According to the masses, I visit the Vogelwiese at night, ride on the flying horses and solicit men and boys that please my fancy. Like a gigantic she-monster, I drag them to my lair—"some to vanish forever." (No doubt, I eat them.)
"Unwashed soldiers and clerks reeking with cheap perfume, actors and students, draymen and generals, it's all the same to the Crown Princess.
"Sometimes, when the spirit moves her, the Crown Princess issues from her gilded apartments in the palace and seizes the sentinel patrolling the corridors. Or she visits the guard-room en déshabille and selects the youngest and best looking officer for her prey.
"Generous, too. She thinks nothing of handing a pension of ten thousand marks per year to a chap that pleased her once."
"Is that all they say about me?"
"Not one-half. Poor devils that can't afford ten marks per year for their fun, Cit's wives that know only their ill-kempt husbands, factory girls that sell their virtue for a supper or a glass of beer—though afterwards they claim it was champagne—all take delight in contemplating that you, or any other good looking royal woman, are Frankenstein's succuba or worse. Didn't they accuse your grand-aunt, Marie Antoinette, of incest with her son and gave him to the cobbler to thrash the immorality out of him?"
"And they give names?"
"Strings of them"—among them several I never heard mentioned before.
Dresden, August 15, 1902.