It was the more necessary that the Princess should never for a moment relax her cheerfulness, because the patient himself soon began to suffer from periods of deep depression. To one friend he even said that his time had already passed away, and the future belonged to his son; to another he declared that he had become an old man and stood with one foot in the grave. On the Emperor William's ninetieth birthday, March 22, 1887, the sailor son of the Crown Princess, Prince Henry of Prussia, was formally betrothed to his cousin, his mother's favourite niece, Princess Irene of Hesse. During the festivities given in honour of the event, it began to be whispered among the guests that the Crown Prince's throat affection was more serious than had as yet been acknowledged. But it is said that the word "cancer" was only first mentioned in connection with the case when, in deference to the highest medical advice of Berlin, he was sent to Ems to be treated for "a bad cold with bronchial complications following on measles." The Crown Prince and Princess, with their family, went to Ems in the middle of April and spent a month there. Not only did this bring no improvement, but the patient became perceptibly worse. He was brought back to Berlin, and a consultation of the most eminent medical experts, including Bergmann, Gerhardt, and Wagener, was held, as the result of which a growth in the throat of a malignant character was diagnosed. Bismarck in his _Reminiscences_ contradicts two curious stories which are worth notice, if only for the reason that they have obtained a certain amount of currency, and one of them is even to be found in an English work on the Emperor William II. The first of these stories is that, after his return from Ems, the Crown Prince signed a document in which, in the event of his surviving his father, he renounced his succession to the throne in favour of his eldest son. There is not, says Bismarck, a shadow of truth in this story. The other statement is that any heir to the Prussian throne who suffers from an incurable physical complaint is, by the Hohenzollern family law, excluded from the succession. The importance of this provision, if it really existed, is obvious; and, at the period we have now reached, when the physical state of the Crown Prince became a subject of intense public interest, it obtained wide currency and no small amount of credit. If, on a strict interpretation of such a rule, the Crown Prince was excluded from the succession, it might have been argued that his eldest son was also incapable of succeeding, owing to the weakened state of his arm. But Bismarck declares categorically that the Hohenzollern family law contains no provision on the matter at all, any more than does the text of the Prussian constitution.