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Secret Memoirs

THE COURT OF ROYAL SAXONY

1891-1902

This edition, printed on Japanese vellum paper, is limited to two
hundred and fifty copies.

No. ________



[Illustration: LOUISE, EX-CROWN-PRINCESS OF SAXONY

Photo taken shortly before her flight from Dresden]

Secret Memoirs

THE COURT OF ROYAL SAXONY 1891-1902

THE STORY OF LOUISE CROWN PRINCESS

FROM THE PAGES OF HER DIARY, LOST AT THE TIME OF HER ELOPEMENT FROM
DRESDEN WITH M. ANDRE ("RICHARD") GIRON

BY HENRY W. FISCHER

Author of "Private Lives of William II and His Consort," "Secret History
of the Court of Berlin," etc., etc.

Illustrated from Photographs

BENSONHURST, NEW YORK FISCHER'S FOREIGN LETTERS, INC. PUBLISHERS

COPYRIGHT, 1912
BY HENRY W. FISCHER

Copyright, 1912, applied for by Henry W. Fischer in Great Britain

Copyright, 1912, by Henry W. Fischer, in Germany, France, Austria,
Switzerland, and all foreign countries having international copyright
arrangements with the United States

[_All rights reserved, including those of translation_]




EDITOR'S CARD


This is to certify that the Ex-Crown Princess of Saxony, now called
Countess Montiguoso, Madame Toselli by her married name, is in no way,
either directly or indirectly, interested in this publication.

There has been no communication of whatever nature, directly or through
a third party, between this lady and the editor or publishers. In fact,
the publication will be as much a surprise to her as to the general
public.

The Royal Court of Saxony, therefore, has no right to claim, on the
ground of this publication, that Princess Louise violated her agreement
with that court as set forth in the chapter on the _Kith and Kin of the
ex-Crown Princess of Saxony_, under the heads of "_Louise's Alimony and
Conditions_" and "_Allowance Raised and a Further Threat_."

    HENRY W. FISCHER, _Editor_.
    Fischer's Foreign Letters, Publishers




THIS BOOK AND ITS PURPOSE

By Henry W. Fischer


Of Memoirs that are truly faithful records of royal lives, we have a
few; the late Queen Victoria led the small number of crowned
autobiographists only to discourage the reading of self-satisfied royal
ego-portrayals forever, but in the Story of Louise of Saxony we have the
main life epoch of a Cyprian Royal, who had no inducement to say
anything false and is not afraid to say anything true.

For the Saxon Louise wrote not to guide the hand of future official
historiographers, or to make virtue distasteful to some sixty odd
grand-children, bored to death by the recital of the late "Mrs. John
Brown's" sublime goodness:--Louise wrote for her own amusement, even as
Pepys did when he diarized the peccadilloes of the Second Charles'
English and French "hures" (which is the estimate these ladies put upon
themselves).[1]

The ex-Crown Princess of Saxony suffered much in her youth by a
narrow-minded, bigoted mother, a Sadist like the monstrous Torquemada;
marriage, she imagined, spelled a rich husband, more lover than master;
freedom from tyranny, paltry surroundings, interference. To her
untutored mind, life at the Saxon Court meant right royal splendor,
liberty to do as one pleases, the companionship of agreeable, amusing
and ready-to-serve friends.


_The Sad Saxon Court_

Her experience? Instead of the Imperial mother who took delight in
cutting her children's faces with diamonds and exposing her daughters to
the foul machinations of worthless teachers--she acquired a
father-in-law (Prince, afterwards King George) whose pretended affection
was but a share of his all-encompassing hatred, whose breath was a
serpent's, whose veins were flowing with gall; the supposed
chevaleresque husband turned out a walking dictionary of petty
indecencies and gross vulgarities when in a favorable mood, a brawler at
other times, a coward always.

As to money--Louise wished for nothing better "than to be an American
multi-millionaire's daughter for a week"! Amusements were few and
frowned upon.

