Prince Otto, by Robert Louis Stevenson 9780748645244

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• T H E n e w e d i n b u r g h e d i t i o n o f the w o r k s o f r o b e r t l o u i s s te v e n s o n • to be complete in thirty-nine volumes Published so far

Prince Otto, edited by Robert P. Irvine

In preparation

Kidnapped, edited by Caroline McCracken-Flesher Weir of Hermiston, edited by Gillian Hughes St Ives, edited by Glenda Norquay More New Arabian Nights: The Dynamiter, edited by Penny Fielding Short Stories 4: The Bottle Imp, Fables and Other Short Narratives, edited by William Gray Essays 1: Virginibus Puerisque, edited by Robert-Louis Abrahamson Essays 2: Familiar Studies, edited by Robert-Louis Abrahamson and Richard Dury Essays 3: Memories and Portraits, edited by Alexander Thomson Essays 4: Uncollected Essays 1868–1879, edited by Richard Dury Essays 5: Uncollected Essays 1880–1894, edited by Lesley Graham The Amateur Emigrant, edited by Julia Reid

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• T H E n e w e d i n b u r g h e d i t i o n o f the w o r k s o f r o b e r t l o u i s s te v e n s o n •

General Editors stephen arata, richard dury, penny fielding, anthony mandal

Prince Otto

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• T H E n e w e d i n b u r g h e d i t i o n o f the w o r k s o f r o b e r t l o u i s s te v e n s o n •

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General Editors

Stephen Arata Richard Dury Penny Fielding Anthony Mandal

Research Fellow

Lena Wånggren

Advisory Editor

Gillian Hughes

Editorial Board

Richard Ambrosini (University of Rome-III) Gerard Carruthers (University of Glasgow) Nicholas Frankel (Virginia Commonwealth University) Peter Garside (University of Edinburgh) Roslyn Jolly (University of New South Wales) Roger Luckhurst (University of London) Alison Lumsden (University of Aberdeen) Adrian Poole (University of Cambridge) Chris Vanden Bossche (University of Notre Dame) Andrew Stauffer (University of Virginia) Kathryn Sutherland (University of Oxford) Alexis Weedon (University of Bedfordshire)

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• r o b e r t l o u i s s te v e n s o n •

Prince Otto edited by Robert P. Irvine

edinburgh university press 2014

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© The University Court of the University of Edinburgh 2014 Edinburgh University Press 22 George Square, Edinburgh eh8 9lf Typeset in Adobe Arno Pro at the Centre for Editorial and Intertextual Research, Cardiff University and the University of Edinburgh and printed and bound in Great Britain on acid-free paper at CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon cr0 4yy isbn 978 0 7486 4523 7 (hb) 978 0 7486 4524 4 (epdf) A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by an means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without the prior permission in writing from the publisher.

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Contents Acknowledgements. . . . . . . . . . ix Preface by the General Editors . . . . . . xi List of Abbreviations . . . . . . . . . xv Chronology of Robert Louis Stevenson. . . . xvi Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . xxiii Composition, publication and early reception . xxiii Influences and artistic contexts. . . . . . x xxv Historical and political contexts . . . . . xlvi Afterlife and influence. . . . . . . . xlix PRINCE OTTO Dedication. . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Book I. Prince Errant . . . . . . . . . 5 Book II. Of Love and Politics. . . . . . . 35 Book III. Fortunate Misfortune . . . . . . 127 Bibliographical Postscript . . . . . . . . 160 Appendices . . . . . . . . . . . . 163 1. Magazine passages excised from book edition . 163 2. Manuscript fragments . . . . . . . . 165 Note on the Text . . . . . . . . . . . 169 Bibliographical history. . . . . . . . 169 Textual essay . . . . . . . . . . . 173 Later editions . . . . . . . . . . . 183 The present text . . . . . . . . . . 183 Emendation List. . . . . . . . . . . 185 End-of-Line Hyphens. . . . . . . . . 188 Explanatory Notes. . . . . . . . . . 189

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Acknowledgements The General Editors would like to express their thanks to The Royal Society of Edinburgh for their generous award of a Workshop Grant and an Arts and Humanities Major Research Grant which made it possible to establish the New Edinburgh Edition. The Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland funded travel and the Moray Endowment Fund enabled digitization through an equipment grant. The edition has been supported in many ways by the Robert Louis Stevenson Club of Edinburgh including financial contributions towards the acquisition of images of manuscripts. The edition has benefited from an EU-funded internship programme administered at the University of Mainz and we would like to extend our thanks to Sigrid Rieuwerts. We would especially like to thank Roger S. Swearingen for advising and generously sharing his encyclopaedic knowledge of Stevenson, his works and his manuscripts. Gillian Hughes has tirelessly shared her extensive knowledge of and scholarly skills in nineteenth-century editing. A large edition is always a collaboration across institutions and we acknowledge the support of the National Library of Scotland for their assistance with digitization and public events, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the Huntingdon Library, the Archive of British Publishing and Printing at the University of Reading and the Robert Louis Stevenson Silverado Museum. For their partnership in public events associated with the edition we are glad to thank the Edinburgh Writers’ Museum and Edinburgh UNESCO City of Literature. The Universities of Edinburgh, Cardiff and Virginia have supported the edition in many ways, and we would like to acknowledge the support and assistance of Jackie Jones and Edinburgh University Press. Preparing this volume has taken the editor into many fields of knowledge in which he found himself a stranger and he is very grateful to those experts who responded to various requests for guidance: Dr Andrew Taylor, Dr Anna Vaninskaya, Dr Véronique Desnain and Professor John W. Cairns at Edinburgh; Professor William Greenslade at the University of the West of England; and Professor Alexis Weedon at the University of Bedfordshire. His task was greatly facilitated by ix

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acknowledgements

New Edinburgh Edition Research Fellow, Dr Lena Wånggren; and the project interns from the University of Mainz: Marina Held, Stefanie Grimm, Désirée Buchinger, Tessa Deiss and Hanne Bergfelder. Grateful thanks are also due to Random House Group Ltd for permission to reproduce material from letters in the Chatto & Windus archive at the University of Reading, and to Dr Barbara Vrachnas for her help in accessing this resource. Finally, his heartfelt thanks to the General Editors of the New Edinburgh Edition of the Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, and especially to Professor Penny Fielding, without whose vision and energy this project would never have been realized.

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Preface by the General Editors In the thirty years after Robert Louis Stevenson’s death in 1894, no fewer than eight collected editions of his works were published. Even in an age when such projects were more common (and economically feasible) than they are now, that is an unusually high number, and it testifies to the endurance of Stevenson’s popularity over the first portion of the twentieth century. For the publishers involved, these were commercial rather than scholarly ventures, understandably so. Little effort was made to establish the accuracy of individual works. In most cases the editions reprinted texts that drew, either directly or at several removes, on the twenty-eight-volume Works of Robert Louis Stevenson [Edinburgh Edition] (1894–98) overseen by Stevenson’s literary executor, Sidney Colvin. With good intentions and what now looks like questionable judgment, Colvin actively re-edited all of the works, altered some, and suppressed others. He also had neither the means nor any compelling motivation to try to untangle the often complicated transmission history of many of the texts in his care. As a result, though the Works of Robert Louis Stevenson [Edinburgh Edition] gathered and made widely accessible nearly all of Stevenson’s numerous literary productions, it preserved them in forms that deviate in countless ways from what Stevenson actually wrote. The New Edinburgh Edition of the Works of Robert Louis Stevenson pays titular tribute to Colvin’s foundational assemblage. It aims, though, to provide what cannot be found in his or any subsequent collected edition, namely accurate texts for all of Stevenson’s substantial oeuvre. The New Edinburgh Edition is designed to appeal both to the general reader and the scholar. Each volume supplies attractive, uncluttered reading texts. Individual works are thoroughly annotated, allowing readers to grasp the full range of Stevenson’s allusions as well as to recover the myriad ways in which he responded to the contemporary world and his cultural heritage. Introductory essays trace composition and publication histories while providing contextual information designed to extend readers’ understanding and, we hope, enhance their appreciation. Textual essays describe the extant witness texts (e.g. manuscript, proof-sheet, periodical publication, single or multiple book editions) for each work as well as the relations among xi

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pr eface

them, while laying out the rationales for the copy texts chosen for the New Edinburgh Edition. In each volume, the textual apparatus provides a full listing of emendations and substantive variants. Overall, we trust that these volumes will help throw into higher relief Stevenson’s distinctive achievements as a creative writer. Those achievements extend across virtually all literary genres. During his lifetime Stevenson was known as a writer of exceptional versatility and skill. His output—in a career of only twenty years—included not just short and long prose fiction, but travel writing, essays, journalism, biography, poetry, drama, and—near the end of his life—ethnographic and political studies of the South Seas. Much of this writing has fallen from view, and for some time now Stevenson’s reputation has rested, sturdily enough, on a small number of works: Treasure Island, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Kidnapped, a few essays, a handful of poems and short stories. By bringing back into print works once highly regarded but long unavailable, the New Edinburgh Edition provides a more complete picture not only of Stevenson’s career but of his place in modern literary history. While it would of course be disingenuous to claim the same high aesthetic merit for each of his works, few are of mere historical interest. In this edition, readers will also find collected in one place pieces, most notably essays and short stories, that for various reasons were either never published or never reprinted after their initial periodical publication. Five volumes of Essays and four of Short Stories for the first time gather together in a uniform critical edition Stevenson’s substantial output in these genres. Henry James called Stevenson ‘a Scotchman of the world’, meaning that while his imagination remained rooted in his homeland—‘it is a good fortune for a genius to have had such a country as Scotland for its primary stuff ’, James notes—he was also a thoroughly cosmopolitan writer who drew inspiration from many literary and cultural traditions outside his own. In his life, too, Stevenson travelled through large portions of the habitable globe without ever losing sight, as it were, of his birthplace. As befits so peripatetic a writer, the volume editors for the New Edinburgh Edition are themselves drawn from across Europe, North America, and the South Pacific. In a sense, nothing less than a global effort would suffice for an undertaking such as this one. For one thing, Stevenson’s manuscripts and other materials are scattered in archives, libraries, and personal collections around the world. For Colvin and his immediate successors, the inaccessibility of much of this material would have frustrated any aspirations—had they had any— to produce an authoritative collected works. Since the 1970s, a numxii

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ber of excellent editions of individual works have been published (and are acknowledged in the appropriate volumes here), but the far-flung dispersal of the relevant sources has until now discouraged efforts to produce a coordinated series of texts covering Stevenson’s entire oeuvre, all prepared by careful study of manuscripts and variant readings in lifetime editions and following unified scholarly procedures. Stevenson’s travels are relevant to the New Edinburgh Edition in another way. All evidence indicates that Stevenson, when he had the chance, preferred to be—indeed, insisted on being—minutely involved in the production of his works. An inveterate reviser and meticulous proofreader, at every stage from manuscript to final publication, Stevenson not only made changes but cancelled those made by, for instance, copy editors or typesetters. Unlike the vast majority of nineteenth-century authors, who happily ceded to printers the task of tidying up their manuscripts to conform to a particular house style, Stevenson resisted efforts to regularize the punctuation or even the grammar of his texts. One of his American editors, Edward Bok, wrote that ‘no man ever went over his proofs more carefully than did Stevenson’. This level of oversight, however, was seldom possible even in the best of circumstances. After 1887, as the Stevenson household moved from upstate New York to California to various locations in the South Pacific, it became virtually impossible. The sheer distances involved compelled Stevenson to relinquish much of his control once a work left his desk. Colvin’s editorial hand was heaviest, but errors and ‘corrections’ could creep in at multiple points in the line of transmission. Add to this the fact that Stevenson contracted with many different publishers in Great Britain and the United States, that his works often were issued more or less simultaneously in both countries under different imprints, that many of his shorter pieces appeared in periodicals before being revised and collected in volumes, that his more popular works went through multiple editions in short spaces of time, and that pirated editions abound, and the task of producing authoritative texts can be seen in all its fascinating, daunting complexity. With these considerations in mind, we have sought to devise editorial principles marked by rigour and consistency, but also flexibility. No single policy for copy text can be adopted because of the varying conditions of production that obtained at different moments in Stevenson’s career. Editors will normally take as copy text the most authoritative early edition—that is, the edition corresponding to the period in which Stevenson worked with greatest concentration and most sustained effort on the piece in question. In most but far from all cases, xiii

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this means the first book edition of a work. For short texts (stories, essays, poems), the first publication in volume form is preferred to periodical publication as the version most carefully prepared and overseen by the author. In all cases, our aim is to publish accurate versions of texts as mediated by the differing circumstances of production and publication in which Stevenson collaborated. The New Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Robert Louis Stevenson thus makes available, often for the first time, authoritative texts that scholars and critics can use in their work and that all readers can rely on.

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List of Abbreviations Listed below are abbreviations of works used recurrently throughout the current volume. Chatto

Prince Otto: A Romance (London: Chatto & Windus, 1885): first UK edition

EdEd

The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Edinburgh Edition, 28 vols (Edinburgh: Chatto & Windus, 1894–8)

Letters

The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mehew, 8 vols (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994–5)

LM

Prince Otto: A Romance in Longman’s Magazine, vols 5–6 (Apr–Oct 1885): first magazine publication

OED

Oxford English Dictionary

Roberts

Prince Otto: A Romance (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1886): first US edition

Tusitala

The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Tusitala Edition, 35 vols (London: Heinemann, 1923–4)

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Chronology of Robert Louis Stevenson 1848 28 Aug: Thomas Stevenson, youngest son of the lighthouse engineer Robert Stevenson, marries Margaret Isabella Balfour, youngest daughter of the Reverend Lewis Balfour, minister at Colinton near Edinburgh. 1850 13 Nov: Robert Lewis (‘Louis’ from c. 1869) Balfour Stevenson, only child, born at 8 Howard Place, Edinburgh. The family later move to 1 Inverleith Terrace (1853), then 17 Heriot Row (1857). 1852 Alison Cunningham (‘Cummy’) enters the family as Stevenson’s nurse. 1860 Stevenson’s Balfour grandfather dies: end of childhood visits to Colinton Manse. 1866 Nov: The Pentland Rising. 1867 Thomas Stevenson leases Swanston Cottage at the foot of the Pentland Hills (until 1880); Nov: Stevenson enters Edinburgh University as student of engineering (abandoned 1871), then law (graduates 1875). 1868 Visits harbour works at Anstruther ( July) and Wick (late Aug–early Oct). 1869 Mar: elected to Speculative Society (fellow members include Charles Baxter, James Walter Ferrier and Walter Simpson); June: accompanies his father on an official tour of inspection of the lighthouses of the Orkney and Shetland islands. 1870 Apr–May: engineering site inspection at Dunoon; Aug: on the islet of Earraid, base for the building of the Dhu Heartach lighthouse.

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chronology 1871 Apr: abandons engineering studies for law; June: tour of Cockermouth and Keswick. Jan–Apr, Edinburgh University Magazine essays: ‘Edinburgh Students in 1824’, ‘The Modern Student Considered Generally’, ‘The Philosophy of Umbrellas’, ‘An Old Scotch Gardener’, ‘Debating Societies’, ‘The Philosophy of Nomenclature’. 1872 July–Aug: in Frankfurt with Walter Simpson, walking tour in the Black Forest. 1873 Jan: tells his father that he no longer believes the Christian religion; July: in England meets Fanny Sitwell and Sidney Colvin (who becomes his literary advisor and later editor); Nov: to Mentone as a cure for nervous exhaustion. Dec: ‘Roads’ (Portfolio—first professionally published essay). 1874 Mentone; Apr: Paris (from now until autumn 1878 he spends a third of his time in France), then Edinburgh; June: elected to Savile Club; Oct: walking tour in Buckinghamshire. May: ‘Ordered South’ (Macmillan’s Magazine); June: ‘Lord Lytton’s Fables in Song’ (Fortnightly Review); Aug: ‘The Ballads and Songs of Scotland’ and ‘Scottish Rivers’ (Academy), ‘Notes on the Movements of Young Children’ (Portfolio); ‘Victor Hugo’s Romances’ (Cornhill Magazine—first of twenty Cornhill essays); Nov: ‘On the Enjoyment of Unpleasant Places’ (Portfolio); Dec: ‘A Quiet Corner of England’ (Academy). 1875 Feb: Leslie Stephen introduces Stevenson to W. E. Henley; Mar: article on Burns for Encyclopaedia Britannica rejected; Mar–Apr: Paris and Barbizon (returns to the Fontainebleau area six more times 1875–78); July: called to the Scottish bar, receives £1000 from his father; Aug: Barbizon, walking tour of the Loing Valley with Simpson. Jan: ‘The Works of Edgar Allan Poe’ (Academy); Feb: An Appeal to the Clergy of the Church of Scotland; Apr: ‘An Autumn Effect’ (Portfolio); Sept–Oct: ‘John Knox and his Relations to Women’ (Macmillan’s); late 1875: ‘Pierre Jean de Béranger’ (Encyclopaedia Britannica); Nov: ‘The Measure of a Marquis’ (Vanity Fair), ‘Mr Browning Again!’ (Vanity Fair).

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chronology 1876 Jan: ‘Winter’s Walk’ from Ayr along the coast of sw Scotland; Aug–Sept: ‘Inland Voyage’ canoe trip from Antwerp to Pontoise; Sept: to Paris then Grez, where he meets Fanny Osbourne. Feb: ‘The Poets and Poetry of Scotland (Academy); Apr: ‘Salvini’s Macbeth’ (Academy); May: ‘Forest Notes’ (Cornhill); June: ‘Jules Verne’s Stories’ (Academy), ‘Walking Tours’ (Cornhill); July: ‘The Comedy of the Noctes Ambrosianae’ (Academy); Aug: ‘Virginibus Puerisque’ (Cornhill); Dec: ‘Charles of Orleans’ (Cornhill). 1877 In Paris and Grez with Fanny Osbourne: Jan–Feb, June–July, Aug–Sept, Sept–Oct, and Dec to Mar 1878. Feb–Mar: ‘An Old Song’ (London—first published fiction); Feb: ‘On Falling in Love’ (Cornhill); Feb: short pieces in London: ‘A Salt-Water Financier’, ‘Mr Tennyson’s Harold’, ‘A Ball At Mr. Elsinare’s’, ‘A Studio of Ladies’, ‘The Paris Bourse’, ‘Wallace’s Russia’; July: ‘An Apology for Idlers’ (Cornhill); Aug: ‘François Villon, student, poet, housebreaker’ (Cornhill); Oct: ‘A Lodging for the Night’ (Temple Bar—first fiction published under his own name). 1878 Paris; Mar: to London, visits George Meredith at Box Hill (further visits in 1879, 1882, 1886); June: Paris; July: Barbizon and Grez, then to London with Fanny Osbourne; Aug: Fanny Osbourne returns to her husband in California; Sept–Oct: Cévennes journey. Jan: ‘Will o’ the Mill’ (Cornhill), ‘The Sire de Malétroit’s Door’ (Temple Bar); Mar: ‘Crabbed Age and Youth’ (Cornhill); Apr: ‘Æs Triplex’ (Cornhill), ‘A Plea for Gas Lamps’ (London); May: An Inland Voyage (first published volume), ‘Pan’s Pipes’ (London), ‘El Dorado’ (London); June–Oct: ‘Latter-Day Arabian Nights’ (London); June–Dec: ‘Notes on Edinburgh’ (Portfolio); July: ‘The English Admirals’ (Cornhill); Sept: ‘Child’s Play’ (Cornhill); Oct: ‘The Gospel According to Walt Whitman’ (New Quarterly); Nov: ‘Leon Berthilini’s Guitar’ (London); Dec: Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes. 1879 Mar: writes much of ‘Lay Morals’; 7 Aug: sails from Glasgow on the Devonia; 17 Aug: arrives in New York; 30 Aug: arrives in Monterey after a train journey across North America; Dec: Fanny Osbourne (now in East Oakland) obtains a divorce; Dec: to San Francisco. May: ‘Truth of Intercourse’ (Cornhill); June: Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes; Oct: ‘Some Aspects of Robert Burns’ (Cornhill), ‘The Story of a Lie’ (New Quarterly).

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chronology 1880 Living poorly in San Francisco, writes ‘Memoirs of Himself ’; Mar: moves to East Oakland, first lung haemorrhage; 19 May: marries Fanny Osbourne in San Francisco; May–July: honeymoon at Calistoga and at an abandoned mining cabin at Silverado; Aug: returns to Scotland with Fanny and her son Lloyd, agrees to withdraw The Amateur Emigrant; Nov: to Davos; Nov–Dec: reading for projected history of the Highlands. Mar: ‘Yoshida-Torajiro’ (Cornhill); June: ‘Henry David Thoreau’ (Cornhill); Sept–Oct: ‘The Pavilion on the Links’ (Cornhill); Nov: ‘The Old Pacific Capital’ (Fraser’s Magazine). 1881 Davos (to May); June–Aug: Pitlochry, writes ‘Thrawn Janet’ and most of ‘The Merry Men’; Aug–Sept: Braemar, begins Treasure Island at Braemar and first ‘Child’s Garden’ verses; Oct: returns to Davos; Nov: unsuccessfully applies for Chair of History and Constitutional Law at Edinburgh University. Feb–Mar, short essays in the Pall Mall Gazette: ‘Health and Mountains’, ‘Davos in Winter’, ‘Alpine Diversions’, ‘The Stimulation of the Alps’, ‘The Misgivings of Convalescence’; Mar: ‘Samuel Pepys’ (Cornhill); Apr: ‘The Morality of the Profession of Letters’ (Fortnightly Review), Virginibus Puerisque and other Papers; Oct: ‘Thrawn Janet’ (Cornhill), ‘Treasure Island’ (Young Folks, to Jan 1882). 1882 Davos (to Apr); June–Sept: Scotland; Sept: Montpelier; Oct: Marseille, lung haemorrhages. Feb: Familiar Studies of Men and Books, ‘Bagster’s Pilgrim’s Progress’ (Magazine of Art); Mar–Apr: Moral Emblems; Apr: ‘Talk and Talkers’ (Cornhill); May: ‘The Foreigner at Home’ (Cornhill); June–July: ‘The Merry Men’ (Cornhill); July: New Arabian Nights; Aug: ‘Talk and Talkers (a Sequel)’ (Cornhill), The Graver and the Pen; Nov: ‘Two Japanese Romances’ (Magazine of Art), ‘A Gossip on Romance’ (Longman’s Magazine); Nov–Dec: ‘The Silverado Squatters’ (Century Illustrated Monthly—his first work published first in the USA). 1883 Marseille; Feb: Hyères (to June 1884). May: ‘A Modern Cosmopolis’ (Magazine of Art); Apr–May: ‘The Treasure of Franchard’ (Longman’s); July–Aug: ‘Across the Plains’ (Longman’s); June– Oct: ‘The Black Arrow’ (Young Folks); Nov: Treasure Island, ‘A Note on Realism’ (Magazine of Art).

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chronology 1884 Hyères. Jan: seriously ill (lung haemorrhages); June: Royat, then London; July: Bournemouth (to Aug 1887), first London performance of Deacon Brodie (written with W. E. Henley). Jan: The Silverado Squatters; Feb: ‘The Character of Dogs’ (English Illustrated Magazine); Apr: ‘A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured’ (Magazine of Art); May: ‘Old Mortality’; May–June: ‘Fontainebleau: Village Communities of Painters’ (Magazine of Art); Dec: ‘A Humble Remonstrance’ (Longman’s), ‘The Body Snatcher’ (Pall Mall Christmas Extra). 1885 Bournemouth; in poor health (serious lung haemorrhages Apr, Aug–Sept); Apr: moves into the house renamed ‘Skerryvore’, Bournemouth, begins close friendship with Henry James. Mar: A Child’s Garden of Verses (published in the USA by Scribner’s, their first Stevenson title); Apr: (with Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson) More New Arabian Nights: The Dynamiter, ‘On Style in Literature: Its Technical Elements’ (Contemporary Review); Nov: Prince Otto (and Apr–Oct, Longman’s); Dec: ‘Olalla’ (Court and Society Review), ‘Markheim’ (The Broken Shaft: Unwin’s Annual 1886). 1886 Bournemouth; Thomas Stevenson depressed and in ill health; May: learning the piano; July: first musical composition. Jan: Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde; July: Kidnapped (and May–July, Young Folks); Nov: ‘Some College Memories’ (The New Amphion). 1887 Bournemouth; May: Thomas Stevenson dies, Stevenson in Edinburgh for the last time; Aug: sails for New York with his mother, Fanny and Lloyd; Sept: agrees to write twelve monthly essays for Scribner’s Magazine; Oct: Saranac Lake, upper New York State (to Apr 1888). Feb: The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables; Apr: ‘Pastoral’ (Longman’s), ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ (Contemporary Review); May: ‘Books Which Have Influenced Me’ (British Weekly), ‘The Manse’ (Scribner’s Magazine); June: ‘Thomas Stevenson, Civil Engineer’ (Contemporary Review); July: Underwoods; Nov: Memories and Portraits; Dec: ‘The Misadventures of John Nicholson’ (Yule Tide … Cassell’s Christmas Annual). 1888 Saranac Lake; Feb: withdraws ‘Confessions of a Unionist’ from Scribner’s Magazine; Mar: quarrel with Henley, McClure offers to syndicate letters written on a Pacific cruise; Apr–June: New York and Manasquan; May: signs

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chronology contract for Fables; 28 June: leaves San Francisco with Fanny, Lloyd and his mother aboard the Casco; Aug: Marquesas; Sept: Paumotus; Sept–Dec: Tahiti, haemorrhages. Jan: Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin; June: The Black Arrow. Jan–Dec, monthly essays in Scribner’s Magazine: ‘A Chapter on Dreams’, ‘The Lantern-Bearers’, ‘Beggars’, ‘Pulvis et Umbra’, ‘Gentlemen’, ‘Some Gentlemen in Fiction’, ‘Popular Authors’, ‘Epilogue to An Inland Voyage’, ‘A Letter to a Young Gentleman who Proposes to Embrace the Career of Art’, ‘Contributions to the History of Fife’, ‘The Education of an Engineer’, ‘A Christmas Sermon’. 1889 Jan–June: Hawaii; May: visits leper settlement at Molokai; June: leaves Honolulu aboard the Equator with Fanny, Lloyd and Joe Strong on a trading cruise through the Gilbert Islands; 7 Dec: arrives in Apia, Samoa. June: (with Lloyd Osbourne) The Wrong Box; Sept: The Master of Ballantrae (and Nov 1888–Oct 1889, Scribner’s). 1890 Jan: buys land at ‘Vailima’; Feb–Mar: Sydney; seriously ill, abandons idea of returning to Europe for a holiday; Apr–July: with Fanny on the Janet Nicoll cruise from Sydney through the Cook, Ellice, Gilbert and Marshall Islands to New Caledonia; Aug–Sept: Sydney; Sept: moves into a cabin on the Vailima estate. Mar: ‘Father Damien’; Dec: Ballads. 1891 Jan–Mar: Sydney; Apr: moves into the main house at Vailima. Feb–Mar: ‘The Bottle Imp’ (Herald; and Mar–Apr: Black and White); Feb– Dec: ‘The South Seas’ (Sun and Black and White). 1892 June: Belle Strong becomes his amanuensis; July: Belle obtains divorce from Joe Strong; Oct: starts Weir of Hermiston. Apr: Across the Plains with Other Memories and Essays; June: (with Lloyd Osbourne) The Wrecker (and Aug 1891–July 1892, Scribner’s); July–Aug: ‘The Beach of Falesá’ (Illustrated London News), A Footnote to History. (With W. E. Henley) Three Plays. 1893 Jan: second wing of Vailima completed, starts St Ives; Feb–Mar: Sydney; July: civil war in Samoa. Feb: ‘The Isle of Voices’ (National Observer); Apr: Island Nights’ Entertainments; Sept: David Balfour/Catriona (and Dec 1892–Sept 1893, Atalanta).

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chronology 1894 Oct: Samoan chiefs build the Road of Gratitude to Vailima; Nov: first volume of the Edinburgh Edition published; 3 Dec: dies of cerebral haemorrhage. Aug: ‘My First Book: Treasure Island’ (The Idler; and Sept, McClure’s Magazine); July (USA; Sept in UK): (with Lloyd Osbourne) The Ebb-Tide (and Nov 1893–Feb 1894, To-day; Feb–July 1894, McClure’s Magazine). 1895 The Amateur Emigrant. 1895, 1899, 1911 Letters. 1896 Weir of Hermiston, In the South Seas, ‘Lay Morals’, Fables, Songs of Travel. 1897 St Ives.

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Introduction Between his first popular and critical successes, the children’s adventure story Treasure Island (published in book form 1883) and the ‘shilling shocker’ Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Robert Louis Stevenson spent a great deal of hope and time and effort on a book that received only lukewarm praise from reviewers and did little for his reputation as a writer: Prince Otto. Yet this is a fascinating text, best understood as an experiment in genre: Stevenson himself described it, in retrospect, as ‘a strange example of the difficulty of being ideal in an age of realism’ (Letters 5, 203). This introduction will explain how Prince Otto was written, published and received, and the literary sources and historical contexts on which it drew. Composition, Publication and Early Reception

In his essay ‘A College Magazine’, written for the 1887 collection Memories and Portraits, Stevenson commented that he thought more tenderly of his first plays than of his other early exercises in literary emulation, ‘for they were not only conceived at first under the bracing influence of old Dumas, but have met with resurrections’; and one of these, ‘originally known as Semiramis: a Tragedy, I have observed on bookstalls under the alias of Prince Otto’ (30). We do not know when exactly Semiramis was composed. A notebook entry, most probably from 1878, begins a play called ‘The King’s Divinity; or the Forest Inn’ with a scene in which a king finds himself alone during a hunt and, deciding to enter the inn, says to himself, ‘Let me come down from the isolation of the throne […] I cannot think my face will be known; for I have not hunted here before’ (Beinecke 38, 851). Since a version of this scenario found its way into the early chapters of Prince Otto, and as Stevenson would later say of his novel that ‘the plan is the old King’s Heart’ (Letters 4, 99), this may have been a first attempt at revising Semiramis. In any case, by January 1880 Stevenson had conceived the story that would eventually become this novel. A notebook entry from around this time lists the characters for a play called ‘The Greenwood State’ (see Appendix 2); and in a letter to his friend and collaborator William Ernest Henley he contrasts this project with a xxiii

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California-set story called The Vendetta: The Forest State or The Greenwood State: A Romance is another pair of shoes. It is my old Semiramis, our half-seen Duke and Duchess, which suddenly sprang into sunshine clearness as a story the other day. The kind, happy dénouement is unfortunately absolutely undramatic; which will be our only trouble in quarrying out the play. I mean we shall quarry from it. […] A brave story, I swear; and a brave play too, if we can find the trick to make the end. The play, I fear, will have to end darkly, and that spoils the quality as I now see it, a kind of crockery, eighteenth century, high-life-below-stairs life, breaking up like ice in spring before the nature and the certain modicum of manhood of my poor, clever, feather headed Prince, whom I love already. […] Certain scenes are, in conception, the best I have ever made […]. Those at the end, von Rosen and the Princess, the Prince and the Princess, and the Princess and Gondremarck, as I now see them from here, should be nuts, Henley, nuts. (Letters 3, 56–7) The characters listed in both the letter and in the notebook are those of Prince Otto. Over the following months the idea that a play would eventually be ‘quarried’ from a prose romance seems to have been abandoned; in letters to his friend and mentor, Cambridge professor Sidney Colvin, Prince of Grünwald is a just a ‘story’ in late February 1880, and Prince Otto a ‘novel’ of 200 pages in late March (Letters 3, 64 and 68–9). By this time Stevenson was living in Fanny Osbourne’s house in Oakland, California, and it was here that Stevenson dictated the outline of the novel to Fanny’s sister Nellie from his sickbed, as described in the Dedication to the published volume. Stevenson later recalled that he drafted the first chapter of Prince Otto at Kingussie in the Scottish Highlands in August 1882 (Letters 6, 48); but that was the only progress made in the three years between the Oakland synopsis and the rapid drafting of the bulk of the novel in April and May 1883 at Hyères in the south of France. His diary records that work commenced, or recommenced, on 10 April; in a fortnight he could claim four chapters completed ‘out of twenty’ (Letters 4, 106); eleven by the end of the month; and seventeen by 7 May (Swearingen, 82; Beinecke 28, 660). By 29 May he could write to Henley, ‘It is all drafted but three chapters; and about half of it has been rewritten’ (Letters 4, 128). xxiv

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Then Prince Otto was laid to one side in favour of a new novel, The Black Arrow. Work did not resume until October 1883. In Stevenson’s letters to Henley, first sixty-five pages, then nine chapters, then about one hundred pages were claimed to be ‘practically’ or ‘almost’ ready or ‘near fit’ for publication (Letters 4, 184, 194 and 203). By 13 December, Stevenson could write that ‘My brief romance, Prince Otto […] is near an end. I have still one chapter to write de fond en comble [that is, completely], and three or four to strengthen or recast’ (Letters 4, 215); and on the last day of the year, that ‘I have finished or all but finished my novel, Prince Otto’ (Letters 4, 227). Yet on 9 March 1884 he had to confess to Colvin that ‘Two chapters of Otto do remain: one to rewrite, one to create; and I am not yet able to tackle them’ (Letters 4, 245). It was not until 7 April that he could write to Henley that the novel was finally complete (Letters 4, 265). This protracted process of revision involved a contribution from his wife Fanny: looking back in 1887, Stevenson observed that ‘whole chapters of Otto were written as often as five or six times, and one chapter, that of the Countess and the Princess, eight times by me and once by my wife—my wife’s version was the second last’ (Letters 6, 48). Their work on this second-last version of Book ii chapter 8 thus preceded the couple’s more sustained collaboration on The Dynamiter (1885), which got under way later in 1884 (Letters 5, 21). In the meantime, arrangements were being made for publication. Throughout Prince Otto’s development, Stevenson anticipated serialization in one of the many monthly magazines that published longer fiction in this way, as well as the sale of the copyright to the publisher of a book version. This was the usual procedure in this period, and maximized the author’s income from a novel. Sending a copy of the book to a friend in 1885, Stevenson mourned this necessity: ‘I hope you have not seen it in parts; it was not meant to be so read; and only my poverty (dishonourably) consented to the serial evolution’ (Letters 5, 136). Yet while he was still writing it, his doubts about Prince Otto (see below) made him feel that it should be ‘placed anywhere for as much as could be got for it, and rather in the shadow, till one saw the look of it in print’ (Letters 4, 194; to Henley), suggesting a positive role for periodical publication in the ongoing revision of the text. Several periodicals which had previously bought Stevenson’s work were sounded out. Temple Bar, which had taken two of Stevenson’s earliest short stories, made an offer; The Cornhill Magazine was approached, though it was ‘full’ in the spring of 1883 when Stevenson still hoped for early publication (Letters 4, 115); and in July Henley, who often acted xxv

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as Stevenson’s unpaid agent in these matters, was sure he could get a very good deal with the American Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine which had already snapped up The Silverado Squatters (Atkinson, 184, 189). But by November 1883 attention had turned to Longman’s Magazine, which had published ‘The Treasure of Franchard’ in two parts the preceding April and May. On 17 November Henley urged Stevenson to ask not £200, but £250. A good novel is a saleable article, & should not be parted with cheap. Do stiffen your neck, & wipe your nose, & put on your gloves, & learn to take a proper pride in yourself. Mrs. Louis!—If you don’t make this wildgoose creature of yours a little haughtier & firmer I shall take him back to Kegan Paul. (Atkinson, 191)1 In mid-December Stevenson was able to report ‘Longman fetched [that is, interested or attracted] by Otto’ (Letters 4, 218); and ‘Mrs Louis’, in her 1905 preface to Prince Otto, confirms that Henley’s instincts had proved correct, without mentioning his advice: My husband was asked by Mr Longman to put a price on his work. With much perturbation he answered, naming a sum absurdly small. I insisted that this should be changed to a larger amount; but how earnestly I wished I had not interfered when days passed without a word in reply. My husband’s mortification was acute. He said he felt like a cheat, and turned cold when he remembered that he had demanded two hundred and fifty pounds for the serial rights of a tale the publishers apparently thought worth nothing at all. He actually had the pen in his hand to write a telegram retracting the terms in his letter when a hurried note arrived from Messrs Longmans, saying that they considered two hundred and fifty pounds a very moderate price for the story, which should go to press immediately. (Tusitala 4, xvi–xvii) The exact terms of the contract are not clear; records of the magazine have not survived in the Longman archive. Asking Charles Baxter, who handled his finances, for a loan in December 1883, Stevenson reassured him that ‘I shall have £100, as soon as a book, now some time sent to press appears, and £250, as soon as I send in the MS of Prince Otto, which is within a week or a fortnight of completion’ (Letters 4, 220). xxvi

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Roger Swearingen (82) plausibly suggests that the £100 from Longman paid into Stevenson’s account on 3 January 1884 is part-payment of the £250; but we can be sure that Longman did not have a complete manuscript at this point, both because, as Stevenson describes their arrangement, this would have triggered payment of the full amount, and also because, as mentioned above, it was not until April that Stevenson could write, ‘I have finished Otto and, by this master-stroke, driven the gaunt wolf from the door, where he was already licking his canines with a wrinkled smile’ (Letters 4, 265). It is possible that Longman was persuaded to advance £100 to the penurious author to tide him over, even without the promised manuscript (in the event a typescript: Letters 4, 249); but if so, the remaining £150 never appeared in Baxter’s accounts. Henley’s comment, in a letter dated 3 May, that he had told the editor of the Cornhill that Longman ‘had just given’ Stevenson £250 for Prince Otto, perhaps gives the impression that the money was paid in a single sum on delivery of the completed text, in line with Stevenson’s expectations in December (Atkinson, 223). As early as May 1883, Stevenson had Chatto & Windus in mind as publisher of the book version of Prince Otto (Letters 4, 115); they had brought out New Arabian Nights, a two-volume collection of Stevenson’s shorter magazine fiction, in July the previous year. In July 1883 Henley claimed that ‘Chatto offers £50 for the magazine rights of Otto’ (Atkinson, 189); that is, for one of Chatto’s monthly magazines, Belgravia or The Gentleman’s Magazine. Shortly after, Stevenson toyed with the idea of approaching Cassell (Letters 4, 145), with whom he had recently arranged a book version of Treasure Island. But on 11 September 1884 Henley reported Chatto’s offer of £100 for the book rights, which sum appeared in Baxter’s accounts on 20 September (Letters 8, 418n). This sum was for the exclusive right to publish in Britain for three years, after which period the copyright reverted to the author. This follows the pattern of Stevenson’s deals with Chatto for new books up until this point; most recently, in January 1884, Stevenson had accepted £100 for five years’ copyright in The Silverado Squatters (Stevenson’s later contracts with Chatto instead paid him a 1s. royalty on every 6s. volume sold). On 3 October 1884 Stevenson wrote to Andrew Chatto to tell him that he had received an offer of £25 for Prince Otto from America (Letters 5, 11). This was from the distinguished Boston publisher Roberts Brothers. Its managing editor, Thomas Niles Jr, had a sharp eye for quality British imports, both adult and juvenile: earlier in the year he had published the American edition of Treasure Island. The sum ofxxvii

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fered seems small, but in the absence of any international law of copyright an American publisher was not legally obliged to pay anything at all to republish a British book in the United States. Their £25 bought Roberts Brothers, not a US copyright, but simply the goodwill of the author, and ‘early sheets’ (corrected proof copy) sent directly from the British publisher as soon as they had been pulled from the press. From these the ‘authorized’ US publisher could set his type and get his book on sale ahead of his rivals, who would have to wait for bound volumes to come on sale in Britain before they would have a text to copy. This procedure of course demanded the collaboration of the British publisher. Hence Stevenson’s letter to Chatto, to clarify the nature of their contract: if it had granted American ‘rights’ to Chatto, the publisher could sell early sheets to the US on his own behalf; if not, the money went to the author. Andrew Chatto replied on 6 October, confirming that ‘You are quite right in supposing that I did not mean to acquire the American rights in “Prince Otto”. I am very glad to learn that you have had an application for the early sheets, and we will furnish you in due course with a corrected copy of the proofs for America’ (Chatto & Windus Archive, A/18, f. 985). Prince Otto was first published in seven instalments in the monthly Longman’s Magazine for April through October 1885. Stevenson then revised his novel for the book version published by Chatto & Windus, which was ready for sale by 15 October. For the nature and extent of these revisions, see ‘Textual Essay’ in ‘Note on the Text’ in this volume. While all ran smoothly with Chatto & Windus, the deal between Stevenson and Roberts Brothers nearly collapsed during the Longman’s serialization. Niles seems to have got cold feet, prompting Stevenson to demand, ‘Am I to understand from the concluding paragraph of your letter that you wish to withdraw your offer for the sheets of Otto?’ on 6 June (Letters 5, 111). He was then in touch with an alternative American publisher, Charles Scribner’s Sons in New York. On 13 September he wrote to Scribner’s explaining that the deal with Roberts Brothers was going through after all (acknowledged in a letter from Scribner’s, in Beinecke 18, 493), though he also wrote to Roberts Brothers on 23 September offering to cancel their agreement, in which case the early sheets (by this point probably on their way across the Atlantic) should be forwarded to Scribner’s (Letters 5, 127–8). By 18 January 1886 Stevenson had received his £25 from Niles, he noted in a letter to Scribner’s, ‘but I much fear he means to play dog in the manger’ (Letters 5, 179). Part of the problem was the time it had taken to get Chatto’s ‘early sheets’ to Boston and then for Roberts Brothers to proxxviii

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duce their book. Stevenson wrote to Niles on 16 March, ‘The sheets of Otto were under correction to the last day; they may have come late; but it is a long while from then to now; if the pirates have had the open field for so long, it is not altogether the fault of my perpetual revisions, but something also of your own delay’ (Letters 5, 233). Certainly, very cheap versions of Prince Otto were appearing in the subscription libraries of New York publishers such as John B. Alden (as Vol. ii, no. 1 of ‘The New York Novelist’, 1887) and George Munro (as no. 704 of ‘The Seaside Library Pocket Edition’, 1888) very quickly after Roberts Brothers finally published Stevenson’s novel in 1886, priced $1. The Leipzig publishing house of Baron von Tauchnitz brought out editions of novels in English for the continental market, and in May 1884 Henley promised Tauchnitz early sheets of Prince Otto while arranging their edition of Treasure Island (Atkinson, 221). But this offer does not seem to have been taken up: the agreements with Tauchnitz assembled by Charles Baxter in July 1892 do not include one for Prince Otto. In a letter of 16 April 1888, Chatto & Windus accepted £8 from Charles-Bernard Derosne of Paris for the right to publish a French translation (Chatto & Windus Archive, A/21, f. 774). This too seems to have come to nothing: when a French version was published in 1896 as Le roman du Prince Othon, it was by London publisher John Lane and translated by Egerton Castle, and brought out in Paris the following year by the publisher Perrin. From the period of Prince Otto’s drafting in the spring of 1883 onwards, Stevenson’s high ambitions for his novel were shadowed by doubts about his ability to realize them. ‘I have no idea whether or not Otto will be good’, he confessed to Henley on 30 April; ‘It is all pitched pretty high and stilted; almost like the Arabs, at that’, referring to his New Arabian Nights of 1882 (Letters 4, 110). In general, reviewers of the published novel both recognized the ambition and shared the doubts. The book version of Treasure Island (1883) had made Stevenson famous, and Prince Otto was widely noticed. The earliest review, in the Pall Mall Gazette for 6 November 1885, praised the novel’s style and imagination in extravagant terms that Chatto would later use in their adverts: It is a book to be drunk in one long breath, like a draught of sunny Moselle from a tapering, iridescent Venetian goblet. Iridescent is just the word to describe Mr. Stevenson’s fantasy in this, its latest expression. Its colours flit and flash and flow into xxix

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each other, and will not bear enumeration, much less analysis. (5) The reviewer picks out for special praise the ‘nature-pictures’ in Book iii chapter 1, the wit of the dialogue, and the character of the Countess von Rosen. But the ‘ordinary reader […] must be warned not to expect a story of sensational incident’, and there is also much puzzling over the source of Stevenson’s inspiration, over what sort of book this is: as ‘a comedy in the purest sense of the word’ rather than a romance, it is suggested that ‘For an ideal theatre it might be dramatized, though heaven forbid that it should be for any real theatre!’ Another London evening newspaper, the St James’s Gazette (1 Jan 1886), was similarly enthusiastic (especially about von Rosen), and its enthusiasm similarly qualified. The Countess, after all, was only ‘a subordinate character’. And while the flight of the Princess at the beginning of Book iii was ‘a piece of well-sustained narrative’, it was marred by the ‘preciosity’ of its language. Stevenson’s ambition is acknowledged, but ‘we must pronounce regretfully that “Prince Otto” is not a masterpiece. The “Suicide Club” [in New Arabian Nights] was a masterpiece in its own way. But here the author has aimed higher’ and fallen short (7). The most negative coverage was in the portmanteau reviews of two London weeklies. For the Saturday Review (21 Nov 1885), Prince Otto’s generic indeterminacy had become a moral problem when combined with the matter of marriage. ‘[A]n impossible prince ruling over an impossible territory at an indeterminate time’ ought to inhabit a fairy tale, and a story which calls itself a romance ought to include ‘lofty ideals’ and ‘doughty deeds’. But instead of soaring, all the characters ‘grovel’; the court intrigue is ‘unsavoury’, Otto is ‘a fool and a wittol’ (that is, a knowing cuckold), and Seraphina, ‘for ought we are told, may or may not have been the Messalina folks thought her’ (691; see 16 in this volume). Stevenson had anticipated such a response while writing the novel: he had warned Henley in May 1883 that von Rosen was ‘a risqué character […] a jolly, elderly—how shall I say?—fuckstress; whom I try to handle so as to please this rotten public, and damn myself the while for ruining good material’ (Letters 4, 115). Prince Otto was, on his own definition, ‘very moral, very, quite in my highest vein,’ but its supposed and incipient adulteries prompted him to run ‘all the dangerous passages’ past Sidney Colvin with the intention that they be ‘softened’ for publication (Letters 4, 143, 17/18 July 1883; to Henley). This perhaps worked: it is striking that von Rosen was so widely praised, and that the Saturday Review seems to have been alone in its distaste for the xxx

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novel’s representation of marriage. It occupies more common ground with other journals on the matter of style. The language which the Pall Mall Gazette had considered only ‘sometimes, perhaps, a trifle overbold’, the St James’s Gazette ‘precious’, and that Stevenson had worried was ‘pretty high and stilted’, the Saturday found simply ‘laboured and affected’. Among the novels it discussed alongside Prince Otto was Camiola: A Girl with a Fortune by the Irish MP Justin McCarthy. ‘It was amusing to see the race between me and Justin M‘Carthy’ Stevenson wrote to Edmund Gosse on 2 January 1886; ‘the Milesian has won by a length’ (Letters 5, 171). The main object of criticism in The Graphic (5 Dec 1885) was the unreality of Otto and Seraphina and their relationship; ‘as a flight of fancy, seasoned with satire and adorned with descriptive writing of the highest order, the book must needs be enjoyed by all but those perverse people who want everything to mean something’ (615). In consequence, Prince Otto was ‘on the threshold of Gilbertian comedy’: ‘picture my agony’ at this comparison, wrote Stevenson to Gosse. Longer responses to Prince Otto came in the more highbrow weeklies from men known to the author. Henley claimed credit for getting the influential Athenæum to print his dedicated essay on Prince Otto instead of including a review in a survey of ‘New Novels’ as in the Saturday (Atkinson, 308). His review appeared, anonymously, in the 21 November issue. Like the Pall Mall Gazette, Henley praises von Rosen, ‘Princess Cinderella’, and the style. But he also defines Stevenson’s whole project negatively, in opposition to what is expected of a novel: Mr. Stevenson’s new book is so plainly an essay in pure literature that to the average reader it may be something of a disappointment. It has none of the qualities of an ordinary novel. Means, atmosphere, characters, effects—everything is peculiar. Mr. Stevenson has worked from beginning to end on a convention which is hardly to be paralleled in modern literature. The ordinary material of the novel he throws aside; in half a dozen sentences he gives the results of a whole volume of realism; he goes straight to the quick of things, and concerns himself with none but essentials. That his work is perfectly successful it would be rash to assert. But […] it may be taken as a model by anybody with an understanding of art in its severer and more rigid sense, and a desire to excel in the higher ranges of literary achievement. (663) xxxi

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What The Graphic would later call Prince Otto’s ‘mock-realism’ Henley identifies as a rejection of realist conventions altogether in the pursuit of ‘pure literature’. Like the Pall Mall Gazette Henley warns off the ‘ordinary reader’, identified as the ‘public of Mudie’ (Mudie’s Subscription Library was a byword for predictable middlebrow family reading); this is perhaps the same readership that The Graphic ironically hails as ‘perverse people who want everything to mean something’. But Henley’s praise for specific aspects of Prince Otto, and for its aspiration to aesthetic purity, are as balanced with qualifications as the acclaim of the other reviews. The St James’s Gazette followed him in refusing it the status of a masterpiece; his observation that ‘In the style there are notes of blank verse which afflict the reader with a sense of chill unknown to those who have delighted in the verbal felicity’ of Stevenson’s previous work (664) was repeated by The Graphic (‘an occasional tendency to slip into the rhythm of verse, which is simply the ruin of prose’). In a letter to Stevenson, Henley immediately claimed that this apparent lack of enthusiasm for the novel was the effect of bad editing: ‘The review has been so gutted & ironed out that its effect is something quite other than I intended. So tell nobody I wrote it; if you can, forgive me my share in it’ (Atkinson, 307). Yet the review’s claim that in Prince Otto Stevenson ‘here and there appears to be slightly too personal to be wholly acceptable, a little too histrionic to be quite effective’; and that ‘Otto is, perhaps, a trifle too histrionic, especially in his relations with Madame von Rosen’ (664) repeats a term he had already used in a private letter: ‘’Tis that which makes your Otto seem unreal, & gives him the last, the finishing touch of histrionics’ (Atkinson, 306), though in the absence of the other side of the correspondence we do not know what ‘that’ referred to. On 10 November Henley had confessed to Fanny, ‘I like Otto, on the whole, much. But was it worth the trouble?’ (Atkinson, 304). Stevenson had often asked himself the same question, and in fact regarded Henley’s praise in the Athenæum as something more than the novel deserved (Letters 5, 156–7). By the time Prince Otto was reviewed in the Academy on 2 February 1886, the reviewer had to acknowledge that previous notices had all ‘expressed more or less disappointment’, but also that this was ‘creditable […] to the author who raises such extravagant expectations.’ The reviewer, who put his name to the review, was Edward Purcell, and prior to publication Stevenson had written to the editor of the Academy, James Sutherland Cotton, specifically requesting that Purcell review this novel (Letters 8, 419). He was rewarded with an insightful account xxxii

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of his achievement so far, and one which takes Stevenson seriously as a moral writer, albeit one who ‘never will have […] any new gospel of life to give us’: There still, however, remains that strange mixture of audacious candour and audacious reticence on the great issues of morality which attracted and distressed from the first. […] We have no right to demand his scheme of human life; but this is certain, that his puzzling enigmatic ethics, whether they be individual, or whether they are a true reflection of a present transitional state of society, are the real hindrance to his aim of producing a great romance worthy of his genius. In Prince Otto he tried, and owns his failure. (140) The following contrast with Walter Scott explains the connection: Scott’s romance is strengthened and disciplined ‘by his perfect assimilation of conventional principles’; Stevenson’s weakened ‘because it ventures into a world ignored by Scott, where all is doubt and difficulty’ (140). But the ‘lukewarmness of the public’ to the book remains a matter of simple disappointment: ‘Because we, and the author too, are bent upon his producing something more sustained, more suited to be placed beside, and compared with, and preferred to, other great fictions; and we all expected that Prince Otto was to prove the magnum opus. Well, we were wrong’; and its ‘exasperating’ faults include ‘a certain wrong-headedness which is a new feature’ in Stevenson’s writing (141). Like the Pall Mall Gazette, Purcell picks out New Arabian Nights but also, and especially, The Dynamiter as the standards against which Prince Otto must be judged: the second of these is a ‘masterpiece’ on account of ‘the insolent prodigality of its invention’ (140) in comparison with the realist novel (a point Henley makes about Prince Otto itself). Stevenson’s letter to Purcell of 27 February agrees about his difference from Scott: ‘Sir Walter was a good man, and a good man content with a more or less conventional solution, whereas I am only a man who would be content to be good if I knew what goodness was— and could lay hold of it’ (Letters 5, 213). While the many reviews in the daily press generally repeat various combinations of the points discussed so far, they occasionally add a curious perspective of their own. The Daily News for 22 December 1885 suggests that Prince Otto will satisfy if read as

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a satire on life, on government, on marriage, on things in general. The upshot of it would seem to be that imperfect men and women like Prince Otto and Princess Seraphina are in a false position when they pose as rulers of their fellow creatures, and that the world’s conventional arrangement of classes is absurd. Very likely. […] If it is read as a story it will disappoint and bewilder. There is no one in it at all so touching to the imagination or so clinging in the memory as Mr. Stevenson’s older friend, the Donkey of the Cevennes. (3) The same paper’s roundup of ‘Literature of the Year’ in its 31 December issue is much kinder to this ‘grown-up fairy tale’, though still ‘puzzled’ by Otto himself (3). The Glasgow Herald on 7 January 1886 praises the morality of Prince Otto: it is ‘full of many lessons in the conduct of life, which even we who are not princes and princesses may profitably apply to our own affairs. Not that Mr Stevenson ever sets himself to preach; only the lessons are there for those who have ears to hear and brains to understand’ (2). Roberts Brothers’ delay in publishing an American edition meant that Prince Otto appeared in the US only after Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and reviews there usually begin by mentioning the latter title. The daily New-York Tribune notes the ‘strongest conceivable contrast’ between the works (10): to enjoy Prince Otto ‘is to taste a sense of literary luxury, the style is so dainty, rich, flexible, delicate and pure’. Seraphina’s flight in the forest is quoted at length by way of example: ‘In this harsh workaday world the production of such pretty, tender, fresh and graceful pictures is a benefaction, and the author deserves our sincerest thanks and praises’ (10). Like the Tribune, the Book Buyer for May reviews Prince Otto alongside the first American edition of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. It notes that while Stevenson’s novel is ‘not a masterpiece’, the story is as ‘striking, and in some respects as bizarre’ as the first stories of New Arabian Nights, but also contains ‘certain truths of range and moment’ like Jekyll and Hyde: ‘It is the double charm of Mr. Stevenson’s genius that, in these later works, he has no purpose apparently beyond the entertainment of the moment, and, at the same time, he brings into our minds, by some concealed door of approach, some deep and vital truth of life’ (176). In contrast, the fortnightly Literary World, reviewing the book in its ‘Minor Fiction’ section, repeats the complaint of unreality already levelled by the London Graphic: ‘Mr. Stevenson’s Prince Otto affects us rather like the dance of shadows depicted on the screen of a magic lantern than as the movement of real men and women’ (182); this ‘audacious xxxiv

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levity’ aside, ‘the book is entertaining, as anything written by Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson is pretty sure to be’ (182). The American, on 12 June, praises everything except the plot: the ‘petty German principality and its court, its scheming prime minister, gossipy atmosphere, intrigues, etc., are all palpably stage properties, most likely bequeathed by Disraeli from the collection he had brought together for educational purposes in training “Vivian Grey” ’ (122). Influences and artistic contexts

‘We ask ourselves how this turn of fancy ever found its way into the writer’s mind. […] Where are we to look for its germs?’ asks the baffled reviewer of Stevenson in the Pall Mall Gazette (5). But Purcell assures us that it is worth looking: ‘I have traced so many of his happiest conceptions to other books, that still more might probably be traced by other readers. No-one, unless inspired, can evolve ideas and incidents, without some peg of suggestion’ (140). This section will trace some of the texts which may have suggested important elements of Prince Otto. The reviews discussed above often attempt this task themselves, though usually to point up Stevenson’s distance from the sources tentatively indicated. The Pall Mall Gazette offers ‘Mr. Shorthouse’s “spiritual romances” ’ as the books ‘which, in externals, “Prince Otto” most nearly resembles’; but while Joseph Henry Shorthouse’s John Inglesant (1881) attends to the inner life of its characters as they traverse a historical-political crisis, it is hard to see the basis of the comparison beyond this, other than that both books are hard to categorize. The same review, spotting as it does the dramatic structure underlying Stevenson’s novel, suggests the plays of Alfred de Musset as a precedent, and Henley also makes this comparison in his essay: de Musset’s romantic comedies are often set in princely courts, and some of the dialogue of Prince Otto shares their lightness and humour. In fact rather different types of French drama are more specific influences, as outlined below. The name most often mentioned in the reviews is that of George Meredith. This comparison has a particular logic to it, since Stevenson looked to the English novelist as his modern master. Meredith himself was impressed with Prince Otto, Stevenson reported to Henley in November 1885: ‘I had yesterday a letter from Geo. Meredith, which was one of the events of my life. He cottoned (for one thing) though with differences, to Otto: cottoned more than my rosiest visions had inspired me to hope; said things that (from him) I would blush to xxxv

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quote’ (Letters 5, 154). Henley, Pall Mall, the Daily News and the British Quarterly Review for January 1886 all make the connection to Meredith in terms of style; Henley, for example, claiming that ‘[h]ere and there’ Prince Otto borrows ‘the turn of his dialogue, the pregnant brevity of his descriptions’ (Henley, 664). This is a difficult claim to substantiate: certainly, Stevenson’s prose rarely approaches the daunting sophistication of Meredith’s in his most celebrated work, The Egoist of 1879 (and Stevenson made some efforts to simplify his style for book publication: see ‘Textual Essay’ in ‘Note on the Text’ in this volume). In general, it may be more helpful to think of the example of Meredith as giving Stevenson license to make (in his own words) a ‘high, stilted’ style a feature of his book, rather than borrowing specific techniques. An exception is the much-praised ‘Princess Cinderella’ chapter, describing Seraphina’s flight through the forest. This echoes an episode in Meredith’s first full-length novel The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859) in both style and content. In Volume iii chapter 11, ‘Nature Speaks’, Richard, having been duped into guilt-stricken exile from his wife Lucy on the continent, learns from his father that she has borne him a son in his absence. The discovery propels him into a joyous ramble in the night-time German woods and a thunderstorm. The episode ends: A pale grey light on the skirts of the flying tempest displayed the dawn. Richard was walking hurriedly. The green drenched weeds lay all about in his path, bent thick, and the forest drooped glimmeringly. Impelled as a man who feels a revelation mounting obscurely to his brain, Richard was passing one of those little forest-chapels, hung with votive wreaths, where the peasant halts to kneel and pray. Cold, still, in the twilight it stood, rain-drops pattering round it. He looked within, and saw the Virgin holding her Child. He moved by. But not many steps had he gone ere his strength went out of him, and he shuddered. What was it? He asked not. He was in other hands. Vivid as lightning the Spirit of Life illumined him. He felt in his heart the cry of his child, his darling’s touch. With shut eyes he saw them both. They drew him from the depths; they led him a blind and tottering man. And as they led him he had a sense of purification so sweet he shuddered again and again.   When he looked out from his trance on the breathing world, the small birds hopped and chirped; warm fresh sunlight was over all the hills. He was on the edge of the forest, entering xxxvi

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a plain clothed with ripe corn under a spacious morning sky. (464–5) The description of intense subjective experience here (Richard’s obscure ‘revelation’ and ‘sense of purification’), and of the natural world which both produces and reflects that experience, clearly inform Stevenson’s handling of Seraphina’s forest wanderings in Book iii chapter 1 of Prince Otto. Meredith’s Adventures of Harry Richmond (1870–1) is also set partly in Germany, where the hero falls in love with Princess Ottilia of Eppenwelzen-Sarkeld. But this is a picaresque novel with a straightforward first-person narrative voice quite unlike Meredith’s more usual style and has no significant relation to Prince Otto; its petty German court is merely a quaint backdrop to the hero’s relationships with his scheming father and his beloved. Instead, the reviewer in The American, as quoted at the end of the previous section, points to Benjamin Disraeli’s Vivian Grey (1826–7; revised 1853) as a possible source of the German milieu of Prince Otto. This is quite right. In Volume ii Disraeli’s hero wanders into tiny German statelets whose names advertise their fictional origins (Little Lilliput, Micromegas) but which are also placed at a quite precise moment in history. Vivian’s amusement at their ‘affectation of royal pomp’ (306) is informed by his knowledge that these princes have been stripped of sovereignty in the consolidation of larger political units by the recent (in the 1820s) Congress of Vienna (see Historical and Political Contexts below). It is in this context that Vivian encounters the language of liberal revolution that also features in Prince Otto: ‘Yes! The enlightened spirit of the age shall yet shake the quavering councils of the Reisenburg cabal. I will, in truth I have already seconded the just, the unanswerable demands of an oppressed and insulted people; and, ere six months are over, I trust to see the convocation of a free and representative council in the capital […] | [and] to gain for our fellow-subjects their withheld rights; rights which belong to them as men, not merely as Germans. Within this week I have forwarded to the Residence a memorial […] requesting the immediate grant of a constitution similar to those of Wirtemburg and Bavaria. (311–12) Reisenburg, into which Little Lilliput has been absorbed, is ruled from behind the scenes by a brilliant minister Beckendorff, while xxxvii

