Читать книгу Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess - Fischer Henry William - Страница 2

By Henry W. Fischer

Of Memoirs that are truly faithful records of royal lives, we have a few; the late Queen Victoria led the small number of crowned autobiographists only to discourage the reading of self-satisfied royal ego-portrayals forever, but in the Story of Louise of Saxony we have the main life epoch of a Cyprian Royal, who had no inducement to say anything false and is not afraid to say anything true.

For the Saxon Louise wrote not to guide the hand of future official historiographers, or to make virtue distasteful to some sixty odd grand-children, bored to death by the recital of the late "Mrs. John Brown's" sublime goodness: – Louise wrote for her own amusement, even as Pepys did when he diarized the peccadilloes of the Second Charles' English and French "hures" (which is the estimate these ladies put upon themselves).1

The ex-Crown Princess of Saxony suffered much in her youth by a narrow-minded, bigoted mother, a Sadist like the monstrous Torquemada; marriage, she imagined, spelled a rich husband, more lover than master; freedom from tyranny, paltry surroundings, interference. To her untutored mind, life at the Saxon Court meant right royal splendor, liberty to do as one pleases, the companionship of agreeable, amusing and ready-to-serve friends.

The Sad Saxon Court

Her experience? Instead of the Imperial mother who took delight in cutting her children's faces with diamonds and exposing her daughters to the foul machinations of worthless teachers – she acquired a father-in-law (Prince, afterwards King George) whose pretended affection was but a share of his all-encompassing hatred, whose breath was a serpent's, whose veins were flowing with gall; the supposed chevaleresque husband turned out a walking dictionary of petty indecencies and gross vulgarities when in a favorable mood, a brawler at other times, a coward always.

As to money – Louise wished for nothing better "than to be an American multi-millionaire's daughter for a week"! Amusements were few and frowned upon.

Liberty? None outside of a general permit to eat, drink and couple like animals in pasture, was recognized or tolerated. Nor could the royal young woman make friends. Her relatives-by-marriage were mostly freaks, and all were unbearable; her entourage a collection of spies and flunkeys.

If charity-bazaars, pious palaver, and orphaned babies' diapers had not been the sole topic of conversation at court; if there had been intellectual enjoyment of any kind, Louise might never have taken up her pen. As it was: "This Diary is intended to contain my innermost thoughts, my ambitions, my promises for the future, Myself. * * * These pages are my Father-Confessor. I confess to myself. * * * And as I start in writing letters to myself, it occurs to me that my worse self may be corresponding with my better self, or vice-versa."

At any rate she thinks "this Diary business will be quite amusing."

Louise's Amusing Writings

It is. The world always laughs at the – husband of a woman whose history isn't one long yawn.

Nor is Louise content with a bust picture.2 She gives full length portraits of herself, family, friends, enemies, and lovers, which latter she picks hap-hazard among commoners and the nobility. Only one of them was a prince of the blood, and he promptly proved the most false and dishonorable of the lot.

When Louise's pen-pictures do not deal with her amororos, they focus invariably emperors and princes, kings and queens, – contemporary personages whose acquaintance, by way of the newspapers and magazines, we all enjoy to the full, as "stern rulers," "sacrificers to the public weal," "martyrs of duty," "indefatigable workers," "examples of abstinence," and "high-mindedness" – everything calculated to make life a burden to the ordinary mortal.

Kings in Fiction and in Reality

But kings and emperors, we are told by these distant observers, are built that way; they would not be happy unless they made themselves unhappy for their people's sake. And as to queens and empresses, – they simply couldn't live if they didn't inspect their linen closets daily, stand over a broiling cook-stove, or knit socks for the offspring of inebriated bricklayers "and sich."

Witness Louise, Imperial and Royal Highness, Archduchess of Austria, Princess of Hungary and Tuscany, Crown Princess of Saxony, etc., etc., smash these paper records of infallible royal rectitude, and superhuman, almost inhuman, royal probity!

Had she castigated her own kind after royalty unkenneled her, neck and crop, her story might admit of doubt, but she wrote these things while in the full enjoyment of her rank and station, before her title as future queen was ever questioned or menaced.

