A SERVANT-TYRANT
My correspondence is not safe from the malicious woman appointed
Grand Mistress--Lovers at a distance and by correspondence--Fell in
love with a leg.
LOSCHWITZ, _September 8, 1894_.
Baroness Tisch, now that she attained the height of her ambition, is
beginning to show her claws. She is an infernal cat. Her skinniness
makes her repulsive to me and her face gives everyone the impression
that she just sucked an enormous lemon. She lisps and that makes me
nervous. I feel like aping her when she isn't around.
She's after me like the devil chasing a poor soul and as I never address
her except to command or reprimand, she tries to find out any secret
doings, or thinkings, I may be guilty of by way of letters I write or
receive.
According to the laws of most countries private correspondence is
sacred, legally and morally. The late Field-Marshal, Count Blumenthal,
wrote to his wife of the Crown Prince, afterwards Emperor Frederick,
that he was a "d----fool," but "as communications between husband and
wife are privileged," no official cognizance was taken.
Otherwise in this petty kingdom and, as already told, in Austria, whose
monarch, in family matters at least, holds to the "_L'Etat c'est moi_"
maxim.
The King's spy, the Tisch, constituted herself post-office of Villa
Loschwitz--a duty appertaining to her rank--and I wager she works the
"_Black Cabinet_" to perfection. Of course, I am now careful in all I
write and advise my friends to be, but I sometimes get letters from
Unknowns, people that sympathize with me or have fallen in love with me.
All women in high station have lovers among the lowly. I recall the
Cardinal Dubois' yarn about Salvatico, envoy of the Prince of Modena, my
kinsman of yore. The Italian was sent to Paris to conduct home his
master's lovely intended, _Mademoiselle_ de Valois, daughter of the
Regent. It happened that the emissary was introduced to _Mademoiselle's_
room an hour before the time set, when she was lying on a lounge "with
one leg, almost naked, hanging down." Salvatico fell in love with the
leg and exhausted himself in so many "Ah, ah's" of admiration and other
love-sick stunts that the Duke of Richelieu, having older rights, said
to him: "Rogue, if you had your deserts I would cut off your two ears!"
No man, except my husband, has seen my legs, which is a pity, perhaps,
but the extreme _decollete_ demanded at certain court functions,
especially in Berlin, gained me many epistolary lovers, whose homage I
accept gracefully, but in silence, of course.
Still, a malicious thing like the Tisch, if one gives her enough rope,
might arrange, on paper at least, to get me with child by a Lothario a
hundred miles off, even as the children of Madame de Montespan and Louis
XIV were credited to the Marquis, her husband, residing a hundred
leagues away, at Guienne. Let me find her red-handed and she will fare
even worse than Schoenstein.