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the Grand Duke himself provides a source for Stevenson’s Otto in the readiness of his mind ‘to receive any impression from the person who last addresses him, though he himself be fully aware of the inferiority of his adviser’s intellect to his own, or the imperfection of that adviser’s knowledge’ (324–5). This description comes from Sievers, a scholar and journalist celebrated for his ‘bitter sarcasms, enlightened views, and indignant eloquence’ (338): in Prince Otto, Sir John Crabtree combines this role with that of an English traveller like Vivian. But Disraeli does not portray a courtly culture on the brink of overthrow such as we find in Stevenson. The revolutionary agenda quoted above is expounded by the Prince of Little Lilliput, for whom it represents the prospect of revenge on the ascendant House of Reisenburg. Beckendorff eventually wins him round with a ceremonial position at the Reisenburg court; the satirical Sievers, exiled for an attack on Austrian war-mongering, is brought in from the cold to be censor of the press. This successful containment confirms the view of Sievers himself, when he comments that while liberal protests ‘have of late frequently frightened the Grand Duke, who, in despair, would perhaps grant a Constitution if Beckendorff would allow him’, the minister himself ‘knows, from the characters of many of these philosophers and patriots, that their private interest is generally the secret spring of their public virtue’ (326). Such cynicism regarding statesmen is reiterated by Stevenson in the figure of Gondremark. But while Sievers assures Vivian that ‘[t]he people, who enjoy an impartial administration of equal laws, […] and are flourishing, under the wise and moderate rule of their new monarch, have in fact no inclination to exert themselves for the attainment of constitutional liberty’ (325), in Prince Otto the people represent a political force in their own right, which cannot be deflected by the co-option of their aristocratic leaders. If Vivian Grey did not spring to the minds of British reviewers of Prince Otto, that was perhaps because they took the main concern of Stevenson’s novel to be, not politics, but love and, especially, married love, which plays no role in Disraeli’s German scenes. Only Purcell mentions the novelist from whom Stevenson most clearly borrows in constructing the marriage situation in the court of Grünewald, when he comments that Prince Otto ‘refines the odours of Auerbach’s pine woods’ (141). As several of the reviews imply, a story set in a Germany of deep forests, friendly farmers, honest woodcutters, handsome princes and beautiful princesses immediately recalls the Märchen of the Brothers Grimm. In the version of Prince Otto serialized in Longman’s Magazine, Princess Seraphina ends the story by re-imagining xxxviii

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it as just such a fairy-tale (see Appendix 1). But Berthold Auerbach had already reclaimed the rural poor of southern Germany for a more realistic fictional mode in his Schwarzwälder Dorfgeschichten (1843), translated into English as Village Tales from the Black Forest in 1847; individual stories from this collection were translated and published throughout the second half of the century. And his most famous novel, Auf der Höhe (1865; translated and published as On the Heights in 1867) brings the forest peasantry into collision with the life of a small court in a manner very like that of Prince Otto. The courtly intrigue here is driven not, in the first instance, by politics, but by the adulterous (though unconsummated) passion between the king and one of his queen’s ladies-in-waiting, Countess Irma Wildenort. At the climax of the novel, false reports that she has become the king’s mistress reach her beloved father and precipitate his death. Stricken with grief and guilt, Irma flees his deathbed for the forest in a scene which is another inspiration for Seraphina’s flight in Book iii chapter 1 of Stevenson’s novel: ‘She went further and further through the pathless wood, treading down the soft moss’ (Auerbach iii, 1): She looked up at the stars, she saw well known constellations, she knew their position, but the great waymarks in infinite space, led not a solitary, erring child of man on her evil way through the forest. […] [H]ow annihilated was now every thing in her, how fallen was all that was noble in her, even her gaze at the heavens seemed obstructed. (iii, 2–3) She finds refuge on a remote farm granted as a reward to a peasant couple for the woman’s service as nurse to the infant prince. The court believes her to have committed suicide, prompting great grief and heart-searching in the royal couple; Irma is eventually found, mortally ill, in time to forgive and be forgiven by the queen. After her death, the king and queen walk alone into the forest, hand in hand: The queen stood still. With all her ardent love so long repressed and impelled by the deepest agitation of feeling, she embraced her husband. She kissed his mouth, and eyes, and brow, and said: ‘I have prayed the departed for forgiveness. She died with my kiss. I now beg you for forgiveness, you who are living. […]’ She drew out an amulet which she wore concealed near her heart. It was the king’s betrothal ring. xxxix

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‘Take this ring once more from my hand,’ said the queen. ‘We are espoused anew,’ replied the king. He put the ring on his finger, and clasped the queen in his arms; and while he held her in embrace, her head rested near his heart. With a firm step they proceeded onwards down the mountain. (iii, 447) This renewal of married love in a sylvan setting in the last chapter of On the Heights offered Stevenson the model for the conclusion of his own, just as he borrowed the plot device of a false assumption of royal adultery that this ending resolves. That it was borrowed from prose fiction explains why, as Stevenson commented to Henley in 1880, ‘The kind, happy dénouement is unfortunately absolutely undramatic’; one can say the same of Seraphina’s flight through the woods, also inspired by novels, Auerbach’s as well as Meredith’s. Another of Stevenson’s sources in prose fiction brings us to French literature, which Stevenson read in the original language and on which he drew a great deal in writing Prince Otto. The series of historical romances which Alexandre Dumas père began with The Three Musketeers ends with the very long Le Vicomte de Bragelonne (1847–50), which Stevenson counted among his very favourite books (see ‘A Gossip on a Novel of Dumas’s’ in Memories and Portraits, 110–18). The English translation is usually divided into three books, The Vicomte de Bragelonne, Louise de la Vallière and The Man in the Iron Mask. In the second of these we find the model for one of the most intriguing episodes of Prince Otto, von Rosen’s donation of her savings to rescue the honesty of the Prince in Book ii chapter 9. When Otto realizes the money is her own, he is ashamed to accept it: ‘And then drawing himself up, “O madam,” he cried, “I understand. You must indeed think meanly of the Prince” ’ (90). She asks him to think that he has merely ‘found an excellent investment for a friend’s money’ (91), but the scene is charged with the sexual attraction between them, and ends with a kiss. In chapter 10 (‘The Dowry’) of Louise de la Vallière we find a very similar episode. The widowed Marquise de Plessis-Bellière is in love with Fouquet, the King’s finance minister, though she has so far refused his advances. But Fouquet’s enemy at court, Colbert, has persuaded the King to demand vast sums from Fouquet as a means of ruining him. Bellière sells her jewellery and plate and brings Fouquet the money, saying she has ‘certain funds which somewhat embarrass me’ and is ‘anxious to entrust a friend to turn it to account’.2 Fouquet experiences a similar humiliation to Otto’s: xl

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Fouquet […] remained for a moment plunged in thought; then, suddenly starting back, he turned pale, and sank down in his chair, concealing his face in his hands. ‘Madame, madame,’ he murmured, ‘what opinion can you have of me when you make me such an offer?’3 Bellière confesses her love, and Fouquet accepts the money: ‘ “And take the woman with it,” said the Marquise, throwing herself into his arms’,4 and ending the chapter. So far this section has been exploring Prince Otto’s borrowings from other novels. Yet as this introduction began by noting, in 1887 Stevenson insisted that Prince Otto was first conceived as a play ‘under the bracing influence of old Dumas’, who had enjoyed an equally successful career as a playwright. Even before it was published, Stevenson worried that his novel was ‘one half story, and one half play’ (Letters 5, 17), and Henley later agreed that it had never quite subsumed its original conception: ‘I think that, when you wrote, you were maybe thinking too much of the play, & felt your Otto from the footlights inwards’ (Atkinson, 306). We can, as it happens, identify the particular Dumas drama which Stevenson regarded as his inspiration. Colvin, writing in Scribner’s Magazine in 1912, describes a bound set of Dumas’s plays which had originally belonged to Henley, and which had been annotated in Stevenson’s hand. At the end of Un mariage sous Louis XV (1841), Stevenson had written: Stunning in all points, the trick by which the role of the Chevalier is saved is Dumas all over. But even I, the thief, am surprised to see how much of Otto is more or less unconsciously stolen from this play, which is about A. D. at his best. Not a dull word; not an unkind one; pleasant, chivalrous, alive. (Colvin, 604) Dumas’s comedy begins with a marriage of convenience between the Comte de Candale and his convent-educated cousin. By the end of Act ii they have both accepted that the other has a lover, but in Act iii each feels the stirrings of jealousy. Act iv ends with their declaration of love for each other and abandonment of their old connections. Colvin observes that ‘It is hard to see on what grounds Stevenson should here consider himself a borrower’ other than the play’s ending, ‘like Prince Otto, with the reconciliation of an estranged husband and wife’ (Colvin, 604). This is a fair point: jealousy of Otto’s closeness to von Rosen plays no part in bringing Seraphina back to her husband, and xli

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Otto is in love with Seraphina from the start. There is one specific element in Dumas’s plot which is taken over into Stevenson’s, and that is the role of the duel in realizing the wife’s love for her husband. At a masked ball, the Comtesse is insulted, and her lover demands satisfaction without giving his name. The next day, the Comte contrives to take his place, and wins the duel. Her uncle’s report of her husband’s readiness to fight in her defence precipitates new feelings for him on the part of the Comtesse, just as Sir John’s account of Otto’s challenge forces Seraphina to reassess her husband in Book iii chapter 1 (140): countess.  He protects me at the price of his own life, from duty! commander.  I’d say from love. countess.  What do you mean?… (iv. 6)5 But there is no equivalent in Un mariage sous Louis XV to Otto’s conjugal unhappiness. We might find a model for this in the rather more pessimistic works of Alexandre fils. The scene in Book ii chapter 6 in which Otto expresses his love for his wife and finds it steadfastly unreciprocated, and warns her that her alliance with Baron Gondremark is causing a scandal, may echo the scenes (Act i scene 5, and Act ii scene 6) of the younger Dumas’s La Comtesse Romani (first performed in 1876) in which the lovelorn Count realizes his actress wife’s lack of love for him as he fails to persuade her not to resume her stage career, and hears her confess to an affair with a baron. But without knowing more about Stevenson’s theatre-going in Paris and London in the second half of the 1870s, such connections are bound to remain speculative. Stevenson points us towards another dramatic source for Prince Otto by placing Grünewald on the borders of the grand duchy of Gerolstein. Jacques Offenbach’s operetta La Grande-Duchesse de Gerolstein premiered in Paris in 1867; Stevenson admitted liking it in a letter to Henley in early 1882 (Letters 3, 290). The libretto, by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy, centres on the bored twenty-year-old ruler of this fictional German realm. Her guardian, Baron Puck, struggles to divert her from exercising any real power, first with the prospect of marriage to Paul, Crown Prince of Steis-Stein-Steis Langen-Hosen Schorstenburg, then with the excitement of a war with a neighbouring principality, as he explains to his co-conspirator General Boom: puck. You understand our plans, lull her to-day with the charms of the regimental song, a week hence dazzle her xlii

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with the glories of victory— boom.  Then return to our hearths and homes. puck.  And share the power of the State. boom.  And share the power of the State.6 The story ends with the Grand Duchess resigned to marrying the devoted but ineffectual Prince Paul. In the older male courtier’s dazzling of a young female sovereign with the prospect of military triumph for his own selfish ends, and her eventual reconciliation to marriage with a prince as powerless as herself, we can see the germ of Gondremark’s manipulation of Seraphina and her relationship to Otto (the manuscript character-list for ‘The Greenwood State’ reveals that Stevenson’s first choice of name for his hero was Paul: see Appendix 2). Gondremark is a name borrowed by Stevenson from another Offenbach operetta, La Vie parisienne (1866). However, Meilhac and Halévy had themselves borrowed Gerolstein from an earlier fiction, Eugène Sue’s serial novel Les mystères de Paris (1842–3). Its hero is Grand Duke Rodolph of Gerolstein, who explores the impoverished and lawless Cité district of the French capital disguised as a working man, uncovering conspiracies and righting wrongs. Rodolph’s adventures had already provided the template for Prince Florizel of Bohemia’s in Stevenson’s 1878 story-cycles ‘The Suicide Club’ and ‘The Rajah’s Diamond’, later collected in New Arabian Nights, and Book i of Prince Otto, too, features the investigations of an incognito sovereign. But Les mystères de Paris also offers a precedent for the dynamics of the court to which Otto returns, in the retrospective narration of Rodolph’s education at the hands of the villainous Doctor Polidori in chapter 25. Although Gerolstein is ‘only a secondary state’, Polidori ‘indulged the idea of being one day its Richelieu, and of making Rodolph play the part of the do-nothing prince’.7 So Polidori teaches the young Rodolph to take Louis XV as his monarchical ideal: According to the Doctor, to pass his time delightfully and idly amongst women and the refinements of luxury,—to repose from time to time from the animation of sensual pleasures, amidst the delightful attractions of the fine arts,—to hunt occasionally, not as a Nimrod, but as an intelligent epicurean, to enjoy the transitory fatigues which make idleness and repose taste but the sweeter,—this, this was the only life which a prince should think of enjoying, who (and this was the height xliii

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of happiness) could find a prime minister capable of devoting himself boldly to the distressing and overwhelming burden of state affairs.8 Stevenson’s hero has devoted himself to this kind of lifestyle, at the price, also described here, of surrendering political power to a selfinterested minister (this is nothing like Auerbach’s monarch in On the Heights). A third connection between Prince Otto and Les mystères de Paris is Rodolph’s model farm outside Paris which functions as a refuge for those he rescues from its slums. It is presided over by Father Châtelain: not a priest, but ‘an old white-haired labourer’ with a ‘fine, bold, yet sensible expression of face’ who has worked on the farm since childhood: ‘When Rodolph purchased the farm, the old servant had been strongly recommended to him, and he was forthwith raised to the rank of overlooker […]; and unbounded, indeed, was the influence possessed by Father Châtelain by virtue of his age, his knowledge, and experience’ (330–1).9 With his speeches extolling the virtues of labour, the pious Father Châtelain is perhaps the inspiration for Killian Gottesheim in Prince Otto, and Rodolph’s purchase of this rural refuge at Bouqueval the original for Otto’s purchase of River Farm (its passing through the hands of Countess von Rosen perhaps glances at Countess Wildenort’s retreat to a similar forest idyll in On the Heights). In these French-language sources, Stevenson found the imaginary German principality ready-made as the setting for a certain kind of story, one in which the power of the ruler is threatened with diversion into the hands of the unscrupulous courtier. Neither Sue nor Meilhac and Halévy make Gerolstein the scene of politics in any wider sense. Sue indeed isolates his hero’s homeland from the liberal critique which he brings to bear on France, so that we are invited to applaud the preservation of absolutism there by Rodolph’s father: ‘This excellent people enjoyed so much real felicity, and were so perfectly contented with their condition, that the enlightened care of the Grand Duke was not much called into action to preserve them from the mania of constitutional innovations’.10 The most pervasive dramatic influence on Prince Otto, in contrast, addresses the possibility of revolution directly, and is itself the product of a counter-revolutionary context: Victorien Sardou’s Rabagas (1872). This play is set in a real French-speaking principality, Monaco, not a fictional German one, and its Prince is a politically astute widower, distracted not by the potential adultery of his wife, but by the anxiety that his daughter will be seduced by one of his young officers. His palace, however, provides the model for Otto’s in xliv

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Stevenson’s novel: it is in a city, with a secret corridor from the Prince’s apartments to a deserted courtyard which exits on the street, through which the Prince can leave incognito (iv. 1. 162), and from which his enemies plan to abduct him in a carriage at the outset of a coup d’état (iv. 9. 191). For this prince, like Otto, is threatened by popular republicanism, and like Otto has a self-serving agent of that republicanism at the heart of his court. But Rabagas, an unscrupulous lawyer, is openly head of the revolutionary forces as Gondremark is not, and is invited to become Governor in an attempt to leave them leaderless. The author of this idea is Mrs Eva Blount, a worldly American widow who uses a combination of political cunning and sexual charm to serve the Prince, with whom she is in love. Mrs Blount, that is, fills a strikingly similar role in Rabagas to that played in Prince Otto by the Countess von Rosen; while von Rosen comes close to seducing Otto, the play ends with Mrs Blount rewarded with marriage to the Prince of Monaco. Act iii includes three scenes (4, 6 and 7) in which Mrs Blount converses, in quick succession, with the Princess Gabrielle, the Prince, and Rabagas, providing Stevenson with the dramatic structure of chapters 11–13, in which von Rosen expostulates in turn with Gondremark, Otto, and the Princess Seraphina. Rabagas, written and first performed in Paris in the immediate aftermath of the suppression of the 1871 Commune, is a bitterly anti-revolutionary satire as well as a comedy, and the Danton-quoting Rabagas, unlike Gondremark, is simply a fool and a villain. Nevertheless, Sardou’s play provided Stevenson with an important precedent for placing the life of a petty court in the context of a recognisably nineteenth-century popular politics, which he did not find in the other works discussed in this section. One further text is worth mentioning as a possible source for Prince Otto, both because, like Stevenson’s novel but unlike all the other texts mentioned so far, it ends with its hero’s abdication, and also because of its curious personal connection with Stevenson himself. The Fall of Prince Florestan, a novella published anonymously by the English statesman Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke in 1874, is the memoir of an imaginary twenty-four-year-old Florestan II of Monaco, the Cambridge-educated son of a Prince of Wurtemberg and a Grimaldi. Florestan’s fictional accession requires the sudden deaths of the historical Charles III, his heir Albert, and Albert’s son, in the January of 1874; Florestan’s liberalism soon puts him at odds with his devoutly Catholic subjects, and he abdicates in time to return for an Easter vacation’s training with the Trinity rowing team, while Monaco votes for annexation to the French Republic. On first arriving in Monaco, Florestan xlv

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gathers various opinions on his new realm (his only previous knowledge, he admits, coming from Rabagas) in a series of conversations that are very like those which enlighten Otto in the first chapters of Stevenson’s novel. Dilke’s novella ends with a postscript summarizing English newspaper coverage of these events and their lesson for British and French politics, which might also have provided Stevenson with a precedent for his ‘Bibliographical Postscript’ to Prince Otto. On 16 December 1873 the twenty-three-year-old Stevenson, in the south of France for his health, was taken by Sidney Colvin to dine with the ‘republican’ Dilke and his wife in Monaco (Letters 1, 411). In April 1874 Stevenson wrote to his mother that, according to Colvin, the Dilkes ‘are convinced beyond possibility of deconviction, that I wrote Prince Florestan’ (Letters 1, 507). Dilke himself (radical, cosmopolitan, a writer of travel books and a baronet) may have been an inspiration for Sir John Crabtree. Historical and political contexts

If some of the names adopted by Stevenson for characters and places remind us that Grünewald is a product of the imagination, the story told by Prince Otto also invites the reader to consider its relation to nineteenth-century political history. Tiny principalities ruled from petty courts were not an invention of novels and operettas: before the Napoleonic Wars, hundreds of such territories shared the map of Germany with larger kingdoms such as Prussia, Saxony and Bavaria. Some of these survived among the thirty-eight states into which the German-speaking lands were reorganized by the Congress of Vienna at the wars’ end in 1815; that Grünewald has vanished, as the novel’s opening tells us, ‘at the spiriting of several bald diplomatists’ (7) suggests that it was one of the many which did not. In one other respect, the wider German political scene evoked by the novel looks like a prewar, eighteenth-century one. The ‘German Empire’ of which the narrator also tells us that Grünewald had for centuries been an ‘infinitesimal member’ (7) is the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, while it lasted the highest level of sovereignty in German-speaking Europe. In its tenth-century origins the Empire had set itself up as successor to the Western Roman Empire: it is perhaps relevant that the first ruler to be crowned Römisch-Deutscher Kaiser was an Otto, in 962. After a long decline it survived in the eighteenth century as a means of settling disputes between its constituent states, and protecting its smaller members from its larger ones, most notably Prussia and Austria. But xlvi

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Napoleonic conquest finished it off: the last Emperor, Franz II, abdicated in 1806, and the post was not revived after Napoleon’s defeat. The novel also refers to the Empire as still extant in Book i chapter 4, where we are told that the merchants with whom Otto travels come from ‘various states of the empire’ (32). However, the political language used by the characters, and the nature of the political crisis in which Grünewald finds itself, are very clearly nineteenth-century ones. For Stevenson’s readers in 1885, a transformation much more recent and striking than the 1806 dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire intruded itself between current political realities and the novel’s Germany of petty principalities: namely, the declaration of a Second German Empire in 1871, in practice a modern federal nation-state under Prussian hegemony. Gondremark’s surname is borrowed from Offenbach, as mentioned above; but one of Stevenson’s motives in choosing this name was probably to evoke the historical architect of the Second Reich, Otto von Bismarck. The ­association is reinforced by Gondremark’s Prussian origins (Bismarck was from a Prussian landowning family), and his political praxis. Gondremark is ready to co-opt liberal forces to his own ends, as had Bismarck in the 1860s while Prussian Prime Minister; and he attempts to provoke war with a foreign country for domestic political purposes, as Bismarck’s wars with Denmark in 1864 and France in 1870–1 had been. By conjuring the figure of Bismarck in this way, the novel puts a reminder of the new Germany inside its stylized representation of the old one. Christopher Harvie has suggested that the revolution with which the novel ends is intended as a representation of an earlier upheaval, the revolutions in the German states in March 1848 (117). Part of a wave of uprisings across Europe sparked by the overthrow of King Louis-Philippe in France in February, these were driven by discontent with the arbitrary rule of the monarchies re-established in 1815, and demanded in their place constitutional governments, free speech and the rule of law. Both Fritz (16) and Sir John (47) identify the forces opposed to Otto as ‘Liberal’ ones, echoing the rhetoric of 1848. Aspects of Stevenson’s plot also recall the March revolutions: the role of sexual scandal in discrediting the ruling dynasties, for example, and the sudden and ‘relatively bloodless’ collapse of regimes in what one historian has called ‘a collective loss of nerve’ among the ruling elites (Blackbourn, 107). However, Prince Otto is not a historical novel, and makes no attempt to remain faithful to a particular series of historical events or even to one historical epoch: the anachronism of ‘Liberals’ inhabitxlvii

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ing the Holy Roman Empire makes that sufficiently clear. Three specific aspects of the novel’s rebels serve to dissociate them from the German revolutionaries of 1848. In the first place, they are represented as simply and consistently ‘Republican’ (e.g. on 29, 47, 76): and while a republican faction grew during the course of 1848, it never had anything like this dominance. In the second place, Stevenson’s rebels are never represented as German nationalists: they sometimes call themselves ‘Patriots’, but this seems to mean patriots of Grünewald, and used in the older sense as a synonym for ‘opponents of the court’. For the historical revolutionaries of 1848, in contrast, the cause of reform was inseparable from that of national unification, their constitutionalism necessarily requiring a constitution for all Germany. Finally, there is Stevenson’s location of these revolutionary energies in a network of Masonic Lodges (16, 123). Freemasons indeed played an important role in the liberalization of German society in the first half of the nineteenth century, and many were prominent in the revolution as members of the moderate parties. But the Lodges themselves included a wide range of political opinions, and generally tried to remain above party politics (see Hoffman, 35–75). Indeed, all this suggests that Stevenson is not modelling his revolutionary party on a German example at all, but on that of a country that he knew intimately by frequent residence and fluency in the language. After the failure of the revolution of 1830, French republicans had turned their Masonic Lodges into a means of developing a national organization, whose crucial influence can be gauged by at least one historian’s characterization of the 1848 constitution as a ‘Masonic Republic’ (Combes, 42). This close association of French Freemasonry with republicanism continued into Stevenson’s own time: ‘Freemasons constituted the hard core of the republican camp’ (Halpern, 258) in the elections of 1877 which ensured that a third Republic remained the form of the new French state, elections which Stevenson witnessed at first hand. We should therefore think of Prince Otto as rehearsing, not the politics of this or that liberal revolution in this or that particular country, but the general opposition in mid-century Europe between liberal revolutionaries and absolutist monarchy. This is confirmed by the ‘Bibliographical Postscript’ which ends the novel. Here (161), it is noted that Gondremark has been hymned by Swinburne and Victor Hugo alongside, it is implied, Kossuth (in Hungary) and Mazzini (in Italy: see Explanatory Notes, note to 161.7–8). The politics at stake in Stevenson’s novel are real enough, but abstracted from any more specific historical milieu. Stevenson could not have anticipated, as he xlviii

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after life and influence

planned Prince Otto in early 1880, that it would be published in book form just before the first United Kingdom General Election to be held, in November and December 1885, on a franchise extended by the Third Reform Act passed the previous year; that is, the first election for the House of Commons in which more than half of adult males could cast a vote, on a qualification made uniform across borough and county in all four home nations. This perhaps lacked the drama and glamour of 1848 or the Italian Risorgimento, but the extension of the franchise was a British manifestation of the Europe-wide movement for liberalization which provides the historical background to this novel. Afterlife and influence

Given Prince Otto’s origins in a play, it is not surprising that it was soon adapted for the stage. In 1888 Stevenson gave his blessing (Letters 6, 104) to Gerard Gurney and T. B. Thalberg’s dramatization of the novel; and ‘a comedy in three acts’ was first performed, not on the ideal stage demanded by the Pall Mall Gazette, but in the Spa Concert Room in Harrogate on the afternoon of Saturday 24 March. Thalberg played Otto, and Gurney Gotthold (The Era, 31 Mar 1888, 8). The Harrogate performance was a one-off, and plans to transfer to London (The Era, 18 Aug 1888, 7) apparently came to nothing. However, on 4 June 1900 and for the five following nights Thalberg played Otto with a different company to great acclaim at the Theatre Royal, Glasgow, followed by at least one performance in Edinburgh on 11 June (Glasgow Herald, 1 June 1900, 8). A text of the play seems not to have survived; but from a press account of the Glasgow production (The Era, 9 June 1900, 11), we know that the Prologue was set at River Farm, Act i in the Princess’s apartments, Act ii in the Council Chamber and Act iii in the Felsenburg prison. In the letter to Henley quoted at the start of this introduction, Stevenson comments that the play he will eventually ‘quarry’ from the prose Prince Otto ‘will have to end darkly’ in contrast to the novel’s ‘kind, happy dénouement’ (Letters 3, 56); consciously or unconsciously Gurney and Thalberg realized this design in the Harrogate version of the play which, despite being advertised as a comedy, ended with Otto dying in Seraphina’s arms, poisoned on Gondremark’s orders before von Rosen can get to the Felsenburg prison with the order for his release. The version performed in Scotland returned to the original ending, and was praised for taking its dialogue from the novel (Pall Mall Gazette, 6 June 1900, 8). To judge by the cast-list and review of this production in The Era, Gurney and Thalxlix

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introduction

berg’s play expanded the roles of Madame Grafinski and Countess von Eisenthal, married Gordon to the latter, and added a general unknown to Stevenson’s story. Two five-act stage versions were also produced in the US, both by actor-playwright Otis Skinner. The first, in 1897, seems to have taken enormous liberties with its source, not even retaining the name of the central character in Prince Rudolph; the second stayed closer to Stevenson’s novel. Skinner opened in the title role of Prince Otto at McVicker’s Theatre in Chicago on 22 April 1900 (The Era, 5 May 1900, 14); on 3 September he made his New York debut at Wallack’s Theatre with the same play (New York Times, 4 Sept 1900), and enjoyed a run of forty performances (Internet Broadway Database) before touring. Prince Otto makes one striking appearance in twentieth-century fiction. The autodidact clerk Leonard Bast in E.  M. Forster’s novel Howards End (1910) is an enthusiast for the writer he calls ‘R. L. S.’. On his first visit to the cultured Schlegels, Bast finds himself explaining a long nocturnal walk in the country he had undertaken the previous weekend. ‘Yes, but I want—I wanted—have you ever read The Ordeal of Richard Feverel?’ Margaret nodded. ‘It’s a beautiful book. I wanted to get back to the earth, don’t you see, like Richard does in the end. Or have you ever read Stevenson’s Prince Otto?’ Helen and Tibby groaned gently. ‘That’s another beautiful book. You get to the earth in that. I wanted—’ He mouthed affectedly. (100) This passage suggests how Stevenson’s novel had come to be seen in the quarter-century after its publication. Meredith’s fiction is recognized as an important work by Margaret Schlegel’s acknowledgment that she has read it; but mention of the novel by Meredith’s disciple Stevenson is greeted with groans. The distinction exemplifies the twentieth-century emergence of a canon of classic nineteenth-century fiction, which will include the high art of Richard Feverel and Meredith, but exclude Prince Otto and the middlebrow hero ‘R. L. S.’. But the choice of these particular texts is also suggestive. It seems as if Prince Otto’s aspiration to a certain kind of literary ‘beauty’ is being used here to figure Bast’s own cultural aspirations, precisely because Prince Otto is understood to have failed, as Bast will fail; as Bast is failing in this l

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notes

scene, by putting Prince Otto on a level with The Ordeal of Richard Feverel. Forster is assuming that his readers know that Prince Otto had been judged a failure, whether they had read it or not. But those that had read Seraphina’s experience of the ‘wonderful revolution’ of the dawn (131) as well as of Richard’s sunrise ‘revelation’ will better appreciate the bathos of Bast’s own night-time ramble: ‘But was the dawn wonderful?’ asked Helen. With unforgettable sincerity he replied: ‘No.’ (102) Perhaps Prince Otto’s most marked influence was on the career of Stevenson himself. ‘Otto was my hardest effort, for I wished to do something very swell, which did not quite come off ’ he reflected in 1887 (Letters 6, 48); and even as he was writing it, he commented to Colvin that ‘it is very likely that the big effort, instead of being a masterpiece, may be the blotted copy, the gymnastic exercise’ (Letters 4, 246). Prince Otto is certainly very much more than that: but the lesson Stevenson seems to have drawn from it was to try less hard for the magnum opus, and instead to rely on his own genius for prose fiction to raise more recognisable genres to their own kind of greatness. Notes 1. Kegan Paul had published Stevenson’s first, non-fiction, books before the shift to Chatto for New Arabian Nights in 1882: Stevenson thought that Kegan Paul had treated him badly (Letters 2, 269, 289 and 303). 2. Dumas 2009, 90. This translates: ‘j’ai quelques fonds qui m’embarrassent. Je […] désire charger un ami de faire valoir mon argent’ (Dumas 1926–7, iii, 98). 3. Dumas 2009, 90. This translates: Fouquet […] demeura un instant pensif; puis tout à coup, se reculant, il pâlit et tomba sur une chaise en cachant son visage dans ses mains. — Oh! marquise! marquise! murmura-t-il. — Eh bien? — Quelle opinion avez-vous donc de moi pour me faire une pareille offre?’ (Dumas 1926–7, iii, 98) 4. Dumas 2009, 92. This translates: ‘Et voici la femme, dit la marquise en se jetant dans ses bras’ (Dumas 1926–7, iii, 101). 5. This translates: la comtesse.  Il me sauve au prix de son sang, par devoir! le commandeur.  Dis donc par amour.

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introduction la comtesse.  Que dites-vous? … (Dumas 1889, 192) 6. This translates: puck.  Donc, c’est entendu: tout à l’heure la chanson militaire—dans huit jours la victoire! boum.  Après ça, le retour dans nos foyers! puck.  Et à nous deux le pouvoir! boum.  Et à nous deux le pouvoir! (Meilhac and Halévy 1868, 8; English version also taken from this volume.) 7. Sue 1845, 231. This translates: ‘Quoique le grand-duché de Gerolstein ne fût qu’un État secondaire, Polidori s’était bercé de l’espoir d’en être un jour le Richelieu, et de dresser Rodolphe au rôle de prince fainéant’ (Sue 1843, 206). 8. Sue 1845, 233. This translates: Couler délicieusement et paresseusement ses jours au milieu des femmes et des raffinements du luxe; se reposer tour à tour de l’enivrement des plaisirs sensuels par les délicieuses récréations des arts; chercher parfois dans la chasse, non pas en sauvage Nemrod, mais en intelligent épicurien, ces fatigues passagères qui doublent le charme de l’indolence et de la paresse … telle était, selon le docteur, la seule vie possible pour un prince qui (comble de bonheur!) trouvait un premier minister capable de se vouer courageusement au fastidieux et lourd fardeau des affaires de l’État. (Sue 1843, 207). 9. Sue 1845, 330–1. This translates and condenses: un vieux laboureur à cheveux blancs, au visage loyal, au regard franc et hardi, à la bouche un peu moqueuse; véritable type du paysan de bon sens, de ces esprits fermes et droits, nets et lucides, rustiques et malins […]. Lorsque Rodolphe acheta la métairie, le vieux serviteur lui fut justement recommandé; il le garda et l’investit […] d’une sorte de surintendance des travaux de culture. Le père Châtelain exerçait sur ce personnel de la ferme une haute influence due à son âge, à son savoir, à son expérience. (Sue 1843, 285–6). 10. Sue 1845, 228. This translates: ‘Ces braves gens jouissaient d’un bonheur si profond, ils étaient si complétement satisfaits de leur condition, que la sollicitude éclairée du grand-duc avait eu peu à faire pour les préserver de la manie des innovations constitutionnelles’ (Sue 1843, 202).

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wor ks cited works cited The American, 12 June 1886, 122: ‘Briefer Notices’. Atkinson, Damian (ed.). The Letters of William Ernest Henley to Robert Louis Stevenson (High Wycombe, 2008). Auerbach, Berthold. On the Heights, trans. F. E. Bunnett, 2nd edn, 3 vols (Leipzig, 1868). Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library (Beinecke), Yale University, GM 664. Reference is to box and folder number. Blackbourn, David. History of Germany, 1780–1918, 2nd edn (Oxford, 2003). The Book Buyer: A Summary of American and Foreign Literature, 3. 4 (May 1886), 176: ‘Prince Otto. A Romance. By Robert Louis Stevenson’. British Quarterly Review, 165 ( Jan 1886), 212–21: ‘Novels of the Quarter’. Chatto & Windus Archive, University of Reading, Special Collections. Reference is to letter book and folio number. Colvin, Sir Sidney. ‘Stevensoniana’, Scribner’s Magazine, 52. 5 (Nov 1912), 593–606. Combes, André. ‘Fevrier–juin 1848, La République maçonnique’, L’Histoire 256 ( July 2001), 42–5. Daily News, 22 Dec 1885, 3: ‘Recent Novels’. Daily News, 31 Dec 1885, 3: ‘Literature of the Year’. [Dilke, Sir Charles Wentworth.] The Fall of Prince Florestan. By Himself (London, 1874). Disraeli, Benjamin. Vivian Grey (London, 1853). Dumas, Alexandre, père. ‘Un mariage sous Louis XV: comédie en quatre actes, en prose’, Théatre Complet de Alex. Dumas, 25 vols (Paris, 1889), vii, 97–196. ——. Le Vicomte de Bragelonne, ou dix ans plus tard, 6 vols (Paris, 1926–7). ——. Louise de la Vallière, ed. David Coward (Oxford, 2009). Dumas, Alexandre, fils. La Comtesse Romani: comédie en trois actes (Paris, 1877). Forster, E.M. Howards End, ed. David Lodge (Harmondsworth, 2000). Glasgow Herald, 7 Jan 1886, 2: ‘Prince Otto’. The Graphic, 5 Dec 1885, 615: ‘New Novels’. Halpern, Avner. The Democratisation of France, 1840–1901: Sociabilité, Freemasonry and Radicalism (London, 1999). Harvie, Christopher. ‘The Politics of Stevenson’, Stevenson and Victorian Scotland, ed. Jenni Calder (Edinburgh, 1981), 107–25.

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introduction [Henley, W. E.]. ‘Prince Otto: a Romance. By Robert Louis Stevenson (Chatto & Windus)’, Athenæum, 21 Nov 1885, 663–4. Hoffman, Stefan-Ludwig. The Politics of Sociability: Freemasonry and German Civil Society, 1840–1918, trans. Tom Lampert (Ann Arbor, 2007). Meilhac, Henri and Ludovic Halévy. La Grande-Duchesse de Gerolstein (The Grand Duchess of Gerolstein), trans. Charles Lamb Kenney (London, 1868). Literary World, 29 May 1886, 182. Meredith, George. The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, ed. Edward Mendelson (Harmondsworth, 1998). New-York Tribune, 18 Apr 1886, 10: ‘Recent Novels. Romantic and Realistic’. Pall Mall Gazette, 6 Nov 1885, 5: ‘A New Romance by Mr Louis Stevenson’. Purcell, Edward. ‘Prince Otto: A Romance. By R. L. Stevenson (Chatto & Windus)’, The Academy, 271 (27 Feb 1886), 140–1. St James’s Gazette, 1 Jan 1886, 7: ‘Mr Stevenson’s “Prince Otto” ’. Sardou, Victorien. Rabagas: comédie en cinq actes, en prose (Paris, 1872). Saturday Review, 21 Nov 1885, 690–1: ‘Four novels’. Stevenson, Robert Louis. Prince Otto, Tusitala Edition, 4 (London, 1924). ——. Memories and Portraits, Tusitala Edition, 29 (London, 1924). Swearingen, Roger G. The Prose Writings of Robert Louis Stevenson: A Guide (London, 1980). Sue, Eugène. Les mystères de Paris. Nouvelle édition, revue par l’auteur. Première partie (Paris, 1843). ——. The Mysteries of Paris (London, 1845).

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PRINCE Jl,

OTTO

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BY

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

CHATTO & \VINDUS, PICCADILLY 1885 [The rigid

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to NELLY VAN DE GRIFT (Mrs. Adulfo Sanchez, of Monterey .)

At last, after so many years, I have the pleasure of re-introducing you to Prince Otto, whom you will remember a very little fellow, no bigger in fact than a few sheets of memoranda written for me by your kind hand. The sight of his name will carry you back to an old wooden house embowered in creepers; a house that was far gone in the respectable stages of antiquity and seemed indissoluble from the green garden in which it stood, and that yet was a sea-traveller in its younger days, and had come round the Horn piecemeal in the belly of a ship, and might have heard the seamen stamping and shouting and the note of the boatswain’s whistle. It will recall to you the nondescript inhabitants now so widely scattered:—the two horses, the dog, and the four cats, some of them still looking in your face as you read these lines;—the poor lady, so unfortunately married to an author;—the China boy, by this time, perhaps, baiting his line by the banks of a river in the Flowery Land;—and in particular the Scot who was then sick apparently unto death, and whom you did so much to cheer and keep in good behaviour. You may remember that he was full of ambitions and designs: so soon as he had his health again completely, you may remember the fortune he was to earn, the journeys he was to go upon, the delights he was to enjoy and confer, and (among other matters) the masterpiece he was to make of Prince Otto! Well, we will not give in that we are finally beaten. We read together in those days the story of Braddock, and how, as he was carried dying from the scene of his defeat, he promised himself to do better another time: a story that will always touch a brave heart, and a dying speech worthy of a more fortunate commander. I try to be of Braddock’s mind. I still mean to get my health again; I still purpose, by hook or crook, this book or the next, to launch a masterpiece; and I still intend—some how, some time or other—to see your face and to hold your hand. 3

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pr ince otto

Meanwhile, this little paper traveller goes forth instead, crosses the great seas and the long plains and the dark mountains, and comes at last to your door in Monterey, charged with tender greetings. Pray you, take him in. He comes from a house where (even as in your own) there are gathered together some of the waifs of our company at Oakland; a house—for all its outlandish Gaelic name and distant station—where you are well-beloved. R. L. S. Skerryvore, Bournemouth.

4

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BOOK I Prince Errant

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Chapter 1 IN WHICH THE PRINCE DEPARTS ON AN ADVENTURE

You shall seek in vain upon the map of Europe for the bygone state of Grünewald. An independent principality, an infinitesimal member of the German Empire, she played, for several centuries, her part in the discord of Europe; and, at last, in the ripeness of time and at the spiriting of several bald diplomatists, vanished like a morning ghost. Less fortunate than Poland, she left not a regret behind her; and the very memory of her boundaries has faded. It was a patch of hilly country covered with thick wood. Many streams took their beginning in the glens of Grünewald, turning mills for the inhabitants. There was one town, Mittwalden, and many brown, wooden hamlets, climbing roof above roof, along the steep bottom of dells, and communicating by covered bridges over the larger of the torrents. The hum of watermills, the splash of running water, the clean odour of pine sawdust, the sound and smell of the pleasant wind among the innumerable army of the mountain pines, the dropping fire of huntsmen, the dull stroke of the wood-axe, intolerable roads, fresh trout for supper in the clean bare chamber of an inn, and the song of birds and the music of the village-bells—these were the recollections of the Grünewald tourist. North and east the foothills of Grünewald sank with varying profile into a vast plain. On these sides many small states bordered with the principality, Gerolstein, an extinct grand duchy, among the number. On the south it marched with the comparatively powerful kingdom of Seaboard Bohemia, celebrated for its flowers and mountain bears, and inhabited by a people of singular simplicity and tenderness of heart. Several intermarriages had, in the course of centuries, united the crowned families of Grünewald and maritime Bohemia; and the last Prince of Grünewald, whose history I purpose to relate, drew his descent through Perdita, the only daughter of King Florizel the First of Bohemia. That these intermarriages had in some degree mitigated the rough, manly stock of the first Grünewalds, was an opinion widely held within the borders of the principality. The charcoal burner, the 7

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mountain sawyer, the wielder of the broad axe among the congregated pines of Grünewald, proud of their hard hands, proud of their shrewd ignorance and almost savage lore, looked with an unfeigned contempt on the soft character and manners of the sovereign race. The precise year of grace in which this tale begins shall be left to the conjecture of the reader. But for the season of the year (which, in such a story, is the more important of the two) it was already so far forward in the spring, that when mountain people heard horns echoing all day about the north-west corner of the principality, they told themselves that Prince Otto and his hunt were up and out for the last time till the return of autumn. At this point the borders of Grünewald descend somewhat steeply, here and there breaking into crags; and this shaggy and trackless country stands in a bold contrast to the cultivated plain below. It was traversed at that period by two roads alone; one, the imperial highway, bound to Brandenau in Gerolstein, descended the slope obliquely and by the easiest gradients. The other ran like a fillet across the very forehead of the hills, dipping into savage gorges, and wetted by the spray of tiny waterfalls. Once it passed beside a certain tower or castle, built sheer upon the margin of a formidable cliff, and commanding a vast prospect of the skirts of Grünewald and the busy plains of Gerolstein. The Felsenburg (so this tower was called) served now as a prison, now as a hunting-seat; and for all it stood so lonesome to the naked eye, with the aid of a good glass the burghers of Brandenau could count its windows from the lime-tree terrace where they walked at night. In the wedge of forest hillside enclosed between the roads, the horns continued all day long to scatter tumult; and at length, as the sun began to draw near to the horizon of the plain, a rousing triumph announced the slaughter of the quarry. The first and second huntsman had drawn somewhat aside, and from the summit of a knoll gazed down before them on the drooping shoulders of the hill and across the expanse of plain. They covered their eyes, for the sun was in their faces. The glory of its going down was somewhat pale. Through the confused tracery of many thousands of naked poplars, the smoke of so many houses, and the evening steam ascending from the fields, the sails of a windmill on a gentle eminence moved very conspicuously, like a donkey’s ears. And hard by, like an open gash, the imperial highroad ran straight sunward, an artery of travel. There is one of nature’s spiritual ditties, that has not yet been set to words or human music: ‘The Invitation to the Road;’ an air continually sounding in the ears of gipsies, and to whose inspiration our 8

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book i chapter 1

nomadic fathers journeyed all their days. The hour, the season, and the scene, all were in delicate accordance. The air was full of birds of passage, steering westward and northward over Grünewald, an army of specks to the up-looking eye. And below, the great practicable road was bound for the same quarter. But to the two horsemen on the knoll this spiritual ditty was unheard. They were, indeed, in some concern of mind, scanning every fold of the subjacent forest, and betraying both anger and dismay in their impatient gestures. ‘I do not see him, Kuno,’ said the first huntsman, ‘nowhere—not a trace, not a hair of the mare’s tail! No, sir, he’s off; broke cover and got away. Why, for twopence I would hunt him with the dogs!’ ‘Mayhap, he’s gone home,’ said Kuno, but without conviction. ‘Home!’ sneered the other. ‘I give him twelve days to get home. No, it’s begun again; it’s as it was three years ago, before he married; a disgrace! Hereditary prince, hereditary fool! There goes the government over the borders on a grey mare. What’s that? No, nothing—no, I tell you, on my word, I set more store by a good gelding or an English dog. That for your Otto!’ ‘He’s not my Otto,’ growled Kuno. ‘Then I don’t know whose he is,’ was the retort. ‘You would put your hand in the fire for him to-morrow,’ said Kuno, facing round. ‘Me!’ cried the huntsman. ‘I would see him hanged! I’m a Grünewald patriot—enrolled, and have my medal, too; and I would help a prince! I’m for liberty and Gondremark.’ ‘Well, it’s all one,’ said Kuno. ‘If anybody said what you said, you would have his blood, and you know it.’ ‘You have him on the brain,’ retorted his companion. ‘There he goes!’ he cried, the next moment. And sure enough, about a mile down the mountain, a rider on a white horse was seen to flit rapidly across a heathy open and vanish among the trees on the farther side. ‘In ten minutes he’ll be over the border into Gerolstein,’ said Kuno. ‘It’s past cure.’ ‘Well, if he founders that mare, I’ll never forgive him,’ added the other, gathering his reins. And as they turned down from the knoll to rejoin their comrades, the sun dipped and disappeared, and the woods fell instantly into the gravity and greyness of the early night. 9

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Chapter 2 IN WHICH THE PRINCE PLAYS HAROUN-AL-RASCHID

The night fell upon the Prince while he was threading green tracks in the lower valleys of the wood; and though the stars came out overhead and displayed the interminable order of the pine-tree pyramids, regular and dark like cypresses, their light was of small service to a traveller in such lonely paths, and from thenceforth he rode at random. The austere face of nature, the uncertain issue of his course, the open sky and the free air, delighted him like wine; and the hoarse chafing of a river on his left sounded in his ears agreeably. It was past eight at night before his toil was rewarded and he issued at last out of the forest on the firm white highroad. It lay downhill before him, with a sweeping eastward trend, faintly bright between the thickets; and Otto paused and gazed upon it. So it ran, league after league, still joining others, to the farthest ends of Europe, there skirting the sea-surge, here gleaming in the lights of cities; and the innumerable army of tramps and travellers moved upon it in all lands as by a common impulse, and were now in all places drawing near to the inn door and the night’s rest. The pictures swarmed and vanished in his brain; a surge of temptation, a beat of all his blood, went over him, to set spur to the mare and to go on into the unknown for ever. And then it passed away; hunger and fatigue, and that habit of middling actions which we call common sense, resumed their empire; and in that changed mood, his eye lighted upon two bright windows on his left hand, between the road and river. He turned off by a by-road, and in a few minutes he was knocking with his whip on the door of a large farmhouse, and a chorus of dogs from the farmyard were making angry answer. A very tall, old, whiteheaded man came, shading a candle, at the summons. He had been of great strength in his time, and of a handsome countenance; but now he was fallen away, his teeth were quite gone, and his voice when he spoke was broken and falsetto. ‘You will pardon me,’ said Otto. ‘I am a traveller and have entirely lost my way.’ 10

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book i chapter 2

‘Sir,’ said the old man, in a very stately, shaky manner, ‘you are at the River Farm, and I am Killian Gottesheim, at your disposal. We are here, sir, at about an equal distance from Mittwalden in Grünewald and Brandenau in Gerolstein: six leagues to either, and the road excellent; but there is not a wine bush, not a carter’s alehouse, anywhere between. You will have to accept my hospitality for the night; rough hospitality, to which I make you freely welcome; for, sir,’ he added with a bow, ‘it is God who sends the guest.’ ‘Amen. And I most heartily thank you,’ replied Otto, bowing in his turn. ‘Fritz,’ said the old man, turning towards the interior, ‘lead round this gentleman’s horse; and you, sir, condescend to enter.’ Otto entered a chamber occupying the greater part of the groundfloor of the building. It had probably once been divided; for the farther end was raised by a long step above the nearer, and the blazing fire and the white supper-table seemed to stand upon a daïs. All around were dark, brass-mounted cabinets and cupboards; dark shelves carrying ancient country crockery; guns and antlers and broadside ballads on the wall; a tall old clock with roses on the dial; and down in one corner the comfortable promise of a wine barrel. It was homely, elegant, and quaint. A powerful youth hurried out to attend on the grey mare; and when Mr. Killian Gottesheim had presented him to his daughter Ottilia, Otto followed to the stable as became, not perhaps the Prince, but the good horseman. When he returned, a smoking omelette and some slices of home-cured ham were waiting him; these were followed by a ragout and a cheese; and it was not until his guest had entirely satisfied his hunger, and the whole party drew about the fire over the wine jug, that Killian Gottesheim’s elaborate courtesy permitted him to address a question to the Prince. ‘You have perhaps ridden far, sir?’ he inquired. ‘I have, as you say, ridden far,’ replied Otto; ‘and, as you have seen, I was prepared to do justice to your daughter’s cookery.’ ‘Possibly, sir, from the direction of Brandenau?’ continued Killian. ‘Precisely: and I should have slept to-night, had I not wandered, in Mittwalden,’ answered the Prince, weaving in a patch of truth, according to the habit of all liars. ‘Business leads you to Mittwalden?’ was the next question. ‘Mere curiosity,’ said Otto. ‘I have never yet visited the principality of Grünewald.’ ‘A pleasant state, sir,’ piped the old man, nodding, ‘a very pleasant 11

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state, and a fine race, both pines and people. We reckon ourselves part Grünewalders here, lying so near the borders; and the river there is all good Grünewald water, every drop of it. Yes, sir, a fine state. A man of Grünewald now will swing me an axe over his head that many a man of Gerolstein could hardly lift; and the pines, why, deary me, there must be more pines in that little state, sir, than people in this whole big world. ’Tis twenty years now since I crossed the marches, for we grow home-keepers in old age; but I mind it as if it was yesterday. Up and down, the road keeps right on from here to Mittwalden; and nothing all the way but the good green pine-trees, big and little, and water power! water power at every step, sir. We once sold a bit of forest, up there beside the highroad; and the sight of minted money that we got for it, has set me ciphering ever since what all the pines in Grünewald would amount to.’ ‘I suppose you see nothing of the Prince?’ inquired Otto. ‘No,’ said the young man, speaking for the first time, ‘nor want to.’ ‘Why so? is he so much disliked?’ asked Otto. ‘Not what you might call disliked,’ replied the old gentleman, ‘but despised, sir.’ ‘Indeed,’ said the Prince, somewhat faintly. ‘Yes, sir, despised,’ nodded Killian, filling a long pipe, ‘and, to my way of thinking, justly despised. Here is a man with great opportunities, and what does he do with them? He hunts, and he dresses very prettily—which is a thing to be ashamed of in a man—and he acts plays; and if he does aught else, the news of it has not come here.’ ‘Yet these are all innocent,’ said Otto. ‘What would you have him do—make war?’ ‘No, sir,’ replied the old man. ‘But here it is; I have been fifty years upon this River Farm, and wrought in it, day in, day out; I have ploughed and sowed and reaped, and risen early, and waked late; and this is the upshot: that all these years it has supported me and my family; and been the best friend that ever I had, set aside my wife; and now, when my time comes, I leave it a better farm than when I found it. So it is, if a man works hearty in the order of nature, he gets bread and he receives comfort, and whatever he touches breeds. And it humbly appears to me, if that Prince was to labour on his throne, as I have laboured and wrought in my farm, he would find both an increase and a blessing.’ ‘I believe with you, sir,’ Otto said; ‘and yet the parallel is inexact. For the farmer’s life is natural and simple; but the prince’s is both artificial and complicated. It is easy to do right in the one, and exceedingly 12

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d­ ifficult not to do wrong in the other. If your crop is blighted, you can take off your bonnet and say, “God’s will be done”; but if the prince meets with a reverse, he may have to blame himself for the attempt. And perhaps, if all the kings in Europe were to confine themselves to innocent amusement, the subjects would be the better off.’ ‘Ay,’ said the young man Fritz, ‘you are in the right of it there. That was a true word spoken. And I see you are like me, a good patriot and an enemy to princes.’ Otto was somewhat abashed at this deduction, and he made haste to change his ground. ‘But,’ said he, ‘you surprise me by what you say of this Prince Otto. I have heard him, I must own, more favourably painted. I was told he was, in his heart, a good fellow, and the enemy of no one but himself.’ ‘And so he is, sir,’ said the girl, ‘a very handsome, pleasant prince; and we know some who would shed their blood for him.’ ‘O! Kuno!’ said Fritz. ‘An ignoramus!’ ‘Ay, Kuno, to be sure,’ quavered the old farmer. ‘Well, since this gentleman is a stranger to these parts, and curious about the Prince, I do believe that story might divert him. This Kuno, you must know, sir, is one of the hunt servants, and a most ignorant, intemperate man: a right Grünewalder, as we say in Gerolstein. We know him well, in this house; for he has come as far as here after his stray dogs; and I make all welcome, sir, without account of state or nation. And, indeed, between Gerolstein and Grünewald the peace has held so long that the roads stand open like my door; and a man will make no more of the frontier than the very birds themselves.’ ‘Ay,’ said Otto, ‘it has been a long peace—a peace of centuries.’ ‘Centuries, as you say,’ returned Killian: ‘the more the pity that it should not be for ever. Well, sir, this Kuno was one day in fault, and Otto, who has a quick temper, up with his whip and thrashed him, they do say, soundly. Kuno took it as best he could, but at last he broke out, and dared the Prince to throw his whip away and wrestle like a man; for we are all great at wrestling in these parts, and it’s so that we generally settle our disputes. Well, sir, the Prince did so; and being a weakly creature, found the tables turned; for the man whom he had just been thrashing like a negro slave, lifted him with a back grip and threw him heels over-head.’ ‘He broke his bridle-arm,’ cried Fritz—‘and some say his nose. Serve him right, say I! Man to man, which is the better at that?’ ‘And then?’ asked Otto. ‘O, then, Kuno carried him home; and they were the best of friends 13

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from that day forth. I don’t say it’s a discreditable story, you observe,’ continued Mr. Gottesheim; ‘but it’s droll, and that’s the fact. A man should think before he strikes; for, as my nephew says, man to man was the old valuation.’ ‘Now, if you were to ask me,’ said Otto, ‘I should perhaps surprise you. I think it was the Prince that conquered.’ ‘And, sir, you would be right,’ replied Killian, seriously. ‘In the eyes of God, I do not question but you would be right; but men, sir, look at these things differently, and they laugh.’ ‘They made a song of it,’ observed Fritz. ‘How does it go? Ta-tumta-ra . . . .’ ‘Well,’ interrupted Otto, who had no great anxiety to hear the song, ‘the Prince is young; he may yet mend.’ ‘Not so young, by your leave,’ cried Fritz. ‘A man of forty.’ ‘Thirty-six,’ corrected Mr. Gottesheim. ‘O,’ cried Ottilia, in obvious disillusion, ‘a man of middle age! And they said he was so handsome when he was young!’ ‘And bald, too,’ added Fritz. Otto passed his hand among his locks. At that moment he was far from happy, and even the tedious evenings at Mittwalden Palace began to smile upon him by comparison. ‘O, six-and-thirty!’ he protested. ‘A man is not yet old at six-andthirty. I am that age myself.’ ‘I should have taken you for more, sir,’ piped the old farmer. ‘But if that be so, you are of an age with Master Ottekin, as people call him; and, I would wager a crown, have done more service in your time. Though it seems young by comparison with men of a great age like me, yet it’s some way through life for all that; and the mere fools and fiddlers are beginning to grow weary and to look old. Yes, sir, by sixand-thirty, if a man be a follower of God’s laws, he should have made himself a home and a good name to live by; he should have got a wife and a blessing on his marriage; and his works, as the Word says, should begin to follow him.’ ‘Ah, well, the Prince is married,’ cried Fritz, with a coarse burst of laughter. ‘That seems to entertain you, sir,’ said Otto. ‘Ay,’ said the young boor. ‘Did you not know that? I thought all Europe knew it!’ And he added a pantomime of a nature to explain his accusation to the dullest. ‘Ah, sir,’ said Mr. Gottesheim, ‘it is very plain that you are not from hereabouts! But the truth is, that the whole princely family and Court 14

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are rips and rascals, not one to mend another. They live, sir, in idleness and—what most commonly follows it—corruption. The Princess has a lover; a Baron, as he calls himself, from East Prussia; and the Prince is so little of a man, sir, that he holds the candle. Nor is that the worst of it, for this foreigner and his paramour are suffered to transact the State affairs, while the Prince takes the salary and leaves all things to go to wrack. There will follow upon this some manifest judgment which, though I am old, I may survive to see.’ ‘Good man, you are in the wrong about Gondremark,’ said Fritz, showing a greatly increased animation; ‘but for all the rest, you speak the God’s truth like a good patriot. As for the Prince, if he would take and strangle his wife, I would forgive him yet.’ ‘Nay, Fritz,’ said the old man, ‘that would be to add iniquity to evil. For you perceive, sir,’ he continued, once more addressing himself to the unfortunate Prince, ‘this Otto has himself to thank for these disorders. He has his young wife and his principality, and he has sworn to cherish both.’ ‘Sworn at the altar!’ echoed Fritz. ‘But put your faith in princes!’ ‘Well, sir, he leaves them both to an adventurer from East Prussia,’ pursued the farmer; ‘leaves the girl to be seduced and to go on from bad to worse, till her name’s become a taproom by-word, and she not yet twenty; leaves the country to be overtaxed, and bullied with armaments, and jockied into war——’ ‘War!’ cried Otto. ‘So they say, sir; those that watch their ongoings, say to war,’ asseverated Killian. ‘Well, sir, that is very sad; it is a sad thing for this poor, wicked girl to go down to hell with people’s curses; it’s a sad thing for a tight little happy country to be misconducted; but whoever may complain, I humbly conceive, sir, that this Otto cannot. What he has worked for, that he has got; and may God have pity on his soul, for a great and a silly sinner’s!’ ‘He has broke his oath; then he is a perjurer. He takes the money and leaves the work; why, then plainly he’s a thief. A cuckold he was before, and a fool by birth. Better me that!’ cried Fritz, and snapped his fingers. ‘And now, sir, you will see a little,’ continued the farmer, ‘why we think so poorly of this Prince Otto. There’s such a thing as a man being pious and honest in the private way; and there is such a thing, sir, as a public virtue; but when a man has neither, the Lord lighten him! Even this Gondremark, that Fritz here thinks so much of——’ ‘Ay,’ interrupted Fritz, ‘Gondremark’s the man for me. I would we 15

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had his like in Gerolstein.’ ‘He is a bad man,’ said the old farmer, shaking his head; ‘and there was never good begun by the breach of God’s commandments. But so far I will go with you: he is a man that works for what he has.’ ‘I tell you he’s the hope of Grünewald,’ cried Fritz. ‘He doesn’t suit some of your high-and-dry, old, ancient ideas; but he’s a downright modern man—a man of the new lights and the progress of the age. He does some things wrong; so they all do; but he has the people’s interests next his heart; and you mark me—you, sir, who are a Liberal, and the enemy of all their governments, you please to mark my words—the day will come in Grünewald, when they take out that yellow-headed skulk of a Prince and that dough-faced Messalina of a Princess, march ’em back foremost over the borders, and proclaim the Baron Gondremark first President. I’ve heard them say it in a speech. I was at a meeting once at Brandenau, and the Mittwalden delegates spoke up for fifteen thousand. Fifteen thousand, all brigaded, and each man with a medal round his neck to rally by. That’s all Gondremark.’ ‘Ay, sir, you see what it leads to: wild talk to-day, and wilder doings to-morrow,’ said the old man. ‘For there is one thing certain: that this Gondremark has one foot in the Court backstairs, and the other in the Masons’ lodges. He gives himself out, sir, for what nowadays they call a patriot: a man from East Prussia!’ ‘Give himself out!’ cried Fritz. ‘He is! He is to lay by his title as soon as the Republic is declared; I heard it in a speech.’ ‘Lay by Baron to take up President?’ returned Killian. ‘King Log, King Stork. But you’ll live longer than I, and you will see the fruits of it.’ ‘Father,’ whispered Ottilia, pulling at the speaker’s coat, ‘surely the gentleman is ill.’ ‘I beg your pardon,’ cried the farmer, rewaking to hospitable thoughts; ‘can I offer you anything?’ ‘I thank you. I am very weary,’ answered Otto. ‘I have presumed upon my strength. If you would show me to a bed, I should be grateful.’ ‘Ottilia, a candle!’ said the old man. ‘Indeed, sir, you look paley. A little cordial water? No? Then follow me, I beseech you, and I will bring you to the stranger’s bed. You are not the first by many who has slept well below my roof,’ continued the old gentleman, mounting the stairs before his guest; ‘for good food, honest wine, a grateful conscience, and a little pleasant chat before a man retires, are worth all the possets and apothecary’s drugs. See, sir,’ and here he opened a door and ushered Otto into a little whitewashed sleeping-room, ‘here you are in port. It is small, but it is airy, and the sheets are clean and kept 16

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in lavender. The window, too, looks out above the river, and there’s no music like a little river’s. It plays the same tune (and that’s the favourite) over and over again, and yet does not weary of it like men fiddlers. It takes the mind out of doors; and though we should be grateful for good houses, there is, after all, no house like God’s out-of-doors. And lastly, sir, it quiets a man down like saying his prayers. So here, sir, I take my kind leave of you until to-morrow; and it is my prayerful wish that you may slumber like a prince.’ And the old man, with the twentieth courteous inclination, left his guest alone.

