The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe, Volume I. | Page 5

and full of shadows, showing their surroundings, describing as far as possible the atmosphere in which they move, the conditions of life which they are obliged to consider, the temptations to which they are exposed--and to which they sometimes succumb--and when I have completed my task I venture to believe that the readers of these volumes, while they may find the two emperors neither quite so blameless, nor yet quite so bad as they expected, may nevertheless experience a greater degree of sympathy and regard for them as being after all so extremely human.

CHAPTER II
While Emperor Francis-Joseph is justly reputed to have played sad havoc with the hearts of the fair sex in his dominions, especially in his younger days, having inherited that frivolity with regard to women which is a traditional characteristic of the illustrious House of Hapsburg, he has never at any moment during his long reign permitted his susceptibility to feminine charms to go to the length of influencing his political conduct, or the action of his government.
Emperor William, on the other hand, whose married life has been, from a domestic point of view, singularly blameless, and who has been an exceptionally faithful husband, has, in at least two instances, permitted himself to be swayed in his r?le of sovereign by ladies, who for a time figured as his "Egerias." One of them was a woman of extraordinary cleverness, and an American by birth, who while she has long since ceased to exercise any influence upon him, has retained the affection and the regard of both his consort and himself. She is the Countess Waldersee, daughter of the late David Lee, a wholesale grocer of New York, and who at the time that she became the wife of Field-marshal Count Waldersee, was the widow of the present German empress's uncle, Prince Frederick of Schleswig-Holstein. The latter abandoned his royal rank and titles, and assumed the merely nobiliary status of a Prince of Noer, in order to make her his consort.
The countess is treated as an aunt by both William and the kaiserin, and she may be said to have swayed her imperial nephew by her cleverness and intellectual brilliancy, rather than by her looks, for she is a woman already well-advanced in years.
Different in this respect was the influence of the emperor's other Egeria, namely, the Polish baroness, Jenny Koscielska, a woman of rare elegance and beauty, whose political importance during the time she reigned supreme at the Court of Berlin, was attributable to her personal fascination rather than to her sagacity or statecraft. She is the wife of that Baron Kosciol-Koscielski, who was one of the most celebrated leaders of the Polish party in the Russian House of Lords, and perhaps, also, the most popular of all modern Polish poets and playwrights.
It would be going too far to assert that William was infatuated by her loveliness. Yet there Is no doubt that as long as she figured at the Court of Berlin, he not only paid her the most marked attention, but likewise allowed himself to be advised by her in political matters. It was during the so-called "reign of the baroness" that the kaiser showed such an extraordinary degree of favor to his Polish subjects as to excite the jealousy and ill-will of the people in many other parts of his dominions. He reestablished the Polish language in the schools and churches of Posen, that is of Prussian-Poland, nominated a Polish ecclesiastic to the archbishopric of that province, and conferred so many court dignities, government offices, and decorations upon the compatriots of the fair Jenny, as to give rise to the remark that the best road to imperial preferment at Berlin was to add the Polish and feminine termination of "ska" to one's name. Old Prince Bismarck, who was at the time at daggers-drawn with his young sovereign, at length gave public utterance to the popular ill-will, excited by the r?le of Egeria, which the baroness was accused of playing to the "Numa Pompilius" of Emperor William. For, in the course of an address delivered by the old ex-chancellor at Friedrichsr��h, and reproduced in extenso in the press, he declared among other things that: "The Polish influence in political affairs increases always in the measure that some Polish family obtains of more or less influence at Court. I need not allude here to the r?le formerly played by the princely house of Radziwill. To-day we have exactly the same state of affairs, which is to be deplored!" Bismarck's allusion to the Radziwills was an ungenerous reference to the romantic attachment of old Emperor William for that Princess Elize Radziwill, whom he was so determined to marry that he offered his father to abandon his rights of succession to the throne on her account. This King