Liberty? None outside of a general permit to eat, drink and couple like
animals in pasture, was recognized or tolerated. Nor could the royal
young woman make friends. Her relatives-by-marriage were mostly freaks,
and all were unbearable; her entourage a collection of spies and
flunkeys.

If charity-bazaars, pious palaver, and orphaned babies' diapers had not
been the sole topic of conversation at court; if there had been
intellectual enjoyment of any kind, Louise might never have taken up
her pen. As it was: "This Diary is intended to contain my innermost
thoughts, my ambitions, my promises for the future, _Myself_. * * *
These pages are my Father-Confessor. I confess to myself. * * * And as I
start in writing letters to myself, it occurs to me that my worse self
may be corresponding with my better self, or vice-versa."

At any rate she thinks "this Diary business will be quite amusing."


_Louise's Amusing Writings_

It is. The world always laughs at the--husband of a woman whose history
isn't one long yawn.

Nor is Louise content with a bust picture.[2] She gives full length
portraits of herself, family, friends, enemies, and lovers, which latter
she picks hap-hazard among commoners and the nobility. Only one of them
was a prince of the blood, and he promptly proved the most false and
dishonorable of the lot.

When Louise's pen-pictures do not deal with her _amororos_, they focus
invariably emperors and princes, kings and queens,--contemporary
personages whose acquaintance, by way of the newspapers and magazines,
we all enjoy to the full, as "stern rulers," "sacrificers to the public
weal," "martyrs of duty," "indefatigable workers," "examples of
abstinence," and "high-mindedness"--everything calculated to make life a
burden to the ordinary mortal.


_Kings in Fiction and in Reality_

But kings and emperors, we are told by these _distant_ observers, are
built that way; they would not be happy unless they made themselves
unhappy for their people's sake. And as to queens and empresses,--they
simply couldn't live if they didn't inspect their linen closets daily,
stand over a broiling cook-stove, or knit socks for the offspring of
inebriated bricklayers "and sich."

Witness Louise, Imperial and Royal Highness, Archduchess of Austria,
Princess of Hungary and Tuscany, Crown Princess of Saxony, etc., etc.,
smash these paper records of infallible royal rectitude, and superhuman,
almost inhuman, royal probity!

Had she castigated her own kind _after_ royalty unkenneled her, neck and
crop, her story might admit of doubt, but she wrote these things while
in the full enjoyment of her rank and station, before her title as
future queen was ever questioned or menaced.

Her Diary finishes with her last night in the Dresden palace. We do not
hear so much as the clatter of the carriage wheels that carried her and
"Richard" to her unfrocking as princess of the blood,--in short, our
narrator is not prejudiced, on the defensive, or soured by
disfranchisement. She had no axes to grind while writing; for her all
kings dropped out of the clouds; the lustre that surrounds a king never
dimmed while her Diary was in progress, and before she ceases talking to
us she never "ate of the fish that hath fed of that worm that hath eat
of a king."

Yet this large folio edition of _obscenites royale_, chock full, at the
same time, of intensely human and interesting facts, notable and amusing
things, as enthralling as a novel by Balzac,--Louise's life record in
sum and substance, since her carryings-on _after_ she doffed her royal
robes for the motley of the free woman are of no historical, and but
scant human interest.

The prodigality of the mass of indictments Louise launches against
royalty as every-day occurrences, reminds one of the great Catharine
Sforza, Duchess of Milan's clever _mot_. When the enemy captured her
children she merely said, "I retain the oven for more."


_Royal Scandals_

Such scandalmongering! Only Her Imperial Highness doesn't see the
obloquy,--sarcasm, cynicism and disparagement being royalty's every-day
diet.

Such gossiping! But what else was there to do at a court whose
literature is tracts and whose theatre of action the drill grounds.

But for all that, Louise's Diary is history, because its minute things
loom big in connection with social and political results, even as its
horrors and abnormalities help paint court life and the lives of kings
and princes as they _are_, not as royalties' sycophants and apologizers
would have us view them.

