Each time I have stayed at the Court of Vienna I have regretted that I did not know Louis II personally. When I first saw him he had already taken refuge in his dreams and his dreamlike castles.
Like Rudolph, he had been seized with a great mistrust, not of humanity, but of those who directed human affairs. He did not, like Rudolph, find a way of escape in suicide. Louis II created for himself a paradise of art and beauty, where he endeavoured to lose himself, away from his people, whom he loved, and by whom he was loved in return.
I once caught sight of him in the park at Munich sitting alone in his state carriage, escorted by rather theatrical outriders. Behind the bevelled plate-glass windows framed in gold, he sat imposing and motionless.
He was an astonishing apparition, one which the crowd saluted without his seeming to take any notice.
After his extravagances the Court, forced to economize, easily adopted a more or less bourgeois existence.
I rejoiced to see the patriarchal customs of the Regent, Prince Luitpold. I had not then much experience of politics, and only saw the surface of things. The impatient insubordination of Bavaria to Prussia, from which a more intelligent and less divided Europe might have derived so much advantage, escaped me. I only saw in the Regent a character out of one of Topfer's stories.
He devoted the greater part of his time, even in his old age, to physical exercises. Shooting and swimming were his favourite pastimes. He bathed every day all the year round in one of the large ponds on his estate in Nymphenburg. And when he was not shooting he was walking. His outward appearance gave no indication of his rank. I met him one autumn day in Vienna in one of the little streets off the Prater behind the Lusthaus; he was in his shirt sleeves; his coat and top hat were hanging on the point of the walking-stick which he carried over his shoulder. He seemed happier than a king.
His inseparable companion, a poodle no less shaggy and hairy than his master, accompanied him. They looked exactly like one another. At a distance a nearsighted person might easily have mistaken the dog for the Regent and the Regent for the dog.
Louis III, his son and successor, inherited his father's simple tastes, which he believed he could simplify still more. But excess in anything is a mistake. His abuse of simplicity was practically his only way of making a mark in contemporaneous history. History will not preserve the memory of this mediocre King of Bavaria, but it will remember his unfashionable clothes, his concertina trousers, his square boots with rubber heels and his wrinkled socks, by which he wished to demonstrate his democratic tastes. He would have done better to have recollected that the duty of a king is to raise the man in the street to the level of the throne, and not to let the king descend to the level of the man in the street.
He was not popular, owing to his bad taste. In vain he paraded his love of beer, coarse jokes, sausages and skittles. The Bavarians remembered Louis II as a good king, and at the same time as a grandly spectacular king.