"IN LOVE THERE ARE NO PRINCESSES, ONLY WOMEN"
A diplomatic trick—Jealous of Romano's past—The pact for life and the talisman—If there were a theatre fire the talisman would discover our love to the King—Some ill-natured reflections—Bernhardt's escapades cover up my tracks—The "black sheep" jumps his horse over a coffin—King gives him a beating—Bernhardt's mess-room lingo—Anecdotes of royal voluptuaries—Forces animals to devour each other—Naked ballet-girls as horses—Abnormals rule the world.
Dresden, May 20, 1898.
Romano learned about my theatre going by a diplomatic trick. He told one of the minor attaches of the Embassy that he had orders to watch me—"all-highest command." The official, consequently, negotiated with the box offices of all the theatres to phone him the moment Her Imperial Highness ordered seats.
I am crazy to know how many women Romano loved in the twenty or more years since he grew to man's estate, and how many he seduced. It agitates and pains me to think of it, but all my questions are barren of results.
Yesterday I asked him whether he ever knew a Princess of the Blood before me—"knew" in the biblical sense.
"In love," he said, "there are no princesses, there are women only."
He saw that I was hurt and added quickly: "Now don't be unreasonable, Louise—no prejudices. With the thought in my mind that you are an Imperial Highness, or that you consider yourself of better clay than I, I couldn't love you as I do."
Dresden, July 1, 1898.
We made a life-pact. Romano cut a gold piece in two and bored a hole in each half. He drew thin gold chains through the holes, gave me one of the amulets, and kept the other. Our combined monograms were already engraved on the bits of gold en miniature. Each swore to wear the talisman on the naked body for life, but we exchange amulets daily, or as often as we meet.
When I am enthroned in the royal box and look down upon my lover below, I think all the time of this, our secret understanding, and it sometimes occurs to me, that the opera house might get on fire and both of us perish.
Next day our bodies would be found. In or near the royal box, that of a woman, burned so as to be unrecognizable at first. ("We are all of the same clay," says Romano.)
And down in the orchestra floor they would find Romano's body, likewise unrecognizable.
And on my charred breast they would find the half of a twenty-mark piece. And on his charred chest they would find the half of a twenty-mark piece.
And they would put the two together and discover that they match.
Consternation, speculation!
Someone suggests that the mysterious gold pieces be photographed for publication and the engraver who made the monogram, and the jeweler who sold the two chains come forward as witnesses.
Meanwhile the identity of my body is established. That of Romano's follows. Scandalum magnatum! But what are you going to do about it, Messieurs?
If you had only known it a week ago! A prison à la Princess Ahlden, or the Danish Queen Caroline Matilda, for me, disgraceful dismissal for Romano, for times are happily past when comely gentlemen, who have the wit to amuse royal ladies, durst be murdered in cold blood like Koenigsmarck, or be-handed, be-headed and cut into ninety-nine pieces as Struensee was in Copenhagen market-square.
What are you going to do about it, King, George, Frederick Augustus?
I'll tell you. You will bury me with the pomp of kings; and your sycophants will print beautiful stories about me, asserting that I died trying to rescue others, or did something of the sort; and your Court Chaplains will weep and pray and lie for me. And the tip of Queen Carola's nose will be redder than ever.
Dresden, September 1, 1898.
My young friend Bernhardt is doing me a great service and himself a lot of harm.
A good-natured, tractable boy au fond, they made him a poltroon and worse by their persecutions, their meanness, their petty tyranny. He is proud, and they sent him to reside on a village manure heap; he is ambitious, and must drill raw recruits from morn till night; he is eager to learn and they try to embalm his intellect with tracts and kill his initiative by the endless, watery ennui of tu-penny environment.
Of course, he gets desperate and kicks over the traces, and while attracting the dear family's disapproving attention, I am more free than ever to devote myself to my Romano.
Bernhardt's "latest" is really inexcusable. "I wonder we don't turn tigers with the education we receive," said one of the brothers of Louis XVI when upbraided for thoughtlessness and lack of consideration for the feelings of others—but Bernhardt seems to qualify for a vulture, and no original one at that, for a like offense as he is charged with was, several years ago, laid at the door of my cousin, Archduke Otho of Austria.
Observe half a dozen young officers riding horseback in the neighborhood of their garrison town, Bernhardt at the head. At a bend in the road, a rural funeral cortège hoves into sight: coffin borne on the shoulders of half a dozen peasants; weeping relatives; friends promising themselves a good time at the widow's expense on returning home. A black cross lifted high; priest and choir-boys in their robes.
"Halt," thunders Bernhardt, blocking the way.
The priest tries to expostulate with the half-drunken fellow.