There is a perfect downpour of books eulogizing monarchs and monarchy;
royal governments spend millions of the people's money to uphold and
aggrandize exalted kingship and seedy princeship alike; three-fourths of
the press of Europe is swayed by king-worship, or subsidized to sing the
praises of "God's Anointed," while in our own country the aping of
monarchical institutions, the admiration for court life, the
idealization of kings, their sayings, doings and pretended superiority,
as carried on by the multi-rich, are undermining love for the Republic
and the institutions our fathers fought and bled for.


_Un-American Folly_

It's the purpose of the present volume to show the guilty folly of such
un-American, un-republican, wholly unjustifiable, reprehensible and
altogether ridiculous King-worship, not by argument, or a more or less
fanciful story, but by the unbiased testimony of an "insider."

Let it be considered, above all, that a member of the proudest Imperial
family in the wide, wide world demonstrates, by inference, the absurdity
of King-worship!

Of course, whether or not you'll obey the impassioned appeal of the
corner sermonizer, who, espying a number of very decolletee ladies
passing by in a carriage, cried out: "_Quand vous voyez ces tetons
rebondies, qui se montrent avec tant d'impudence, bandez! bandez!
bandez! vous--les yeux!_" is a matter for you to decide.

       *       *       *       *       *

Seek not for descriptions of ceremonials and festivities in these pages;
only imbeciles among kings are interested in such wearying spectacles,
intended to dazzle the multitude. The Czar Paul, who became insane and
had his head knocked off by his own officers, appeared upon the scene
vacated by his brilliant mother, Catharine the Great, with a valise full
of petty regulations, ready drawn up, by which, every day, every hour,
every minute, he announced some foolish change, punishment or favor, but
I often saw Kaiser Wilhelm and other kings look intensely bored and
disgusted when obliged to attend dull and superfluous court or
government functions.


_Royalty's Loose Talk_

But for genuine expressions of the royal self consult Louise. Those who
think that royalty shapes its language in accordance with the plural of
the personal pronoun, sometimes used in state papers, will be shocked at
the "neglige talk" of one royal highness and the "rag-time" expressions
of others. Louise, herself, assures us over and over again that she
"_feels like a dog_," a statement no self-respecting publisher's reader
would allow to pass, yet I was told by a friend of King Frederick of
Denmark that he loved to compare his "all-highest person" to a "_mut_,"
and I remember a letter from Victor Emanuel II to his great Minister,
Count Cavour, solemnly protesting that he (the King) was "_no ass_."

When the same Danish ruler, the seventh of his name, was asked why, in
thunder, he married a common street walker (the Rasmussen, afterwards
created Countess Danner), he cried out with every indication of gusto:
"You don't know how deliciously common that girl is."

Frederick's words explain the hostler marriages of several royal women
mentioned by Louise, as well as her own and loving family's
_broulleries_ of the fish-wife order, repeatedly described in the Diary.


_Royalty Threatens a Royal Woman_

It is safe to say that few $15 flats in all the United States witnessed
more outrageous family jars than were fought out in the gilded halls of
the Dresden palace between Louise and father-in-law and Louise and
husband. Threats of violence are frequent; Prince George promises his
daughter-in-law a sound beating at the hands of the Crown Prince and the
Crown Princess confesses that she would rather go to bed with a drunken
husband, booted and spurred, than risk a sword thrust.

At the coronation of the present Czar, at Moscow, I mistook the Duke of
Edinburgh, brother of the late King Edward, for a policeman attached to
the British Ambassador, so exceedingly commonplace a person in
appearance, speech and manner he seemed; Louise has a telling chapter on
the mean looks of royalty, but fails to see the connection between that
and royalty's coarseness.

Perhaps it wasn't the "commonness" of Lady Emma Hamilton, child of the
slums, impersonator of _risque_ stage pictures, and mistress of the
greatest naval hero of all times, that appealed primarily to Louise's
grand-aunt, Queen Caroline of Naples, but the abandon of the beautiful
Englishwoman, her reckless exposure of person, her freedom of speech,
certainly sealed the friendship between the adventuress and the despotic
ruler who deserved the epithet of "bloody" no less than Mary of England.


