A few days later Prince Hohenlohe was himself able to judge how far this was true about the Empress, for he went out to call on his Sovereign at Charlottenburg, and found him with his wife. The Empress excused her presence by pleading the necessity of supporting the Emperor during the audience. The whole of the conversation had to be carried on, so far as the Emperor was concerned, by means of writing-tablets. Hohenlohe observed that the Emperor would benefit by the amount of work he had to do, at which the Sovereign nodded approvingly. At the end of the interview: "The Emperor placed his hand on my shoulder and smiled sadly, so that I could hardly restrain my tears. He gave me the impression of a martyr; and, indeed, no martyrdom in the world is comparable with this slow death. Everyone who comes near him is full of admiration for his courageous and quiet resignation to a fate which is inevitable, and which he fully realises." But it is plain that the Empress had not yet resigned herself to consider his death as in any way imminent. Later in the same month, Hohenlohe had an audience of the Empress, and during their conversation she said something which made it clear to her old friend that she still entertained illusions as to her husband's real condition--indeed, he was himself so shaken by what she said that he wrote in his diary: "It is perhaps possible that the illness will be of long duration. The expectation of a speedy end has not yet been confirmed." There can be no doubt that the accession of the Emperor Frederick was expected in not a few quarters to mean the almost immediate fall of Bismarck, but this expectation left out of account various important factors of the situation. Both the new Emperor and his Empress, though, as we have seen, they profoundly disapproved of Bismarck's policy as a whole, nevertheless fully realised the Chancellor's patriotism and the unparalleled services which he had been able to render to the German people. Bismarck, in his own account of his relations with the Emperor, recalls that they began as far back as 1848, when Prince Frederick William was only seventeen, and he had since received from him various proofs of personal confidence, notably on the occasion of the Dantzig episode in 1863. This confidence was, Bismarck declares, quite independent of political principles and differences of opinion, and though many attempts to shake it were made from interested quarters, they had no permanent success. Later Bismarck also asserted roundly that the Emperor Frederick made it easy for him, by his amiability and confidence, to transfer to him the affection he had cherished for his father. He was both more open than his father had been to the constitutional idea of Ministerial responsibility, and also less hampered by family traditions in adjusting himself to political necessities. And Bismarck goes on to state that "all assertions of lasting discord in our relations are unfounded."