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Chapter 3 IN WHICH THE PRINCE COMFORTS AGE AND BEAUTY AND DELIVERS A LECTURE ON DISCRETION IN LOVE

The Prince was early abroad: in the time of the first chorus of birds, of the pure and quiet air, of the slanting sunlight and the mile-long shadows. To one who had passed a miserable night, the freshness of that hour was tonic and reviving; to steal a march upon his slumbering fellows, to be the Adam of the coming day, composed and fortified his spirits; and the Prince, breathing deep and pausing as he went, walked in the wet fields beside his shadow, and was glad. A trellised path led down into the valley of the brook, and he turned to follow it. The stream was a break-neck, boiling Highland river. Hard by the farm, it leaped a little pre­cipice in a thick grey-mare’s tail of twisted filaments, and then lay and worked and bubbled in a lynn. Into the middle of this quaking pool a rock protruded, shelving to a cape; and thither Otto scrambled and sat down to ponder. Soon the sun struck through the screen of branches and thin early leaves that made a hanging bower above the fall; and the golden lights and flitting shadows fell upon and marbled the surface of that seething pot; and rays plunged deep among the turning waters; and a spark, as bright as a diamond, lit upon the swaying eddy. It began to grow warm where Otto lingered, warm and heady; the lights swam, weaving their maze across the shaken pool; on the impending rock, reflections danced like butterflies; and the air was fanned by the waterfall as by a swinging curtain. Otto, who was weary with tossing and beset with horrid phantoms of remorse and jealousy, instantly fell dead in love with that sun-chequered, echoing corner. Holding his feet, he stared out of a drowsy trance, wondering, admiring, musing, losing his way among uncer­tain thoughts. There is nothing that so apes the external bearing of free will, as that uncon­scious bustle, obscurely following liquid laws, with which a river contends among obstructions. It seems the very play of man and destiny, and as Otto pored on these recurrent changes, he grew, by equal steps, the sleepier and the more profound. Eddy and 18

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Prince were alike jostled in their purpose, alike anchored by intangible influences in one corner of the world. Eddy and Prince were alike useless, starkly useless, in the cosmology of men. Eddy and Prince— Prince and Eddy. It is probable he had been some while asleep when a voice recalled him from oblivion. ‘Sir,’ it was saying; and looking round, he saw Mr. Killian’s daughter, terrified by her boldness and making bashful signals from the shore. She was a plain, honest lass, healthy and happy and good, and with that sort of beauty that comes of happiness and health. But her confusion lent her for the moment an additional charm. ‘Good morning,’ said Otto, rising and moving towards her. ‘I arose early and was in a dream.’ ‘O, sir!’ she cried, ‘I wish to beg of you to spare my father; for I assure your Highness, if he had known who you was, he would have bitten his tongue out sooner. And Fritz, too—how he went on! But I had a notion; and this morning I went straight down into the stable, and there was your Highness’s crown upon the stirrup-irons! But, oh, sir, I made certain you would spare them; for they were as innocent as lambs.’ ‘My dear,’ said Otto, both amused and gratified, ‘you do not understand. It is I who am in the wrong; for I had no business to conceal my name and lead on these gentlemen to speak of me. And it is I who have to beg of you, that you will keep my secret and not betray the discourtesy of which I was guilty. As for any fear of me, your friends are safe in Gerolstein; and even in my own territory, you must be well aware I have no power.’ ‘O, sir,’ she said, curtsying, ‘I would not say that: the huntsmen would all die for you.’ ‘Happy Prince!’ said Otto. ‘But although you are too courteous to avow the knowledge, you have had many opportunities of learning that I am a vain show. Only last night we heard it very clearly stated. You see the shadow flitting on this hard rock. Prince Otto, I am afraid, is but the moving shadow, and the name of the rock is Gondremark. Ah! if your friends had fallen foul of Gondremark! But happily the younger of the two admires him. And as for the old gentleman your father, he is a wise man and an excellent talker, and I would take a long wager he is honest.’ ‘O, for honest, your Highness, that he is!’ exclaimed the girl. ‘And Fritz is as honest as he. And as for all they said, it was just talk and nonsense. When countryfolk get gossiping, they go on, I do assure you, for the fun; they don’t as much as think of what they say. If you went to 19

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the next farm, it’s my belief you would hear as much against my father.’ ‘Nay, nay,’ said Otto, ‘there you go too fast. For all that was said against Prince Otto——’ ‘O, it was shameful!’ cried the girl. ‘Not shameful—true,’ returned Otto. ‘Oh, yes—true. I am all they said of me—all that and worse.’ ‘I never!’ cried Ottilia. ‘Is that how you do? Well, you would never be a soldier. Now if any one accuses me, I get up and give it them. O, I defend myself. I wouldn’t take a fault at another person’s hands, no, not if I had it on my forehead. And that’s what you must do, if you mean to live it out. But, indeed, I never heard such nonsense. I should think you was ashamed of yourself! You’re bald then, I suppose?’ ‘O no,’ said Otto, fairly laughing. ‘There I acquit myself: not bald!’ ‘Well, and good?’ pursued the girl. ‘Come now, you know you are good, and I’ll make you say so. . . . Your Highness, I beg your humble pardon. But there’s no disrespect intended. And anyhow, you know you are.’ ‘Why, now, what am I to say?’ replied Otto. ‘You are a cook, and excellently well you do it; I embrace the chance of thanking you for the ragout. Well now, have you not seen good food so bedevilled by unskilful cookery that no one could be brought to eat the pudding? That is me, my dear. I am full of good ingredients, but the dish is worthless. I am—I give it you in one word—sugar in the salad.’ ‘Well, I don’t care, you’re good,’ reiterated Ottilia, a little flushed by having failed to understand. ‘I will tell you one thing,’ replied Otto: ‘You are!’ ‘Ah, well, that’s what they all said of you,’ moralised the girl; ‘such a tongue to come round—such a flattering tongue!’ ‘O, you forget, I am a man of middle age,’ the Prince chuckled. ‘Well, to speak to you, I should think you was a boy; and Prince or no Prince, if you came worrying where I was cooking, I would pin a napkin to your tails. . . . And, O Lord, I declare I hope your Highness will forgive me,’ the girl added. ‘I can’t keep it in my mind.’ ‘No more can I,’ cried Otto. ‘That is just what they complain of!’ They made a loverly-looking couple; only the heavy pouring of that horse-tail of water made them raise their voices above lovers’ pitch. But to a jealous onlooker from above, their mirth and close proximity might easily give umbrage; and a rough voice out of a tuft of brambles began calling on Ottilia by name. She changed colour at that. ‘It is Fritz,’ she said. ‘I must go.’ ‘Go, my dear, and I need not bid you go in peace, for I think you 20

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have discovered that I am not formidable at close quarters,’ said the Prince, and made her a fine gesture of dismissal. So Ottilia skipped up the bank, and disappeared into the thicket, stopping once for a single blushing bob—blushing, because she had in the interval once more forgotten and remembered the stranger’s quality. Otto returned to his rock promontory; but his humour had in the meantime changed. The sun now shone more fairly on the pool; and over its brown, welling surface, the blue of heaven and the golden green of the spring foliage danced in fleeting arabesque. The eddies laughed and brightened with essential colour. And the beauty of the dell began to rankle in the Prince’s mind; it was so near to his own borders, yet without. He had never had much of the joy of possessorship in any of the thousand and one beautiful and curious things that were his; and now he was conscious of envy for what was another’s. It was, indeed, a smiling, dilettante sort of envy; but yet there it was: the passion of Ahab for the vineyard, done in little; and he was relieved when Mr. Killian appeared upon the scene. ‘I hope, sir, that you have slept well under my plain roof,’ said the old farmer. ‘I am admiring this sweet spot that you are privileged to dwell in,’ replied Otto, evading the inquiry. ‘It is rustic,’ returned Mr. Gottesheim, looking around him with complacency, ‘a very rustic corner; and some of the land to the west is most excellent fat land, excellent deep soil. You should see my wheat in the ten-acre field. There is not a farm in Grünewald, no, nor many in Gerolstein, to match the River Farm. Some sixty—I keep thinking when I sow—some sixty, and some seventy, and some an hundredfold; and my own place, six score! But that, sir, is partly the farming.’ ‘And the stream has fish?’ asked Otto. ‘A fish-pond,’ said the farmer. ‘Ay, it is a pleasant bit. It is pleasant even here, if one had time, with the brook drumming in that black pool, and the green things hanging all about the rocks, and, dear heart, to see the very pebbles! all turned to gold and precious stones! But you have come to that time of life, sir, when, if you will excuse me, you must look to have the rheumatism set in. Thirty to forty is, as one may say, their seedtime. And this is a damp cold corner for the early morning and an empty stomach. If I might humbly advise you, sir, I would be moving.’ ‘With all my heart,’ said Otto, gravely. ‘And so you have lived your life here?’ he added, as they turned to go. 21

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‘Here I was born,’ replied the farmer, ‘and here I wish I could say I was to die. But fortune, sir, fortune turns the wheel. They say she is blind, but we will hope she only sees a little farther on. My grandfather and my father and I, we have all tilled these acres, my furrow following theirs. All the three names are on the garden bench, two Killians and one Johann. Yes, sir, good men have prepared themselves for the great change in my old garden. Well do I mind my father, in a woollen nightcap, the good soul, going round and round to see the last of it. “Killian,” said he, “do you see the smoke of my tobacco? Why,” said he, “that is man’s life.” It was his last pipe, and I believe he knew it; and it was a strange thing, without doubt, to leave the trees that he had planted, and the son that he had begotten, ay, sir, and even the old pipe with the Turk’s head that he had smoked since he was a lad and went a-courting. But here we have no continuing city; and as for the eternal, it’s a comfortable thought that we have other merits than our own. And yet you would hardly think how sore it goes against the grain with me, to die in a strange bed.’ ‘And must you do so? For what reason?’ Otto asked. ‘The reason? The place is to be sold; three thousand crowns,’ replied Mr. Gottesheim. ‘Had it been a third of that, I may say without boasting that, what with my credit and my savings, I could have met the sum. But at three thousand, unless I have singular good fortune and the new proprietor continues me in office, there is nothing left me but to budge.’ Otto’s fancy for the place redoubled at the news, and became joined with other feelings. If all he heard were true, Grünewald was growing very hot for a sovereign Prince; it might be well to have a refuge; and if so, what more delightful hermitage could man imagine? Mr. Gottesheim, besides, had touched his sympathies. Every man loves in his soul to play the part of the stage deity. And to step down to the aid of the old farmer, who had so roughly handled him in talk, was the ideal of a Fair Revenge. Otto’s thoughts brightened at the prospect, and he began to regard himself with a renewed respect. ‘I can find you, I believe, a purchaser,’ he said, ‘and one who would continue to avail himself of your skill.’ ‘Can you, sir, indeed?’ said the old man. ‘Well, I shall be heartily obliged; for I begin to find a man may practise resignation all his days, as he takes physic, and not come to like it in the end.’ ‘If you will have the papers drawn, you may even burthen the purchase with your interest,’ said Otto. ‘Let it be assured to you through life.’ 22

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‘Your friend, sir,’ insinuated Killian, ‘would not, perhaps, care to make the interest revertible? Fritz is a good lad.’ ‘Fritz is young,’ said the Prince, drily; ‘he must earn consideration, not inherit.’ ‘He has long worked upon the place, sir,’ insisted Mr. Gottesheim; ‘and at my great age, for I am seventy-eight come harvest, it would be a troublesome thought to the proprietor how to fill my shoes. It would be a care spared to assure yourself of Fritz. And I believe he might be tempted by a permanency.’ ‘The young man has unsettled views,’ returned Otto. ‘Possibly the purchaser——’ began Killian. A little spot of anger burned in Otto’s cheek. ‘I am the purchaser,’ he said. ‘It was what I might have guessed,’ replied the farmer, bowing with an aged, obsequious dignity. ‘You have made an old man very happy; and I may say, indeed, that I have entertained an angel unawares. Sir, the great people of this world—and by that I mean those who are great in station—if they had only hearts like yours, how they would make the fires burn and the poor sing!’ ‘I would not judge them hardly, sir,’ said Otto. ‘We all have our ­frailties.’ ‘Truly, sir,’ said Mr. Gottesheim, with unction. ‘And by what name, sir, am I to address my generous landlord?’ The double recollection of an English traveller, whom he had received the week before at court, and of an old English rogue called Transome, whom he had known in youth, came pertinently to the Prince’s help. ‘Transome,’ he answered, ‘is my name. I am an English traveller. It is, to-day, Tuesday. On Thursday, before noon, the money shall be ready. Let us meet, if you please, in Mittwalden, at the “Morning Star.” ’ ‘I am, in all things lawful, your servant to command,’ replied the farmer. ‘An Englishman! You are a great race of travellers. And has your lordship some experience of land?’ ‘I have had some interest of the kind before,’ returned the Prince; ‘not in Gerolstein, indeed. But fortune, as you say, turns the wheel, and I desire to be beforehand with her revolutions.’ ‘Very right, sir, I am sure,’ said Mr. Killian. They had been strolling with deliberation; but they were now drawing near to the farmhouse, mounting by the trellised pathway to the level of the meadow. A little before them, the sound of voices had been some while audible, and now grew louder and more distinct with 23

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every step of their advance. Presently, when they emerged upon the top of the bank, they beheld Fritz and Ottilia some way off; he, very black and bloodshot, emphasising his hoarse speech with the smacking of his fist against his palm; she, standing a little way off in blowsy, voluble distress. ‘Dear me!’ said Mr. Gottesheim, and made as if he would turn aside. But Otto went straight towards the lovers, in whose dissension he believed himself to have a share. And, indeed, as soon as he had seen the Prince, Fritz had stood tragic, as if awaiting and defying his ­approach. ‘O, here you are!’ he cried, as soon as they were near enough for easy speech. ‘You are a man at least, and must reply. What were you after? Why were you two skulking in the bush? God!’ he broke out, turning again upon Ottilia, ‘to think that I should waste my heart on you!’ ‘I beg your pardon,’ Otto cut in. ‘You were addressing me. In virtue of what circumstance am I to render you an account of this young lady’s conduct? Are you her father? her brother? her husband?’ ‘O, sir, you know as well as I,’ returned the peasant. ‘We keep company, she and I. I love her, and she is by way of loving me; but all shall be above-board, I would have her to know. I have a good pride of my own.’ ‘Why, I perceive I must explain to you what love is,’ said Otto. ‘Its measure is kindness. It is very possible that you are proud; but she, too, may have some self-esteem; I do not speak for myself. And perhaps, if your own doings were so curiously examined, you might find it inconvenient to reply.’ ‘These are all set-offs,’ said the young man. ‘You know very well that a man is a man, and a woman only a woman. That holds good all over, up and down. I ask you a question, I ask it again, and here I stand.’ He drew a mark and toed it. ‘When you have studied liberal doctrines somewhat deeper,’ said the Prince, ‘you will perhaps change your note. You are a man of false weights and measures, my young friend. You have one scale for women, another for men; one for princes, and one for farmer-folk. On the prince who neglects his wife you can be most severe. But what of the lover who insults his mistress? You use the name of love. I should think this lady might very fairly ask to be delivered from love of such a nature. For if I, a stranger, had been one-tenth part so gross and so discourteous, you would most righteously have broke my head. It would have been in your part, as lover, to protect her from such in­solence. Protect her first, then, from yourself.’ 24

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‘Ay,’ quoth Mr. Gottesheim, who had been looking on with his hands behind his tall old back, ‘ay, that’s scripture truth.’ Fritz was staggered, not only by the Prince’s imperturbable superiority of manner, but by a glimmering consciousness that he himself was in the wrong. The appeal to liberal doctrines had, besides, unmanned him. ‘Well,’ said he, ‘if I was rude, I’ll own to it. I meant no ill, and did nothing out of my just rights; but I am above all these old vulgar notions too; and if I spoke sharp, I’ll ask her pardon.’ ‘Freely granted, Fritz,’ said Ottilia. ‘But all this doesn’t answer me,’ cried Fritz. ‘I ask what you two spoke about. She says she promised not to tell; well, then, I mean to know. Civility is civility; but I’ll be no man’s gull. I have a right to common justice, if I do keep company!’ ‘If you will ask Mr. Gottesheim,’ replied Otto, ‘you will find I have not spent my hours in idleness. I have, since I arose this morning, agreed to buy the farm. So far I will go to satisfy a curiosity which I condemn.’ ‘O, well, if there was business, that’s another matter,’ returned Fritz. ‘Though it beats me why you could not tell. But, of course, if the gentleman is to buy the farm, I suppose there would naturally be an end.’ ‘To be sure,’ said Mr. Gottesheim, with a strong accent of conviction. But Ottilia was much braver. ‘There now!’ she cried in triumph. ‘What did I tell you? I told you I was fighting your battles. Now you see! Think shame of your suspicious temper! You should go down upon your bended knees both to that gentleman and me.’

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Chapter 4 IN WHICH THE PRINCE COLLECTS OPINIONS BY THE WAY

A little before noon Otto, by a triumph of manœuvring, effected his escape. He was quit in this way of the ponderous gratitude of Mr. Killian, and of the confidential gratitude of poor Ottilia; but of Fritz he was not quit so readily. That young politician, brimming with mysterious glances, offered to lend his convoy as far as to the highroad; and Otto, in fear of some residuary jealousy and for the girl’s sake, had not the courage to gainsay him; but he regarded his companion with uneasy glances, and devoutly wished the business at an end. For some time Fritz walked by the mare in silence; and they had already traversed more than half the proposed distance when, with something of a blush, he looked up and opened fire. ‘Are you not,’ he asked, ‘what they call a socialist?’ ‘Why, no,’ returned Otto, ‘not precisely what they call so. Why do you ask?’ ‘I will tell you why,’ said the young man. ‘I saw from the first that you were a red progressional, and nothing but the fear of old Killian kept you back. And there, sir, you were right: old men are always cowards. But nowadays, you see, there are so many groups: you can never tell how far the likeliest kind of man may be prepared to go; and I was never sure you were one of the strong thinkers, till you hinted about women and free love.’ ‘Indeed,’ cried Otto, ‘I never said a word of such a thing.’ ‘Not you!’ cried Fritz. ‘Never a word to compromise! You was sowing seed: ground-bait, our president calls it. But it’s hard to deceive me, for I know all the agitators and their ways, and all the doctrines; and between you and me,’ lowering his voice, ‘I am myself affiliated. O, yes, I am a secret society man, and here is my medal.’ And drawing out a green ribbon that he wore about his neck, he held up, for Otto’s inspection, a pewter medal bearing the imprint of a Phœnix and the legend, Libertas. ‘And so now you see you may trust me,’ added Fritz. ‘I am none of your ale-house talkers; I am a convinced revolutionary.’ And he looked meltingly upon Otto. 26

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‘I see,’ replied the Prince; ‘that is very gratifying. Well, sir, the great thing for the good of one’s country is, first of all, to be a good man. All springs from there. For my part, although you are right in thinking that I have to do with politics, I am unfit by intellect and temper for a leading rôle. I was intended, I fear, for a subaltern. Yet we have all something to command, Mr. Fritz, if it be only our own temper; and a man about to marry must look closely to himself. The husband’s, like the prince’s, is a very artificial standing; and it is hard to be kind in either. Do you follow that?’ ‘O, yes, I follow that,’ replied the young man, sadly chop-fallen over the nature of the information he had elicited; and then brightening up: ‘Is it,’ he ventured, ‘is it for an arsenal that you have bought the farm?’ ‘We’ll see about that,’ the Prince answered, laughing. ‘You must not be too zealous. And in the meantime, if I were you, I would say nothing on the subject.’ ‘O, trust me, sir, for that,’ cried Fritz, as he pocketed a crown. ‘And you’ve let nothing out; for I suspected—I might say I knew it—from the first. And mind you, when a guide is required,’ he added, ‘I know all the forest paths.’ Otto rode away, chuckling. This talk with Fritz had vastly entertained him; nor was he altogether discontented with his bearing at the farm; men, he was able to tell himself, had behaved worse under smaller provocation. And, to harmonise all, the road and the April air were both delightful to his soul. Up and down, and to and fro, ever mounting through the wooded foothills, the broad, white highroad wound onward into Grünewald. On either hand the pines stood coolly rooted—green moss prospering, springs welling forth between their knuckled spurs; and though some were broad and stalwart, and others spiry and slender, yet all stood firm in the same attitude and with the same expression, like a silent army presenting arms. The road lay all the way apart from towns and villages, which it left on either hand. Here and there, indeed, in the bottom of green glens, the Prince could spy a few congregated roofs, or perhaps above him, on a shoulder, the solitary cabin of a woodman. But the highway was an international undertaking, and with its face set for distant cities, scorned the little life of Grünewald. Hence it was exceeding solitary. Near the frontier Otto met a detachment of his own troops marching in the hot dust; and he was recognised and somewhat feebly cheered as he rode by. But from that time forth and for a long while he was alone with the great woods. 27

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Gradually the spell of pleasure relaxed; his own thoughts returned, like stinging insects, in a cloud; and the talk of the night before, like a shower of buffets, fell upon his memory. He looked east and west for any comforter; and presently he was aware of a cross-road coming steeply down hill, and a horseman cautiously descending. A human voice or presence, like a spring in the desert, was now welcome in itself, and Otto drew bridle to await the coming of this stranger. He proved to be a very red-faced, thick-lipped countryman, with a pair of fat saddle-bags and a stone bottle at his waist; who, as soon as the Prince hailed him, jovially, if somewhat thickly, answered. At the same time he gave a beery yaw in the saddle. It was clear his bottle was no longer full. ‘Do you ride towards Mittwalden?’ asked the Prince. ‘As far as the cross-road to Tannenbrunn,’ the man replied. ‘Will you bear company?’ ‘With pleasure. I have even waited for you on the chance,’ answered Otto. By this time they were close alongside; and the man, with the countryfolk instinct, turned his cloudy vision first of all on his companion’s mount. ‘The devil!’ he cried. ‘You ride a bonny mare, friend!’ And then, his curiosity being satisfied about the essential, he turned his attention to that merely secondary matter, his companion’s face. He started. ‘The Prince!’ he cried, saluting, with another yaw that came near dismounting him. ‘I beg your pardon, your Highness, not to have reco’nised you at once.’ The Prince was vexed out of his self-possession. ‘Since you know me,’ he said, ‘it is unnecessary we should ride together. I will precede you, if you please.’ And he was about to set spur to the grey mare, when the half-drunken fellow, reaching over, laid his hand upon the rein. ‘Hark you,’ he said, ‘prince or no prince, that is not how one man should conduct himself with another. What! You’ll ride with me incog. and set me talking! But if I know you, you’ll preshede me, if you please! Spy!’ And the fellow, crimson with drink and injured vanity, almost spat the word into the Prince’s face. A horrid confusion came over Otto. He perceived that he had acted rudely, grossly presuming on his station. And perhaps a little shiver of physical alarm mingled with his remorse, for the fellow was very powerful and not more than half in the possession of his senses. ‘Take your hand from my rein,’ he said, with a sufficient assumption of command; and when the man, rather to his wonder, had obeyed: ‘You should understand, sir,’ he added, ‘that while I might be glad to ride with you as 28

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one person of sagacity with another, and so receive your true opinions, it would amuse me very little to hear the empty compliments you would address to me as Prince.’ ‘You think I would lie, do you?’ cried the man with the bottle, purpling deeper. ‘I know you would,’ returned Otto, entering entirely into his selfpossession. ‘You would not even show me the medal you wear about your neck.’ For he had caught a glimpse of a green ribbon at the fellow’s throat. The change was instantaneous: the red face became mottled with yellow; a thick-fingered, tottering hand made a clutch at the tell-tale ribbon. ‘Medal!’ the man cried, wonderfully sobered. ‘I have no medal.’ ‘Pardon me,’ said the Prince. ‘I will even tell you what that medal bears: a Phœnix burning, with the word Libertas.’ The medallist remaining speechless, ‘You are a pretty fellow,’ continued Otto, smiling, ‘to complain of incivility from the man whom you conspire to murder.’ ‘Murder!’ protested the man. ‘Nay, never that; nothing criminal for me!’ ‘You are strangely misinformed,’ said Otto. ‘Conspiracy itself is criminal, and insures the pain of death. Nay, sir, death it is; I will guarantee my accuracy. Not that you need be so deplorably affected, for I am no officer. But those who mingle with politics should look at both sides of the medal.’ ‘Your Highness . . .’ began the knight of the bottle. ‘Nonsense! you are a Republican,’ cried Otto; ‘what have you to do with highnesses? But let us continue to ride forward. Since you so much desire it, I cannot find it in my heart to deprive you of my company. And for that matter, I have a question to address to you. Why, being so great a body of men—for you are a great body—fifteen thousand, I have heard, but that will be understated; am I right?’ The man gurgled in his throat. ‘Why, then, being so considerable a party,’ resumed Otto, ‘do you not come before me boldly with your wants?—what do I say? with your commands? Have I the name of being passionately devoted to my throne? I can scarce suppose it. Come, then; show me your majority, and I will instantly resign. Tell this to your friends; assure them from me of my docility; assure them that, however they conceive of my deficiencies, they cannot suppose me more unfit to be a ruler than I do myself. I am one of the worst princes in Europe; will they improve on that?’ ‘Far be it from me . . .’ the man began. 29

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‘See, now, if you will not defend my government!’ cried Otto. ‘If I were you, I would leave conspiracies. You are as little fit to be a conspirator as I to be a king.’ ‘One thing I will say out,’ said the man. ‘It is not so much you that we complain of; it’s your lady.’ ‘Not a word, sir,’ said the Prince; and then after a moment’s pause, and in tones of some anger and contempt: ‘I once more advise you to have done with politics,’ he added; ‘and when next I see you, let me see you sober. A morning drunkard is the last man to sit in judgment even upon the worst of princes.’ ‘I have had a drop, but I have not been drinking,’ the man replied, triumphing in a sound distinction. ‘And if I had, what then? Nobody hangs by me. But my mill is standing idle, and I blame it on your wife. Am I alone in that? Go round and ask. Where are the mills? Where are the young men that should be working? Where is the currency? All paralysed. No, sir, it is not equal; for I suffer for your faults—I pay for them, by George, out of a poor man’s pocket. And what have you to do with mine? Drunk or sober, I can see my country going to hell, and I can see whose fault it is. And so now, I’ve said my say, and you may drag me to a stinking dungeon; what care I? I’ve spoke the truth, and so I’ll hold hard, and not intrude upon your Highness’s society.’ And the miller reined up and, clumsily enough, saluted. ‘You will observe, I have not asked your name,’ said Otto. ‘I wish you a good ride,’ and he rode on hard. But let him ride as he pleased, this interview with the miller was a chokepear, which he could not swallow. He had begun by receiving a reproof in manners, and ended by sustaining a defeat in logic, both from a man whom he despised. All his old thoughts returned with fresher venom. And by three in the afternoon, coming to the cross-roads for Beckstein, Otto decided to turn aside and dine there leisurely. Nothing at least could be worse than to go on as he was going. In the inn at Beckstein he remarked, immediately upon his entrance, an intelligent young gentleman dining, with a book in front of him. He had his own place laid close to the reader, and with a proper apology, broke ground by asking what he read. ‘I am perusing,’ answered the young gentleman, ‘the last work of the Herr Doctor Hohenstockwitz, cousin and librarian of your Prince here in Grünewald—a man of great erudition and some lambencies of wit.’ ‘I am acquainted,’ said Otto, ‘with the Herr Doctor, though not yet with his work.’ 30

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‘Two privileges that I must envy you,’ replied the young man, politely: ‘an honour in hand, a pleasure in the bush.’ ‘The Herr Doctor is a man much respected, I believe, for his attainments?’ asked the Prince. ‘He is, sir, a remarkable instance of the force of intellect,’ replied the reader. ‘Who of our young men know anything of his cousin, all reigning Prince although he be? Who but has heard of Doctor Gotthold? But intellectual merit, alone of all distinctions, has its base in nature.’ ‘I have the gratification of addressing a student—perhaps an author?’ Otto suggested. The young man somewhat flushed. ‘I have some claim to both distinctions, sir, as you suppose,’ said he; ‘there is my card. I am the licentiate Roederer, author of several works on the theory and practice of politics.’ ‘You immensely interest me,’ said the Prince; ‘the more so as I gather that here in Grünewald we are on the brink of revolution. Pray, since these have been your special studies, would you augur hopefully of such a movement?’ ‘I perceive,’ said the young author, with a certain vinegary twitch, ‘that you are unacquainted with my opuscula. I am a convinced authoritarian. I share none of those illusory, Utopian fancies with which empirics blind themselves and exasperate the ignorant. The day of these ideas is, believe me, past, or at least passing.’ ‘When I look about me——’ began Otto. ‘When you look about you,’ interrupted the licentiate, ‘you behold the ignorant. But in the laboratory of opinion, beside the studious lamp, we begin already to discard these figments. We begin to return to nature’s order, to what I might call, if I were to borrow from the language of therapeutics, the expectant treatment of abuses. You will not misunderstand me,’ he continued: ‘a country in the condition in which we find Grünewald, a prince such as your Prince Otto, we must explicitly condemn; they are behind the age. But I would look for a remedy not to brute convulsions, but to the natural supervenience of a more able sovereign. I should amuse you, perhaps,’ added the licentiate, with a smile, ‘I think I should amuse you if I were to explain my notion of a prince. We who have studied in the closet, no longer, in this age, propose ourselves for active service. The paths, we have perceived, are incompatible. I would not have a student on the throne, though I would have one near by for an adviser. I would set forward as prince a man of a good, medium understanding, lively rather than deep; a man of courtly manner, possessed of the double art to ingra31

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tiate and to command; receptive, accommodating, seductive. I have been observing you since your first entrance. Well, sir, were I a subject of Grünewald I should pray heaven to set upon the seat of government just such another as yourself.’ ‘The devil, you would!’ exclaimed the Prince. The licentiate, Roederer, laughed most heartily. ‘I thought I should astonish you,’ he said. ‘These are not the ideas of the masses.’ ‘They are not, I can assure you,’ Otto said. ‘Or rather,’ distinguished the licentiate, ‘not to-day. The time will come, however, when these ideas shall prevail.’ ‘You will permit me, sir, to doubt it,’ said Otto. ‘Modesty is always admirable,’ chuckled the theorist. ‘But yet I assure you, a man like you, with such a man as, say, Doctor Gotthold at your elbow, would be, for all practical issues, my ideal ruler.’ At this rate the hours sped pleasantly for Otto. But the licentiate unfortunately slept that night at Beckstein, where he was, being dainty in the saddle and given to half stages. And to find a convoy to Mittwalden, and thus mitigate the company of his own thoughts, the Prince had to make favour with a certain party of wood merchants from various states of the empire, who had been drinking together somewhat noisily at the far end of the apartment. The night had already fallen when they took the saddle. The merchants were very loud and mirthful; each had a face like a nor’west moon; and they played pranks with each others’ horses, and mingled songs and choruses, and alternately remembered and forgot the companion of their ride. Otto thus combined society and solitude, hearkening now to their chattering and empty talk, now to the voices of the encircling forest. The starlit dark, the faint wood airs, the clank of the horseshoes making broken music, accorded together and attuned his mind. And he was still in a most equal temper when the party reached the top of that long hill that overlooks Mittwalden. Down in the bottom of a bowl of forest, the lights of the little formal town glittered in a pattern, street crossing street; away by itself on the right, the palace was glowing like a factory. Although he knew not Otto, one of the wood merchants was a native of the state. ‘There,’ said he, pointing to the palace with his whip, ‘there is Jezebel’s inn.’ ‘What, do you call it that?’ cried another laughing. ‘Ay, that’s what they call it,’ returned the Grünewalder; and he broke into a song, which the rest, as people well acquainted with the words and air, instantly took up in chorus. Her Serene Highness Amalia 32

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Seraphina, Princess of Grünewald, was the heroine, Gondremark the hero of this ballad. Shame hissed in Otto’s ears. He reined up short and sat stunned in the saddle; and the singers continued to descend the hill without him. The song went to a rough, swashing, popular air; and long after the words became inaudible the swing of the music, rising and falling, echoed insult in the Prince’s brain. He fled the sounds. Hard by him on his right a road struck towards the palace, and he followed it through the thick shadows and branching alleys of the park. It was a busy place on a fine summer’s afternoon, when the court and burghers met and saluted; but at that hour of the night in the early spring it was deserted to the roosting birds. Hares rustled among the covert; here and there a statue stood glimmering, with its eternal gesture; here and there the echo of an imitation temple clattered ghostly to the trampling of the mare. Ten minutes brought him to the upper end of his own home garden, where the small stables opened, over a bridge, upon the park. The yard clock was striking the hour of ten; so was the big bell in the palace bell-tower; and, farther off, the belfries of the town. About the stable all else was silent but the stamping of stalled horses and the rattle of halters. Otto dismounted; and as he did so a memory came back to him: a whisper of dishonest grooms and stolen corn, once heard, long forgotten, and now recurring in the nick of opportunity. He crossed the bridge, and, going up to a window, knocked six or seven heavy blows in a particular cadence, and, as he did so, smiled. Presently a wicket was opened in the gate, and a man’s head appeared in the dim starlight. ‘Nothing to-night,’ said a voice. ‘Bring a lantern,’ said the Prince. ‘Dear heart a’ mercy!’ cried the groom. ‘Who’s that?’ ‘It is I, the Prince,’ replied Otto. ‘Bring a lantern, take in the mare, and let me through into the garden.’ The man remained silent for a while, his head still projecting through the wicket. ‘His Highness!’ he said at last. ‘And why did your Highness knock so strange?’ ‘It is a superstition in Mittwalden,’ answered Otto, ‘that it cheapens corn.’ With a sound like a sob the groom fled. He was very white when he returned, even by the light of the lantern; and his hand trembled as he undid the fastenings and took the mare. ‘Your Highness,’ he began at last, ‘for God’s sake . . . .’ And there he 33

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paused, oppressed with guilt. ‘For God’s sake, what?’ asked Otto, cheerfully. ‘For God’s sake, let us have cheaper corn, say I. Good-night!’ And he strode off into the garden, leaving the groom petrified once more. The garden descended by a succession of stone terraces to the level of the fish pond. On the far side the ground rose again, and was crowned by the confused roofs and gables of the palace. The modern pillared front, the ball-room, the great library, the princely apartments, the busy and illuminated quarters of that great house, all faced the town. The garden side was much older; and here it was almost dark; only a few windows quietly lighted at various elevations. The great square tower rose, thinning by stages like a telescope; and on the top of all the flag hung motionless. The garden, as it now lay in the dusk and glimmer of the starshine, breathed of April violets. Under night’s cavern arch the shrubs obscurely bustled. Through the plotted terraces and down the marble stairs the Prince rapidly descended, fleeing before uncomfortable thoughts. But, alas! from these there is no city of refuge. And now, when he was about midway of the descent, distant strains of music began to fall upon his ear from the ball-room, where the court was dancing. They reached him faint and broken, but they touched the keys of memory; and through and above them, Otto heard the ranting melody of the wood merchants’ song. Mere blackness seized upon his mind. Here he was, coming home; the wife was dancing, the husband had been playing a trick upon a lackey; and meanwhile, all about them, they were a by-word to their subjects. Such a prince, such a husband, such a man, as this Otto had become! And he sped the faster onward. Some way below he came unexpectedly upon a sentry; yet a little further, and he was challenged by a second; and as he crossed the bridge over the fish pond, an officer making the rounds stopped him once more. The parade of watch was more than usual; but curiosity was dead in Otto’s mind, and he only chafed at the interruption. The porter of the back postern admitted him, and started to behold him so disordered. Thence, hasting by private stairs and passages, he came at length unseen to his own chamber, tore off his clothes, and threw himself upon his bed in the dark. The music of the ball-room still continued to a very lively measure; and still, behind that, he heard in spirit the chorus of the merchants clanking down the hill.

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BOOK II Of Love and Politics

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Chapter 1 WHAT HAPPENED IN THE LIBRARY

At a quarter before six on the following morning Doctor Gotthold was already at his desk in the library; and with a small cup of black coffee at his elbow, and an eye occasionally wandering to the busts and the long array of many-coloured books, was quietly reviewing the labours of the day before. He was a man of about forty, flaxen-haired, with refined features a little worn, and bright eyes somewhat faded. Early to bed and early to rise, his life was devoted to two things: erudition and Rhine wine. An ancient friendship existed latent between him and Otto; they rarely met, but when they did it was to take up at once the thread of their suspended intimacy. Gotthold, the virgin priest of knowledge, had envied his cousin, for half a day, when he was married; he had never envied him his throne. Reading was not a popular diversion at the court of Grünewald; and that great, pleasant, sunshiny gallery of books and statues was, in practice, Gotthold’s private cabinet. On this particular Wednesday morning, however, he had not been long about his manuscript when a door opened and the Prince stepped into the apartment. The doctor watched him as he drew near, receiving, from each of the embayed windows in succession, a flush of morning sun; and Otto looked so gay, and walked so airily, he was so well dressed and brushed and frizzled, so point-de-vice, and of such a sovereign elegance, that the heart of his cousin the recluse was rather moved against him. ‘Good morning, Gotthold,’ said Otto, dropping in a chair. ‘Good morning, Otto,’ returned the librarian. ‘You are an early bird. Is this an accident, or do you begin reforming?’ ‘It is about time, I fancy,’ answered the Prince. ‘I cannot imagine,’ said the Doctor. ‘I am too sceptical to be an ethical adviser; and as for good resolutions, I believed in them when I was young. They are the colours of hope’s rainbow.’ ‘If you come to think of it,’ said Otto, ‘I am not a popular sovereign.’ And with a look he changed his statement to a question. ‘Popular? Well, there I would distinguish,’ answered Gotthold, 37

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leaning back and joining the tips of his fingers. ‘There are various kinds of popularity; the bookish, which is perfectly impersonal, as unreal as the nightmare; the politician’s, a mixed variety; and yours, which is the most personal of all. Women take to you; footmen adore you; it is as natural to like you as to pat a dog; and were you a saw-miller you would be the most popular citizen in Grünewald. As a prince—well, you are in the wrong trade. It is perhaps philosophical to recognise it as you do.’ ‘Perhaps philosophical?’ repeated Otto. ‘Yes, perhaps. I would not be dogmatic,’ answered Gotthold. ‘Perhaps philosophical, and certainly not virtuous,’ Otto resumed. ‘Not of a Roman virtue,’ chuckled the recluse. Otto drew his chair nearer to the table, leaned upon it with his elbow, and looked his cousin squarely in the face. ‘In short,’ he asked, ‘not manly?’ ‘Well,’ Gotthold hesitated, ‘not manly, if you will.’ And then with a laugh, ‘I did not know that you gave yourself out to be manly,’ he added. ‘It was one of the points that I inclined to like about you; inclined, I believe, to admire. The names of virtues exercise a charm on most of us; we must lay claim to all of them, however incompatible; we must all be both daring and prudent; we must all vaunt our pride and go to the stake for our humility. Not so you. Without compromise you were yourself: a pretty sight. I have always said it: none so void of all pretence as Otto.’ ‘Pretence and effort both!’ cried Otto. ‘A dead dog in a canal is more alive. And the question, Gotthold, the question that I have to face is this: Can I not, with effort and self-denial, can I not become a tolerable sovereign?’ ‘Never,’ replied Gotthold. ‘Dismiss the notion. And besides, dear child, you would not try.’ ‘Nay, Gotthold, I am not to be put by,’ said Otto. ‘If I am constitutionally unfit to be a sovereign, what am I doing with this money, with this palace, with these guards? And I—a thief—am to execute the law on others?’ ‘I admit the difficulty,’ said Gotthold. ‘Well, can I not try?’ continued Otto. ‘Am I not bound to try? And with the advice and help of such a man as you——’ ‘Me!’ cried the librarian. ‘Now, God forbid!’ Otto, though he was in no very smiling humour, could not forbear to smile. ‘Yet I was told last night,’ he laughed, ‘that with a man like me to impersonate, and a man like you to touch the springs, a very 38

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possible government could be composed.’ ‘Now I wonder in what diseased imagination,’ Gotthold said, ‘that preposterous monster saw the light of day?’ ‘It was one of your own trade—a writer; one Roederer,’ said Otto. ‘Roederer! an ignorant puppy!’ cried the librarian. ‘You are ungrateful,’ said Otto. ‘He is one of your professed admirers.’ ‘Is he?’ cried Gotthold, obviously impressed. ‘Come, that is a good account of the young man. I must read his stuff again. It is the rather to his credit, as our views are opposite. The east and west are not more opposite. Can I have converted him? But no; the incident belongs to Fairyland.’ ‘You are not then,’ asked the Prince, ‘an authoritarian?’ ‘I? God bless me, no!’ said Gotthold. ‘I am a red, dear child.’ ‘That brings me then to my next point, and by a natural transition. If I am so clearly unfitted for my post,’ the Prince asked; ‘if my friends admit it, if my subjects clamour for my downfall, if revolution is preparing at this hour, must I not go forth to meet the inevitable? should I not save these horrors and be done with these absurdities? in a word, should I not abdicate? O, believe me, I feel the ridicule, the vast abuse of language,’ he added, wincing, ‘but even a principulus like me cannot resign; he must make a great gesture, and come buskined forth, and abdicate.’ ‘Ay,’ said Gotthold, ‘or else stay where he is. What gnat has bitten you to-day? Do you not know that you are touching, with lay hands, the very holiest inwards of philosophy, where madness dwells? Ay, Otto, madness; for in the serene temples of the wise, the inmost shrine, which we carefully keep locked, is full of spiders’ webs. All men, all, are fundamentally useless; nature tolerates, she does not need, she does not use them: sterile flowers! All—down to the fellow swinking in a byre, whom fools point out for the exception—all are useless; all weave ropes of sand; or like a child that has breathed on a window, write and obliterate, write and obliterate, idle words! Talk of it no more. That way, I tell you, madness lies.’ The speaker rose from his chair and then sat down again. He laughed a little laugh, and then, changing his tone, resumed: ‘Yes, dear child, we are not here to do battle with giants; we are here to be happy like the flowers, if we can be. It is because you could, that I have always secretly admired you. Cling to that trade; believe me, it is the right one. Be happy, be idle, be airy. To the devil with all casuistry! and leave the state to Gondremark, as heretofore. He does it well enough, they say; and his vanity enjoys the situation.’ 39

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‘Gotthold,’ cried Otto, ‘what is this to me? Useless is not the question; I cannot rest at uselessness; I must be useful or I must be noxious—one or other. I grant you the whole thing, prince and principality alike, is pure absurdity, a stroke of satire; and that a banker or the man who keeps an inn has graver duties. But now, when I have washed my hands of it three years, and left all—labour, responsibility, and honour and enjoyment too, if there be any—to Gondremark and to—Seraphina——’ He hesitated at the name, and Gotthold glanced aside. ‘Well,’ the Prince continued, ‘what has come of it? Taxes, army, cannon—why, it’s like a box of lead soldiers! And the people sick at the folly of it, and fired with the injustice! And war, too—I hear of war—war in this teapot! What a complication of absurdity and disgrace! And when the inevitable end arrives—the revolution—who will be to blame in the sight of God, who will be gibbeted in public opinion? I! Prince Puppet!’ ‘I thought you had despised public opinion,’ said Gotthold. ‘I did,’ said Otto, sombrely, ‘but now I do not. I am growing old. And then, Gotthold, there is Seraphina. She is loathed in this country that I brought her to and suffered her to spoil. Yes, I gave it her as a plaything, and she has broken it: a fine Prince, an admirable Princess! Even her life—I ask you, Gotthold, is her life safe?’ ‘It is safe enough to-day,’ replied the librarian; ‘but since you ask me seriously, I would not answer for to-morrow. She is ill-advised.’ ‘And by whom? By this Gondremark, to whom you counsel me to leave my country,’ cried the Prince. ‘Rare advice! The course that I have been following all these years, to come at last to this. O, ill-advised! if that were all! See now, there is no sense in beating about the bush between two men: you know what scandal says of her?’ Gotthold, with pursed lips, silently nodded. ‘Well, come, you are not very cheering as to my conduct as the Prince; have I even done my duty as a husband?’ Otto asked. ‘Nay, nay,’ said Gotthold, earnestly and eagerly, ‘this is another chapter. I am an old celibate, an old monk. I cannot advise you in your marriage.’ ‘Nor do I require advice,’ said Otto, rising. ‘All of this must cease.’ And he began to walk to and fro with his hands behind his back. ‘Well, Otto, may God guide you!’ said Gotthold, after a considerable silence. ‘I cannot.’ ‘From what does all this spring?’ said the Prince, stopping in his walk. ‘What am I to call it? Diffidence? The fear of ridicule? Inverted vanity? What matter names, if it has brought me to this? I could never 40

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bear to be bustling about nothing; I was ashamed of this toy kingdom from the first; I could not tolerate that people should fancy I believed in a thing so patently absurd! I would do nothing that cannot be done smiling. I have a sense of humour forsooth! I must know better than my maker. And it was the same thing in my marriage,’ he added more hoarsely. ‘I did not believe this girl could care for me; I must not intrude; I must preserve the foppery of my indifference. What an impotent picture!’ ‘Ay, we have the same blood,’ moralised Gotthold. ‘You are drawing, with fine strokes, the character of the born sceptic.’ ‘Sceptic?—coward!’ cried Otto. ‘Coward is the word. A springless, putty-hearted, cowering coward!’ And as the Prince rapped out the words in tones of unusual vigour, a little, stout, old gentleman, opening a door behind Gotthold, received them fairly in the face. With his parrot’s beak for a nose, his pursed mouth, his little goggling eyes, he was the picture of formality; and in ordinary circumstances, strutting behind the drum of his corporation, he impressed the beholder with a certain air of frozen dignity and wisdom. But at the smallest contrariety, his trembling hands and disconnected gestures betrayed the weakness at the root. And now, when he was thus surprisingly received in that library of Mittwalden Palace, which was the customary haunt of silence, his hands went up into the air as if he had been shot, and he cried aloud with the scream of an old woman. ‘O!’ he gasped, recovering, ‘Your Highness! I beg ten thousand pardons. But your Highness at such an hour in the library!—a circumstance so unusual as your Highness’s presence was a thing I could not be expected to foresee.’ ‘There is no harm done, Herr Cancellarius,’ said Otto. ‘I came upon the errand of a moment: some papers I left over night with the Herr Doctor,’ said the Chancellor of Grünewald. ‘Herr Doctor, if you will kindly give me them, I will intrude no longer.’ Gotthold unlocked a drawer and handed a bundle of manuscript to the old gentleman, who prepared, with fitting salutations, to take his departure. ‘Herr Greisengesang, since we have met,’ said Otto, ‘let us talk.’ ‘I am honoured by his Highness’s commands,’ replied the Chancellor. ‘All has been quiet since I left?’ asked the Prince, resuming his seat. ‘The usual business, your Highness,’ answered Greisengesang; ‘punctual trifles: huge, indeed, if neglected, but trifles when discharged. 41

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Your Highness is most zealously obeyed.’ ‘Obeyed, Herr Cancellarius?’ returned the Prince. ‘And when have I obliged you with an order? Replaced, let us rather say. But to touch upon these trifles; instance me a few.’ ‘The routine of government, from which your Highness has so wisely dissociated his leisure . . .’ began Greisengesang. ‘We will leave my leisure, sir,’ said Otto. ‘Approach the facts.’ ‘The routine of business was proceeded with,’ replied the official, now visibly twittering. ‘It is very strange, Herr Cancellarius, that you should so persistently avoid my questions,’ said the Prince. ‘You tempt me to suppose a purpose in your dulness. I have asked you whether all was quiet; do me the pleasure to reply.’ ‘Perfectly—O, perfectly quiet,’ jerked the ancient puppet, with every signal of untruth. ‘I make a note of these words,’ said the Prince, gravely. ‘You assure me, your sovereign, that since the date of my departure nothing has occurred of which you owe me an account.’ ‘I take your Highness, I take the Herr Doctor to witness,’ cried Greisengesang, ‘that I have had no such expression.’ ‘Halt!’ said the Prince; and then, after a pause: ‘Herr Greisengesang, you are an old man, and you served my father before you served me,’ he added. ‘It consists neither with your dignity nor mine, that you should babble excuses and stumble possibly upon untruths. Collect your thoughts; and then categorically inform me of all you have been charged to hide.’ Gotthold, stooping very low over his desk, appeared to have resumed his labours; but his shoulders heaved with subterranean merriment. The Prince waited, drawing his handkerchief quietly through his fingers. ‘Your Highness, in this informal manner,’ said the old gentleman at last, ‘and being unavoidably deprived of documents, it would be difficult, it would be impossible, to do justice to the somewhat grave occurrences which have transpired.’ ‘I will not criticise your attitude,’ replied the Prince. ‘I desire that, between you and me, all should be done gently; for I have not forgotten, my old friend, that you were kind to me from the first, and for a period of years a faithful servant. I will thus dismiss the matters on which you waive immediate inquiry. But you have certain papers actually in your hand. Come, Herr Greisengesang, there is at least one point for which you have authority. Enlighten me on that.’ 42

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‘On that?’ cried the old gentleman. ‘O, that is a trifle; a matter, your Highness, of police; a detail of a purely administrative order. These are simply a selection of the papers seized upon the English traveller.’ ‘Seized?’ echoed Otto. ‘In what sense? Explain yourself.’ ‘Sir John Crabtree,’ interposed Gotthold, looking up, ‘was arrested yesterday evening.’ ‘Is this so, Herr Cancellarius?’ demanded Otto, sternly. ‘It was judged right, your Highness,’ protested Greisengesang. ‘The decree was in due form, invested with your Highness’s authority by procuration. I am but an agent; I had no status to prevent the measure.’ ‘This man, my guest, has been arrested,’ said the Prince. ‘On what grounds, sir? With what colour of pretence?’ The Chancellor stammered. ‘Your Highness will perhaps find the reason in these documents,’ said Gotthold, pointing with the tail of his pen. Otto thanked his cousin with a look. ‘Give them to me,’ he said, addressing the Chancellor. But that gentleman visibly hesitated to obey. ‘Baron von Gondremark,’ he said, ‘has made the affair his own. I am in this case a mere messenger; and as such, I am not clothed with any capacity to communicate the documents I carry. Herr Doctor, I am convinced you will not fail to bear me out.’ ‘I have heard a great deal of nonsense,’ said Gotthold, ‘and most of it from you; but this beats all.’ ‘Come, sir,’ said Otto, rising, ‘the papers. I command.’ Herr Greisengesang instantly gave way. ‘With your Highness’s permission,’ he said, ‘and laying at his feet my most submiss apologies, I will now hasten to attend his further orders in the Chancery.’ ‘Herr Cancellarius, do you see this chair?’ said Otto. ‘There is where you shall attend my further orders. O, now, no more!’ he cried, with a gesture, as the old man opened his lips. ‘You have sufficiently marked your zeal to your employer; and I begin to weary of a moderation you abuse.’ The Chancellor moved to the appointed chair and took his seat in silence. ‘And now,’ said Otto, opening the roll, ‘what is all this? it looks like the manuscript of a book.’ ‘It is,’ said Gotthold, ‘the manuscript of a book of travels.’ ‘You have read it, Doctor Hohenstockwitz?’ asked the Prince. ‘Nay, I but saw the title page,’ replied Gotthold. ‘But the roll was 43

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given to me open, and I heard no word of any secrecy.’ Otto dealt the Chancellor an angry glance. ‘I see,’ he went on. ‘The papers of an author seized at this date of the world’s history, in a state so petty and so ignorant as Grünewald, here is indeed an ignominious folly. Sir,’ to the Chancellor, ‘I marvel to find you in so scurvy an employment. On your conduct to your Prince I will not dwell; but to descend to be a spy! For what else can it be called? To seize the papers of this gentleman, the private papers of a stranger, the toil of a life, perhaps—to open, and to read them. And what have we to do with books? The Herr Doctor might perhaps be asked for his advice; but we have no index expurgatorius in Grünewald. Had we but that, we should be the most absolute parody and farce upon this tawdry earth.’ Yet, even while Otto spoke, he had continued to unfold the roll; and now, when it lay fully open, his eye rested on the title page elaborately written in red ink. It ran thus: ‘Memoirs of a Visit to the Various Courts of Europe, by Sir John Crabtree, Baronet.’ Below was a list of chapters, each bearing the name of one of the European Courts; and among these the nineteenth and the last upon the list was dedicated to Grünewald. ‘Ah! The Court of Grünewald!’ said Otto, ‘that should be droll reading.’ And his curiosity itched for it. ‘A methodical dog, this English Baronet,’ said Gotthold. ‘Each chapter written and finished on the spot. I shall look for his work when it appears.’ ‘It would be odd, now, just to glance at it,’ said Otto, wavering. Gotthold’s brow darkened, and he looked out of window. But though the Prince understood the reproof, his weakness prevailed. ‘I will,’ he said, with an uneasy laugh, ‘I will, I think, just glance at it.’ So saying, he resumed his seat and spread the traveller’s manuscript upon the table.

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Chapter 2 ‘ON THE COURT OF GRÜNEWALD,’ BEING A PORTION OF THE TRAVELLER’S MANUSCRIPT

It may well be asked (it was thus the English traveller began his nineteenth chapter) why I should have chosen Grünewald out of so many other states equally petty, formal, dull, and corrupt. Accident, indeed, decided, and not I; but I have seen no reason to regret my visit. The spectacle of this small society macerating in its own abuses was not perhaps instructive, but I have found it exceedingly diverting. The reigning Prince, Otto Johann Friedrich, a young man of imperfect education, questionable valour, and no scintilla of capacity, has fallen into entire public contempt. It was with difficulty that I obtained an interview, for he is frequently absent from a court where his presence is unheeded, and where his only rôle is to be a cloak for the amours of his wife. At last, however, on the third occasion when I visited the palace, I found this sovereign in the exercise of his inglorious function, with the wife on one hand and the lover on the other. He is not ill-looking; he has hair of a ruddy gold, which naturally curls, and his eyes are dark, a com­bination which I always regard as the mark of some congenital deficiency, physical or moral; his features are irregular but pleasing; the nose perhaps a little short, and the mouth a little womanish; his address is excellent, and he can express himself with point. But to pierce below these externals is to come on a vacuity of any sterling quality, a deliquescence of the moral nature, a frivolity and inconsequence of purpose that mark the nearly perfect fruit of a decadent age. He has a worthless smattering of many subjects, but a grasp of none. ‘I soon weary of a pursuit,’ he said to me, laughing; it would almost appear as if he took a pride in his incapacity and lack of moral courage. The results of his dilettantism are to be seen in every field; he is a bad fencer, a second-rate horseman, dancer, shot; he sings—I have heard him—and he sings like a child; he writes intolerable verses in more than doubtful French; he acts like the common amateur; and in short there is no end to the number of the things that he does, and does badly. His one manly taste is for the chase. In sum, he is but a 45

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plexus of weaknesses; the singing chambermaid of the stage, tricked out in man’s apparel and mounted on a circus horse. I have seen this poor phantom of a prince riding out alone or with a few huntsmen, disregarded by all, and I have been even grieved for the bearer of so futile and melancholy an existence. The last Merovingians may have looked not otherwise. The Princess Amalia Seraphina, a daughter of the Grand Ducal house of Toggenburg-Tannhäuser, would be equally inconsiderable if she were not a cutting instrument in the hands of an ambitious man. She is much younger than the Prince, a girl of two-and-twenty, sick with vanity, superficially clever, and fundamentally a fool. She has a red-brown rolling eye, too large for her face, and with sparks of both levity and ferocity; her forehead is high and narrow, her figure thin and a little stooping. Her manners, her conversation, which she interlards with French, her very tastes and ambitions, are alike assumed; and the assumption is ungracefully apparent: Hoyden playing Cleopatra. I should judge her to be incapable of truth. In private life a girl of this description embroils the peace of families, walks attended by a troop of scowling swains, and passes, once at least, through the divorce court; it is a common and, except to the cynic, an uninteresting type. On the throne, however, and in the hands of a man like Gondremark, she may become the authoress of serious public evils. Gondremark, the true ruler of this unfortunate country, is a more complex study. His position in Grünewald, to which he is a foreigner, is eminently false; and that he should maintain it as he does, a very miracle of impudence and dexterity. His speech, his face, his policy, are all double: heads and tails. Which of the two extremes may be his actual design he were a bold man who should offer to decide. Yet I will hazard the guess that he follows both experimentally, and awaits, at the hand of destiny, one of those directing hints of which she is so lavish to the wise. On the one hand, as Maire de Palais to the incompetent Otto, and using the love-sick Princess for a tool and mouthpiece, he pursues a policy of arbitrary power and territorial aggrandisement. He has called out the whole capable male population of the state to military service; he has bought cannon; he has tempted away promising officers from foreign armies; and he now begins, in his international relations, to assume the swaggering port and the vague threatful language of a bully. The idea of extending Grünewald may appear absurd, but the little state is advantageously placed, its neighbours are all defenceless; and if at any moment the jealousies of the greater courts should neutral46

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ise each other, an active policy might double the principality both in population and extent. Certainly at least the scheme is entertained in the court of Mittwalden; nor do I myself regard it as entirely desperate. The margravate of Brandenburgh has grown from as small beginnings to a formidable power; and though it is late in the day to try adventurous policies, and the age of war seems ended, Fortune, we must not forget, still blindly turns her wheel for men and nations. Concurrently with, and tributary to, these warlike preparations, crushing taxes have been levied, journals have been suppressed, and the country, which three years ago was prosperous and happy, now stagnates in a forced inaction, gold has become a curiosity, and the mills stand idle on the mountain streams. On the other hand, in his second capacity of popular tribune, Gondremark is the incarnation of the free lodges, and sits at the centre of an organised conspiracy against the state. To any such movement my sympathies were early acquired, and I would not willingly let fall a word that might embarrass or retard the revolution. But to show that I speak of knowledge, and not as the reporter of mere gossip, I may mention that I have myself been present at a meeting where the details of a republican Constitution were minutely debated and arranged; and I may add that Gondremark was throughout referred to by the speakers as their captain in action and the arbiter of their disputes. He has taught his dupes (for so I must regard them) that his power of resistance to the Princess is limited, and at each fresh stretch of authority persuades them, with specious reasons, to postpone the hour of insurrection. Thus (to give some instances of his astute diplomacy) he salved over the decree enforcing military service, under the plea that to be well drilled and exercised in arms was ever a necessary preparation for revolt. And the other day, when it began to be rumoured abroad that a war was being forced on a reluctant neighbour, the Grand Duke of Gerolstein, and I made sure it would be the signal for an instant rising, I was struck dumb with wonder to find that even this had been prepared and was to be accepted. I went from one to another in the Liberal camp, and all were in the same story, all had been drilled and schooled and fitted out with vacuous argument. ‘The lads had better see some real fighting,’ they said; ‘and besides, it will be as well to capture Gerolstein: we can then extend to our neighbours the blessing of liberty on the same day that we snatch it for ourselves; and the republic will be all the stronger to resist, if the kings of Europe should band themselves together to reduce it.’ I know not which of the two I should admire the more: the simplicity of the multitude or 47

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the audacity of the adventurer. But such are the subtleties, such the quibbling reasons, with which he blinds and leads this people. How long a course so tortuous can be pursued with safety I am incapable of guessing; not long, one would suppose; and yet this singular man has been treading the mazes for five years, and his favour at court and his popularity among the lodges still endure unbroken. I have the privilege of slightly knowing him. Heavily and somewhat clumsily built, of a vast, disjointed, rambling frame, he can still pull himself together, and figure, not without admiration, in the saloon or the ball-room. His hue and temperament are plentifully bilious; he has a saturnine eye; his cheek is of a dark blue where he has been shaven. Essentially he is to be numbered among the man-haters, a convinced contemner of his fellows. Yet he is himself of a commonplace ambition and greedy of applause. In talk, he is remarkable for a thirst of information, loving rather to hear than to communicate; for sound and studious views; and, judging by the extreme short-sightedness of common politicians, for a remarkable prevision of events. All this, however, without grace, pleasantry, or charm, heavily set forth, with a dull countenance. In our numerous conversations, although he has always heard me with deference, I have been conscious throughout of a sort of ponderous finessing hard to tolerate. He produces none of the effect of a gentleman; devoid not merely of pleasantry, but of all attention or communicative warmth of bearing. No gentleman, besides, would so parade his amours with the Princess; still less repay the Prince for his long-suffering with a studied insolence of demeanour and the fabrication of insulting nicknames, such as Prince Featherhead, which run from ear to ear and create a laugh throughout the country. Gondremark has thus some of the clumsier characters of the self-made man, combined with an inordinate, almost a besotted, pride of intellect and birth. Heavy, bilious, selfish, inornate, he sits upon this court and country like an incubus. But it is probable that he preserves softer gifts for necessary purposes. Indeed, it is certain, although he vouchsafed none of it to me, that this cold and stolid politician possesses to a great degree the art of ingratiation, and can be all things to all men. Hence there has probably sprung up the idle legend that in private life he is a gross romping voluptuary. Nothing, at least, can well be more surprising than the terms of his connection with the Princess. Older than her husband, certainly uglier, and, according to the feeble ideas common among women, in every particular less pleasing, he has not only seized the complete command of all her thought and action, but has imposed on her in 48

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public a humiliating part. I do not here refer to the complete sacrifice of every rag of her reputation; for to many women these extremities are in themselves attractive. But there is about the court a certain lady of a dishevelled reputation, a Countess von Rosen, wife or widow of a cloudy count, no longer in her second youth and already bereft of some of her attractions, who unequivocally occupies the station of the Baron’s mistress. I had thought, at first, that she was but a hired accomplice, a mere blind or buffer for the more important sinner. A few hours’ acquaintance with Madame von Rosen for ever dispelled the illusion. She is one rather to make than to prevent a scandal, and she values none of those bribes—money, honours, or employment— with which the situation might be gilded. Indeed, as a person frankly bad, she pleased me, in the court of Grünewald, like a piece of nature. The power of this man over the Princess is, therefore, without bounds. She has sacrificed to the adoration with which he has inspired her not only her marriage vow and every shred of public decency, but that vice of jealousy which is so much dearer to the female sex than either intrinsic honour or outward consideration. Nay, more: a young, although not a very attractive woman, and a Princess both by birth and fact, she submits to the triumphant rivalry of one who might be her mother as to years, and who is so manifestly her inferior in station. This is one of the mysteries of the human heart. But the rage of illicit love, when it is once indulged, appears to grow by feeding; and to a person of the character and temperament of this unfortunate young lady, almost any depth of degradation is within the reach of possibility.

