Rendezvous at studio--State takes my children from me--Madhouse or flight--I brought fifty-two trunks to the palace--Depart with small satchel--If I attempt to see my children I'll be seized as "mad woman"--Varying emotions of the last ten minutes--Threatening shadows thrown on a curtain decide me--Ready for flight--Diary the last thing to go into the satchel 345 [Illustration: FROM LOUISE'S DIARY] THE STORY OF LOUISE, CROWN PRINCESS OF SAXONY CHAPTER I MOTHERHOOD A sterile Royal Family once fruitful--Diary true record of self--Long legs of Countess Solms--A child only because he can't help it--Wet nurse to Socialist brat--Royal permit for nursing--Royal negligee talk--A Saxon failing. CASTLE WACHWITZ, _February 17, 1893_. I did my duty towards the Saxons. I gave them a Prince. The Royal House ought to be grateful to me:--I am helping to perpetuate it. Who would, if I didn't? My sister-in-law, Princess Mathilde, is an old maid. The other, Maria Josepha, as sterile as Sarah was before she reached the nineties. This applies also to Isabelle, the wife of brother-in-law, John-George. And Prince Max, tired of ballet girls, is about to take the soutane. There is just one more royal Saxon princess, Elizabeth, and she succeeded in having children neither with her husband _de jure_, the late Duke of Genoa, nor with her husband-lover, Marquis Rapallo. Louise, then, is the sole living hope of the royal Saxons that, only 160 years ago, boasted of a sovereign having three hundred and fifty-two children to his credit, among them not a few subsequently accounted geniuses. Augustus, the Physical Strong (1670 to 1733), was the happy father, the _Mareshal de_ Saxe one of his numerous gifted offspring. Alas, since then the House of Wettin has declined not in numbers only. Poor baby is burdened with ten names in honor of so many ancestors. Why, in addition, they want to call him "Maria" I cannot for the life of me understand, for there never was a Saxon princess or queen that amounted to a row of pins. I wonder whether they will say the same of me after the crown of the Wettiners descended upon my brow. Those so inclined should consult these papers ere they begin throwing stones, for my Diary is intended to contain my innermost thoughts, my ambitions, my promises for the future, _Myself_, and let no one judge me by what I say other than what is recorded here. These pages are my Father Confessor. I confess to myself,--what a woman in my position says to members of her family or official and semi-official persons--her servants, so to speak--doesn't signify, to borrow a phrase from my good cousin, the Kaiser Wilhelm. Father-in-law George tells me to trust no one but him, my husband, and Frederick Augustus's sisters, cousins and aunts, and to rely on prayer only, yet, stubborn as nature made me, I prefer respectable white paper to my sweet relatives.