Suddenly all of us were surprised by the announcement that the Kaiser's favoured civilian in Turkey had married Mademoiselle Julie de Lagarenne, daughter of Paul de Lagarenne, son of the great French sugar refiner, and secretary of the French Embassy at Rome. We heard also that, having married in Italy, he was bringing his wife to Berlin. Indeed, a week after that news was spread I met them both in Kranzler's in Unter den Linden, and there he introduced me to a pretty, dark-haired, vivacious young Frenchwoman, who spoke German well, and who told me that her husband had already given in her name for presentation at the next Court.
That was about a month prior to Orville Wright's flight and the midnight visit of Frau Kleist to the Emperor.
Truth to tell, the old woman's mention of Herr Reitschel's name caused me considerable misgivings, because three weeks before I had gathered certain strange facts from a secret report of a spy who in Constantinople had been set to watch Herr Reitschel's doings. That spy was Frau Kleist's son.
The Kaiser trusts nobody. Even his favourites and most intimate cronies are spied upon, and reports upon those familiar blue papers are furnished regularly. In view of what I had read in that report from Karl Kleist, I stood amazed when, at the grand Court a week later, I had witnessed Herr Reitschel's French wife bow before the Emperor and Empress and noticed how graciously the Kaiser had smiled upon her. Truly the Emperor is sphinx-like and imperturbable. Outside the privacy of his own room, that chamber of cunning plots and fierce revenge, he never allows his sardonic countenance to betray his inner thoughts, and will grasp the hand of his most hated enemy with the hearty warmth of friendship, a Satanic volte-face in which danger and evil lurk always, a trait inherited to its full degree by the Crown-Prince.
The days that followed Frau Kleist's midnight visit were indeed busy, eventful days. Certain diplomatic negotiations with Washington had been unsuccessful; Von Holleben, the Ambassador, had been recalled, and given an extremely bad half-hour by both Kaiser and Chancellor. In addition, some wily American journalist had fathomed the amazing duplicity of Prince Henry's visit to the States and Germany's Press Bureau in America, while the Yellow Press of New York had published a ghastly array of facts and figures concerning the latter, together with facsimile documents, all of which had sent His Majesty half-crazy with anger.
Nearly three months passed.
Herr Reitschel often came from Constantinople, and frequently brought his handsome young wife with him, for he was persona grata at Court. To me this was indeed strange in view of the reports of the ex-opera dancer's son—who, by the way, lived in Constantinople in the unsuspicious guise of a carpet-dealer, and unknown to the bank director.
The latter had, assisted by his wife's fortune, inherited from her grandmother, purchased the Schloss Langenberg, the splendid ancestral castle and estates of the Princes of Langenberg, situate on a rock between Ilmenau and Zella, in the beautiful Thuringian Forest, and acknowledged to be one of the most famous shooting estates in the Empire. It was not, therefore, surprising that the Emperor, to mark his favour, should express a desire to shoot capercailzie there—a desire which, of course, delighted Herr Reitschel, who had only a few days before been decorated with the Order of the Black Eagle.
One afternoon in mid-autumn the Emperor, accompanied by the Crown-Prince and myself, together with the suite, arrived by the Imperial train at the little station of Ilmenau, where, of course, Reitschel and his pretty wife, with the land-rats, head and under foresters, and all sorts of civil officials in black coats and white ties bowed low as the All-Highest stepped from his saloon. The Kaiser was most gracious to his host and hostess, while the schloss, we found, was almost equal in beauty and extent to that of Prince Max Egon zu Fürstenberg at Donau-Eschingen, which place we always visited once, if not twice, each year.
The Emperor had complained of a slight cold, and in consequence, just before we left Berlin, I had been instructed to summon by telegraph a certain Dr. Vollerthun from Augsburg, who was a perfect stranger to us all, but who had, I supposed, been recommended to the Emperor by somebody who, for some consideration, wished to advance him in his profession.