Her Diary finishes with her last night in the Dresden palace. We do not hear so much as the clatter of the carriage wheels that carried her and "Richard" to her unfrocking as princess of the blood, – in short, our narrator is not prejudiced, on the defensive, or soured by disfranchisement. She had no axes to grind while writing; for her all kings dropped out of the clouds; the lustre that surrounds a king never dimmed while her Diary was in progress, and before she ceases talking to us she never "ate of the fish that hath fed of that worm that hath eat of a king."

Yet this large folio edition of obscénités royale, chock full, at the same time, of intensely human and interesting facts, notable and amusing things, as enthralling as a novel by Balzac, – Louise's life record in sum and substance, since her carryings-on after she doffed her royal robes for the motley of the free woman are of no historical, and but scant human interest.

The prodigality of the mass of indictments Louise launches against royalty as every-day occurrences, reminds one of the great Catharine Sforza, Duchess of Milan's clever mot. When the enemy captured her children she merely said, "I retain the oven for more."

Royal Scandals

Such scandalmongering! Only Her Imperial Highness doesn't see the obloquy, – sarcasm, cynicism and disparagement being royalty's every-day diet.

Such gossiping! But what else was there to do at a court whose literature is tracts and whose theatre of action the drill grounds.

But for all that, Louise's Diary is history, because its minute things loom big in connection with social and political results, even as its horrors and abnormalities help paint court life and the lives of kings and princes as they are, not as royalties' sycophants and apologizers would have us view them.

There is a perfect downpour of books eulogizing monarchs and monarchy; royal governments spend millions of the people's money to uphold and aggrandize exalted kingship and seedy princeship alike; three-fourths of the press of Europe is swayed by king-worship, or subsidized to sing the praises of "God's Anointed," while in our own country the aping of monarchical institutions, the admiration for court life, the idealization of kings, their sayings, doings and pretended superiority, as carried on by the multi-rich, are undermining love for the Republic and the institutions our fathers fought and bled for.

Un-American Folly

It's the purpose of the present volume to show the guilty folly of such un-American, un-republican, wholly unjustifiable, reprehensible and altogether ridiculous King-worship, not by argument, or a more or less fanciful story, but by the unbiased testimony of an "insider."

Let it be considered, above all, that a member of the proudest Imperial family in the wide, wide world demonstrates, by inference, the absurdity of King-worship!

Of course, whether or not you'll obey the impassioned appeal of the corner sermonizer, who, espying a number of very décolletée ladies passing by in a carriage, cried out: "Quand vous voyez ces tetons rebondies, qui se montrent avec tant d'impudence, bandez! bandez! bandez! vous – les yeux!" is a matter for you to decide.

Seek not for descriptions of ceremonials and festivities in these pages; only imbeciles among kings are interested in such wearying spectacles, intended to dazzle the multitude. The Czar Paul, who became insane and had his head knocked off by his own officers, appeared upon the scene vacated by his brilliant mother, Catharine the Great, with a valise full of petty regulations, ready drawn up, by which, every day, every hour, every minute, he announced some foolish change, punishment or favor, but I often saw Kaiser Wilhelm and other kings look intensely bored and disgusted when obliged to attend dull and superfluous court or government functions.

Royalty's Loose Talk

But for genuine expressions of the royal self consult Louise. Those who think that royalty shapes its language in accordance with the plural of the personal pronoun, sometimes used in state papers, will be shocked at the "négligé talk" of one royal highness and the "rag-time" expressions of others. Louise, herself, assures us over and over again that she "feels like a dog," a statement no self-respecting publisher's reader would allow to pass, yet I was told by a friend of King Frederick of Denmark that he loved to compare his "all-highest person" to a "mut," and I remember a letter from Victor Emanuel II to his great Minister, Count Cavour, solemnly protesting that he (the King) was "no ass."

When the same Danish ruler, the seventh of his name, was asked why, in thunder, he married a common street walker (the Rasmussen, afterwards created Countess Danner), he cried out with every indication of gusto: "You don't know how deliciously common that girl is."

Frederick's words explain the hostler marriages of several royal women mentioned by Louise, as well as her own and loving family's broulleries of the fish-wife order, repeatedly described in the Diary.

