The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875-1912Hegermann-Lindencrone, L. de (Lillie de)
History
The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875-1912
Hegermann-Lindencrone, L. de (Lillie de)
Courts and courtiers; Europe -- Social life and customs
His brother, Prince Joachim Albrecht, is also a very good musician,
but differs radically from Prince Wilhelm. He plays the violoncello
very well, and favors modern music. He composes ballads, and leads his
own regimental orchestra. He is as jolly and unconventional as his
brother is reserved and grave. When he dines with us he brings his
violoncello, and I accompany him on my piano. He composed two very
pretty and successful ballets, both given for charity. The first one
was danced by Frederikke and two other girls and three young officers.
It was called "_La Leçon de Danse_." On the top of the program,
instead of the English device, "_Honi soit qui mal y pense_," I put
"_Honi soit qui mal y danse_" in the same shield. Hardly any one in
the German audience saw the joke--nothing more than that it was a
_druckfehler_ (printer's error). The rehearsals were in my _salon_,
and we had great amusement over them. The second ballet was more
pretentious, and was danced in one of the largest theaters in Berlin.
It was called the "Enchanted Castle." A parvenu buys an ancestral
castle, and on his arrival there falls asleep in the great hall,
filled with the portraits of ancestors and knights in armor. The
ladies, in their old-fashioned dresses, step out from their frames,
and with the knights in armor move in a stately quadrille. After they
return to their frames, thirty young couples dance a ballet, and when
they finish, the parvenu wakes up. It was very pretty and brought in a
lot of money, and there was a question of its being repeated for the
Emperor, but this was not done.
_February, 1908._
Dear L.,--The Crown Prince and the Crown Princess gave a small
_bal-costume_. It was their first entertainment of any importance,
though there were very few people invited. As Frederikke is a dancing
young person, we were invited, enabling me to take many girls under my
protecting wing. The Emperor was dressed as the Grand Elector of
Brandenburg. The Empress had copied an old family portrait at San
Souci. She had a voluminous blond peruke and a flowing blue dress. She
looked very handsome. The Princes were generally dressed as their
ancestors and looked very familiar, as almost all of them stand in the
_Sièges Allée_. I learned much of German history that evening. The
Emperor was very kind and gave me a spirited and concise history of
those whom his six sons represented. No one except the Kaiser would
ever have had the persistency to stay booted and spurred during the
whole evening without a murmur, though he must have suffered from the
heat and been uncomfortable to a great degree. He had thick, brown
curls which hung close about his ears; thick, high, and hot leather
boots; and heavy leather gloves which he conscientiously kept on till
the very end.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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