On one side lies the big Sand-Hof or gravelled courtyard, divided by high iron railings edged with grass and flowers from the Mopke, the fine wide space where in former days Frederick drilled his soldiers. On the other side of the Mopke stand the royal stables, the kitchens, the chapel of the Palace, and, divided by a beautiful stone arcade, the two “Communs,” in one of which is housed the Palace guard, which occupies the ground floor, while the Commandant and his family inhabit the first floor.
The Sand-Hof faces the apartments of the Emperor and Empress, which on the other side have an outlook onto the spacious garden, laid out in trim beds, with fountains on each side—a garden to look at rather than to walk in; but hidden away in corners behind big beech hedges, are other shady gardens of trees—rose-gardens, with grassy lawns, the children’s garden, one with a tea-house, where the Emperor and Empress breakfast in the summer-time with their family.
Most old palaces that I have seen are conspicuous for their splendour and still more for their inconvenience—they are structurally almost incapable of being adapted to modern requirements; and the Neues Palais is no exception to this rule, though wonders have been done in the matter of the installation of adequate heating apparatus and bathrooms. Most of this work was accomplished under the superintendence and on the initiative of the late Empress Frederick, whose practical, energetic mind seems to have grappled successfully with the great problems of plumbing and domestic efficiency which present themselves with perhaps more insistence in palaces than elsewhere.
But there was no way of overcoming the difficulty caused by the lack of any passage in the wing where the apartment of the Princess was situated on the first floor—the Prinzen-Wohnung or Dwelling of the Princes as it is called. Here two magnificent salons had been transformed into bedrooms, one for the Princess, one for the Ober-Gouvernante. These were obviously originally intended for reception-rooms, having doors at each end and in the middle, and were the only means of communication between the sitting-room and dining-room, so that whoever passed from one to the other was perforce obliged to traverse the whole length of one of these rooms, unless they went downstairs and passed through the courtyard to another staircase, which was what the servants had to do in all weathers.
In a smaller but very beautiful salon forming the entrance to the Prinzen-Wohnung a cooking-stove had been placed in the massive marble fireplace for the purpose of keeping dishes warm, for all the food of the Palace is prepared in a kitchen situated in the “Communs,” a building on the far side of the Mopke communicating with the Palace by a long underground passage along which the dishes are brought.
Here it may be pointed out that all the stables, carriages, kitchens, etc., as well as the palaces themselves, are always officially styled “royal,” not “imperial,” as they belong to the Kingdom of Prussia and are not part of the appanage of the Empire.
The sitting-room I occupied first on coming to the Neues Palais remained just as it had been at the time it was built, somewhere about 1770. Its walls were covered with small irregular pieces of dark blue glass set in cement and carried up into the centre of the ceiling, in which was inserted a circle of small mirrors where at night, if one chanced to look up, one saw the lamplight reflected. Over the big marble chimneypiece, bearing the cipher of Frederick the Great, was another high mirror of the same period (Louis XV) with a golden-rayed sun fixed in its upper part. I never was able to learn the meaning of this sun, which was repeated in other palaces built by the famous King of Prussia.
Above the blue salon was an equally spacious bedroom situated at an angle of the palace wing with bull’s-eye windows looking north and east. It was furnished, like most German bedrooms, to serve also as a sitting-room, and contained a sofa, a large centre table, and a big escritoire, besides the necessary cupboards and wardrobes. It was heated in winter by one of those tall chocolate-coloured tiled stoves called Kachel-Ofen which are so much used in Germany. In cold weather the Ofen was lit with wood at an early hour of the morning, and was supposed, after consuming a few logs, to have absorbed enough heat for the rest of the day. Though offensive to a sense of beauty, the Kachel-Ofen may generally be trusted to keep the temperature warm at a minimum of expenditure in fuel.
“I don’t know why English people always want to look at a fire,” said one German lady, defending the superior economy and effectiveness of the national heating system. “It isn’t the look of a fire that warms you. I never felt the cold so much anywhere as in England. All that beautiful coal warming the chimney, while I sat shivering two yards away from it!”
Our life at the Neues Palais is less strenuous than at Homburg. For one thing the Ober-Gouvernante is there, a pale, dark-eyed German in whose hands, although she herself has no teaching to do, lies the chief responsibility of the education of the Princess. Then there is the tutor who gives all the German lessons. He has not been in Homburg, where there was only room to lodge the tutor of Prince Joachim.