The Emperor’s condescension reached the ears of the Duchess Sophia, and the embers of her jealousy burst into a blaze. Eléonore’s conduct was a model of wifely devotion; so, as the Duchess Sophia could not bring any charge against her after her marriage, she raked up some old slander, and accused her publicly of having simultaneously carried on two intrigues when she was at the court of France. She represented her as a designing adventuress, who, while doing her best to marry Colin, a page-in-waiting of Elizabeth Charlotte Duchess of Orleans, tried to catch George William as the bigger match of the two. These charges were not very damaging or convincing, but malice went further. We find the Duchess Sophia writing to her niece, the Duchess of Orleans: “Never would any respectable girl have entered the house of the Princess de Tarente, for, though she is my aunt—to my intense disgust—she is not a person with whom any one can live and remain clean. However,” she added, “d’Olbreuse being a nobody, it did not matter much.” George William treated the tale about the intrigue with the contempt it deserved, but the statement that his wife was “a nobody” seems to have rankled; so he and his lady thought of a very poor means of defence. They paid two thousand thalers to a French genealogist to make out an elaborate family tree, to prove that Eléonore d’Olbreuse was descended in an almost direct line from the kings of France. The Duchess Sophia received the pedigree with scorn and derision, and transmitted it to the Duchess of Orleans, who, being malicious and a wit, made out a caricature, in which she clearly showed that her head cook was a descendant of Philip the Bold. Naturally these tactics did not tend to smooth matters between Sophia and Eléonore, who were now not on speaking terms, nor were they successful in winning George William from the object of his affections. Manlike, the more his wife was attacked the more he defended her; and Eléonore, who had her share of vanity, was so upset and wounded by being thus flouted that she became quite ill, and had to take a cure at Pyrmont, then a fashionable watering-place, to restore her health. George William was worried, too, and by way of a consolation he purchased for Eléonore another and yet more valuable estate, including the fertile island of Wilhelmsburg, in the Elbe, near Hamburg. This he settled upon her for life, and made arrangements for it to become, after her death, the inheritance of Sophie Dorothea. Again Ernest Augustus protested, and again he was bought off, this time with a bribe of eighteen thousand thalers. But all the same, the victory remained with Eléonore. If she could not get the genealogy, at least she had substantial consolation. The possession of a property like the island of Wilhelmsburg naturally aroused comment, not only at Osnabrück, but the neighbouring courts. It was regarded as open evidence of Eléonore’s