Accustomed to enjoy a place, even when very young, at her father’s table, she early acquired a habit of self-possession, became as pert as young Cyrus, and as forward as the juvenile Wharton. ‘How would you define time and space?’ said her father once to Mirabeau. The Princess Caroline, then twelve years old, anticipated the witty Frenchman’s answer, by replying, ‘Space is in the mouth of Madame von L----, and time is in her face.’ When told that it was not fitting for so young a lady to have an opinion of her own, she observed, correctly enough, ‘People without opinions of their own are like barren tracts which will not bear grass.’ As her mother seldom asked any other question than ‘What is the news?’ and loved the small gossip which arises out of such a query, the Princess was more frequently engaged in serious discussions with her instructress than with the Duchess. The Countess von Bade having remarked that she herself was wicked because an evil spirit impelled her, and that she was by nature too feeble to resist, ‘If that be the case,’ observed the young lady, ‘you are simply a piece of clay moulded by another’s will.’ The orthodox Lutheran lady was about to explain, but the daughter of a mother who had brought ‘her girls’ up to membership with no church in particular cut short the controversy with an infallible air which would have done credit to Pope Joan, ‘My dear, we are all bad--very bad; but we were all created so, and it’s no fault of ours.’ The utterer of this speech was doubly unfortunate: her intellect was fine, but it was ill-trained; she was the daughter of a kind-hearted woman, incapable of fulfilling with propriety the duty of a mother; and she became the wife of a prince who was, as Sheridan remarked, ‘too much a lady’s man ever to become the man of one lady.’ The Princess, at a very early period, discovered how to be mistress of her weak mother. Therewith, however, she had a heart that readily felt for the poor. She was terribly self-willed, and played the harpsichord like St. Cecilia.