I AM DETERMINED TO DO AS I PLEASE
I reject mother's tearful reproaches—I beard Prince George in his lair despite whining chamberlains—I tell him what I think of him, and he becomes frightened—Threatens madhouse—"I dare you to steal my children"—I win my point—and the children—"Her Imperial Highness regrets"—Lots of forbidden literature—Precautions against intriguing Grand Mistress—The affair with Henry—was it a flower-covered pit to entrap me?—Castle Stolpen and some of its awful history.
Dresden, November 5, 1901.
Patience ceased to be a virtue. Tolerance would be a crime against myself. I am determined to do as I please in future. If it upsets the King's, Prince George's and the rest's delicate digestion, so much the better.
The newspapers are hinting about my troubles with Prince George and the King. When I go driving or appear at the theatre, the public shows its sympathy in many ways. Sometimes I am acclaimed to the echo.
Mamma wrote me a tearful letter. She spent six hours in prayers for "sinful Louise" and sends me the fruits of her meditations: six pages of close script, advising me how to regain the King's and Prince George's favor.
Never before have I failed in outward respect to my mother, but this time I wrote to her: "Pray attend to your own affairs. Don't meddle in mine which you are entirely unable to understand."
Dresden, November 6, 1901.
Bernhardt was sent to Sonnenstein. Whether he became insane at Nossen, or whether it is the family's intention to drive him mad among the madmen of Sonnenstein, I don't know, but it behooves me to be careful.
Sonnenstein has accommodation for both sexes.
Loschwitz, November 15, 1901.
I sent a letter to the King, asking him to have Loschwitz Castle prepared for my reception. His Majesty didn't deign to answer, but Prince George commanded me in writing to stay at Dresden "under his watchful eye."
I immediately proceeded to his apartments in my morning undress, without hat, gloves or wrap. As I rushed through the anteroom, Adjutant von Metsch begged me with up-lifted hands not to force His Royal Highness's door, Prince George being too ill to receive me, etc., etc. I paid no attention to his mournful whinings. At that moment I had courage enough to stock a regiment.
"So you won't allow me to go to Loschwitz," I addressed George as I suddenly bobbed up at the side of his desk.
My father-in-law looked at me as if I were a spook, emerged from a locked closet.
"Who let you in?" he managed to say after a while.
"I didn't come here to answer questions," I replied. "I came to announce that if you don't let me go to Loschwitz, there will be a scandal that will resound all over Christendom and make you impossible in your own capital."
"Why do you want to leave Dresden?" he insisted.
"Because I want to be alone. Because I am tired of hateful faces. Because I refuse to accept orders and insults from people that are beneath an Imperial Princess of Austria."
Prince George turned pale.
"Am I one of those beneath Your Imperial Highness?" he queried stupidly.
"Decidedly so."
A long pause. Then Prince George shouted: "To the devil with you. I don't care whether you stay in Loschwitz, or Dresden, or on the Vogelwiese."
The Vogelwiese is an amusement park, respectable enough, but the word or name, as used by George, reeked with sinister and insulting meaning.
Trembling with rage, I replied: "Right royal language you royal Saxons use. From time to time, I suppose, you refresh your fish-wife vocabulary in the annals of Augustus the Physical Strong, than whom a more gross word-slinger did not walk the history of the eighteenth century."
I believe Prince George was frightened by my violence. Assuming a haughty tone he said formally: "Your Imperial Highness is at liberty to travel whenever you please, but you will be so good as to leave your children in Dresden."
I stepped up to the white-livered coward and hissed in his face: "Steal my children if you dare, and I will go to France, or Switzerland and ask a republican President to interfere for humanity's sake."
"And—land yourself in an insane asylum," sneered George.
"An old trick of the Royal House of Saxony, I know," I shouted back. "Bernhardt is saner than you, yet the King sent him to Sonnenstein. If such a crime had been perpetrated by one not a king, he would go to jail."
Prince George pointed a trembling finger towards the door. "Out with you!" he bawled hoarsely. "Out!"
I stood my ground. "May I take my children? Yes or no?"
He rang the bell and repeated mechanically: "Out with you, out!"
I had another fit of crying convulsions. Doctors, maids and lackeys were summoned in numbers. They bedded me on the couch and six men-servants carried me to my apartments.
Two days later I went to Loschwitz with my children.
I had defied the King. Prince George was humbled. I carried my point, and the Dresden court will not see me again in a hurry.
Loschwitz, Christmas, 1901.
I refused to spend Christmas at Court. Frederick Augustus planned a stay of a couple of weeks. "Not a single night," I wrote back.
