THE Emperor William has a great horror of every possible kind of infection, especially of the ordinary cold.
Unhappy officials summoned to Court while suffering from this minor ailment may be seen using surreptitious pocket-handkerchiefs behind the kindly shelter of a palm, or slipping through the window on to the terrace to indulge in the inevitable sneeze out of range of His Majesty’s observation.
Whenever the Emperor himself catches the complaint he at once retires to bed till the worst is over, and all engagements are cancelled until he is well again.
“Go to bed and perspire” (only he uses a more forcible Anglo-Saxon word) is the advice he gives and follows.
Upon the shoulders of his medical attendants, two in number, rests the responsibility of safeguarding the Emperor as much as possible from every source of infection.
How many panic-stricken exits from one palace to another do I remember! Flights at an hour’s notice from measles, chicken-pox, or scarlet fever, sometimes only to meet an equally dire disease already installed before us.
On one occasion the Court had just returned from Berlin after the season, and had settled down comfortably at the New Palace, when some tiresome child in the Communs opposite was found to be suffering from measles, and we were all (with the exception of the Emperor, fortunately absent for two days) hurried off to the Marmor Palais, which happened to be totally unfurnished, all its chairs and tables having been warehoused for the winter and not yet replaced.
We wandered about the garden there, watching the arrival of the vans, which had been hastily summoned together, and now slowly and at long intervals disgorged their contents at every door.
The rooms allotted to the ladies were in a little Dutch cottage in the garden, and contained only a few clothes-pegs, on which to hang hats and coats. By slow degrees washstands, chairs, wardrobes, kept slowly filtering in—though many of us had to wash our hands at the tap in the passage before going to dine with the Empress.
Somewhere about ten o’clock at night the beds began to arrive, and for the next few days existence partook largely of the disjointed, uncertain, intermittent nature of a picnic. Except for the moral support afforded by the white kid gloves and fan, to which we clung convulsively through that long chaos, we should with difficulty have been able to preserve the decent atmosphere proper to a court.