"Although the manifold and weighty business of the Empire with which your Imperial Majesty is troubled at this time, might well frighten us from disquieting you with our private affairs, yet we presume with profound humility to set before your Imperial Majesty our most pressing distress, and the mighty injuries inflicted upon us at this time without any fault on our part, because it is well known to us that your Imperial Majesty is at all times assiduous in helping most graciously the injured to their rights. "It is not, I hope, unknown to your Imperial Majesty that we have, for nearly eleven years, been united in matrimony with his Most Serene Highness Prince Karl Ludwig, Count Palatine of the Rhine, Elector of the Holy Empire. At that time his Princely Highness, in frequent discourse, both before and after marriage, promised us by the highest oaths, an ever-enduring faith and conjugal love; and we on our part did the like. Being then animated by such reciprocal love, we have served his Highness in all conjugal obedience to the best of our power, so far as our womanly weakness permitted. We have also, by the grace of God, reared two young princes and a daughter in all love, so that his Princely Highness ought in justice to have abstained from divorcing himself from us. "We submissively beg your Imperial Majesty to understand that, after three very severe confinements, we clearly traced by many tokens, no slight alienation in the feelings of our lord and husband, which would justly have given rise to suspicion in our minds, if our confiding spirit had not attributed what was good and laudable to his Princely Highness. For when we once, according to princely custom, presented his Princely Highness with a beautiful Neapolitan dapple-gray colt with all its appurtenances, he said to us: 'My treasure, we henceforth desire no such presents, which diminish our treasury;' and the very same day he presented the horse to one of the lowest of his nobles. This insult did so grieve us that, with weeping eyes, we lamented it to our gentlewoman, Maria Susanna von Degenfeld, of whose secret doings we had not at that time the slightest idea. She thereupon made answer, 'That if at any time she should meet with the like behaviour from her future consort, she would refuse all cohabitation with him.' By these words she intended nothing else than to incense us against our lord and master. Not long after, a ring was purloined from us by the said von Degenfeld out of our drawers. This must without doubt have been a concerted plan, for our lord and husband had required this ring of us, and when we could not find it, his Princely Highness was greatly irritated against us, and thus broke out: 'You make me think strange things of you as concerns this ring; I had thought you would have taken better care of it.' Whereupon we answered, 'Ah! my treasure, foster no evil suspicions against me; it has been purloined by some faithless person.' But his