’She sent repeatedly to demand an interview with his Highness; which the latter declined, saying that he would communicate with her Highness when her health was sufficiently recovered.  To one of her passionate letters he sent back for reply a packet, which, when opened, was found to contain the emerald that had been the cause round which all this dark intrigue moved.

’Her Highness at this time became quite frantic; vowed in the presence of all her ladies that one lock of her darling Maxime’s hair was more precious to her than all the jewels in the world:  rang for her carriage, and said she would go and kiss his tomb; proclaimed the murdered martyr’s innocence, and called down the punishment of Heaven, the wrath of her family, upon his assassin.  The Prince, on hearing these speeches (they were all, of course, regularly brought to him), is said to have given one of his dreadful looks (which I remember now), and to have said, “This cannot last much longer.”

’All that day and the next the Princess Olivia passed in dictating the most passionate letters to the Prince her father, to the Kings of France, Naples, and Spain, her kinsmen, and to all other branches of her family, calling upon them in the most incoherent terms to protect her against the butcher and assassin her husband, assailing his person in the maddest terms of reproach, and at the same time confessing her love for the murdered Magny.  It was in vain that those ladies who were faithful to her pointed out to her the inutility of these letters, the dangerous folly of the confessions which they made; she insisted upon writing them, and used to give them to her second robe-woman, a Frenchwoman (her Highness always affectioned persons of that nation), who had the key of her cassette, and carried every one of these epistles to Geldern.

’With the exception that no public receptions were held, the ceremony of the Princess’s establishment went on as before.  Her ladies were allowed to wait upon her and perform their usual duties about her person.  The only men admitted were, however, her servants, her physician and chaplain; and one day when she wished to go into the garden, a heyduc, who kept the door, intimated to her Highness that the Prince’s orders were that she should keep her apartments.

’They abut, as you remember, upon the landing of the marble staircase of Schloss X——­; the entrance to Prince Victor’s suite of rooms being opposite the Princess’s on the same landing.  This space is large, filled with sofas and benches, and the gentlemen and officers who waited upon the Duke used to make a sort of antechamber of the landing-place, and pay their court to his Highness there, as he passed out, at eleven o’clock, to parade.  At such a time, the heyducs within the Princess’s suite of rooms used to turn out with their halberts and present to Prince Victor—­the same ceremony being performed on his own side, when pages came out and announced the approach of his Highness.  The pages used to come out and say, “The Prince, gentlemen!” and the drums beat in the hall, and the gentlemen rose, who were waiting on the benches that ran along the balustrade.