“Gracious prince!”
“Who can make us feel our dependence. Ha! it must be sweet, indeed.”
He again paused. His looks alarmed me, for I had never before seen him thus agitated.
“Whether a man be poorest of the poor,” he continued, “or the next heir to the throne, it is all one and the same thing. There is but one difference between men—to obey or to command.”
He again glanced over the letter.
“You know the man,” he continued, “who has dared to write these words to me. Would you salute him in the street if fate had not made him your master? By Heaven, there is something great in a crown.”
He went on in this strain, giving expression to many things which I dare not trust to paper. On this occasion the prince confided a circumstance to me which alike surprised and terrified me, and which may be followed by the most alarming consequences. We have hitherto been entirely deceived regarding the family relations of the court of ————.
He answered the letter on the spot, notwithstanding my earnest entreaty that he should postpone doing so; and the strain in which he wrote leaves no ground to hope for a favorable settlement of those differences.
You are no doubt impatient, dear O———, to hear something definite with respect to the Greek; but in truth I have very little to tell you. From the prince I can learn nothing, as he has been admitted into her confidence, and is, I believe, bound to secrecy. The fact has, however, transpired that she is not a Greek, as we supposed, but a German of the highest descent. From a certain report that has reached me, it would appear that her mother is of the most exalted rank, and that she is the fruit of an unfortunate amour which was once talked of all over Europe. A course of secret persecution to which she had been exposed, in consequence of her origin, compelled her to seek protection in Venice, and to adopt that concealment which had rendered it impossible for the prince to discover her retreat. The respect with which the prince speaks of her, and a certain deferential deportment which he maintains towards her, appear to corroborate the truth of this report.
He is devoted to her with a fearful intensity of passion which increases day by day. In the earliest stage of their acquaintance but few interviews were granted; but after the first week the separations were of shorter duration, and now there is scarce a day on which the prince is not with her. Whole evenings pass without our even seeing him, and when he is not with her she appears to form the sole object of his thoughts. His whole being seems metamorphosed. He goes about as if wrapped in a dream, and nothing that formerly interested him has now power to arrest his attention even for a moment.