_Covetous Royalty_

Royal covetousness is another subject dwelt on by Louise. We learn that
in money matters the kings and princes of her acquaintance--and her
acquaintance embraces all the monarchs of Europe--are "dirty," that
royal girls are given in marriage to the highest bidder, and that poor
princes have no more chance to marry a rich princess than a drayman an
American multi-millionaire's daughter.

Louise gives us a curious insight into the Pappenheim-Wheeler marriage
embroglio, and refers to some noble families that made their money in
infamous trades; that the Kaiser adopted the title of one of these
unspeakables ("Count of Henneberg") she doesn't seem to know.

We hear of imperial and royal highnesses, living at public expense and
for whom honors and lucrative employment are exacted from the people,
who at home figure as poor relations, obliged to submit to treatment
that a self-respecting "boots" or "omnibus" would resent.

Here we have a royal prince of twenty-four or twenty-five subjected to
kicks and cuffs by his uncle, who happens to be king--no indignity
either to the slugged or the slugger in that--but when a pretty princess
gets a few "_Hochs_" more than an ugly, mouse- majesty, she is
all but flayed for "playing to the gallery."

"High-minded" royalty robs widows and despoils orphans; re-introduces
into the family obsolete punishments forbidden by law; maintains in the
household a despicable spy system! Its respect for womanhood is on a par
with a Bushman's; of authors, "lickspittles" only count; literature,
unless it kowtows to the "all-highest" person, is the "trade of Jew
scribblers."


_Right Royal Manners_

As to manners, what do you think of kings and princes and grand-dukes
who, at ceremonial dinners, pound the table to "show that they are
boss"?

Louise tells of an emperor at a foreign court ignoring one of his
hostesses absolutely, even refusing to acknowledge her salute by a nod.
We hear of expectant royal heirs who engage in wild fandangoes of
merriment while their father, brother or cousin lies dying.

"Personal matter," you say? "A typical case," I retort.

"Ask the _Duc du_ Maine to wait till I am dead before he indulges in the
full extent of his joy," said the dying Louis XIV, when the _De
Profundis_ in the death chamber was suddenly interrupted by the sound of
violent laughter from the adjoining gallery. And the fact that almost
every new king sets aside the testament of his predecessor,--is this not
evidence of the general callowness of feeling prevailing in royal
circles?


_The Irish Famine and Royalty_

In famine times, the kings and princes of old drove the starving out of
town to die of hunger in the fields, and as late as 1772 one hundred and
fifty thousand Saxons died of hunger under the "glorious reign" of
Louise's grandfather-by-marriage, Frederick Augustus III. And the "Life
of Queen Victoria," approved by the Court of St. James, unblushingly
informs us that in 1847 "Her Most Gracious Majesty" was chiefly
concerned about investing to good profit the revenues of the Prince of
Wales, her infant son (about four hundred thousand dollars per annum).

Yet, while Victoria pinched the boy's tenants to extort an extra penny
for him, and "succeeded in saving all but four thousand pounds sterling"
of his imperial allowance, the population of Ireland was reduced two
millions by the most dreadful famine the world remembers!

Before the famine Ireland had a population of 8,196,597, against a
population of 15,914,148 in England and Wales, while Scotland's
population was 2,620,184.

Six years after the famine Ireland's population was 6,574,278,
Scotland's 2,888,742, England and Wales' 17,927,609. Today Ireland's
population is less than Scotland's, the exact figures being: Scotland
4,759,445, Ireland 4,381,951, England and Wales 36,075,269.


_Royalty Utterly Heartless_

However, as the waste of two million human lives, the loss of four
millions in population, subsequently enabled the Prince of Wales to tie
the price of a dukedom[3] in diamonds around a French dancer's neck and
to support a hundred silly harlots in all parts of Europe, who cares?

