The King of Saxony had paid a visit to Brussels in the late autumn of 1914 and had invited this Colonel of his Army to a fastuous banquet given at the Palace Hotel.  The King—­whom the still defiant Brussels Press, especially that unkillable La Libre Belgique, reminded ironically of his domestic infelicity, by enquiring whether he had brought Signor Toselli to conduct his orchestra—­was gratified that a subject of his should be performing the important duties of Secretary to the Brussels Government, and his notice of von Giesselin gave the latter considerable prestige, for a time; an influence which he certainly exercised as far as he was able in softening the edicts and the intolerable desire to annoy and exasperate on the part of the Prussian Governors of province and kingdom.  He even interceded at times for unfortunate British or French subjects, stranded in Brussels, and sometimes asked Vivie about fellow-countrymen who sought this intervention.

This caused her complicated annoyances.  Seeing there was some hope in interesting her in their cases, these English governesses, tutors, clerks, tailors’ assistants and cutters, music-hall singers, grooms appealed to Vivie to support their petitions.  They paid her or her mother a kind of base court, on the tacit assumption that she—­Vivie—­had placed Colonel von Giesselin under special obligations.  If in rare instances, out of sheer pity, she took up a case and von Giesselin granted the petition or had it done in a higher quarter, his action was clearly a personal favour to her; and the very petitioners went away, with the ingratitude common in such cases, and spread the news of Vivie’s privileged position at the Hotel Imperial.  It was not surprising therefore that in the small circles of influential British or American people in Brussels she was viewed with suspicion or contempt.  She supported this odious position at the Hotel Imperial as long as possible, in the hope that Colonel von Giesselin when he had realized the impossibility of using herself or her mother in any kind of intrigue against the British Government would do what the American Consul General professed himself unable or unwilling to do:  obtain for them passports to proceed to Holland.

Von Giesselin, from December, 1914, took up among other duties that of Press Censor and officer in charge of Publicity.  After the occupation of Brussels and the fall of Antwerp, the “patriotic” Belgian Press had withdrawn itself to France and England or had stopped publication.  Its newspapers had been invited to continue their functions as organs of news-distribution and public opinion, but of course under the German Censorate and martial law.  As one editor said to a polite German official:  “If I were to continue the publication of my paper under such conditions, my staff and I would all be shot in a week.”