The Crown Prince had induced his father to visit the Exhibition, and the King, who brought Bismarck with him, had a magnificent reception from the Imperial Court. The Crown Prince and Princess did not abate their interest in politics, and they certainly shared Bismarck’s view at this time that an arrangement with France was in every way desirable in order to avert war and to consolidate the gains of 1866.
In the autumn a terrible scarcity, almost amounting to famine, in East Prussia afforded a fresh opportunity for the practical sympathy of the Crown Prince and Princess. Together they organised a relief fund and relief works by which the sufferings of the population were much mitigated.
It was on February 10, 1868, the anniversary of Queen Victoria’s wedding, and of the Crown Princess’s christening, that another son was born, who seemed sent to fill the terrible gap which the death of Prince Sigismund had made two years before. The child was christened on the King of Prussia’s seventy-first birthday, at Berlin, receiving the names of Joachim Frederick Ernest Waldemar. The Princess’s fourth son was a beautiful and clever child, and his death, which was to follow when he was only eleven years old, was perhaps the deepest grief that fell on his parents. It is significant that when the Emperor Frederick chose his last resting-place, he desired to lie by the side of this child.
In the spring of 1868 the Crown Prince paid a visit to Italy in return for the visit paid to Berlin by Prince Humbert the year before. The Crown Princess did not go with him, but she followed with deep interest and pleasure the accounts of his reception, which were remarkably enthusiastic, and also politically useful, for it prevented the accession to power of a Ministry hostile to Prussia.
In 1869 the Crown Princess received a long visit from Princess Alice at Potsdam, and the two sisters spent their mother’s birthday, May 24, together. Princess Alice spoke in a letter to Queen Victoria of the delightful life “with dear Vicky, so quiet and pleasant, which reminds me in many things of our life in England in former happy days, and so much that we had Vicky has copied for her children. Yet we both always say to each other that no children were so happy, and so spoiled with all the enjoyments and comforts children can wish for, as we were.” Again, on June 19, “Vicky was very low yesterday; she has been so for the last week, and she told me much of what an awful time she went through in 1866 when dear Siggie [Sigismund] died. The little chapel is very peaceful and cheerful and full of flowers. We go there en passant nearly daily, and it seems to give dear Vicky pleasure to go there.”
The two sisters spent a happy time together at Cannes in the late autumn of 1869, while their respective husbands were abroad. The Crown Prince, with Prince Louis of Hesse, visited Vienna, Athens, Constantinople, and the Holy Land, and went on thence to Port Said for the opening of the Suez Canal. In Jerusalem the Crown Prince took formal possession in the name of his father of the ruined convent of St. John, ceded by the Sultan for the erection of a German Protestant Church. The two Princes joined their wives at Cannes shortly before Christmas.
On their way home the Crown Prince and Princess spent a week in Paris, staying at an hotel. The Crown Princess was surprised to see how changed the Emperor Napoleon was since they had seen him last. She thought him ailing and dejected. In the course of conversation, the Emperor mentioned that he had a new Minister, a certain M. Ollivier.
The Crown Prince and Princess returned to Berlin on the morning of the New Year, 1870. The next time the Crown Prince met Napoleon III was on the morning after the capitulation of Sedan.
CHAPTER XIII
THE FRANCO-GERMAN WAR
THE year 1870 opened with no premonition of the tremendous events it was to bring forth.