According to Louise and--others, royalty is the meanest, the most
heartless, the most faithless and the most unjust of the species--that
in addition she herself disgraced its womanhood, after the famous Louise
of Prussia rehabilitated queenship, is regrettable, but to call it
altogether unexpected would be rank euphemism.


_Louise's Character_

If Louise had lived at the time of Phryne, the philosophers would have
characterized her as "an animal with long hair"; if he had known her,
the great Mirabeau might have coined his pet phrase, "a human that
dresses, undresses and--talks" (or writes) for Louise; as a matter of
fact, she is one of those "_Jansenists_" of love who believe in the
utter helplessness of natural woman to turn down a good looking man.

Her great grand-uncle, Emperor Francis, recorded on a pane of glass
overlooking the courtyard of the Vienna _Hofburg_ his opinion of women
in the brief observation: "_Chaque femme varie_" (Women always change).

This is true of Louise and also untrue of her. While occupying her high
position at the Saxon court she was fixed in the determination to make a
cuckold of her husband, though Frederick Augustus, while a pumpkin,
wasn't fricasseed in snow by any means.

The process gave her palpitations, but, like Ninon, she was "_so_ happy
when she had palpitations."


_Changed Lovers Frequently_

As to lovers, she changed them as often as she had to, never hesitating
to pepper her _steady_ romances by playing "everybody's wife," chance
permitting, as she intimates naively towards the close of the Diary.

Qualms of conscience she knows not, but of pride of ancestry, of
insistence on royal prerogatives, she has plenty and to spare.

"My great grand-aunt, Marie Antoinette, did this"; "my good cousins
d'Orleans" (three of them) "allowed themselves to be seduced"; "_ma
cousine de_ Saxe-Coburg laughs at conventionalities,"--there you have
the foundation of the iniquitous philosophy of the royal Lais. And for
the rest--when she is queen, all will be well.


_Her Court--A Seraglio_

Louise's fixed idea was that, as Queen of Saxony, she had but to say the
word to establish a court _a la_ Catharine II; time and again she refers
to the great Empress's male seraglio, and to the enormous sums she
squandered on her favorites. If the Diarist had known that Her Majesty
of Russia, when in the flesh, never suffered to be longer than
twenty-four hours without a lover, Louise, no doubt, would have made the
most elaborate plans to prevent, in her own case, a possible
_interregnum_ of five minutes even.

She thought she held the whip hand because a king cannot produce princes
without his wife, while the wife can produce princes without the king;
besides Frederick Augustus was no paragon, and he who plants horns, must
not grudge to wear them.

A wanton's calculations, it will be argued,--but Louise's records show
that her husband, the king-to-be, fell in with her main idea,--that he
forgave the unfaithful wife, the disgraced princess, because, as Queen,
her popularity would be "a great asset."

And Americans, our women of whom we are so proud, are asked to bow down
to such sorry majesties!


_Sired and "Cousined" by Lunatics_

And is there no excuse for so much baseness in high places? Our royal
Diarist offers none, but her family history is a telling apology.

Be it remembered that Louise is not so much an Austrian as a
Wittelsbacher of the royal house of Bavaria that gave to the world two
mad kings, Louis II and Otho, the present incumbent of the throne,
besides a number of eccentrics, among others Louise's aunts, the Empress
Elizabeth and the Duchess d'Alencon, both dead; Crown Prince Rudolph of
Austria, her cousin, was also undoubtedly insane, the result of breeding
in and in, Austrian, Bourbon and Wittelsbach stock, all practically of
the same parentage, in a mad mix-up, the insane Wittelsbachers
predominating.

To cap the climax, Louise has eighteen or nineteen insane cousins on her
mother's side!

       *       *       *       *       *

Once upon a time Louise's prosaic and stupid great-uncle, as a young
husband, felt dreadfully scandalized when his Queen, Marie Antoinette,
bombarded him with spit-balls.

"What can I do with her?" he asked "Minister Sans-culotte" Dumouriez.

"I would spike the cannon, Sire," replied the courtier.

"_Enclouer le canon_," if performed in time, might have saved Louise,
but I doubt it.