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Chapter 3 THE PRINCE AND THE ENGLISH TRAVELLER

So far Otto read, with waxing indignation; and here his fury overflowed. He tossed the roll upon the table and stood up. ‘This man,’ he said, ‘is a devil. A filthy imagination, an ear greedy of evil, a ponderous malignity of thought and language: I grow like him by the reading! Chancellor, where is this fellow lodged?’ ‘He was committed to the Flag Tower,’ replied Greisengesang, ‘in the Gamiani apartment.’ ‘Lead me to him,’ said the Prince; and then a thought striking him, ‘Was it for that,’ he asked, ‘that I found so many sentries in the garden?’ ‘Your Highness, I am unaware,’ answered Greisengesang, true to his policy. ‘The disposition of the guards is a matter distinct from my functions.’ Otto turned upon the old man fiercely, but ere he had time to speak, Gotthold touched him on the arm. He swallowed his wrath with a great effort. ‘It is well,’ he said, taking the roll. ‘Follow me to the Flag Tower.’ The Chancellor gathered himself together, and the two set forward. It was a long and complicated voyage; for the library was in the wing of the new buildings, and the tower which carried the flag was in the old schloss upon the garden. By a great variety of stairs and corridors, they came out at last upon a patch of gravelled court; the garden peeped through a high grating with a flash of green; tall, old, gabled buildings mounted on every side; the Flag Tower climbed, stage after stage, into the blue; and high over all, among the building daws, the yellow flag wavered in the wind. A sentinel at the foot of the tower stairs presented arms; another paced the first landing; and a third was stationed before the door of the extemporised prison. ‘We guard this mud-bag like a jewel,’ Otto sneered. The Gamiani apartment was so called from an Italian doctor who had imposed on the credulity of a former prince. The rooms were large, airy, pleasant, and looked upon the garden; but the walls were of great thickness (for the tower was old), and the windows were heavily barred. The Prince, followed by the Chancellor, still trotting to keep 50

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up with him, brushed swiftly through the little library and the long saloon, and burst like a thunderbolt into the bedroom at the further end. Sir John was finishing his toilet; a man of fifty, hard, uncompromising, able, with the eye and teeth of physical courage. He was unmoved by the irruption, and bowed with a sort of sneering ease. ‘To what am I to attribute the honour of this visit?’ he asked. ‘You have eaten my bread,’ replied Otto, ‘you have taken my hand, you have been received under my roof. When did I fail you in courtesy? What have you asked that was not granted as to an honoured guest? And here, sir,’ tapping fiercely on the manuscript, ‘here is your return.’ ‘Your Highness has read my papers?’ said the Baronet. ‘I am honoured indeed. But the sketch is most imperfect. I shall now have much to add. I can say that the Prince, whom I had accused of idleness, is zealous in the department of police, taking upon himself those duties that are most distasteful. I shall be able to relate the burlesque incident of my arrest, and the singular interview with which you honour me at present. For the rest, I have already communicated with my Ambassador at Vienna; and unless you propose to murder me, I shall be at liberty, whether you please or not, within the week. For I hardly fancy the future empire of Grünewald is yet ripe to go to war with England. I conceive I am a little more than quits. I owe you no explanation; yours has been the wrong. You, if you have studied my writing with intelligence, owe me a large debt of gratitude. And to conclude, as I have not yet finished my toilet, I imagine the courtesy of a turnkey to a prisoner would induce you to withdraw.’ There was some paper on the table, and Otto, sitting down, wrote a passport in the name of Sir John Crabtree. ‘Affix the seal, Herr Cancellarius,’ he said, in his most princely manner, as he rose. Greisengesang produced a red portfolio, and affixed the seal in the unpoetic guise of an adhesive stamp; nor did his perturbed and clumsy movements at all lessen the comedy of the performance. Sir John looked on with a malign enjoyment; and Otto chafed, regretting, when too late, the unnecessary royalty of his command and gesture. But at length the Chancellor had finished his piece of prestidigitation, and, without waiting for an order, had countersigned the passport. Thus regularised, he returned it to Otto with a bow. ‘You will now,’ said the Prince, ‘order one of my own carriages to be prepared; see it, with your own eyes, charged with Sir John’s effects, and have it waiting within the hour behind the Pheasant House. Sir 51

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John departs this morning for Vienna.’ The Chancellor took his elaborate departure. ‘Here, sir, is your passport,’ said Otto, turning to the Baronet. ‘I regret it from my heart that you have met inhospitable usage.’ ‘Well, there will be no English war,’ returned Sir John. ‘Nay, sir,’ said Otto, ‘you surely owe me your civility. Matters are now changed, and we stand again upon the footing of two gentlemen. It was not I who ordered your arrest; I returned late last night from hunting; and as you cannot blame me for your imprisonment, you may even thank me for your freedom.’ ‘And yet you read my papers,’ said the traveller, shrewdly. ‘There, sir, I was wrong,’ returned Otto; ‘and for that I ask your pardon. You can scarce refuse it, for your own dignity, to one who is a plexus of weaknesses. Nor was the fault entirely mine. Had the papers been innocent, it would have been at most an indiscretion. Your own guilt is the sting of my offence.’ Sir John regarded Otto with an approving twinkle; then he bowed, but still in silence. ‘Well, sir, as you are now at your entire disposal, I have a favour to beg of your indulgence,’ continued the Prince. ‘I have to request that you will walk with me alone into the garden so soon as your convenience permits.’ ‘From the moment that I am a free man,’ Sir John replied, this time with perfect courtesy, ‘I am wholly at your Highness’s command; and if you will excuse a rather summary toilet, I will even follow you as I am.’ ‘I thank you, sir,’ said Otto. So without more delay, the Prince leading, the pair proceeded down through the echoing stairway of the tower, and out through the grating, into the ample air and sunshine of the morning, and among the terraces and flower-beds of the garden. They crossed the fish-pond, where the carp were leaping as thick as bees; they mounted, one after another, the various flights of stairs, snowed upon, as they went, with April blossoms, and marching in time to the great orchestra of birds. Nor did Otto pause till they had reached the highest terrace of the garden. Here was a gate into the park, and hard by, under a tuft of laurel, a marble garden seat. Hence they looked down on the green tops of many elm-trees, where the rooks were busy; and, beyond that, upon the palace roof, and the yellow banner flying in the blue. ‘I pray you to be seated, sir,’ said Otto. 52

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Sir John complied without a word; and for some seconds Otto walked to and fro before him, plunged in angry thought. The birds were all singing for a wager. ‘Sir,’ said the Prince at length, turning towards the Englishman, ‘you are to me, except by the conventions of society, a perfect stranger. Of your character and wishes I am ignorant. I have never wittingly disobliged you. There is a difference in station, which I desire to waive. I would, if you still think me entitled to so much consideration—I would be regarded simply as a gentleman. Now, sir, I did wrong to glance at these papers, which I here return to you; but if curiosity be undignified, as I am free to own, falsehood is both cowardly and cruel. I opened your roll; and what did I find—what did I find about my wife? Lies!’ he broke out. ‘They are lies! There are not, so help me God! four words of truth in your intolerable libel! You are a man; you are old, and might be the girl’s father; you are a gentleman; you are a scholar, and have learned refinement; and you rake together all this vulgar scandal, and propose to print it in a public book! Such is your chivalry! But, thank God, sir, she has still a husband. You say, sir, in that paper in your hand, that I am a bad fencer; I have to request from you a lesson in the art. The park is close behind; yonder is the Pheasant House, where you will find your carriage; should I fall, you know, sir—you have written it in your paper—how little my movements are regarded; I am in the custom of disappearing; it will be one more disappearance; and long before it has awakened a remark, you may be safe across the border.’ ‘You will observe,’ said Sir John, ‘that what you ask is impossible.’ ‘And if I struck you?’ cried the Prince, with a sudden menacing flash. ‘It would be a cowardly blow,’ returned the Baronet, unmoved, ‘for it would make no change. I cannot draw upon a reigning sovereign.’ ‘And it is this man, to whom you dare not offer satisfaction, that you choose to insult!’ cried Otto. ‘Pardon me,’ said the traveller, ‘you are unjust. It is because you are a reigning sovereign that I cannot fight with you; and it is for the same reason that I have a right to criticise your action and your wife. You are in everything a public creature; you belong to the public, body and bone. You have with you the law, the muskets of the army, and the eyes of spies. We, on our side, have but one weapon—truth.’ ‘Truth!’ echoed the Prince, with a gesture. There was another silence. ‘Your Highness,’ said Sir John at last, ‘you must not expect grapes 53

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from a thistle. I am old and a cynic. Nobody cares a rush for me; and on the whole, after the present interview, I scarce know anybody that I like better than yourself. You see, I have changed my mind, and have the uncommon virtue to avow the change. I tear up this stuff before you, here in your own garden; I ask your pardon, I ask the pardon of the Princess; and I give you my word of honour as a gentleman and an old man, that when my book of travels shall appear it shall not contain so much as the name of Grünewald. And yet it was a racy chapter! But had your Highness only read about the other courts! I am a carrion crow; but it is not my fault, after all, that the world is such a nauseous kennel.’ ‘Sir,’ said Otto, ‘is the eye not jaundiced?’ ‘Nay,’ cried the traveller, ‘very likely. I am one who goes sniffing; I am no poet. I believe in a better future for the world; or, at all accounts, I do most potently disbelieve in the present. Rotten eggs is the burthen of my song. But indeed, your Highness, when I meet with any merit, I do not think that I am slow to recognise it. This is a day that I shall still recall with gratitude, for I have found a sovereign with some manly virtues; and for once—old courtier and old radical as I am—it is from the heart and quite sincerely that I can request the honour of kissing your Highness’s hand?’ ‘Nay, sir,’ said Otto, ‘to my heart!’ And the Englishman, taken at unawares, was clasped for a moment in the Prince’s arms. ‘And now, sir,’ added Otto, ‘there is the Pheasant House; close behind it you will find my carriage, which I pray you to accept. God speed you to Vienna!’ ‘In the impetuosity of youth,’ replied Sir John, ‘your Highness has overlooked one circumstance. I am still fasting.’ ‘Well, sir,’ said Otto, smiling, ‘you are your own master; you may go or stay. But I warn you, your friend may prove less powerful than your enemies. The Prince, indeed, is thoroughly on your side; he has all the will to help; but to whom do I speak?—you know better than I do, he is not alone in Grünewald.’ ‘There is a deal in position,’ returned the traveller, gravely nodding. ‘Gondremark loves to temporise; his policy is below ground, and he fears all open courses; and now that I have seen you act with so much spirit, I will cheerfully risk myself on your protection. Who knows? You may be yet the better man.’ ‘Do you indeed believe so?’ cried the Prince. ‘You put life into my heart!’ 54

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‘I will give up sketching portraits,’ said the Baronet. ‘I am a blind owl; I had misread you strangely. And yet remember this; a sprint is one thing, and to run all day another. For I still mistrust your constitution; the short nose, the hair and eyes of several complexions; no, they are diagnostic; and I must end, I see, as I began.’ ‘I am still a singing chambermaid?’ said Otto. ‘Nay, your Highness, I pray you to forget what I had written,’ said Sir John; ‘I am not like Pilate; and the chapter is no more. Bury it, if you love me.’

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Chapter 4 WHILE THE PRINCE IS IN THE ANTE-ROOM . . .

Greatly comforted by the exploits of the morning, the Prince turned towards the Princess’s ante-room, bent on a more difficult enterprise. The curtains rose before him, the usher called his name, and he entered the room with an exaggeration of his usual mincing and airy dignity. There were about a score of persons waiting, principally ladies; it was one of the few societies in Grünewald where Otto knew himself to be popular; and while a maid of honour made her exit by a side door to announce his arrival to the Princess, he moved round the apartment, collecting homage and bestowing compliments, with friendly grace. Had this been the sum of his duties, he had been an admirable monarch. Lady after lady was impartially honoured by his attention. ‘Madam,’ he said to one, ‘how does this happen? I find you daily more adorable.’ ‘And your Highness daily browner,’ replied the lady. ‘We began equal; O, there I will be bold: we have both beautiful complexions. But while I study mine, your Highness tans himself.’ ‘A perfect negro, madam; and what so fitly—being beauty’s slave?’ said Otto. ‘Madame Grafinski, when is our next play? I have just heard that I am a bad actor.’ ‘O ciel!’ cried Madame Grafinski. ‘Who could venture? What a bear!’ ‘An excellent man, I can assure you,’ returned Otto. ‘O, never! O, is it possible!’ fluted the lady. ‘Your Highness plays like an angel.’ ‘You must be right, madam; who could speak falsely and yet look so charming?’ said the Prince. ‘But this gentleman, it seems, would have preferred me playing like an actor.’ A sort of hum, a falsetto, feminine cooing, greeted the tiny sally; and Otto expanded like a peacock. This warm atmosphere of women and flattery and idle chatter pleased him to the marrow. ‘Madame von Eisenthal, your coiffure is delicious,’ he remarked. ‘Every one was saying so,’ said one. 56

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‘If I have pleased Prince Charming?’ And Madame von Eisenthal swept him a deep curtsey with a killing glance of adoration. ‘It is new?’ he asked. ‘Vienna fashion.’ ‘Mint new,’ replied the lady, ‘for your Highness’s return. I felt young this morning; it was a premonition. But why, Prince, do you ever leave us?’ ‘For the pleasure of the return,’ said Otto. ‘I am like a dog; I must bury my bone, and then come back to gloat upon it.’ ‘O, a bone! Fie, what a comparison! You have brought back the manners of the wood,’ returned the lady. ‘Madam, it is what the dog has dearest,’ said the Prince. ‘But I observe Madame von Rosen.’ And Otto, leaving the group to which he had been piping, stepped towards the embrasure of a window where a lady stood. The Countess von Rosen had hitherto been silent, and a thought depressed, but on the approach of Otto she began to brighten. She was tall, slim as a nymph, and of a very airy carriage; and her face, which was already beautiful in repose, lightened and changed, flashed into smiles, and glowed with lovely colour at the touch of animation. She was a good vocalist; and, even in speech, her voice commanded a great range of changes, the low notes rich with tenor quality, the upper ringing, on the brink of laughter, into music. A gem of many facets and variable hues of fire; a woman who withheld the better portion of her beauty, and then, in a caressing second, flashed it like a weapon full on the beholder; now merely a tall figure and a sallow handsome face, with the evidences of a reckless temper; anon opening like a flower to life and colour, mirth and tenderness:—Madame von Rosen had always a dagger in reserve for the despatch of ill-assured admirers. She met Otto with the dart of tender gaiety. ‘You have come to me at last, Prince Cruel,’ she said. ‘Butterfly! Well, and am I not to kiss your hand?’ she added. ‘Madam, it is I who must kiss yours.’ And Otto bowed and kissed it. ‘You deny me every indulgence,’ she said, smiling. ‘And now what news in Court?’ inquired the Prince. ‘I come to you for my gazette.’ ‘Ditch-water!’ she replied. ‘The world is all asleep, grown grey in slumber; I do not remember any waking movement since quite an eternity; and the last thing in the nature of a sensation was the last time my governess was allowed to box my ears. But yet I do myself and your unfortunate enchanted palace some injustice. Here is the last— O positively!’ And she told him the story from behind her fan, with 57

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many glances, many cunning strokes of the narrator’s art. The others had drawn away, for it was understood that Madame von Rosen was in favour with the Prince. None the less, however, did the Countess lower her voice at times to within a semitone of whispering; and the pair leaned together over the narrative. ‘Do you know,’ said Otto, laughing, ‘you are the only entertaining woman on this earth!’ ‘O, you have found out so much,’ she cried. ‘Yes, madam, I grow wiser with advancing years,’ he returned. ‘Years!’ she repeated. ‘Do you name the traitors? I do not believe in years; the calendar is a delusion.’ ‘You must be right, madam,’ replied the Prince. ‘For six years that we have been good friends, I have observed you to grow younger.’ ‘Flatterer!’ cried she, and then with a change, ‘But why should I say so,’ she added, ‘when I protest I think the same? A week ago I had a council with my Father Director, the glass; and the glass replied, “Not yet!” I confess my face in this way once a month. O! a very solemn moment. Do you know what I shall do when the mirror answers, “Now”?’ ‘I cannot guess,’ said he. ‘No more can I,’ returned the Countess. ‘There is such a choice! Suicide, gambling, a nunnery, a volume of memoirs, or politics—the last, I am afraid.’ ‘It is a dull trade,’ said Otto. ‘Nay,’ she replied, ‘it is a trade I rather like. It is, after all, first cousin to gossip, which no one can deny to be amusing. For instance, if I were to tell you that the Princess and the Baron rode out together daily to inspect the cannon, it is either a piece of politics or scandal, as I turn my phrase. I am the alchemist that makes the transmutation. They have been everywhere together since you left,’ she continued, brightening as she saw Otto darken; ‘that is a poor snippet of malicious gossip—and they were everywhere cheered—and with that addition all becomes political intelligence.’ ‘Let us change the subject,’ said Otto. ‘I was about to propose it,’ she replied, ‘or rather to pursue the politics. Do you know? this war is popular—popular to the length of cheering Princess Seraphina.’ ‘All things, madam, are possible,’ said the Prince; ‘and this among others, that we may be going into war, but I give you my word of honour I do not know with whom.’ ‘And you put up with it?’ she cried. ‘I have no pretensions to morality; and I confess I have always abominated the lamb, and nourished 58

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a romantic feeling for the wolf. O, be done with lambiness! Let us see there is a prince, for I am weary of the distaff.’ ‘Madam,’ said Otto, ‘I thought you were of that faction.’ ‘I should be of yours, mon Prince, if you had one,’ she retorted. ‘Is it true that you have no ambition? There was a man once in England whom they call the kingmaker. Do you know,’ she added, ‘I fancy I could make a prince?’ ‘Some day, madam,’ said Otto, ‘I may ask you to help make a farmer.’ ‘Is that a riddle?’ asked the Countess. ‘It is,’ replied the Prince, ‘and a very good one too.’ ‘Tit for tat. I will ask you another,’ she returned. ‘Where is Gondremark?’ ‘The Prime Minister? In the prime-ministry, no doubt,’ said Otto. ‘Precisely,’ said the Countess; and she pointed with her fan to the door of the Princess’s apartments. ‘You and I, mon Prince, are in the ante-room. You think me unkind,’ she added. ‘Try me and you will see. Set me a task, put me a question; there is no enormity I am not capable of doing to oblige you, and no secret that I am not ready to betray.’ ‘Nay, madam, but I respect my friend too much,’ he answered, kissing her hand. ‘I would rather remain ignorant of all. We fraternise like foemen soldiers at the outposts, but let each be true to his own army.’ ‘Ah,’ she cried, ‘if all men were generous like you, it would be worth while to be a woman!’ Yet, judging by her looks, his generosity, if anything, had disappointed her; she seemed to seek a remedy, and, having found it, brightened once more. ‘And now,’ she said, ‘may I dismiss my sovereign? This is rebellion and a cas pendable; but what am I to do? My bear is jealous!’ ‘Madam, enough!’ cried Otto. ‘Ahasuerus reaches you the sceptre; more, he will obey you in all points. I should have been a dog to come to whistling.’ And so the Prince departed, and fluttered round Grafinski and von Eisenthal. But the Countess knew the use of her offensive weapons, and had left a pleasant arrow in the Prince’s heart. That Gondremark was jealous—here was an agreeable revenge! And Madame von Rosen, as the occasion of the jealousy, appeared to him in a new light.

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Chapter 5 . . . GONDREMARK IS IN MY LADY’S CHAMBER

The Countess von Rosen spoke the truth. The great Prime Minister of Grünewald was already closeted with Seraphina. The toilet was over; and the Princess, tastefully arrayed, sat face to face with a tall mirror. Sir John’s description was unkindly true, true in terms and yet a libel, a misogynistic masterpiece. Her forehead was perhaps too high, but it became her; her figure somewhat stooped, but every detail was formed and finished like a gem; her hand, her foot, her ear, the set of her comely head, were all dainty and accordant; if she was not beautiful, she was vivid, changeful, coloured, and pretty with a thousand various prettinesses; and her eyes, if they indeed rolled too consciously, yet rolled to purpose. They were her most attractive feature, yet they continually bore eloquent false witness to her thoughts; for while she herself, in the depths of her immature, unsoftened heart, was given altogether to manlike ambition and the desire of power, the eyes were by turns bold, inviting, fiery, melting, and artful, like the eyes of a rapacious syren. And artful, in a sense, she was. Chafing that she was not a man and could not shine by action, she had conceived a woman’s part, of answerable domination; she sought to subjugate for by-ends, to rain influence and be fancy free; and while she loved not man, loved to see man obey her. It is a common girl’s ambition. Such was perhaps that lady of the glove, who sent her lover to the lions. But the snare is laid alike for male and female, and the world most artfully contrived. Near her, in a low chair, Gondremark had arranged his limbs into a cat-like attitude, high-shouldered, stooping, and submiss. The formidable blue jowl of the man, and the dull bilious eye, set perhaps a higher value on his evident desire to please. His face was marked by capacity, temper, and a kind of bold, piratical dishonesty which it would be calumnious to call deceit. His manners, as he smiled upon the Princess, were overfine, yet hardly elegant. ‘Possibly,’ said the Baron, ‘I should now proceed to take my leave. I must not keep my sovereign in the ante-room. Let us come at once to 60

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a decision.’ ‘It cannot, cannot be put off?’ she asked. ‘It is impossible,’ answered Gondremark. ‘Your Highness sees it for herself. In the earlier stages, we might imitate the serpent; but for the ultimatum, there is no choice but to be bold like lions. Had the Prince chosen to remain away, it had been better; but we have gone too far forward to delay.’ ‘What can have brought him?’ she cried. ‘To-day of all days?’ ‘The marplot, madam, has the instinct of his nature,’ returned Gondremark. ‘But you exaggerate the peril. Think, madam, how far we have prospered, and against what odds! Shall a Featherhead?—but no!’ And he blew upon his fingers lightly with a laugh. ‘Featherhead,’ she replied, ‘is still the Prince of Grünewald.’ ‘On your sufferance only, and so long as you shall please to be indulgent,’ said the Baron. ‘There are rights of nature; power to the powerful is the law. If he shall think to cross your destiny—well, you have heard of the brazen and the earthen pot.’ ‘Do you call me pot? You are ungallant, Baron,’ laughed the Princess. ‘Before we are done with your glory, I shall have called you by many different titles,’ he replied. The girl flushed with pleasure. ‘But Frédéric is still the Prince, Monsieur le Flatteur,’ she said. ‘You do not propose a revolution?—you of all men?’ ‘Dear madam, when it is already made!’ he cried. ‘The Prince reigns indeed in the almanack; but my Princess reigns and rules.’ And he looked at her with a fond admiration that made the heart of Seraphina swell. Looking on her huge slave, she drank the intoxicating joys of power. Meanwhile he continued, with that sort of massive archness that so ill became him, ‘She has but one fault; there is but one danger in the great career that I foresee for her. May I name it? may I be so irreverent? It is in herself—her heart is soft.’ ‘Her courage is faint, Baron,’ said the Princess. ‘Suppose we have judged ill, suppose we were defeated?’ ‘Defeated, madam?’ returned the Baron, with a touch of ill humour. ‘Is the dog defeated by the hare? Our troops are all cantoned along the frontier; in five hours the vanguard of five thousand bayonets shall be hammering on the gates of Brandenau; and in all Gerolstein there are not fifteen hundred men who can manœuvre. It is as simple as a sum. There can be no resistance.’ ‘It is no great exploit,’ she said. ‘Is that what you call glory? It is like 61

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beating a child.’ ‘The courage, madam, is diplomatic,’ he replied. ‘We take a grave step; we fix the eyes of Europe, for the first time, on Grünewald; and in the negotiations of the next three months, mark me, we stand or fall. It is there, madam, that I shall have to depend upon your counsels,’ he added, almost gloomily. ‘If I had not seen you at work, if I did not know the fertility of your mind, I own I should tremble for the consequence. But it is in this field that men must recognise their inability. All the great negotiators, when they have not been women, have had women at their elbows. Madame de Pompadour was ill served; she had not found her Gondremark; but what a mighty politician! Catherine de Medici, too, what justice of sight, what readiness of means, what elasticity against defeat! But alas! madam, her Featherheads were her own children; and she had that one touch of vulgarity, that one trait of the good-wife, that she suffered family ties and affections to confine her liberty.’ These singular views of history, strictly ad usum Seraphinæ, did not weave their usual soothing spell over the Princess. It was plain that she had taken a momentary distaste to her own resolutions; for she continued to oppose her counsellor, looking upon him out of half-closed eyes and with the shadow of a sneer upon her lips. ‘What boys men are!’ she said; ‘what lovers of big words! Courage, indeed! If you had to scour pans, Herr von Gondremark, you would call it, I suppose, Domestic Courage?’ ‘I would, madam,’ said the Baron, stoutly, ‘if I scoured them well. I would put a good name upon a virtue; you will not overdo it; they are not so enchanting in themselves.’ ‘Well, but let me see,’ she said. ‘I wish to understand your courage. Why we asked leave, like children! Our grannie in Berlin, our uncle in Vienna, the whole family, have patted us on the head and sent us forward. Courage? I wonder when I hear you!’ ‘My Princess is unlike herself,’ returned the Baron. ‘She has forgotten where the peril lies. True, we have received encouragement on every hand; but my Princess knows too well on what untenable conditions; and she knows besides how, in the publicity of the diet, these whispered conferences are forgotten and disowned. The danger is very real’—he raged inwardly at having to blow the very coal he had been quenching—‘none the less real in that it is not precisely military, but for that reason the easier to be faced. Had we to count upon your troops, although I share your Highness’s expectations of the conduct of Alvenau, we cannot forget that he has not been proved in chief 62

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­command. But where negotiation is concerned, the conduct lies with us; and with your help, I laugh at danger.’ ‘It may be so,’ said Seraphina, sighing. ‘It is elsewhere that I see danger. The people, these abominable people—suppose they should instantly rebel? What a figure we should make in the eyes of Europe to have undertaken an invasion while my own throne was tottering to its fall!’ ‘Nay, madam,’ said Gondremark, smiling, ‘here you are beneath yourself. What is it that feeds their discontent? What but the taxes? Once we have seized Gerolstein, the taxes are remitted, the sons return covered with renown, the houses are adorned with pillage, each tastes his little share of military glory, and behold us once again a happy family! “Ay,” they will say, in each other’s long ears, “the Princess knew what she was about; she was in the right of it; she has a head upon her shoulders; and here we are, you see, better off than before.” But why should I say all this? It is what my Princess pointed out to me herself; it was by these reasons that she converted me to this adventure.’ ‘I think, Herr von Gondremark,’ said Seraphina, somewhat tartly, ‘you often attribute your own sagacity to your Princess.’ For a second Gondremark staggered under the shrewdness of the attack; the next, he had perfectly recovered. ‘Do I?’ he said. ‘It is very possible. I have observed a similar tendency in your Highness.’ It was so openly spoken, and appeared so just, that Seraphina breathed again. Her vanity had been alarmed, and the greatness of the relief improved her spirits. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘all this is little to the purpose. We are keeping Frédéric without, and I am still ignorant of our line of battle. Come, co-admiral, let us consult. . . . How am I to receive him now? And what are we to do if he should appear at the council?’ ‘Now,’ he answered. ‘I shall leave him to my Princess for just now! I have seen her at work. Send him off to his theatricals! But in all gentleness,’ he added. ‘Would it, for instance, would it displease my sovereign to affect a headache?’ ‘Never!’ said she. ‘The woman who can manage, like the man who can fight, must never shrink from an encounter. The knight must not disgrace his weapons.’ ‘Then let me pray my belle dame sans merci,’ he returned, ‘to affect the only virtue that she lacks. Be pitiful to the poor young man; affect an interest in his hunting; be weary of politics; find in his society, as it were, a grateful repose from dry considerations. Does my Princess authorise the line of battle?’ ‘Well, that is a trifle,’ answered Seraphina. ‘The council—there is 63

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the point.’ ‘The council?’ cried Gondremark. ‘Permit me, madam.’ And he rose and proceeded to flutter about the room, counterfeiting Otto both in voice and gesture not unhappily. ‘ “ What is there to-day, Herr von Gondremark? Ah, Herr Cancellarius, a new wig! You cannot deceive me; I know every wig in Grünewald; I have the sovereign’s eye. What are these papers about? O, I see. O, certainly. Surely, surely. I wager none of you remarked that wig. By all means. I know nothing about that. Dear me, are there as many as all that? Well, you can sign them; you have the procuration. You see, Herr Cancellarius, I knew your wig.” And so,’ concluded Gondremark, resuming his own voice, ‘our sovereign, by the particular grace of God, enlightens and supports his privy councillors.’ But when the Baron turned to Seraphina for approval, he found her frozen. ‘You are pleased to be witty, Herr von Gondremark,’ she said, ‘and have perhaps forgotten where you are. But these rehearsals are apt to be misleading. Your master, the Prince of Grünewald, is sometimes more exacting.’ Gondremark cursed her in his soul. Of all injured vanities, that of the reproved buffoon is the most savage; and when grave issues are involved, these petty stabs become unbearable. But Gondremark was a man of iron; he showed nothing; he did not even, like the common trickster, retreat because he had presumed, but held to his point bravely. ‘Madam,’ he said, ‘if, as you say, he prove exacting, we must take the bull by the horns.’ ‘We shall see,’ she said, and she arranged her skirt like one about to rise. Temper, scorn, disgust, all the more acrid feelings, became her like jewels; and she now looked her best. ‘Pray God they quarrel,’ thought Gondremark. ‘The damned minx may fail me yet, unless they quarrel. It is time to let him in. Zz—fight, dogs!’ Consequent on these reflections, he bent a stiff knee and chivalrously kissed the Princess’s hand. ‘My Princess,’ he said, ‘must now dismiss her servant. I have much to arrange against the hour of council.’ ‘Go,’ she said, and rose. And as Gondremark tripped out of a private door, she touched a bell, and gave the order to admit the Prince.

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Chapter 6 THE PRINCE DELIVERS A LECTURE ON MARRIAGE, WITH PRACTICAL ILLUSTRATIONS OF DIVORCE

With what a world of excellent intentions Otto entered his wife’s cabinet! how fatherly, how tender! how morally affecting were the words he had prepared! Nor was Seraphina unamiably inclined. Her usual fear of Otto as a marplot in her great designs was now swallowed up in a passing distrust of the designs themselves. For Gondremark, besides, she had conceived an angry horror. In her heart she did not like the Baron. Behind his impudent servility, behind the devotion which, with indelicate delicacy, he still forced on her attention, she divined the grossness of his nature. So a man may be proud of having tamed a bear, and yet sicken at his captive’s odour. And above all, she had certain jealous intimations that the man was false, and the deception double. True, she falsely trifled with his love; but he, perhaps, was only trifling with her vanity. The insolence of his late mimicry, and the odium of her own position as she sat and watched it, lay besides like a load upon her conscience. She met Otto almost with a sense of guilt, and yet she welcomed him as a deliverer from ugly things. But the wheels of an interview are at the mercy of a thousand ruts; and even at Otto’s entrance, the first jolt occurred. Gondremark, he saw, was gone; but there was the chair drawn close for consultation; and it pained him not only that this man had been received, but that he should depart with such an air of secrecy. Struggling with this twinge, it was somewhat sharply that he dismissed the attendant who had brought him in. ‘You make yourself at home, chez moi,’ she said, a little ruffled both by his tone of command and by the glance he had thrown upon the chair. ‘Madam,’ replied Otto, ‘I am here so seldom that I have almost the rights of a stranger.’ ‘You choose your own associates, Frédéric,’ she said. ‘I am here to speak of it,’ he returned. ‘It is now four years since we were married; and these four years, Seraphina, have not perhaps 65

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been happy either for you or for me. I am well aware I was unsuitable to be your husband. I was not young, I had no ambition, I was a trifler; and you despised me, I dare not say unjustly. But to do justice on both sides, you must bear in mind how I have acted. When I found it amused you to play the part of Princess on this little stage, did I not immediately resign to you my box of toys, this Grünewald? And when I found I was distasteful as a husband, could any husband have been less intrusive? You will tell me that I have no feelings, no preference, and thus no credit; that I go before the wind; that all this was in my character. And indeed, one thing is true, that it is easy, too easy, to leave things undone. But Seraphina, I begin to learn it is not always wise. If I were too old and too uncongenial for your husband, I should still have remembered that I was the Prince of that country to which you came, a visitor and a child. In that relation also there were duties, and these duties I have not performed.’ To claim the advantage of superior age is to give sure offence. ‘Duty!’ laughed Seraphina, ‘and on your lips, Frédéric! You make me laugh. What fancy is this? Go, flirt with the maids and be a prince in Dresden China, as you look. Enjoy yourself, mon enfant, and leave duty and the state to us.’ The plural grated on the Prince. ‘I have enjoyed myself too much,’ he said, ‘since enjoyment is the word. And yet there were much to say upon the other side. You must suppose me desperately fond of hunting. But indeed there were days when I found a great deal of interest in what it was courtesy to call my government. And I have always had some claim to taste; I could tell live happiness from dull routine; and between hunting, and the throne of Austria, and your society, my choice had never wavered, had the choice been mine. You were a girl, a bud, when you were given me——’ ‘Heavens!’ she cried, ‘is this to be a love scene?’ ‘I am never ridiculous,’ he said; ‘it is my only merit; and you may be certain this shall be a scene of marriage à la mode. But when I remember the beginning, it is bare courtesy to speak in sorrow. Be just, madam: you would think me strangely uncivil to recall these days without the decency of a regret. Be yet a little juster, and own, if only in complaisance, that you yourself regret that past.’ ‘I have nothing to regret,’ said the Princess. ‘You surprise me. I thought you were so happy.’ ‘Happy and happy, there are so many hundred ways,’ said Otto. ‘A man may be happy in revolt; he may be happy in sleep; wine, change, and travel make him happy; virtue, they say, will do the like—I have 66

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not tried; and they say also that in old, quiet, and habitual marriages there is yet another happiness. Happy, yes; I am happy if you like; but I will tell you frankly, I was happier when I brought you home.’ ‘Well,’ said the Princess, not without constraint, ‘it seems you changed your mind.’ ‘Not I,’ returned Otto, ‘I never changed. Do you remember, Seraphina, on our way home, when you saw the roses in the lane, and I got out and plucked them? It was a narrow lane between great trees; the sunset at the end was all gold, and the rooks were flying overhead. There were nine, nine red roses; you gave me a kiss for each, and I told myself that every rose and every kiss should stand for a year of love. Well, in eighteen months there was an end. But do you fancy, Seraphina, that my heart has altered?’ ‘I am sure I cannot tell,’ she said, like an automaton. ‘It has not,’ the Prince continued. ‘There is nothing ridiculous, even from a husband, in a love that owns itself unhappy and that asks no more. I built on sand; pardon me, I do not breathe a reproach—I built, I suppose, upon my own infirmities; but I put my heart in the building, and it still lies among the ruins.’ ‘How very poetical!’ she said with a little choking laugh, unknown relentings, unfamiliar softnesses, moving within her. ‘What would you be at?’ she added, hardening her voice. ‘I would be at this,’ he answered; ‘and hard it is to say. I would be at this:—Seraphina, I am your husband after all, and a poor fool that loves you. Understand,’ he cried almost fiercely, ‘I am no suppliant husband; what your love refuses I would scorn to receive from your pity. I do not ask, I would not take it. And for jealousy, what ground have I? A dog-in-the-manger jealousy is a thing the dogs may laugh at. But at least, in the world’s eye, I am still your husband; and I ask you if you treat me fairly? I keep to myself, I leave you free, I have given you in everything your will. What do you in return? I find, Seraphina, that you have been too thoughtless. But between persons such as we, in our conspicuous station, particular care and a particular courtesy are owing. Scandal is perhaps not easy to avoid; but it is hard to bear.’ ‘Scandal!’ she cried, with a deep breath. ‘Scandal! It is for this you have been driving!’ ‘I have tried to tell you how I feel,’ he replied. ‘I have told you that I love you—love you in vain—a bitter thing for a husband; I have laid myself open that I might speak without offence. And now that I have begun, I will go on and finish.’ ‘I demand it,’ she said. ‘What is this about?’ 67

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Otto flushed crimson. ‘I have to say what I would fain not,’ he answered. ‘I counsel you to see less of Gondremark.’ ‘Of Gondremark? And why?’ she asked. ‘Your intimacy is the ground of scandal, madam,’ said Otto, firmly enough—‘of a scandal that is agony to me, and would be crushing to your parents if they knew it.’ ‘You are the first to bring me word of it,’ said she. ‘I thank you.’ ‘You have perhaps cause,’ he replied. ‘Perhaps I am the only one among your friends——’ ‘O, leave my friends alone,’ she interrupted. ‘My friends are of a different stamp. You have come to me here and made a parade of sentiment. When have I last seen you? I have governed your kingdom for you in the meanwhile, and there I got no help. At last, when I am weary with a man’s work, and you are weary of your playthings, you return to make me a scene of conjugal reproaches—the grocer and his wife! The positions are too much reversed; and you should understand, at least, that I cannot at the same time do your work of government and behave myself like a little girl. Scandal is the atmosphere in which we live, we princes; it is what a prince should know. You play an odious part. Do you believe this rumour?’ ‘Madam, should I be here?’ said Otto. ‘It is what I want to know!’ she cried, the tempest of her scorn increasing. ‘Suppose you did—I say, suppose you did believe it?’ ‘I should make it my business to suppose the contrary,’ he answered. ‘I thought so. O, you are made of baseness!’ said she. ‘Madam,’ he cried, roused at last, ‘enough of this. You wilfully misunderstand my attitude; you outwear my patience. In the name of your parents, in my own name, I summon you to be more circumspect.’ ‘Is this a request, Monsieur mon mari?’ she demanded. ‘Madam, if I chose, I might command,’ said Otto. ‘You might, sir, as the law stands, make me prisoner,’ returned Seraphina. ‘Short of that you will gain nothing.’ ‘You will continue as before?’ he asked. ‘Precisely as before,’ said she. ‘As soon as this comedy is over, I shall request the Freiherr von Gondremark to visit me. Do you understand?’ she added, rising. ‘For my part, I have done.’ ‘I will then ask the favour of your hand, madam,’ said Otto, palpitating in every pulse with anger. ‘I have to request that you will visit in my society another part of my poor house. And reassure yourself—it will not take long—and it is the last obligation that you shall have the chance to lay me under.’ 68

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‘The last?’ she cried. ‘Most joyfully!’ She offered her hand, and he took it; on each side with an elaborate affectation, each inwardly incandescent. He led her out by the private door, following where Gondremark had passed; they threaded a corridor or two, little frequented, looking on a court, until they came at last into the Prince’s suite. The first room was an armoury, hung all about with the weapons of various countries, and looking forth on the front terrace. ‘Have you brought me here to slay me?’ she inquired. ‘I have brought you, madam, only to pass on,’ replied Otto. Next they came to a library, where an old chamberlain sat half asleep. He rose and bowed before the princely couple, asking for orders. ‘You will attend us here,’ said Otto. The next stage was a gallery of pictures, where Seraphina’s portrait hung conspicuous, dressed for the chase, red roses in her hair, as Otto, in the first months of marriage, had directed. He pointed to it without a word; she raised her eyebrows in silence; and they passed still forward into a matted corridor where four doors opened. One led to Otto’s bedroom; one was the private door to Seraphina’s. And here, for the first time, Otto left her hand, and stepping forward, shot the bolt. ‘It is long, madam,’ said he, ‘since it was bolted on the other side.’ ‘One was effectual,’ returned the Princess. ‘Is this all?’ ‘Shall I reconduct you?’ he asked, bowing. ‘I should prefer,’ she asked, in ringing tones, ‘the conduct of the Freiherr von Gondremark.’ Otto summoned the chamberlain. ‘If the Freiherr von Gondremark is in the palace,’ he said, ‘bid him attend the Princess here.’ And when the official had departed, ‘Can I do more to serve you, madam?’ the Prince asked. ‘Thank you, no. I have been much amused,’ she answered. ‘I have now,’ continued Otto, ‘given you your liberty complete. This has been for you a miserable marriage.’ ‘Miserable!’ said she. ‘It has been made light to you; it shall be lighter still,’ continued the Prince. ‘But one thing, madam, you must still continue to bear—my father’s name, which is now yours. I leave it in your hands. Let me see you, since you will have no advice of mine, apply the more attention of your own to bear it worthily.’ ‘Herr von Gondremark is long in coming,’ she remarked. ‘O Seraphina, Seraphina!’ he cried. And that was the end of their 69

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interview. She tripped to a window and looked out; and a little after, the chamberlain announced the Freiherr von Gondremark, who entered with something of a wild eye and changed complexion, confounded, as he was, at this unusual summons. The Princess faced round from the window with a pearly smile; nothing but her heightened colour spoke of discomposure. Otto was pale, but he was otherwise master of himself. ‘Herr von Gondremark,’ said he, ‘oblige me so far: reconduct the Princess to her own apartment.’ The Baron, still all at sea, offered his hand, which was smilingly accepted, and the pair sailed forth through the picture-gallery. As soon as they were gone, and Otto knew the length and breadth of his miscarriage, and how he had done the contrary of all that he intended, he stood stupefied. A fiasco so complete and sweeping was laughable, even to himself; and he laughed aloud in his wrath. Upon this mood there followed the sharpest violence of remorse; and to that again, as he recalled his provocation, anger succeeded afresh. So he was tossed in spirit; now bewailing his inconsequence and lack of temper, now flaming up in white hot indignation and a noble pity for himself. He paced his apartment like a leopard. There was danger in Otto, for a flash. Like a pistol, he could kill at one moment, and the next he might be kicked aside. But just then, as he walked the long floors in his alternate humours, tearing his handkerchief between his hands, he was strung to his top note, every nerve attent. The pistol, you might say, was charged. And when jealousy from time to time fetched him a lash across the tenderest of his feeling, and sent a string of her firepictures glancing before his mind’s eye, the contraction of his face was even dangerous. He disregarded jealousy’s inventions, yet they stung. In this height of his anger, he still preserved his faith in Seraphina’s innocence; but the thought of her possible misconduct was the bitterest ingredient in his pot of sorrow. There came a knock at the door, and the chamberlain brought him a note. He took it and ground it in his hand, continuing his march, continuing his bewildered thoughts; and some minutes had gone by before the circumstance came clearly to his mind. Then he paused and opened it. It was a pencil scratch from Gotthold, thus conceived: ‘The council is privately summoned at once. ‘G. v. H.’ 70

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If the council was thus called before the hour, and that privately, it was plain they feared his interference. Feared: here was a sweet thought. Gotthold, too—Gotthold, who had always used and regarded him as a mere pleasant lad, had now been at the pains to warn him; Gotthold looked for something at his hands. Well, none should be disappointed; the Prince, too long beshadowed by the uxorious lover, should now return and shine. He summoned his valet, repaired the disorder of his appearance with elaborate care; and then, curled and scented and adorned, Prince Charming in every line, but with a twitching nostril, he set forth unattended for the council.

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Chapter 7 THE PRINCE DISSOLVES THE COUNCIL

It was as Gotthold wrote. The liberation of Sir John, Greisengesang’s uneasy narrative, last of all, the scene between Seraphina and the Prince, had decided the conspirators to take a step of bold timidity. There had been a period of bustle, liveried messengers speeding here and there with notes; and at half-past ten in the morning, about an hour before its usual hour, the council of Grünewald sat around the board. It was not a large body. At the instance of Gondremark, it had undergone a strict purgation, and was now composed exclusively of tools. Three secretaries sat at a side table. Seraphina took the head; on her right was the Baron, on her left Greisengesang; below these Grafinski the treasurer, Count Eisenthal, a couple of non-combatants, and, to the surprise of all, Gotthold. He had been named a privy councillor by Otto, merely that he might profit by the salary; and as he was never known to attend a meeting, it had occurred to nobody to cancel his appointment. His present appearance was the more ominous, coming when it did. Gondremark scowled upon him; and the non-combatant on his right, intercepting this black look, edged away from one who was so clearly out of favour. ‘The hour presses, your Highness,’ said the Baron; ‘may we proceed to business?’ ‘At once,’ replied Seraphina. ‘Your Highness will pardon me,’ said Gotthold; ‘but you are still, perhaps, unacquainted with the fact that Prince Otto has returned.’ ‘The Prince will not attend the council,’ replied Seraphina, with a momentary blush. ‘The despatches, Herr Cancellarius? There is one for Gerolstein?’ A secretary brought a paper. ‘Here, madam,’ said Greisengesang. ‘Shall I read it?’ ‘We are all familiar with its terms,’ replied Gondremark. ‘Your Highness approves?’ ‘Unhesitatingly,’ said Seraphina. ‘It may then be held as read,’ concluded the Baron. ‘Will your High72

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ness sign?’ The Princess did so; Gondremark, Eisenthal, and one of the noncombatants followed suit; and the paper was then passed across the table to the librarian. He proceeded leisurely to read. ‘We have no time to spare, Herr Doctor,’ cried the Baron, brutally. ‘If you do not choose to sign on the authority of your sovereign, pass it on. Or you may leave the table,’ he added, his temper ripping out. ‘I decline your invitation, Herr von Gondremark; and my sovereign, as I continue to observe with regret, is still absent from the board,’ replied the Doctor, calmly; and he resumed the perusal of the paper, the rest chafing and exchanging glances. ‘Madam and gentlemen,’ he said, at last, ‘what I hold in my hand is simply a declaration of war.’ ‘Simply,’ said Seraphina, flashing defiance. ‘The sovereign of this country is under the same roof with us,’ continued Gotthold, ‘and I insist he shall be summoned. It is needless to adduce my reasons; you are all ashamed at heart of this projected treachery.’ The council waved like a sea. There were various outcries. ‘You insult the Princess,’ thundered Gondremark. ‘I maintain my protest,’ replied Gotthold. At the height of this confusion the door was thrown open; an usher announced, ‘Gentlemen, the Prince!’ and Otto, with his most excellent bearing, entered the apartment. It was like oil upon the troubled waters; every one settled instantly into his place, and Greisengesang, to give himself a countenance, became absorbed in the arrangement of his papers; but in their eagerness to dissemble, one and all neglected to rise. ‘Gentlemen,’ said the Prince, pausing. They all got to their feet in a moment; and this reproof still further demoralised the weaker brethren. The Prince moved slowly towards the lower end of the table; then he paused again, and, fixing his eye on Greisengesang, ‘How comes it, Herr Cancellarius,’ he asked, ‘that I have received no notice of the change of hour?’ ‘Your Highness,’ replied the Chancellor, ‘her Highness the Princess . . .’ and there paused. ‘I understood,’ said Seraphina, taking him up, ‘that you did not purpose to be present.’ Their eyes met for a second, and Seraphina’s fell; but her anger only burned the brighter for that private shame. ‘And now, gentlemen,’ said Otto, taking his chair, ‘I pray you to be 73

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seated. I have been absent: there are doubtless some arrears; but ere we proceed to business, Herr Grafinski, you will direct four thousand crowns to be sent to me at once. Make a note, if you please,’ he added, as the treasurer still stared in wonder. ‘Four thousand crowns?’ asked Seraphina. ‘Pray, for what?’ ‘Madam,’ returned Otto, smiling, ‘for my own purposes.’ Gondremark spurred up Grafinski underneath the table. ‘If your Highness will indicate the destination . . .’ began the puppet. ‘You are not here, sir, to interrogate your Prince,’ said Otto. Grafinski looked for help to his commander; and Gondremark came to his aid, in suave and measured tones. ‘Your Highness may reasonably be surprised,’ he said; ‘and Herr Grafinski, although I am convinced he is clear of the intention of offending, would have perhaps done better to begin with an explanation. The resources of the State are at the present moment entirely swallowed up, or, as we hope to prove, wisely invested. In a month from now, I do not question we shall be able to meet any command your Highness may lay upon us; but at this hour I fear that, even in so small a matter, he must prepare himself for disappointment. Our zeal is no less, although our power may be inadequate.’ ‘How much, Herr Grafinski, have we in the treasury?’ asked Otto. ‘Your Highness,’ protested the treasurer, ‘we have immediate need of every crown.’ ‘I think, sir, you evade me,’ flashed the Prince; and then turning to the side table, ‘Mr. Secretary,’ he added, ‘bring me, if you please, the treasury docket.’ Herr Grafinski became deadly pale; the chancellor, expecting his own turn, was probably engaged in prayer; Gondremark was watching like a ponderous cat. Gotthold, on his part, looked on with wonder at his cousin; he was certainly showing spirit, but what, in such a time of gravity, was all this talk of money? and why should he waste his strength upon a personal issue? ‘I find,’ said Otto, with his finger on the docket, ‘that we have 20,000 crowns in case.’ ‘That is exact, your Highness,’ replied the Baron. ‘But our liabilities, all of which are happily not liquid, amount to a far larger sum; and at the present point of time, it would be morally impossible to divert a single florin. Essentially, the case is empty. We have, already presented, a large note for material of war.’ ‘Material of war?’ exclaimed Otto, with an excellent assumption of surprise. ‘But if my memory serves me right, we settled these accounts 74

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in January.’ ‘There have been further orders,’ the Baron explained. ‘A new park of artillery has been completed; five hundred stand of arms, seven hundred baggage mules—the details are in a special memorandum. Mr. Secretary Holtz, the memorandum, if you please.’ ‘One would think, gentlemen, that we were going to war,’ said Otto. ‘We are,’ said Seraphina. ‘War!’ cried the Prince, ‘And, gentlemen, with whom? The peace of Grünewald has endured for centuries. What aggression, what insult, have we suffered?’ ‘Here, your Highness,’ said Gotthold, ‘is the ultimatum. It was in the very article of signature, when your Highness so opportunely entered.’ Otto laid the paper before him; as he read, his fingers played tattoo upon the table. ‘Was it proposed,’ he inquired, ‘to send this paper forth without a knowledge of my pleasure?’ One of the non-combatants, eager to trim, volunteered an answer. ‘The Herr Doctor von Hohenstockwitz had just entered his dissent,’ he added. ‘Give me the rest of this correspondence,’ said the Prince. It was handed to him, and he read it patiently from end to end, while the councillors sat foolishly enough looking before them on the table. The secretaries, in the background, were exchanging glances of delight; a row at the council was for them a rare and welcome feature. ‘Gentlemen,’ said Otto, when he had finished, ‘I have read with pain. This claim upon Obermünsterol is palpably unjust; it has not a tincture, not a show, of justice. There is not in all this ground enough for after-dinner talk, and you propose to force it as a casus belli.’ ‘Certainly, your Highness,’ returned Gondremark, too wise to defend the indefensible, ‘the claim on Obermünsterol is simply a pretext.’ ‘It is well,’ said the Prince. ‘Herr Cancellarius, take your pen. “The council,” ’ he began to dictate—‘I withhold all notice of my intervention,’ he said, in parenthesis and addressing himself more directly to his wife; ‘and I say nothing of the strange suppression by which this business has been smuggled past my knowledge. I am content to be in time—“The council,” ’ he resumed, ‘ “on a further examination of the facts, and enlightened by the note in the last despatch from Gerolstein, have the pleasure to announce that they are entirely at one, both as to fact and sentiment, with the Grand Ducal Court of Gerolstein.” You have it? Upon these lines, sir, you will draw up the despatch.’ ‘If your Highness will allow me,’ said the Baron, ‘your Highness is 75

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so imperfectly acquainted with the internal history of this correspondence, that any interference will be merely hurtful. Such a paper as your Highness proposes, would be to stultify the whole previous policy of Grünewald.’ ‘The policy of Grünewald!’ cried the Prince. ‘One would suppose you had no sense of humour! Would you fish in a coffee cup?’ ‘With deference, your Highness,’ returned the Baron, ‘even in a coffee cup there may be poison. The purpose of this war is not simply territorial enlargement; still less is it a war of glory; for, as your Highness indicates, the state of Grünewald is too small to be ambitious. But the body politic is seriously diseased; republicanism, socialism, many disintegrating ideas are abroad; circle within circle, a really formidable organisation has grown up about your Highness’s throne.’ ‘I have heard of it, Herr von Gondremark,’ put in the Prince; ‘but I have reason to be aware that yours is the more authoritative information.’ ‘I am honoured by this expression of my Prince’s confidence,’ returned Gondremark, unabashed. ‘It is, therefore, with a single eye to these disorders, that our present external policy has been shaped. Something was required to divert public attention, to employ the idle, to popularise your Highness’s rule, and, if it were possible, to enable him to reduce the taxes at a blow and to a notable amount. The proposed expedition—for it cannot without hyperbole be called a war— seemed to the council to combine the various characters required; a marked improvement in the public sentiment has followed even upon our preparations; and I cannot doubt that when success shall follow, the effect will surpass even our boldest hopes.’ ‘You are very adroit, Herr von Gondremark,’ said Otto. ‘You fill me with admiration. I had not heretofore done justice to your qualities.’ Seraphina looked up with joy, supposing Otto conquered; but Gondremark still waited, armed at every point; he knew how very stubborn is the revolt of a weak character. ‘And the territorial army scheme, to which I was persuaded to consent—was it secretly directed to the same end?’ the Prince asked. ‘I still believe the effect to have been good,’ replied the Baron; ‘discipline and mounting guard are excellent sedatives. But I will avow to your Highness, I was unaware, at the date of that decree, of the magnitude of the revolutionary movement; nor did any of us, I think, imagine that such a territorial army was a part of the republican proposals.’ ‘It was?’ asked Otto. ‘Strange! Upon what fancied grounds?’ ‘The grounds were indeed fanciful,’ returned the Baron. ‘It was 76

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conceived among the leaders that a territorial army, drawn from and returning to the people, would, in the event of any popular uprising, prove lukewarm or unfaithful to the throne.’ ‘I see,’ said the Prince. ‘I begin to understand.’ ‘His Highness begins to understand?’ repeated Gondremark, with the sweetest politeness. ‘May I beg of him to complete the phrase?’ ‘The history of the revolution,’ replied Otto, drily. ‘And now,’ he added, ‘what do you conclude?’ ‘I conclude, your Highness, with a simple reflection,’ said the Baron, accepting the stab without a quiver, ‘the war is popular; were the rumour contradicted to-morrow, a considerable disappointment would be felt in many classes; and in the present tension of spirits, the most lukewarm sentiment may be enough to precipitate events. There lies the danger. The revolution hangs imminent; we sit, at this council board, below the sword of Damocles.’ ‘We must then lay our heads together,’ said the Prince, ‘and devise some honourable means of safety.’ Up to this moment, since the first note of opposition fell from the librarian, Seraphina had uttered about twenty words. With a somewhat heightened colour, her eyes generally lowered, her foot sometimes nervously tapping on the floor, she had kept her own counsel and commanded her anger like a hero. But at this stage of the engagement she lost control of her impatience. ‘Means!’ she cried. ‘They have been found and prepared before you knew the need for them. Sign the despatch, and let us be done with this delay.’ ‘Madam, I said “honourable,” ’ returned Otto, bowing. ‘This war is, in my eyes, and by Herr von Gondremark’s account, an inadmissible expedient. If we have misgoverned here in Grünewald, are the people of Gerolstein to bleed and pay for our misdoings? Never, madam; not while I live. But I attach so much importance to all that I have heard to-day for the first time—and why only to-day, I do not even stop to ask—that I am eager to find some plan that I can follow with credit to myself.’ ‘And should you fail?’ she asked. ‘Should I fail, I will then meet the blow half way,’ replied the Prince. ‘On the first open discontent, I shall convoke the States, and, when it pleases them to bid me, abdicate.’ Seraphina laughed angrily. ‘This is the man for whom we have been labouring!’ she cried. ‘We tell him of change; he will devise the means, he says; and his device is abdication? Sir, have you no shame to come 77

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here at the eleventh hour among those who have borne the heat and burthen of the day? Do you not wonder at yourself? I, sir, was here in my place, striving to uphold your dignity alone. I took counsel with the wisest I could find, while you were eating and hunting. I have laid my plans with foresight; they were ripe for action; and then—’ she choked—‘then you return—for a forenoon—to ruin all! To-morrow, you will be once more about your pleasures; you will give us leave once more to think and work for you; and again you will come back, and again you will thwart what you had not the industry or knowledge to conceive. Oh! it is intolerable. Be modest, sir. Do not presume upon the rank you cannot worthily uphold. I would not issue my commands with so much gusto—it is from no merit in yourself they are obeyed. What are you? What have you to do in this grave council? Go,’ she cried, ‘go among your equals! The very people in the streets mock at you for a prince.’ At this surprising outburst the whole council sat aghast. ‘Madam,’ said the Baron, alarmed out of his caution, ‘command yourself.’ ‘Address yourself to me, sir!’ cried the Prince. ‘I will not bear these whisperings!’ Seraphina burst into tears. ‘Sir,’ cried the Baron, rising, ‘this lady——’ ‘Herr von Gondremark,’ said the Prince, ‘one more observation, and I place you under arrest.’ ‘Your Highness is the master,’ replied Gondremark, bowing. ‘Bear it in mind more constantly,’ said Otto. ‘Herr Cancellarius, bring all the papers to my cabinet. Gentlemen, the council is dissolved.’ And he bowed and left the apartment, followed by Greisengesang and the secretaries, just at the moment when the Princess’s ladies, summoned in all haste, entered by another door to help her forth.

