Klaus Heinrich lived there without unnecessary expense, with one major-domo, who superintended the household, a Baron von Schulenburg-Tressen, nephew of the Mistress of the Robes. Besides his valet, Neumann, he had two other lackeys for his daily needs; he borrowed the game-keeper when necessary for ceremonial shoots, from the Grand Duke's Court. One coachman and a couple of grooms in red waistcoats looked after the carriages and horses, which consisted of one pony-cart, one brougham, one dog-cart, two riding and two carriage horses. One gardener, helped by two boys, looked after the park and the garden; and one cook with her kitchen-maid, as well as two chambermaids, made up the female staff of the “Hermitage.”
It was Court Marshal von Schulenburg's business to keep his young master's establishment going on the apanage which the Landtag, after Albrecht's accession, had voted the Grand Duke's brother after a serious debate. It amounted to two thousand five hundred pounds. For the sum of four thousand pounds, which had been the original demand, had never had any prospect of recommending itself to the Landtag, and so a wise and magnanimous act of self-denial had been credited to Klaus Heinrich, which had made an excellent impression in the country. Every winter Herr von Schulenburg sold the ice from the pond. He had the hay in the park mowed twice every summer and sold. After the harvests the surface of the fields looked almost like English turf.
Further, Dorothea, the Dowager Grand Duchess, no longer lived in the Old Schloss, and the causes of her retirement were both sad and uncomfortable. For she too, the Princess whom the much-travelled Herr von Knobelsdorff had described more than once as one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen, the Princess whose radiant smiles had evoked joy, enthusiasm, and cheers whenever she had shown herself to the longing gaze of the toil-worn masses, she too had had to pay her tribute to time. Dorothea had aged, her calm perfection, the admiration and joy of everybody, had during recent years withered so fast and steadily that the woman in her had been unable to keep pace with the transformation. Nothing, no art, no measures, even the painful and repulsive ones, with which she tried to stave off decay, had availed to prevent the sweet brightness of her deep blue eyes from fading, rings of loose yellow skin from forming under them, the wonderful little dimples in her cheeks from turning into furrows, and her proud and hard mouth from looking drawn and bitter.
But since her heart had been hard as her beauty, and had been absorbed in that beauty, since her beauty had been her very soul and she had had no wish, no love, beyond the effect of that beauty on the hearts of others, while her own heart never beat the faster for anything or anyone, she was now disconsolate and lost, could not accommodate herself to the change and rebelled against it. Surgeon-General Eschrich said something about mental disturbance resulting from an unusually quick climacteric, and his opinion was undoubtedly correct in a sense. The sad truth at any rate was that Dorothea during the last years of her husband's life had already shown signs of profound mental disturbance and trouble.
She became light-shy, gave orders that at the Thursday concerts in the Marble Hall all the lights should be shaded red, and flew into a passion because she could not have the same thing done at all other festivities, the Court Ball, the Private Ball, the Dinner Party, and the Great Court, as the kind of twilight feeling in the Marble Hall had been enough by itself to call forth many cutting remarks. She spent whole days before her looking-glasses, and it was noticed that she fondled with her hands those which for some reason or other reflected her image in a more favourable light. Then again she had all the looking-glasses removed from her rooms, and those fixed in the wall draped, went to bed and prayed for death.
One day Baroness von Schulenburg found her quite distracted and feverish with weeping in the Hall of the Twelve Months before the big portrait which represented her at the height of her beauty…. At the same time a diseased misanthropy began to take possession of her, and both Court and people were distressed to notice how the bearing of this erstwhile goddess began to lose its assurance, her deportment became strangely awkward, and a pitiful look came into her eyes.
At last she shut herself up altogether, and, at the last Court Ball he attended, Johann Albrecht had escorted his sister Catherine instead of his “indisposed Consort.” His death was from one point of view a release for Dorothea, as it relieved her from all her duties as a sovereign. She chose as dower-house Schloss Segenhaus, a monastic-looking old hunting-seat, which lay in a solemn park about one and a half hour's drive from the capital, and had been decorated by some pious old sportsman with religious and sporting emblems curiously intermixed. There she lived, eclipsed and odd, and excursionists could often watch her from afar, walking in the park with Baroness von Schulenburg-Tressen, and bowing graciously to the trees on each side of the path.
Lastly, Princess Ditlinde had married at the age of twenty, one year after her father's death. She bestowed her hand on a prince of a mediatised house, Prince Philipp zu Ried-Hohenried, a no longer young, but well-preserved, cultured little man of advanced views, who paid her flattering attentions for some considerable time, did all his courting at first-hand, and offered the Princess his heart and hand in an honest bourgeois way at a charity function.
It would be wrong to say that this alliance evoked wild enthusiasm in the country. It was received with indifference; it disappointed. It is true, more ambitious hopes had been secretly entertained for Johann Albrecht's daughter, and all the critics could say was that the marriage could not be called a mésalliance in so many words. It was a fact that Ditlinde, in giving her hand to the Prince—which she did of her own free will, and quite uninfluenced by others—had undoubtedly descended out of her sphere of Highness into a more free and human atmosphere. Her noble spouse was not only a lover and collector of oil paintings, but also a business man and tradesman on a large scale.
The dynasty had ceased to exercise any sovereign right hundreds of years ago, but Philipp was the first of his house to make up his mind to exploit his private means in a natural way. After spending his youth in travelling, he had looked around for a sphere of activity which would keep him busy and contented, and at the same time (a matter of necessity) would increase his income. So he launched out into various enterprises, started farms, a brewery, a sugar factory, several saw-mills on his property, and began to exploit his extensive peat deposits in a methodical way. As he brought expert knowledge and sound business instincts to all his enterprises, they soon began to pay, and returned profits which, if their origin was not very princely, at any rate provided him with the means of leading a princely existence which he would otherwise not have had.