They parleyed; they begged. "The Crown Prince desires to spend Christmas with the children. In the interests of public opinion, it's absolutely necessary that he does."
"But not—that I submit to prostitution. I will give him a dinner, but he will drive back to Dresden immediately afterwards."
Frederick Augustus brought numerous presents for me. "You may place them under the Christmas tree," I ordered the Tisch.
"Oh, Your Imperial Highness, look," cried the Tisch, holding up something or other.
I turned my back on her and looked out of the window. I never went near my end of the Christmas table. "You will send the things brought by His Royal Highness to the bazaar for crippled children," I told the House Marshal. "They shall be sold for the benefit of the poor."
Loschwitz, January 1, 1902.
"Her Imperial Highness regrets."
I refused the invitations to today's family dinner; the grand reception, Te Deum and parade. "Unprecedented affront!" What do I care!
I have eighteen horses, half-a-dozen carriages, I drive, I ride, I hunt, I give the Tisch palpitation daily by the literature I affect: Zola, Flaubert, M'lle Paul, Ma Femme, M'lle de Maupin, Casanova, M'me Bovary. And the periodicals I subscribed for! Simplicissimus, Harden's Zukunft, all the double entendre weeklies and monthlies of Paris. May Prince George and Mathilde burst with rage and envy when they hear of my excursions in the realms of the literary Satans.
Loschwitz, January 15, 1902.
The Tisch is beginning to treat me like a person irresponsible for her doings. Sonnenstein is looming up anew. But I am going to fool her. As I will hold no more speech with her, there will be no occasion for turning my own words against me.
If I have to give a command, or answer a question, I ask Lucretia or Fräulein von Schoenberg to convey my orders.
Loschwitz, March 20, 1902.
An uneventful winter is drawing to a close. By banishing myself to this quiet place I raised a barrier against quarrels, against harsh orders, against humiliations. And the barrier also shuts out: love, happiness.
Sometimes, when the Tisch's hateful mouth spouts honeyed platitudes, I ask myself whether the affair with Henry wasn't, after all, a flower-covered pit dug for me by my enemies.
It was the Tisch who had Henry appointed Vortänzer.
Maybe, knowing my inflammable heart, she offered the tempting bait solely to the end of getting me into her power?
Far from impossible.
I curse the day when I entered Dresden, joined this court and family.
Loschwitz, May 15, 1902.
Royal command to join the court at Pillnitz June 1. The King, who has been ailing for some time, is anxious to be reunited with the children, and, as a necessary evil, I must go along.
I replied that I would prefer Nossen, or even Stolpen, if it pleases His Majesty.
Castle Stolpen is an old-time stronghold of the bishops of Meissen, and its very ruins are pregnant with reminiscences of a barbaric age. The apartments once occupied by the Countess Cosel, as a prison first, as a residence after the death of Augustus, might be made habitable even now. Exceedingly interesting are the old-time torture chambers and the subterranean living rooms of the "sworn torturer" and the dogs, man-shaped, that served him.
Sanct. Donatus Tower, a wing of the great, black pile, was the ancient habitat of these worthies, and the torture chamber, still extant, is a hall almost as big as the Dresden throne-room. In an inscription hewn in the basalt, the sovereign bishop, Johannes VI, poses as builder and seems proud of the damnable fact. Other princes of the Church let us know in high-sounding Latin script that they created the "Monk hole" and the "stairless prison" respectively.
The latter is a vast subterranean vault, never reached by sunshine or light of any kind. Its victims were made to descend some twenty feet below the surface of the earth on a ladder. When near the bottom, the ladder was pulled up and—stayed up. The prisoners were fed once every twenty-four hours, when a leather water pouch and some pounds of black bread were sent down on a rope.
Of course only the strongest got a morsel, or a drink of water. The others died of starvation and the survivors lived only until there were new arrivals, stronger than themselves. The dead bodies were never removed, and horrible stories of necrophily smudge the records of this awful prison and cover its princely keepers with infamy.
The "Monk's hole" was called officially "Obey Your Judge." It is a sort of chimney, just large enough to take the body of a man.
When a monk or other prisoner refused to confess, he was let down into the hole in the wall to starve, while tempting dishes, meat, wine and bread, were dangled over his head, almost within reach of his hands.
Of course, after enduring this torture for several days, the delinquent was glad enough to "Obey His Judge."
By offering to go to this abode of horror and to take the place of Cosel, I meant to show my utter contempt for the royal favor vouchsafed.