On the next day after Reverdil's arrival, the king and he took the promised drive with Brandt. Our authority gives a most sarcastic account of Brandt's behaviour during the drive: how he occupied the entire back of the carriage, with one of his elbows out of the window to announce his presence to passers-by. The poor king was crouched up in a corner, with a sad and constrained air, and appeared relieved when they returned home. Reverdil felt the greatest pity for him, and, on the spot, accepted Brandt's offer to leave him to drive out alone in future with the king.
Reverdil remained by himself in the royal apartments with the monarch. His mania, which he concealed from some persons, and which even the physicians in daily attendance on him had not yet noticed, began at once to manifest itself. "You are Brandt," he said to his visitor; then, breaking into a rapid and incoherent babble, he repeated some verses from Zaire, in which tragedy he had acted with Reverdil four years before. Then he said, "You are Denize; you are Latour;" two French actors who had been in his service; and eventually addressed Reverdil by his right name. These extravagances, or a profound silence, or questions about the signs of a change which was incessantly about to take place in his person, occupied nearly three-fourths of the tête-à-tête, during the four months that Reverdil was almost solely with the king, either in his apartments, or driving out, with no other suite but the postilion and a mounted lackey.
At times pride exalted the king; he had been greeted like a god by the English nation; other kings were eclipsed; it was too much wit that had turned his head. At other times the king was oppressed and melancholy: after all that he had done; after braving everything: he would never be more than a "little man;" that is to say, a weak and dependent man. He often talked about killing, and asked Reverdil whether he might not do so only once with impunity and without scandal, or whether, if he did so, he would be hopelessly wretched. On other occasions he pretended to attack his own life. "Shall I drown myself?" he would say; "shall I throw myself out of window, or dash out my brains against the wall?" His object was to alarm Reverdil, and by leaving him the choice, he soon forgot this folly. Still it is true that he often desired death, but feared it at the same time. One of the amusements was pulling in a two-oared boat on the small lake round the palace, and the poor king often said to Reverdil, with the most unhappy face in the world, "I should like to throw myself into the lake and be pulled out again directly." His imagination only found a refuge in a state of apathy, which was the object of his hopes and desires. There were three marked shades in his madness, which he indicated by three German expressions.[161] According to the stage of his trouble, he often wound up his remarks by saying, with a groan, "I am confused" (Ich bin confus); or else, "There is a noise in my head" (Es rappelt bei mir); or, lastly, "I am quite beside myself" (Er ist ganz übergeschnappt). At times, his muttered and confused remarks ended with the words, "I can stand it no longer."
The king was evidently very unhappy; and honest Reverdil was equally so. The latter usually passed an hour with Christian after the dinner; and as he had been his reader, the king, at times, put a book in his hand, not to listen to what he read, but that he might indulge in his own melancholy reveries, and talk to himself in a low voice. The first book Reverdil took up was a dictionary of celebrated men, marked at the history of Rizzio, the lover of Mary Stuart, assassinated by Darnley, her husband. If this was the trick of a valet, it failed in its effect, for the king never listened. Besides, the king had not the slightest tendency to jealousy, for he spoke twice to Reverdil about a thing which would have aroused that feeling in any other husband. Once he said that Struensee was the queen's Cicisbeo; on another occasion, he asked his visitor whether he believed that the King of Prussia slept with Queen Matilda. "Why, who is the King of Prussia?" Reverdil asked. "Oh! Struensee." This way of designating the favourite proved, at any rate, what power the latter possessed over the weak-minded monarch.
The details which Reverdil gives us about the habits of the court are very curious. When they did not go hunting, they assembled to breakfast between eleven and twelve o'clock. The king, the queen, Counts Struensee and Brandt, with some of their male and female favourites, were always present; and when the state of the weather allowed it, breakfast was followed by a walk, in which Struensee gave his arm to the queen; the king, to the only maid-of-honour who was admitted to this familiarity; each of the other gentlemen to a lady; and chance did not decide the selection. From time to time, the same party dined at some summer-house, a distance away. Etiquette was banished from these parties; and the newly-appointed pages waited at table. They only entered when a bell was rung, and left the room when they had done what was wanted. On these excursions, the queen drove out in the same carriage with the king and Struensee. She placed herself between them at table; and if the king misbehaved himself, Reverdil led him out of the room. The queen even returned at night alone with the favourite. This princess, who, on her arrival from England, had been extremely affable and ingenious in finding occasions to say agreeable things to everybody, now only spoke with eagerness to the favourite; and if before and after dinner she addressed any one, whether male or female, Struensee was listening.
With this exception, the indecent tone supposed by the public did not prevail in this company; they resembled the servants of a large house who had sat down to table in their master's absence. A new comer must have been struck by the familiar tone, and at seeing a court where there were no great noblemen, and hardly any gentlemen.
Reverdil was astonished at not hearing a word about the queen dowager and her son, who lived at Fredensborg, about nine miles from Hirschholm. There seemed a settled determination to keep Prince Frederick apart from his brother; no appanage was granted him, though it was full time to think about it, nor was he initiated into affairs of state. Reverdil resolved to do what he could to satisfy the queen dowager by inducing the king to drive over and see her; but the latter would not consent. Hence the estrangement came from Christian, and not from the queen dowager.
We have seen how Prince Frederick was kept out of the king's box at the play; and Brandt was blamed for it, although it was done by the monarch's express order. Equal anger was felt because Brandt did not invite the prince to the private theatricals and dancing which filled up a portion of the evenings at Hirschholm. For this, so Reverdil says, Struensee was mainly to blame. He had seen at London and Berlin the princes paying their court to the king, and mixing themselves up with the grandees in the ante-chamber. On his return, he was shocked by the old Danish fashion, by which the courtiers did not come to the king's ante-room till they had paid their respects to the royal princes and princesses, who were thus placed on a level with the sovereign. He therefore resolved to make Prince Frederick undergo these humiliations until he had learned his duty.
It required a great occasion for the queen dowager and her son to be invited, at lengthened intervals, to dine at Hirschholm. When they arrived, they were kept waiting; and the frigid reception granted them left them but little doubt that their presence was disagreeable. They were not angry with the king, and did not explain this contempt by his caprices or his indolent apathy, but they blamed the young queen and her adherents. Hence serious aid frivolous subjects combined to foment the misunderstanding in the royal family and between relations. The lightest insults are not those which hurt the least.
Serious complaints were being raised about this time at the court of the queen dowager, in the capital and the provinces, about the education of the prince royal, or rather, because his education was not yet begun. He was said to be left in the gardens of Hirschholm to the inclemency of the seasons and his own imprudence, with no other society but that of two lads of the lowest rank. The most reasonable and the warmest patriots said bitterly, that a retarded education was a great fault in the case of a boy whose majority began at the age of thirteen; as if the natural progress of a boy could be accelerated in accordance with human institutions.