Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess. Fischer Henry William
by Her Majesty's Dame of the Palace, Countess von Minckwitz: "The Queen is graciously pleased to invite your Imperial Highness to audience."
Of course her pleasure is a command. I dressed in state and ordered all the ladies and gentlemen of my court to attend me to the royal chambers.
Queen Carola was very nice, giving the impression that she would be more lovely still if she dared.
"Prince George has just commanded your husband," she said, – "the King ordered this condescension on my brother-in-law's part. You will have to thank him for it."
Isn't it amusing to be an Imperial Highness and a Crown Princess to be ordered around like a "boots" and to be "commanded" like an orphan child to say thanks to one's betters!
I promised and the Queen, assuming that I intended to act the good little girl, took courage to say – for she is the biggest of cowards – "You are too popular, Louise. Such a reception as you had! All the papers, even the Jew-sheets, are full of it."
And before I could make any excuses for my popularity she added in sorrowful, half-accusing tones: "I lived here ever so many years and the mob never applauded me."
"It's so fickle," I quoted. I had to say something, you know.
"And contemptible," added the Queen heartily. "But how is baby?"
I begged permission to send for him. Her Majesty was pleased to play with the little one for a minute or two and that secured me a gracious exit. The Queen attended me to the door, opening it with her own royal hand, thereby rehabilitating me with my entourage waiting outside.
Meanwhile Frederick Augustus had a "critical quarter of an hour" with father-in-law, who assumed to speak on behalf of the King.
"The King," he said, "despised 'playing to the gallery' worse than the devil hated holy water." (This court is overrun with Jesuits, and we must needs adopt their vernacular.)
The King, he repeated, thought it very bad taste for anyone to take the centre of the stage in these "popularity-comedies," and he told a lot more lies of the same character. Then he bethought himself of his own grieved authority.
"Tell your wife," he said, "that I, her father-in-law, and next to the throne, do everything in my power to escape such turbulent scenes, and that I would rather ride about town in an ordinary Droschke (cab) of the second class, preserving my incognito, than in a state carriage and be the object of popular acclamation."
When Frederick Augustus repeated the above with the most solemn face in the world, I thought I would die with laughter and actually had to send for my tire-woman to let my corset out a few notches.
"The old monkey," I cried – "as if he wasn't after 'Hochs' morning, noon and night; as if he thought of anything else when he mounts a carriage or his horse."
"You forget yourself, Louise," warned Frederick Augustus in the voice of an undertaker, and I really think he meant it. But I wasn't in the mood to be silenced.
"And as if I didn't know that, like Kaiser Wilhelm, he keeps a record of towns and villages that were never honored by one of his visits, intending to make his ceremonial entry there at the first plausible opportunity."
"It isn't true," insisted Frederick Augustus.
Then I got angry. "It may be thought polite in the bosom of your family to call one another a liar," I retorted, "but don't you get into the habit of introducing those tap-room manners in the ménage of an Imperial Highness of Austria. I forbid it."
And then I gave rein to some of the bitterness that had accumulated in my heart against the old man. Didn't I know that George was mad enough to quarrel with his dinner when, on his drives about town, he observed a single person refusing to salute him? And wasn't it a fact that the Socialists had combined never more to raise their hats to him just because he insisted on it? And wasn't that one of the reasons why the government was more hard on them than happened to be politic?
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