The certainty that he must succeed his brother in the kingship, as well as his own commanding character made his Court very regal and very important. He was admirably seconded by his Princess, a daughter of the House of Saxe-Weimar. The Empress Augusta, to give her the title by which she is best known, was in 1851 a graceful, still very attractive lady, in spite of her forty years. She was a woman of refined accomplishments, a scientific musician, a great lover of art. She was very well read, especially in French literature, and kept a French reader, M. Guillard, attached to her household. She preferred Victor Hugo, Balzac, Lamartine, Alexandre Dumas and the English writers to the dull dogmatics of the German schoolmen of that day. Bismarck complained not a little of her foreign predilections, and considered that she was far too much inclined to belittle what was German in favour of exotic literature. The truth was that the two natures were not sympathetic: she was highly strung and æsthetic—in him not even Paris and St. Petersburg (now Petrograd) had been able to polish the roughness of the diamond. When the fateful episode at Ems occurred, the plain-spoken statesman did not conceal his fear lest the King should come under the influence of the Queen, who was hard by at her beloved Coblenz. At any rate, she made the Princely Court gay and very agreeable, and Bismarck was able to console himself with the reflection that his policy—I am now speaking of nineteen years before the great war—had a strenuous supporter in the Prince’s right-hand man, Count Karl Von der Goltz. Prince Frederick, the future hero of so many pitched battles, the father of the present Kaiser, was a tall, fair, handsome stripling, beardless and very young looking, who a year or two later confided to my father that he was “almost engaged” to our Princess Royal. His sister, Princess Louise, still alive as Grand Duchess of Baden, was a lovely maiden, such as Perrault might have imagined, or Madame d’Aulnoy portrayed. The ladies- and gentlemen-in-waiting were well qualified to turn what might have been a very dull Court into an intimate little coterie, enlivened by private theatricals in French, music, readings and other amusements; it was very dignified in that there was nothing frivolous about it, but it was never stiff and never dull. The two ladies were Countess Haack—elderly, and if the truth must be told, rather plain—and Countess Oriolla, a beauty who preferred maiden meditation to matrimony, and would not be won.