It is this aversion to being considered as swayed by any other influence than his own that has led the emperor on so many occasions to adopt a course diametrically opposed to that urged upon him by his clever and masterful mother, a woman with the most powerful intellect and the least tact to be found in all Old World royalties.  It was this, too, that led the emperor to banish, just a trifle unjustly, the pretty and dashing Countess Hohenau from his court.  She had been guilty of no indiscretion with regard to him.  She had done nothing wrong, and she was not only a brilliant ornament of the imperial entourage, but likewise a relative of the family.  But he banished both her husband and herself almost at a moment’s notice, owing to the fact that in the anonymous letters circulated at the time of the so-called Kotze scandal, he was mentioned as altogether infatuated and subjugated by her beauty.

Count Hohenau is the half-brother of that Prince Albert of Prussia, who is now Regent of the Grand Duchy of Brunswick.  Old Prince Albert of Prussia, his father, was married to the eccentric and half-crazy Princess Marianne of the Netherlands.  Not long after the birth of the present Prince Albert, she lost her heart to such an extent to a chamberlain in her household that her husband was compelled to divorce her, whereupon she contracted a morganatic marriage with the gentleman in question, and lived and died at an advanced age only about twelve years ago.

Prince Albert, the elder, thereupon married morganatically a young girl of noble birth of the name of Baroness Rauch, whose family had for more than one hundred and fifty years occupied leading positions at the Court of Berlin.  On the occasion of her marriage to the prince, she received from the Prussian Crown the title of Countess of Hohenau, and the children whom she bore to Prince Albert the elder are now known as Counts and Countesses of Hohenau.  The elder of these Counts Hohenau bears the name of Fritz, and his wife, before their banishment from the capital, was one of the most dashing and brilliant figures in the ultra-aristocratic society of Berlin.  No entertainment was regarded as complete without her presence, and in every social enterprise, no matter whether it was a flower corso, a charity fair, a hunt, a picnic, or amateur theatricals, she was always to the fore, besides being the leader in every new fashion, and in every new extravagance.  Although eccentric—­she was the first member of her sex to show herself astride on horseback in the Thiergarten—­and in spite of her being famed as a thorough-paced coquette, and as a flirt, yet no one ventured to impugn her good name, until the disgraceful anonymous letter scandal; and both her husband and herself naturally resent most keenly that without any hearing or explanation they should have been banished from the court, and sent to live, first at Hanover, then at Dresden, but always away from Berlin and Potsdam, solely on account of an anonymous letter.