He: “Yes, but that was not done through ill-will, but through misunderstandings and insufficient knowledge of the matter in hand. When anything of importance was going on he usually began by taking the wrong road, but in the end he always allowed himself to be put straight again. Thus during the period of conflict when he could no longer get any Ministers, he wished to abdicate. When I was summoned to him at Babelsberg he had the act of abdication ready signed. He said: ‘If I cannot find any Ministers who will govern as I think right then my son had better try his hand.’ I assured him that I was prepared to be the Minister he wanted. ‘Even against the majority?’ he asked. ‘Yes, even against the majority,’ I replied. ‘Well then, that’s all right,’ he said, and tore up the document, and with it a whole sheet of concessions to the Liberals, which he had previously read to me.” I: “Then afterwards when you travelled to Jueterbogk to meet him. The ladies at Baden had filled him with apprehensions as to an impending revolution, and he already saw the scaffold awaiting him, and you--you infused courage into him by appealing to his honour and grasping his sword knot, as you once expressed it to me?” He: “Yes, and on other occasions he had too much courage, and wished to move too rapidly and take too much. Thus in 1864 he wished to march into Jutland without Austria, and at Nikolsburg to continue the war as far as Vienna.” I recalled the attack of hysterical weeping there. “Then at first he wanted to have half of Saxony, half of Hanover, Ansbach and Bayreuth, and a piece of Bohemia from Austria, until I persuaded him how unpractical that was.” “And in 1870 the military conspiracy at Mainz before the march into France, and afterwards at Versailles his attitude towards the claims of the Bavarians?” I added. He: “Certainly, when they actually proposed to proceed to violence against Bavaria and afterwards intended to deny her rights which she was entitled to claim.” I said: “The expression ‘cloak’ reminds me of its converse. Monarchs are often adorned with other people’s feathers. If a battle is won at which one of them happens to be present as a spectator, he is said to have won it, although of course the staff has really won it; and so it is in your case in the field of politics.” “Why, yes,” he replied; “but if the work is done and succeeds that is the main point. It is a matter of indifference who did it.”