    HENRY W. FISCHER.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: "Be civil, good people, I am the English hure," said Nell
Gwyn, addressing a London mob that threatened to storm her carriage,
assuming that its occupant was the hated Frenchwoman.]

[Footnote 2: "Your biography give a faithful portrait of self," said
Fontenelle, the famous French Academician, to an 18th Century Marquise,
"but I miss the record of your gallantries."

"_Ah, Monsieur, c'est que je ne me suis peinte qu'en buste!_" replied
her ladyship.]

[Footnote 3: The Prince of Wales' revenue is derived from the Duchy of
Cornwall, amounting to about half a million dollars per year.]




KITH AND KIN OF THE EX-CROWN PRINCESS OF SAXONY


_Louise's Own Family_

The royal woman whose life's history is recorded in this volume was born
Louise Antoinette, Daughter of the late Grand Duke Ferdinand IV of
Tuscany (died January 17, 1908) and the Dowager Grand Duchess Alice,
_nee_ Princess Bourbon of Parma.

       *       *       *       *       *

Louise has four brothers, among them the present head of the Tuscany
family, Joseph Ferdinand, who dropped the obsolete title of Grand Duke
and is officially known as Archduke of Austria-Hungary.

He is a brigadier general, commanding the Fifth Austrian Infantry, and
unmarried.

Better known is Louise's older brother, the former Archduke Leopold, who
dropped his title and dignities, and, as a Swiss citizen, adopted the
name of Leopold Wulfling. This Leopold is generally regarded as a black
sheep.

Louise more often refers to him in the present volume than to any other
member of her family.

He is now a commoner by his own, more or less enforced, abdication, as
Louise is a commoner by decree of her chief-of-family, the Austrian
Emperor, Francis Joseph, dated Vienna, January 27, 1903.

A month before above date the Saxon court had conferred on Louise the
title of Countess Montiguoso, while, on her own part, she adopted the
fanciful cognomen of Louise of Tuscany.

Of Louise's two remaining brothers, one, Archduke Peter, serves in the
Austrian army as Colonel of the Thirty-second Infantry, while Archduke
Henry is Master of Horse in the Sixth Bavarian Dragoons.

Only one of Louise's four sisters is married, the oldest, Anna, now
Princess Johannes of Hohenlohe-Bartenstein.

The unmarried sisters are Archduchesses Margareta (31 years old),
Germana (28 years old), Agnes (22 years old).

       *       *       *       *       *


_Mother Comes of Mentally Tainted Stock_

Louise's mother, _nee_ Princess Alice of Parma, is the only surviving
sister of the late Duke Robert, who left twenty children, all living,
and of whom eighteen or nineteen are either imbeciles or raving
lunatics, the present head of the house, Duke Henry, belonging to the
first category of mentally unsound.

Louise's first cousin, Prince Elias of Parma, the seventh son, is
accounted sound, but Elias's sister, Zita (the twelfth child), developed
maniacal tendencies since her marriage to Archduke Karl Francis Joseph,
heir-presumptive to the crown of Austria-Hungary.

       *       *       *       *       *


_Francis Joseph's Autocratic Rule_

_Louise Formerly in Line of Austrian Succession_

Louise was in the line of the Austrian succession until, upon her
marriage to the Crown Prince of Saxony (1891), she officially renounced
her birthrights.

Emperor Francis Joseph of Austria-Hungary is Louise's grand-uncle as
well as chief of the imperial family of Austria, the royal family of
Hungary, the Grand-ducal family of Tuscany (now extinct as far as the
title goes), and of the Estes, which is the Ducal Line of Modena,
extinct in the male line. Finally he is recognized as chief by the ducal
family of Parma, descendants of the Spanish Hapsburgs.

Emperor Francis Joseph rules all the Hapsburgers, Austrian, Hungarian,
and those of Tuscany, of Este, of Modena and Parma, autocratically, his
word being law in the family. Even titles conferred by birth can be
taken away by him, as exemplified in the case of Louise and her brother
Leopold.

