Conspicuous among friends of this particular character, is Baron von Kiderlen-Waechter, who holds the rank of minister plenipotentiary in the diplomatic service of Germany, and who was recently, and possibly still remains, Prussian envoy to the Court of Denmark, but who is known in the imperial circle at Berlin by the nickname of “August,” that being the “sobriquet” given to the clowns belonging to variety-shows and circuses in England, Austria, and France.  In fact, he certainly occupies among William’s immediate circle of cronies and associates the position of court jester, and the emperor makes a point of taking the baron along with him whenever he goes on his annual yachting trips along the coast of Sweden and Norway.  The latter is the life and soul of these imperial yachting parties, his witticisms, his antics, and, above all, his inimitable talent for mimicry keeping even the sailors of the Hohenzollern in continual roars of laughter.  Yet he can be grave and dignified on state occasions, and when one sees him at the Court of Berlin arrayed in full uniform, his breast covered with decorations, it is difficult to realize that this imposing-looking diplomat is the principal partner of the autocrat of Germany in such juvenile games as “Hot Cockles,” which is a very favorite game on board the Hohenzollern, and in which the kneeling and blindfolded victim receives a terrific spank or smack, and then has to guess, under the penalty of ridiculous forfeits, who it is that struck him!

No one would ever have dreamt of finding any fault with this intimacy between the emperor and the baron, had it not been for the fact that the latter laid himself open to charges of having taken advantage of the imperial favor won by mimicry and practical joking, to further political and personal intrigues in which he was interested.  Indeed, he was repeatedly accused in the German press of being largely responsible for the manifestation of animosity between the Court of Berlin and Friedrichsrueh that characterized the last eight or nine years of the life of Prince Bismarck.  The newspapers did not hesitate to assert that the baron, who had formerly been one of the confidential secretaries of the old chancellor, had deliberately fomented the irritation of the kaiser against the veteran statesman, believing that any reconciliation between the monarch and his former chancellor would entail the baron’s disgrace.  Finally, the abuse of the baron in the Berlin press became so pronounced that he was virtually obliged to challenge the editor of one of the most vituperative of the metropolitan sheets, and very gallantly lodged a bullet through the shoulder of this “knight of the quill!”

For this escapade the baron was condemned to three months’ imprisonment by the courts, duelling, as has been intimated already, being forbidden by law in Germany.  His incarceration in the military fortress of Ehrenbreitstein on the Rhine was absolutely unprecedented.  Ambassadors and envoys have in times gone by been imprisoned by sovereigns to whose courts they were accredited, in defiance of all the laws of international right regulating the intercourse between civilized powers, but this was the first occasion of a government taking the unheard-of step of jailing one of its own envoys.