Every Sunday morning the ladies and gentlemen of the suite used to assemble before church time on the terrace opposite the great statue (copied from the Farnese Hercules) which stands away at the top of the hill crowning the artificial rock terraces, caves and cascades made by a former Landgraf of Hesse-Cassel. This statue is so large that a man can stand inside the club upon which Hercules leans. The weather was always judged (or misjudged) according to whether Herkules loomed near or retired into the background. After standing a little, and chatting in the usual desultory way of people who meet often and rarely have new experiences to confide, the Empress and Princess would appear, followed by the Emperor.
On my first visit to Wilhelmshöhe, as we wended our way to the little chapel in one wing of the Palace, the Emperor said that he hoped I would “sing in a loud, deep voice” in church, because the singing was usually very bad. I commented on the slowness of German hymn-singing, and His Majesty told me how surprised he was once, when visiting at Windsor “with Grandmamma” a year or two before she died, to hear the organ burst out suddenly into the Austrian National Anthem, not knowing that it had been adopted as an English hymn-tune.
The way to the chapel was through a long matted corridor hung with queer old-fashioned paintings of distorted-looking animals.
Just before the door of the royal pew hung on each side of the wall two pictures of ferocious cows whose eyes followed with a threatening glare as people went in or out of chapel. Underneath the cows was placed the alms-dish for the contributions of Their Majesties and the Court.
The Emperor and Empress occupied two special gilt and red-velvet chairs, and the Court ordinary cane-bottomed ones—also gilt—which made a great scraping on the floor as we rose to pray or sat down to sing according to the usual German custom.
The congregation consisted chiefly of a few officers and foresters with their wives and children, and a well-meaning choir sang timidly in the gallery up above.
The dining-room and neighbouring salons in Wilhelmshöhe were beautifully furnished in Empire style and in late Louis Quinze. The fine view from the windows, away over the undulating hills beyond Cassel, helped to beguile the rather wearisome standing about and half-hearted after-dinner conversation. One of the old generals who wanted to improve his English always came ponderously in my direction if he saw me glancing at some of the English fashion-papers lying on the table, as he declared himself deeply interested in “ladies’ toilettes.” I was always rather apprehensive when he turned over the leaves, looking at them carefully through his eyeglass, and when he got to the hair “transformations” usually thought it best to retire before he reached pages of a still more intimate nature.
Jerome Bonaparte inhabited Wilhemshöhe for seven years when he was King of Westphalia, and introduced all the Empire sofas and chairs. The salon of the Princess was a delightful room with a parquet floor, panelled and painted white, and the mahogany furniture was upholstered in a most beautiful tone of striped yellow satin. Leading from it was the breakfast-room, with striped red-stain wall-coverings hung with pictures of the children of the House of Hesse-Cassel, to whom the Schloss belonged before they lost it by fighting against Prussia in the war of 1866. These unfortunate infants of two or three years were dressed in stuffy, heavy, thickly-embroidered garments of black and red velvet, and wore stiffly-starched, scratchy-looking ruffs round their poor little chubby necks.
In Wilhelmshöhe Schloss Napoleon III. was lodged after being taken prisoner by the Germans. In the Empress’s sitting-room is the writing-table he used, with the hole burnt in it where he always laid his cigar.
Not far from Wilhelmshöhe, just a pleasant drive of an hour or so, past yellowing cornfields, under rows of apple and cherry trees, lay Wilhelmsthal, a charming country-house lying in a tiny hamlet far from a railway station, also built by an Elector of Hesse and inhabited by the before-mentioned King Jerome. This delightful little summer Schloss has hardly been touched in its arrangements since the Great Napoleon’s brother left it. All the beds remain with the French eagle spreading its wings above the green silk curtains; the Dresden china figures he looked at every day still occupy their places on the shelves; the china timepiece that struck the hour yet stands beside his bed, though it has long ago ceased to measure time. The tourist can lean out of the windows of his bedroom and see the carp, descendants of those he used to feed, or perhaps the very same fish, swimming about in the pond a little distance away. It is a place where time seems to have stood still for the last hundred years.