Whenever the Emperor himself catches the complaint he at once retires to bed till the worst is over, and all engagements are cancelled until he is well again. “Go to bed and perspire” (only he uses a more forcible Anglo-Saxon word) is the advice he gives and follows. Upon the shoulders of his medical attendants, two in number, rests the responsibility of safeguarding the Emperor as much as possible from every source of infection. How many panic-stricken exits from one palace to another do I remember! Flights at an hour’s notice from measles, chicken-pox, or scarlet fever, sometimes only to meet an equally dire disease already installed before us. On one occasion the Court had just returned from Berlin after the season, and had settled down comfortably at the New Palace, when some tiresome child in the _Communs_ opposite was found to be suffering from measles, and we were all (with the exception of the Emperor, fortunately absent for two days) hurried off to the Marmor Palais, which happened to be totally unfurnished, all its chairs and tables having been warehoused for the winter and not yet replaced. We wandered about the garden there, watching the arrival of the vans, which had been hastily summoned together, and now slowly and at long intervals disgorged their contents at every door. The rooms allotted to the ladies were in a little Dutch cottage in the garden, and contained only a few clothes-pegs, on which to hang hats and coats. By slow degrees washstands, chairs, wardrobes, kept slowly filtering in--though many of us had to wash our hands at the tap in the passage before going to dine with the Empress. Somewhere about ten o’clock at night the beds began to arrive, and for the next few days existence partook largely of the disjointed, uncertain, intermittent nature of a picnic. Except for the moral support afforded by the white kid gloves and fan, to which we clung convulsively through that long chaos, we should with difficulty have been able to preserve the decent atmosphere proper to a court. Another sudden exodus occurred once, when the whole Court, including the Emperor, were for the first time installed for the winter in Belle Vue, with its charming garden, which had been recommended by the doctors as a salutary change from the Schloss in the Lust-Garten, which possesses only a few sooty trees on a grass plot two yards square. Everybody was delighted with the innovation, and the last dresses were being hung in the wardrobes, the finishing touches given to the delightfully quaint, sunny little freshly-painted rooms overlooking the green Tier-Garten, when a rumour ran shuddering through the palace. We were to pack up at once and return to the gloomy old Schloss at the other end of the town. Prince Oskar, just returned from Italy, had developed chicken-pox--that very catching illness--and was to remain in Belle Vue with his adjutant and servants, while the rest of us migrated elsewhere.