"One of his chief amusements was to hire a drove of ballet girls for parlor horses. He had a carriage constructed no bigger or heavier than a Japanese jinrickshaw, and to this hitched ten or twenty ballet girls in their birthday suits, walking on all fours, himself rider and driver. "Gracious--how he lashed his treble and quadruple teams of human flesh as they pulled him from room to room, and his was no make-belief ferocity, either. He was a niggardly rake, but in order to indulge his Sadist tendencies, agreed to pay one _Thaler_ (Seventy-five cents) for every drop of blood shed by the girls. "To make the count easier, white linen sheets were spread over the carpets, and the sum total was paid over to the two-legged horses after each entertainment, the girls showing the sorest stripes or wounds getting the larger share." Romano, who lived at half a dozen courts and is primed with the scandalous gossip of them all, could certainly write an entertaining book on the fallacies and vices of the world's Great. It's most indelicate, to be sure, but I laughed long and hard over the sexual specialty of my uncle, Archduke Karl Ludwig, who is bad, anyhow, as everybody knows. One morning His Highness rose at an unusually early hour, even before the scrub-women made their exit. In the corridors, in the parlors, everywhere blonde and dark percherons, cleaning away for dear life and courting housemaid's knee! Karl Ludwig has no more use for women than the late Chevalier de Lorraine, the President of the _Mignons_, but the exaggerated protuberances he met so unexpectedly on all sides, appealed to his sense of humor, or some other sense which I would hate to name. Anyhow, he ran into the garden and cut himself a switch. And ever since then his chief amusement is to switch scrubbing percherons. If he succeeds in dealing one a blow unforeseen by lying in wait for her, or coming upon her all of a sudden, he is particularly satisfied with his day's work and is liable to give a beggar a copper instead of the usual demi-copper. And of such abnormals the rulers of the world are recruited. CHAPTER XXXIX MY PUNISHMENT I lose my lover--Quarrels with me because I did my duty as a mother--Royalty extols me for the same reason--My pride of kingship aroused by Socialist scribblers--Change my opinion as to Duke's widow--Parents arrive--Father and his alleged astrolatry--His finances disarranged by alimony payments--My uncle, the Emperor, rebukes mother harshly for complaining of _roue_ father. DRESDEN, _Christmas, 1898_. God punished me for my sins. My children, one after the other, were ill with scarlet fever, and the youngest is only now out of danger. Of course, I abandoned all my frivolities. I can say without boasting that the mother atoned for the short-comings of the wife and princess. Hence I thought justified to arrange for a right royal Christmas present: Romano.