Royalty Threatens a Royal Woman

It is safe to say that few $15 flats in all the United States witnessed more outrageous family jars than were fought out in the gilded halls of the Dresden palace between Louise and father-in-law and Louise and husband. Threats of violence are frequent; Prince George promises his daughter-in-law a sound beating at the hands of the Crown Prince and the Crown Princess confesses that she would rather go to bed with a drunken husband, booted and spurred, than risk a sword thrust.

At the coronation of the present Czar, at Moscow, I mistook the Duke of Edinburgh, brother of the late King Edward, for a policeman attached to the British Ambassador, so exceedingly commonplace a person in appearance, speech and manner he seemed; Louise has a telling chapter on the mean looks of royalty, but fails to see the connection between that and royalty's coarseness.

Perhaps it wasn't the "commonness" of Lady Emma Hamilton, child of the slums, impersonator of risqué stage pictures, and mistress of the greatest naval hero of all times, that appealed primarily to Louise's grand-aunt, Queen Caroline of Naples, but the abandon of the beautiful Englishwoman, her reckless exposure of person, her freedom of speech, certainly sealed the friendship between the adventuress and the despotic ruler who deserved the epithet of "bloody" no less than Mary of England.

Covetous Royalty

Royal covetousness is another subject dwelt on by Louise. We learn that in money matters the kings and princes of her acquaintance – and her acquaintance embraces all the monarchs of Europe – are "dirty," that royal girls are given in marriage to the highest bidder, and that poor princes have no more chance to marry a rich princess than a drayman an American multi-millionaire's daughter.

Louise gives us a curious insight into the Pappenheim-Wheeler marriage embroglio, and refers to some noble families that made their money in infamous trades; that the Kaiser adopted the title of one of these unspeakables ("Count of Henneberg") she doesn't seem to know.

We hear of imperial and royal highnesses, living at public expense and for whom honors and lucrative employment are exacted from the people, who at home figure as poor relations, obliged to submit to treatment that a self-respecting "boots" or "omnibus" would resent.

Here we have a royal prince of twenty-four or twenty-five subjected to kicks and cuffs by his uncle, who happens to be king – no indignity either to the slugged or the slugger in that – but when a pretty princess gets a few "Hochs" more than an ugly, mouse-colored majesty, she is all but flayed for "playing to the gallery."

"High-minded" royalty robs widows and despoils orphans; re-introduces into the family obsolete punishments forbidden by law; maintains in the household a despicable spy system! Its respect for womanhood is on a par with a Bushman's; of authors, "lickspittles" only count; literature, unless it kowtows to the "all-highest" person, is the "trade of Jew scribblers."

Right Royal Manners

As to manners, what do you think of kings and princes and grand-dukes who, at ceremonial dinners, pound the table to "show that they are boss"?

Louise tells of an emperor at a foreign court ignoring one of his hostesses absolutely, even refusing to acknowledge her salute by a nod. We hear of expectant royal heirs who engage in wild fandangoes of merriment while their father, brother or cousin lies dying.

"Personal matter," you say? "A typical case," I retort.

"Ask the Duc du Maine to wait till I am dead before he indulges in the full extent of his joy," said the dying Louis XIV, when the De Profundis in the death chamber was suddenly interrupted by the sound of violent laughter from the adjoining gallery. And the fact that almost every new king sets aside the testament of his predecessor, – is this not evidence of the general callowness of feeling prevailing in royal circles?

The Irish Famine and Royalty

In famine times, the kings and princes of old drove the starving out of town to die of hunger in the fields, and as late as 1772 one hundred and fifty thousand Saxons died of hunger under the "glorious reign" of Louise's grandfather-by-marriage, Frederick Augustus III. And the "Life of Queen Victoria," approved by the Court of St. James, unblushingly informs us that in 1847 "Her Most Gracious Majesty" was chiefly concerned about investing to good profit the revenues of the Prince of Wales, her infant son (about four hundred thousand dollars per annum).

Yet, while Victoria pinched the boy's tenants to extort an extra penny for him, and "succeeded in saving all but four thousand pounds sterling" of his imperial allowance, the population of Ireland was reduced two millions by the most dreadful famine the world remembers!

Before the famine Ireland had a population of 8,196,597, against a population of 15,914,148 in England and Wales, while Scotland's population was 2,620,184.

Six years after the famine Ireland's population was 6,574,278, Scotland's 2,888,742, England and Wales' 17,927,609. Today Ireland's population is less than Scotland's, the exact figures being: Scotland 4,759,445, Ireland 4,381,951, England and Wales 36,075,269.

