When to-day I think of William II., I always recall a scene which seemed symbolical of the German Sovereign and his people.
A great crowd filled an immense hall of the grey castle which the past has left in the heart of modern Berlin. People of every rank stood shoulder to shoulder, for it was the one day of the year when the Imperial Court sets courage and faithful service before birth and noble ancestry, the day of the Ordensfest.
I was quite young and I felt joyous and happy as
Eulalia
I passed up the hall in the Imperial procession, with a page bearing my long manteau de cour. And each time that I turned from side to side to bow to the people, I caught a glimpse of the Kaiser at the head of the procession, a silver figure, like Lohengrin, on whose cuirass and helmet the light flashed. Before him walked four heralds in mediæval dress, sounding silver trumpets, and when he reached the dais and stood before the throne, looking down the castle hall, I saw in his steel-blue eyes that look of exaltation which his profound and unshakable belief in the divinity of kings gives him.
Was I a princess born in a democratic age? Or was I living in the age of chivalry, or at the vanished Court of Versailles? Before me, as I went to the dais, stood an Emperor as unshaken in the belief that he possessed godlike qualities as Charlemagne when a Pope set the unexpected crown upon his brow, or, as the Roi Soleil, unflattered by worship he believed to be his due. It seemed that I should have been one of those Infantas of Velasquez in a brocade dress and fluttering a little fan.
The impression the Kaiser made on me that morning of the Ordensfest was not new, though it came with fresh, almost startling, force. I had known him years before as Prince Wilhelm—a simple and unaffected youth. Then he became Crown Prince, and I noted a change. His manner became more imperious, less spontaneous. I felt that he was schooling himself, holding himself in check, conscious of the burden of coming responsibilities, fearing, yet longing for, the golden irksomeness of the Imperial crown. Since he has ascended the throne, I have never met him without realising that he is dominated by the belief that he is an instrument in the hands of the Almighty, divinely appointed to reign.