The saddest day in her whole childhood was that in which her dear governess was dismissed. The latter had often defended her little pupil when she saw her unjustly accused, as not infrequently occurred, her otherwise admirable and dearly-loved stepmother having the weakness--it was the only fault that could be laid to her charge--sometimes to try to shield her own children from their father’s severity, at the expense of the others. And Fräulein Lavater’s zealous efforts to exculpate the poor child, on an occasion when she knew her to be the victim of a most cruel injustice, simply led to her own dismissal. It was for both of them a cruel blow, and my mother has often told me how she wandered next day heartbroken through the empty desolate rooms, throwing herself at last on a sofa to cry her eyes out, with no one to care what had become of her. My mother had hardly been able to speak a word of German at the time when Fräulein Lavater came to her. Nassau belonged to the Confederation of the Rhine and had decidedly French sympathies, so that everything was new to my mother, when she came to Neuwied, marrying into a family that had been mediatised for having drawn the sword for Germany. She was simply shocked at the brutality of one of my great-uncles, who related how he had ridden about on the field of Waterloo, in the hope of finding Napoleon and making an end of him. “That fellow Bonaparte! if I could but have got at him!” Uncle Max would say, clenching his fist; and my mother turned away in horror at such savage sentiments. There had been, quite unknown to herself, another marriage planned for her, with the heir to the throne of Russia, whose father, the Emperor Nicholas, was a great friend of my grandfather. But the match, on which both fathers were so bent, fell through after my grandfather’s death, the Emperor’s expressed desire merely having the effect of driving his son into opposition to his wishes. But my mother was ignorant of all this; all she knew of or cared for in Russia was the family of the Grand-Duchess Hélène, her own first cousin and sister to her stepmother. To her, the Grand-Duchess, and her daughters, she was deeply attached.