Aunt Lotti took no stock in my mother’s similar plans, for she was no clairvoyant, no natural wonder, only a sort of imitator. It would soon be seen that nothing was to be realized. But my mother’s tests came out just as brilliantly. I myself dealt the cards and entered the winnings and losses in a little book. The winnings were always so much the greater that the first million was reached in a few weeks. “Chance,” opined Aunt Lotti. Self-deception? I now ask myself in this case also. The figures were there, and now plan-making and air-castle building broke out among us in great style. In the neighborhood of Brünn there is a Liechtenstein domain, Eisgrub, with a marvelous castle and park; we had seen it once when we were on a picnic. We would buy Eisgrub. Perhaps Prince Liechtenstein would not part with it—well, one can have anything if one only pays a price well above the market value. The castle was most beautifully furnished, but yet a good many things would have to be changed; for instance, I was to have a chamber with porcelain walls and porcelain furniture. This porcelain room afforded me such anticipatory joys of possession as few things ever did. The pink diamonds in my future jewel case were a delight to me too. All people have white diamonds—the pink stones would be something special. But our wishes did not turn merely toward ornament and show; we meant also to practice beneficence on a large scale, i. e. build asylums for the blind, hospitals, etc.; and surprise with adequate properties all our kinsfolk and acquaintances who were suffering from any sort of lack. This whole array of dreams of the future, which had consolidated into an assured expectation, represented “the important thing” to me at that time.
Elvira kept aloof from all this plan-making. She set no store by earthly possessions; the only harvest she wanted to reap was poetic fame; her fancy was too thoroughly busied with its own creations to occupy itself with idle air-castle-building into the bargain. Our games of puff had undergone some modifications now: at present the hero no longer needed to be furnished with wealth, but other combinations were devised. A poor but proud lieutenant rejecting the adored millionairess who absolutely throws herself at his head, but moved to relent by the sight of her despair threatening to pass into consumption.
Thus the summer of 1856 came on, and the journey to Wiesbaden was undertaken. Each of the million-huntresses carried in her cartridge box (i. e. portemonnaie) a capital of a few hundred florins set apart for this use; and the game bags too, i. e. two big portfolios with combination locks, were in readiness for the noble quarry.
My guardian Fürstenberg was not taken into confidence: he was the personification of propriety and sober sense; anything queer was hateful to him. He did not approve of the journey itself to begin with. If he had known what crazy ideas (for he would certainly have thought them crazy) were connected with it, he would perhaps have put in a veto. He did try to talk them out of the trip to the foreign watering-place; he was particularly not suited with the fact that I was to be taken along. I ought not to be interrupted in my studies; besides, it struck him that my education in the most important things was very backward. Thus, e. g., I was not at all skillful with the needle. To be sure I regaled him every Christmas, and on the day of his patron saint, with embroidered pillows and slippers that teemed with roses and lilies, if it was not cat-heads or lion-heads for variety; but I was not capable of knitting an honest stocking, he knew, and he disapproved. I did not seem to him pious enough either: I knew the catechism by heart, no doubt, and had taken my first communion, but yet it did not seem to him that I had the right zeal for the faith, took the right pleasure in going to church.
As a counterpart to my guardian, Landgrave Fürstenberg, my cousin had her godfather General Count Huyn. He too had been on terms of close friendship with her father, and continued always anxious about his godchild’s welfare. He was more than conventionally pious, he was exaggeratedly pious. He had carried on long discussions with Elvira’s father; the Protestant scholar’s philosophy accorded but ill with the Catholic aristocrat’s religiousness verging on bigotry, but this divergence had been no detriment to their friendship—it was in the sphere of the most profound speculation that they conducted their theologico-philosophical debates, for Count Huyn’s piety was not that of simplicity but of Scriptural learning, so both of them found intellectual stimulus in these disquisitions.
Elvira had to write to her godfather every week, and usually received answers—friendly admonitions, little sermons. He knew of her poetic activity, but did not approve of it. Literature seemed to him most unbecoming to women. Virtuous and pious, modest and gentle, industrious, submissive, unassuming,—these were to be the qualities that it was for his little goddaughter Karoline (he never called her Elvira) to acquire. My cousin respected her godfather highly, but did not lay his sermons to heart. She, who had already read—I will not say understood—Hegel and Fichte and Kant, was not to be reached by the precepts of the primer. As a philosopher’s daughter and pupil she had come to take a view of the world which went beyond the line of creeds and represented deism on a basis of natural science.
I too, despite my youth, had fed my mind on Kant and Descartes, had studied Plato’s Phaedo and Humboldt’s Kosmos, and along with these the history of the wars of the Inquisition and of religion; and to the question “What religion do you profess?” I should have replied with Schiller, at that time my favorite poet, “None—I am too religious to.”
The first long journey—that brings on an indescribably sweet fever. Traveling was not indeed so comfortable at that time as to-day (though the comfort of to-day does still leave a great deal to be desired); there were then neither dining-cars nor toilet-rooms nor sleeping-cars; there was much of martyrdom connected with the ride; yet this journey seemed to me the sum of all enjoyment—nay, more, of all happiness.
When we arrived, our mothers were totally used up; we two schoolgirls felt nothing but sheer bliss. First a day of rest in the hotel, then house-hunting; then moving to a villa on the street that runs along the Kurort to the Dietenmühle; from our balcony one could hear the tones of the music at the Kur. Visit to the Kursaal. Entrance by a vestibule; then through a great ballroom with marble pillars, then to the right into the suite of gaming-rooms. Children were not admitted there; but we two, Elvira with her fourteen years, I with my thirteen and tall of my age, were regarded as young girls, and the liveried porters made no objections. All four of us wandered through the two roulette parlors, the two trente-et-quarante parlors, and the adjoining reception-rooms. All this was not at that time so gorgeously furnished as are now the gaming-rooms of the Casino at Monte Carlo, but was more like the interior of a castle. After we had seen the halls we went back through the ballroom and out on the other side of the building, to the terrace and the park. In the middle of the park lies a large pond, out of which rises a fountain, and on which dazzlingly white swans float. The music—an Austrian military band from Mainz—is playing on the terrace; and below the terrace stand chairs and tables, and there one sees a numerous and elegant assemblage sitting, standing, walking up and down. Many uniforms among them. The Prussian and Austrian garrisons from the fort, and also the Nassau army, are numerously represented there. Our mothers had a few last year’s acquaintances here; among others, a Nassau court dignitary with his wife; and by chance these were present on that first day, so social life was immediately started. That did not at all suit our mothers though: they had come for a far too serious piece of work to give themselves up to sociality. But in the forenoons they would be free, for the patrons of the place did not assemble till the time of the afternoon music; and perhaps it was even better to take the mind off now and then from the harassing exertion of the efforts to foresee.
A very tall youth in cadet uniform came up to our group. He was a nephew of the Court Marshal of Nassau, and begged to be introduced; Baron Friedrich von Hadeln. The young man saluted respectfully first the older ladies, then, with equal respect, us two. We thanked him graciously: we really were, then, already veritable young ladies.