Chapter 27The Way of PrincesFÜRSTENART
📖 This chapter with the German alongside →
On the way back, and round about, we found no room on the Greek ship. