‘When the count was in the vault, he came a little to himself, and spoke:--“You take a guiltless man’s life. On that I’ll die, but do not let me perish like a dog, in my blood and my sins. Grant me a priest, for my soul’s sake.” Then the _Electoral Prince went out_, and the fourier remained alone with him. Then was a strange parson fetched, and a strange executioner, and the fourier fetched a great chair. And when the count had confessed, he was so weak that three or four of them lifted him into the chair; and there _in the prince’s presence_ was his head laid at his feet. And they had tools with them, and they dug a hole in the right corner of the vault, and there they laid him, and there he must be to be found. When all was over, this Bernhard slipped away from the castle; and indeed Counsellor Lucius, who was a friend of the princess’s, sent him some of his livery to save him; for they sought him in all corners, because they had seen him in the room during the affray.... And what Bernhard Zayer saw in the vault, he saw through a crack.’ Clear as this narrative is in its details, it is contradictory and rests on small basis of truth. The Electoral Prince was undoubtedly absent on the night Königsmark was murdered. The Countess Aurora of Königsmark has left a statement of her brother’s intimacy with the princess, in which the innocence of the latter is maintained, but _his_ imprudence acknowledged. The statement referred to explains the guilty nature of the intercourse kept up between Königsmark and the Countess von Platen. It is written in terms of extreme indelicacy. We may add that the faithful von Knesebeck, on whose character no one ever cast an imputation, in her examination before the judges, argued the innocence of her accused mistress upon grounds the nature of which cannot even be alluded to. The princess, it is clear, had urged Königsmark to renew his interrupted intrigue with von Platen, out of dread that the latter, taking the princess as the cause of the intercourse having been broken off, should work a revenge, which she did not hesitate to menace, upon the princess herself. The details of all the stories are marked by great improbability, and they have not been substantiated by the alleged death-bed confessions of the Countess von Platen, and Baumain, one of the guards--the two criminals having, without so intending it, confessed to the same clergyman, a minister named Kramer! Though these confessions are spoken of, and are even cited by German authors, their authenticity cannot be warranted. At all events, there is an English version of the details of this murder given by Horace Walpole; and as that lively writer founded his lugubrious details upon authority which he deemed could not be gainsaid, they may fairly find a place, by way of supplement to the foreign version.