The Princess Priscillas Fortnight | Page 2

lingering there with her serenity and ripeness, her calm skies and her
windless days long after the Saxons and Prussians have lit their stoves
and got out their furs. There figs can be eaten off the trees in one's

garden, and vineyards glow on the hillsides. There the people are
Catholics, and the Protestant pastor casts no shadow of a black gown
across life. There as you walk along the white roads, you pass the
image of the dead Christ by the wayside; mute reminder to those who
would otherwise forget of the beauty of pitifulness and love. And there,
so near is Kunitz to the soul of things, you may any morning get into
the train after breakfast and in the afternoon find yourself drinking
coffee in the cool colonnades of the Piazza San Marco at Venice.
Kunitz is the capital of the duchy, and the palace is built on a hill. It is
one of those piled-up buildings of many windows and turrets and
battlements on which the tourist gazes from below as at the realization
of a childhood's dream. A branch of the river Loth winds round the
base of the hill, separating the ducal family from the red-roofed town
along its other bank. Kunitz stretches right round the hill, lying clasped
about its castle like a necklet of ancient stones. At the foot of the castle
walls the ducal orchards and kitchen gardens begin, continuing down to
the water's edge and clothing the base of the hill in a garment of
blossom and fruit. No fairer sight is to be seen than the glimpse of these
grey walls and turrets rising out of a cloud of blossom to be had by him
who shall stand in the market place of Kunitz and look eastward up the
narrow street on a May morning; and if he who gazes is a dreamer he
could easily imagine that where the setting of life is so lovely its days
must of necessity be each like a jewel, of perfect brightness and beauty.
The Princess Priscilla, however, knew better. To her unfortunately the
life within the walls seemed of a quite blatant vulgarity; pervaded by
lacqueys, by officials of every kind and degree, by too much food, too
many clothes, by waste, by a feverish frittering away of time, by a
hideous want of privacy, by a dreariness unutterable. To her it was a
perpetual behaving according to the ideas officials had formed as to the
conduct to be expected of princesses, a perpetual pretending not to see
that the service offered was sheerest lip-service, a perpetual shutting of
the eyes to hypocrisy and grasping selfishness. Conceive, you tourist
full of illusions standing free down there in the market place, the
frightfulness of never being alone a moment from the time you get out
of bed to the time you get into it again. Conceive the deadly patience

needed to stand passive and be talked to, amused, taken care of, all day
long for years. Conceive the intolerableness, if you are at all sensitive,
of being watched by eyes so sharp and prying, so eager to note the least
change of expression and to use the conclusions drawn for personal
ends that nothing, absolutely nothing, escapes them. Priscilla's sisters
took all these things as a matter of course, did not care in the least how
keenly they were watched and talked over, never wanted to be alone,
liked being fussed over by their ladies-in-waiting. They, happy girls,
had thick skins. But Priscilla was a dreamer of dreams, a poet who
never wrote poems, but whose soul though inarticulate was none the
less saturated with the desires and loves from which poems are born.
She, like her sisters, had actually known no other states; but then she
dreamed of them continuously, she desired them continuously, she read
of them continuously; and though there was only one person who knew
she did these things I suppose one person is enough in the way of
encouragement if your mind is bent on rebellion. This old person, cause
of all the mischief that followed, for without his help I do not see what
Priscilla could have done, was the ducal librarian--Hofbibliothekar,
head, and practically master of the wonderful collection of books and
manuscripts whose mere catalogue made learned mouths in distant
parts of Europe water and learned lungs sigh in hopeless envy. He too
had officials under him, but they were unlike the others: meek youths,
studious and short-sighted, whose business as far as Priscilla could see
was to bow themselves out silently whenever she and her
lady-in-waiting came in. The librarian's name was Fritzing; plain Herr
Fritzing originally, but gradually by various stages at last arrived at the
dignity and sonorousness of Herr Geheimarchivrath Fritzing. The