Wishing to test my new powers at once, I rang. Ludwig appeared.
"Good Lord!" I thought, "if M. Thierry could only see you he'd feel reassured."
The fellow, thirty years old or so, had the most amazingly inexpressive face I had ever beheld before I went to Germany. Subsequently I became quite used to these good-natured, blue-eyed bran-bags. His head was that of nine out of ten of our prisoners.
I only managed to extract from Ludwig one piece of information, that I should take my meals on the ground floor (my room was on the floor above) in a room reserved for the civil and military establishment of Duke Joachim, that is to say myself, Major von Kessel and Professor Cyrus Beck, of Kiel University. In addition we could all have meals served in our own rooms if we wished.
Vignerte had hitherto spoken in the same level tone, finding no difficulty in recalling the smallest detail of a story with which he visibly lived night and day. But at this point he paused.
I see, my friend, that my tale is not boring you, but I begin to be conscious now of the difficulties of my task. Hitherto chronological order has been enough, but at this point I must change it for a time or I shall risk confusing you and obscuring the broad outline with a mass of petty detail. Let me give you now a detailed description of Lautenburg and its inhabitants. When I have done this we will return to the course of events. They will group the picture.
1. THE PALACE
I should say palaces, rather than palace, as the residence of the Grand Dukes of Lautenburg-Detmold is a combination of a Renaissance castle, built on one side of a Gothic keep, and a Louis Quatorze palace shamelessly copied from Versailles. Taken separately, each of these components is not without architectural merit, but their combination presented enormous difficulties to the architect of the Grand Duke Ulrich, the present sovereign's grandfather, who was instructed to make a symmetrical whole of these incompatible edifices. He solved his problem by throwing out a wing on the left, erecting a flanking tower on the right, and adding in the centre a kind of hall which is a cross between the Gare d'Orsay and the Chapel at Versailles. I admit his task was appalling, but why is it that these insoluble architectural puzzles are always to be met with in Germany?
Such as it is, this immense hall is used both as council chamber and banqueting-hall, and I must say that, communicating with the gallery of the palace and the Great Hall of the castle, it serves its double purpose well enough.
The palace meets the castle in the middle, so that the combined edifice has the shape of a T. It crowns a hill which towers over the town, and falls away sheer at the foot of the castle, but in a gentle slope behind the palace. The Melna passes through the town and winds round the castle in a gorge, a hundred feet deep or so, before glancing off to bound the French garden, which stretches behind the palace.