The Princess who was to become Queen of Prussia and the first German Empress had been brought up at Goethe's knee. She belonged, in an intellectual sense, to the eighteenth rather than the nineteenth century. She knew French as well as she knew German--indeed, it is said that she often thought in French, and perhaps her chief friend, at the time of her son's marriage to the Princess Royal, was Monsieur de Bacourt, the French diplomatist to whom the Duchesse de Dino's diary-letters were for the most part addressed. Among her intimates were many Catholics, and for many years it was believed in Berlin that she had been secretly received into the Roman Church. As a young woman she was full of heart and warmth of feeling, but she soon learnt, what her daughter-in-law never succeeded in mastering, the wisdom of circumspection and the painful necessity for prudence. She early made up her mind to remain on the whole in shadow. While never concealing her point of view from those about her, she yet never took any public part in the affairs of State. During the Crimean War, when the whole of the Prussian Court was pro-Russian, the Princess of Prussia had been pro-English--a fact which naturally endeared her to Queen Victoria, but which had made her Prussian relatives very sore and angry. When the Princess Royal arrived in Berlin as the bride of the King of Prussia's heir-presumptive, the Crimean War was already being forgotten. Among the Liberals there was what may be called a pro-English party, and the joyous simplicity and youthful charm of the Princess silenced criticism, at any rate for a time. It must be remembered that the Princess Royal had left a young Court. At the time of her marriage her parents were still young people--she made them grandparents when they were only thirty-eight. But the Court in which she now became an important personage was composed of middle-aged men and women, with some very old people. There was still living in the Court circle a lady who was said to remember Frederick the Great. This was the Countess Pauline Neale, who had been one of Queen Louise's ladies-in-waiting. She could recollect with vivid intensity every detail and episode associated with Napoleon's treatment of the King and Queen. Of great age, too, was the gigantic Field-Marshal Wrangel, who had actually carried the colours of his regiment at the battle of Leipzig. Another interesting personality in the Princess Royal's new family circle was her husband's aunt, Princess Charles, sister of the Princess of Prussia, who afterwards became the grandmother of the Duchess of Connaught. She still bore traces of the wonderful beauty for which she had been famed in the 'twenties, but was, of course, no longer a young woman.