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Chapter 8 THE PARTY OF WAR TAKES ACTION

Half an hour after, Gondremark was once more closeted with Seraphina. ‘Where is he now?’ she asked, on his arrival. ‘Madam, he is with the Chancellor,’ replied the Baron. ‘Wonder of wonders, he is at work!’ ‘Ah,’ she said, ‘he was born to torture me! Oh, what a fall, what a humiliation! Such a scheme to wreck upon so small a trifle! But now all is lost.’ ‘Madam,’ said Gondremark, ‘nothing is lost. Something, on the other hand, is found. You have found your senses; you see him as he is—see him as you see everything where your too-good heart is not in question—with the judicial, with the statesman’s eye. So long as he had a right to interfere, the empire that may be was still distant. I have not entered on this course without the plain foresight of its dangers; and even for this I was prepared. But, madam, I knew two things: I knew that you were born to command, that I was born to serve; I knew that by a rare conjuncture, the hand had found the tool; and from the first I was confident, as I am confident to-day, that no hereditary trifler has the power to shatter that alliance.’ ‘I, born to command!’ she said. ‘Do you forget my tears?’ ‘Madam, they were the tears of Alexander,’ cried the Baron. ‘They touched, they thrilled me; I forgot myself a moment—even I! But do you suppose that I had not remarked, that I had not admired, your previous bearing? your great self-command? Ay, that was princely!’ He paused. ‘It was a thing to see. I drank confidence! I tried to imitate your calm. And I was well inspired; in my heart, I think that I was well inspired; that any man, within the reach of argument, had been convinced! But it was not to be; nor, madam, do I regret the failure. Let us be open; let me disclose my heart. I have loved two things, not unworthily: Grünewald and my sovereign!’ Here he kissed her hand. ‘Either I must resign my ministry, leave the land of my adoption and the queen whom I had chosen to obey—or——’ He paused again. ‘Alas, Herr von Gondremark, there is no “or,” ’ said Seraphina. 79

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‘Nay, madam, give me time,’ he replied. ‘When first I saw you, you were still young; not every man would have remarked your powers; but I had not been twice honoured by your conversation ere I had found my mistress. I have, madam, I believe, some genius; and I have much ambition. But the genius is of the serving kind; and to offer a career to my ambition, I had to find one born to rule. This is the base and essence of our union; each had need of the other; each recognised, master and servant, lever and fulcrum, the complement of his endowment. Marriages, they say, are made in heaven: how much more these pure, laborious, intellectual fellowships, born to found empires! Nor is this all. We found each other ripe, filled with great ideas that took shape and clarified with every word. We grew together—ay, madam, in mind we grew together like twin children. All of my life until we met was petty and groping; was it not—I will flatter myself openly—it was the same with you! Not till then had you those eagle surveys, that wide and hopeful sweep of intuition! Thus we had formed ourselves, and we were ready.’ ‘It is true,’ she cried. ‘I feel it. Yours is the genius; your generosity confounds your insight; all I could offer you was the position, was this throne, to be a fulcrum. But I offered it without reserve; I entered at least warmly into all your thoughts; you were sure of me—sure of my support—certain of justice. Tell me, tell me again, that I have helped you.’ ‘Nay, madam,’ he said, ‘you made me. In everything you were my inspiration. And as we prepared our policy, weighing every step, how often have I had to admire your perspicacity, your man-like diligence and fortitude! You know that these are not the words of flattery; your conscience echoes them; have you spared a day? have you indulged yourself in any pleasure? Young and beautiful, you have lived a life of high intellectual effort, of irksome intellectual patience with details. Well, you have your reward: with the fall of Brandenau, the throne of your Empire is founded.’ ‘What thought have you in your mind?’ she asked. ‘Is not all ruined?’ ‘Nay, my Princess, the same thought is in both our minds,’ he said. ‘Herr von Gondremark,’ she replied, ‘by all that I hold sacred, I have none; I do not think at all; I am crushed.’ ‘You are looking at the passionate side of a rich nature, misunderstood and recently insulted,’ said the Baron. ‘Look into your intellect, and tell me.’ ‘I find nothing, nothing but tumult,’ she replied. ‘You find one word branded, madam,’ returned the Baron: 80

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‘ “Abdication!” ’ ‘O!’ she cried. ‘The coward! He leaves me to bear all, and in the hour of trial he stabs me from behind. There is nothing in him, not respect, not love, not courage—his wife, his dignity, his throne, the honour of his father, he forgets them all!’ ‘Yes,’ pursued the Baron, ‘the word Abdication. I perceive a glimmering there.’ ‘I read your fancy,’ she returned. ‘It is mere madness, midsummer madness. Baron, I am more unpopular than he. You know it. They can excuse, they can love, his weakness; but me, they hate.’ ‘Such is the gratitude of peoples,’ said the Baron. ‘But we trifle. Here, madam, are my plain thoughts. The man who in the hour of danger speaks of abdication is, for me, a venomous animal. I speak with the bluntness of gravity, madam; this is no hour for mincing. The coward, in a station of authority, is more dangerous than fire. We dwell on a volcano; if this man can have his way, Grünewald before a week will have been deluged with innocent blood. You know the truth of what I say; we have looked unblenching into this ever-possible catastrophe. To him it is nothing: he will abdicate! Abdicate, just God! and this unhappy country committed to his charge, and the lives of men and the honour of women . . .’ His voice appeared to fail him; in an instant he had conquered his emotion and resumed: ‘But you, madam, conceive more worthily of your responsibilities. I am with you in the thought; and in the face of the horrors that I see impending, I say, and your heart repeats it—we have gone too far to pause. Honour, duty, ay, and the care of our own lives, demand we should proceed.’ She was looking at him, her brow thoughtfully knitted. ‘I feel it,’ she said. ‘But how? He has the power.’ ‘The power, madam? The power is in the army,’ he replied; and then hastily, ere she could intervene, ‘we have to save ourselves,’ he went on; ‘I have to save my Princess, she has to save her minister; we have both of us to save this infatuated youth from his own madness. He in the outbreak would be the earliest victim; I see him,’ he cried, ‘torn in pieces; and Grünewald, unhappy Grünewald! Nay, madam, you who have the power must use it; it lies hard upon your conscience.’ ‘Show me how!’ she cried. ‘Suppose I were to place him under some constraint, the revolution would break upon us instantly.’ The Baron feigned defeat. ‘It is true,’ he said. ‘You see more clearly than I do. Yet there should, there must be, some way.’ And he waited for his chance. ‘No,’ she said; ‘I told you from the first there is no remedy. Our 81

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hopes are lost: lost by one miserable trifler, ignorant, fretful, fitful— who will have disappeared to-morrow, who knows? to his boorish pleasures!’ Any peg would do for Gondremark. ‘The thing!’ he cried, striking his brow. ‘Fool, not to have thought of it! Madam, without perhaps knowing it, you have solved our problem.’ ‘What do you mean? Speak!’ she said. He appeared to collect himself; and then, with a smile, ‘The Prince,’ he said, ‘must go once more a-hunting.’ ‘Ay, if he would!’ cried she, ‘and stay there!’ ‘And stay there,’ echoed the Baron. It was so significantly said, that her face changed; and the schemer, fearful of the sinister ambiguity of his expressions, hastened to explain. ‘This time he shall go hunting in a carriage, with a good escort of our foreign lancers. His destination shall be the Felsenburg; it is healthy, the rock is high, the windows are small and barred; it might have been built on purpose. We shall entrust the captaincy to the Scotchman Gordon; he at least will have no scruple. Who will miss the sovereign? He is gone hunting; he came home on Tuesday, on Thursday he returned; all is usual in that. Meanwhile the war proceeds; our Prince will soon weary of his solitude; and about the time of our triumph, or, if he prove very obstinate, a little later, he shall be released upon a proper understanding, and I see him once more directing his theatricals.’ Seraphina sat gloomy, plunged in thought. ‘Yes,’ she said suddenly, ‘and the despatch? He is now writing it.’ ‘It cannot pass the council before Friday,’ replied Gondremark; ‘and as for any private note, the messengers are all at my disposal. They are picked men, madam. I am a person of precaution.’ ‘It would appear so,’ she said, with a flash of her occasional repugnance to the man; and then after a pause, ‘Herr von Gondremark,’ she added, ‘I recoil from this extremity.’ ‘I share your Highness’s repugnance,’ answered he. ‘But what would you have? We are defenceless, else.’ ‘I see it, but this is sudden. It is a public crime,’ she said, nodding at him with a sort of horror. ‘Look but a little deeper,’ he returned, ‘and whose is the crime?’ ‘His!’ she cried. ‘His, before God! And I hold him liable. But still——’ ‘It is not as if he would be harmed,’ submitted Gondremark. ‘I know it,’ she replied, but it was still unheartily. And then, as brave men are entitled, by prescriptive right as old 82

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as the world’s history, to the alliance and the active help of Fortune, the punctual goddess stepped down from the machine. One of the Princess’s ladies begged to enter; a man, it appeared, had brought a line for the Freiherr von Gondremark. It proved to be a pencil billet, which the crafty Greisengesang had found the means to scribble and despatch under the very guns of Otto; and the daring of the act bore testimony to the terror of the actor. For Greisengesang had but one influential motive: fear. The note ran thus: ‘At the first council, procuration to be withdrawn.—Corn. Greis.’ So, after three years of exercise, the right of signature was to be stript from Seraphina. It was more than an insult; it was a public disgrace; and she did not pause to consider how she had earned it, but morally bounded under the attack as bounds the wounded tiger. ‘Enough,’ she said; ‘I will sign the order. When shall he leave?’ ‘It will take me twelve hours to collect my men, and it had best be done at night. To-morrow midnight, if you please?’ answered the Baron. ‘Excellent,’ she said. ‘My door is always open to you, Baron. As soon as the order is prepared, bring it me to sign.’ ‘Madam,’ he said, ‘alone of all of us you do not risk your head in this adventure. For that reason, and to prevent all hesitation, I venture to propose the order should be in your hand throughout.’ ‘You are right,’ she replied. He laid a form before her, and she wrote the order in a clear hand, and re-read it. Suddenly a cruel smile came on her face. ‘I had forgotten his puppet,’ said she. ‘They will keep each other company.’ And she interlined and initialed the condemnation of Doctor Gotthold. ‘Your Highness has more memory than your servant,’ said the Baron; and then he, in his turn, carefully perused the fateful paper. ‘Good!’ said he. ‘You will appear in the drawing-room, Baron?’ she asked. ‘I thought it better,’ said he, ‘to avoid the possibility of a public affront. Anything that shook my credit might hamper us in the immediate future.’ ‘You are right,’ she said; and she held out her hand as to an old friend and equal.

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Chapter 9 THE PRICE OF THE RIVER FARM; IN WHICH VAIN-GLORY GOES BEFORE A FALL

The pistol had been practically fired. Under ordinary circumstances the scene at the council table would have entirely exhausted Otto’s store both of energy and anger; he would have begun to examine and condemn his conduct, have remembered all that was true, forgotten all that was unjust in Seraphina’s onslaught; and by half an hour after, would have fallen into that state of mind in which a Catholic flees to the confessional and a sot takes refuge with the bottle. Two matters of detail preserved his spirits. For, first, he had still an infinity of business to transact; and to transact business, for a man of Otto’s neglectful and procrastinating habits, is the best anodyne for conscience. All afternoon he was hard at it with the Chancellor, reading, dictating, signing, and despatching papers; and this kept him in a glow of selfapproval. But, secondly, his vanity was still alarmed; he had failed to get the money; to-morrow before noon he would have to disappoint old Killian; and in the eyes of that family which counted him so little, and to which he had sought to play the part of the heroic comforter, he must sink lower than at first. To a man of Otto’s temper, this was death. He could not accept the situation. And even as he worked, and worked wisely and well, over the hated details of his principality, he was secretly maturing a plan by which to turn the situation. It was a scheme as pleasing to the man as it was dishonourable in the prince; in which his frivolous nature found and took vengeance for the gravity and burthen of the afternoon. He chuckled as he thought of it: and Greisengesang heard him with wonder, and attributed his lively spirits to the skirmish of the morning. Led by this idea, the antique courtier ventured to compliment his sovereign on his bearing. It reminded him, he said, of Otto’s father. ‘What?’ asked the Prince, whose thoughts were miles away. ‘Your Highness’s authority at the board,’ explained the flatterer. ‘O, that! O yes,’ returned Otto; but for all his carelessness, his vanity was delicately tickled, and his mind returned and dwelt approvingly over the details of his victory. ‘I quelled them all,’ he thought. 84

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When the more pressing matters had been dismissed, it was already late, and Otto kept the Chancellor to dinner, and was entertained with a leash of ancient histories and modern compliments. The Chancellor’s career had been based, from the first off-put, on entire subserviency; he had crawled into honours and employments; and his mind was prostitute. The instinct of the creature served him well with Otto. First, he let fall a sneering word or two upon the female intellect; thence he proceeded to a closer engagement; and before the third course he was artfully dissecting Seraphina’s character to her approving husband. Of course no names were used; and of course the identity of that abstract or ideal man, with whom she was currently contrasted, remained an open secret. But this stiff old gentleman had a wonderful instinct for evil, thus to wind his way into man’s citadel; thus to harp by the hour on the virtues of his hearer and not once alarm his self-respect. Otto was all roseate, in and out, with flattery and Tokay and an approving conscience. He saw himself in the most attractive colours. If even Greisengesang, he thought, could thus espy the loose stitches in Seraphina’s character, and thus disloyally impart them to the opposite camp, he, the discarded husband—the dispossessed Prince—could scarce have erred on the side of severity. In this excellent frame he bade adieu to the old gentleman, whose voice had proved so musical, and set forth for the drawing-room. Already on the stair, he was seized with some compunction; but when he entered the great gallery and beheld his wife, the Chancellor’s abstract flatteries fell from him like rain, and he re-awoke to the poetic facts of life. She stood a good way off below a shining lustre, her back turned. The bend of her waist over­came him with a physical weakness. This was the girl-wife who had lain in his arms and whom he had sworn to cherish; there was she, who was better than success. It was Seraphina who restored him from the blow. She swam forward and smiled upon her husband with a sweetness that was insultingly artificial. ‘Frédéric,’ she lisped, ‘you are late.’ It was a scene of high comedy, such as is proper to unhappy marriages; and her aplomb disgusted him. There was no etiquette at these small drawing-rooms. People came and went at pleasure. The window embrasures became the roost of happy couples; at the great chimney, the talkers mostly congregated, each full-charged with scandal; and down at the farther end the gamblers gambled. It was towards this point that Otto moved, not ostentatiously, but with a gentle insistance, and scattering attentions as he went. Once abreast of the card-table, he placed himself opposite to 85

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Madame von Rosen, and, as soon as he had caught her eye, withdrew to the embrasure of a window. There she had speedily joined him. ‘You did well to call me,’ she said, a little wildly. ‘These cards will be my ruin.’ ‘Leave them,’ said Otto. ‘I!’ she cried, and laughed; ‘they are my destiny. My only chance was to die of a consumption; now I must die in a garret.’ ‘You are bitter to-night,’ said Otto. ‘I have been losing,’ she replied. ‘You do not know what greed is.’ ‘I have come, then, in an evil hour,’ said he. ‘Ah, you wish a favour!’ she cried, brightening beautifully. ‘Madam,’ said he. ‘I am about to found my party, and I come to you for a recruit.’ ‘Done,’ said the Countess. ‘I am a man again.’ ‘I may be wrong,’ continued Otto, ‘but I believe upon my heart you wish me no ill.’ ‘I wish you so well,’ she said, ‘that I dare not tell it you.’ ‘Then if I ask my favour?’ quoth the Prince. ‘Ask it, mon Prince,’ she answered. ‘Whatever it is, it is granted.’ ‘I wish you,’ he returned, ‘this very night to make the farmer of our talk.’ ‘Heaven knows your meaning!’ she exclaimed. ‘I know not, neither care; there are no bounds to my desire to please you. Call him made.’ ‘I will put it in another way,’ returned Otto. ‘Did you ever steal?’ ‘Often!’ cried the Countess. ‘I have broken all the ten commandments; and if there were more to-morrow I should not sleep till I had broken these.’ ‘This is a case of burglary: to say truth, I thought it would amuse you,’ said the Prince. ‘I have no practical experience,’ she replied, ‘but O! the good-will! I have broken a workbox in my time, and several hearts, my own included. Never a house! But it cannot be difficult; sins are so unromantically easy! What are we to break?’ ‘Madam, we are to break the treasury,’ said Otto; and he sketched to her briefly, wittily, with here and there a touch of pathos, the story of his visit to the farm, of his promise to buy it, and of the refusal with which his demand for money had been met that morning at the council; concluding with a few practical words as to the treasury windows, and the helps and hindrances of the proposed exploit. ‘They refused you the money,’ she said, when he had done. ‘And you accepted the refusal? Well!’ 86

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‘They gave their reasons,’ replied Otto, colouring. ‘They were not such as I could combat; and I am driven to dilapidate the funds of my own country by a theft. It is not dignified; but it is fun.’ ‘Fun,’ she said; ‘yes.’ And then she remained silently plunged in thought for an appreciable time. ‘How much do you require?’ she asked at length. ‘Three thousand crowns will do,’ he answered, ‘for I have still some money of my own.’ ‘Excellent,’ she said, regaining her levity. ‘I am your true accomplice. And where are we to meet?’ ‘You know the Flying Mercury,’ he answered, ‘in the Park? Three pathways intersect; there they have made a seat and raised the statue. The spot is handy, and the deity congenial.’ ‘Child,’ she said, and tapped him with her fan. ‘But do you know, my Prince, you are an egoist—your handy trysting-place is miles from me. You must give me ample time; I cannot, I think, possibly be there before two. But as the bell beats two, your helper shall arrive: welcome, I trust. Stay—do you bring any one?’ she added. ‘O, it is not for a chaperone—I am not a prude!’ ‘I shall bring a groom of mine,’ said Otto. ‘I caught him stealing corn.’ ‘His name?’ she asked. ‘I profess I know not. I am not yet intimate with my corn-stealer,’ returned the Prince. ‘It was in a professional capacity——’ ‘Like me! Flatterer!’ she cried. ‘But oblige me in one thing. Let me find you waiting at the seat—yes, you shall await me; for on this expedition it shall be no longer Prince and Countess, it shall be the lady and the squire—and your friend the thief shall be no nearer than the fountain. Do you promise?’ ‘Madam, in everything you are to command; you shall be captain, I am but supercargo,’ answered Otto. ‘Well, Heaven bring all safe to port!’ she said. ‘It is not Friday!’ Something in her manner had puzzled Otto, had possibly touched him with suspicion. ‘Is it not strange,’ he remarked, ‘that I should choose my accomplice from the other camp?’ ‘Fool!’ she said. ‘But it is your only wisdom that you know your friends.’ And suddenly, in the vantage of the deep window, she caught up his hand and kissed it with a sort of passion. ‘Now, go,’ she added, ‘go at once.’ He went, somewhat staggered, doubting in his heart that he was 87

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overbold. For in that moment she had flashed upon him like a jewel; and even through the strong panoply of a previous love he had been conscious of a shock. Next moment he had dismissed the fear. Both Otto and the Countess retired early from the drawing-room; and the Prince, after an elaborate feint, dismissed his valet and went forth by the private passage and the back postern in quest of the groom. Once more the stable was in darkness, once more Otto employed the talismanic knock, and once more the groom appeared and sickened with terror. ‘Good evening, friend,’ said Otto, pleasantly. ‘I want you to bring a corn sack—empty this time—and to accompany me. We shall be gone all night.’ ‘Your Highness,’ groaned the man, ‘I have the charge of the small stables. I am here alone.’ ‘Come,’ said the Prince, ‘you are no such martinet in duty.’ And then seeing that the man was shaking from head to foot, Otto laid a hand upon his shoulder. ‘If I meant you harm,’ he said, ‘should I be here?’ The fellow became instantly reassured. He got the sack; and Otto led him round by several paths and avenues, conversing pleasantly by the way, and left him at last planted by a certain fountain where a goggle-eyed Triton spouted intermittently into a rippling laver. Thence he proceeded alone to where, in a round clearing, a copy of Gian Bologna’s Mercury stood tiptoe in the twilight of the stars. The night was warm and windless. A shaving of new moon had lately arisen; but it was still too small and too low down in heaven to contend with the immense host of lesser luminaries; and the rough face of the earth was drenched with starlight. Down one of the alleys, which widened as it receded, he could see a part of the lamplit terrace where a sentry silently paced, and beyond that a corner of the town with interlacing street-lights. But all around him the young trees stood mystically blurred in the dim shine; and in the stock-still quietness the upleaping god appeared alive. In this dimness and silence of the night, Otto’s conscience became suddenly and staringly luminous like the dial of a city clock. He averted the eyes of his mind, but the finger, rapidly travelling, pointed to a series of misdeeds that took his breath away. What was he doing in that place? The money had been wrongly squandered, but that was largely by his own neglect. And he now proposed to embarrass the finances of this country which he had been too idle to govern. And he now proposed to squander the money once again, and this time for a private, if a generous end. And the man whom he had reproved for 88

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stealing corn, he was now to set stealing treasure. And then there was Madame von Rosen, upon whom he looked down with some of that ill-favoured contempt of the chaste male for the imperfect woman. Because he thought of her as one degraded below scruples, he had picked her out to be still more degraded, and to risk her whole irregular establishment in life by complicity in this dishonourable act. It was uglier than a seduction. Otto had to walk very briskly and whistle very busily; and when at last he heard steps in the narrowest and darkest of the alleys, it was with a gush of relief that he sprang to meet the Countess. To wrestle alone with one’s good angel is so hard! and so precious, at the proper time, is a companion certain to be less virtuous than oneself! It was a young man who came towards him—a young man of small stature and a peculiar gait, wearing a wide flapping hat, and carrying, with great weariness, a heavy bag. Otto recoiled; but the young man held up his hand by way of signal, and coming up with a panting run, as if with the last of his endurance, laid the bag upon the ground, threw himself upon the bench, and disclosed the features of Madame von Rosen. ‘You, Countess!’ cried the Prince. ‘No, no,’ she panted, ‘the Count von Rosen—my young brother. A capital fellow. Let him get his breath.’ ‘Ah, madam . . . .’ said he. ‘Call me Count,’ she returned, ‘respect my incognito.’ ‘Count be it, then,’ he replied. ‘And let me implore that gallant gentleman to set forth at once on our enterprise.’ ‘Sit down beside me here,’ she returned, patting the further corner of the bench. ‘I will follow you in a moment. O, I am so tired—feel how my heart leaps! Where is your thief?’ ‘At his post,’ replied Otto. ‘Shall I introduce him? He seems an excellent companion.’ ‘No,’ she said, ‘do not hurry me yet. I must speak to you. Not but I adore your thief; I adore any one who has the spirit to do wrong. I never cared for virtue till I fell in love with my Prince.’ She laughed musically. ‘And even so, it is not for your virtues,’ she added. Otto was embarrassed. ‘And now,’ he asked, ‘if you are anyway rested?’ ‘Presently, presently. Let me breathe,’ she said, panting a little harder than before. ‘And what has so wearied you?’ he asked. ‘This bag? And why, in the name of eccentricity, a bag? For an empty one, you might have relied 89

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on my own foresight; and this one is very far from being empty. My dear Count, with what trash have you come laden? But the shortest method is to see for myself.’ And he put down his hand. She stopped him at once. ‘Otto,’ she said, ‘no—not that way. I will tell, I will make a clean breast. It is done already. I have robbed the treasury single-handed. There are three thousand two hundred crowns. O, I trust it is enough!’ Her embarrassment was so obvious that the Prince was struck into a muse, gazing in her face, with his hand still outstretched, and she still holding him by the wrist. ‘You!’ he said, at last. ‘How?’ And then drawing himself up, ‘O madam,’ he cried, ‘I understand. You must indeed think meanly of the Prince.’ ‘Well then, it was a lie!’ she cried. ‘The money is mine, honestly my own—now yours. This was an unworthy act that you proposed. But I love your honour, and I swore to myself that I should save it in your teeth. I beg of you to let me save it’—with a sudden lovely change of tone. ‘Otto, I beseech you let me save it. Take this dross from your poor friend who loves you!’ ‘Madam, madam,’ babbled Otto, in the extreme of misery, ‘I cannot—I must go.’ And he half rose; but she was on the ground before him in an instant, clasping his knees. ‘No,’ she gasped, ‘you shall not go. Do you despise me so entirely? It is dross; I hate it; I should squander it at play and be no richer; it is an investment; it is to save me from ruin. Otto,’ she cried, as he again feebly tried to put her from him, ‘if you leave me alone in this disgrace, I will die here!’ He groaned aloud. ‘O,’ she said, ‘think what I suffer! If you suffer from a piece of delicacy, think what I suffer in my shame! To have my trash refused! You would rather steal, you think of me so basely! You would rather tread my heart in pieces! O, unkind! O my Prince! O Otto! O pity me!’ She was still clasping him; then she found his hand and covered it with kisses, and at this his head began to turn. ‘O,’ she cried again, ‘I see it! O what a horror! It is because I am old, because I am no longer beautiful.’ And she burst into a storm of sobs. This was the coup de grâce. Otto had now to comfort and compose her as he could, and before many words, the money was accepted. Between the woman and the weak man such was the inevitable end. Madame von Rosen instantly composed her sobs. She thanked him with a fluttering voice, and resumed her place upon the bench at the far end from Otto. ‘Now you see,’ she said, ‘why I bade you keep the thief at distance, and why I came alone. How I trembled for my treasure!’ 90

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‘Madam,’ said Otto, with a tearful whimper in his voice, ‘spare me! You are too good, too noble!’ ‘I wonder to hear you,’ she returned. ‘You have avoided a great folly. You will be able to meet your good old peasant. You have found an excellent investment for a friend’s money. You have preferred essential kindness to an empty scruple; and now you are ashamed of it! You have made your friend happy; and now you mourn as the dove! Come, cheer up. I know it is depressing to have done exactly right; but you need not make a practice of it. Forgive yourself this virtue; come now, look me in the face and smile!’ He did look at her. When a man has been embraced by a woman, he sees her in a glamour; and at such a time, in the baffling glimmer of the stars, she will look wildly well. The hair is touched with light; the eyes are constellations; the face sketched in shadows—a sketch, you might say, by passion. Otto became consoled for his defeat; he began to take an interest. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I am no ingrate.’ ‘You promised me fun,’ she returned, with a laugh. ‘I have given you as good. We have had a stormy scena.’ He laughed in his turn, and the sound of the laughter, in either case, was hardly reassuring. ‘Come, what are you going to give me in exchange,’ she continued, ‘for my excellent declamation?’ ‘What you will,’ he said. ‘Whatever I will? Upon your honour? Suppose I asked the crown?’ She was flashing upon him, beautiful in triumph. ‘Upon my honour,’ he replied. ‘Shall I ask the crown?’ she continued. ‘Nay; what should I do with it? Grünewald is but a petty state; my ambition swells above it. I shall ask—I find I want nothing,’ she concluded. ‘I will give you something instead. I will give you leave to kiss me—once.’ Otto drew near, and she put up her face; they were both smiling, both on the brink of laughter, all was so innocent and playful; and the Prince, when their lips encountered, was dumbfounded by the sudden convulsion of his being. Both drew instantly apart, and for an appreciable time sat tongue-tied. Otto was indistinctly conscious of a peril in the silence, but could find no words to utter. Suddenly the Countess seemed to awake. ‘As for your wife——’ she began in a clear and steady voice. The word recalled Otto, with a shudder, from his trance. ‘I will hear nothing against my wife,’ he cried wildly; and then, recovering himself and in a kindlier tone, ‘I will tell you my one secret,’ he added. ‘I love 91

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my wife.’ ‘You should have let me finish,’ she returned, smiling. ‘Do you suppose I did not mention her on purpose? You know you had lost your head. Well, so had I. Come now, do not be abashed by words,’ she added, somewhat sharply. ‘It is the one thing I despise. If you are not a fool, you will see that I am building fortresses about your virtue. And at any rate, I choose that you shall understand that I am not dying of love for you. It is a very smiling business; no tragedy for me! And now here is what I have to say about your wife: She is not and she never has been Gondremark’s mistress. Be sure he would have boasted if she had. Good-night!’ And in a moment she was gone down the alley, and Otto was alone with the bag of money and the flying god.

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Chapter 10 GOTTHOLD’S REVISED OPINION; AND THE FALL COMPLETED

The Countess left poor Otto with a caress and buffet simultaneously administered. The welcome word about his wife and the virtuous ending of his interview should doubtless have delighted him. But for all that, as he shouldered the bag of money and set forward to rejoin his groom, he was conscious of many aching sensibilities. To have gone wrong and to have been set right, makes but a double trial for man’s vanity. The discovery of his own weakness and possible unfaith had staggered him to the heart; and to hear, in the same hour, of his wife’s fidelity from one who loved her not, increased the bitterness of the surprise. He was about halfway between the fountain and the Flying Mercury before his thoughts began to be clear; and he was surprised to find them resentful. He paused in a kind of temper, and struck with his hand a little shrub. Thence there arose instantly a cloud of awakened sparrows, which as instantly dispersed and disappeared into the thicket. He looked at them stupidly, and when they were gone continued staring at the stars. ‘I am angry. By what right? By none!’ he thought; but he was still angry. He cursed Madame von Rosen and instantly repented. Heavy was the money on his shoulders. When he reached the fountain, he did, out of ill-humour and parade, an unpardonable act. He gave the money bodily to the dishonest groom. ‘Keep this for me,’ he said, ‘until I call for it to-morrow. It is a great sum, and by that you will judge that I have not condemned you.’ And he strode away ruffling, as if he had done something generous. It was a desperate stroke to re-enter at the point of the bayonet into his self-esteem; and, like all such, it was fruitless in the end. He got to bed with the devil, it appeared: kicked and tumbled till the gray of the morning; and then fell inopportunely into a leaden slumber, and awoke to find it ten. To miss the appointment with old Killian after all, had been too tragic a miscarriage: and he hurried with all his might, found the groom (for a wonder) faithful to his trust, and arrived only a few minutes before noon in the guest-chamber of the Morning Star. Killian was there in his Sunday’s best and looking very gaunt and rigid; 93

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a lawyer from Brandenau stood sentinel over his outspread papers; and the groom and the landlord of the inn were called to serve as witnesses. The obvious deference of that great man, the innkeeper, plainly affected the old farmer with surprise; but it was not until Otto had taken the pen and signed that the truth flashed upon him fully. Then, indeed, he was beside himself. ‘His Highness!’ he cried, ‘His Highness!’ and repeated the exclamation till his mind had grappled fairly with the facts. Then he turned to the witnesses. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘you dwell in a country highly favoured by God; for of all generous gentlemen, I will say it on my conscience, this one is the king. I am an old man, and I have seen good and bad, and the year of the great famine; but a more excellent gentleman, no, never.’ ‘We know that,’ cried the landlord, ‘we know that well in Grünewald. If we saw more of his Highness we should be the better pleased.’ ‘It is the kindest Prince,’ began the groom, and suddenly closed his mouth upon a sob, so that every one turned to gaze upon his emotion. Otto not last; Otto struck with remorse, to see the man so grateful. Then it was the lawyer’s turn to pay a compliment. ‘I do not know what Providence may hold in store,’ he said, ‘but this day should be a bright one in the annals of your reign. The shouts of armies could not be more eloquent than the emotion on these honest faces.’ And the Brandenau lawyer bowed, skipped, stepped back and took snuff, with the air of a man who has found and seized an opportunity. ‘Well, young gentleman,’ said Killian, ‘if you will pardon me the plainness of calling you a gentleman, many a good day’s work you have done, I doubt not, but never a better, or one that will be better blessed; and whatever, sir, may be your happiness and triumph in that high sphere to which you have been called, it will be none the worse, sir, for an old man’s blessing!’ The scene had almost assumed the proportions of an ovation; and when the Prince escaped he had but one thought: to go wherever he was most sure of praise. His conduct at the board of council occurred to him as a fair chapter; and this evoked the memory of Gotthold. To Gotthold he would go. Gotthold was in the library as usual, and laid down his pen, a little angrily, on Otto’s entrance. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘here you are.’ ‘Well,’ returned Otto, ‘we made a revolution, I believe.’ ‘It is what I fear,’ returned the Doctor. ‘How?’ said Otto. ‘Fear? Fear is the burnt child. I have learned my strength and the weakness of the others; and I now mean to govern.’ 94

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Gotthold said nothing, but he looked down and smoothed his chin. ‘You disapprove?’ cried Otto. ‘You are a weathercock.’ ‘On the contrary,’ replied the Doctor. ‘My observation has confirmed my fears. It will not do, Otto, not do.’ ‘What will not do?’ demanded the Prince, with a sickening stab of pain. ‘None of it,’ answered Gotthold. ‘You are unfitted for a life of action; you lack the stamina, the habit, the restraint, the patience. Your wife is greatly better, vastly better; and though she is in bad hands, displays a very different aptitude. She is a woman of affairs; you are— dear boy, you are yourself. I bid you back to your amusements; like a smiling dominie, I give you holidays for life. Yes,’ he continued, ‘there is a day appointed for all when they shall turn again upon their own philosophy. I had grown to disbelieve impartially in all; and if in the atlas of the sciences there were two charts I disbelieved in more than all the rest, they were politics and morals. I had a sneaking kindness for your vices; as they were negative, they flattered my philosophy; and I called them almost virtues. Well, Otto, I was wrong; I have forsworn my sceptical philosophy; and I perceive your faults to be unpardonable. You are unfit to be a Prince, unfit to be a husband. And I give you my word, I would rather see a man capably doing evil, than blundering about good.’ Otto was still silent, in extreme dudgeon. Presently the Doctor resumed: ‘I will take the smaller matter first: your conduct to your wife. You went, I hear, and had an explanation. That may have been right or wrong; I know not; at least, you had stirred her temper. At the council she insults you; well, you insult her back—a man to a woman, a husband to his wife, in public! Next upon the back of this, you propose—the story runs like wildfire—to recall the power of signature. Can she ever forgive that? a woman—a young woman—ambitious, conscious of talents beyond yours? Never, Otto. And to sum all, at such a crisis in your married life, you get into a window corner with that ogling dame von Rosen. I do not dream that there was any harm; but I do say it was an idle disrespect to your wife. Why, man, the woman is not decent.’ ‘Gotthold,’ said Otto, ‘I will hear no evil of the Countess.’ ‘You will certainly hear no good of her,’ returned Gotthold; ‘and if you wish your wife to be the pink of nicety, you should clear your court of demi-reputations.’ ‘The commonplace injustice of a by-word,’ Otto cried. ‘The partiality of sex. She is a demi-rep; what then is Gondremark? Were she a 95

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man——’ ‘It would be all one,’ retorted Gotthold, roughly. ‘When I see a man, come to years of wisdom, who speaks in double-meanings and is the braggart of his vices, I spit on the other side. “You, my friend,” say I, “are not even a gentleman.” Well, she’s not even a lady.’ ‘She is the best friend I have, and I choose that she shall be respected,’ Otto said. ‘If she is your friend, so much the worse,’ replied the Doctor. ‘It will not stop there.’ ‘Ah!’ cried Otto, ‘there is the charity of virtue! All evil in the spotted fruit. But I can tell you, sir, that you do Madame von Rosen prodigal injustice.’ ‘You can tell me!’ said the Doctor, shrewdly. ‘Have you tried? have you been riding the marches?’ The blood came into Otto’s face. ‘Ah!’ cried Gotthold, ‘look at your wife and blush! There’s a wife for a man to marry and then lose! She’s a carnation, Otto. The soul is in her eyes.’ ‘You have changed your note for Seraphina, I perceive,’ said Otto. ‘Changed it!’ cried the Doctor, with a flush. ‘Why, when was it different? But I own I admired her at the council. When she sat there silent, tapping with her foot, I admired her as I might a hurricane. Were I one of those who venture upon matrimony, there had been the prize to tempt me! She invites, as Mexico invited Cortez; the enterprise is hard, the natives are unfriendly—I believe them cruel too—but the metropolis is paved with gold and the breeze blows out of paradise. Yes, I could desire to be that conqueror. But to philander with von Rosen; never! Senses? I discard them; what are they?—pruritus! Curiosity? Reach me my Anatomy!’ ‘To whom do you address yourself?’ cried Otto. ‘Surely, you, of all men, know that I love my wife!’ ‘O, love!’ cried Gotthold; ‘love is a great word; it is in all the dictionaries. If you had loved, she would have paid you back. What does she ask? A little ardour!’ ‘It is hard to love for two,’ replied the Prince. ‘Hard? Why, there’s the touchstone! O, I know my poets!’ cried the Doctor. ‘We are but dust and fire, too arid to endure life’s scorching; and love, like the shadow of a great rock, should lend shelter and refreshment, not to the lover only, but to his mistress and to the children that reward them; and their very friends should seek repose in the fringes of that peace. Love is not love that cannot build a home. And 96

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you call it love to grudge and quarrel and pick faults? You call it love to thwart her to her face, and bandy insults? Love!’ ‘Gotthold, you are unjust. I was then fighting for my country,’ said the Prince. ‘Ay, and there’s the worst of all,’ returned the Doctor. ‘You could not even see that you were wrong; that being where they were, retreat was ruin.’ ‘Why, you supported me!’ cried Otto. ‘I did. I was a fool like you,’ replied Gotthold. ‘But now my eyes are open. If you go on as you have started, disgrace this fellow Gondremark, and publish the scandal of your divided house, there will befall a most abominable thing in Grünewald. A revolution, friend—a ­revolution.’ ‘You speak strangely for a red,’ said Otto. ‘A red republican, but not a revolutionary,’ returned the Doctor. ‘An ugly thing is a Grünewalder drunk! One man alone can save the country from this pass, and that is the double-dealer Gondremark, with whom I conjure you to make peace. It will not be you; it never can be you:—you, who can do nothing, as your wife said, but trade upon your station—you, who spent the hours in begging money! And in God’s name, what for? Why money? What mystery of idiocy was this?’ ‘It was to no ill end. It was to buy a farm,’ quoth Otto, sulkily. ‘To buy a farm!’ cried Gotthold. ‘Buy a farm!’ ‘Well, what then?’ returned Otto. ‘I have bought it, if you come to that.’ Gotthold fairly bounded on his seat. ‘And how that?’ he cried. ‘How?’ repeated Otto, startled. ‘Ay, verily, how!’ returned the Doctor. ‘How came you by the money?’ The Prince’s countenance darkened. ‘That is my affair,’ said he. ‘You see you are ashamed,’ retorted Gotthold. ‘And so you bought a farm in the hour of your country’s need—doubtless to be ready for the abdication; and I put it that you stole the funds. There are not three ways of getting money: there are but two: to earn and steal. And now, when you have combined Charles the Fifth and Long-fingered Tom, you come to me to fortify your vanity! But I will clear my mind upon this matter: until I know the right and wrong of the transaction, I put my hand behind my back. A man may be the pitifullest prince, he must be a spotless gentleman.’ The Prince had gotten to his feet, as pale as paper. ‘Gotthold,’ he said, ‘you drive me beyond bounds. Beware, sir, beware!’ 97

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‘Do you threaten me, friend Otto?’ asked the Doctor, grimly. ‘That would be a strange conclusion.’ ‘When have you ever known me use my power in any private animosity?’ cried Otto. ‘To any private man, your words were an unpardonable insult, but at me you shoot in full security, and I must turn aside to compliment you on your plainness. I must do more than pardon, I must admire, because you have faced this—this formidable monarch, like a Nathan before David. You have uprooted an old kindness, sir, with an unsparing hand. You leave me very bare. My last bond is broken; and though I take Heaven to witness that I sought to do the right, I have this reward: to find myself alone. You say I am no gentleman; yet the sneers have been upon your side; and though I can very well perceive where you have lodged your sympathies, I will forbear the taunt.’ ‘Otto, are you insane?’ cried Gotthold, leaping up. ‘Because I ask you how you came by certain moneys, and because you refuse——’ ‘Herr von Hohenstockwitz, I have ceased to invite your aid in my affairs,’ said Otto. ‘I have heard all that I desire, and you have sufficiently trampled on my vanity. It may be that I cannot govern, it may be that I cannot love—you tell me so with every mark of honesty; but God has granted me one virtue, and I can still forgive. I forgive you; even in this hour of passion, I can perceive my faults and your excuses; and if I desire that in future I may be spared your conversation, it is not, sir, from resentment—not resentment—but, by Heaven, because no man on earth could endure to be so rated. You have the satisfaction to see your sovereign weep; and that person whom you have so often taunted with his happiness reduced to the last pitch of solitude and misery. No,—I will hear nothing; I claim the last word, sir, as your Prince; and that last word shall be—forgiveness.’ And with that Otto was gone from the apartment, and Doctor Gotthold was left alone with the most conflicting sentiments of sorrow, remorse, and merriment; walking to and fro before his table, and asking himself, with hands uplifted, which of the pair of them was most to blame for this unhappy rupture. Presently, he took from a cupboard a bottle of Rhine wine and a goblet of the deep Bohemian ruby. The first glass a little warmed and comforted his bosom; with the second he began to look down upon these troubles from a sunny mountain; yet a while, and filled with this false comfort and contemplating life throughout a golden medium, he owned to himself, with a flush, a smile, and a half-pleasurable sigh, that he had been somewhat over plain in dealing with his cousin. ‘He said the truth, too,’ added the 98

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penitent librarian, ‘for in my monkish fashion I adore the Princess.’ And then, with a still deepening flush and a certain stealth, although he sat all alone in that great gallery, he toasted Seraphina to the dregs.

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Chapter 11 PROVIDENCE VON ROSEN: ACT THE FIRST: SHE BEGUILES THE BARON

At a sufficiently late hour, or to be more exact, at three in the afternoon, Madame von Rosen issued on the world. She swept downstairs and out across the garden, a black mantilla thrown over her head, and the long train of her black velvet dress ruthlessly sweeping in the dirt. At the other end of that long garden, and back to back with the villa of the Countess, stood the large mansion where the Prime Minister transacted his affairs and pleasures. This distance, which was enough for decency by the easy canons of Mittwalden, the Countess swiftly traversed, opened a little door with a key, mounted a flight of stairs, and entered unceremoniously into Gondremark’s study. It was a large and very high apartment; books all about the walls, papers on the table, papers on the floor; here and there a picture, somewhat scant of drapery; a great fire glowing and flaming in the blue tiled hearth; and the daylight streaming through a cupola above. In the midst of this sat the great Baron Gondremark in his shirt-sleeves, his business for that day fairly at an end, and the hour arrived for relaxation. His expression, his very nature, seemed to have undergone a fundamental change. Gondremark at home appeared the very antipode of Gondremark on duty. He had an air of massive jollity that well became him; grossness and geniality sat upon his features; and along with his manners, he had laid aside his sly and sinister expression. He lolled there, sunning his bulk before the fire, a noble animal. ‘Hey!’ he cried. ‘At last!’ The Countess stepped into the room in silence, threw herself on a chair, and crossed her legs. In her lace and velvet, with a good display of smooth black stocking and of snowy petticoat, and with the refined profile of her face and slender plumpness of her body, she showed in singular contrast to the big, black, intellectual satyr by the fire. ‘How often do you send for me?’ she cried. ‘It is compromising.’ Gondremark laughed. ‘Speaking of that,’ said he, ‘what in the devil’s name were you about? You were not home till morning.’ ‘I was giving alms,’ she said. 100

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The Baron again laughed loud and long, for in his shirt-sleeves he was a very mirthful creature. ‘It is fortunate I am not jealous,’ he remarked. ‘But you know my way: pleasure and liberty go hand in hand. I believe what I believe; it is not much, but I believe it. But now, to business. Have you not read my letter?’ ‘No,’ she said; ‘my head ached.’ ‘Ah well! then I have news indeed!’ cried Gondremark. ‘I was mad to see you all last night and all this morning: for yesterday afternoon I brought my long business to a head; the ship has come home; one more dead lift, and I shall cease to fetch and carry for the Princess Ratafia. Yes, ’tis done. I have the order all in Ratafia’s hand; I carry it on my heart. At the hour of twelve to-night, Prince Featherhead is to be taken in his bed and, like the bambino, whipped into a chariot; and by next morning he will command a most romantic prospect from the donjon of the Felsenburg. Farewell, Featherhead! The war goes on, the girl is in my hand; I have long been indispensable, but now I shall be sole. I have long,’ he added exultingly, ‘long carried this intrigue upon my shoulders, like Samson with the gates of Gaza; now I discharge that burthen.’ She had sprung to her feet a little paler. ‘Is this true?’ she cried. ‘I tell you a fact,’ he asseverated. ‘The trick is played.’ ‘I will never believe it,’ she said. ‘An order? In her own hand? I will never believe it, Heinrich.’ ‘I swear to you,’ said he. ‘O, what do you care for oaths—or I either? What would you swear by? Wine, women, and song? It is not binding,’ she said. She had come quite close up to him and laid her hand upon his arm. ‘As for the order—no, Heinrich, never! I will never believe it. I will die ere I believe it. You have some secret purpose—what, I cannot guess—but not one word of it is true.’ ‘Shall I show it you?’ he asked. ‘You cannot,’ she answered. ‘There is no such thing.’ ‘Incorrigible Sadducee!’ he cried. ‘Well, I will convert you; you shall see the order.’ He moved to a chair where he had thrown his coat, and then drawing forth and holding out a paper, ‘Read,’ said he. She took it greedily, and her eye flashed as she perused it. ‘Hey!’ cried the Baron, ‘there falls a dynasty, and it was I that felled it; and I and you inherit!’ He seemed to swell in stature; and next moment, with a laugh, he put his hand forward. ‘Give me the dagger,’ said he. But she whisked the paper suddenly behind her back and faced him, lowering. ‘No, no,’ she said. ‘You and I have first a point to settle. 101

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Do you suppose me blind? She could never have given that paper but to one man, and that man her lover. Here you stand—her lover, her accomplice, her master—O, I well believe it, for I know your power. But what am I?’ she cried; ‘I, whom you deceive!’ ‘Jealousy!’ cried Gondremark. ‘Anna, I would never have believed it! But I declare to you by all that’s credible, that I am not her lover. I might be, I suppose; but I never yet durst risk the declaration. The chit is so unreal; a mincing doll; she will and she will not; there is no counting on her, by God! And hitherto I have had my own way without, and keep the lover in reserve. And I say, Anna,’ he added with severity, ‘you must break yourself of this new fit, my girl; there must be no combustion. I keep the creature under the belief that I adore her; and if she caught a breath of you and me, she is such a fool, prude, and dog in the manger, that she is capable of spoiling all.’ ‘All very fine,’ returned the lady. ‘With whom do you pass your days? and which am I to believe, your words or your actions?’ ‘Anna, the devil take you, are you blind?’ cried Gondremark. ‘You know me. Am I likely to care for such a preciosa? ’Tis hard that we should have been together for so long, and you should still take me for a troubadour. But if there is one thing that I despise and deprecate, it is all such figures in Berlin wool. Give me a human woman—like myself. You are my mate; you were made for me; you amuse me like the play. And what have I to gain that I should pretend to you? If I do not love you, what use are you to me? Why, none. It is as clear as noonday.’ ‘Do you love me, Heinrich?’ she asked, languishing. ‘Do you truly?’ ‘I tell you,’ he cried, ‘I love you next after myself. I should be all abroad if I had lost you.’ ‘Well, then,’ said she, folding up the paper and putting it calmly in her pocket, ‘I will believe you, and I join the plot. Count upon me. At midnight, did you say? It is Gordon, I see, that you have charged with it. Excellent; he will stick at nothing.’ Gondremark watched her suspiciously. ‘Why do you take the paper?’ he demanded. ‘Give it here.’ ‘No,’ she returned; ‘I mean to keep it. It is I who must prepare the stroke; you cannot manage it without me; and to do my best I must possess the paper. Where shall I find Gordon? In his rooms?’ She spoke with a rather feverish self-possession. ‘Anna,’ he said sternly, the black, bilious countenance of his palace rôle taking the place of the more open favour of his hours at home, ‘I ask you for that paper. Once, twice, and thrice.’ ‘Heinrich,’ she returned, looking him in the face, ‘take care. I will 102

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put up with no dictation.’ Both looked dangerous; and the silence lasted for a measurable interval of time. Then she made haste to have the first word; and with a laugh that rang clear and honest, ‘Do not be a child,’ she said. ‘I wonder at you. If your assurances are true, you can have no reason to mistrust me, nor I to play you false. The difficulty is to get the Prince out of the palace without scandal. His valets are devoted; his chamberlain a slave; and yet one cry might ruin all.’ ‘They must be overpowered,’ he said, following her to the new ground, ‘and disappear along with him.’ ‘And your whole scheme along with them!’ she cried. ‘He does not take his servants when he goes a-hunting: a child could read the truth. No, no; the plan is idiotic; it must be Ratafia’s. But hear me. You know the Prince worships me?’ ‘I know,’ he said. ‘Poor Featherhead, I cross his destiny!’ ‘Well now,’ she continued, ‘what if I bring him alone out of the palace, to some quiet corner of the Park—the Flying Mercury, for instance? Gordon can be posted in the thicket; the carriage wait behind the temple; not a cry, not a scuffle, not a footfall; simply, the Prince vanishes!—What do you say? Am I an able ally? Are my beaux yeux of service? Ah, Heinrich, do not lose your Anna!—she has power!’ He struck with his open hand upon the chimney. ‘Witch!’ he said, ‘there is not your match for devilry in Europe. Service! the thing runs on wheels.’ ‘Kiss me, then, and let me go. I must not miss my Featherhead,’ she said. ‘Stay, stay,’ said the Baron; ‘not so fast. I wish, upon my soul, that I could trust you; but you are, out and in, so whimsical a devil that I dare not. Hang it, Anna, no; it’s not possible!’ ‘You doubt me, Heinrich?’ she cried. ‘Doubt is not the word,’ said he. ‘I know you. Once you were clear of me with that paper in your pocket, who knows what you would do with it?—not you, at least—nor I. You see,’ he added, shaking his head paternally upon the Countess, ‘you are as vicious as a monkey.’ ‘I swear to you,’ she cried, ‘by my salvation . . . .’ ‘I have no curiosity to hear you swearing,’ said the Baron. ‘You think that I have no religion? You suppose me destitute of honour. Well,’ she said, ‘see here: I will not argue, but I tell you once for all: leave me this order, and the Prince shall be arrested—take it from me, and, as certain as I speak, I will upset the coach. Trust me, or fear me: take your choice.’ And she offered him the paper. 103

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The Baron, in a great contention of mind, stood irresolute, weighing the two dangers. Once his hand advanced, then dropped. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘since trust is what you call it . . . .’ ‘No more,’ she interrupted. ‘Do not spoil your attitude. And now since you have behaved like a good sort of fellow in the dark, I will condescend to tell you why. I go to the palace to arrange with Gordon; but how is Gordon to obey me? And how can I foresee the hours? It may be midnight; ay, and it may be night-fall; all’s a chance; and to act, I must be free and hold the strings of the adventure. And now,’ she cried, ‘your Vivien goes. Dub me your knight!’ And she held out her arms and smiled upon him radiant. ‘Well,’ he said, when he had kissed her, ‘every man must have his folly; I thank God mine is no worse. Off with you! I have given a child a squib.’

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Chapter 12 PROVIDENCE VON ROSEN: ACT THE SECOND: SHE INFORMS THE PRINCE

It was the first impulse of Madame von Rosen to return to her own villa and revise her toilette. Whatever else should come of this adventure, it was her firm design to pay a visit to the Princess. And before that woman, so little beloved, the Countess would appear at no disadvantage. It was the work of minutes. Von Rosen had the captain’s eye in matters of the toilette; she was none of those who hang in Fabian helplessness among their finery and, after hours, come forth upon the world as dowdies. A glance, a loosened curl, a studied and admired disorder in the hair, a bit of lace, a touch of colour, a yellow rose in the bosom; and the instant picture was complete. ‘That will do,’ she said. ‘Bid my carriage follow me to the palace. In half an hour it should be there in waiting.’ The night was beginning to fall and the shops to shine with lamps along the tree-beshadowed thoroughfares of Otto’s capital, when the Countess started on her high emprise. She was jocund at heart; pleasure and interest had winged her beauty, and she knew it. She paused before the glowing jeweller’s; she remarked and praised a costume in the milliner’s window; and when she reached the lime-tree walk, with its high, umbrageous arches and stir of passers-by in the dim alleys, she took her place upon a bench and began to dally with the pleasures of the hour. It was cold, but she did not feel it, being warm within; her thoughts, in that dark corner, shone like the gold and rubies at the jeweller’s; her ears, which heard the brushing of so many footfalls, transposed it into music. What was she to do? She held the paper by which all depended. Otto and Gondremark and Ratafia, and the state itself, hung light in her balances, as light as dust; her little finger laid in either scale would set all flying: and she hugged herself upon her huge preponderance, and then laughed aloud to think how giddily it might be used. The vertigo of omnipotence, the disease of Cæsars, shook her reason. ‘O the mad world!’ she thought, and laughed aloud in exultation. A child, finger in mouth, had paused a little way from where she 105

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sat, and stared with cloudy interest upon this laughing lady. She called it nearer; but the child hung back. Instantly, with that curious passion which you may see any woman in the world display, on the most odd occasions, for a similar end, the Countess bent herself with singleness of mind to overcome this diffidence; and presently, sure enough, the child was seated on her knee, thumbing and glowering at her watch. ‘If you had a clay bear and a china monkey,’ asked von Rosen, ‘which would you prefer to break?’ ‘But I have neither,’ said the child. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘here is a bright florin, with which you may purchase both the one and the other; and I shall give it you at once, if you will answer my question. The clay bear or the china monkey—come?’ But the unbreeched soothsayer only stared upon the florin with big eyes; the oracle could not be persuaded to reply; and the Countess kissed him lightly, gave him the florin, set him down upon the path, and resumed her way with swinging and elastic gait. ‘Which shall I break?’ she wondered; and she passed her hand with delight among the careful disarrangement of her locks. ‘Which?’ and she consulted heaven with her bright eyes. ‘Do I love both or neither? A little—passionately—not at all? Both or neither—both, I believe; but at least I will make hay of Ratafia.’ By the time she had passed the iron gates, mounted the drive, and set her foot upon the broad flagged terrace, the night had come completely; the palace front was thick with lighted windows; and along the balustrade, the lamp on every twentieth baluster shone clear. A few withered tracks of sunset, amber and glow-worm green, still lingered in the western sky; and she paused once again to watch them fading. ‘And to think,’ she said, ‘that here am I—destiny embodied, a norn, a fate, a providence—and have no guess upon which side I shall declare myself! What other woman in my place would not be prejudiced, and think herself committed? But, thank Heaven! I was born just!’ Otto’s windows were bright among the rest, and she looked on them with rising tenderness. ‘How does it feel to be deserted?’ she thought. ‘Poor dear fool! The girl deserves that he should see this order.’ Without more delay, she passed into the palace and asked for an audience of Prince Otto. The Prince, she was told, was in his own apartment, and desired to be private. She sent her name. A man presently returned with word that the Prince tendered his apologies, but could see no one. ‘Then I will write,’ she said, and scribbled a few lines alleging urgency of life and death. ‘Help me, my Prince,’ she added; ‘none but you can help me.’ This time the messenger returned more 106

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speedily and begged the Countess to follow him: the Prince was graciously pleased to receive the Frau Gräfin von Rosen. Otto sat by the fire in his large armoury, weapons faintly glittering all about him in the changeful light. His face was disfigured by the marks of weeping; he looked sour and sad; nor did he rise to greet his visitor, but bowed, and bade the man begone. That kind of general tenderness which served the Countess for both heart and conscience, sharply smote her at this spectacle of grief and weakness; she began immediately to enter into the spirit of her part; and as soon as they were alone, taking one step forward and with a magnificent gesture— ‘Up!’ she cried. ‘Madame von Rosen,’ replied Otto, dully, ‘you have used strong words. You speak of life and death. Pray, madam, who is threatened? Who is there,’ he added bitterly, ‘so destitute that even Otto of Grünewald can assist him?’ ‘First learn,’ said she, ‘the names of the conspirators: the Princess and the Baron Gondremark. Can you not guess the rest?’ And then as he maintained his silence—‘You!’ she cried, pointing at him with her finger. ‘’Tis you they threaten! Your rascal and mine have laid their heads together and condemned you. But they reckoned without you and me. We make a partie carré, Prince, in love and politics. They lead an ace, but we shall trump it. Come, partner, shall I draw my card?’ ‘Madam,’ he said, ‘explain yourself. Indeed I fail to comprehend.’ ‘See, then,’ said she; and handed him the order. He took it, looked upon it with a start; and then, still without speech, he put his hand before his face. She waited for a word in vain. ‘What!’ she cried, ‘do you take the thing downheartedly? As well seek wine in a milkpail as love in that girl’s heart! Be done with this, and be a man. After the league of the lions, let us have a conspiracy of mice, and pull this piece of machinery to ground. You were brisk enough last night when nothing was at stake and all was frolic. Well, here is better sport; here is life indeed.’ He got to his feet with some alacrity, and his face, which was a little flushed, bore the marks of resolution. ‘Madame von Rosen,’ said he, ‘I am neither unconscious nor ungrateful; this is the true continuation of your friendship; but I see that I must disappoint your expectations. You seem to expect from me some effort of resistance; but why should I resist? I have not much to gain; and now that I have read this paper, and the last of a fool’s paradise is shattered, it would be hyperbolical to speak of loss in the same breath with Otto of Grünewald. I have no party; no policy; no 107

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pride, nor anything to be proud of. For what benefit or principle under Heaven do you expect me to contend? Or would you have me bite and scratch like a trapped weasel? No, madam; signify to those who sent you my readiness to go. I would at least avoid a scandal.’ ‘You go?—of your own will, you go?’ she cried. ‘I cannot say so much, perhaps,’ he answered; ‘but I go with good alacrity. I have desired a change some time; behold one offered me! Shall I refuse? Thank God, I am not so destitute of humour as to make a tragedy of such a farce.’ He flicked the order on the table. ‘You may signify my readiness,’ he added, grandly. ‘Ah,’ she said, ‘you are more angry than you own.’ ‘I, madam? angry?’ he cried. ‘You rave. I have no cause for anger. In every way I have been taught my weakness, my instability, and my unfitness for the world. I am a plexus of weaknesses, an impotent Prince, a doubtful gentleman; and you yourself, indulgent as you are, have twice reproved my levity. And shall I be angry? I may feel the unkindness, but I have sufficient honesty of mind to see the reasons of this coup d’état.’ ‘From whom have you got this?’ she cried in wonder. ‘You think you have not behaved well? My Prince, were you not young and handsome, I should detest you for your virtues. You push them to the verge of commonplace. And this ingratitude——’ ‘Understand me, Madame von Rosen,’ returned the Prince, flushing a little darker, ‘there can be here no talk of gratitude, none of pride. You are here, by what circumstance I know not, but doubtless led by your kindness, mixed up in what regards my family alone. You have no knowledge what my wife, your sovereign, may have suffered; it is not for you—no, nor for me—to judge. I own myself in fault; and were it otherwise, a man were a very empty boaster who should talk of love and start before a small humiliation. It is in all the copybooks that one should die to please his lady-love; and shall a man not go to prison?’ ‘Love? And what has love to do with being sent to gaol?’ exclaimed the Countess, appealing to the walls and roof. ‘Heaven knows I think as much of love as any one; my life would prove it; but I admit no love, at least for a man, that is not equally returned. The rest is moonshine.’ ‘I think of love more absolutely, madam, though I am certain no more tenderly, than a lady to whom I am indebted for such kindnesses,’ returned the Prince. ‘But this is unavailing. We are not here to hold a court of troubadours.’ ‘Still,’ she replied, ‘there is one thing you forget. If she conspires with Gondremark against your liberty, she may conspire with him 108

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against your honour also.’ ‘My honour?’ he repeated. ‘For a woman, you surprise me. If I have failed to gain her love or play my part of husband, what right is left me? or what honour can remain in such a scene of defeat? No honour that I recognise. I am become a stranger. If my wife no longer loves me, I will go to prison, since she wills it; if she love another, where should I be more in place? or whose fault is it but mine? You speak, Madame von Rosen, like too many women, with a man’s tongue. Had I myself fallen into temptation (as, Heaven knows, I might) I should have trembled, but still hoped and asked for her forgiveness; and yet mine had been a treason in the teeth of love. But let me tell you, madam,’ he pursued, with rising irritation, ‘where a husband by futility, facility, and ill-timed humours has outwearied his wife’s patience, I will suffer neither man nor woman to misjudge her. She is free; the man has been found wanting.’ ‘Because she loves you not?’ the Countess cried. ‘You know she is incapable of such a feeling.’ ‘Rather, it was I who was born incapable of inspiring it,’ said Otto. Madame von Rosen broke into sudden laughter. ‘Fool,’ she cried, ‘I am in love with you myself.’ ‘Ah, madam, you are most compassionate,’ the Prince retorted, smiling. ‘But this is waste debate. I know my purpose. Perhaps, to equal you in frankness, I know and embrace my advantage. I am not without the spirit of adventure. I am in a false position—so recognised by public acclamation: do you grudge me, then, my issue?’ ‘If your mind is made up, why should I dissuade you?’ said the Countess. ‘I own, with a bare face, I am the gainer. Go, you take my heart with you, or more of it than I desire; I shall not sleep at night for thinking of your misery. But do not be afraid; I would not spoil you, you are such a fool and hero.’ ‘Alas! madam,’ cried the Prince, ‘and your unlucky money! I did amiss to take it, but you are a wonderful persuader. And I thank God, I can still offer you the fair equivalent.’ He took some papers from the chimney. ‘Here, madam, are the title-deeds,’ he said; ‘where I am going, they can certainly be of no use to me, and I have now no other hope of making up to you your kindness. You made the loan without formality, obeying your kind heart. The parts are somewhat changed; the sun of this Prince of Grünewald is upon the point of setting; and I know you better than to doubt you will once more waive ceremony, and accept the best that he can give you. If I may look for any pleasure in the coming time, it will be to remember that the peasant is secure, 109

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and my most generous friend no loser.’ ‘Do you not understand my odious position?’ cried the Countess. ‘Dear Prince, it is upon your fall that I begin my fortune.’ ‘It was the more like you to tempt me to resistance,’ returned Otto. ‘But this cannot alter our relations; and I must, for the last time, lay my commands upon you in the character of Prince.’ And with his loftiest dignity, he forced the deeds on her acceptance. ‘I hate the very touch of them,’ she cried. There followed upon this a little silence. ‘At what time,’ resumed Otto, ‘(if indeed you know) am I to be arrested?’ ‘Your Highness, when you please!’ exclaimed the Countess. ‘Or if you choose to tear that paper, never!’ ‘I would rather it were done quickly,’ said the Prince. ‘I shall take but time to leave a letter for the Princess.’ ‘Well,’ said the Countess, ‘I have advised you to resist; at the same time, if you intend to be dumb before your shearers, I must say that I ought to set about arranging your arrest. I offered’—she hesitated—‘I offered to manage it, intending, my dear friend—intending, upon my soul, to be of use to you. Well, if you will not profit by my good will, then be of use to me; and as soon as ever you feel ready, go to the Flying Mercury where we met last night. It will be none the worse for you; and to make it quite plain, it will be better for the rest of us.’ ‘Dear madam, certainly,’ said Otto. ‘If I am prepared for the chief evil, I shall not quarrel with details. Go, then, with my best gratitude; and when I have written a few lines of leave-taking, I shall immediately hasten to keep tryst. To-night, I shall not meet so dangerous a cavalier,’ he added, with a smiling gallantry. As soon as Madame von Rosen was gone, he made a great call upon his self-command. He was face to face with a miserable passage where, if it were possible, he desired to carry himself with dignity. As to the main fact, he never swerved or faltered; he had come so heartsick and so cruelly humiliated from his talk with Gotthold, that he embraced the notion of imprisonment with something bordering on relief. Here was, at least, a step which he thought blameless; here was a way out of his troubles. He sat down to write to Seraphina; and his anger blazed. The tale of his forbearances mounted, in his eyes, to something monstrous; still more monstrous, the coldness, egoism, and cruelty that had required and thus requited them. The pen which he had taken shook in his hand. He was amazed to find his resignation fled, but it was gone beyond his recall. In a few white-hot words, he bade adieu, dubbing desperation by the name of love, and calling his wrath 110

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f­ orgiveness; then he cast but one look of leave-taking on the place that had been his for so long and was now to be his no longer; and hurried forth—love’s prisoner—or pride’s. He took that private passage which he had trodden so often in less momentous hours. The porter let him out; and the bountiful, cold air of the night and the pure glory of the stars received him on the threshold. He looked round him, breathing deep of earth’s plain fragrance; he looked up into the great array of heaven, and was quieted. His little turgid life dwindled to its true proportions; and he saw himself (that great flame-hearted martyr!) stand like a speck under the cool cupola of the night. Thus he felt his cureless injuries already soothed; the live air of out-of-doors, the quiet of the world, as if by their silent music, sobering and dwarfing his emotions. ‘Well, I forgive her,’ he said. ‘If it be of any use to her, I forgive.’ And with brisk steps, he crossed the garden, issued upon the Park and came to the Flying Mercury. A dark figure moved forward from the shadow of the pedestal. ‘I have to ask your pardon, sir,’ a voice observed, ‘but if I am right in taking you for the Prince, I was given to understand that you would be prepared to meet me.’ ‘Herr Gordon, I believe?’ said Otto. ‘Herr Oberst Gordon,’ replied that officer. ‘This is rather a ticklish business for a man to be embarked in; and to find that all is to go pleasantly, is a great relief to me. The carriage is at hand; shall I have the honour of following your Highness?’ ‘Colonel,’ said the Prince, ‘I have now come to that happy moment of my life, when I have orders to receive but none to give.’ ‘A most philosophical remark!’ returned the Colonel. ‘Begad, a very pertinent remark! it might be Plutarch. I am not a drop’s blood to your Highness, or indeed to any one in this principality; or else I should dislike my orders. But as it is, and since there is nothing unnatural or unbecoming on my side, and your Highness takes it in good part, I begin to believe we may have a capital time together, sir—a capital time. For a gaoler is only a fellow captive.’ ‘May I inquire, Herr Gordon,’ asked Otto, ‘what led you to accept this dangerous and I would fain hope thankless office?’ ‘Very natural, I am sure,’ replied the officer of fortune. ‘My pay is, in the meanwhile, doubled.’ ‘Well, sir, I will not presume to criticise,’ returned the Prince. ‘And I perceive the carriage.’ Sure enough, at the intersection of two alleys of the Park, a coach 111

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and four, conspicuous by its lanterns, stood in waiting. And a little way off about a score of lancers were drawn up under the shadow of the trees.

