IV
Well, Raoul Vignerte! What are you after now? What’s this new craze of yours? Why! only a few weeks ago you didn’t know in the morning where your dinner was coming from. Your acme of happiness was to be certain of the next day’s meals. Here you are certain not only of tomorrow’s, but next month’s, and even for years to come. You have only to devote yourself to your work—work, the only thing that brings no regret. And with all this you are unhappy, not merely unhappy, but actually miserable. You are more miserable than on the day when you arrived at the Gare d’Orsay, turning out your pockets to see if you could find a proper tip for the porter without changing your one gold piece, which, once broken into, would vanish all too quickly. What is the cause of your suffering? Your cursed imagination. Isn’t it because you know that henceforth all the beauties of Paris, all the treasures of France, could not satiate the longings within you? She! a beauty, a Grand Duchess! Poor fool! You called yourself an anti-romanticist and used to make fun of the Romantic Drama. Yet here you are, when it suits your purpose, repeating all unconsciously the adventure of Ruy Blas, lackey to Monseigneur the Marquis de Finlas. Is this what your gods, Le Play and Auguste Comte, have brought you to? You are a funny creature! Why, the queen of your dreams is even further from you than from that little red Hussar with his elegant indolence, rank, and a coat-of-arms to back him....
I got to work and gradually found that the dust of the library chased away my envy, hatred and regret. I accustomed myself to the idea that I should never set foot in the left wing of the palace. I liked to think that she dawdled out life there with her Melusine, and that I was never made for such a place. I deliberately intended to take away from my visit to Lautenburg everything I thought could help or amuse me. In two years’ time I should have saved five or six thousand francs and collected material for three or four books. I would return to Paris, and with my methodical industry and the memory of what I had missed, would make her mine. After all, Paris was better than this scornful, barbaric beauty!
Professor Thierry had drawn up an excellent plan of campaign, and the further I explored the library, the more I appreciated his wisdom. The history of the German dynasties contemporary with Louis XIV. sheds a wonderful light on his reign, throwing its natural attraction into greater relief. The single preoccupation of German princelings towards the close of the seventeenth century was to imitate the King of France, the usual method being to secure the services of artists, or pupils of artists, who had worked for him. But while every French seigneur made a point of having a particular artist to work exclusively for him, it is amusing to see how the Germans usually clubbed together to share the expense of commissioning some particular painter, sculptor, or gardener. It reminds one of the way in which poor Parisian families club together to buy a sack of vegetables or a whole lamb at the Halles.
I discovered among the archives most of the estimates of the French painters and sculptors who worked not merely for the Dukes of Lautenburg and Detmold, but also for the Dukes of Lüneburg-Celle and the Electors of Hanover. Ernout executed most of the statuary groups in the gardens. Gourvil, a pupil at La Quintinie, laid them out. Lesigne, a pupil of Lebrun, was commissioned to do the frescoes. A Catalan, Giroud, was in charge of the iron and locksmith’s work. Zeyer, a painter in lacquer and instructor to Princess Sophie-Dorothea, has left some charming work on the doors of the Herrenhausen Palace at Hanover and of the Palace of Lautenburg.
Their accounts were hotly disputed by the stewards of these Sovereigns, and in many cases the princes themselves did not hesitate to suggest reductions in their own hands. I examined with great interest a long bill of Giroud’s, exhibited by that artist before a Hanover tribunal in 1690, to justify his charges for the installation of a number of secret springs at the Herrenhausen. Duke Ernest-Augustus, the future Elector, failed to establish his case for reduction. At that date, at any rate, Hanover had judges who judged.
I had decided in principle to confine my researches to the influence of France on the Courts of Germany in the seventeenth century. I had at my disposal a mass of documents, more than enough for Professor Thierry’s purpose and comprising material for a book of my own. It is to that Zeyer, lacquer artist and instructor to Princess Sophie-Dorothea, that I owe the extension of my original plan. I found among his accounts a transcript of his evidence before the Commission of Enquiry which tried the unhappy Hanoverian sovereign. He is thus responsible for the events which were to follow.
Vignerte stopped, thought a moment and then put an unexpected question.
“Do you know the dramatic story of Count Philip Christopher of Königsmark?”
For answer I repeated the following lines:
The Count of Königsmark once loved a queen,
Became the queen’s own lover, so folk say,
In her own room, censed with fresh-burnt verbene
When nights were young as when they died to-day.
What idle thoughts she poured into thy mind
Who could declare, what idle tales she told
As beaded bluebells all the while she twined
With hearts’ ease in her locks of russet gold.
