The same satisfaction was not experienced by the Duchess Eleanora. When she came to learn the facts, she burst forth in expressions of grief and indignation. The marriage which had now been definitely broken, had been with her an affair of a mother’s heart. It had not been less an affair of a young girl’s heart with Sophia Dorothea. Duke Anton Ulrich of Wolfenbüttel came in person to Zell, to ask the fulfilment of the promise of her hand to his son. On learning that the alleged promise had been broken, he left Zell with the utmost indignation; and romance, at least, says of Königsmark, that he too, had left it with a feeling of sorrow that Sophia Dorothea was to be sacrificed to such an unworthy person as George Louis. It was a pitiable case! There were three persons who were to be rendered irretrievably wretched, in order, not that any one might be rendered happy, but that a man without a heart might be made a little more rich in the possession of dirt. The acres of Zell were to bring misery on their heiress, and every acre was to purchase its season of sorrow. No entreaty could move the duke.[1] In his dignity he forgot the father: and the prayers and tears of his child failed to touch the parent, who really loved her well, but whose affection was dissolved beneath the fiery heat of his ambition. He was singularly ambitious; for the possible effect of a marriage with George Louis was merely to add his own independent duchy of Luneburg to the dominions of Hanover. His daughter, moreover, detested her cousin, and his wife detested her sister-in-law; above all, the newly accepted bridegroom, if he did not detest, had no shadow, nor affected to have any shadow of respect, regard, or affection for the poor young victim who was to be flung to him with indecent and unnatural disregard of all her feelings as daughter and maiden. Sophia Dorothea’s especial distaste for George Louis was grounded not only in her knowledge of his character, but also of his want of respect for her mother, of whom he always spoke in contemptuous terms. Sophia Dorothea’s inclinations, her father said, he would never constrain; but when this seemed to give her some hope of release, her father observed that a good daughter’s inclinations were always identical with those of her parents. She had a heart to listen to, she thought. She had a father whom she was bound to obey, he said --and said it with terrible iteration. Her aversion is reported to have been so determined that, when the portrait of her future lord was presented to her, she flung it against the wall with such violence that the glass was smashed, and the dismounted diamonds were scattered over the room.