Royalty Utterly Heartless

However, as the waste of two million human lives, the loss of four millions in population, subsequently enabled the Prince of Wales to tie the price of a dukedom3 in diamonds around a French dancer's neck and to support a hundred silly harlots in all parts of Europe, who cares?

According to Louise and – others, royalty is the meanest, the most heartless, the most faithless and the most unjust of the species – that in addition she herself disgraced its womanhood, after the famous Louise of Prussia rehabilitated queenship, is regrettable, but to call it altogether unexpected would be rank euphemism.

Louise's Character

If Louise had lived at the time of Phryne, the philosophers would have characterized her as "an animal with long hair"; if he had known her, the great Mirabeau might have coined his pet phrase, "a human that dresses, undresses and – talks" (or writes) for Louise; as a matter of fact, she is one of those "Jansenists" of love who believe in the utter helplessness of natural woman to turn down a good looking man.

Her great grand-uncle, Emperor Francis, recorded on a pane of glass overlooking the courtyard of the Vienna Hofburg his opinion of women in the brief observation: "Chaque femme varie" (Women always change).

This is true of Louise and also untrue of her. While occupying her high position at the Saxon court she was fixed in the determination to make a cuckold of her husband, though Frederick Augustus, while a pumpkin, wasn't fricasseed in snow by any means.

The process gave her palpitations, but, like Ninon, she was "so happy when she had palpitations."

Changed Lovers Frequently

As to lovers, she changed them as often as she had to, never hesitating to pepper her steady romances by playing "everybody's wife," chance permitting, as she intimates naïvely towards the close of the Diary.

Qualms of conscience she knows not, but of pride of ancestry, of insistence on royal prerogatives, she has plenty and to spare.

"My great grand-aunt, Marie Antoinette, did this"; "my good cousins d'Orleans" (three of them) "allowed themselves to be seduced"; "ma cousine de Saxe-Coburg laughs at conventionalities," – there you have the foundation of the iniquitous philosophy of the royal Lais. And for the rest – when she is queen, all will be well.

Her Court – A Seraglio

Louise's fixed idea was that, as Queen of Saxony, she had but to say the word to establish a court à la Catharine II; time and again she refers to the great Empress's male seraglio, and to the enormous sums she squandered on her favorites. If the Diarist had known that Her Majesty of Russia, when in the flesh, never suffered to be longer than twenty-four hours without a lover, Louise, no doubt, would have made the most elaborate plans to prevent, in her own case, a possible interregnum of five minutes even.

She thought she held the whip hand because a king cannot produce princes without his wife, while the wife can produce princes without the king; besides Frederick Augustus was no paragon, and he who plants horns, must not grudge to wear them.

A wanton's calculations, it will be argued, – but Louise's records show that her husband, the king-to-be, fell in with her main idea, – that he forgave the unfaithful wife, the disgraced princess, because, as Queen, her popularity would be "a great asset."

And Americans, our women of whom we are so proud, are asked to bow down to such sorry majesties!

Sired and "Cousined" by Lunatics

And is there no excuse for so much baseness in high places? Our royal Diarist offers none, but her family history is a telling apology.

Be it remembered that Louise is not so much an Austrian as a Wittelsbacher of the royal house of Bavaria that gave to the world two mad kings, Louis II and Otho, the present incumbent of the throne, besides a number of eccentrics, among others Louise's aunts, the Empress Elizabeth and the Duchess d'Alencon, both dead; Crown Prince Rudolph of Austria, her cousin, was also undoubtedly insane, the result of breeding in and in, Austrian, Bourbon and Wittelsbach stock, all practically of the same parentage, in a mad mix-up, the insane Wittelsbachers predominating.

To cap the climax, Louise has eighteen or nineteen insane cousins on her mother's side!

Once upon a time Louise's prosaic and stupid great-uncle, as a young husband, felt dreadfully scandalized when his Queen, Marie Antoinette, bombarded him with spit-balls.

"What can I do with her?" he asked "Minister Sans-culotte" Dumouriez.

"I would spike the cannon, Sire," replied the courtier.

"Enclouer le canon," if performed in time, might have saved Louise, but I doubt it.

Henry W. Fischer.