After the return of Ernest Augustus and his daughter-in-law to Hanover, the praise of Sophia Dorothea was ever the theme which hung on the lips of the former, and such eulogy was as poison poured in the ears of Madame von Platen. She dreaded the loss of her own influence over the father of George Louis, and she fancied she might preserve it by destroying the happiness of the wife of his son. Her hatred of that poor lady had been increased by a circumstance with which she could not be connected, but which nearly concerned the Duchess of Zell. Ernest Augustus used occasionally to visit Madame von Platen at her own residence, with more than enough of publicity. He was more inclined to conversation with her than with his prime-minister, her husband; and she had wit enough, if not worth, to give warrant for such preference. Now and then, however, the ducal sovereign would repair to pay his homage to the lady without previous notice being forwarded of his coming; and it was on one of these occasions that, on arriving at the mansion, or in the gardens of the mansion of his minister’s spouse, he found, not the lady of the house, who was absent, but her bright-eyed, ordinary-featured, and quick-witted handmaid, who bore a name which might have been given to such an official in Elizabethan plays by Ford or Fletcher. Her name was ‘Use.’ Ernest Augustus found the wit of Use much to his taste; and the delighted abigail was perfectly self-possessed, and more brilliant than common in the converse which she sustained for the pleasure of the sovereign, and her own expected profit. She had just, it is supposed, come to the point of some exquisitely epigrammatic tale, for the prince was laughing with his full heart, and her hand in his, and the ’tiring maiden was as radiant as successful wit and endeavour could make her, when Madame von Platen interrupted the sparkling colloquy by her more fiery presence. She affected to be overcome with indignation at the boldness of a menial who dared to make merry with a sovereign duke; and when poor Use had been rudely dismissed from the two presences--the one august and the other angry--the Countess von Platen probably remonstrated with Ernest Augustus, respectfully or otherwise, upon his deplorable want of dignity and good taste. Revenge certainly followed, whether remonstrance may or may not have been offered. Ernest Augustus went to sojourn for a time at one of his rural palaces, and he had no sooner left his capital than the countess committed the terrified Use to close imprisonment in the common gaol. The history of little German courts assures us that this exercise and abuse of power were not at all uncommon with the ‘favourites’ of German princes. Their word was ‘all potential as the duke’s,’ and doubtless the Countess von Platen’s authority was as good warrant for a Hanoverian gaoler to hold Use in custody as if he had shut up that maid, who offended by her wit, under the sign manual of Ernest Augustus himself.