The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe, Volume I. | Page 3

the manner in which he was brought up,
and which are certain to disappear with advancing years and
experience.
During his early manhood, Prince William was by no means a favorite
either at his grandfather's court or at that of any other foreign sovereign
which he was occasionally allowed to visit. Pale-faced and
delicate-looking, very severely treated by his mother, who is what one
is bound to call _une maîtresse femme_, the boy at seventeen was by
no manner of means prepossessing, and his efforts to assert himself,
and to crush down a good deal of natural awkwardness and timidity
added to his singularly unlikeable appearance.
In those days it could clearly be seen that everything that he did or said
was meant to create an impression of dignity and of grandeur, to which
his physique did not lend itself very easily, and the contrast between
him and his bosom friend the courteous, graceful and dashing Crown
Prince of Austria, was very marked.
Good-hearted and endowed with a great many truly generous instincts
the young fellow was, however, sorely handicapped by his education,
the abnormal strictness displayed towards him at the Court of Berlin,
and also by a continually and most distressingly empty purse. It is a
hard and almost pitiful thing for the heir apparent of a great empire to
find himself often without the necessary amount with which to cut the
figure which his social rank forces him to adopt, and it must have been
especially galling to the overbearing and proud nature of this boy to be
continually obliged to borrow from his friends, nay even from his aides
de camp, small sums wherewith to pay his way wherever he went.
Nevertheless his father and mother, then Crown Prince and Crown
Princess of Germany, believed it to be a thoroughly wholesome thing
for the young man to have to humble his pride, should he not be
content with the very small allowance made to him, this unfortunate
idea being, however, the cause of a great deal of bitterness, which to

this day has not completely faded from the heart of the now omnipotent
ruler of the German Empire.
It is undeniable that many eccentricities and false moves on the part of
William II. have been grossly exaggerated and placed before the public
in a false light, showing him up as a conceited, bumptious and silly
person, whereas not only his state of health, but his entourage should
have been blamed for whatever he did that was out of place. During a
great many years the young prince suffered from what is called
technically otitis media, namely, a disease of the middle ear, very
painful, exasperating and even somewhat humiliating to endure, and
which he must have inherited in some extraordinary way from his
great-uncle, King William IV. of Prussia, who died insane. There are
certainly some traits of resemblance between this hapless monarch and
the present occupant of the German throne, for in both there exists and
has existed the same exaggerated and narrow-minded religious beliefs,
bordering on mysticism, and also an all-embracing faith in their
absolute and unquestionable infallibility.
It has long since become a well-anchored creed that William II. has
occasional fits of insanity. This is by no means the case, but it must be
admitted that the peculiar malady to which I referred above, and which
is as yet not eradicated from his system, causes him, at times, days of
the most excruciating pains all over the back and side of his head, and
it is scarcely surprising that at such moments the emperor should act in
a way which astonishes the uninitiated. Indeed, William II. displays
extraordinary force of character in suppressing physical agony, when
the duties he owes to the state force him to come forward when unfit
for anything else but the sick room.
The truth of the matter is that there are but few who can boast of
knowing him well, and the masses as well as the classes both at home
and abroad seem to take a peculiarly keen delight in accepting for
gospel truth any sweeping statements made about him by the press of
all civilized countries.
Although twenty-nine years of age when he ascended the throne on
June 15, 1888, he may be said to have been at that time still but a raw

youth, continually kept in the background, and treated more or less like
a child, without any consequence or weight. It is, therefore, not
remarkable that the first years of his reign should have been signalized
by many errors of judgment; for it is not with impunity that one
suddenly releases a person, locked up for years in a dark room and
drives him into dazzlingly-lighted spaces without a guide, a
philosopher, or a friend by