"'Your dear father gave them to me when I was a bride,' she said with a sigh, for it is but two years since we lost him.
"'Lovely!' cried my sister Clarechen when she saw me, but Ludwig frowned.
"'Why French flowers?' he asked, his eyes on the fleur-de-lys. Ludwig sees all things. 'Why not something German and blue?' he asked with great discontent.
"Ludwig is very strange in some ways. For one thing, he will not speak French, like all well-bred people.
"'I am a German,' he will say, 'why not speak my own language?'
"And he calls mother 'Frau,' and not 'Madame,' and me 'Fräulein,' and all my notes to him must be written in German, and German is so hard, not beautiful, like French, and he scolds me when I make more than a dozen mistakes in my articles: die, der, das.
"But my dress, my lovely, lovely dress!
"It might have been blue, or red, or any colour, for all that it mattered. The crowd was so great no one looked at poor little Erna von Bergman, and next day she spent hours darning a great rent in her skirt.
"But I have seen our Crown Princess, and she smiled right at me, so what else matters? No one could behead her as the French did Marie Antoinette; no, not even for liberty.
"She was in white and wore a crown of sparkling diamonds. The Crown Prince looked at her as if he adored her. He is very earnest and grave, she, very bright and gay. There is great love between them, I can see that, because of my own love for my Ludwig.