"On the 30th of May I revisited her, after having been unable, on account of a slight indisposition, to see my patients for several days. Her governess then told me that the Princess had made great progress. She lay at an angle of 80°. The governess placed herself at the foot of the couch, held out her hands to the Princess, and drew her up into an upright position, and she told me that this had been done several times of late during my enforced absence. Whilst she was thus standing I made the Princess raise and depress her feet, and go through all the motions of walking. Immediately on my return home I set to work to construct a machine which might enable her to walk without risk of a fall and of hurting herself. On the 19th of June, in the evening, I told the Princess that the apparatus was nearly finished. Next day, a little after 10 A.M., I visited her. When I opened her door she rose up from a chair in which she was seated, and came towards me with short, somewhat uncertain steps. I bowed myself, in token of joy and thanks to God.
"At that moment a gentleman I had never seen before entered the room and exclaimed, 'Mathilde! you have had faith in God!' The Princess replied, 'I have had, and I have now, entire faith.' The gentleman said, 'Your faith has saved and healed you. God has succoured you.' Then I began to suspect that some strange influence was at work, and that something had been going on of which I was not cognizant. I asked the gentleman what was the meaning of this. He raised his right hand to heaven, and replied that he had prayed and thought of the Princess that morning at mass, and that Prince Wallerstein was privy to the whole proceeding. I was puzzled and amazed. Then I asked the Princess to walk again. She did so, and shortly after I left, and only then did I learn that the stranger was the Prince of Hohenlohe.
"Next month, on July 21, her aunt, the Princess Eleanor of Schwarzenberg, came with three of the sisters of Princess Mathilde to fetch her away and to take her back to her father. Her Highness did me the honour of visiting me along with the Princesses on the second day after their arrival, to thank me for the pains I had taken to cure the Princess Mathilde. Before they left, Dr. Schäfer, who had attended her at Ratisbon, Herr Textor, and myself were allowed to examine the Princess. Dr. Schäfer found that the condition of the thorax was mightily improved since she had been in my hands. I, however, saw that her condition had retrograded since I had last seen her on June 20, and it was agreed that the Princess was to occupy her extension-couch at night, and by day wear the steel apparatus for support I had contrived for her. At the same time Dr. Schäfer distinctly assured her and the Princess, her aunt, that under my management the patient had recovered the power of walking before the 19th of June."
This account puts a different complexion on the cure, and shows that it was not in any way miraculous. The Prince and the peasant stepped in and snatched the credit of having cured the Princess from the doctor, to whom it rightly belonged.
Before we proceed, it will be well to say a few words about this Prince Alexander Hohenlohe. The Hohenlohe family takes its name from a bare elevated plateau in Franconia. About the beginning of the 16th century it broke into two branches; the elder is Hohenlohe-Neuenstein, the younger is Hohenlohe-Waldenburg.
The elder branch has its sub-ramifications—Hohenlohe-Langenburg, which possesses also the county of Gleichen; and the Hohenlohe-Oehringen and the Hohenlohe-Kirchberg sub-branches. The second main branch of Hohenlohe-Waldenburg has also its lateral branches, as those of Hohenlohe-Bartenstein and Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst; the last of these being Catholic.
Prince Leopold Alexander was born in 1794 at Kupferzell, near Waldenburg, and was the eighteenth child of Prince Karl Albrecht and his wife Judith, Baroness Reviczky. His father never became reigning prince, from intellectual incapacity, and Alexander lost him when he was one year old. He was educated for the Church by the ex-Jesuit Riel, and went to school first in Vienna, then at Berne; in 1810 he entered the Episcopal seminary at Vienna, and finished his theological studies at Ellwangen in 1814. He was ordained priest in 1816, and went to Rome.
Dr. Wolff, the father of Sir Henry Drummond Wolff, in his "Travels and Adventures," which is really his autobiography, says (vol i. p. 31):—
"Wolff left the house of Count Stolberg on the 3rd April, 1815, and went to Ellwangen, and there met again an old pupil from Vienna, Prince Alexander Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst, afterwards so celebrated for his miracles—to which so many men of the highest rank and intelligence have borne witness that Wolff dares not give a decided opinion about them. But Niebuhr relates that the Pope said to him himself, speaking about Hohenlohe in a sneering manner, 'Questo far dei miracoli!' This fellow performing miracles!