No one would ever have dreamt of finding any fault with this intimacy between the emperor and the baron, had it not been for the fact that the latter laid himself open to charges of having taken advantage of the imperial favor won by mimicry and practical joking, to further political and personal intrigues in which he was interested. Indeed, he was repeatedly accused in the German press of being largely responsible for the manifestation of animosity between the Court of Berlin and Friedrichsrüh that characterized the last eight or nine years of the life of Prince Bismarck. The newspapers did not hesitate to assert that the baron, who had formerly been one of the confidential secretaries of the old chancellor, had deliberately fomented the irritation of the kaiser against the veteran statesman, believing that any reconciliation between the monarch and his former chancellor would entail the baron's disgrace. Finally, the abuse of the baron in the Berlin press became so pronounced that he was virtually obliged to challenge the editor of one of the most vituperative of the metropolitan sheets, and very gallantly lodged a bullet through the shoulder of this "knight of the quill!"
For this escapade the baron was condemned to three months' imprisonment by the courts, duelling, as has been intimated already, being forbidden by law in Germany. His incarceration in the military fortress of Ehrenbreitstein on the Rhine was absolutely unprecedented. Ambassadors and envoys have in times gone by been imprisoned by sovereigns to whose courts they were accredited, in defiance of all the laws of international right regulating the intercourse between civilized powers, but this was the first occasion of a government taking the unheard-of step of jailing one of its own envoys.
Fortunately for the baron, the King of Denmark was, before his accession to the throne, an officer of the German army, and as such was disposed to regard with the utmost leniency the offence for which his excellency was condemned to imprisonment. He realized that the baron had no alternative but to fight, his honor having been questioned by the paper whose editor he challenged. Although duelling is forbidden by the criminal law of Germany, under the penalty of imprisonment, yet, had the baron failed to fight, and taken shelter behind the law, he would not only have been compelled to resign his diplomatic office, his position at court, and his rank in the army, but he would have subjected himself to such odium as to have become to all intents and purposes a social outcast, and compelled to leave Germany.
Appreciating this, old King Christian raised no objections to the appointment of a chargé d'affaires, to represent the diplomatic interests of Germany at his court, during the term of imprisonment served by the minister plenipotentiary, and from the moment when the latter completed his term, and was liberated from prison, he resumed his duties as envoy at the Court of Copenhagen, just as if nothing had happened.
Another intimate friend of the kaiser, who possesses much the same talents de société as Baron Kiderlen-Waechter, and whose position in the high favor of the kaiser has been a subject of much unfavorable comment, and even of open abuse in Berlin, is Baron Holstein, popularly known as the "Austern-Freund" or "Oyster-Friend," owing to his altogether phenomenal capacity for the absorption of bivalves, and his strongly developed fondness for good cheer! Baron Holstein, like Baron Kiderlen-Waechter, was formerly one of the confidential secretaries of Prince Bismarck, and a daily guest at his table, and was treated as a member of the old chancellor's family for years, yet he became one of the most relentless foes of the Bismarck family as soon as the prince was dismissed from office.
Prince Bismarck was not the sort of man to submit in silence to the enmity of his former secretary, and a few years after his retirement to Friedrichsrüh he took occasion, during the course of a public discussion of the circumstances which led to the disgrace and ruin of Count Harry Arnim, for a long time German ambassador at Paris, to disclose for the first time in speech, and in print, the part which Baron Holstein had played in the affair. According to the prince, Baron Holstein, while first secretary of the German embassy at Paris, and though treated by Count Arnim as an inmate of his home, living in fact under his roof, and eating at his table, was in the habit throughout an entire year of sending secret reports to Berlin against the chief under whom he was serving—reports which subsequently furnished the basis of the charges upon which Count Arnim was tried, convicted and disgraced.
It is true that some mention was made in the Parisian and English press at the time of the Arnim trial of the questionable rôle which Baron Holstein had played in the affair, and there were a number of Parisian papers that did not hesitate to hold up the baron to, at any rate, French obloquy, as a man guilty of the base betrayal of the kindest and most indulgent of chiefs. The only person on that occasion who had the courage to take up the baron's defence was M. de Blowitz, French correspondent of the London Times, of which he is described on the banks of the Seine, as the "ambassador," and who possesses an immense amount of influence with the Parisian press. Blowitz's championship of the baron's cause was sincerely appreciated by the latter. He called upon the correspondent, thanked him effusively, and declared that it was his intervention alone that had made his stay at Paris possible.
During the conversation that followed, Blowitz opened his heart to his visitor, telling him that his own position as the Paris correspondent of the Times was in danger owing to some changes in the administration of the London office. A fortnight later, Blowitz received from the managing editor of the Times in London a letter sixteen pages long, addressed to Printing-House Square, and entirely written and signed by Baron Holstein. It denounced Blowitz as being one of the creatures of the late Duc Decazes, as wilfully ignoring and concealing for interested purposes of his own, a number of matters that should have found their way into the columns of the Times, and urging the managers of the latter to send to Paris some fitter and more impartial person, who would be better able to keep the great English newspaper au courant of what was going on below as well as above the surface, than so unscrupulous a person as M. de Blowitz. This letter was dated exactly three days after the latter's visit of gratitude to the correspondent, and the incident may be regarded as being in perfect harmony with the behavior of this favorite of the kaiser to both Count Harry Arnim and subsequently to Prince Bismarck.
The third of these cronies of the kaiser, to whom his subjects take objection on the ground that they are in the habit of using the favor shown to them by his majesty to further their own interests, and to injure those who, for one reason or another, have incurred their animosity, is Count Philip Eulenburg, who has been again and again referred to in the Berlin newspapers as "the Troubadour." He is at the present moment German ambassador at Vienna, whence his predecessor, Prince Reuss, was ousted in spite of the eminent services of a personal character which he had rendered to the emperor, in order to make way for the count. The latter's intimacy with his sovereign is largely due to his cleverness as a poet, a dramatist, and a composer, and while he has furnished the words to many of the musical compositions of the kaiser, William has, in turn, had much of his own poetry set to music by the count.
Philip Eulenburg has been clever enough to foster William's very pardonable weakness as to his gifts as a musician and a poet, and being a man of the most charming manners, possessed of an unusual supply of tact, and extremely accomplished in many respects, he has acquired an extraordinary degree of influence over his sovereign. Indeed it may be doubted whether there is any member of the imperial entourage who stands as high in the good graces of the German ruler as does his ambassador to the Court of Vienna.