“The author of those lines,” said Vignerte, “had read Blaze de Bury’s book. It is the only useful work in French on the tragedy. Do you remember it?”
“I’m afraid I’ve forgotten most of it,” I confessed.
“I shall have to give you the story in some detail. It will not explain my own adventure. It makes it even more extraordinary.”
You will certainly remember what was the general situation in the State of Hanover in 1680. Its sovereign was Ernest-Augustus, a profligate versed in all the arts of statesmanship, who had been successively Bishop of Osnabrück, and Duke and Elector of Hanover. His brother, George-William, was Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg. Ernest-Augustus had a son, George: George-William a daughter, Sophie-Dorothea.
The ambitions of Ernest-Augustus had a double goal. His primary aim was to recover his brother’s estates for his family. There was only one method—to marry George to Sophie-Dorothea. The marriage took place in 1682 when the Duchess of Brunswick-Lüneburg was only sixteen.
The other ambition of Ernest-Augustus soared higher. It was the crown of England. Fortune favoured him. One after another the twelve children of Queen Anne were gathered by death. Ernest-Augustus was not to see the fulfilment of his work—he died in 1698—but his son George reaped its fruits. On the death of Queen Anne in 1714 he mounted the throne of Great Britain as George I. He mounted it alone. Eighteen years before he had separated from his wife as the result of an infamous intrigue, and when her husband assumed the crown of England the wretched Sophie-Dorothea was dragging out her weary days in the Castle of Ahlden, more prison than palace.
You must forgive me for this dry summary of facts. It is essential I should be clear.
The story of Sophie-Dorothea’s divorce is the story of the assassination of Count Philip-Christopher von Königsmark.
A member of one of the highest and most ancient Swedish families, friend of the Prince-Elector of Saxony, as dark and handsome as Sophie-Dorothea was fair and lovely, Count Philip and the Duchess of Brunswick-Lüneburg had known each other at Celle in their childhood when they were affianced in the ingenuous manner of the times. Their ways had parted, however, and Philip had led the adventurous life of a gallant Swedish free-lance at the Courts of James II. and Louis XIV., at Dresden and Venice.
Was Sophie-Dorothea’s marriage a spur to his old love or a blow to his vanity? Whatever the reason, the fact remains that one fine morning Hanover witnessed the arrival of Count Philip von Königsmark.
The Court of the Elector was a den of debauch, a garbage-heap on which Sophie-Dorothea, fair lily, was slowly fading. Betrayed by a husband whom she had ever despised, compelled to tolerate, as gracefully as she could, the virago Countess von Platen, the abject favourite of Ernest-Augustus, she spent her weary life in solitude, preoccupied solely with the education of her two children—a son who was destined for the throne of England, and a daughter who was one day to be Queen of Prussia.
Then Königsmark arrived at Hanover and the drama opened.
Count Philip had come to take his revenge by winning back the heart of Sophie-Dorothea. But before he had even set eyes on her Countess von Platen had her eye on him. He deemed it wise not to flout the all-powerful favourite, but he was obliged to go to great lengths in order to soothe the susceptibilities of that woman—a Messalina and Lady Macbeth in one. He went, in fact, to the furthest limit. Once compromised, she would be in his power—but it was he who found himself in her clutches.
Then began the idyll of Philip von Königsmark and Sophie-Dorothea. The gloomy Herrenhausen Palace witnessed their ephemeral loves. Sophie-Dorothea’s first notion was that the gallant Count had come to Hanover only to see for himself the misery and desertion of her who had been compelled by her father’s wishes to marry another. His practically open liaison with Countess von Platen added fresh torture to her lot. But one morning, going with her lady-in-waiting to the little wood in the Herrenhausen park where she sat out every day, she spied the Count just moving off. A note was left on the seat, with these lines, in the style of Benserade:
In other days a fickle swain was I;
Upon the green from lass to lass
At any hour I’d lightly pass;
Only a change, this pleased my eye
But since I’ve seen my fairest Sylvia’s face,
From her my love no more can range,
I’ll make one last supreme exchange.
From her I’ll never change my place.
Was Sophie-Dorothea Königsmark’s mistress? I still doubt it, even after reading their correspondence in the archives of La Gardie. But I must freely confess that it must have been quite impossible to doubt it in so corrupt a Court as Hanover, where it was common knowledge that Duke George’s wife received the handsome Swedish adventurer every evening in her apartments.
The vindictive Countess von Platen was the last to know that she was the laughing-stock of the whole palace, but that day the doom of both Count and Duchess was sealed.
