In this determination they were supported by the “Willy” von Hohenaus, by the various members of the Hohenlohe family, by Baron Schrader, Baron Hugo Reischach, chamberlain to the Empress Frederick, Prince and Princess Aribert of Anhalt, the latter being a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, Prince and Princess Albert of Saxe-Altenburg, and last, but not least, Baron von Tausch, the chief of the secret police attached to the particular service of the emperor.

I have already mentioned that suspicions had at first been directed against the empress’s only brother, Duke Ernest-Gunther of Schleswig-Holstein.  Somehow or other, probably through reading the detective novels of Gaboriau, Baron Schrader became imbued with the idea that the most successful manner of discovering the identity of the suspected writer of the anonymous letters would be to carefully examine the blotting-pads which either he or she were in the habit of using.  Accordingly, Countess Fritz von Hohenau took advantage of the admiration and devotion entertained for her by Count Augustus Bismarck to induce him to bring to her the blotting-pad habitually used by the duke, to whose household he belonged, as chief aid-de-camp.  The count, very reluctantly, it is true, brought to Madame von Hohenau, the said blotting-pad, and it was immediately submitted to a most careful and even microscopical examination by her husband, herself, and their friends.  But in spite of every effort it was impossible to discover the slightest analogy between the writing of the anonymous letters and the impressions left on the blotting-pad of the duke.  The countess and her assistants in this queer task, therefore, came to the conclusion that they would have to search in a different direction.

It is impossible to say with any degree of certainty how suspicion was then directed towards Baron Kotze.  But I am under the impression that his name was first mentioned in connection with the affair by Baron Schrader, who like himself was a Master of Ceremonies of the Court of Berlin.  The vast wealth enjoyed by the Kotzes, as well as the extraordinary favor manifested towards them by the emperor and the members of the reigning family, had not unnaturally rendered them objects of no little jealousy on the part of other personages belonging to the court circle.  The exceedingly sarcastic and malevolent tongue of the Baroness Kotze, and the somewhat coarse flavor of the ever-ready jest and quip of her jovial, loud-voiced, hail-fellow-well-met mannered husband did not tend to render the couple very popular.

Baron Kotze’s mother had been an heiress in her own right as the daughter of the court banker, Krause, while the baron’s wife is the daughter of that extraordinary old General von Treskow, who for so long commanded the division of Guards, and whose reputation as one of the bravest and most dashing officers of the war of 1870, alone saved him from the ridicule which his corseted waist, his painted