Opinions are divided. Was the Count, as some say, buried in a grave in the park? Or, according to another version which I have reasons to believe the true one, was his corpse covered with quick-lime and thrown under the stone floor of the room known as the "Knights' Hall"? Or was it simply cast into the latrines which communicated with the Lüne flowing at the foot of the castle, as the author of the "Secret History"[2] would have us believe? Was his the corpse, as Horace Walpole asserts, which was discovered twenty years later under the floor of a retiring-room in the Herrenhausen? I only put these problems to explain to you, though to me it still remains inexplicable, my feverish resolution to solve them. You may well imagine that the mystery was more vivid and intriguing to me than to any other man, partly because of the situation at the palace, with its many points of resemblance to that in which the tragedy took place, and partly because of the priceless material at my disposal in the ducal library. The most valuable authority till then available was the correspondence of Königsmark and Sophie-Dorothea, to be found in the archives of the La Gardie Library at Loeberod in Sweden. This correspondence was discovered by Professor Palmblad, who published extracts from it at Upsala in 1851. When Professor Thierry in taking leave of me had referred me to Palmblad's work, he hoped that at Lautenburg I should be able to discover a portion of the correspondence, which wandered all over Germany before finding a definite home at Loeberod. I was, however, unable to find anything, though I had compensation for my disappointment in another and most fruitful discovery. You remember I spoke of Sophie-Dorothea's daughter a short time ago. She married the Crown Prince of Prussia, the future "Drill-Sergeant King," Frederick I. "A harsh and tyrannical husband," as Blaze de Bury writes, "his first act, on mounting the throne, was to forbid his wife formally to hold any sort of communication with the prisoner of Ahlden. It was only when Sophie-Dorothea had inherited from her mother a revenue of twenty thousand crowns, a very considerable sum in those days, that the royal miser began to soften towards her, though his sudden concern was purely mercenary, being based solely on his wife's possible interest in the inheritance, an interest which the celebrated jurisconsult, Thomasius, had laboured to establish."[3]