AFTERWARDS
When his first grief was stilled, the King went to Fritz and Willy in
the garden. Plucking a branch on which grew three roses, he returned
with the little princes to the Queen. The three kissed her, and the King
laid the roses in her hand as the second carriage dashed up to the
palace.
Charlotte and Carl had come too late. Their mother had been dead a half
hour. The old Countess was all they had now, and she hushed her sobs to
comfort the King and her Queen's poor children, but, poor old lady, her
heart was broken at eighty and she lived only a few years more.
The doctors who examined the body of Queen Louisa after death declared
that a polypus, formed by grief and worry, had grown on her heart and
killed her, but the people of Prussia would have none of this.
"A polypus, nein," they said. "It is Napoleon who has done this. We will
rise. We will drive the tyrant from our land, for he has killed the best
friend of Prussia."
"The ravens, Bettina," said the Herr Lieutenant, "will fly now from
Kyffhaeuser. Wait, old Barbarossa will wake now and save us."
But the peasants had another hero.
"Shill is not dead!" they cried. "The brave Shill is not dead. He, too,
loved our Queen. He is in hiding and will lead us against Napoleon."
"It is as if we had lost a member of our own family," wept Madame von
Stork, as she tried to comfort poor Marianne.
When they brought the Queen's body to Berlin and it lay in state,
Bettina went, with the girls of the "Luisenstift" to look for the last
time on the face of the Queen who had cared for her. The Berliners who
gazed also, thought their own thoughts, made up their minds, and went
home to await the funeral, which took place on the thirtieth, the Royal
children with their father following the coffin, a nurse bearing in her
arms the new baby, little Albrecht.
"After Jena," said the Berliners, "we thought we had lost all, but then
we had our Queen."
Not even the Queen's death, however, moved Napoleon, who, having Prussia
under his thumb, meant to keep her there. Realising this, many patriotic
Germans, refusing to accept French rule, departed to St. Petersburg.
Among them was Baron von Stein, for the Czar, who was beginning to tire
of his friend Napoleon, invited him to be his counsellor. After his
departure Professor von Stork received a letter from Otto.
"Napoleon rules Prussia," he wrote. "If I return home I must fight as he
orders, for we fear a war with Russia. In St. Petersburg Baron von Stein
is forming a German legion of deserters from Prussia. I shall join it.
Never will I fight under the banners of France. Arndt is in St.
Petersburg, also, and will be Stein's secretary. Between them and with
Hardenburg as Minister, Prussia may yet be saved. Until then, Auf
wiedersehen."
On the very day that this letter arrived, Berlin was startled by the
news that Napoleon with his soldiers was to march against Alexander.