Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess.

by Henry W. Fischer.

THIS BOOK AND ITS PURPOSE

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 amus.e.m.e.nt, 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 s.a.d.i.s.t 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-encompa.s.sing 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"! Amus.e.m.e.nts 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 n.o.bility. 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, Archd.u.c.h.ess of Austria, Princess of Hungary and Tuscany, Crown Princess of Saxony, etc., etc., smash these paper records of infallible royal rect.i.tude, 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 t.i.tle 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 disfranchis.e.m.e.nt. She had no axes to grind while writing; for her all kings dropped out of the clouds; the l.u.s.tre 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 _obscenites 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 ma.s.s of indictments Louise launches against royalty as every-day occurrences, reminds one of the great Catharine Sforza, d.u.c.h.ess 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 "G.o.d's Anointed," while in our own country the aping of monarchical inst.i.tutions, 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 inst.i.tutions 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 impa.s.sioned appeal of the corner sermonizer, who, espying a number of very decolletee ladies pa.s.sing 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 mult.i.tude. 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 p.r.o.noun, sometimes used in state papers, will be shocked at the "neglige talk" of one royal highness and the "rag-time" expressions of others. Louise, herself, a.s.sures us over and over again that she "_feels like a dog_," a statement no self-respecting publisher's reader would allow to pa.s.s, 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 a.s.s_."

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 Amba.s.sador, 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 coa.r.s.eness.

Perhaps it wasn't the "commonness" of Lady Emma Hamilton, child of the slums, impersonator of _risque_ 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 "b.l.o.o.d.y" no less than Mary of England.