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Chapter 13 PROVIDENCE VON ROSEN: ACT THE THIRD: SHE ENLIGHTENS SERAPHINA

When Madame von Rosen left the Prince, she hurried straight to Colonel Gordon; and not content with directing the arrangements, she had herself accompanied the soldier of fortune to the Flying Mercury. The Colonel gave her his arm, and the talk between this pair of conspirators ran high and lively. The Countess, indeed, was in a whirl of pleasure and excitement; her tongue stumbled upon laughter, her eyes shone, the colour that was usually wanting now perfected her face. It would have taken little more to bring Gordon to her feet—or so, at least, she believed, disdaining the idea. Hidden among some lilac bushes, she enjoyed the great decorum of the arrest, and heard the dialogue of the two men die away along the path. Soon after, the rolling of a carriage and the beat of hoofs arose in the still air of the night, and passed speedily farther and fainter into silence. The Prince was gone. Madame von Rosen consulted her watch. She had still, she thought, time enough for the tit-bit of her evening; and hurrying to the palace, winged by the fear of Gondremark’s arrival, she sent her name and a pressing request for a reception to the Princess Seraphina. As the Countess von Rosen unqualified, she was sure to be refused; but as an emissary of the Baron’s, for so she chose to style herself, she gained immediate entry. The Princess sat alone at table, making a feint of dining. Her cheeks were mottled, her eyes heavy; she had neither slept nor eaten; even her dress had been neglected. In short, she was out of health, out of looks, out of heart, and hag-ridden by her conscience. The Countess drew a swift comparison, and shone brighter in beauty. ‘You come, madam, de la part de Monsieur le Baron,’ drawled the Princess. ‘Be seated! What have you to say?’ ‘To say?’ repeated Madame von Rosen. ‘O, much to say! Much to say, that I would rather not, and much to leave unsaid that I would rather say. For I am like St. Paul, your Highness, and always wish to do the things I should not. Well! to be categorical—that is the word?—I 113

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took the Prince your order. He could not credit his senses. “Ah,” he cried, “dear Madame von Rosen, it is not possible—it cannot be—I must hear it from your lips. My wife is a poor girl misled, she is only silly, she is not cruel.” “Mon Prince,” said I, “a girl—and therefore cruel; youth kills flies.”—He had such pain to understand it!’ ‘Madame von Rosen,’ said the Princess, in most steadfast tones, but with a rose of anger in her face, ‘who sent you here, and for what purpose? Tell your errand.’ ‘O, madam, I believe you understand me very well,’ returned von Rosen. ‘I have not your philosophy. I wear my heart upon my sleeve, excuse the indecency! It is a very little one,’ she laughed, ‘and I so often change the sleeve!’ ‘Am I to understand the Prince has been arrested?’ asked the Princess, rising. ‘While you sat there dining!’ cried the Countess, still nonchalantly seated. ‘You have discharged your errand,’ was the reply; ‘I will not detain you.’ ‘O no, madam,’ said the Countess, ‘with your permission, I have not yet done. I have borne much this evening in your service. I have suffered. I was made to suffer in your service.’ She unfolded her fan as she spoke. Quick as her pulses beat, the fan waved languidly. She betrayed her emotion only by the brightness of her eyes and face, and by the almost insolent triumph with which she looked down upon the Princess. There were old scores of rivalry between them in more than one field; so at least von Rosen felt; and now she was to have her hour of victory in them all. ‘You are no servant, Madame von Rosen, of mine,’ said Seraphina. ‘No, madam, indeed,’ returned the Countess; ‘but we both serve the same person, as you know—or if you do not, then I have the pleasure of informing you. Your conduct is so light—so light,’ she repeated, the fan wavering higher like a butterfly, ‘that perhaps you do not truly understand.’ The Countess rolled her fan together, laid it in her lap, and rose to a less languorous position. ‘Indeed,’ she continued, ‘I should be sorry to see any young woman in your situation. You began with every advantage—birth, a suitable marriage—quite pretty too— and see what you have come to! My poor girl, to think of it! But there is nothing that does so much harm,’ observed the Countess finely, ‘as giddiness of mind.’ And she once more unfurled the fan, and approvingly fanned herself. ‘I will no longer permit you to forget yourself,’ cried Seraphina. ‘I 114

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think you are mad.’ ‘Not mad,’ returned von Rosen. ‘Sane enough to know you dare not break with me to-night, and to profit by the knowledge. I left my poor, pretty Prince Charming crying his eyes out for a wooden doll. My heart is soft; I love my pretty Prince; you will never understand it, but I long to give my Prince his doll, dry his poor eyes, and send him off happy. O, you immature fool!’ the Countess cried, rising to her feet, and pointing at the Princess the closed fan that now began to tremble in her hand. ‘O wooden doll!’ she cried, ‘have you a heart, or blood, or any nature? This is a man, child—a man who loves you. O, it will not happen twice! it is not common; beautiful and clever women look in vain for it. And you, you pitiful schoolgirl, tread this jewel underfoot! you, stupid with your vanity! Before you try to govern kingdoms, you should first be able to behave yourself at home; home is the woman’s kingdom.’ She paused and laughed a little, strangely to hear and look upon. ‘I will tell you one of the things,’ she said, ‘that were to stay unspoken. Von Rosen is a better woman than you, my Princess, though you will never have the pain of understanding it; and when I took the Prince your order, and looked upon his face, my soul was melted—O, I am frank—here, within my arms, I offered him repose!’ She advanced a step superbly as she spoke, with outstretched arms; and Seraphina shrank. ‘Do not be alarmed!’ the Countess cried; ‘I am not offering that hermitage to you; in all the world there is but one who wants to, and him you have dismissed! “If it will give her pleasure I should wear the martyr’s crown,” he cried, “I will embrace the thorns.” I tell you—I am quite frank—I put the order in his power and begged him to resist. You, who have betrayed your husband, may betray me to Gondremark; my Prince would betray no one. Understand it plainly,’ she cried, ‘’tis of his pure forbearance you sit there; he had the power—I gave it him—to change the parts; and he refused, and went to prison in your place.’ The Princess spoke with some distress. ‘Your violence shocks me and pains me,’ she began, ‘but I cannot be angry with what at least does honour to the mistaken kindness of your heart: it was right for me to know this. I will condescend to tell you. It was with deep regret that I was driven to this step. I admit in many ways the Prince—I admit his amiability. It was our great misfortune, it was perhaps somewhat of my fault, that we were so unsuited to each other; but I have a regard, a sincere regard, for all his qualities. As a private person I should think as you do. It is difficult, I know, to make allowances for state considerations. I have only with deep reluctance obeyed the call 115

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of a superior duty; and so soon as I dare do it for the safety of the state, I promise you the Prince shall be released. Many in my situa­tion would have resented your freedoms. I am not—’ and she looked for a moment rather piteously upon the Countess—‘I am not altogether so inhuman as you think.’ ‘And you can put these troubles of the state,’ the Countess cried, ‘to weigh with a man’s love?’ ‘Madame von Rosen, these troubles are affairs of life and death to many; to the Prince, and perhaps even to yourself, among the number,’ replied the Princess, with dignity. ‘I have learned, madam, although still so young, in a hard school, that my own feelings must everywhere come last.’ ‘O callow innocence!’ exclaimed the other. ‘Is it possible you do not know, or do not suspect, the intrigue in which you move? I find it in my heart to pity you! We are both women after all—poor girl, poor girl!—and who is born a woman is born a fool. And though I hate all women—come, for the common folly, I forgive you. Your Highness’— she dropped a deep stage courtesy and resumed her fan—‘I am going to insult you, to betray one who is called my lover, and if it pleases you to use the power I now put unreservedly into your hands, to ruin my dear self. O, what a French comedy! You betray, I betray, they betray. It is now my cue. The letter, yes. Behold the letter, madam, its seal unbroken as I found it by my bed this morning; for I was out of humour, and I get many, too many, of these favours. For your own sake, for the sake of my Prince Charming, for the sake of this great principality that sits so heavy on your conscience, open it and read!’ ‘Am I to understand,’ inquired the Princess, ‘that this letter in any way regards me?’ ‘You see I have not opened it,’ replied von Rosen; ‘but ’tis mine, and I beg you to experiment.’ ‘I cannot look at it till you have,’ returned Seraphina, very seriously. ‘There may be matter there not meant for me to see; it is a private letter.’ The Countess tore it open, glanced it through, and tossed it back; and the Princess, taking up the sheet, recognised the hand of Gondremark, and read with a sickening shock the following lines:— ‘Dearest Anna, come at once. Ratafia has done the deed, her husband to be packed to prison. This puts the minx entirely in my power; le tour est joué; she will now go steady in harness, or I will know the reason why. Come. ‘Heinrich.’ ‘Command yourself, madam,’ said the Countess, watching with some alarm the white face of Seraphina. ‘It is in vain for you to fight 116

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with Gondremark: he has more strings than mere court favour, and could bring you down to-morrow with a word. I would not have betrayed him otherwise; but Heinrich is a man, and plays with all of you like marionettes. And now at least you see for what you sacrificed my Prince. Madam, will you take some wine? I have been cruel.’ ‘Not cruel, madam—salutary,’ said Seraphina, with a phantom smile. ‘No, I thank you, I require no attentions. The first surprise affected me: will you give me time a little? I must think.’ She took her head between her hands, and contemplated for a while the hurricane confusion of her thoughts. ‘This information reaches me,’ she said, ‘when I have need of it. I would not do as you have done, but yet I thank you. I have been much deceived in Baron Gondremark.’ ‘O, madam, leave Gondremark, and think upon the Prince!’ cried von Rosen. ‘You speak once more as a private person,’ said the princess; ‘nor do I blame you. But my own thoughts are more distracted. However, as I believe you are truly a friend to my—to the——as I believe,’ she said, ‘you are a friend to Otto, I shall put the order for his release into your hands this moment. Give me the ink-dish. There!’ And she wrote hastily, steadying her arm upon the table, for she trembled like a reed. ‘Remember, madam,’ she resumed, handing her the order, ‘this must not be used nor spoken of at present; till I have seen the Baron, any hurried step—I lose myself in thinking. The suddenness has shaken me.’ ‘I promise you I will not use it,’ said the Countess, ‘till you give me leave, although I wish the Prince could be informed of it, to comfort his poor heart. And oh, I had forgotten, he has left a letter. Suffer me, madam; I will bring it you. This is the door, I think?’ And she sought to open it. ‘The bolt is pushed,’ said Seraphina, flushing. ‘O! O!’ cried the Countess. A silence fell between them. ‘I will get it for myself,’ said Seraphina; ‘and in the meanwhile I beg you to leave me. I thank you, I am sure, but I shall be obliged if you will leave me.’ The Countess deeply courtesied, and withdrew.

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Chapter 14 RELATES THE CAUSE AND OUTBREAK OF THE REVOLUTION

Brave as she was, and brave by intellect, the Princess, when first she was alone, clung to the table for support. The four corners of her universe had fallen. She had never liked nor trusted Gondremark completely; she had still held it possible to find him false to friendship; but from that to finding him devoid of all those public virtues for which she had honoured him, a mere commonplace intriguer, using her for his own ends, the step was wide and the descent giddy. Light and darkness succeeded each other in her brain; now she believed, and now she could not. She turned, blindly groping for the note. But von Rosen, who had not forgotten to take the warrant from the Prince, had remembered to recover her note from the Princess: von Rosen was an old campaigner, whose most violent emotion aroused rather than clouded the vigour of her reason. The thought recalled to Seraphina the remembrance of the other letter—Otto’s. She rose and went speedily, her brain still wheeling, and burst into the Prince’s armoury. The old chamberlain was there in waiting; and the sight of another face, prying (or so she felt) on her distress, struck Seraphina into childish anger. ‘Go!’ she cried; and then, when the old man was already half way to the door, ‘Stay!’ she added. ‘As soon as Baron Gondremark arrives, let him attend me here.’ ‘It shall be so directed,’ said the chamberlain. ‘There was a letter . . . .’ she began, and paused. ‘Her Highness,’ said the chamberlain, ‘will find a letter on the table. I had received no orders, or her Highness had been spared this trouble.’ ‘No, no, no,’ she cried. ‘I thank you. I desire to be alone.’ And then, when he was gone, she leaped upon the letter. Her mind was still obscured; like the moon upon a night of clouds and wind, her reason shone and was darkened; and she read the words by flashes. ‘Seraphina,’ the Prince wrote, ‘I will write no syllable of reproach. I have seen your order, and I go. What else is left me? I have wasted my love, and have no more. To say that I forgive you is not needful: at least, we are now separate for ever; by your own act, you free me from my 118

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willing bondage: I go free to prison. This is the last that you will hear of me in love or anger. I have gone out of your life; you may breathe easy; you have now rid yourself of the husband who allowed you to desert him, of the Prince who gave you his rights, and of the married lover who made it his pride to defend you in your absence. How you have requited him, your own heart more loudly tells you than my words. There is a day coming when your vain dreams will roll away like clouds, and you will find yourself alone. Then you will remember ‘Otto.’ She read with a great horror on her mind; that day, of which he wrote, was come. She was alone; she had been false, she had been cruel; remorse rolled in upon her; and then with a more piercing note, vanity bounded on the stage of consciousness. She a dupe! she helpless! she to have betrayed herself in seeking to betray her husband! she to have lived these years upon flattery, grossly swallowing the bolus, like a clown with sharpers! she—Seraphina! Her swift mind drank the consequences; she foresaw the coming fall, her public shame; she saw the odium, disgrace, and folly of her story flaunt through Europe. She recalled the scandal she had so royally braved; and alas! she had now no courage to confront it with. To be thought the mistress of that man: perhaps for that .  .  .  . She closed her eyes on agonising vistas. Swift as thought she had snatched a bright dagger from the weapons that shone along the wall. Ay, she would escape. From that world-wide theatre of nodding heads and buzzing whisperers, in which she now beheld herself unpitiably martyred, one door stood open. At any cost, through any stress of suffering, that greasy laughter should be stifled. She closed her eyes, breathed a wordless prayer, and pressed the weapon to her bosom. At the astonishing sharpness of the prick, she gave a cry and awoke to a sense of undeserved escape. A little ruby spot of blood was the reward of that great act of desperation; but the pain had braced her like a tonic, and her whole design of suicide had passed away. At the same instant regular feet drew near along the gallery, and she knew the tread of the big Baron, so often gladly welcome, and even now rallying her spirits like a call to battle. She concealed the dagger in the folds of her skirt; and drawing her stature up, she stood firmfooted, radiant with anger, waiting for the foe. The Baron was announced, and entered. To him, Seraphina was a hated task: like the schoolboy with his Virgil, he had neither will nor leisure to remark her beauties; but when he now beheld her standing illuminated by her passion, new feelings flashed upon him, a frank 119

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­admiration, a brief sparkle of desire. He noted both with joy; they were means. ‘If I have to play the lover,’ thought he, for that was his constant preoccupation, ‘I believe I can put soul into it.’ Meanwhile, with his usual ponderous grace, he bent before the lady. ‘I propose,’ she said in a strange voice, not known to her till then, ‘that we release the Prince and do not prosecute the war.’ ‘Ah, madam,’ he replied, ‘’tis as I knew it would be! Your heart, I knew, would wound you when we came to this distasteful but most necessary step. Ah, madam, believe me, I am not unworthy to be your ally; I know you have qualities to which I am a stranger, and count them the best weapons in the armoury of our alliance:—the girl in the queen—pity, love, tenderness, laughter; the smile that can reward. I can only command; I am the frowner. But you! And you have the fortitude to command these comely weaknesses, to tread them down at the call of reason. How often have I not admired it even to yourself! Ay, even to yourself,’ he added tenderly, dwelling, it seemed, in memory on hours of more private admiration. ‘But now, madam——’ ‘But now, Herr von Gondremark, the time for these declarations has gone by,’ she cried. ‘Are you true to me? are you false? Look in your heart and answer: it is your heart I want to know.’ ‘It has come,’ thought Gondremark. ‘You, madam!’ he cried, starting back—with fear, you would have said, and yet a timid joy. ‘You! yourself, you bid me look into my heart?’ ‘Do you suppose I fear?’ she cried, and looked at him with such a heightened colour, such bright eyes, and a smile of so abstruse a meaning, that the Baron discarded his last doubt. ‘Ah, madam!’ he cried, plumping on his knees. ‘Seraphina! Do you permit me? have you divined my secret? It is true—I put my life with joy into your power—I love you, love with ardour, as an equal, as a mistress, as a brother-in-arms, as an adored, desired, sweet-hearted woman. O Bride!’ he cried, waxing dithyrambic, ‘bride of my reason and my senses, have pity, have pity on my love!’ She heard him with wonder, rage, and then contempt. His words offended her to sickness; his appearance, as he grovelled bulkily upon the floor, moved her to such laughter as we laugh in nightmares. ‘O shame!’ she cried. ‘Absurd and odious! What would the Countess say?’ That great Baron Gondremark, the excellent politician, remained for some little time upon his knees in a frame of mind which perhaps we are allowed to pity. His vanity, within his iron bosom, bled and raved. If he could have blotted all, if he could have withdrawn part, if 120

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he had not called her bride—with a roaring in his ears, he thus regretfully reviewed his declaration. He got to his feet tottering; and then, in that first moment when a dumb agony finds a vent in words, and the tongue betrays the inmost and worst of a man, he permitted himself a retort which, for six weeks to follow, he was to repent at leisure. ‘Ah,’ said he, ‘the Countess? Now I perceive the reason of your Highness’s disorder.’ The lackey-like insolence of the words was driven home by a more insolent manner. There fell upon Seraphina one of those storm-clouds which had already blackened upon her reason; she heard herself cry out; and when the cloud dispersed, flung the blood-stained dagger on the floor, and saw Gondremark reeling back with open mouth and clapping his hand upon the wound. The next moment, with oaths that she had never heard, he leaped at her in savage passion; clutched her as she recoiled; and in the very act, stumbled and drooped. She had scarce time to fear his murderous onslaught ere he fell before her feet. He rose upon one elbow; she still staring upon him, white with horror. ‘Anna!’ he cried, ‘Anna! Help!’ And then his utterance failed him, and he fell back, to all appearance dead. Seraphina ran to and fro in the room; she wrung her hands and cried aloud; within she was all one uproar of terror, and conscious of no articulate wish but to awake. There came a knocking at the door; and she sprang to it and held it, panting like a beast, and with the strength of madness in her arms, till she had pushed the bolt. At this success a certain calm fell upon her reason. She went back and looked upon her victim, the knocking growing louder. O yes, he was dead. She had killed him. He had called upon von Rosen with his latest breath; ah! who would call on Seraphina? She had killed him. She, whose irresolute hand could scarce prick blood from her own bosom, had found strength to cast down that great colossus at a blow. All this while the knocking was growing more uproarious and more unlike the staid career of life in such a palace. Scandal was at the door, with what a fatal following she dreaded to conceive; and at the same time among the voices that now began to summon her by name, she recognised the Chancellor’s. He or another, somebody must be the first. ‘Is Herr von Greisengesang without?’ she called. ‘Your Highness—yes!’ the old gentleman answered. ‘We have 121

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heard cries, a fall. Is anything amiss?’ ‘Nothing,’ replied Seraphina. ‘I desire to speak with you. Send off the rest.’ She panted between each phrase; but her mind was clear. She let the looped curtain down upon both sides before she drew the bolt; and, thus secure from any sudden eyeshot from without, admitted the obsequious Chancellor and again made fast the door. Greisengesang clumsily revolved among the wings of the curtain; so that she was clear of it as soon as he. ‘My God!’ he cried. ‘The Baron!’ ‘I have killed him,’ she said. ‘O, killed him!’ ‘Dear me,’ said the old gentleman, ‘this is most unprecedented. Lovers’ quarrels,’ he added ruefully, ‘redintegratio——’ and then paused. ‘But, my dear madam,’ he broke out again, ‘in the name of all that is practical, what are we to do? This is exceedingly grave; morally, madam, it is appalling. I take the liberty, your Highness, for one moment, of addressing you as a daughter, a loved although respected daughter; and I must say that I cannot conceal from you that this is morally most questionable. And, O dear me, we have a dead body!’ She had watched him closely; hope fell to contempt; she drew away her skirts from his weakness, and, in the act, her own strength returned to her. ‘See if he be dead,’ she said; not one word of explanation or defence; she had scorned to justify herself before so poor a creature: ‘See if he be dead’ was all. With the greatest compunction, the Chancellor drew near; and as he did so the wounded Baron rolled his eyes. ‘He lives,’ cried the old courtier, turning effusively to Seraphina. ‘Madam, he still lives.’ ‘Help him, then,’ returned the Princess, standing fixed. ‘Bind up his wound.’ ‘Madam, I have no means,’ protested the Chancellor. ‘Can you not take your handkerchief, your neckcloth, anything?’ she cried; and at the same moment, from her light muslin gown she rent off a flounce and tossed it on the floor. ‘Take that,’ she said, and for the first time directly faced Greisengesang. But the Chancellor held up his hands and turned away his head in agony. The grasp of the falling Baron had torn down the dainty fabric of the bodice; and—‘O Highness!’ cried Greisengesang, appalled, ‘the terrible disorder of your toilette!’ ‘Take up that flounce,’ she said; ‘the man may die.’ Greisengesang turned in a flutter to the Baron, and attempted 122

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some innocent and bungling measures. ‘He still breathes,’ he kept saying. ‘All is not yet over; he is not yet gone.’ ‘And now,’ said she, ‘if that is all you can do, begone and get some porters; he must instantly go home.’ ‘Madam,’ cried the Chancellor, ‘if this most melancholy sight were seen in town—O dear, the State would fall!’ he piped. ‘There is a litter in the Palace,’ she replied. ‘It is your part to see him safe. I lay commands upon you. On your life it stands.’ ‘I see it, dear Highness,’ he jerked. ‘Clearly I see it. But how? what men? The Prince’s servants—yes. They had a personal affection. They will be true, if any.’ ‘O, not them!’ she cried. ‘Take Sabra, my own man.’ ‘Sabra! The grand-mason?’ returned the Chancellor, aghast. ‘If he but saw this, he would sound the tocsin—we should all be butchered.’ She measured the depth of her abasement steadily. ‘Take whom you must,’ she said, ‘and bring the litter here.’ Once she was alone she ran to the Baron, and with a sickening heart sought to allay the flux of blood. The touch of the skin of that great charlatan revolted her to the toes; the wound, in her ignorant eyes, looked deathly; yet she contended with her shuddering, and, with more skill at least than the Chancellor’s, staunched the welling injury. An eye unprejudiced with hate would have admired the Baron in his swoon; he looked so great and shapely; it was so powerful a machine that lay arrested; and his features, cleared for the moment both of temper and dissimulation, were seen to be so purely modelled. But it was not thus with Seraphina. Her victim, as he lay outspread, twitching a little, his big chest unbared, fixed her with his ugliness; and her mind flitted for a glimpse to Otto. Rumours began to sound about the Palace of feet running and of voices raised; the echoes of the great arched staircase were voluble of some confusion; and then the gallery jarred with a quick and heavy tramp. It was the Chancellor, followed by four of Otto’s valets and a litter. The servants, when they were admitted, stared at the dishevelled Princess and the wounded man; speech was denied them, but their thoughts were riddled with profanity. Gondremark was bundled in; the curtains of the litter were lowered; the bearers carried it forth, and the Chancellor followed behind with a white face. Seraphina ran to the window. Pressing her face upon the pane, she could see the terrace, where the lights contended; thence, the avenue of lamps that joined the Palace and town; and overhead the hollow night and the larger stars. Presently the small procession issued from 123

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the Palace, crossed the parade, and began to thread the glittering alley: the swinging couch with its four porters, the much-pondering Chancellor behind. She watched them dwindle with strange thoughts: her eyes fixed upon the scene, her mind still glancing right and left on the overthrow of her life and hopes. There was no one left in whom she might confide; none whose hand was friendly, or on whom she dared to reckon for the barest loyalty. With the fall of Gondremark her party, her brief popularity, had fallen. So she sat crouched upon the window seat, her brow to the cool pane; her dress in tatters, barely shielding her; her mind revolving bitter thoughts. Meanwhile, consequences were fast mounting; and in the deceptive quiet of the night, downfall and red revolt were brewing. The litter had passed forth between the iron gates and entered on the streets of the town. By what flying panic, by what thrill of air communicated, who shall say? but the passing bustle in the Palace had already reached and re-echoed in the region of the burghers. Rumour, with her loud whisper, hissed about the town; men left their homes without knowing why; knots formed along the boulevard; under the rare lamps and the great limes the crowd grew blacker. And now through the midst of that expectant company, the unusual sight of a closed litter was observed approaching, and trotting hard behind it that great dignitary Cancellarius Greisengesang. Silence looked on as it went by; and as soon as it was passed, the whispering seethed over like a boiling pot. The knots were sundered; and gradually, one following another, the whole mob began to form into a procession and escort the curtained litter. Soon spokesmen, a little bolder than their mates, began to ply the Chancellor with questions. Never had he more need of that great art of falsehood, by whose exercise he had so richly lived. And yet now he stumbled, the master passion, fear, betraying him. He was pressed; he became incoherent; and then from the jolting litter came a groan. In the instant hubbub and the gathering of the crowd as to a natural signal, the clear-eyed quavering Chancellor heard the catch of the clock before it strikes the hour of doom; and for ten seconds he forgot himself. This shall atone for many sins. He plucked a bearer by the sleeve. ‘Bid the Princess flee. All is lost,’ he whispered. And the next moment he was babbling for his life among the multitude. Five minutes later the wild-eyed servant burst into the armoury. ‘All is lost!’ he cried. ‘The Chancellor bids you flee.’ And at the same time, looking through the window, Seraphina saw the black rush of the populace begin to invade the lamplit avenue. 124

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‘Thank you, Georg,’ she said. ‘I thank you. Go.’ And as the man still lingered, ‘I bid you go,’ she added. ‘Save yourself.’ Down by the private passage, and just some two hours later, Amalia Seraphina, the last Princess, followed Otto Johann Friedrich, the last Prince of Grünewald.

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BOOK III Fortunate Misfortune

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Chapter 1 PRINCESS CINDERELLA

The porter, drawn by the growing turmoil, had vanished from the postern, and the door stood open on the darkness of the night. As Seraphina fled up the terraces, the cries and loud footing of the mob drew nearer the doomed palace; the rush was like the rush of cavalry; the sound of shattering lamps tingled above the rest; and overtowering all, she heard her own name bandied among the shouters. A bugle sounded at the door of the guard-room; one gun was fired; and then with the yell of hundreds, Mittwalden Palace was carried at a rush. Sped by these dire sounds and voices, the Princess scaled the long garden, skimming like a bird the starlit stairways; crossed the Park, which was in that place narrow; and plunged upon the farther side into the rude shelter of the forest. So, at a bound, she left the discretion and the cheerful lamps of Palace evenings; ceased utterly to be a sovereign lady; and, falling from the whole height of civilisation, ran forth into the woods, a ragged Cinderella. She went direct before her through an open tract of the forest, full of brush and birches, and where the starlight guided her; and beyond that again, must thread the columned blackness of a pine grove joining overhead the thatch of its long branches. At that hour, the place was breathless; a horror of night like a presence occupied that dungeon of the wood; and she went groping, knocking against the boles—her ear, betweenwhiles, strained to aching and yet unrewarded. But the slope of the ground was upward, and encouraged her; and presently she issued on a rocky hill that stood forth above the sea of forest. All around were other hilltops, big and little; sable vales of forest between; overhead the open heaven and the brilliancy of countless stars; and along the western sky the dim forms of mountains. The glory of the great night laid hold upon her; her eyes shone with stars; she dipped her sight into the coolness and brightness of the sky, as she might have dipped her wrist into a spring; and her heart, at that ethereal shock, began to move more soberly. The sun that sails overhead, ploughing into gold the fields of daylight azure and uttering the signal to man’s myriads, has no word apart for man the individual; and 129

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the moon, like a violin, only praises and laments our private destiny. The stars alone, cheerful whisperers, confer quietly with each of us like friends; they give ear to our sorrows smilingly, like wise old men, rich in tolerance; and by their double scale, so small to the eye, so vast to the imagination, they keep before the mind the double character of man’s nature and fate. There sate the Princess, beautifully looking upon beauty, in council with these glad advisers. Bright like pictures, clear like a voice in the porches of her ear, memory re-enacted the tumult of the evening: The Countess and the dancing fan, the big Baron on his knees, the blood on the polished floor, the knocking, the swing of the litter down the avenue of lamps, the messenger, the cries of the charging mob; and yet all were far away and phantasmal, and she was still healingly conscious of the peace and glory of the night. She looked towards Mittwalden; and above the hilltop, which already hid it from her view, a throbbing redness hinted of fire. Better so: better so, that she should fall with tragic greatness, lit by a blazing palace! She felt not a trace of pity for Gondremark or of concern for Grünewald: that period of her life was closed for ever, a wrench of wounded vanity alone surviving. She had but one clear idea: to flee;—and another, obscure and half-rejected, although still obeyed: to flee in the direction of the Felsenburg. She had a duty to perform, she must free Otto—so her mind said, very coldly; but her heart embraced the notion of that duty even with ardour, and her hands began to yearn for the grasp of kindness. She rose, with a start of recollection, and plunged down the slope into the covert. The woods received and closed upon her. Once more, she wandered and hasted in a blot, uncheered, unpiloted. Here and there, indeed, through rents in the wood-roof, a glimmer attracted her; here and there, a tree stood out among its neighbours by some force of outline; here and there, a brushing among the leaves, a notable blackness, a dim shine, relieved, only to exaggerate, the solid oppression of the night and silence. And betweenwhiles, the unfeatured darkness would redouble and the whole ear of night appear to be gloating on her steps. Now she would stand still, and the silence would grow and grow, till it weighed upon her breathing; and then she would address herself again to run, stumbling, falling, and still hurrying the more. And presently the whole wood rocked and began to run along with her. The noise of her own mad passage through the silence spread and echoed, and filled the night with terror. Panic hunted her: Panic from the trees reached forth with clutching branches; the darkness was lit up and peopled with strange forms and faces. She strangled and fled 130

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before her fears. And yet in the last fortress, reason, blown upon by these gusts of terror, still shone with a troubled light. She knew, yet could not act upon her knowledge; she knew that she must stop, and yet she still ran. She was already near madness, when she broke suddenly into a narrow clearing. At the same time the din grew louder, and she became conscious of vague forms and fields of whiteness. And with that the earth gave way; she fell and found her feet again with an incredible shock to her senses, and her mind was swallowed up. When she came again to herself, she was standing to the mid-leg in an icy eddy of a brook, and leaning with one hand on the rock from which it poured. The spray had wet her hair. She saw the white cascade, the stars wavering in the shaken pool, foam flitting, and high overhead the tall pines on either hand serenely drinking starshine; and in the sudden quiet of her spirit, she heard with joy the firm plunge of the cataract in the pool. She scrambled forth dripping. In the face of her proved weakness, to adventure again upon the horror of blackness in the groves were a suicide of life or reason. But here, in the alley of the brook, with the kind stars above her, and the moon presently swimming into sight, she could await the coming of day without alarm. This lane of pine trees ran very rapidly down hill and wound among the woods; but it was a wider thoroughfare than the brook needed, and here and there were little dimpling lawns and coves of the forest, where the starshine slumbered. Such a lawn she paced, taking patience bravely; and now she looked up the hill and saw the brook coming down to her in a series of cascades; and now approached the margin, where it welled among the rushes silently; and now gazed at the great company of heaven with an enduring wonder. The early evening had fallen chill, but the night was now temperate; out of the recesses of the wood there came mild airs as from a deep and peaceful breathing; and the dew was heavy on the grass and the tight-shut daisies. This was the girl’s first night under the naked heaven; and now that her fears were overpast, she was touched to the soul by its serene amenity and peace. Kindly the host of heaven blinked down upon that wandering Princess; and the honest brook had no words but to encourage her. At last she began to be aware of a wonderful revolution, compared to which the fire of Mittwalden Palace was but the crack and flash of a percussion cap. The countenance with which the pines regarded her began insensibly to change; the grass too, short as it was, and the whole winding staircase of the brook’s course, began to wear a solemn freshness of appearance. And this slow transfiguration reached her heart, 131

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and played upon it, and transpierced it with a serious thrill. She looked all about; the whole face of nature looked back, brimful of meaning, finger on lip, leaking its glad secret. She looked up. Heaven was almost emptied of stars. Such as still lingered shone with a changed and waning brightness, and began to faint in their stations. And the colour of the sky itself was the most wonderful; for the rich blue of the night had now melted and softened and brightened; and there had succeeded in its place a hue that has no name, and that is never seen but as the herald of morning. ‘O!’ she cried, joy catching at her voice, ‘O! it is the dawn!’ In a breath she passed over the brook, and looped up her skirts and fairly ran in the dim alleys. As she ran, her ears were aware of many pipings, more beautiful than music; in the small dish-shaped houses in the fork of giant arms, where they had lain all night, lover by lover, warmly pressed, the bright-eyed, big-hearted singers began to awaken for the day. Her heart melted and flowed forth to them in kindness. And they, from their small and high perches in the clerestories of the wood cathedral, peered down sidelong at the ragged Princess as she flitted below them on the carpet of the moss and tassel. Soon she had struggled to a certain hilltop, and saw far before her the silent inflooding of the day. Out of the East it welled and whitened; the darkness trembled into light; and the stars were extinguished like the street-lamps of a human city. The whiteness brightened into silver, the silver warmed into gold, the gold kindled into pure and living fire; and the face of the East was barred with elemental scarlet. The day drew its first long breath, steady and chill; and for leagues around the woods sighed and shivered. And then, at one bound, the sun had floated up; and her startled eyes received day’s first arrow, and quailed under the buffet. On every side, the shadows leaped from their ambush and fell prone. The day was come, plain and garish; and up the steep and solitary eastern heaven, the sun, victorious over his competitors, continued slowly and royally to mount. Seraphina drooped for a little, leaning on a pine, the shrill joy of the woodlands mocking her. The shelter of the night, the thrilling and joyous changes of the dawn, were over; and now, in the hot eye of the day, she turned uneasily and looked sighingly about her. Some way off among the lower woods, a pillar of smoke was mounting and melting in the gold and blue. There, surely enough, were human folk, the hearth-surrounders. Man’s fingers had laid the twigs; it was man’s breath that had quickened and encouraged the baby flames; and now, as the fire caught, it would be playing ruddily on the face of its creator. 132

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At the thought, she felt a-cold and little and lost in that great out-ofdoors. The electric shock of the young sunbeams and the unhuman beauty of the woods began to irk and daunt her. The covert of the house, the decent privacy of rooms, the swept and regulated fire, all that denotes or beautifies the home life of man, began to draw her as with cords. The pillar of smoke was now risen into some stream of moving air; it began to lean out sideways in a pennon; and thereupon, as though the change had been a summons, Seraphina plunged once more into the labyrinth of the wood. She left day upon the high ground. In the lower groves there still lingered the blue early twilight and the seizing freshness of the dew. But here and there, above this field of shadow, the head of a great outspread pine was already glorious with day; and here and there, through the breaches of the hills, the sunbeams made a great and luminous entry. Here Seraphina hastened along forest paths. She had lost sight of the pilot smoke, which blew another way, and conducted herself in that great wilderness by the direction of the sun. But presently fresh signs bespoke the neighbourhood of man; felled trunks, white slivers from the axe, bundles of green boughs, and stacks of firewood. These guided her forward; until she came forth at last upon the clearing whence the smoke arose. A hut stood in the clear shadow, hard by a brook which made a series of inconsiderable falls; and on the threshold, the Princess saw a sun-burnt and hard-featured woodman, standing with his hands behind his back and gazing skyward. She went to him directly: a beautiful, bright-eyed, and haggard vision; splendidly arrayed and pitifully tattered; the diamond ear-drops still glittering in her ears; and with the movement of her coming, one small breast showing and hiding among the ragged covert of the laces. At that ambiguous hour, and coming as she did from the great silence of the forest, the man drew back from the Princess as from something elfin. ‘I am cold,’ she said, ‘and weary. Let me rest beside your fire.’ The woodman was visibly commoved, but answered nothing. ‘I will pay,’ she said, and then repented of the words, catching perhaps a spark of terror from his frightened eyes. But, as usual, her courage rekindled brighter for the check. She put him from the door and entered; and he followed her in superstitious wonder. Within, the hut was rough and dark; but on the stone that served as hearth, twigs and a few dry branches burned with the brisk sounds and all the variable beauty of fire. The very sight of it composed her; she crouched hard by on the earth floor and shivered in the glow, and 133

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looked upon the eating blaze with admiration. The woodman was still staring at his guest: at the wreck of the rich dress, the bare arms, the bedraggled laces and the gems. He found no word to utter. ‘Give me food,’ said she,—‘here, by the fire.’ He set down a pitcher of coarse wine, bread, a piece of cheese, and a handful of raw onions. The bread was hard and sour, the cheese like leather; even the onion, which ranks with the truffle and the nectarine in the chief place of honour of earth’s fruits, is not perhaps a dish for princesses when raw. But she ate, if not with appetite, with courage; and when she had eaten, did not disdain the pitcher. In all her life before, she had not tasted of gross food nor drunk after another; but a brave woman far more readily accepts a change of circumstances than the bravest man. All that while, the woodman continued to observe her furtively, many low thoughts of fear and greed contending in his eyes. She read them clearly, and she knew she must begone. Presently she arose and offered him a florin. ‘Will that repay you?’ she asked. But here the man found his tongue. ‘I must have more than that,’ said he. ‘It is all I have to give you,’ she returned, and passed him by serenely. Yet her heart trembled, for she saw his hand stretched forth as if to arrest her, and his unsteady eyes wandering to his axe. A beaten path led westward from the clearing, and she swiftly followed it. She did not glance behind her. But as soon as the least turning of the path had concealed her from the woodman’s eyes, she slipped among the trees and ran till she deemed herself in safety. By this time the strong sunshine pierced in a thousand places the pine-thatch of the forest, fired the red boles, irradiated the cool aisles of shadow, and burned in jewels on the grass. The gum of these trees was dearer to the senses than the gums of Araby; each pine, in the lusty morning sunlight, burned its own wood-incense; and now and then a breeze would rise and toss these rooted censers, and send shade and sun-gem flitting, swift as swallows, thick as bees; and wake a brushing bustle of sounds that murmured and went by. On she passed, and up and down, in sun and shadow; now aloft on the bare ridge among the rocks and birches, with the lizards and the snakes; and anon in the deep grove among sunless pillars. Now she followed wandering wood-paths, in the maze of valleys; and again, from a hilltop, beheld the distant mountains and the great birds circling under the sky. She would see afar off a nestling hamlet, and go round to avoid it. Below, she traced the course of the foam of mountain torrents. 134

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Nearer hand, she saw where the tender springs welled up in silence, or oozed in green moss; or in the more favoured hollows a whole family of infant rivers would combine, and tinkle in the stones, and lie in pools to be a bathing-place for sparrows, or fall from the sheer rock in rods of crystal. Upon all these things, as she still sped along in the bright air, she looked with a rapture of surprise and a joyful fainting of the heart; they seemed so novel, they touched so strangely home, they were so hued and scented, they were so beset and canopied by the dome of the blue air of heaven. At length, when she was well weary, she came upon a wide and shallow pool. Stones stood in it, like islands; bullrushes fringed the coast; the floor was paved with the pine needles; and the pines themselves, whose roots made pro­montories, looked down silently on their green images. She crept to the margin and beheld herself with wonder, a hollow and bright-eyed phantom, in the ruins of her palace robe. The breeze now shook her image; now it would be marred with flies; and at that she smiled; and from the fading circles, her counterpart smiled back to her and looked kind. She sat long in the warm sun, and pitied her bare arms that were all bruised and marred with falling, and marvelled to see that she was dirty, and could not grow to believe that she had gone so long in such a strange disorder. Then, with a sigh, she addressed herself to make a toilet by that forest mirror, washed herself pure from all the stains of her adventure, took off her jewels and wrapped them in her handkerchief, re-arranged the tatters of her dress, and took down the folds of her hair. She shook it round her face, and the pool repeated her thus veiled. Her hair had smelt like violets, she remembered Otto saying; and so now she tried to smell it, and then shook her head, and laughed a little, sadly, to herself. The laugh was returned upon her in a childish echo. She looked up; and lo! two children looking on,—a small girl and a yet smaller boy, standing, like playthings, by the pool, below a spreading pine. Seraphina was not fond of children, and now she was startled to the heart. ‘Who are you?’ she cried, hoarsely. The mites huddled together and drew back; and Seraphina’s heart reproached her that she should have frightened things so quaint and little, and yet alive with senses. She thought upon the birds and looked again at her two visitors; so little larger and so far more innocent. On their clear faces, as in a pool, she saw the reflection of their fears. With gracious purpose she arose. ‘Come,’ she said, ‘do not be afraid of me,’ and took a step towards 135

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them. But alas! at the first movement, the two poor babes in the wood turned and ran helter-skelter from the Princess. The most desolate pang was struck into the girl’s heart. Here she was, twenty-two—soon twenty-three—and not a creature loved her; none but Otto; and would even he forgive? If she began weeping in these woods alone, it would mean death or madness. Hastily she trod the thoughts out like a burning paper; hastily rolled up her locks, and with terror dogging her, and her whole bosom sick with grief, resumed her journey. Past ten in the forenoon, she struck a highroad, marching in that place uphill between two stately groves, a river of sunlight; and here, dead weary, careless of consequences, and taking some courage from the human and civilised neighbourhood of the road, she stretched herself on the green margin in the shadow of a tree. Sleep closed on her, at first with a horror of fainting, but when she ceased to struggle, kindly embracing her. So she was taken home for a little, from all her toils and sorrows, to her Father’s arms. And there in the meanwhile her body lay exposed by the highwayside, in tattered finery; and on either hand from the woods the birds came flying by and calling upon others, and debated in their own tongue this strange appearance. The sun pursued his journey; the shadow flitted from her feet, shrank higher and higher, and was upon the point of leaving her altogether, when the rumble of a coach was signalled to and fro by the birds. The road in that part was very steep; the rumble drew near with great deliberation; and ten minutes passed before a gentleman appeared, walking with a sober elderly gait upon the grassy margin of the highway, and looking pleasantly around him as he walked. From time to time he paused, took out his note-book and made an entry with a pencil; and any spy who had been near enough would have heard him mumbling words as though he were a poet testing verses. The voice of the wheels was still faint, and it was plain the traveller had far outstripped his carriage. He had drawn very near to where the Princess lay asleep, before his eye alighted on her; but when it did he started, pocketed his notebook, and approached. There was a mile-stone close to where she lay; and he sat down on that and coolly studied her. She lay upon one side, all curled and sunken, her brow on one bare arm, the other stretched out, limp and dimpled. Her young body, like a thing thrown down, had scarce a mark of life. Her breathing stirred her not. The deadliest fatigue was thus confessed in every language of the sleeping flesh. 136

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The traveller smiled grimly. As though he had looked upon a statue, he made a grudging inventory of her charms: the figure in that touching freedom of forgetfulness surprised him; the flush of slumber became her like a flower. ‘Upon my word,’ he thought, ‘I did not think the girl could be so pretty. And to think,’ he added, ‘that I am under obligation not to use one word of this!’ He put forth his stick and touched her; and at that she awoke, sat up with a cry, and looked upon him wildly. ‘I trust your Highness has slept well,’ he said, nodding. But she only uttered sounds. ‘Compose yourself,’ said he, giving her certainly a brave example in his own demeanour. ‘My chaise is close at hand; and I shall have, I trust, the singular entertainment of abducting a sovereign Princess.’ ‘Sir John!’ she said, at last. ‘At your Highness’s disposal,’ he replied. She sprang to her feet. ‘O,’ she cried, ‘have you come from Mittwalden?’ ‘This morning,’ he returned, ‘I left it; and if there is any one less likely to return to it than yourself, behold him!’ ‘The Baron——’ she began, and paused. ‘Madam,’ he answered, ‘it was well meant, and you are quite a Judith; but after the hours that have elapsed, you will probably be relieved to hear that he is fairly well. I took his news this morning ere I left. Doing fairly well, they said, but suffering acutely. Hey?—acutely. They could hear his groans in the next room.’ ‘And the Prince,’ she asked, ‘is anything known of him?’ ‘It is reported,’ replied Sir John, with the same pleasurable deliberation, ‘that upon that point your Highness is the best authority.’ ‘Sir John,’ she said eagerly, ‘you were generous enough to speak about your carriage. Will you, I beseech you, will you take me to the Felsenburg? I have business there of an extreme importance.’ ‘I can refuse you nothing,’ replied the old gentleman, gravely and seriously enough. ‘Whatever, madam, it is in my power to do for you, that shall be done with pleasure. As soon as my chaise shall overtake us, it is yours to carry you where you will. But,’ added he, reverting to his former manner, ‘I observe you ask me nothing of the Palace.’ ‘I do not care,’ she said. ‘I thought I saw it burning.’ ‘Prodigious!’ said the Baronet. ‘You thought? And can the loss of forty toilettes leave you cold? Well, madam, I admire your fortitude. And the state, too? As I left, the government was sitting,—the new 137

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government, of which at least two members must be known to you by name: Sabra, who had, I believe, the benefit of being formed in your employment—a footman,—am I right?—and our old friend the Chancellor, in something of a subaltern position. But in these convulsions, the last shall be first and the first last.’ ‘Sir John,’ she said, with an air of perfect honesty, ‘I am sure you mean most kindly, but these matters have no interest for me.’ The Baronet was so utterly discountenanced, that he hailed the appearance of his chaise with welcome, and, by way of saying something, proposed that they should walk back to meet it. So it was done; and he helped her in with courtesy, mounted to her side, and from various receptacles (for the chaise was most completely fitted out) produced fruits and truffled liver, beautiful white bread, and a bottle of delicate wine. With these he served her like a father, coaxing and praising her to fresh exertions; and during all that time, as though silenced by the laws of hospitality, he was not guilty of the shadow of a sneer. Indeed his kindness seemed so genuine that Seraphina was moved to gratitude. ‘Sir John,’ she said, ‘you hate me in your heart; why are you so kind to me?’ ‘Ah, my good lady,’ said he, with no disclaimer of the accusation, ‘I have the honour to be much your husband’s friend, and somewhat his admirer.’ ‘You!’ she cried. ‘They told me you wrote cruelly of both of us.’ ‘Such was the strange path by which we grew acquainted,’ said Sir John. ‘I had written, madam, with particular cruelty (since that shall be the phrase) of your fair self. Your husband set me at liberty, gave me a passport, ordered a carriage, and then, with the most boyish spirit, challenged me to fight. Knowing the nature of his married life, I thought the dash and loyalty he showed delightful. “Do not be afraid,” says he; “if I am killed, there is nobody to miss me.” It appears you subsequently thought of that yourself. But I digress. I explained to him it was impossible that I could fight! “Not if I strike you?” says he. Very droll; I wish I could have put it in my book. However, I was conquered, took the young gentleman to my high favour, and tore up my bits of scandal on the spot. That is one of the little favours, madam, that you owe your husband.’ Seraphina sat for some while in silence. She could bear to be misjudged without a pang by those whom she contemned; she had none of Otto’s eagerness to be approved, but went her own way straight and head in air. To Sir John, however, after what he had said, and as her 138

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husband’s friend, she was prepared to stoop. ‘What do you think of me?’ she asked abruptly. ‘I have told you already,’ said Sir John: ‘I think you want another glass of my good wine.’ ‘Come,’ she said, ‘this is unlike you. You are not wont to be afraid. You say that you admire my husband: in his name, be honest.’ ‘I admire your courage,’ said the Baronet. ‘Beyond that, as you have guessed, and indeed said, our natures are not sympathetic.’ ‘You spoke of scandal,’ pursued Seraphina. ‘Was the scandal great?’ ‘It was considerable,’ said Sir John. ‘And you believed it?’ she demanded. ‘O, madam,’ said Sir John, ‘the question!’ ‘Thank you for that answer!’ cried Seraphina. ‘And now here, I will tell you, upon my honour, upon my soul, in spite of all the scandal in this world, I am as true a wife as ever stood.’ ‘We should probably not agree upon a definition,’ observed Sir John. ‘O!’ she cried, ‘I have abominably used him—I know that; it is not that I mean. But if you admire my husband, I insist that you shall understand me: I can look him in the face without a blush.’ ‘It may be, madam,’ said Sir John; ‘nor have I presumed to think the contrary.’ ‘You will not believe me?’ she cried. ‘You think I am a guilty wife? You think he was my lover?’ ‘Madam,’ returned the Baronet, ‘when I tore up my papers, I promised your good husband to concern myself no more with your affairs; and I assure you for the last time that I have no desire to judge you.’ ‘But you will not acquit me! Ah!’ she cried, ‘he will—he knows me better!’ Sir John smiled. ‘You smile at my distress?’ asked Seraphina. ‘At your woman’s coolness,’ said Sir John. ‘A man would scarce have had the courage of that cry, which was, for all that, very natural, and I make no doubt quite true. But remark, madam—since you do me the honour to consult me gravely—I have no pity for what you call your distresses. You have been completely selfish, and now reap the consequence. Had you once thought of your husband, instead of singly thinking of yourself, you would not now have been alone, a fugitive, with blood upon your hands, and hearing from a morose old Englishman truth more bitter than scandal.’ ‘I thank you,’ she said, quivering. ‘This is very true. Will you stop 139

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the carriage?’ ‘No, child,’ said Sir John, ‘not until I see you mistress of yourself.’ There was a long pause, during which the carriage rolled by rock and woodland. ‘And now,’ she resumed, with perfect steadiness, ‘will you consider me composed? I request you, as a gentleman, to let me out.’ ‘I think you do unwisely,’ he replied. ‘Continue, if you please, to use my carriage.’ ‘Sir John,’ she said, ‘if death were sitting on that pile of stones, I would alight! I do not blame, I thank you; I now know how I appear to others; but sooner than draw breath beside a man who can so think of me, I would——O!’ she cried, and was silent. Sir John pulled the string, alighted, and offered her his hand; but she refused the help. The road had now issued from the valleys in which it had been winding, and come to that part of its course where it runs, like a cornice, along the brow of the steep northward face of Grünewald. The place where they had alighted was at a salient angle; a bold rock and some wind-tortured pine-trees overhung it from above; far below the blue plains lay forth and melted into heaven; and before them the road, by a succession of bold zigzags, was seen mounting to where a tower upon a tall cliff closed the view. ‘There,’ said the Baronet, pointing to the tower, ‘you see the Felsenburg, your goal. I wish you a good journey, and regret I cannot be of more assistance.’ He mounted to his place and gave a signal, and the carriage rolled away. Seraphina stood by the wayside, gazing before her with blind eyes. Sir John she had dismissed already from her mind: she hated him, that was enough; for whatever Seraphina hated or contemned fell instantly to Lilliputian smallness, and was thenceforward steadily ignored in thought. And now she had matter for concern indeed. Her interview with Otto, which she had never yet forgiven him, began to appear before her in a very different light. He had come to her, still thrilling under recent insult, and not yet breathed from fighting her own cause; and how that knowledge changed the value of his words! Yes, he must have loved her; this was a brave feeling—it was no mere weakness of the will. And she, was she incapable of love? It would appear so; and she swallowed her tears, and yearned to see Otto, to explain all, to ask pity upon her knees for her transgressions, and, if all else were now beyond the reach of reparation, to restore at least the liberty of which 140

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she had deprived him. Swiftly she sped along the highway, and, as the road wound out and in about the bluffs and gullies of the mountain, saw and lost by glimpses the tall tower that stood before and above her, purpled by the mountain air.

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Chapter 2 TREATS OF A CHRISTIAN VIRTUE

When Otto mounted to his rolling prison, he found another occupant in a corner of the front seat; but as this person hung his head and the brightness of the carriage lamps shone outward, the Prince could only see it was a man. The Colonel followed his prisoner and clapped to the door; and at that the four horses broke immediately into a swinging trot. ‘Gentlemen,’ said the Colonel, after some little while had passed, ‘if we are to travel in silence, we might as well be at home. I appear, of course, in an invidious character; but I am a man of taste, fond of books and solidly informing talk, and unfortunately condemned for life to the guardroom. Gentlemen, this is my chance: don’t spoil it for me. I have here the pick of the whole court, barring lovely woman; I have a great author in the person of the Doctor——’ ‘Gotthold!’ cried Otto. ‘It appears,’ said the Doctor, bitterly, ‘that we must go together. Your Highness had not calculated upon that.’ ‘What do you infer?’ cried Otto; ‘that I had you arrested?’ ‘The inference is simple,’ said the Doctor. ‘Colonel Gordon,’ said the Prince, ‘oblige me so far, and set me right with Herr von Hohenstockwitz.’ ‘Gentlemen,’ said the Colonel, ‘you are both arrested on the same warrant in the name of the Princess Seraphina, acting regent, countersigned by Prime Minister Freiherr von Gondremark, and dated the day before yesterday, the twelfth. I reveal to you the secrets of the prison house,’ he added. ‘Otto,’ said Gotthold, ‘I ask you to pardon my suspicions.’ ‘Gotthold,’ said the Prince, ‘I am not certain I can grant you that.’ ‘Your Highness is, I am sure, far too magnanimous to hesitate,’ said the Colonel. ‘But allow me: we speak at home in my religion of the means of grace: and I now propose to offer them.’ So saying, the Colonel lighted a bright lamp which he attached to one side of the carriage, and from below the front seat produced a goodly basket adorned with the long necks of bottles. ‘Tu spem reducis—how does it go, Doctor?’ 142

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he asked gaily. ‘I am, in a sense, your host; and I am sure you are both far too considerate of my embarrassing position to refuse to do me honour. Gentlemen, I drink to the Prince!’ ‘Colonel,’ said Otto, ‘we have a jovial entertainer. I drink to Colonel Gordon.’ Thereupon all three took their wine very pleasantly; and even as they did so, the carriage with a lurch turned into the high road and began to make better speed. All was bright within; the wine had coloured Gotthold’s cheek; dim forms of forest trees, dwindling and spiring, scarves of the starry sky, now wide and now narrow, raced past the windows; through one that was left open the air of the woods came in with a nocturnal raciness; and the roll of wheels and the tune of the trotting horses sounded merrily on the ear. Toast followed toast; glass after glass was bowed across and emptied by the trio; and presently there began to fall upon them a luxurious spell, under the influence of which little but the sound of quiet and confidential laughter interrupted the long intervals of meditative silence. ‘Otto,’ said Gotthold, after one of these seasons of quiet, ‘I do not ask you to forgive me. Were the parts reversed, I could not forgive you.’ ‘Well,’ said Otto, ‘it is a phrase we use. I do forgive you, but your words and your suspicions rankle; and not yours alone. It is idle, Colonel Gordon, in view of the order you are carrying out, to conceal from you the dissensions of my family; they have gone so far that they are now public property. Well, gentlemen, can I forgive my wife? I can, of course, and do; but in what sense? I would certainly not stoop to any revenge; as certainly I could not think of her but as one changed beyond my recognition.’ ‘Allow me,’ returned the Colonel. ‘You will permit me to hope that I am addressing Christians? We are all conscious, I trust, that we are miserable sinners.’ ‘I disown the consciousness,’ said Gotthold. ‘Warmed with this good fluid, I deny your thesis.’ ‘How, sir? You never did anything wrong? and I heard you asking pardon but this moment, not of your God, sir, but of a common fellow-worm!’ the Colonel cried. ‘I own you have me; you are expert in argument, Herr Oberst,’ said the Doctor. ‘Begad, sir, I am proud to hear you say so,’ said the Colonel. ‘I was well grounded indeed at Aberdeen. And as for this matter of forgiveness, it comes, sir, of loose views and (what is if anything more danger143

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ous) a regular life. A sound creed and a bad morality, that’s the root of wisdom. You two gentlemen are too good to be forgiving.’ ‘The paradox is somewhat forced,’ said Gotthold. ‘Pardon me, Colonel,’ said the Prince; ‘I readily acquit you of any design of offence, but your words bite like satire. Is this a time, do you think, when I can wish to hear myself called good, now that I am paying the penalty (and am willing like yourself to think it just) of my prolonged misconduct?’ ‘O, pardon me!’ cried the Colonel. ‘You have never been expelled from the divinity hall; you have never been broke. I was: broke for a neglect of military duty. To tell you the open truth, your Highness, I was the worse of drink; it’s a thing I never do now,’ he added, taking out his glass. ‘But a man, you see, who has really tasted the defects of his own character, as I have, and has come to regard himself as a kind of blind teetotum knocking about life, begins to learn a very different view about forgiveness. I will talk of not forgiving others, sir, when I have made out to forgive myself, and not before; and the date is like to be a long one. My father, the Reverend Alexander Gordon, was a good man, and damned hard upon others. I am what they call a bad one, and that is just the difference. The man who cannot forgive any mortal thing is a green hand in life.’ ‘And yet I have heard of you, Colonel, as a duellist,’ said Gotthold. ‘A different thing, sir,’ replied the soldier. ‘Professional etiquette. And I trust without unchristian feeling.’ Presently after the Colonel fell into a deep sleep; and his companions looked upon each other, smiling. ‘An odd fish,’ said Gotthold. ‘And a strange guardian,’ said the Prince. ‘Yet what he said was true.’ ‘Rightly looked upon,’ mused Gotthold, ‘it is ourselves that we cannot forgive, when we refuse forgiveness to our friend. Some strand of our own misdoing is involved in every quarrel.’ ‘Are there not offences that disgrace the pardoner?’ asked Otto. ‘Are there not bounds of self-respect?’ ‘Otto,’ said Gotthold, ‘does any man respect himself? To this poor waif of a soldier of fortune we may seem respectable gentlemen; but to ourselves, what are we unless a paste-board portico and a deliquium of deadly weaknesses within?’ ‘I? yes,’ said Otto; ‘but you, Gotthold—you, with your interminable industry, your keen mind, your books—serving mankind, scorning pleasures and temptations! You do not know how I envy you.’ ‘Otto,’ said the Doctor, ‘in one word, and a bitter one to say: I am a 144

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secret tippler. Yes, I drink too much. The habit has robbed these very books, to which you praise my devotion, of the merits that they should have had. It has spoiled my temper. When I spoke to you the other day, how much of my warmth was in the cause of virtue? how much was the fever of last night’s wine? Ay, as my poor fellow-sot there said, and as I vaingloriously denied, we are all miserable sinners, put here for a moment, knowing the good, choosing the evil, standing naked and ashamed in the eye of God.’ ‘Is it so?’ said Otto. ‘Why, then, what are we? Are the very best——’ ‘There is no best in man,’ said Gotthold. ‘I am not better, it is likely I am not worse, than you or that poor sleeper. I was a sham, and now you know me: that is all.’ ‘And yet it has not changed my love,’ returned Otto, softly. ‘Our misdeeds do not change us. Gotthold, fill your glass. Let us drink to what is good in this bad business; let us drink to our old affection; and, when we have done so, forgive your too just grounds of offence, and drink with me to my wife, whom I have so misused, who has so misused me, and whom I have left, I fear, I greatly fear, in danger. What matters it how bad we are, if others can still love us, and we can still love others?’ ‘Ay!’ replied the Doctor. ‘It is very well said. It is the true answer to the pessimist, and the standing miracle of mankind. So you still love me? and so you can forgive your wife? Why, then, we may bid conscience “Down, dog,” like an ill-trained puppy yapping at shadows.’ The pair fell into silence, the Doctor tapping on his empty glass. The carriage swung forth out of the valleys on that open balcony of high road that runs along the front of Grünewald, looking down on Gerolstein. Far below, a white waterfall was shining to the stars from the falling skirts of forest, and beyond that, the night stood naked above the plain. On the other hand, the lamplight skimmed the face of the precipices, and the dwarf pine-trees twinkled with all their needles, and were gone again into the wake. The granite roadway thundered under wheels and hoofs; and at times, by reason of its continual winding, Otto could see the escort on the other side of a ravine, riding well together in the night. Presently the Felsenburg came plainly in view, some way above them, on a bold projection of the mountain, and planting its bulk against the starry sky. ‘See, Gotthold,’ said the Prince, ‘our destination.’ Gotthold awoke as from a trance. ‘I was thinking,’ said he, ‘if there is danger, why did you not resist? 145

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I was told you came of your free will; but should you not be there to help her?’ The colour faded from the Prince’s cheeks.

