From the Augusta-Stift, an aristocratic ladies’ school in Potsdam in which the Empress was much interested, three suitable young maidens of good family were chosen.
Every morning they were fetched at half-past seven by a royal carriage and brought to the New Palace, where they shared the lessons and games of the Princess until half-past twelve, when they were reconducted to their Stift. It was fondly hoped by the ladies of the Court that this arrangement would put a stop to the constant interruption of lessons—a hope which was scarcely realized, for it made not the slightest difference.
Girls in high-class German schools lead a very different life to those in similar institutions in England. They must all wear uniform, ugly for choice; they must have their hair plaited in the tightest, most uncompromising of plaits, which is not allowed to hang down, but is pinned by multitudinous hairpins into a hard knob. Their whole existence is absorbed in the acquisition of knowledge, and the exercise they take is a matter not of pleasure but of health. If they do anything naughty, or are untidy, they wear ribbon rosettes whose colours show nicely-graduated degrees of infamy, and they must weep bitterly when they don’t know their lessons, and ask forgiveness for a failure to indicate the exact position of Kamschatka. They are usually nice, happy, pleasant-mannered girls, expert at making Knixes, those quaint little German curtsies which seem to carry one back into Jane Austen’s books. They kiss the hands of their elders, and as soon as they are confirmiert and leave school, blossom out into very fashionably-dressed, handsome young women, with hair done in the latest fashion, and a decided penchant for young lieutenants. Their highest ambition is to be verlobt as soon as possible, and they never turn their thoughts again in the direction of Kamschatka or any other part of the globe existing beyond their immediate sphere of observation. They make excellently self-sacrificing wives and mothers, and help to preserve in their husbands that attitude of infallibility which is the peculiar prerogative of German mankind. They invariably converse fairly well in English and French, and are able to quote Goethe, Schiller and Shakespeare in a manner which, if a little mechanical, still gives an agreeable impression of culture and is some relief from the domestic pursuits which, after marriage, they fulfil with praiseworthy ardour. They are as opposed to the self-possessed, slangy, sporting English schoolgirl with her multifarious ambitions as can well be imagined. They never desire to go on the stage, never want a vote, and are perfectly content with the limited prospect which life offers to their sex. So in their ill-fitting black frocks, in hard, round, black straw sailor hats, with their luxuriant hair strained brutally off their foreheads into the tightest, hardest of coils, every morning came three little girls to share the studies and recreations of the Princess. There had been some heart-burning among the parents of the young ladies of the Stift, as each one considered that her child had peculiar qualifications as a possible companion to royalty; but the final decision lay in the hands of the head-mistress and the tutor of the Princess, and the choice ultimately made was undoubtedly a wise one, though sometimes the more unregenerate officers of His Majesty’s suite ventured the opinion that the girls in question were “zu gut erzogen"—too well brought up—from which it may be gathered that they desired to see a little more natural, healthy naughtiness exhibited. It is, however, unreasonable to expect a child, even if endowed with gifts in this direction, not to put a good many curbs on her inclination when she is chosen to share the comparatively pleasant life at Court in exchange for that of the Stift; and as they were expressly encouraged to assert their own rights and not to let the Princess always win at the games they played—a deplorable tendency which had its root as much in the Princess’s superiority at games as in the ill-advised instructions of foolish parents—they soon discovered, as children will, a democratic level of existence which was invaluable as an educational factor. Each child, including the Princess, was called by her Christian name, and it was a matter for congratulation when one of the “Stifts-Kinder,” as they were called, was found to have an immense superiority over the Princess in the matter of evolutions on the parallel bars. This quartette of young people worked and played together amicably for some years—until, in fact, the time approached for the confirmation of the Princess, that great event in the life of a German girl which seems to make a sharp, decided finish to her childhood and flings her full-fledged into a new existence.
When the Court was staying in Berlin, the Stifts-Kinder came under a lady’s escort by train every morning from Potsdam to Berlin, where they were driven straight to Belle Vue. They had four little desks side by side in one of the big empty salons there, and their cheerful faces and gay shrieks of laughter as they jumped over the flower-beds in the intervals of lessons, or in wet weather chased each other through the stately rooms with their decorous suites of brocaded furniture, added a pleasant element of youth and freshness to the old palace.
The Princess told many interesting facts about Belle Vue. Among other things, when I was admiring the blue satin curtains in one room and remarking on their newness, she said, “Yes, of course; that was because of the Shah of Persia.”
“Why?” I inquired, wondering what the Shah had to do with curtains in Belle Vue.
“Oh, don’t you know? He and his suite stayed here once, and they used to kill sheep in this room, and wiped their hands on the blue satin curtains; and they had to be replaced, of course!”
She said further that the old “Shah,” the one who threw chicken-bones and asparagus-ends over his shoulder to the servants standing behind, tried to imitate European manners and eat with a fork instead of his fingers, but being unaccustomed to the implement, compromised on Persian and European methods by picking up the meat with his fingers, sticking it on the fork, and thus conveying it to his mouth.
“When Great-Grandmamma Augusta once offered him a dish of strawberries, instead of taking a few on to his plate, he just ate them from the dish while she held it. Fancy! Great-Grandmamma Augusta—who was so particular! Everybody nearly had a fit!”
An intense interest in human nature was one of the traits which the Princess shared with her father, the Emperor. She liked, if possible, to merge herself in the crowd, to watch people going about their daily affairs, to see young people making love, old people cooking or reading the papers. She had a healthy, vital curiosity; knew all about the brothers of the Stifts-Kinder, and to whom they were, or were likely to be, engaged. One particular friend among the boarders at the Stift—not one of those who came daily, but another who was frequently invited to the Palace, a very nice American girl called Yvette Borup—had a brother who accompanied Peary on his expedition to the North Pole. After coming safely through all the dangers and hardships of the Polar expedition, this brother a year or two later was unfortunately drowned in America while boating; but at the time of which I write he was absent with Peary, and there were few days when the Princess did not wonder “where Yvette’s brother had got to now.”