On the evening of Saturday, July 1st, 1694, Königsmark, returning to his room, found on his table a note with a few words scribbled in pencil:
Princess Sophie-Dorothea will expect Count Königsmark this evening, after ten.
This note, a forgery imitating Sophie-Dorothea’s handwriting, was the work of Countess von Platen. Königsmark, unsuspecting and brave as a lion, kept the appointment. He left the Princess at two in the morning.
Next morning Sophie-Dorothea saw from her balcony two men furtively wandering in the park as if they had lost something. They were Count Philip’s servants searching for their master. He was never to be seen again, by them or any one else.
There you have the tragedy, my friend. There remains the dénouement, the divorce of Sophie-Dorothea. That unhappy young woman of twenty-eight lived in a world of enemies. She wished to leave her husband, who was a nightmare to her, but was prevented by the wishes of her father, who had forced a marriage on her for political reasons. A love-sick girl could not be allowed to upset the pretty scheme which had the throne of England as its possible goal. The unhappy creature refused to lend herself to it. She was dangerous for other reasons. The Swedish Count had relations. And so she was duly divorced after a trial in which she suffered every outrage and humiliation. Her children were taken out of her care, and ultimately the wife of the King of England, once more plain Duchess, died a prisoner in her Castle at Ahlden in 1726. Then only did the parental fury relent. The vaults of the castle in which she was born were opened to her corpse. There, in the obscurest corner of the crypt of the keep of Celle, is a humble coffin, bearing no inscription. It contains the mortal remains of Sophie-Dorothea, wife of the Elector George-Lonis of Hanover, King of England under the name of George I.
I have outlined, as briefly as I could, the story of Philip von Königsmark and Sophie-Dorothea. I need hardly say that many points in the tragedy have never yet been cleared up. The assassination of the Count is undoubtedly the most obscure incident in the whole affair. Witnesses agree that it was Countess von Platen who set the trap in which he perished. Ten hired assassins pierced him with their swords and the horrible Countess herself dealt him the final blow. But what was done with the corpse? This is where the mystery begins.
Opinions are divided. Was the Count, as some say, buried in a grave in the park? Or, according to another version which I have reasons to believe the true one, was his corpse covered with quick-lime and thrown under the stone floor of the room known as the “Knights’ Hall”? Or was it simply cast into the latrines which communicated with the Lüne flowing at the foot of the castle, as the author of the “Secret History”2 would have us believe? Was his the corpse, as Horace Walpole asserts, which was discovered twenty years later under the floor of a retiring-room in the Herrenhausen? I only put these problems to explain to you, though to me it still remains inexplicable, my feverish resolution to solve them. You may well imagine that the mystery was more vivid and intriguing to me than to any other man, partly because of the situation at the palace, with its many points of resemblance to that in which the tragedy took place, and partly because of the priceless material at my disposal in the ducal library.
The most valuable authority till then available was the correspondence of Königsmark and Sophie-Dorothea, to be found in the archives of the La Gardie Library at Loeberod in Sweden. This correspondence was discovered by Professor Palmblad, who published extracts from it at Upsala in 1851. When Professor Thierry in taking leave of me had referred me to Palmblad’s work, he hoped that at Lautenburg I should be able to discover a portion of the correspondence, which wandered all over Germany before finding a definite home at Loeberod. I was, however, unable to find anything, though I had compensation for my disappointment in another and most fruitful discovery.
You remember I spoke of Sophie-Dorothea’s daughter a short time ago. She married the Crown Prince of Prussia, the future “Drill-Sergeant King,” Frederick I. “A harsh and tyrannical husband,” as Blaze de Bury writes, “his first act, on mounting the throne, was to forbid his wife formally to hold any sort of communication with the prisoner of Ahlden. It was only when Sophie-Dorothea had inherited from her mother a revenue of twenty thousand crowns, a very considerable sum in those days, that the royal miser began to soften towards her, though his sudden concern was purely mercenary, being based solely on his wife’s possible interest in the inheritance, an interest which the celebrated jurisconsult, Thomasius, had laboured to establish.”3
The Queen of Prussia was the meekest of women, but, urged on secretly by her confessor, she had never ceased to reproach herself for not having boldly taken her captive mother’s part, convinced as she was of her innocence. She began to take advantage of her forbidding husband’s better moments to collect the material on which to base proceedings to clear her character. Unfortunately Sophie-Dorothea died in 1726. This did not deter her royal daughter from pursuing her labour of love. Thanks to her resolution and the learned assistance of the jurisconsult Thomasius already mentioned, an enormous dossier, comprising some twelve hundred documents, was prepared. It established beyond doubt Sophie-Dorothea’s innocence and Countess von Platen’s ignominy. This monument of filial devotion was never to serve any practical purpose. An anonymous note at the top of the file records that on the representations of George II., King of England, communicated to his brother-in-law, Frederick I. of Prussia through the British Minister, the rehabilitation suit was never begun. The English King observed to his sister, not without truth, that every piece of evidence disproving their mother’s guilt only established their father’s.
