A SERVANT-TYRANT
My correspondence is not safe from the malicious woman appointed Grand Mistress—Lovers at a distance and by correspondence—Fell in love with a leg.
Loschwitz, September 8, 1894.
Baroness Tisch, now that she attained the height of her ambition, is beginning to show her claws. She is an infernal cat. Her skinniness makes her repulsive to me and her face gives everyone the impression that she just sucked an enormous lemon. She lisps and that makes me nervous. I feel like aping her when she isn't around.
She's after me like the devil chasing a poor soul and as I never address her except to command or reprimand, she tries to find out any secret doings, or thinkings, I may be guilty of by way of letters I write or receive.
According to the laws of most countries private correspondence is sacred, legally and morally. The late Field-Marshal, Count Blumenthal, wrote to his wife of the Crown Prince, afterwards Emperor Frederick, that he was a "d—— fool," but "as communications between husband and wife are privileged," no official cognizance was taken.
Otherwise in this petty kingdom and, as already told, in Austria, whose monarch, in family matters at least, holds to the "L'Etat c'est moi" maxim.
The King's spy, the Tisch, constituted herself post-office of Villa Loschwitz—a duty appertaining to her rank—and I wager she works the "Black Cabinet" to perfection. Of course, I am now careful in all I write and advise my friends to be, but I sometimes get letters from Unknowns, people that sympathize with me or have fallen in love with me. All women in high station have lovers among the lowly. I recall the Cardinal Dubois' yarn about Salvatico, envoy of the Prince of Modena, my kinsman of yore. The Italian was sent to Paris to conduct home his master's lovely intended, Mademoiselle de Valois, daughter of the Regent. It happened that the emissary was introduced to Mademoiselle's room an hour before the time set, when she was lying on a lounge "with one leg, almost naked, hanging down." Salvatico fell in love with the leg and exhausted himself in so many "Ah, ah's" of admiration and other love-sick stunts that the Duke of Richelieu, having older rights, said to him: "Rogue, if you had your deserts I would cut off your two ears!"
No man, except my husband, has seen my legs, which is a pity, perhaps, but the extreme décolleté demanded at certain court functions, especially in Berlin, gained me many epistolary lovers, whose homage I accept gracefully, but in silence, of course.
Still, a malicious thing like the Tisch, if one gives her enough rope, might arrange, on paper at least, to get me with child by a Lothario a hundred miles off, even as the children of Madame de Montespan and Louis XIV were credited to the Marquis, her husband, residing a hundred leagues away, at Guienne. Let me find her red-handed and she will fare even worse than Schoenstein.