“I am delighted to see by your letter that you deliberate gravely upon your budget, and I shall be most happy to look through it, if you send it to me; this is the only way to have a clear idea to one’s self of what one has, spends, and ought to spend. As this is a business of which I have had long and frequent experience, I will give you one rule for your guidance in it, namely, to set apart a considerable balance pour l’imprévu. This gentleman is the costliest of guests in life, and we shall look very blank if we have nothing to set before him.”
During the first summer of their married life, the Prince and Princess set up quite a modest establishment at the Castle of Babelsberg, and this made the Princess very happy.
Seated on a declivity of a richly wooded hill, about three miles from Potsdam, and looking down upon a fine expanse of water, the little Castle of Babelsberg commands a charming view of the surrounding country. “Everything there,” wrote Queen Victoria on her first visit, “is very small, a Gothic bijou, full of furniture, and flowers (creepers), which they arrange very prettily round screens, and lamps, and pictures. There are many irregular turrets and towers and steps.”
It was at Babelsberg that the Princess Royal began to try and see something of the intellectual and artistic world of Berlin. Neither the husband nor the wife was under the dominion of the class and caste prejudices which even now are so astonishing a feature of German social life, and which were then even more powerful and far-reaching. That the Prince and Princess should appear actually to enjoy the society of mere painters and writers and scientists, whether they occupied any official positions or not, seemed extraordinary and highly improper to the whole bureaucratic element of Berlin, and must, we can well imagine, have seriously offended the Prince’s father.
It is easy to be wise after the event. No one now can help seeing that it would have been the truest wisdom for the young Princess to have rigidly suppressed her natural tastes and intellectual interests, and to have led a life of the narrowly conventional character which Prussian princesses were expected to lead. But she was incapable of such self-suppression, which would have seemed to her deceitful, and the mild cautions and hints at prudence in her father’s letters were pathetically inadequate to the needs of her critical position. She was herself still quite unaware of how closely she was being watched and criticised. “I am very happy,” she told a guest at one of the Court receptions, “and I am intensely proud of belonging to this country.”
The more the Princess’s social preferences aroused the suspicion and indignation of the Court world, the more popular she became with the “intellectuals,” unfortunately not a profitable exchange for her as she was then situated. We become aware of this by a passage in the Reminiscences of Professor Schellbach, who had been mathematical tutor to Prince Frederick William. He writes:
“The first words which the Princess addressed to me with the greatest kindness were, ‘I love mathematics, physics, and chemistry.’ I was much pleased, for I saw that the Prince must have given her a pleasant account of me. Under the direction of her highly cultivated father, who had himself studied it, Princess Victoria had become acquainted with natural science, and had even received her first teaching from such famous men as Faraday and Hoffman. Our beloved Princess soon revealed her love for art and science, as well as her pleasure in setting problems of her own. Her Royal Highness at first tried to go on with her studies in physics and mathematics under my direction, but soon her artistic work took up the remainder of time which the requirements of Court life left to her.”
Early in June Prince Albert carried out his plan of visiting his daughter and son-in-law, but it was at Babelsberg, not at Coburg, as he had hoped. He was able to report to Queen Victoria: “The relation between the young people is all that can be desired. I have had long talks with them both, singly and together, which gave me the greatest satisfaction.”
Prince Albert was, however, shocked to find the King of Prussia in a terrible state:
“The King looks frightfully ill; he was very cordial and friendly, and for the half hour he stayed with us, did not once get confused, but complained greatly about his state of health. He is thin and fallen away over his whole body, with a large stomach, his face grown quite small. He made many attempts at joking in the old way, but with a voice quite broken, and features full of pain. ‘Wenn ich einmal fort bin, wieder fort bin,’ he said, grasping his forehead and striking it, ‘then the Queen must pay us a visit here, it will make me so happy.’ What he meant was, ‘Wenn ich wieder wohl bin.’ ‘It is so tedious,’ he murmured; thus it is plainly to be seen that he has not quite given up all thought of getting better. The Prince’s whole aim is to be serviceable to his brother. He still walks very lame, but looks well. I kept quietly in the house all day with Vicky, who is very sensible and good.”