"And would you go with me to the end of the earth, as the story books put it?" I asked tremblingly.
"Louise," he answered, "if you are brave enough and strong enough to throw away a crown, I will be your slave for life."
Dresden, October 20, 1902.
"Your Imperial Highness was pleased to call me a thief once," said the Tisch early this morning as she entered my boudoir, triumph written all over her yellow countenance. "You repeated that calumny to the Prince Royal and doubtless to many other persons. Today came the opportunity to live up to my reputation. I stole a letter addressed to you by your present lover, and as Your Imperial Highness is pleased to doubt my authority, immediately sent it to His Majesty. It makes highly interesting reading."
The blow made my knees tremble, but pain and rage came to my assistance, effacing the momentary weakness.
"Don't think for a moment to frighten me," I cried. "I say to your face that I have a lover—a gentleman, not an unspeakable, like your nephew. And now listen: I will tell the King and the press of Europe, if it must be, that it was you, my Grand Mistress, who 'pandered' me to Henry—for—revenue. I will have him whipped out of the army——"
"You don't suppose for a moment that the word of an adulteress would prove acceptable either to His Majesty or anyone else?" hissed the insolent creature.
"My word will be accepted all around," I shouted back, "for I have the proofs, proofs that you smuggled this unspeakable into my household, proofs that you lied to the King in order not to disrupt your nephew's career.
"And I will cry from the house-tops that you discovered my relations with Henry only after I had paid his debts, after I had financed his excursions to gambling-houses and to usurers' dens. Ah, I paid his tailors and glove-makers, his board and lodging, his laundry bills. I paid the alimony due his strumpets, and after all was done, after his lieutenantship had again a clean bill of health, financially speaking, then, and not a moment before, did you step in and make an end of the farce, wherein I played the part of 'angel,' or pay-master."