The submissive Prussian Queen yielded to the force of this political argument. The file, a monument of futile industry, after various wanderings recorded in the note I have mentioned, ended by falling in 1783 into the hands of the Grand Duchess Charlotte-Augusta of Lautenburg, niece of the reigning sovereign. It was this very file that I had the good fortune to discover among the uncatalogued manuscripts in the ducal library at the end of January, 1914. From the original notes of the cross-examination of Fräulein von Knesebeck, Sophie-Dorothea’s confidante, to the record of Countess von Platen’s confession,4 had before me everything required to reconstruct the story of the mysterious Herrenhausen drama. In the casual manner of historians in dealing with uncatalogued manuscripts I carried off to the privacy of my room the six packets containing the whole melancholy story.
What a pageant of love and chivalry, crime and passion, grandeur, life and death, was unrolled for me in its musty pages and clerkly script in divers tongues! At night, when the castle was asleep, I pulled my table up to my glowing log fire and worked in a kind of burning frenzy. Here I touched history, live history, not the poor second or third hand imitation which was doled out to us, according to syllabus, from the Sorbonne Library. I will admit, I must admit, that the fumes of romance mingled with the soulless passion for knowledge that seized my very being. The Court of Hanover danced before my eyes, fantastic and brutal—Ernest-Augustus, the Silenus of politics; George-Louis, the narrow-minded profligate; Countess von Platen, the fearsome Messalina, beautiful and winning notwithstanding; Königsmark, the swarthy adventurer in his blood-stained doublet of pink and gold; pure-souled Sophie-Dorothea, fair and slender in her wedding gown of silver brocade.
Silver, did I say? There spoke the historian, the maker of books. But oh! how much fairer, how much nearer, I imagined her in another gown, a gown fresh in my mind! A gown of green velvet!
Winter was almost over, already yielding to the spring. I had opened my window to help my fire to draw, and through it the air wafted in with the magic touch of living breath. Through the darkness I felt the presence of the black trees, their bare branches quivering with the promise of life.
Several times, my friend, my dear friend—when death hovers overhead why should I not confess those follies which are the price and glory of life for men like ourselves?—under the spell of that old story of a gallant, murdered lover and a fair dead Queen, and impelled by an instinct the sureness of which Fate was in due course to reveal, I pushed open the door of my room with a beating heart. The corridor was dark. The old staircase creaked beneath my steps. Often in the great hall I had seen the lantern of the sleeping watchman. What on earth should I have said, had I been challenged?
The open postern exposed a great steel blue vault in the middle of which mysterious Cassiopeia seemed to shiver. I went out, crossing the moon-bathed lawns, hiding in the shadows of the yews. A light shone in the centre wing of the palace. The Grand Duke Frederick-Augustus must be a late worker! All was dark in the left wing, but when I reached the end of the building and pressed myself against the wall I knew that here, too, there were some who kept late hours.
Spring was not yet with us, but one felt that the song of the nightingale would soon be heard. Bright and spearlike, a ray of light spanned the gravel path, emanating from another window dark with heavy hangings and curtains.
The nightingale was not yet singing in the French park, embedded in the heart of that Germany whither Fate had led me. But behind that window a poignant long-drawn wail, interrupted at intervals by maddening silences that made my nerves quiver with apprehension, came slowly and softly from the silent palace straight to my heart. For Fräulein von Graffenfried was playing Schumann’s most plaintive berceuses to her mistress on her violin.
Notes
2Secret History of the Duchess of Hanover, published in London in 1732, without the author’s name but attributed to Baron von Bielefeld, chargé d’affaires of the Court of Prussia at Hanover. For this and later references I have amplified Vignerte’s particulars with the aid of Blaze de Bury’s articles, which appeared first in the Revue des Deux Mondes and were collected into one volume, the “Episode de l’Histoire du Hanovre, Les Königsmark,” in 1855.
3Blaze de Bury: “Episode de l’Histoire du Hanovre.” Notes and evidence, p. 378.
4A duplicate in manuscript of this confession, entitled “Funeral Oration of Countess C. E. von Platen,” may be seen in the archives of Vienna.