Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess. Fischer Henry William
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Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess
EDITOR'S CARD
This is to certify that the Ex-Crown Princess of Saxony, now called Countess Montiguoso, Madame Toselli by her married name, is in no way, either directly or indirectly, interested in this publication.
There has been no communication of whatever nature, directly or through a third party, between this lady and the editor or publishers. In fact, the publication will be as much a surprise to her as to the general public.
The Royal Court of Saxony, therefore, has no right to claim, on the ground of this publication, that Princess Louise violated her agreement with that court as set forth in the chapter on the Kith and Kin of the ex-Crown Princess of Saxony, under the heads of "Louise's Alimony and Conditions" and "Allowance Raised and a Further Threat."
Henry W. Fischer, Editor.
Fischer's Foreign Letters, Publishers
THIS BOOK AND ITS PURPOSE
Of Memoirs that are truly faithful records of royal lives, we have a few; the late Queen Victoria led the small number of crowned autobiographists only to discourage the reading of self-satisfied royal ego-portrayals forever, but in the Story of Louise of Saxony we have the main life epoch of a Cyprian Royal, who had no inducement to say anything false and is not afraid to say anything true.
For the Saxon Louise wrote not to guide the hand of future official historiographers, or to make virtue distasteful to some sixty odd grand-children, bored to death by the recital of the late "Mrs. John Brown's" sublime goodness: – Louise wrote for her own amusement, even as Pepys did when he diarized the peccadilloes of the Second Charles' English and French "hures" (which is the estimate these ladies put upon themselves).1
The ex-Crown Princess of Saxony suffered much in her youth by a narrow-minded, bigoted mother, a Sadist like the monstrous Torquemada; marriage, she imagined, spelled a rich husband, more lover than master; freedom from tyranny, paltry surroundings, interference. To her untutored mind, life at the Saxon Court meant right royal splendor, liberty to do as one pleases, the companionship of agreeable, amusing and ready-to-serve friends.
Her experience? Instead of the Imperial mother who took delight in cutting her children's faces with diamonds and exposing her daughters to the foul machinations of worthless teachers – she acquired a father-in-law (Prince, afterwards King George) whose pretended affection was but a share of his all-encompassing hatred, whose breath was a serpent's, whose veins were flowing with gall; the supposed chevaleresque husband turned out a walking dictionary of petty indecencies and gross vulgarities when in a favorable mood, a brawler at other times, a coward always.
As to money – Louise wished for nothing better "than to be an American multi-millionaire's daughter for a week"! Amusements were few and frowned upon.
Liberty? None outside of a general permit to eat, drink and couple like animals in pasture, was recognized or tolerated. Nor could the royal young woman make friends. Her relatives-by-marriage were mostly freaks, and all were unbearable; her entourage a collection of spies and flunkeys.
If charity-bazaars, pious palaver, and orphaned babies' diapers had not been the sole topic of conversation at court; if there had been intellectual enjoyment of any kind, Louise might never have taken up her pen. As it was: "This Diary is intended to contain my innermost thoughts, my ambitions, my promises for the future, Myself. * * * These pages are my Father-Confessor. I confess to myself. * * * And as I start in writing letters to myself, it occurs to me that my worse self may be corresponding with my better self, or vice-versa."
At any rate she thinks "this Diary business will be quite amusing."
It is. The world always laughs at the – husband of a woman whose history isn't one long yawn.
Nor is Louise content with a bust picture.2 She gives full length portraits of herself, family, friends, enemies, and lovers, which latter she picks hap-hazard among commoners and the nobility. Only one of them was a prince of the blood, and he promptly proved the most false and dishonorable of the lot.
When Louise's pen-pictures do not deal with her amororos, they focus invariably emperors and princes, kings and queens, – contemporary personages whose acquaintance, by way of the newspapers and magazines, we all enjoy to the full, as "stern rulers," "sacrificers to the public weal," "martyrs of duty," "indefatigable workers," "examples of abstinence," and "high-mindedness" – everything calculated to make life a burden to the ordinary mortal.
But kings and emperors, we are told by these distant observers, are built that way; they would not be happy unless they made themselves unhappy for their people's sake. And as to queens and empresses, – they simply couldn't live if they didn't inspect their linen closets daily, stand over a broiling cook-stove, or knit socks for the offspring of inebriated bricklayers "and sich."
Witness Louise, Imperial and Royal Highness, Archduchess of Austria, Princess of Hungary and Tuscany, Crown Princess of Saxony, etc., etc., smash these paper records of infallible royal rectitude, and superhuman, almost inhuman, royal probity!
Had she castigated her own kind after royalty unkenneled her, neck and crop, her story might admit of doubt, but she wrote these things while in the full enjoyment of her rank and station, before her title as future queen was ever questioned or menaced.
Her Diary finishes with her last night in the Dresden palace. We do not hear so much as the clatter of the carriage wheels that carried her and "Richard" to her unfrocking as princess of the blood, – in short, our narrator is not prejudiced, on the defensive, or soured by disfranchisement. She had no axes to grind while writing; for her all kings dropped out of the clouds; the lustre that surrounds a king never dimmed while her Diary was in progress, and before she ceases talking to us she never "ate of the fish that hath fed of that worm that hath eat of a king."
Yet this large folio edition of obscénités royale, chock full, at the same time, of intensely human and interesting facts, notable and amusing things, as enthralling as a novel by Balzac, – Louise's life record in sum and substance, since her carryings-on after she doffed her royal robes for the motley of the free woman are of no historical, and but scant human interest.
The prodigality of the mass of indictments Louise launches against royalty as every-day occurrences, reminds one of the great Catharine Sforza, Duchess of Milan's clever mot. When the enemy captured her children she merely said, "I retain the oven for more."
Such scandalmongering! Only Her Imperial Highness doesn't see the obloquy, – sarcasm, cynicism and disparagement being royalty's every-day diet.
Such gossiping! But what else was there to do at a court whose literature is tracts and whose theatre of action the drill grounds.
But for all that, Louise's Diary is history, because its minute things loom big in connection with social and political results, even as its horrors and abnormalities help paint court life and the lives of kings and princes as they are, not as royalties' sycophants and apologizers would have us view them.
There is a perfect downpour of books eulogizing monarchs and monarchy; royal governments spend millions of the people's money to uphold and aggrandize exalted kingship and seedy princeship alike; three-fourths of the press of Europe is swayed by king-worship, or subsidized to sing the praises of "God's Anointed," while in our own country the aping of monarchical institutions, the admiration for court life, the idealization of kings, their sayings, doings and pretended superiority, as carried on by the multi-rich, are undermining love for the Republic and the institutions our fathers fought and bled for.
It's the purpose of the present volume to show the guilty folly of such un-American, un-republican, wholly unjustifiable, reprehensible and altogether ridiculous King-worship, not by argument, or a more or less fanciful story, but by the unbiased testimony
"Be civil, good people, I am the English hure," said Nell Gwyn, addressing a London mob that threatened to storm her carriage, assuming that its occupant was the hated Frenchwoman.
"Your biography give a faithful portrait of self," said Fontenelle, the famous French Academician, to an 18th Century Marquise, "but I miss the record of your gallantries."
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