       *       *       *       *       *


_Royal Saxons_

As a member of the Austrian imperial family, the Hapsburgers, founded in
883, Louise ranked higher than her husband, the Crown Prince of the
petty Kingdom of Saxony, whose claim to the royal title dates from
1806,--a gift of the Emperor Napoleon.

She married Frederick Augustus November 21, 1891, while the latter's
uncle reigned as King Albert of Saxony (1873 to 1902).

Louise's father-in-law, up to then known as Prince George, succeeded his
brother June 19, 1902. He was then a widower and his family consisted
of:

Princess Mathilde, unmarried,

The Crown Prince Frederick Augustus, husband of Louise,

Princess Marie-Josepha, wife of Archduke Otho of Austria,

Prince Johann George, at that time married to Isabelle of Wuerttemberg,
and

Prince Max. The latter subsequently shelved his title and entered the
Church July 26, 1896. He is a professor of canonical law and slated for
a German bishopric.

At the time of Prince George's ascension, there was also living the late
King Albert's widow, Queen Caroline, _nee_ Princess of Wasa, since
dead.

The Marchesa Rapallo, _nee_ Princess Elizabeth of Saxony, is a sister of
the late King George.


_Louise and Her Father-in-Law_

During King George's short reign, Louise ran away from the Saxon court,
end of November, 1902.

On February 11, 1903, divorce was pronounced against her by a special
court assembled by King George.

Louise was adjudged the guilty party and deprived of the name and style
of Crown Princess of Saxony. As previously (January 27) the Austrian
Emperor had forbidden her to use the name and title of Austrian
Archduchess and Imperial and royal Princess, Louise would have been
nameless but for the rank and title of Countess Montiguoso, conferred
upon her by King George.

       *       *       *       *       *


_Louise's Alimony Conditional_

At the same time Louise accepted from the court of Saxony a considerable
monthly allowance on condition that "she undertake nothing liable to
compromise the reigning family, either by criticism or story, either by
word, deed or in writing."

       *       *       *       *       *


_Frederick Augustus, King_

Upon his father's death, Frederick Augustus succeeded King George
October 15, 1904. He is now forty-seven years old, while Louise is
forty-two.

The King of Saxony has six children by Louise, three boys and three
girls, five born in wedlock, the youngest born without wedlock. The
children born in wedlock are:

    The present Crown Prince, born 1893.
    Frederick Christian, likewise born in 1893.
    Ernest, born 1896.
    Margaret, born 1900.
    And Marie Alix, born 1901.

The youngest Princess of Saxony, so called, Anna Monica, was born by
Louise more than six months after she left her husband and nearly three
months after her divorce.

Louise desired to retain Anna Monica in her own custody, but though the
child's fathership is in doubt, to say the least, Frederick Augustus
insisted upon the little one's transference to his care.

       *       *       *       *       *


_Allowance Raised and a Further Threat_

King Frederick Augustus raised Louise's allowance to $12,000 per year,
"which alimony ceases if the said Countess Montiguoso shall commit,
either personally, directly or indirectly, any act in writing or
otherwise liable to injure the reputation of King Frederick Augustus or
members of the royal family of Saxony, or if the said Countess
Montiguoso contributes to any such libellous publication in any manner
or form."

       *       *       *       *       *


_The Divorce of Royal Couple Illegal_

After divorce was pronounced against her, Louise declined to accept the
decree of the court, pronouncing the proceedings illegal on the ground
that both she and husband are Catholics and that the Roman Catholic
Church, under no circumstances, recognizes divorce. Her protest gained
importance from the fact that her marriage to Frederick Augustus was
solemnized by the rites of the Roman Catholic Church. The Saxon court,
on the other hand, justified its own decision by basing same on a
certain civil ceremony entered into by Louise and Frederick Augustus
previous to the church marriage.

       *       *       *       *       *


_Louise Marries a Second Time_

When Louise realized in the course of years that Frederick Augustus
would not take her back, she changed her mind as to the illegality of
