‘Not at all, Mr. Chancellor.  I do but ask a question.’

‘You fence.  Your question was dictated by impatience.’

’Yes, for the facts and elucidations!

‘For the romance, that is.  You wish me to depict emotions.’

Hereupon this destroyer of temper embrowned his nostrils with snuff, adding,—­’I am unable to.’

’Then one is not to learn why the princess could not fulfil her engagement?’

’Judged from the point of view of the pretender to the supreme honour of the splendid alliance, the fault was none of hers.  She overlooked his humble, his peculiarly dubious, birth.’

‘Her father interposed?’

‘No.’

‘The Family?’

‘Quite inefficacious to arrest her determinations.’

‘What then—­what was in her way?’

‘Germany.’

‘What?’

’Great Germany, young gentleman.  I should have premised that, besides mental, she had eminent moral dispositions,—­I might term it the conscience of her illustrious rank.  She would have raised the poet to equal rank beside her had she possessed the power.  She could and did defy the Family, and subdue her worshipping father, the most noble prince, to a form of paralysis of acquiescence—­if I make myself understood.  But she was unsuccessful in her application for the sanction of the Diet.’

‘The Diet?’

’The German Diet.  Have you not lived among us long enough to know that the German Diet is the seat of domestic legislation for the princely Houses of Germany?  A prince or a princess may say, “I will this or that.”  The Diet says, “Thou shalt not”; pre-eminently, “Thou shalt not mix thy blood with that of an impure race, nor with blood of inferiors.”  Hence, we have it what we see it, a translucent flood down from the topmost founts of time.  So we revere it.  “Qua man and woman,” the Diet says, by implication, “do as you like, marry in the ditches, spawn plentifully.  Qua prince and princess, No!  Your nuptials are nought.  Or would you maintain them a legal ceremony, and be bound by them, you descend, you go forth; you are no reigning sovereign, you are a private person.”  His Serene Highness the prince was thus prohibited from affording help to his daughter.  The princess was reduced to the decision either that she, the sole child born of him in legal wedlock, would render him qua prince childless, or that she would—­in short, would have her woman’s way.  The sovereignty of Leiterstein continued uninterruptedly with the elder branch.  She was a true princess.’

‘A true woman,’ said I, thinking the sneer weighty.

The Chancellor begged me to recollect that he had warned me there was no romance to be expected.

I bowed; and bowed during the remainder of the interview.

Chancellor von Redwitz had performed his mission.  The hours of my convalescence were furnished with food for amusement sufficient to sustain a year’s blockade; I had no further longing for society, but I craved for fresh air intensely.