And he added quickly: "As to the Dresdeners, they are tickled because, every time they applaud you, the King is scandalized." "How do they know that I am not on good terms with the King?" "The very children in arms understand." All Dresden, says Richard, is talking about me. Everybody assumes to know the number and qualities of my lovers. "Louise," they argue, "knows how to enjoy herself, but, though it serves the King right, we wouldn't have her for a daughter-in-law, either." According to the masses, I visit the Vogelwiese at night, ride on the flying horses and solicit men and boys that please my fancy. Like a gigantic she-monster, I drag them to my lair--"some to vanish forever." (No doubt, I eat them.) "Unwashed soldiers and clerks reeking with cheap perfume, actors and students, draymen and generals, it's all the same to the Crown Princess. "Sometimes, when the spirit moves her, the Crown Princess issues from her gilded apartments in the palace and seizes the sentinel patrolling the corridors. Or she visits the guard-room _en deshabille_ and selects the youngest and best looking officer for her prey. "Generous, too. She thinks nothing of handing a pension of ten thousand marks per year to a chap that pleased her once." "Is that all they say about me?" "Not one-half. Poor devils that can't afford ten marks per year for their fun, Cit's wives that know only their ill-kempt husbands, factory girls that sell their virtue for a supper or a glass of beer--though afterwards they claim it was champagne--all take delight in contemplating that you, or any other good looking royal woman, are Frankenstein's succuba or worse. Didn't they accuse your grand-aunt, Marie Antoinette, of incest with her son and gave him to the cobbler to thrash the immorality out of him?" "And they give names?" "Strings of them"--among them several I never heard mentioned before. * * * * * DRESDEN, _August 15, 1902_. Richard is jealous--jealous of the men I did love and the regiments that public opinion give me credit for. He must needs think I have loins of steel. He tells me he suffers agonies by what I confessed, and still more by what I hide. To see him thus unhappy gives me intense pleasure, for it shows that the boy loves me to distraction. _Midnight._ M. Giron was very cold and distant during the afternoon's lessons. I had previously lunched with him at his studio and we were very gay then. I teased him unmercifully about "his royal _demi-mondaine_," as the masses painted me. Frederick Augustus was very gallant at dinner and told me, before a table full of people, that he would take pleasure in sleeping with me tonight. I have too bad a conscience to deny myself to him. But I ran over to the opera for half an hour and ordered M. Giron to my box.