In a few moments the Kaiser had summoned, by his private telephone, Koehler, then chief of the Berlin secret police, and given orders that the Princess was to be watched in Switzerland. Half an hour later three police agents were on their way to Zurich to follow and persecute the poor, distracted woman, even beyond the confines of the Empire.
She was, no doubt, in deadly fear of being sent to a living tomb, so that her mouth should be closed for ever.
The Emperor, not content with casting her out of Germany, intended to wreak a terrible and fiendish revenge upon her by closing her lips and confining her in an asylum. She knew that, and seeing herself surrounded by enemies and spies on every hand—for even her brother Leopold, with whom she had travelled to Switzerland, now refused to assist her—she adopted the only method of further escape that at the moment presented itself.
Alone and without anyone to advise her, she, as you know, took a desperate resolve, one, alas! fraught with disastrous consequences.
The iron had indeed entered the poor Princess's soul.
Note by William Le Queux
The dénouement of this base intrigue of the Emperor's will be best related in Her Imperial Highness's own words. In one of her letters, which I have on my table as I write, she says:
"I saw before me in those never-to-be-forgotten days all the horrors of a 'Maison de Santé.' What could I do? I was friendless in a strange hotel. Even Leopold seemed disinclined to be further troubled by a runaway sister. I knew Frau von Fritsch, that unscrupulous liar, had accused me falsely of having secret love affairs, and that the Emperor had directed the whole plot which was to culminate in my confinement in an asylum. Suddenly a solution occurred to me. I remembered that Monsieur Giron, who had already suffered greatly through his friendship with me. If he joined me, then my flight from Dresden would be considered as an elopement, and I should escape a living death in a madhouse! Monsieur Giron was at that moment my only friend, and it was for that reason that I telegraphed to him at Brussels. Well, he joined me, and by doing so completed the Emperor's triumph."
The subtle, ever-scheming Madman of Europe, warped as he is in soul as in body, had, with his true Hun craftiness and unscrupulousness, aided by Judicial Councillor Löhlein and the spy Von Metzsch, succeeded in hounding down an honest, defenceless woman as high born as his own diseased self, and casting her in ignominy and shame out of his now doomed Empire.