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Chapter 3 PROVIDENCE VON ROSEN: ACT THE LAST: IN WHICH SHE GALLOPS OFF

When the busy Countess came forth from her interview with Seraphina, it is not too much to say that she was beginning to be terribly afraid. She paused in the corridor and reckoned up her doings with an eye to Gondremark. The fan was in requisition in an instant; but her disquiet was beyond the reach of fanning. ‘The girl has lost her head,’ she thought; and then dismally, ‘I have gone too far.’ She instantly decided on secession. Now the Mons Sacer of the Frau von Rosen was a certain rustic villa in the forest, called by herself, in a smart attack of poesy, Tannen-Zauber, and by everybody else plain Kleinbrunn. Thither, upon the thought, she furiously drove, passing Gondremark at the entrance to the Palace avenue, but feigning not to observe him; and as Kleinbrunn was seven good miles away and in the bottom of a narrow dell, she passed the night without any rumour of the outbreak reaching her; and the glow of the conflagration was concealed by intervening hills. Frau von Rosen did not sleep well; she was seriously uneasy as to the results of her delightful evening, and saw herself condemned to quite a lengthy sojourn in her deserts and a long defensive correspondence, ere she could venture to return to Gondremark. On the other hand, she examined, by way of pastime, the deeds she had received from Otto; and even here saw cause for disappointment. In these troublous days she had no taste for landed property, and she was convinced, besides, that Otto had paid dearer than the farm was worth. Lastly, the order for the Prince’s release fairly burned her meddling fingers. All things considered, the next day beheld an elegant and beautiful lady, in a riding-habit and a flapping hat, draw bridle at the gate of the Felsenburg, not perhaps with any clear idea of her purpose, but with her usual experimental views on life. Governor Gordon, summoned to the gate, welcomed the omnipotent Countess with his most gallant bearing, though it was wonderful how old he looked in the morning. ‘Ah, Governor,’ she said, ‘we have surprises for you, sir,’ and nodded at him meaningly. 147

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‘Eh, madam, leave me my prisoners,’ he said; ‘and if you will but join the band, begad, I’ll be happy for life.’ ‘You would spoil me, would you not?’ she asked. ‘I would try, I would try,’ returned the Governor, and he offered her his arm. She took it, picked up her skirt, and drew him close to her. ‘I have come to see the Prince,’ she said. ‘Now, infidel! on business. A message from that stupid Gondremark, who keeps me running like a courier. Do I look like one, Herr Gordon?’ And she planted her eyes in him. ‘You look like an angel, ma’am,’ returned the Governor, with a great air of finished gallantry. The Countess laughed. ‘An angel on horseback!’ she said. ‘Quick work.’ ‘You came, you saw, you conquered,’ flourished Gordon, in high good humour with his own wit and grace. ‘We toasted you, madam, in the carriage, in an excellent good glass of wine; toasted you fathom deep; the finest woman, with, begad, the finest eyes in Grünewald. I never saw the like of them but once, in my own country, when I was a young fool at College: Thomasina Haig, her name was. I give you my word of honour, she was as like you as two peas.’ ‘And so you were merry in the carriage?’ asked the Countess, gracefully dissembling a yawn. ‘We were; we had a very pleasant conversation; but we took perhaps a glass more than that fine fellow of a Prince has been accustomed to,’ said the Governor; ‘and I observe this morning that he seems a little off his mettle. We’ll get him mellow again ere bedtime. This is his door.’ ‘Well,’ she whispered, ‘let me get my breath. No, no; wait. Have the door ready to open.’ And the Countess, standing like one inspired, shook out her fine voice in ‘Lascia ch’ io pianga;’ and when she had reached the proper point, and lyrically uttered forth her sighings after liberty, the door, at a sign, was flung wide open, and she swam into the Prince’s sight, bright-eyed, and with her colour somewhat freshened by the exercise of singing. It was a great dramatic entrance, and to the somewhat doleful prisoner within the sight was sunshine. ‘Ah, madam,’ he cried, running to her—‘you here!’ She looked meaningly at Gordon; and as soon as the door was closed she fell on Otto’s neck. ‘To see you here!’ she moaned and clung to him. But the Prince stood somewhat stiffly in that enviable situation, and the Countess instantly recovered from her outburst. ‘Poor child,’ she said, ‘poor child! Sit down beside me here, and tell 148

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me all about it. My heart really bleeds to see you. How does time go?’ ‘Madam,’ replied the Prince, sitting down beside her, his gallantry recovered, ‘the time will now go all too quickly till you leave. But I must ask you for the news. I have most bitterly condemned myself for my inertia of last night. You wisely counselled me; it was my duty to resist. You wisely and nobly counselled me; I have since thought of it with wonder. You have a noble heart.’ ‘Otto,’ she said, ‘spare me. Was it even right, I wonder? I have duties, too, you poor child; and when I see you they all melt—all my good resolutions fly away.’ ‘And mine still come too late,’ he replied, sighing. ‘Oh, what would I not give to have resisted? What would I not give for freedom?’ ‘Well, what would you give?’ she asked; and the red fan was spread; only her eyes, as if from over battlements, brightly surveyed him. ‘I? What do you mean? Madam, you have some news for me,’ he cried. ‘O, O!’ said madam, dubiously. He was at her feet. ‘Do not trifle with my hopes,’ he pleaded. ‘Tell me, dearest Madame von Rosen, tell me! You cannot be cruel: it is not in your nature. Give? I can give nothing; I have nothing; I can only plead in mercy.’ ‘Do not,’ she said; ‘it is not fair. Otto, you know my weakness. Spare me. Be generous.’ ‘O, madam,’ he said, ‘it is for you to be generous, to have pity.’ He took her hand and pressed it; he plied her with caresses and appeals. The Countess had a most enjoyable sham siege, and then relented. She sprang to her feet, she tore her dress open, and, all warm from her bosom, threw the order on the floor. ‘There!’ she cried. ‘I forced it from her. Use it, and I am ruined!’ And she turned away as if to veil the force of her emotions. Otto sprang upon the paper, read it, and cried out aloud. ‘O, God bless her!’ he said, ‘God bless her.’ And he kissed the writing. Von Rosen was a singularly good-natured woman, but her part was now beyond her. ‘Ingrate!’ she cried; ‘I wrung it from her, I betrayed my trust to get it, and ’tis she you thank!’ ‘Can you blame me?’ said the Prince. ‘I love her.’ ‘I see that,’ she said. ‘And I?’ ‘You, Madam von Rosen? You are my dearest, my kindest, and most generous of friends,’ he said, approaching her. ‘You would be a perfect friend, if you were not so lovely. You have a great sense of humour, you cannot be unconscious of your charm, and you amuse 149

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yourself at times by playing on my weakness; and at times I can take pleasure in the comedy. But not to-day: to-day you will be the true, the serious, the manly friend, and you will suffer me to forget that you are lovely and that I am weak. Come, dear Countess, let me to-day repose in you entirely.’ He held out his hand, smiling, and she took it frankly. ‘I vow you have bewitched me,’ she said; and then with a laugh, ‘I break my staff!’ she added; ‘and I must pay you my best compliment. You made a difficult speech. You are as adroit, dear Prince, as I am—charming.’ And as she said the word with a great courtesy, she justified it. ‘You hardly keep the bargain, madam, when you make yourself so beautiful,’ said the Prince, bowing. ‘It was my last arrow,’ she returned. ‘I am disarmed. Blank cartridge, O mon Prince! And now I tell you, if you choose to leave this prison, you can, and I am ruined. Choose!’ ‘Madam von Rosen,’ replied Otto, ‘I choose, and I will go. My duty points me, duty still neglected by this Featherhead. But do not fear to be a loser. I propose instead that you should take me with you, a bear in chains, to Baron Gondremark. I am become perfectly unscrupulous: to save my wife I will do all, all he can ask or fancy. He shall be filled; were he huge as leviathan and greedy as the grave, I will content him. And you, the fairy of our pantomime, shall have the credit.’ ‘Done!’ she cried. ‘Admirable! Prince Charming no longer—Prince Sorcerer, Prince Solon! Let us go this moment. Stay,’ she cried, pausing. ‘I beg, dear Prince, to give you back these deeds. ’Twas you who liked the farm—I have not seen it; and it was you who wished to benefit the peasants. And, besides,’ she added, with a comical change of tone, ‘I should prefer the ready money.’ Both laughed. ‘Here I am, once more a farmer,’ said Otto, accepting the papers, ‘but overwhelmed in debt.’ The Countess touched a bell, and the Governor appeared. ‘Governor,’ she said, ‘I am going to elope with his Highness. The result of our talk has been a thorough understanding, and the coup d’état is over. Here is the order.’ Colonel Gordon adjusted silver spectacles upon his nose. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘the Princess: very right. But the warrant, madam, was countersigned.’ ‘By Heinrich!’ said von Rosen. ‘Well, and here am I to represent him.’ ‘Well, your Highness,’ resumed the soldier of fortune, ‘I must congratulate you upon my loss. You have been cut out by beauty, and I am 150

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left lamenting. The Doctor still remains to me: probus, doctus, lepidus, jucundus: a man of books.’ ‘Ay, there is nothing about poor Gotthold,’ said the Prince. ‘The Governor’s consolation? Would you leave him bare?’ asked von Rosen. ‘And, your Highness,’ resumed Gordon, ‘may I trust that in the course of this temporary obscuration, you have found me discharge my part with suitable respect and, I may add, tact? I adopted purposely a cheerfulness of manner; mirth, it appeared to me, and a good glass of wine, were the fit alleviations.’ ‘Colonel,’ said Otto, holding out his hand, ‘your society was of itself enough. I do not merely thank you for your pleasant spirits; I have to thank you, besides, for some philosophy, of which I stood in need. I trust I do not see you for the last time; and in the meanwhile, as a memento of our strange acquaintance, let me offer you these verses on which I was but now engaged. I am so little of a poet, and was so ill inspired by prison bars, that they have some claim to be at least a curiosity.’ The Colonel’s countenance lighted as he took the paper; the silver spectacles were hurriedly replaced. ‘Ha!’ he said, ‘Alexandrines, the tragic metre. I shall cherish this, your Highness, like a relic; no more suitable offering, although I say it, could be made. “Dieux de l’immense plaine et des vastes forêts.” Very good,’ he said, ‘very good indeed! “Et du geolier lui-même apprendre des leçons.” Most handsome, begad!’ ‘Come, Governor,’ cried the Countess, ‘you can read his poetry when we are gone. Open your grudging portals.’ ‘I ask your pardon,’ said the Colonel. ‘To a man of my character and tastes, these verses, this handsome reference—most moving, I assure you. Can I offer you an escort?’ ‘No, no,’ replied the Countess. ‘We go incogniti, as we arrived. We ride together; the Prince will take my servant’s horse. Hurry and privacy, Herr Oberst, that is all we seek.’ And she began impatiently to lead the way. But Otto had still to bid farewell to Dr. Gotthold; and the Governor following, with his spectacles in one hand and the paper in the other, had still to communicate his treasured verses, piece by piece, as he succeeded in deciphering the manuscript, to all he came across; and still his enthusiasm mounted. ‘I declare,’ he cried at last, with the air of one who has at length divined a mystery, ‘they remind me of Robbie Burns!’ 151

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But there is an end to all things; and at length Otto was walking by the side of Madame von Rosen, along that mountain wall, her servant following with both the horses, and all about them sunlight, and breeze, and flying bird, and the vast regions of the air, and the capacious prospect: wildwood and climbing pinnacle, and the sound and voice of mountain torrents, at their hand: and far below them, green melting into sapphire on the plains. They walked at first in silence; for Otto’s mind was full of the delight of liberty and nature, and still, betweenwhiles, he was preparing his interview with Gondremark. But when the first rough promontory of the rock was turned, and the Felsenburg concealed behind its bulk, the lady paused. ‘Here,’ she said, ‘I will dismount poor Karl, and you and I must ply our spurs. I love a wild ride with a good companion.’ As she spoke, a carriage came into sight round the corner next below them in the order of the road. It came heavily creaking, and a little ahead of it a traveller was soberly walking, note-book in hand. ‘It is Sir John,’ cried Otto, and he hailed him. The Baronet pocketed his note-book, stared through an eye-glass, and then waved his stick; and he on his side, and the Countess and the Prince on theirs, advanced with somewhat quicker steps. They met at the rëentrant angle, where a thin stream sprayed across a boulder and was scattered in rain among the brush; and the Baronet saluted the Prince with much punctilio. To the Countess, on the other hand, he bowed with a kind of sneering wonder. ‘Is it possible, madam, that you have not heard the news?’ he asked. ‘What news?’ she cried. ‘News of the first order,’ returned Sir John: ‘a revolution in the State, a Republic declared, the palace burned to the ground, the Princess in flight, Gondremark wounded——’ ‘Heinrich wounded?’ she screamed. ‘Wounded and suffering acutely,’ said Sir John. ‘His groans——’ There fell from the lady’s lips an oath so potent that, in smoother hours, it would have made her hearers jump. She ran to her horse, scrambled to the saddle, and, yet half seated, dashed down the road at full gallop. The groom, after a pause of wonder, followed her. The rush of her impetuous passage almost scared the carriage horses over the verge of the steep hill; and still she clattered further, and the crags echoed to her flight, and still the groom flogged vainly in pursuit of her. At the fourth corner, a woman trailing slowly up leaped back with a cry and escaped death by a hand’s-breadth. But the Countess wasted 152

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neither glance nor thought upon the incident. Out and in, about the bluffs of the mountain wall, she fled, loose-reined, and still the groom toiled in her pursuit. ‘A most impulsive lady!’ said Sir John. ‘Who would have thought she cared for him?’ And before the words were uttered, he was struggling in the Prince’s grasp. ‘My wife! the Princess? What of her?’ ‘She is down the road,’ he gasped. ‘I left her twenty minutes back.’ And next moment, the choked author stood alone, and the Prince on foot was racing down the hill behind the Countess.

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Chapter 4 BABES IN THE WOOD

While the feet of the Prince continued to run swiftly, his heart, which had at first by far outstripped his running, soon began to linger and hang back. Not that he ceased to pity the misfortune or to yearn for the sight of Seraphina; but the memory of her obdurate coldness awoke within him, and woke in turn his own habitual diffidence of self. Had Sir John been given time to tell him all, had he even known that she was speeding to the Felsenburg, he would have gone to her with ardour. As it was, he began to see himself once more intruding, profiting, perhaps, by her misfortune, and now that she was fallen, proffering unloved caresses to the wife who had spurned him in prosperity. The sore spots upon his vanity began to burn; once more, his anger assumed the carriage of a hostile generosity; he would utterly forgive indeed; he would help, save, and comfort his unloving wife; but all with distant self-denial, imposing silence on his heart, respecting Seraphina’s disaffection as he would the innocence of a child. So, when at length he turned a corner and beheld the Princess, it was his first thought to reassure her of the purity of his respect, and he at once ceased running and stood still. She, upon her part, began to run to him with a little cry; then, seeing him pause, she paused also, smitten with remorse; and at length, with the most guilty timidity, walked nearly up to where he stood. ‘Otto,’ she said, ‘I have ruined all!’ ‘Seraphina!’ he cried with a sob, but did not move, partly withheld by his resolutions, partly struck stupid at the sight of her weariness and disorder. Had she stood silent, they had soon been locked in an embrace. But she too had prepared herself against the interview, and must spoil the golden hour with protestations. ‘All!’ she went on, ‘I have ruined all! But, Otto, in kindness you must hear me—not justify, but own, my faults. I have been taught so cruelly; I have had such time for thought, and see the world so changed. I have been blind, stone-blind; I have let all true good go by me, and lived on shadows. But when this dream fell, and I had betrayed you, and thought I had killed——’ She paused. ‘I thought I had killed Gondre154

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mark,’ she said with a deep flush, ‘and I found myself alone as you said.’ The mention of the name of Gondremark pricked the Prince’s generosity like a spur. ‘Well,’ he cried, ‘and whose fault was it but mine? It was my duty to be beside you, loved or not. But I was a skulker in the grain, and found it easier to desert than to oppose you. I could never learn that better part of love, to fight love’s battles. But yet the love was there. And now when this toy kingdom of ours has fallen, first of all by my demerits, and next by your inexperience, and we are here alone together, as poor as Job and merely a man and a woman—let me conjure you to forgive the weakness and to repose in the love. Do not mistake me!’ he cried, seeing her about to speak, and imposing silence with uplifted hand. ‘My love is changed; it is purged of any conjugal pretension; it does not ask, does not hope, does not wish, for a return in kind. You may forget for ever that part in which you found me so distasteful, and accept without embarrassment the affection of a brother.’ ‘You are too generous, Otto,’ she said. ‘I know that I have forfeited your love. I cannot take this sacrifice. You had far better leave me. O go away, and leave me to my fate!’ ‘O no!’ said Otto; ‘we must first of all escape out of this hornet’s nest, to which I led you. My honour is engaged. I said but now we were as poor as Job; and behold! not many miles from here I have a house of my own to which I will conduct you. Otto the Prince being down, we must try what luck remains to Otto the Hunter. Come, Seraphina; show that you forgive me, and let us set about this business of escape in the best spirits possible. You used to say, my dear, that, except as a husband and a prince, I was a pleasant fellow. I am neither now, and you may like my company without remorse. Come, then; it were idle to be captured. Can you still walk? Forth, then,’ said he, and he began to lead the way. A little below where they stood, a good-sized brook passed below the road, which overleapt it in a single arch. On one bank of that loquacious water a footpath descended a green dell. Here it was rocky and stony, and lay on the steep scarps of the ravine; here it was choked with brambles; and there, in fairy haughs, it lay for a few paces evenly on the green turf. Like a sponge, the hillside oozed with well-water. The burn kept growing both in force and volume; at every leap it fell with heavier plunges and span more widely in the pool. Great had been the labours of that stream, and great and agreeable the changes it had wrought. It had cut through dykes of stubborn rock, and now, like a blowing dolphin, spouted through the orifice; along all its humble coasts, it had undermined and rafted-down the goodlier timber of the 155

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forest; and on these rough clearings it now set and tended primrose gardens, and planted woods of willow, and made a favourite of the silver birch. Through all these friendly features the path, its human acolyte, conducted our two wanderers downward,—Otto before, still pausing at the more difficult passages to lend assistance; the Princess following. From time to time, when he turned to help her, her face would lighten upon his—her eyes, half desperately, woo him. He saw, but dared not understand. ‘She does not love me,’ he told himself, with magnanimity. ‘This is remorse or gratitude; I were no gentleman, no, nor yet a man, if I presumed upon these pitiful concessions.’ Some way down the glen, the stream, already grown to a good bulk of water, was rudely dammed across, and about a third of it abducted in a wooden trough. Gaily the pure water, air’s first cousin, fleeted along the rude aqueduct, whose sides and floor it had made green with grasses. The path, bearing it close company, threaded a wilderness of briar and wild rose. And presently, a little in front, the brown top of a mill and the tall mill-wheel, spraying diamonds, arose in the narrows of the glen; at the same time the snoring music of the saws broke the silence. The miller, hearing steps, came forth to his door, and both he and Otto started. ‘Good-morning, miller,’ said the Prince. ‘You were right, it seems, and I was wrong. I give you the news, and bid you to Mittwalden. My throne has fallen—great was the fall of it!—and your good friends of the Phœnix bear the rule.’ The red-faced miller looked supreme astonishment. ‘And your Highness?’ he gasped. ‘My Highness is running away,’ replied Otto, ‘straight for the frontier.’ ‘Leaving Grünewald?’ cried the man. ‘Your father’s son? It’s not to be permitted!’ ‘Do you arrest us, friend?’ asked Otto, smiling. ‘Arrest you? I?’ exclaimed the man. ‘For what does your Highness take me? Why, sir, I make sure there is not a man in Grünewald would lay hands upon you.’ ‘O, many, many,’ said the Prince; ‘but from you, who were bold with me in my greatness, I should even look for aid in my distress.’ The miller became the colour of beetroot. ‘You may say so indeed,’ said he. ‘And meanwhile, will you and your lady step into my house.’ ‘We have not time for that,’ replied the Prince; ‘but if you would oblige us with a cup of wine without here, you will give a pleasure and 156

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a service, both in one.’ The miller once more coloured to the nape. He hastened to bring forth wine in a pitcher and three bright crystal tumblers. ‘Your Highness must not suppose,’ he said, as he filled them, ‘that I am an habitual drinker. The time when I had the misfortune to encounter you, I was a trifle overtaken, I allow; but a more sober man than I am in my ordinary, I do not know where you are to look for; and even this glass that I drink to you (and to the lady) is quite an unusual recreation.’ The wine was drunk with due rustic courtesies; and then, refusing further hospitality, Otto and Seraphina once more proceeded to descend the glen, which now began to open and to be invaded by the taller trees. ‘I owed that man a reparation,’ said the Prince; ‘for when we met I was in the wrong and put a sore affront upon him. I judge by myself, perhaps; but I begin to think that no one is the better for a humiliation.’ ‘But some have to be taught so,’ she replied. ‘Well, well,’ he said, with a painful embarrassment. ‘Well, well. But let us think of safety. My miller is all very good, but I do not pin my faith to him. To follow down this stream will bring us, but after innumerable windings, to my house. Here, up this glade, there lies a crosscut—the world’s end for solitude—the very deer scarce visit it. Are you too tired, or could you pass that way?’ ‘Choose the path, Otto. I will follow you,’ she said. ‘No,’ he replied, with a singular imbecility of manner and appearance, ‘but I meant the path was rough. It lies, all the way, by glade and dingle, and the dingles are both deep and thorny.’ ‘Lead on,’ she said. ‘Are you not Otto the Hunter?’ They had now burst across a veil of underwood, and were come into a lawn among the forest, very green and innocent, and solemnly surrounded by trees. Otto paused on the margin, looking about him with delight; then his glance returned to Seraphina, as she stood framed in that sylvan pleasantness and looking at her husband with undecipherable eyes. A weakness both of the body and mind fell on him like the beginnings of sleep; the cords of his activity were relaxed, his eyes clung to her. ‘Let us rest,’ he said; and he made her sit down, and himself sat down beside her on the slope of an inconsiderable mound. She sat with her eyes downcast, her slim hand dabbling in grass, like a maid waiting for love’s summons. The sound of the wind in the forest swelled and sank, and drew near them with a running rush, and died away and away in the distance into fainting whispers. Nearer 157

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hand, a bird out of the deep covert uttered broken and anxious notes. All this seemed but a halting prelude to speech. To Otto it seemed as if the whole frame of nature were waiting for his words; and yet his pride kept him silent. The longer he watched that slender and pale hand plucking at the grasses, the harder and rougher grew the fight between pride and its kindly adversary. ‘Seraphina,’ he said at last, ‘it is right you should know one thing: I never . . . .’ He was about to say ‘doubted you,’ but was that true? And, if true, was it generous to speak of it? Silence succeeded. ‘I pray you, tell it me,’ she said; ‘tell it me, in pity.’ ‘I mean only this,’ he resumed, ‘that I understand all, and do not blame you. I understand how the brave woman must look down on the weak man. I think you were wrong in some things; but I have tried to understand it, and I do. I do not need to forget or to forgive, Seraphina, for I have understood.’ ‘I know what I have done,’ she said. ‘I am not so weak that I can be deceived with kind speeches. I know what I have been—I see myself. I am not worth your anger, how much less to be forgiven! In all this downfall and misery, I see only me and you: you, as you have been always; me, as I was—me, above all! O yes, I see myself: and what can I think?’ ‘Ah, then, let us reverse the parts!’ said Otto. ‘It is ourselves we cannot forgive, when we deny forgiveness to another—so a friend told me last night. On these terms, Seraphina, you see how generously I have forgiven myself. But am not I to be forgiven? Come, then, forgive yourself—and me.’ She did not answer in words, but reached out her hand to him quickly. He took it; and as the smooth fingers settled and nestled in his, love ran to and fro between them in tender and transforming currents. ‘Seraphina,’ he cried, ‘O, forget the past! Let me serve and help you; let me be your servant; it is enough for me to serve you and to be near you; let me be near you, dear—do not send me away.’ He hurried his pleading like the speech of a frightened child. ‘It is not love,’ he went on; ‘I do not ask for love; my love is enough . . .’ ‘Otto!’ she said, as if in pain. He looked up into her face. It was wrung with the very ecstasy of tenderness and anguish; on her features, and most of all in her changed eyes, there shone the very light of love. ‘Seraphina?’ he cried aloud, and with a sudden, tuneless voice, ‘Seraphina?’ ‘Look round you at this glade,’ she cried, ‘and where the leaves 158

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are coming on young trees, and the flowers begin to blossom. This is where we meet, meet for the first time; it is so much better to forget and to be born again. O, what a pit there is for sins—God’s mercy, man’s oblivion!’ ‘Seraphina,’ he said, ‘let it be so, indeed; let all that was be merely the abuse of dreaming; let me begin again, a stranger. I have dreamed, in a long dream, that I adored a girl unkind and beautiful; in all things my superior, but still cold like ice. And again I dreamed, and thought she changed and melted, glowed and turned to me. And I—who had no merit but a love, slavish and unerect—lay close, and durst not move for fear of waking.’ ‘Lie close,’ she said, with a deep thrill of speech. So they spake in the spring woods; and meanwhile, in Mittwalden Rath-haus, the Republic was declared.

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Bibliographical Postscript, TO COMPLETE THE STORY

The reader well informed in modern history will not require details as to the fate of the Republic. The best account is to be found in the memoirs of Herr Greisengesang (7 Bände: Leipzig), by our passing acquaintance the licentiate Roederer. Herr Roederer, with too much of an author’s licence, makes a great figure of his hero—poses him, indeed, to be the centre-piece and cloud-compeller of the whole. But, with due allowance for this bias, the book is able and complete. The reader is of course acquainted with the vigorous and bracing pages of Sir John (2 volumes: London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown). Sir John, who plays but a toothcomb in the orchestra of this historical romance, blows in his own book the big bassoon. His character is there drawn at large; and the sympathy of Landor has countersigned the admiration of the public. One point, however, calls for explanation; the chapter on Grünewald was torn by the hand of the author in the palace gardens; how comes it, then, to figure at full length among my more modest pages, the Lion of the caravan? That eminent literatus was a man of method; ‘Juvenal by double entry,’ he was once profanely called; and when he tore the sheets in question, it was rather, as he has since explained, in the search for some dramatic evidence of his sincerity, than with the thought of practical deletion. At that time, indeed, he was possessed of two blotted scrolls and a fair copy in double. But the chapter, as the reader knows, was honestly omitted from the famous ‘Memoirs on the various Courts of Europe.’ It has been mine to give it to the public. Bibliography still helps us with a farther glimpse of our characters. I have here before me a small volume (printed for private circulation: no printer’s name; n.d.) ‘Poésies par Frédéric et Amélie.’ Mine is a presentation copy, obtained for me by Mr. Bain in the Haymarket; and the name of the first owner is written on the fly-leaf in the hand of Prince Otto himself. The modest epigraph—‘La rime n’est pas riche’— may be attributed, with a good show of likelihood, to the same collaborator. It is strikingly appropriate, and I have found the volume very dreary. Those pieces in which I seem to trace the hand of the Princess 160

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are particularly dull and conscientious. But the booklet had a fair success with that public for which it was designed; and I have come across some evidences of a second venture of the same sort, now unprocurable. Here, at least, we may take leave of Otto and Seraphina—what do I say? of Frédéric and Amélie—ageing together peaceably at the court of the wife’s father, jingling French rhymes and correcting joint proofs. Still following the book-lists, I perceive that Mr. Swinburne has dedicated a rousing lyric and some vigorous sonnets to the memory of Gondremark; that name appears twice at least in Victor Hugo’s trumpet-blasts of patriot enumeration; and I came latterly, when I supposed my task already ended, on a trace of the fallen politician and his Countess. It is in the ‘Diary of J. Hogg Cotterill, Esq.’ (that very interesting work). Mr. Cotterill, being at Naples, is introduced (May 27th) to ‘a Baron and Baroness Gondremark—he a man who once made a noise—she still beautiful—both witty. She complimented me much upon my French—should never have known me to be English—had known my uncle, Sir John, in Germany—recognised in me, as a family trait, some of his grand air and studious courtesy—asked me to call.’ And again (May 30th) ‘visited the Baronne de Gondremark—much gratified—a most refined, intelligent woman, quite of the old school, now hélas! extinct—had read my Remarks on Sicily—it reminds her of my uncle, but with more of grace—I feared she thought there was less energy—assured no—a softer style of presentation, more of the literary grace, but the same firm grasp of circumstance and force of thought—in short, just Buttonhole’s opinion. Much encouraged. I have a real esteem for this patrician lady.’ The acquaintance lasted some time; and when Mr. Cotterill left in the suite of Lord Protocol, and, as he is careful to inform us, in Admiral Yardarm’s flag-ship, one of his chief causes of regret is to leave ‘that most spirituelle and sympathetic lady, who already regards me as a younger brother.’

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Appendices 1. Magazine Passages Excised from Book Edition

For a survey of Stevenson’s extensive revisions to the text published in Longman’s Magazine for book publication, see ‘Textual Essay’ in ‘Note on the Text’. One short passage of dialogue was removed in its entirety from Book i chapter 5, and this is reproduced below, followed by the original ending of the last chapter of the novel, very extensively rewritten by Stevenson for the Chatto & Windus edition. Book ii chapter 5 from Longman’s Magazine, 32 ( June 1885), 216: The following passage, from ‘Admiral?’ to ‘mon premier minister’ was replaced with an ellipsis for the book version (see 63 in the present edition).  ‘[…] Come, co-admiral, let us consult.’ ‘Admiral?’ replied the Baron, smiling. ‘How many years before we have an admiral in Grünewald?’ ‘It is a long way to the sea, Monsieur l’ambitieux; and we cannot have an admiral until we have a port,’ she answered. ‘O, a long way!’ said Gondremark. ‘When a state begins growing, it grows by geometrical progression.’ ‘Come,’ she said, ‘you trifle, Monsieur mon premier ministre. How am I to receive him now? And what are we to do if he should appear at the council?’ Conclusion to Book iii chapter 4 from Longman’s Magazine, 36 (Oct 1885), 662–4: In Longman’s Magazine the following passage concluded the action of the novel, before it was replaced with the ending used on 157–9 in the present edition. ‘[…] I judge by myself, perhaps; but I begin to think that no one is the better for a humiliation.’ ‘It was like you,’ she said; ‘you are a Prince in kindliness.’ She looked at him, as she said it, with a glow; and Otto winced. ‘Do not say such things to me!’ he cried. ‘Otto,’ she returned, ‘I never spared you the bad, when I thought it. 163

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Now, when I think all good, shall I begin?’ ‘Well, well,’ he said, blushing withal and with a mortal tenderness at heart. ‘Well, well. But let us think of safety. My miller is all very good, but I do not pin my faith to him. To follow down this stream will bring us, but after innumerable windings, to my house. Here, up this glade, there lies a cross-cut—the world’s end for solitude—the very deer scarce visit it. Are you too tired, or could you pass that way?’ ‘I would follow you to the moon,’ said Seraphina. ‘No,’ he replied, with a singular imbecility of manner and appearance, ‘but I meant the path was rough. It lies, all the way, by glade and dingle, and the dingles are both deep and thorny.’ ‘Do you take me for so fine a lady?’ said she. ‘I am no more afraid of briars than yourself. Come, lead on! Let us forget that we were ever princes; I am Eve, you Adam; you will see that I can pick up my petticoats and jump a brook. Come; here is open turf; let us take hands and run like children.’ Indeed they had now burst across a veil of underwood, and were come into a lawn among the forest, very green and innocent, and solemnly surrounded by the trees. It seemed to invite glad spirits to the games of childhood; and the Prince and Princess did as she proposed. Her hand lay warm and moist and human within his; his heart leaped, not with the running, but this nearness. And when they had come to the far end of the glade, she dropped upon the sod, made him sit by her, and still held his hand. ‘Let us pretend that we have never met,’ she said. ‘You do not know, and I will tell you, my story. I was bewitched for years in an enchanted palace, and at last my prison (which was all of crockery!) fell with a crash, and I ran forth into the woods. I do not think that I had breathed before; my heart had been entirely dead. There was a stream and the moon shone, and then, the most wonderful of all, dawn came, and I was changed into a living girl. That is my tale; tell yours.’ ‘I have not any,’ replied Otto, ‘but only this, that I was a great fool, and am one still.’ ‘Let me tell your fortune,’ she said, looking at his hand in hers. ‘Here I see that you will always be generous, even to the unworthy; but yet that you are proud; and you are very worthy to be loved, and will be loved; and you have long been misjudged, but now your friends adore you.’ ‘Who does?’ he asked. ‘All of them,’ said she; and then suddenly, ‘Look round you at this glade,’ she cried, ‘and where the leaves are coming on young trees, and 164

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the flowers begin to blossom. This is where we meet, meet for the first time; it is so much better to forget and to be born again. I never saw, you never knew me, till to-day. Oh, what a pit there is for sins—God’s mercy, man’s oblivion! And then to awaken, grown man-children. No, we have never met.’ ‘Seraphina,’ he said, ‘let it be so, indeed; let all that was, be merely the abuse of dreaming; let me not have seen, not sought, not married, not misused you; let me begin again, a stranger. I have dreamed, in a long dream, that I adored a girl, unkind and beautiful; in all things my superior, but still cold like ice. And again I dreamed, and thought she changed and melted, glowed and turned to me. And I—who had no merit but a love, slavish and unerect—lay close, and durst not move for fear of waking.’ ‘Lie close,’ she said, with a deep thrill of speech. ‘Stir not a finger, dear, or we may both awake. I, too, have dreamed my nightmare. Now, as I sit here, I begin to tell myself there was a Prince in fairy tales, who loved a thing of ice and folly; and under every trial, still loved on; loved the ingrate, the traitor, the insolent—and oh! still loved, or so I tell myself; and when at last God sent a soul into his froward mistress, his great heart leapt up, and he forgave her all.’ So they spake in the spring woods; and meanwhile, in Mittwalden Rath-haus, the Republic was declared. 2. Manuscript Fragments

No manuscript version of Prince Otto has survived. The only manuscript materials relevant to this novel are lists of characters and chapters, and draft dedicatory matter, held in the Beinecke Collection of Yale University Library in New Haven, Connecticut, and in the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. The lists of characters and chapters indicate that these manuscripts were written early in the process of composition; indeed the inclusion of ‘soldiers’ under the named characters in the first document below suggests that this is a list of dramatic roles, compiled while Stevenson was still thinking of his story as a play. In the Beinecke Collection Beinecke MS 6742 (notebook page: manuscript list of characters for ‘The Greenwood State’, written Jan–May 1880): 1. Prince Paul [‘Otto Fred. jr.’ written above] John Frederick 165

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appendices

2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Princess Amalia Seraphine Conrad, Baron Gondremarck Kilian Gottesheim (- [illeg.]) Ottilie Countess Amalia von Rosen [line indicates order of first two words should be reversed] 7. Chancellor [‘Otto’ written above] Greisengesang The Ranger of GrünWald Soldiers The Greenwood State Beinecke MS-ts 6743 (typed transcript of draft dedicatory poem): All else being now dispatched, there but remains To take farewell of all my pleasant pains Farewell of these my children and my friends The story lives or dies Who seemed to me Herewith of all my pains, I take farewell Farewell of these my children and my friends That for some months the actors of the story whether and of words Bind up a little faggot, and thereon A name inscribe, whose name, indeed, but hers Beinecke MS 6744 (notebook page: manuscript draft preface): How shall I this Nelly know? By her blue So vast an apparatus for so small a volume seems amiss In this book it has been tried to touch a note of idyl, and yet, in obedience to the taste of our age, to show the characters upon the level and marred by all the imperfections of nature everyday mankind. A book must stand or fall upon its merits; but I cannot let this Prince of mine go forth upon the world without a word of apology, and perhaps of warning to myself and others. All works when they come home, as it were from the casting, are unrecogniz defaced beyond the recognition of their authors; the old homely phrase “your mother would not 166

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know you,” is truly to the point. I will say that my Otto when he was conceived was beautiful; and while I see in the result evidences of imperfection that belong to myself only, faults of workmanship, holes in the ballad, defects of [blank space], I think that I see some also which are fairly attributable to the age. If I deceive myself, the reader will scarcely grudge me so agreeable a fancy; if I am right, the recognition may perhaps save a fellow writer some mistake. For it seems clear to me, that I have tried to attain too clear a realisation, too full an embodiment: and that in the multiplicity [‘mass’ is written above as a possible substitution] of detail, the lineaments of my characters (though not, I would fain hope, the interest of the fable) have been lost. Strong hands, it may be answered, can fashion, in one grasp, the whole conditions and detail of life, or so great a bulk of them at least, as gives us that illusion. But we are not all strong. In seeking after strength, we may overlie and dissemble other qualities. A certain level of realisation fits a certain mind; and he will be the wise artist, and he only will accomplish things of beauty, that has the tact to discover and the courage to confine himself to that. R. L. S. In the Huntington Library HM2407, f. 3 (chapter list and preface on the notebook page): xv. Rosen + Baron. xvi. Rosen + Prince. xvii. Rosen + Princess xix. The revolution xx. The Prisoner. xxi. The release xxii. The Princess in the woods. xxiii. The Prince and the Princess. [A line indicates that xxii should be inserted between xix and xx.] You were kind enough to help me with the plan of this story; you even deigned to approve of the design; and this emboldens me to send you the poor changeling First of anyone you heard and approved of the design of what has now grown into this volume: when I was in need of both you lent me the help of your pen and countenance [‘encouragement’ is written 167

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above]; and now, across so wide [‘great’ written above] an interval of sea and land, HM2407, f. 76 (notebook page): My Otto, ere from muse he came, And Now, the door opens, and from school A big rag-headed gawky fool My changeling [‘Otto’ inserted above] comes. Children and books on whom we spend our years, Are but adored in hope, . . . First on the lap the [illeg.] infant sits, Lo this, my child, the mother says, shall grow. Saith the mother; and the friend Looking onward down the years Gives smiles for smile and tears for tears. At last the child grows up and goes away, And the dawn-glories fade into the day. Yet for the dreams he was the hero of, The baffled mother still p[illeg.] My unborn Otto you endured but here

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Note on the Text The following essay includes an account of the material production of Prince Otto in both its serialized and book forms; a survey of the revisions Stevenson made to the magazine text for book publication; a description of the later significant editions available to the editor; a rationale for choosing a copy text from among these various sources; and the principles upon which the present volume occasionally diverges from that copy text. For the genesis and publication of Prince Otto, see the Introduction to this volume. As noted there, the protracted process of this novel’s composition continued into the period of publication. In the absence of any manuscripts, or of the typescript from which Longman set the serialized version, the only variant texts available to us are the published ones, from Longman’s Magazine for April–October 1885, and the book version from Chatto & Windus, which remained substantially the same throughout its many impressions. The revisions made by Stevenson for book publication, surveyed below under ‘Textual Essay’, represent his final intentions, and the first edition from Chatto & Windus has accordingly been taken as the copy text for this edition. In the following discussion, location references to the Longman’s Magazine version employ the abbreviation LM, followed by Part number and page number. Unaccompanied page numbers refer to the present volume, which is based on the Chatto 1885 edition. Bibliographical history Prince Otto was first published in seven instalments in the monthly Longman’s Magazine for April through October 1885: Book i chapters 1–3 in April (vol. 5 no. 30, 641–60); Book i chapter 4 and Book ii chapters 1 and 2 in May (vol. 6 no. 31, 89–112); chapters 3–6 in June (no. 32, 203–24); chapters 7–9 in July (no. 33, 316–36); chapters 10–13 in August (no. 34, 424–48); Book ii chapter 14, and Book iii chapter 1, in September (no. 35, 540–60); and Book iii chapters 2–4, and the ‘Bibliographical Postscript’, in October (no. 36, 648–66). Longman’s, launched in 1882, sold for 6d., half the price of the longer-established ‘shilling monthlies’ like the Cornhill, Temple Bar, and Belgravia, and 169

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enjoyed a correspondingly higher, though slowly declining, circulation: probably still around 70,000 in 1885. We know from a letter from Stevenson to his brother Bob and his wife Louisa in March (Letters 4, 249) that Longman’s worked from a typescript that Stevenson had made for them, rather than directly from a manuscript. Our only glimpse of the process of revision for book publication, as distinct from its results, comes in a letter to Stevenson in the Chatto archive from 7 July, where the company offers ‘Many thanks for the promised proofs of “Prince Otto” ’ (Chatto & Windus Archive, A/19, f. 608). Chatto would not have had proofs of their own version of the text for Stevenson to check a full two-and-a-half months before they began printing their first impression (see below): so this must refer to proofs of the Longman’s Magazine version, which Stevenson was revising and sending on to Chatto as they became available. These must have been supplemented with fresh copy for the extensively re-written passages of Book iii, and perhaps for other points as well. As well as Stevenson’s revisions, there are a great many differences between the Longman’s and the Chatto texts in accidentals of punctuation, hyphenation, capitalization and spelling which are the result of different conventions adhered to in the workshops of these publishing houses. In the process of setting the type for the book version, several substantive mis-transcriptions from the revised copy also crept in: see List of Emendations. Stevenson wrote to Chatto on 23 September 1885, ‘I herewith return you the first two sheets of Otto in which you will find but one correction’; he added that ‘The proofs, till near the end will take no time and cost you very little for corrections; of the last two or three chapters, I am not so very sure’ (Letters 5, 127). This must refer to Chatto’s own proof-sheets; Stevenson seems to be anticipating very late revisions to Book iii. Indeed he admitted to his mother in a letter of 8 October, when the book was ‘about through the press’, that ‘I have had a considerable fight with the proofs’ (Letters 5, 130), and later confirmed that ‘The sheets of Otto were under correction to the last day’ (Letters 5, 233). The production of Prince Otto by Chatto & Windus is comprehensively documented in one of the company’s stock books (Chatto & Windus Archive, B/2/15, f. 160), and the information which follows is taken from this source. The book was produced in two octavo formats, one to retail at 6s., the other at 2s., according to Chatto’s usual practice. I refer below to ‘editions’ of the novel, corresponding to the nomenclature of their title pages. However, all of Chatto’s printings of Prince Otto, for both 6s. and 2s. formats, were made from substantially 170

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the same setting of the type; so strictly speaking they constitute many impressions of the same edition. The 6s. version was printed on Double Crown sheets of 20 by 30 inches; each sheet produced two gatherings of eight 7½- by 5-inch leaves. A first edition of 1000 copies was ordered from the printers Spottiswoode and Co. on 25 September 1885; these were delivered and bound in three batches, of 600 copies on 15 October, and 200 each on 28 and 29 October. A second 6s. edition was ordered on 23 November, and a handful of corrections were made to type (mostly inserting missing punctuation) before this was printed and bound on 24 November (200 copies), 27 November (100), and 7–17 December (205). These two editions were bound in blue-green cloth patterned with a red floral motif, the title and author’s name printed in gilt on the spine in fancy letters, and patterned end-papers. The printed text of 300 pages was followed by thirty-two separately numbered pages of the Chatto & Windus catalogue, dated April (first edition) and October (second edition) 1885. On 26 November, just three days after the second 6s. edition had been ordered, Chatto ordered a third, of another 500 copies. By the last printing of the second edition Spottiswoode had made stereotype plates, and the new sheets were printed from these at the same time, on 7 December: only the title page was changed, to read ‘Third Edition’ and dated 1886. These sheets were to be held over unbound until the new year, and then bound in small batches according to demand. 150 were bound on 11 January 1886, and another 50 on 15 March. But it would be nearly two years before Chatto felt it was worth putting more 6s. copies of Prince Otto on the market: 100 on 31 January 1888, and another 100 on 9 October. The last batch was not bound for sale until after Chatto’s copyright in Prince Otto had run out: 109 on 20 and 28 September 1889. At least these later printings of the ‘third edition’, and possibly all of them, were bound in plain brown (1888) or blue (1889) buckram over more substantial boards with bevelled edges, and plain end-papers, rather than the patterned covers and end-papers of the other 6s. copies; title and author’s name were printed on the spine in plain gilt letters. All of these volumes included the usual thirty-twopage ‘List of Books’ from the publisher at the back. The 2s. ‘yellow-back’ version of Prince Otto was printed on the 28by 38-inch paper that Chatto ordered for their cheap editions: the stereotype plates used for the 6s. edition, more closely spaced, produced four gatherings of eight slightly smaller (7 by 4¾ inches) leaves from each sheet. These were bound in a glazed and illustrated paper-over171

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card cover. The illustrations were produced by the workshop of Edmund Evans; the front cover shows a scene from Book iii chapter 1, Sir John contemplating Seraphina sleeping in the grass, below Felsenburg castle. The spine was also illustrated and carried the price, ‘two shillings’ at the bottom. The back cover carried an advert for Pears’ Soap. End papers carried more adverts; at the front of the book, these were followed by another verso of adverts and then a leaf listing Chatto’s ‘Cheap Editions of Popular Novels’ in the same 2s. format. The usual thirty-two-page catalogue was sewn in at the back. Chatto ordered 3000 copies in this format from Spottiswoode on 13 February 1886. With ‘Fourth edition’ on the title page, they were printed, delivered and bound by 16 March (1500), 24 March (1000), 2 April (400) and 5 April (118). As with the 6s. version, Chatto made a repeat order before this one had been completed: on 1 April for 2000, and on 6 April for another 1000. Spottiswoode printed these in two batches, of 1500 on 7 April, and 1530 on 29 April. This April order, or conceivably only its second batch, has ‘A New Edition’ in place of ‘Fourth Edition’ on the title page. The 7 April batch was bound for immediate distribution. The 29 April sheets were held over until 25 June and 26 August (500 copies bound on each occasion); the last 530 were bound on 15 March 1887. Chatto’s three-year copyright in Prince Otto ran out on 28 October 1888. Presumably in anticipation of this, on 11 June that year Chatto ordered another 1000 sets of the 2s. sheets from Spottiswoode. These were delivered on 22 June (300 copies) and 13 August (1215), with ‘A New Edition’ and a new date, 1888, on the title page. The June copies were bound for immediate distribution. The others would be bound in small batches only after Chatto’s copyright had expired: on 25 July and 22 October 1889 (200 and 300 volumes respectively); 23 March and 9 September 1891 (100 on each occasion); and 11 May 1892 (another 200). Charles Baxter was more or less aware of the situation in July 1892, which he summarized thus in a digest of Stevenson’s agreements with his publishers: ‘Last edition of 1500 copies of cheap edition printed 11 June 1888 – about 300 copies of these remain unsold which the publisher may dispose of without payment’ (British Library, Add. MS 56638, f. 80). In fact 328 sets of the sheets of Prince Otto remained not just unsold, but unbound, in the summer of 1892, and were only finally sent to market the following year, on 23 January (100), 23 March (26), and 3 July (202).

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TEXTUAL ESSAY Stevenson made too many revisions to his text between serial and book publication to allow all of them to be listed here. In Books i and ii, most of the changes are minor and fall into several classes. In these books, there is a general tendency to cut individual words that are not strictly necessary to meaning. For example, in the penultimate paragraph of Book i chapter 4 in Longman’s Magazine (LM ii, 98), Otto ‘rapidly descended, fleeing still before uncomfortable thoughts’ into the palace gardens; and in the last paragraph continues to his room, ‘hasting up by private stairs and passages’. For the book version, Stevenson cut ‘still’ from the first sentence and ‘up’ from the second (34). There are around twenty such cuts from Books i and ii. At the same time, Stevenson frequently simplifies either vocabulary or syntax, or both together. In Book ii chapter 1 of the Longman’s version, for example, Gotthold makes clear his disapproval of Otto’s reading Sir John’s manuscript: ‘But though the Prince comprehended the reproof, his weakness was greater than his strength’ (LM ii, 107). For the book version, Stevenson changes this to: ‘But though the Prince understood the reproof, his weakness prevailed’ (44). The most striking example of this comes in Book ii chapter 3: Otto assures Sir John in the Longman’s text that ‘The Prince, indeed, is thoroughly acquired you’ (LM iii, 208). For the book version Stevenson changes this to ‘The Prince, indeed, is thoroughly on your side’ (54). In half-a-dozen places, Stevenson reorganises the order of the phrases qualifying the verb of a sentence. Once Otto has reached his room, in the paragraph from Book i chapter 4 cited above, he ‘threw himself in the dark upon his bed’ in Longman’s (LM ii, 98); this becomes ‘threw himself upon his bed in the dark’ in the book (34). The general tendency in this type of revision is to reposition later in the sentence phrases that Longman’s places before the subject; or to reposition after the verb phrases that Longman’s places between the subject and the verb. In the first category, we have Longman’s describing how ‘stage after stage, the Flag Tower climbed into the blue’ in Book ii chapter 3 (LM iii, 203); in the book this becomes ‘the Flag Tower climbed, stage after stage, into the blue’ (50). Earlier in this paragraph we have an example of the second category of revision: ‘the garden, with a flash of green, peeped through a high grating’ in Longman’s, where ‘the garden peeped through a high grating with a flash of green’ in the book. Similarly in chapter 6, Stevenson alters ‘at the end the sunset was all gold’ to ‘the sunset at the end was all gold’; ‘overhead the rooks were 173

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flying’ to ‘the rooks were flying overhead’ (LM iii, 220; 67); but also ‘A fiasco so complete and sweeping, even to himself, was laughable’ to ‘A fiasco so complete and sweeping was laughable, even to himself ’ (LM iii, 223; 70). Stevenson also made some more substantial changes to Books i and ii for the Chatto volume. In Book i chapter 2, the Longman’s text has Killian allege the Prince’s cuckoldry with the sentence, ‘The Princess has a lover; a Baron, as he calls himself, from East Prussia’ (LM i, 649); Stevenson sharpened this by adding, ‘and the Prince is so little of a man, sir, that he holds the candle’ (15). In Book ii chapter 5, he cut a digression on the subject of Grünewald’s prospects of acquiring a seacoast that I have included in Appendix 1 (163). Then, twice in chapter 8, he cuts Seraphina’s post-council expressions of contempt for her husband. The Longman’s text follows ‘Such a scheme to wreck upon so small a trifle!’ with ‘Who could have dreamed he would become a bully?’(LM iv, 323); and follows ‘—his wife, his dignity, his throne, the honour of his father, he forgets them all!’ with ‘Incarnate milk! how I despise him!’ (LM iv, 325). In both cases, the second exclamation was deleted for the book (79 and 81). The first passage that Stevenson more extensively reorganized comes in chapter 9, with Otto’s encounter with von Rosen in the Palace gardens. In the Longman’s version, the first thing that Otto notices after recognizing the lady in her disguise is the bag she carries, which will turn out to contain the money with which she wants him to buy his farm: ‘No, no,’ she panted, ‘the Count von Rosen—my young brother. A capital fellow. Let him get his breath.’ ‘Well, and why has he a bag?’ he asked. ‘Sit down beside me here,’ she said (LM iv, 333) For the book version, Stevenson postpones the moment when the bag attracts Otto’s curiosity: ‘No, no,’ she panted, ‘the Count von Rosen—my young brother. A capital fellow. Let him get his breath.’ ‘Ah, madam . . . .’ said he. ‘Call me Count,’ she returned, ‘respect my incognito.’ ‘Count be it, then,’ he replied. ‘And let me implore that gallant gentleman to set forth at once on our enterprise.’ ‘Sit down beside me here,’ she returned (89) 174

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Longman’s thus has to return to the topic later: Otto was embarrassed. ‘But you have not yet told me. What is in the bag?’ he asked. ‘Presently, presently. Let me breathe,’ she said, panting a little harder than before. ‘Well’ he returned, ‘I shall see for myself.’ And he put down his hand. (LM iv, 334) But in the revised version Otto forces the revelation as soon as the bag catches his eye: Otto was embarrassed. ‘And now,’ he asked, ‘if you are anyway rested?’ ‘Presently, presently. Let me breathe,’ she said, panting a little harder than before. ‘And what has so wearied you?’ he asked. ‘This bag? And why, in the name of eccentricity, a bag? For an empty one, you might have relied on my own foresight; and this one is very far from being empty. My dear Count, with what trash have you come laden? But the shortest method is to see for myself.’ And he put down his hand. (89–90) Stevenson’s final change to this scene was to von Rosen’s confession, ‘How I trembled for my treasure!’ (90), removing her following comment, ‘But I was armed, I had my pistols. You see I could have kept my threat’ (LM iv, 335). Madame von Rosen was the occasion of a few other revisions in the first two Books. As she ponders her course of action in Book ii chapter 12, she admits to herself that she has ‘no guess upon which side I shall declare myself!’ (LM v, 437); in the book version she continues, ‘What other woman in my place would not be prejudiced, and think herself committed? But, thank Heaven! I was born just!’ (106). A little later in the book version she tells Otto that ‘I admit no love, at least for a man, that is not equally returned’ (108); the parenthetical qualification does not appear in the magazine (LM v, 439). Stevenson also altered one interesting moment in the clash between von Rosen and Seraphina in the following chapter (114). She unfolded, as she spoke, her fan. Quick as her pulses beat, the fan waved languidly. It was in her bright face and eyes, and 175

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her triumphant beauty, looking down, mile deep, upon her rival, that the thrill of her emotion stood confessed. (LM v, 444) In revising this, Stevenson normalized the order of the phrases in the first and third sentences in the manner we have seen exemplified elsewhere. But then he also added a reminder of von Rosen’s motives in this encounter, turning our attention from her outward appearance to her perception of herself: She unfolded her fan as she spoke. Quick as her pulses beat, the fan waved languidly. She betrayed her emotion only by the brightness of her eyes and face, and by the almost insolent triumph with which she looked down upon the Princess. There were old scores of rivalry between them in more than one field; so at least von Rosen felt; and now she was to have her hour of victory in them all. (114) The tendency of these revisions is to emphasize von Rosen’s self-consciousness of her role in the plot; they are perhaps also an effect of Stevenson finding her the most interesting of his characters. The most extensively reworked passages of Books i and ii come late in chapter 12 and concern Otto’s self-consciousness rather than his ally’s. This is the point at which Otto goes willingly to the Felsenburg, embracing ‘the notion of imprisonment with something bordering on joy’ in Longman’s (LM v, 441), and ‘with something bordering on relief ’ in the book (110). Again, there is some simplification of vocabulary and grammar: ‘a way from out his troubles’ becomes ‘a way out of his troubles’; the pen which ‘trembled’ in his hand in Longman’s merely ‘shook’ in the book. In other places, the grammar is refined rather than simplified: ‘He was amazed to find his resignation fled, but was not able to recall it’ in Longman’s, where in Chatto ‘it was gone beyond his recall’ (LM v, 441; 110). There is a similar refinement in the last sentence of the following passage: In a few white-hot words, he bade adieu, dubbed desperation by the name of love, and called his wrath forgiveness; cast but one look of leave-taking upon the place that was no longer to be his; […] (LM v, 441–2) In a few white-hot words, he bade adieu, dubbing desperation by the name of love, and calling his wrath forgiveness; then he 176

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cast but one look of leave-taking on the place that had been his for so long and was now to be his no longer; […] (110–11) Note also the increased organization of the revised passage: rather than pile up main verbs in the past tense (‘bade’, ‘dubbed’, ‘called’ ‘cast’), Stevenson subordinates the ‘dubbing’ and the ‘calling’, now in continuous form, under the main act of bidding adieu, and marks the look of leave-taking as a separate act from this with ‘then’. The same sort of subordination also features in the revision of the next paragraph. His little turgid life dwindled to its true proportions; he saw this great, flame-hearted martyr stand but a speck in that cool cupola of night; he felt his cureless injuries already soothed; the live air of out of doors, the quiet of the world, as if by their silent music, sobered his emotions. (LM v, 442) His little turgid life dwindled to its true proportions; and he saw himself (that great flame-hearted martyr!) stand like a speck under the cool cupola of the night. Thus he felt his cureless injuries already soothed; the live air of out-of-doors, the quiet of the world, as if by their silent music, sobering and dwarfing his emotions. (111) In the magazine text, Otto’s injuries are soothed, and his emotions are sobered; in the book version, the sobering and dwarfing of his emotions are aspects of the soothing of his injuries. The other major revision here, putting the phrase ‘great flame-hearted martyr’ into parentheses, has an interesting effect. In the Longman’s text, this at first appears to be how Otto sees himself in the present moment (‘he saw this great, flame-hearted martyr’), but we are then immediately told that, on the contrary, he sees this figure as a ‘speck’. The intention is clearly to convey Otto’s recognition that he has been seeing himself as a martyr up until this point, and now ceases to do so. But the grammar of the sentence, confirmed by the deictic force of ‘this’, insists on the two contradictory perceptions occupying the same moment. Stevenson seems to have recognized that the reader might stumble over this. The following sentence is similar in offering a near-contradiction (‘cureless’ injuries which are being ‘soothed’) which is resolved as soon as we recognize ‘cureless’ as how Otto has experienced his injuries up until now. But here, Otto’s injuries remain real enough in the present moment, even if they no longer seem ‘cureless’; in the preced177

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ing sentence, the object of the verb is a flame-hearted martyr which is immediately exploded as a figment of Otto’s feverish self-pity, so it is hard to comprehend the sense in which Otto ‘sees’ this figure at this moment at all. By shifting the phrase into brackets for the book version, Stevenson distinguishes the characterization of Otto as a ‘great flame-hearted martyr’ from how ‘he saw himself ’ at this precise moment, which is now simply as a ‘speck’. As a ‘great flame-hearted martyr’ then becomes either how Otto has seen himself up until this point, or the narrator’s ironic characterization of that self-perception, or, just possibly, the narrator’s unironic assertion of what Otto really is, even though he does not see himself this way (at least at this point). Stevenson’s use of parentheses to iron out a simple narrative snag in the magazine text generates this ambiguity in the book version, leaving uncertain as it does the attribution of this perception to any particular consciousness. For the book version, Stevenson made almost as many changes to the last four chapters as to the rest of his story put together. Once again, many of these are small, with individual words or short phrases altered, added or deleted. In chapter 1, Seraphina is made ‘twentytwo—soon twenty-three’, a year older than in the magazine text (136; cf. LM vi, 555). But this follows more extended rewriting of some moments in Seraphina’s flight through the woods. In one paragraph, Stevenson begins his revision with that syntactic normalization of which we have already seen several examples: ‘Of pity for Gondremark, of concern for Grünewald, not a trace was found in her’ (LM vi, 549) becomes ‘She felt not a trace of pity for Gondremark or of concern for Grünewald’ (130). The following alteration is more interesting, and once again concerns the character’s reasons for action and degree of consciousness of these. Of her impulse ‘to flee in the direction of the Felsenburg’, the Longman’s text explains that Not her heart, for that is conscious, but her whole dumb nature warmed and yearned for Otto. She had a duty to perform, she must free him: so her mind said, very coldly; but by the heat that mounted in her bosom and the tears that pricked her eyeballs, she ran to him as a friend and protector. (LM vi, 549) In the Chatto version, Stevenson cut the first sentence in the passage quoted. It is not hard to see why: the sentences that follow return to a straightforward opposition between the conscious mind and the ‘dumb nature’ of bosom and tears; the radical reallocation of the ‘heart’ 178

