When I am Queen, I will have friends in plenty. But then I won't need any. Immense wealth will be at my disposal. I will have offices to distribute, titles, crosses and stars.
Instead of tolerating the serpents now coiling at my fireside ready to spring at a word from their master, I will appoint to court offices persons I love or esteem, at least.
Henry shall be my Chief Equerry; the Tisch will be dismissed in disgrace—no pension.
But I am day-dreaming again. I started out to say that I had no friends. Yet there's Bernhardt? Precisely—as long as I am his mistress.
Marie is dead, Melita expects to be divorced before the end of the year. She will be a Russian Grand-Duchess, and the tedium of petty German court life will know her no longer.
Aside from Lucretia, there isn't a man or woman at the Saxon court whom I can trust, for our high functionaries are only lackeys having a bathroom to themselves. In no other way do they differ from the servants who are allowed one bathroom per twenty-four heads.
But the high aristocracy! Its men and women flatter us to get us into leading strings, try to make us pawns on the political or social chess-board. As a whole, they are a despicable lot.
No wonder kings of old married members of their own family exclusively, even their sisters, in re of which the learned Baron von Reitzenstein told me many interesting details.
He copied especially from Egyptian records, but also from Armenian, Babylonian and Persian, to wit:
Daranavausch married his niece, Phratunga.