What a pageant of love and chivalry, crime and passion, grandeur, life and death, was unrolled for me in its musty pages and clerkly script in divers tongues! At night, when the castle was asleep, I pulled my table up to my glowing log fire and worked in a kind of burning frenzy. Here I touched history, live history, not the poor second or third hand imitation which was doled out to us, according to syllabus, from the Sorbonne Library. I will admit, I must admit, that the fumes of romance mingled with the soulless passion for knowledge that seized my very being. The Court of Hanover danced before my eyes, fantastic and brutal—Ernest-Augustus, the Silenus of politics; George-Louis, the narrow-minded profligate; Countess von Platen, the fearsome Messalina, beautiful and winning notwithstanding; Königsmark, the swarthy adventurer in his blood-stained doublet of pink and gold; pure-souled Sophie-Dorothea, fair and slender in her wedding gown of silver brocade.
Silver, did I say? There spoke the historian, the maker of books. But oh! how much fairer, how much nearer, I imagined her in another gown, a gown fresh in my mind! A gown of green velvet!
Winter was almost over, already yielding to the spring. I had opened my window to help my fire to draw, and through it the air wafted in with the magic touch of living breath. Through the darkness I felt the presence of the black trees, their bare branches quivering with the promise of life.
Several times, my friend, my dear friend—when death hovers overhead why should I not confess those follies which are the price and glory of life for men like ourselves?—under the spell of that old story of a gallant, murdered lover and a fair dead Queen, and impelled by an instinct the sureness of which Fate was in due course to reveal, I pushed open the door of my room with a beating heart. The corridor was dark. The old staircase creaked beneath my steps. Often in the great hall I had seen the lantern of the sleeping watchman. What on earth should I have said, had I been challenged?
The open postern exposed a great steel blue vault in the middle of which mysterious Cassiopeia seemed to shiver. I went out, crossing the moon-bathed lawns, hiding in the shadows of the yews. A light shone in the centre wing of the palace. The Grand Duke Frederick-Augustus must be a late worker! All was dark in the left wing, but when I reached the end of the building and pressed myself against the wall I knew that here, too, there were some who kept late hours.
Spring was not yet with us, but one felt that the song of the nightingale would soon be heard. Bright and spearlike, a ray of light spanned the gravel path, emanating from another window dark with heavy hangings and curtains.
The nightingale was not yet singing in the French park, embedded in the heart of that Germany whither Fate had led me. But behind that window a poignant long-drawn wail, interrupted at intervals by maddening silences that made my nerves quiver with apprehension, came slowly and softly from the silent palace straight to my heart. For Fräulein von Graffenfried was playing Schumann's most plaintive berceuses to her mistress on her violin.
[2]Secret History of the Duchess of Hanover, published in London in 1732, without the author's name but attributed to Baron von Bielefeld, chargé d'affaires of the Court of Prussia at Hanover. For this and later references I have amplified Vignerte's particulars with the aid of Blaze de Bury's articles, which appeared first in the Revue des Deux Mondes and were collected into one volume, the "Episode de l'Histoire du Hanovre, Les Königsmark," in 1855.
[3]Blaze de Bury: "Episode de l'Histoire du Hanovre." Notes and evidence, p. 378.
[4]A duplicate in manuscript of this confession, entitled "Funeral Oration of Countess C. E. von Platen," may be seen in the archives of Vienna.