"Shut up, black-coat. I am His Royal Highness, Prince Bernhardt."
Then—the devil must be riding him—he orders the coffin put down on the ground.
"Out of the way, yokels."
And he leaps his horse three or four times across the coffin.
The outrage is duly reported in the newspapers and Bernhardt is summoned before the King. "Don't you dare to appear in uniform," Albert added in his own hand.
"What has happened?" I asked the ne'er-do-well, when he begged for an audience after meeting the King.
He pointed to a swollen cheek.
"He hit me three times in the eats." (I beg the Diary's pardon for the language; I report literally.) "Three times," repeated Bernhardt, "that's the reason he wanted me to appear in mufti. As I went out one of the lackeys said: 'I never heard His Majesty rave so.'"
"But why did you make a beast of yourself?" I asked.
"To force the King to transfer me to another garrison, of course. I can't remain where I am, for the people are terribly incensed against me."
"Did you tell His Majesty?"
"Not on your life," answered Bernhardt. "If I did, I would have to stay there until my last tooth falls out. As things are, the Colonel will insist upon my speedy transference, and that's worth the three slams on the face I got in addition to the various Lausbubs."
"He called you, an army officer, a 'Lausbub.' Where is his vaunted respect for the uniform?"
"Didn't he hit me in the eats?" lamented Bernhardt tragically in his terrible lingo. "I responded both to insult and injury by knocking my heels together and saying: 'At Your Majesty's commands.'"
Of course, I told Romano. "Royalty," he said, "has only, on the face of it, advanced beyond the pirate and robber-baron period. Au fond all princes and kings would be criminals if they happened not to be crowned heads."
THE LATE KING ALBERT OF SAXONY
Louise's Uncle by Marriage
He told me of a Balkan prince—young Alexander of Servia, the same mamma Natalie intended for my consort—whose chief amusement consists in having mice and rats chased by ferocious tom-cats in a big cage made for that purpose. Once, growing tired of that sport, he incarcerated ten tom-cats in the same cage without food many days in succession, visiting the prison hourly to see whether they wouldn't take to devouring each other.
When, in the end, they did, tearing one another to pieces, His Majesty danced around the cage in high glee, pronouncing the battle of the poor beasts a bully spectacle.
"You visited Castle Sibyllenort a week ago," continued Romano—"a most proper place, this royal residence, is it not? You ought to have seen it before your puritan King inherited it, ten years ago, upon the death of the last Duke of Brunswick. At that time it was a veritable museum of pornography, the apotheosis of Paphian voluptuousness. The palace, which has over four hundred rooms and halls—not one which a decent woman might enter without a blush—acquired its equipment as a lupanar and its reputation for debauchery under the famous, or notorious, 'Diamond Duke,' a brother of the Highness who left the estate to King Albert. Both Dukes held high carnival in its gilded halls, but he of the diamonds rather outdid William in outraging decency.
"One of his chief amusements was to hire a drove of ballet girls for parlor horses. He had a carriage constructed no bigger or heavier than a Japanese jinrickshaw, and to this hitched ten or twenty ballet girls in their birthday suits, walking on all fours, himself rider and driver.
"Gracious—how he lashed his treble and quadruple teams of human flesh as they pulled him from room to room, and his was no make-belief ferocity, either. He was a niggardly rake, but in order to indulge his Sadist tendencies, agreed to pay one Thaler (Seventy-five cents) for every drop of blood shed by the girls.
"To make the count easier, white linen sheets were spread over the carpets, and the sum total was paid over to the two-legged horses after each entertainment, the girls showing the sorest stripes or wounds getting the larger share."
Romano, who lived at half a dozen courts and is primed with the scandalous gossip of them all, could certainly write an entertaining book on the fallacies and vices of the world's Great.
It's most indelicate, to be sure, but I laughed long and hard over the sexual specialty of my uncle, Archduke Karl Ludwig, who is bad, anyhow, as everybody knows.
One morning His Highness rose at an unusually early hour, even before the scrub-women made their exit. In the corridors, in the parlors, everywhere blonde and dark percherons, cleaning away for dear life and courting housemaid's knee!
Karl Ludwig has no more use for women than the late Chevalier de Lorraine, the President of the Mignons, but the exaggerated protuberances he met so unexpectedly on all sides, appealed to his sense of humor, or some other sense which I would hate to name. Anyhow, he ran into the garden and cut himself a switch. And ever since then his chief amusement is to switch scrubbing percherons. If he succeeds in dealing one a blow unforeseen by lying in wait for her, or coming upon her all of a sudden, he is particularly satisfied with his day's work and is liable to give a beggar a copper instead of the usual demi-copper.
And of such abnormals the rulers of the world are recruited.