The princess and I became rather well acquainted. I was not a
gentleman, according to her code, but, in the historic words of the
drug clerk, I was something just as good. She honored me with a frank,
disinterested friendship, which still exists. I have yet among my
fading souvenirs of diplomatic service half a dozen notes commanding me
to get up at dawn and ride around the lake, something like sixteen
miles. She was almost as reckless a rider as myself. She was truly a
famous rider, and a woman who sits well on a horse can never be aught
but graceful. She was, in fact, youthful and charming, with the most
magnificent black eyes I ever beheld in a Teutonic head; witty,
besides, and a songstress of no ordinary talent. If I had been in love
with her--which I solemnly vow I was not!--I should have called her
beautiful and exhausted my store of complimentary adjectives.
The basic cause of all this turmoil, about which I am to spin my
narrative, lay in her education. I hold that a German princess should
never be educated save as a German. By this I mean to convey that her
education should not go beyond German literature, German history,
German veneration of laws, German manners and German passivity and
docility. The Princess Hildegarde had been educated in England and
France, which simplifies everything, or, I should say, to be exact,
complicates everything.
She possessed a healthy contempt for that what-d'-ye-call-it that
hedges in a king. Having mingled with English-speaking people, she
returned to her native land, her brain filled with the importance of
feminine liberty of thought and action. Hence, she became the bramble
that prodded the grand duke whichever way he turned. His days were
filled with horrors, his nights with mares which did not have
box-stalls in his stables.
Never could he anticipate her in anything. On that day he placed
guards around the palace she wrote verses or read modern fiction; the
moment he relaxed his vigilance she was away on some heart-rending
escapade. Didn't she scandalize the nobility by dressing up as a
hussar and riding her famous black Mecklenburg cross-country? Hadn't
she flirted outrageously with the French attaché and deliberately
turned her back on the Russian minister, at the very moment, too, when
negotiations were going on between Russia and Barscheit relative to a
small piece of land in the Balkans? And, most terrible of all to
relate, hadn't she ridden a shining bicycle up the Königsstrasse, in
broad daylight, and in bifurcated skirts, besides? I shall never
forget the indignation of the press at the time of this last escapade,
the stroke of apoplexy which threatened the duke, and the room with the
barred window which the princess occupied one whole week.