He told me of a Balkan prince—young Alexander of Servia, the same mamma Natalie intended for my consort—whose chief amusement consists in having mice and rats chased by ferocious tom-cats in a big cage made for that purpose. Once, growing tired of that sport, he incarcerated ten tom-cats in the same cage without food many days in succession, visiting the prison hourly to see whether they wouldn't take to devouring each other.
When, in the end, they did, tearing one another to pieces, His Majesty danced around the cage in high glee, pronouncing the battle of the poor beasts a bully spectacle.
"You visited Castle Sibyllenort a week ago," continued Romano—"a most proper place, this royal residence, is it not? You ought to have seen it before your puritan King inherited it, ten years ago, upon the death of the last Duke of Brunswick. At that time it was a veritable museum of pornography, the apotheosis of Paphian voluptuousness. The palace, which has over four hundred rooms and halls—not one which a decent woman might enter without a blush—acquired its equipment as a lupanar and its reputation for debauchery under the famous, or notorious, 'Diamond Duke,' a brother of the Highness who left the estate to King Albert. Both Dukes held high carnival in its gilded halls, but he of the diamonds rather outdid William in outraging decency.
"One of his chief amusements was to hire a drove of ballet girls for parlor horses. He had a carriage constructed no bigger or heavier than a Japanese jinrickshaw, and to this hitched ten or twenty ballet girls in their birthday suits, walking on all fours, himself rider and driver.
"Gracious—how he lashed his treble and quadruple teams of human flesh as they pulled him from room to room, and his was no make-belief ferocity, either. He was a niggardly rake, but in order to indulge his Sadist tendencies, agreed to pay one Thaler (Seventy-five cents) for every drop of blood shed by the girls.
"To make the count easier, white linen sheets were spread over the carpets, and the sum total was paid over to the two-legged horses after each entertainment, the girls showing the sorest stripes or wounds getting the larger share."
Romano, who lived at half a dozen courts and is primed with the scandalous gossip of them all, could certainly write an entertaining book on the fallacies and vices of the world's Great.
It's most indelicate, to be sure, but I laughed long and hard over the sexual specialty of my uncle, Archduke Karl Ludwig, who is bad, anyhow, as everybody knows.
One morning His Highness rose at an unusually early hour, even before the scrub-women made their exit. In the corridors, in the parlors, everywhere blonde and dark percherons, cleaning away for dear life and courting housemaid's knee!