There was plenty of such entertainment in winter, and we had our part in much of it.  Rellstab, the well-known editor of Voss’s journal, made a clever collection of such jokes in his Christmas Wanderings.  We could read, and whatever was offered by that literary St. Nicholas and highly respected musical critic for cultivated Berlin our mother was quite willing we should enjoy.

CHAPTER VIII.

The revolutionary period
before the revolution

On the 18th of March, the day of the fighting in the streets of Berlin, we had been living for a year in the large suite of apartments at No. 7 Linkstrasse.

Of those who inhabited the same house with us I remember only the sculptor Streichenberg, whose studio was next to our pretty garden, and the Beyers, a married couple.  He, later a general and commander of the troops besieging Strasburg in 1870, was at that time a first lieutenant.  She was a refined, extremely amiable, and very musical woman, who had met our mother before, and now entered into the friendliest relations with her.

A guest of their quiet household, a little Danish girl, one of Fran Beyer’s relatives, shared our play in the garden, and worked with us at the flower beds which had been placed in our charge.  I remember how perfectly charming I thought her, and that her name was Detta Lvsenor.

All the details of our intercourse with her and other new acquaintances who played with us in the garden have vanished from my memory, for the occurrences of that time are thrown into shadow by the public events and political excitement around us.  Even children could not remain untouched by what was impending, for all that we saw or heard referred to it and, in our household, views violently opposed to each other, with the exception of extreme republicanism, were freely discussed.

The majority of our conservative acquaintances were loud in complaint, and bewailed the king’s weakness, and the religious corruption and hypocritical aspirations which were aroused by the honest, but romantic and fanatical religious zeal of Frederick William IV.

I must have heard the loudest lamentations concerning this cancer of society at this time, for they are the most deeply imprinted in my memory.  Even such men as the Gepperts, Franz Kugler, H. M. Romberg, Drake, Wilcke, and others, with whose moderate political views I became acquainted later, used to join us.  Loyal they all were, and our mother was so strongly attached to the house of Hohenzollern that I heard her request one of the younger men, when he sharply declared it was time to force the king to abdicate, either to moderate his speech or cease to visit her house.

Our mother could not prevent, however, similar and worse speeches from coming to our ears.