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to the former in the first sentence has simply been forgotten as surplus to narrative requirements. In the book version, Stevenson puts the ‘heart’ back where we might expect it, aligned with physical impulse in opposition to consciousness: She had a duty to perform, she must free Otto—so her mind said, very coldly; but her heart embraced the notion of that duty even with ardour, and her hands began to yearn for the grasp of kindness. (130) A few paragraphs later we have a type of revision quite different from any other we have seen so far, an elaboration of a description of the ‘wonderful revolution’ in the forest with the approach of sunrise. As ‘this slow transfiguration reached her heart’, Seraphina looks about, and ‘the whole face of nature looked back, brimful of meaning’ (LM vi 550; 131–2). The Longman’s text continues simply She looked up; and lo! heaven was almost emptied of the stars, and the last lingerers were fainting in the blue. ‘O!’ she cried, joy catching at her breath, ‘it is the dawn!’ (LM vi, 550). For the book version Stevenson expands this noticeably: She looked up. Heaven was almost emptied of stars. Such as still lingered shone with a changed and waning brightness, and began to faint in their stations. And the colour of the sky itself was the most wonderful; for the rich blue of the night had now melted and softened and brightened; and there had succeeded in its place a hue that has no name, and that is never seen but as the herald of morning. ‘O!’ she cried, joy catching at her voice, ‘O! it is the dawn!’ (132) The revised passage perhaps develops this paragraph’s opening comparison of this daily ‘revolution’ in nature with the political revolution in Mittwalden; the princess, fallen from her ‘station’, herself lingers, but ‘with a changed and waning brightness’, the experience of nature mediating a personal transformation that parallels, and compensates for, her loss of political power. This transformation is not one that Seraphina can herself articulate, however, and the words are the narrator’s, not hers; consistent with the passage’s earlier ascription of 179

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subjectivity to the natural world rather than to Seraphina (the face of nature looking at her rather than the other way around). Stevenson’s most extensive revisions for book publication are to the final chapter. At the beginning of Otto and Seraphina’s journey through the woods, the changes are mostly the cuts and simplifications that we have seen Stevenson make elsewhere. Some of the cuts suggest an attempt to alter the tone of their encounter, however. ‘She, upon her part, holding out her arms, began to run to him’ in the Longman’s text, and her first words are ‘Otto, […] forgive me! I have ruined all’ (LM vii, 659). In the book version, Seraphina does not hold out her arms, nor does she beg forgiveness. Otto responds with a simple ‘Seraphina!’ (154) rather than, as in the magazine, with the exclamation ‘O, my wife!’: after all, in the speech that follows he claims that his love ‘is purged of all conjugal pretension’. Two paragraphs later, the Longman’s text includes the following passage: And I went, and left you friendless, and believed myself to be love’s martyr. And, dearest, love there was. But I am made so loosely, I could never learn that better part of love, to fight love’s battles. Still I must yield, and play the woman; and, by fits, insult you—as I own I did. (LM vii, 660) Of these four sentences, only part of the third was retained. Removing for the book version Otto’s declaration that he thought of himself as ‘love’s martyr’ is consistent with Stevenson’s new ambivalence about attributing this idea to his character in chapter 12, discussed above. Cutting the last sentence here perhaps moderates the melodrama of Otto’s self-accusation, and makes it more consistently an admission of weakness rather than anything more serious. In the next paragraph of Otto’s speech, the magazine has him asking Seraphina to ‘show that you forgive me (I do, if I have anything to forgive)’; for the book, Stevenson cut the parenthesis, and also Seraphina’s response: ‘ “Otto, I […] will do anything to give you pleasure,” she said, with the most unnecessary fervour of asseveration’ (LM vii, 661). At this point in his text, ‘unnecessary fervour’ seems in general to be the target of Stevenson’s revisions. Stevenson’s changes to the last three pages of Book iii chapter 4 are so extensive that they amount to a complete re-writing, and the Longman’s version has been included in the present volume in Appendix 1 (163–5). Some general observations can be made about this revision. Of the words cut from the lines after ‘I begin to think that no one is 180

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textua l essay

the better for a humiliation’ (157), over two-thirds (349 out of 506) are Seraphina’s direct speech. Of the 645 words added for the book version, only 110 are Seraphina’s direct speech, and 185 are Otto’s. The effect is to substitute Otto’s for Seraphina’s as the dominant voice of the closing of the novel’s action. Because this is the end of the story, that action mostly consists in trying to explain what has gone before. And Seraphina and Otto explain their stories in rather different terms in the two versions of the text. The Longman’s conclusion is built around Seraphina’s perception of the forest as the setting of a new beginning (‘Let us forget that we were ever princes’), which she immediately translates first into mythic terms (‘I am Eve, you Adam’) and then into a return to childhood innocence (‘let us take hands and run like children’; LM vii, 663). This last impulse is endorsed by the narrator in the next paragraph, where it is confirmed that the scene ‘seemed to invite glad spirits to the games of childhood’. Then she makes him sit down, and tells her story as the plot of a fairy-tale: ‘Let us pretend that we have never met,’ she said. ‘You do not know, and I will tell you, my story. I was bewitched for years in an enchanted palace, and at last my prison (which was all of crockery!) fell with a crash, and I ran forth into the woods. I do not think that I had breathed before; my heart had been entirely dead. There was a stream and the moon shone, and then, the most wonderful of all, dawn came, and I was changed into a living girl. (LM vii, 663) She concludes with ‘ “That is my tale; tell yours.” ’ But Otto has no narrative of his own to offer in response: ‘ “I have not any,” replied Otto, “but only this, that I was a great fool, and am one still” ’ (LM vii, 663). Instead, she reiterates her topos of rebirth: ‘ “[I]t is so much better to forget and to be born again. I never saw, you never knew me, till to-day. Oh, what a pit there is for sins—God’s mercy, man’s oblivion! And then to awaken, grown man-children. No, we have never met” ’ (LM vii, 664). And Otto now accepts this idea (‘ “ let it be so, indeed” ’), and repeats it back to her in terms of waking from a dream in a passage retained in the book version as the last long speech of the novel. There, Seraphina’s only response is, ‘ “Lie close,” she said, with a deep thrill of speech’ (159). In the Longman’s text, she continues with Otto’s trope of dreaming, but quickly reverts to the fairy-tale as the model for the story of their marriage: 181

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‘Stir not a finger, dear, or we may both awake. I, too, have dreamed my nightmare. Now, as I sit here, I begin to tell myself there was a Prince in fairy tales, who loved a thing of ice and folly; and under every trial, still loved on; loved the ingrate, the traitor, the insolent—and oh! still loved, or so I tell myself; and when at last God sent a soul into his froward mistress, his great heart leapt up, and he forgave her all.’ (LM vii, 664) This forms the last speech of the novel in the magazine version: the last words, the closing interpretation of the story, comes from Seraphina. In the text revised for book publication, the moral idea of forgiveness largely replaces the mythic idea of rebirth in the lessons drawn by its conclusion. At the same time, we view the scene to a much greater extent through Otto’s consciousness, and with an emphasis on Otto’s agency. Rather than endorsing Seraphina’s perspective on the woodland glade, the narrator adopts Otto’s, in which Seraphina appears to have ‘undecipherable eyes’ (157); he makes her sit down, rather than vice-versa; and his speech is inhibited, not by having no story to tell, but by confused feelings of pride and desire to which the omniscient narrator gives us access. This narrator can also tell us what Otto stops himself from saying: that he never ‘doubted’ Seraphina, reminding us of the painful possibility of her adultery (158). And the increased presence of the narrator in the revised text makes these rather more embodied subjects than those in the Longman’s text, which is almost all dialogue: describing, for example, the ‘tender and transforming currents’ that flow between them when they join hands (158). In the book version it is Otto who first pleads ‘ “O, forget the past” ’; but the only reference to childhood is now the description of this plea as ‘hurried […] like the speech of a frightened child’ (158). Seraphina still introduces the idea that ‘This is where we meet, meet for the first time’; but the following assertion that ‘it is so much better to forget and to be born again’ is now an echo of Otto’s rhetoric rather than her own (159). Otto’s figuration of his previous life as a dream remains, now forming the substantial conclusion of the conversation; but there are no longer any explicit references to fairy-tale. Where the Longman’s text finds closure in the triumphant assertion of the generic conventions of romance, associated, as typically in Stevenson, with the freedoms of childhood, the revised ending for the book version offers instead a moral lesson on the need for mutual forgiveness as the basis of love between subjects torn by pride and desire. This may strike the reader as a much more mature conclusion than that of the magazine version; 182

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it is accompanied by a shift in narrative authority from the female protagonist to the male. LATER EDITIONS The Edinburgh Edition of The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, the first uniform collected works, was edited by his close friend Sidney Colvin, and appeared between 1894 and 1898. Prince Otto appeared in 1895 as Volume ix of this edition, and as Volume ii of its ‘Romances’. Colvin had access to a wide range of manuscript sources when producing the Edinburgh Edition. However, collation of the two texts confirms that in this case he took the Chatto & Windus edition as his copy text, and not any more authoritative source, such as a manuscript or proof sheets revised in the author’s hand. Colvin made no substantial changes to the Chatto & Windus text, and replicated errors in transcription between the Longman’s Magazine version and Chatto’s (see Emendation List, 185–7); his many minor changes to punctuation were clearly on his own initiative. The twentieth century’s most widely available Prince Otto was Volume iv of Heinemann’s Tusitala Edition, first published in 1924. It added Fanny Stevenson’s preface, originally written in 1905 for a collected edition published by Charles Scribner’s Sons of New York; and a specially written memoir by her son Lloyd Osbourne. Its text was based on that of the Edinburgh Edition. The present text Choice of copy text The uniform policy of the New Edinburgh Edition of the Works of Robert Louis Stevenson is to take as copy text that version of the text which most closely represents the author’s final intentions in the context of its publication. The first edition of the book version published by Chatto & Windus incorporates many authorial revisions to the text serialised in Longman’s Magazine. Later ‘editions’ of the Chatto text were actually further impressions of essentially the same text. No later editions of Prince Otto incorporate any changes which can be traced to Stevenson’s own intentions. Therefore the first edition of Prince Otto published by Chatto & Windus in 1885 provides this volume with its copy text.

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Principles of emendation Emendations to the copy text are only made at those points where the copy text clearly does not reflect the author’s final intentions. Such points can be identified in Prince Otto where differences between the copy text and the Longman’s Magazine version clearly reflect, not authorial revision, but errors in the transcription of the text by Chatto’s compositor. At such points the Longman’s text can be taken as representing the author’s final intentions, and the copy text emended accordingly. Obvious errors of punctuation are also emended. Works cited British Library, London, Add. MS 56638. Chatto & Windus Archive, University of Reading, Special Collections. Reference is to stockbook and folio number.

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Emendation List The following list includes all the emendations made to the copy text to produce this volume’s text of Prince Otto. All substantive emendations follow the Longman’s text, on the principle outlined in the ‘The Present Text’ above. The emendation of missing or misplaced punctuation in most cases also follows Longman’s. In two instances, the regularization of speech marks (ensuring that each opening mark is paired with a closing one and vice versa) was carried out in later editions; since there is no reason to suppose Stevenson intended the inconsistencies that made this necessary, the present text has adopted these emendations too. The ‘a’ missing from the copy text at this volume’s 79.15 was due, not to an error of transcription, but to loose type, before plates were made from which to print the text (see ‘Bibliographical History’ above): there is a gap in the first edition where this article should be. The reading of the present text is given first, by page and line number, followed by the source of the new reading, and then, after a square bracket, the reading of the copy text, and the reasoning behind the emendation. Line numbering includes chapter titles and subtitles. 3.13 12.7

recall (Roberts) ] recal marches (LM) ] marshes



Aside from LM, the copy text, and all subsequent editions, have ‘marshes’. Killian has just explained that ‘We reckon ourselves part Grünewalders here, lying so near the borders’, and goes on to explain that the road continues to Otto’s capital, necessarily crossing the border. ‘Marched’ was used as a synonym for ‘bordered’ in the first chapter, where we are told that Grünewald ‘marched with’ Seaboard Bohemia on the south. On the other hand, there has been no mention of ‘marshes’ in this landscape. ‘Marshes’ must therefore be a misreading by Chatto’s compositor.

23.2

revertible (LM) ] reversible

Excluding LM, the copy text, and all subsequent editions, have ‘reversible’. Killian is requesting that, on his death, Fritz should inherit his rights as tenant, instead of their ‘reverting’ to Otto in the precise legal sense of ‘return to the original owner, or to his or her heirs, after the expiry of a grant, or

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emendation list a grantee’s death’ (OED 3.a). This is called ‘reversion’, but OED does not offer ‘reversible’ as a synonym for ‘revertible’ in this sense. It is unlikely that Stevenson would have replaced the more exact legal term with an approximate one, so Chatto’s compositor must have made this substitution.

30.11

have (LM) ] had

39.4 43.23 46.8 47.28

‘It was one (LM) ] It was one nonsense,’ said (LM) ] nonsense, said Tannhäuser (LM) ] Tannhaüser ever (LM) ] even

Excepting LM, the copy text, and all subsequent editions, have ‘I had not been drinking’. Stevenson has already indicated the miller’s drunkenness in his speech (‘reco’nised’, ‘preshede’). However, that he might have introduced this grammatical mistake to the same end is much less likely than that Chatto’s compositor has been confused by ‘have had’ in the preceding clause, or the use of ‘had’ to form the pluperfect subjunctive (‘if I had, what then?’) in the following sentence, or by both together.



Aside from LM, the copy text, and all subsequent editions, have ‘even a necessary preparation.’ ‘Even’ indicates an implausibility about this claim; but Sir John, as an ‘old radical’ (54.19), is unlikely to be sceptical of this central tenet of civic-republican ideology, enshrined most famously in the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution, that military readiness among the people was always (‘ever’) necessary to the defence of their freedoms.

58.8 64.4 64.11 75.8 79.14–15

she cried. (LM) ] she cried.’ ‘ “ What is there (Roberts)] ‘What is there wig.” And so,’ (LM, Roberts)] wig.’ And so,’ ‘War!’ cried (LM) ] ‘War! cried he had a right (LM, 2nd and subsequent Chatto edns) ] he had right them all!’ (2nd and subsequent Chatto edns)] them all! ‘Did you ever (LM, 2nd and subsequent Chatto edns) ] Did you ever your actions?’ (LM) ] your actions? ‘I have no (LM, 2nd and subsequent Chatto edns)] I have no leave me.’ (LM) ] leave me. of her reason. (LM) ] of her reason movement, (LM) ] moment,

81.5 86.24 102.16 103.36 117.35 118.15 136.2

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emendation list Excepting LM, the copy text, and all subsequent editions, have ‘moment’. The ‘movement’ is Seraphina’s ‘step towards them’ in the previous sentence; ‘moment’ has no such context to explain its use, and must be a mistake by Chatto’s compositor.

150.16

‘Madam von (LM) ] ‘Madam, von

157.22 160.32

pass that way?’ (LM) ] pass that way? La rime (LM) ] Le rime



Apart from LM, the copy text, and all subsequent editions, have the masculine article ‘Le’ in place of the correct feminine ‘La’. It is possible that the grammatical mistake in the book version is deliberate, and intended to exemplify what Sir John has called the ‘more than doubtful French’ of Otto’s poetry (45.33). Sidney Colvin, otherwise scrupulous in correcting Stevenson’s French for the Edinburgh Edition, retained ‘Le’.

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End-of-Line Hyphens Listed below are ‘hard’ end-of-line hyphens, not produced accidentally by typesetting, but intended to be retained whatever the format in which the text is typeset and therefore to be retained also in making quotations. The entries are listed by page and line number. 10.29 white-headed 11.13 ground-floor 14.10 Ta-tum-ta-ra 14.22 six-and-thirty 22.7 night-cap 29.6 self-possession 73.2 non-combatants 84.15 self-approval 133.1 out-of-doors 136.35 note-book 157.20 cross-cut

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Explanatory Notes The following notes offer a comprehensive attempt to identify Stevenson’s sources, in addition to quotations, references, historical events and personages, proverbial phrases and obscure or specialist language. The notes are intentionally concise, supplying information rather than critical analysis or expository discussion. References are to first editions, standard editions or editions Stevenson himself used or with which he would have been familiar. For a list of abbreviations of frequently cited works, see xv in this volume. Biblical references are to the Authorized Version, and references to plays by Shakespeare are to The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York and London, 1997). Reference is by page and line number: line numbering includes chapter titles and subtitles. 3.2–3  Nelly van de Grift (Mrs. Adulpho Sanchez of Monterey)  Nellie (as she spelt it herself) Van de Grift (1855–1935) was Stevenson’s wife Fanny Osbourne’s youngest sister and her posthumous biographer (The Life of Mrs Robert Louis Stevenson, New York, 1920). Fanny had adopted this form of the family name, rather than the ‘Vandegrift’ she was born with, at the time of her first visit to Europe in 1875–8. On Fanny’s return to the US Nellie travelled with her and her two children to settle at Monterey, California. Here Nellie met Adulpho Sanchez, joint proprietor of the Bohemia Saloon, whom she married in September 1880. The dedication to Nellie was added for the book editions of Prince Otto. 3.6–19  written for me … sick apparently unto death  The house was Fanny’s at 11th Avenue and 18th Street, East Oakland, California, and had been bought for her by her first husband Sam Osbourne while he was working across the bay in San Francisco. Stevenson became seriously ill while living in San Francisco in the winter of 1879–80, and in March Fanny brought him first to Oakland, and then as his condition worsened into her house, so that she could nurse him. In his weakened state Nellie acted as his amanuensis for the first outlines of Prince Otto.

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3.11  round the Horn  Before the opening of the Panama canal in 1914, shipping from Europe to the west coast of the Americas had to pass Cape Horn at the southern tip of South America. 3.16  the poor lady, so unfortunately married to an author  Louis and Fanny were not officially married until 19 May 1880, and left Oakland soon after, for a honeymoon in the nearby Napa Valley, followed by the journey to Britain between August and October 1880. 3.16  the China boy  Lloyd Osbourne, Fanny’s son, mentions their household having a Chinese cook in this period. An Intimate Portrait of R. L. S. (New York, 1924), 20. 3.17–18  the Flowery Land  China. The phrase appears in English in the mid-19th century, translating the Chinese hwa kwo. 3.27–9  the story of Braddock … better another time  MajorGeneral Edward Braddock (b. 1695) was leader of a British expedition against the French at Fort Duquesne in the Ohio country in 1755. On crossing the Monongahela river, the British column was surprised and routed by a French and Native American force; Braddock was shot in the chest and died during the retreat. Winthrop Sargent, in The History of an Expedition Against Fort Du Quesne (Philadelphia, 1855) reports his last words as ‘We shall better know how to deal with them another time’ (237). 3.31  I still mean to get my health again  In Bournemouth Stevenson’s health was ‘at its lowest ebb’ (Intimate Portrait, 60) since the first onset of pulmonary haemorrhaging at Oakland. 4.9  Skerryvore  the cliff-top house at Bournemouth, on the south coast of England, where Louis and Fanny lived from April 1885 until August 1887. It was a present from his parents, and renamed (from ‘Sea View’) after the location of the lighthouse designed and built by his uncle Alan on a reef sw of Tiree in the Inner Hebrides between 1838 and 1844: the ‘outlandish Gaelic name’ means ‘big reef ’ (sgeir mhòr). 5.2  Prince Errant  Stevenson forms this phrase on a parallel with ‘knight-errant’, the knight of medieval romance who wanders in search of adventures. 7.4 Grünewald (German) ‘Greenwood’. 7.5  German Empire  see Introduction, xlvi. 190

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7.8  Less fortunate than Poland  There had been no Polish state since 1795, when the last territory of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth was partitioned between Prussia, Russia and Austria. 7.13 Mittwalden (German) aiming at ‘Mid-wood’. Place-names in actual use are Mittenwald or Mittenwalde. 7.25 Gerolstein  Stevenson borrows this name from the fictional Grand Duchy of Jacques Offenbach’s opéra bouffe of 1867, La GrandeDuchesse de Gèrolstein: see Introduction, xlii–xliii. 7.27–32  Seaboard Bohemia … King Florizel Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, iii. 3 opens on the coast of Bohemia: the historical Bohemia has no coast. Perdita is the daughter of the King of Sicily, abandoned here as a baby and raised by shepherds; Florizel is the son and heir to the King of Bohemia, who falls in love with and eventually marries her. The Sicilian noble who abandons Perdita is removed from the scene by the famous stage-direction, ‘Exit, pursued by a bear’; and in the scene where Florizel first meets Perdita she discusses the flowers appropriate to garland maidenhood and age (iv. 4). 8.22 Felsenburg (German) ‘Cliff-top castle’. 9.25 patriot In Prince Otto, Stevenson uses this word to mean a self-proclaimed advocate of the interests of ‘the country’ or ‘the people’ in opposition to those of the court, that is, the monarch and his ministers. This is a sense borrowed from the political rhetoric of 18thcentury Britain, to be distinguished from the later, vaguer meaning of ‘patriot’ as lover of his or her country as opposed to other countries. 10.2  haroun-al-raschid  the Caliph, or ruler, of Baghdad who appears in many of the stories in The Thousand and One Nights. In several of them Haroun ventures into the city in disguise; the course of the present chapter was perhaps suggested by the opening of one particular story, ‘The Three Apples’: ‘The Khalif Haroun er Reshid summoned his Vizier Jaafer one night and said to him, “I have a mind to go down into the city and question the common people of the conduct of the officers charged with its government; and those of whom they complain, we will depose, and those whom they commend, we will advance” ’, although they are immediately distracted from this purpose.—John Payne, The Book of a Thousand Nights and One Night, 9 vols (London, 1882), i, 165. 11.2 Gottesheim (German) ‘God’s home’. 191

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11.5  wine bush  a tavern, from the practice of hanging a branch or bunch of ivy as a sign at the door. 11.23–4 Ottilia Stevenson would have found this name in George Meredith’s The Adventures of Harry Richmond (London, 1871), which centres on the love of its English hero for the German Princess Ottilia of Eppenwelzen-Sarkeld. 11.27 ragout a highly seasoned meat and vegetable stew. 14.32–3  his works … follow him  Revelation 14. 13: ‘And I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me, Write, Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord from henceforth: Yea, saith the Spirit, that they may rest from their labours; and their works do follow them.’ 14.38 pantomime Fritz makes the cuckold’s horns with his fingers at his forehead. 15.3  a Baron … East Prussia  The Kingdom of Prussia originated in two discontinuous territories, the region around Berlin from which it got its kings, and lands to the east, now Polish or Russian, from which it got its name. For the significance of giving Gondremark this background, see Introduction, xlvi–xlvii. 15.4  holds the candle  To ‘hold a candle to another’ is ‘to assist him by holding the candle while he works; hence, to help in a subordinate position’ (oed). 15.9 Gondremark Stevenson borrows this name from ‘le baron de Gondremarck’, a Swedish visitor to France in another Offenbach opéra bouffe (see note to 7.25), La Vie parisienne (Paris, 1866). See Introduction, xlii–xliii. 15.18  put your faith in princes  Psalms 146. 3: ‘Put not your faith in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help’. 16.6 high-and-dry  In 19th-century England this initially referred to the old, conservative version of High Church Anglicanism; but it could be used to refer to any outdated attachment to inherited hierarchy. 16.7  new lights  that is, modern doctrines. In Scotland and North America ‘New Light’ had been used since the 18th century to name the reforming side in various ecclesiastical schisms.

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16.12 Messalina Valeria Messalina (d. ad 48) was the third wife of the Roman emperor Claudius. Roman historians such as Tacitus and Suetonius describe her as sexually promiscuous; she plotted to murder Claudius and put her lover on the throne in his place. The plot was discovered and Messalina was executed. 16.21  Masons’ lodges  On the role of Freemasonry in the reform of absolutist regimes such as Otto’s, see Introduction, xlvii–xlix. 16.25–6  King Log, King Stork  refers to the fable by Aesop, ‘The Frogs desiring a King’: The Frogs living an easy, free sort of life among the lakes and ponds, once prayed Jupiter to send them a King. Jove being at that time in a merry mood, threw them a Log, saying, as he did so, ‘There, then, is a King for you.’ Awed by the splash, the Frogs watched their King in fear and trembling, till at last, encouraged by his stillness, one more daring than the rest jumped upon the shoulder of his monarch. Soon, many others followed his example, and made merry on the back of their unresisting King. Speedily tiring of such a torpid ruler, they again petitioned Jupiter, and asked him to send them something more like a King. This time he sent them a Stork, who tossed them about and gobbled them up without mercy. They lost no time, therefore, in beseeching the god to give them again their former state. ‘No, no,’ replied he; ‘a King that did you no harm did not please you. Make the best of the one you have, or you may chance to get a worse in his place’. —J. B. Rundell, Æsop’s Fables, Illustrated by Ernest Griset, with Text Based Chiefly upon Croxall, La Fontaine, and L’Strange (London, 1869), 76. 18.16 lynn pool at the base of a waterfall. 21.16–17  the passion of Ahab for the vineyard  Ahab, king of Israel, offers to buy the vineyard of Naboth, or give a better one in exchange, ‘that I may have it for a garden of herbs, because it is near unto my house’ (i Kings 21. 2). But Naboth will not give it up, and Ahab ‘laid him down upon his bed, and turned away his face, and would eat no bread’ (21. 4). His wife Jezebel solves the problem by arranging for Naboth to be stoned to death. 21.28–9  some sixty … hundredfold  In describing the quantity of grain his land returns as a multiple of the quantity of seed-corn sown, 193

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Killian echoes Jesus’s Parable of the Sower, some of whose seeds ‘fell into good ground, and brought forth fruit, some an hundredfold, some sixtyfold, some thirtyfold’ (Matthew 13. 8). 22.2–3  fortune turns … blind  A wheel turned by the goddess Fortune is an allegory of the impermanence of worldly success common in medieval and early modern writing. The phrasing here perhaps recalls Kent in the stocks in King Lear, ii. 2. 165: ‘Fortune, good night; smile once more; turn thy wheel!’ Fortune is often represented blindfolded. 22.14  here we have no continuing city  See Hebrews 13. 14: ‘For here we have no continuing city, but we seek one to come’; that is, in Heaven. 22.15  we have other merits than our own  ‘merits’ here in the specific theological sense of ‘good works viewed as entitling a person to reward from God; (also) the righteousness and sacrifice of Christ as the ground on which God grants forgiveness to sinners’ (oed). Killian’s doubts about the efficacy of the former, and reliance on the latter, gesture towards Protestant theology. In the words of the Church of Scotland’s Westminster Confession of Faith, ‘We cannot by our best works merit pardon of sin, or eternal life at the hand of God’; we must instead depend ‘upon the efficacy of the merit and intercession of Jesus Christ’ (xvi. 5, xvii. 2). 22.30  the stage deity  the deus ex machina, or the god who intervenes in the last scene of a play in order to resolve the plot. In the classical Greek theatre this character could be lowered onto the stage by a mechanical device: hence ‘step down’ in the next sentence. 22.39–40  burthen the purchase with your interest  ‘interest’ here in the sense of ‘right or title to […] some of the uses or benefits pertaining to property’ (oed). Otto is suggesting, as the following sentence makes clear, that Killian’s tenancy will be guaranteed for his lifetime by the title-deeds when Otto buys the farm. 23.2  make the interest revertible  Killian is requesting that, on his death, Fritz should inherit his rights as tenant, instead of their ‘reverting’ to Otto in the precise legal sense of ‘return to the original owner, or to his or her heirs, after the expiry of a grant, or a grantee’s death’ (oed). See Emendation List, 185.

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23.16  I have entertained an angel unawares  ‘Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares’ (Hebrews 13. 2). 23.25–6  an old English rogue called Transome  The name may be borrowed from the Captain Transom who befriends the hero in Michael Scott’s adventure story Tom Cringle’s Log (Edinburgh, 1829– 30); or it may be an allusion to the wealthy landowner and merchant Harold Transome, who stands for parliament as a Radical in George Eliot’s Felix Holt (Edinburgh, 1866). 24.27 set-offs decorations or ornaments in the sense of distraction. 25.13 gull dupe. 25.14  ‘if I do keep company!’  in the sense of ‘to associate as a lover, to “court” ’, listed by oed as a vulgar or dialect usage (‘company’). 26.19  red progressional  Stevenson invents a typical name for a socialist faction. 26.32–3  a pewter medal … Libertas  medals of the sort that might be worn to signify membership of a Masonic lodge: the phoenix sometimes occurs among the symbols of such ‘lodge tokens’ or ‘members’ jewels’. 28.14 Tannenbrunn (German) literally, ‘pine-well’ or ‘pinespring’. 28.31–2 incog. incognito: ‘With one’s real name, title, or character undisclosed or disguised: used esp. in reference to royal or dignified personages who wish to conceal their identity or not to be openly recognized’ (oed). 30.25 chokepear ‘Something difficult or impossible to “swallow”, […] a severe reproof ’ (oed). 30.37 Hohenstockwitz Stevenson has perhaps constructed this name around ‘hohen Stock’ (German), ‘of high stock, race, or descent’. In Achim von Arnim’s Die Kronenwächter (1817), the last of the Hohenstaufen line is a mad duke living in a run-down castle called Hohenstock. Stevenson adds the German name-ending ‘Witz’, but may also refer to ‘der Witz’ (German): wit or joke.

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31.2  an honour in hand, a pleasure in the bush extrapolating from the proverb ‘a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush’, Stevenson uses ‘in the bush’ to mean ‘anticipated’. 31.12–13 licentiate holder of the academic degree intermediate in some systems between the first degree and the higher postgraduate degrees. In the Church of Scotland, a licentiate is one qualified to preach, but who has not yet been called to a parish. 31.20 opuscula (Latin) minor literary works. 31.22 empirics impostors or charlatans, rather than those who argue from empirical evidence. 31.29  the expectant treatment of abuses  ‘The treatment of a disease is expectant whenever the physician does not attempt to abridge or arrest it, but strives to aid in conducting it to a favorable termination’. —Austen Flint, A Treatise on the Principles and Practice of Medicine, 5th edn (Philadelphia, 1881), 112. 32.37  Jezebel’s inn  Jezebel was the wife of King Ahab and an enemy of the prophets: ‘there was none like unto Ahab, which did sell himself to work wickedness in the sight of the Lord, whom Jezebel his wife stirred up’ (i Kings 21. 25). See also note to 21.16–17. 34.18  city of refuge  an Old Testament term, from Numbers 35 and Joshua 20–1. In Numbers, God tells Moses ‘Speak unto the Children of Israel, and say unto them, When ye be come over Jordan, and into the land of Canaan: | Then ye shall appoint you cities to be cities of refuge for you; that the slayer may flee thither, which killeth any person at unawares. | And they shall be unto you cities for refuge from the avenger; that the manslayer die not, until he stand before the congregation in judgment’ (35. 10–12). 37.24 point-de-vice more correctly, ‘point-device’ or ‘point-vice’: neat or fastidious in matters of dress. The doubly hyphenated form of the phrase is used in Walter Scott’s novel The Monastery (Edinburgh, 1820), chapter 27. 38.12  a Roman virtue  The Latin virtus referred to the qualities required to excel in the public duties, military and political, of an aristocratic citizen. 38.15  not manly  The Roman citizen was of course male, and virtus derives from vir, ‘man’; it thus also signified ‘manliness in the service 196

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of the state by the performance of exemplary deeds according to the proper standards of conduct’.—Donald Earl, The Moral and Political Tradition of Rome (London, 1967), 65. 38.41  touch the springs  make things happen. 39.21 principulus (Latin) diminutive of ‘princeps’, prince. Perhaps a comment by Otto on his own insignificant political power, although the word could also allude to his height. 39.22  come buskined forth  assume the role of a tragic hero. ‘Buskin’ was the Renaissance English word for the high-soled boot worn by actors in classical Greek tragedies, and hence a metonym for tragic drama. 39.30–1  swinking in a byre  labouring in a cowhouse. ‘Swinking’ was archaic in English usage, but still current in the Scotland of Stevenson’s day. 39.32  weave ropes of sand  an image of endless and unproductive labour found in a story told of the Scottish wizard Michael Scott, who ‘was much embarrassed by a spirit, for whom he was under the necessity of finding constant employment. […] At length the enchanter conquered this indefatigable dæmon, by employing him in making ropes out of sea-sand’.—Walter Scott, The Lay of the Last Minstrel (Edinburgh, 1805), Canto ii stanza 13 (note). 39.34  That way, I tell you, madness lies  echoes the king in Shakespeare’s King Lear, iii. 4. 22–3: ‘O, that way madness lies; let me shun that; | No more of that’. 39.40 casuistry here, ‘a quibbling or evasive way of dealing with difficult cases of duty’ (oed). 40.14 gibbeted put on show for public execration, like the bodies of executed criminals hung in chains on a gibbet. 41.17–18 corporation belly (oed 6). 41.36 Greisengesang (German) ‘song of extreme old age’. 44.11  index expurgatorius  strictly speaking, the list of passages to be corrected or deleted in published books to bring them into line with contemporary Catholic teaching, but in popular usage, the list of books prohibited by the Catholic Church: more properly, the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. 197

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45.19–21  hair of a ruddy gold … physical or moral  Sir John is thinking in the categories of 19th-century pseudosciences of physiognomy and race. 46.5 Merovingians Frankish dynasty of the 5th–8th centuries ad. Its later kings were remembered as powerless figureheads, their empire ruled by the family that would eventually replace them; the long hair of the last Merovingian king, Childeric III, was the same colour as Otto’s, and was shorn after his deposition as confirmation of his loss of power. 46.8 Toggenburg-Tannhäuser a comic yoking of the high and the low. Richard Wagner’s opera Tannhäuser had its first London performance in 1876. Toggenburg is an area of eastern Switzerland: the name evokes the Swiss peasantry, both though the local breed of goat, introduced into England in 1884, and through the 1789 autobiography of Ulrich Bräker, Lebensgeschichte und natürliche Ebentheuer des armen Mannes im Tockenburg (The life-story and natural adventures of the poor man in the Toggenburg). 46.16  Hoyden playing Cleopatra  a rude or boisterous girl; Cleopatra VII (d. 30 bc), last queen of Egypt before its conquest by Rome, and seducer of both Julius Caesar and Mark Antony. 46.32  Maire de Palais  also maire du palais (French); intendant of the palace. It is used exclusively of the hereditary chief stewards of the Merovingian kings (see note to 46.5) who became de facto rulers of the Frankish empire during the 8th century before taking the throne for themselves to found the Carolingian dynasty. 47.4  The margravate of Brandenburgh  the north German principality, with its capital at Berlin, which became the core territory of the powerful Kingdom of Prussia. See Introduction, xlvii–xlix for the contemporary resonance of Sir John’s comment. 48.31 incubus an evil spirit that descends on people while they sleep; a nightmare. 49.5 cloudy shady or disreputable; in this sense perhaps Stevenson’s coinage. 50.9  the Gamiani apartment  The origin of the name is explained at 50.31–2. Gamiani; ou, deux nuits d’excès (Brussels, 1833) is a famous French erotic novel, published anonymously but often attributed to Alfred de Musset. 198

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50.22 schloss (German) castle. 50.26  building daws  jackdaws, building their nests. 51.3  his toilet  his washing, dressing and grooming. 51.36 prestidigitation sleight of hand, conjuring. 53.29  I cannot draw upon a reigning sovereign  The encounter between Otto and Sir John suggests the tale of Colonel Seaton, a Scottish officer in the service of the King of Sweden, Gustavus Adolphus, in the 17th century. Seaton, having been offended by the monarch, left for home; Gustavus Adolphus caught up with him beyond the border, and offered him ‘the satisfaction of a gentleman; for we are now without my dominions, and Gustavus and you are equal!’ To which Seaton is supposed to have replied, ‘Sire, you have more than given me satisfaction in condescending to make me your equal. God forbid that my sword should do any mischief to so brave and gracious a sovereign’, and returned to his service’.—Major Ben C. Truman, The Field of Honor (New York, 1884), 74. 53.40–54.1  grapes from a thistle  Jesus’s warning against false prophets: ‘Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?’ (Matthew 7. 16). 55.8  I am not like Pilate  Challenged by the priests over his naming Jesus ‘King of the Jews’ at his execution, ‘Pilate answered, What I have written I have written’ ( John 19. 22). 56.23  O ciel!  (French) O heavens! 57.1  Prince Charming  Although this type has become associated with the hero of ‘Cinderella’ and ‘Snow White’, the name does not originate in the traditional versions of those fairy tales. Rather, it seems to be an invention of the mid-19th-century popular theatre: a role, usually played by a female actor, in a burlesque or pantomime. 58.16  Father Director  that is, a priest in the office of personal spiritual advisor. 59.2  the distaff  the shaft on which wool is wound for spinning; figuratively, women’s work, and by extension, female authority. 59.5–6  There was a man once in England whom they call the kingmaker  Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick (1428–71), the wealthiest English aristocrat of his time, whose power was instrumental in 199

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the deposition of Henry VI in favour of Edward IV during the Wars of the Roses. 59.26  cas pendable  (French) case deserving hanging. 59.28  Ahasuerus reaches you the sceptre  a king of Persia in the Old Testament. When his Jewish queen Esther pleads at his feet for the lives of her people, ‘the king held out the golden sceptre toward Esther’ and agrees to her request (Esther 8. 4). In an earlier incident, angered at his wife’s refusal to obey a command, Ahasuerus had letters sent into all his provinces, ‘that every man should bear rule in his own house’ (Esther 1. 22). 60.19 syren the monster of Greek mythology, half woman and half bird, which lures sailors to their destruction with beautiful singing, famously encountered by Odysseus and his men in Book xii of Homer’s Odyssey. 60.24–5  that lady of the glove, who sent her lover to the lions  referring to a story told of the court of Francis I of France. Watching the king’s lions fighting, a lady drops her glove into the arena and invites her lover to recover it as proof of his love. On his return he throws the glove in her face and refuses to have anything more to do with her. Historical Essays upon Paris, Translated from the French of M. De Saintfoix, 3 vols (London, 1767), i, 149–50. Stevenson probably knew the version in the poem by Leigh Hunt, ‘The Glove and the Lions’, which ends with Francis drawing the moral: ‘ “No love,” quoth he, “but vanity, sets love a task like that” ’.—Stories in Verse (London, 1855), 228. 61.9 marplot This term originates as the name of a character in early-18th-century English comedy, indicating their role in the story; most notably in Susannah Centlivre’s comedies The Busie Body (London, 1709) and Mar-Plot, or the Second Part of The Busie-Body (London, 1711). 61.17  the brazen and the earthen pot  a story best known as another of Aesop’s fables. ‘A river having overflowed its banks, two Pots were carried along in the stream, one made of Earthenware and the other of Brass. “Well, brother, since we share the same fate, let us go along together,” cried the Brazen Pot to the Earthen one. “No, no!” replied the latter in a great fright; “keep off whatever you do, for if you knock against me, or I against you, it will be all over with me—to the bottom I shall go’ (Æsop’s Fables, 43). The usual moral is that in any 200

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encounter between the weak and the powerful, the weak will always come off badly. 61.22–3  Monsieur le Flatteur  (French) ‘Sir Flatterer’. 62.10  Madame de Pompadour  Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson (1721– 64), chief mistress of French king Louis XV when this was an influential political position. 62.11–12  Catherine de Medici  (1519–89) queen-consort of French king Henri II; after his death in 1559, the power behind the throne occupied in succession by her three sons, Frances II, Charles IX and Henri III. 62.17  ad usum Seraphinæ  (Latin) ‘for the use of Seraphina’. This alludes to the text Ad usum Delphini, a 17th-century compilation of classical texts bowdlerized for use in the education of the Dauphin, heir to the French throne. 62.35  the diet  Given the references to the ‘Empire’ at 7.05 and 80.31, this must refer to the Imperial Diet, the Reichstag, the general assembly of the constituent estates of the Holy Roman Empire (see Introduction, xlvi–xlvii). This vanished with the dissolution of the empire in 1806; the German Confederation of 1815–66 also had an assembly known as a diet. 63.36  belle dame sans merci  (French) ‘beautiful lady without mercy’, a type of the indifferent object of a knight’s courtly love, as evoked in poems of this title by Alain Chartier (1424) and John Keats (1819). 65.11  indelicate delicacy  compare Adrian Harley in George Meredith’s The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859) who makes ‘jokes delicately not decent, but so delicately so that it was not decent to perceive it’ (Harmondsworth, 1998, 218). 65.28  chez moi  (French) at my place. 66.19  Dresden China  The fine, hard porcelain produced in Meissen, near Dresden, Germany, lent itself to the production of exquisite, brightly coloured figurines. Seraphina’s words may echo those of Mrs Mountstuart in The Egoist (1879) by George Meredith, who calls Clara Middleton ‘a dainty rogue in porcelain’ (Harmondsworth, 1968, 75). 66.19  mon enfant  (French) my child.

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66.32  à la mode  (French) according to the fashion. ‘Marriage à la mode’ evokes an upper-class disillusion with marriage as portrayed in John Dryden’s play (1673) and William Hogarth’s series of paintings (1743–5), which took this phrase for their titles. 67.17  I built on sand  perhaps an allusion to the Sermon on the Mount, which Jesus ends with advice on the application of his teaching: ‘Therefore whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man, which built his house upon a rock: | And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock. | And every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand: | And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell: and great was the fall of it’ (Matthew 7. 24–7). 67.28  A dog-in-the-manger jealousy  See the fable by the 2ndcentury Greek writer Lucian, long incorporated in collections ascribed to Aesop: ‘A Dog was lying in a Manger full of hay. An Ox, being hungry, came near and was going to eat of the hay. The Dog, getting up and snarling at him, would not let him touch it. “Surly creature,” said the Ox, “you cannot eat the hay yourself, and yet you will let no one else have any” ’ (Æsop’s Fables, 73). 68.29  Monsieur mon mari (French) my husband (but with Monsieur adding an exaggerated formality). 68.35 Freiherr (German) Baron. 70.26 attent attentive. 75.28  casus belli  (Latin) a reason or pretext for war. 77.15  the sword of Damocles  an image of the anxieties of power best known from Cicero’s anecdote in his Tusculan Disputations, in which Dionysius of Syracuse disabuses his flatterer, Damocles, of the notion that a tyrant’s life is a happy one by surrounding him with fine food and wine, riches and attendants, but also suspending a sword by a horse-hair above his neck, robbing Damocles of any pleasure he might take in them. 77.37  I shall convoke the States  Grünewald seems to have a constitution like that of pre-Revolution France in which the monarch can convene a meeting of the ‘States General’ for the purposes of consul202

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tation, attended by representatives of the three ‘estates’ of the realm: clergy, nobles, and commons. Louis XVI’s convocation of this body in May 1789 initiated the chain of events which led to the Revolution. 77.41–78.2  to come here at the eleventh hour among those who have borne the heat and burthen of the day  Seraphina quotes from Jesus’s parable at Matthew 20. 1–16, in which a householder pays the same wage to those who have laboured in his vineyard all day and those who joined them only ‘about the eleventh hour’ (20. 6). The former complain, ‘Saying, These last have wrought but one hour, and thou has made them equal unto us, which have borne the heat and burden of the day’ (20. 12). But Seraphina misses the point, which is that ‘the last shall be first, and the first last; for many be called, but few chosen’ (20. 16). 79.23  the tears of Alexander  an often-cited story about Alexander the Great, told by Greek historian Plutarch (c. ad 46–180) in his essay ‘On Tranquility of Mind’: ‘Alexander wept when he heard Anaxarchus discourse about an infinite number of worlds, and when his friends inquired what ailed him, “Is it not worthy of tears,” he said, “that, when the number of worlds is infinite, we have not yet become lords of a single one?” ’—Moralia, trans. W. C. Helmbold, 16 vols (London, 1939), vi, 178. 81.8–9  midsummer madness  Echoes Olivia in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, iii. 4. 52: ‘Why, this is very midsummer madness’. 83.1–2  Fortune … the machine  See notes to 22.2–3 and 22.30. 85.3 leash a hunting term meaning a set of three. 85.16 Tokay a Hungarian wine. 85.26 lustre chandelier. 86.7 consumption tuberculosis, so named because it ravaged the body. 86.19  mon Prince  (French) my Prince. 86.31 workbox box containing materials for needlework. 87.11  the Flying Mercury  As will be confirmed on 88.22–3, this is a copy of the famous statue of the Roman messenger-god by Giambologna ( Jean Boulogne, 1529–1608), which casts him in flight, running with his left foot supported by a representation of the wind, his right 203

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arm raised and pointing to the heavens. Mercury is also the god of thieves. 87.31 supercargo ‘A representative of the ship’s owner on board a merchant ship, responsible for overseeing the cargo and its sale’ (oed). 88.21 Triton a Greek sea-deity, son of Poseidon, often figured in the sculpture of Baroque fountains as a bearded man with the hindparts of a fish. 88.21 laver  basin (already a poetic archaism by Stevenson’s day). 88.22–3  Gian Bologna’s Mercury  See note to 87.11. 90.15–16  in your teeth  despite you. 90.35  coup de grâce  (French) the blow that finishes off an enemy; a term from martial combat. 91.7  mourn as the dove  The Countess borrows from Hezekiah, King of Judah, remembering his illness: ‘Like a crane or a swallow, so did I chatter: I did mourn as a dove’ (Isaiah 38. 14). 91.18 scena (Italian) scene; a term borrowed from Italian opera to mean a dramatic encounter where feelings run high. 94.40  Fear is the burnt child  a play on the proverb, ‘The burnt child dreads the fire’. 95.12 dominie schoolmaster (in Stevenson’s day not yet a specifically Scottish usage). 95.41 demi-rep ‘a woman of doubtful reputation or suspected chastity’ (oed). 96.14  riding the marches  testing the limits, literally establishing the geographical border, from the archaic verb ‘to redd’. 96.24–6  as Mexico invited Cortez … paved with gold Hernando Cortés (1485–1547), leader of the expedition that defeated the Aztec Empire and claimed Mexico for Spain. That the Aztec metropolis, Tenochtitlan, was ‘paved with gold’ was a common belief among the Spaniards. 96.28 pruritus ‘itching of the skin or other surface’ but also, figuratively, ‘a strong desire or craving’ (oed). 96.29 Anatomy medical textbook. 204

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97.35  Charles the Fifth  the 16th-century King of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor, presumably evoked as a type of monarchical absolutism. Charles, painfully ill, abdicated his throne three years before his death. 97.35–6  Long-fingered Tom  This looks like a folkloric archetype of the thief (pick-pockets were said to be ‘long-fingered’), but is probably Stevenson’s invention. 98.8  like a Nathan before David  When King David gets Bathsheba pregnant, he arranges for her husband to die in battle, so that she can become his wife. But God is angered by this behaviour and sends the prophet Nathan to accuse the king of this crime to his face in ii Samuel 12. 100.6 mantilla ‘A large light veil or scarf, often of black lace, worn […] over the head and covering the shoulders’ (oed). 100.30  slender plumpness  perhaps a translation of the French ideal of feminine beauty, ‘mince et ronde à la fois’ or slender and rounded at the same time. 100.31 satyr woodland god, part human and part animal. 101.10–11  Princess Ratafia  probably referring to the fashionable drink made with nuts or fruit kernels. 101.13  like the bambino, whipped into a chariot  The ‘bambino’ (Italian) here is the Christ-child. This is probably a reference to the famous wooden bambino of the church of Santa Maria in Aracoeli in Rome, credited with the power of curing the sick and easing childbirth, and which had its own carriage to take it to those requesting its miraculous intervention. 101.15 donjon an archaic spelling of dungeon, used to mean the central tower of a castle. 101.18  like Samson with the gates of Gaza  Samson frustrates a plot to kill him in Gaza thus: he ‘arose at midnight, and took the doors of the gate of the city, and the two posts, and went away with them, bar and all, and put them upon his shoulders, and carried them up to the top of an hill that is before Hebron’ ( Judges 16. 3). 101.26  Wine, women, and song  a phrase apparently German in origin. ‘Wer nicht liebt Wein, Weib und Gesang, | Der bleibt ein Narr sein Lebelang! (‘He who loves not wine, women and song, | Remains 205

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a fool his whole life long!’) is the concluding couplet of the song ‘An Luther’ (‘To Luther’) by Johann Heinrich Voss, first published in 1776. More recently (1869) the German phrase had provided the title for a very popular waltz by Johann Strauss II. 101.33 Sadducee an unbeliever: at the time of Christ, an adherent of the sceptical wing of Judaism, and in Christianity, by extension, a denier of the resurrection. 102.14  dog in the manger  See note to 67.28. 102.18 preciosa (Spanish) precious, beautiful, or charming. But the derogatory purpose of Gondremark’s comment fits better with the English sense of ‘precious’ as over-fastidious or affectedly refined. Preciosa is the name of the heroine of the novella by Miguel de Cervantes, ‘La Gitanilla’ (1613): the ‘little Gipsy girl’ of the title who turns out to be a princess. 102.20 troubadour a medieval lyric poet or wandering minstrel. Troubadour verse often celebrates love for a married woman. 102.21  Berlin wool  ‘a fine dyed wool used for knitting, tapestry, and the like’ (oed). 103.20  beaux yeux  (French) beautiful eyes, but also ‘attractive beauty, admiring glances, favour’ (oed). 104.10 Vivien in Arthurian legend, a student of Merlin’s, with whom he is in love; she eventually imprisons him, in some versions of the story in a tower, in others in a tree. In the ‘Merlin and Vivien’ episode (London, 1859) of Alfred Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, ‘the wily Vivien’ (ii. 5, 147) sets off from the court of King Mark of Cornwall, Arthur’s enemy, to infiltrate Arthur’s court in search of sexual corruption, and specifically the adultery of Queen Guinevere with Lancelot. Instead she seduces a charm of imprisonment from Merlin and uses it to lock him in an oak. 105.5 toilette here, dress or costume. 105.9 Fabian refers to the delaying tactics employed by Quintus Fabius Maximus against Hannibal in the Second Punic War (218–201 bc), and not to the recently established socialist society. 105.18 emprise ‘An undertaking, enterprise; esp. one of an adventurous or chivalrous nature’ (oed). 206

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106.10 florin The florin of Stevenson’s Britain was a silver coin worth two shillings. 106.20  A little—passionately—not at all  Alludes to the French children’s counting game with fruit-stones: ‘Il m’aime un peu, beaucoup, passionément, à la folie, pas de tout’. 106.28  a norn  one of the three ‘Fates’ or goddesses of destiny in Scandinavian mythology. 107.2 Gräfin (German) Countess. 107.21–2  partie carré … trump it  A partie carré (French; properly partie carrée) is a party of four, especially of two couples. The allusion here is to the card game whist, played by two couples, where the suit nominated as trumps beats all other cards. 108.39  court of troubadours  See note to 102.20 above. Otto evokes the ‘courts of love’ which tradition describes in 12th-century France, at which nobles and poets debated such questions; most famously that of Eleanor of Aquitaine at Poitiers. 110.16  dumb before your shearers  ‘He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth’ (Isaiah 53. 7). ‘He’ is the one who was ‘wounded for our transgressions, [and] bruised for our iniquities’ (53. 5). 111.22 Oberst (German) Colonel. 111.29  Plutarch  Greek historian (c. ad 46–180), author of Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, which juxtaposes the biographies of famous men to shed light on their virtues and vices (see also note to 79.23). 113.28 hag-ridden oppressed in mind; harrassed, as if mounted by an evil spirit or witch. 113.30  de la part de Monsieur le Baron  (French) on behalf of the Baron. 113.34–5  I am like St. Paul … should not  ‘For the good that I would I do not; but the evil which I would not, that I do’ (Romans 7. 19). 116.38  le tour est joué  (French) it’s all done, we’ve done it (literally, ‘the round/the trick is played’). 207

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119.15 bolus a large pill, hard to swallow. 119.16  a clown with sharpers  a simple countryman or peasant among swindlers. 120.31 dithyrambic elevated or impetuous in speech, in the manner of a Greek choric hymn. 122.11–12  Lovers’ quarrels … redintegratio  Greisengesang recalls the Latin proverb, ‘Amantium irae amoris redintegratio est’, which provides the titles for an English poem by Richard Edwards (1523–66), and for a 17th-century broadside ballad, where it is translated as ‘The falling out of Lovers, is the renewing of Love’. 122.39 toilette See note to 137.40. 123.14 tocsin alarm bell (especially associated with a popular callto-arms in the French Revolution). 127.2  Fortunate Misfortune  a version of the theological idea of ‘felix culpa’, the ‘fortunate fall’ of Adam and Eve: fortunate because it made possible God’s goodness in subsequently redeeming mankind. 129.2  princess cinderella  In the fairy-tale, Cinderella has to flee the palace ball before her gown returns to rags at midnight. 130.39  Panic hunted her  ‘Panic’ in this case evokes the specific terror of woodland wanderers caused by the god Pan (the origin of the term). 132.17 clerestories the windowed upper walls of a cathedral or large church. 132.19 tassel presumably catkins or flowers fallen from the trees above. 133.5–6  draw her as with cords  Things are drawn with cords on two occasions in the Old Testament. Isaiah warns, ‘Woe unto them that draw iniquity with cords of vanity, and sin as it were with a cart rope’ (5. 18); and in Hosea the Lord says of Israel, ‘I drew them with cords of a man, with bands of love: and I was to them as they that take off the yoke on their jaws, and I laid meat unto them’ (11. 4). 133.33 commoved To commove in the sense of ‘to move in mind or feeling, stir to emotion, rouse to passion; to excite’, is, says oed, almost exclusively a Scottish usage after 1500. 208

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134.30  the gums of Araby  aromatic resins used as drugs or perfumes, or to burn as incense, traded into Europe from the east. 135.22  make a toilet  See note to 137.40. 136.2  babes in the wood  The story of a little orphaned boy and girl, abandoned to die in the forest by a wicked uncle to gain their inheritance, was first published as a broadside ballad in 1595, collected in Bishop Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (London, 1765), and frequently republished since then in collections of children’s stories. 137.22–3  quite a Judith  Sir John compares Seraphina to the heroine of a book of the Catholic and Orthodox versions of the Old Testament, who saves Israel by gaining the trust of an enemy general called Holofernes, then decapitating him. 137.40 toilettes here, the collective term for the requisites used in dressing. 138.5  the last shall be first and the first last  Jesus’s words at Matthew 20. 16 (see note to 77.41–78.2 above); also reported at Mark 10. 31 and Luke 13. 30. 140.18  salient angle  an angle pointed outwards: usually used to describe fortifications. 140.31  Lilliputian smallness  the scale of the tiny people of the Kingdom of Lilliput encountered by Lemuel Gulliver in Part i of Gulliver’s Travels (London, 1726) by Jonathan Swift. 142.32  means of grace  the ways in which the Christian acquires faith, principally the gospel and the sacraments of baptism and holy communion. This is a category in Protestant theology generally, not specific to the Calvinism of Gordon’s native Church of Scotland. 142.35  Tu spem reducis  Gordon recalls a line from the Odes of Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus, 68–65 bc), ‘tu spem reducis mentibus anxiis’, ‘You bring back hope to anxious minds’. Odes and Epodes, ed. and trans. Niall Rudd, Book iii ode 21 (Cambridge ma, 2004), 195. Horace is addressing a wine-jar. 144.10  divinity hall  theological faculty or college. 144.10 broke cashiered, deprived of his commission as an officer. 144.15 teetotum a small spinning-top, including the type used in a game of chance; figuratively, something very unsteady. 209

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144.36 paste-board flimsy or unsubstantial. 144.36 deliquium here, apparently, as a synonym for deliquescence, the solution resulting from the liquefying of a salt by absorption of moisture from the air. Gotthold probably means ‘distillation’. 145.7  knowing the good, choosing the evil  perhaps another reference to Romans 7. 19: see note to 113.34–5 above. 147.10  secession … Mons Sacer  a reference to the ‘sacred hill’ (Latin) outside Rome to which, on several occasions, the plebeians of the Republic withdrew in a ‘secession of the commoners’ to put pressure on their rulers during struggles between the two classes. 147.12 Tannen-Zauber (German) literally, ‘the magic of the pines’, but intended to evoke the house hidden in the forest of a traditional fairy-tale. 147.12 Kleinbrunn (German) Little Well or Fountain. 148.14  You came, you saw, you conquered  Gordon adapts Julius Caesar’s summary of his campaign in Britain of 55–54 bc (‘veni, vidi, vici’) as reported by the historians Plutarch and Suetonius. 148.29  Lascia ch’ io pianga  (Italian) ‘Let me weep’, a soprano aria from the opera Rinaldo (London, 1711) by George Frederick Handel, in which the heroine Almirena laments her captivity in the hands of a sorceress. 150.21 leviathan the sea-monster mentioned several times in the Old Testament. 150.24  Prince Solon  Solon (d. 558 bc), the Athenian statesman whose constitutional reforms were credited with laying the foundations for the city-state’s later democracy. 151.1–2  probus, doctus, lepidus, jucundus  (Latin) upright, learned, pleasant, agreeable. Stevenson may have come across a similar phrase in his friend Sidney Colvin’s book Landor (London, 1881), where ‘Lepidus, doctus, liberalis, probus, amicis jucundissimus’ is said to have been the epitaph composed by the writer Walter Savage Landor (see note to 160.14) and his brother for their father (5). 151.20–1  Alexandrines, the tragic metre  An alexandrine is a line of verse with six ‘feet’: that is, usually, twelve syllables. It is the line of French heroic verse. 210

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151.22–3  Dieux de l’immense plaine et des vastes forêts  (French) Gods of the boundless plain and of the vast forests. 151.24  Et du geolier lui-même apprendre des leçons  (French) And learn something from the jailor himself. It was common in the period to omit the circumflex in ‘geôlier’. 151.31 incogniti the plural of incognito: see note to 28.31–2. 151.41  Robbie Burns  Robert Burns (1759–95), Scottish poet; especially revered by nostalgic expatriates such as Gordon. 152.22  rëentrant angle  an angle pointing inwards (a military term). 152.24 punctilio ‘a nicety of behaviour, ceremony, or honour’ (oed). 155.4–5  a skulker in the grain  a phrase which Stevenson had already used in The Amateur Emigrant (written 1879–80) to refer to a work-shy stowaway (EdEd 3, 75). It puns on two senses of the word ‘grain’. The meanings of ‘skulker’ include those birds and animals that hide in tall plants, including cereal-crops. But ‘grain’ can also mean natural inclination or tendency, a sense borrowed from working in stone, wood, and paper; and ‘in grain’ can mean complete, by nature, used ‘esp. with contemptuous epithets, as ass, fool, knave, rogue, etc.’ (oed), a sense borrowed from the dying-trade (‘fast-dyed’). 155.9  as poor as Job  At the start of the Book of Job, Job is very rich; but God allows Satan to destroy his family and his flocks to prove that Job’s piety is not only gratitude for his blessings. Job’s first response is, ‘Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither: the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord’ (1. 21). 156.24  great was the fall of it  from the conclusion of the parable of the house built on sand at Matthew 7. 27: see note to 67.17 above. 157.6–7  in my ordinary  ordinarily (an obsolete usage). 159.14 Rath-haus (German) town hall. 160.5 Bände (German) volumes. 160.5 Leipzig centre of the German book trade and the home of Tauchnitz, publisher of English novels on the continent including Stevenson’s. 211

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160.8 cloud-compeller a Homeric name for Jupiter in Iliad, xiv, thus translated in l. 557 of Alexander Pope’s version (London, 1719). 160.11–12  Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown  the name, from 1824, of the long-established, respected publishing firm; publishers of Longman’s Magazine in which this story first appeared. 160.12 toothcomb that is, paper-and-comb. 160.14 Landor Walter Savage Landor (1775–1864), English man of letters, with satirical instincts that sometimes tended to the libellous, and active sympathies for continental revolutionaries like Garibaldi. 160.19  Juvenal by double entry  that is, a satirist (after Decimus Junius Juvenalis, the great Roman satirist of the late 1st and early 2nd centuries) with the methods of an accountant. 160.29  n.d.  no date. 160.29  Poésies par Frédéric et Amélie  (French) Poetry by Frederick and Amalia. 160.30  Mr. Bain in the Haymarket  a historical bookseller: James Bain, 14 King William Street, London. 160.32  La rime n’est pas riche  (French) The verse is not all that good; there is a play on ‘rime riche’, a rhyme where the whole syllable, and not only the last vowel and its succeeding consonant, is identical. See Emendation List, 187. 161.7–8  Mr. Swinburne … vigorous sonnets  Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909), English poet, author of many poems celebrating the mid-century revolutionary movements on the continent, most notably in Songs before Sunrise (London, 1871), which opens with a ‘Dedication to Joseph Mazzini’, one of the leaders of the struggle for Italian unification. Stevenson is thinking in particular of the sonnets to Lajos Kossuth, Mazzini’s Hungarian counterpart, and Victor Hugo (see following note) in Poems and Ballads, Second Series (London, 1878). 161.9–10  Victor Hugo’s trumpet-blasts of patriot enumeration  The great French patriot died in May 1885, as Prince Otto was beginning its serialization in Longman’s. I have been unable to identify any specific texts to which Stevenson may be referring here. 161.21  hélas!  (French) alas! 212

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161.25  Buttonhole’s opinion  To ‘button-hole’ or ‘button-hold’ is to ‘take hold of (a person) by a button, and detain him in conversation against his will’ (oed); so perhaps ‘Buttonhole’s opinion’ is an opinion solicited in this way. 161.29  spirituelle  (French) ‘Of a highly refined character or nature, esp. in conjunction with liveliness or quickness of mind’ (oed).

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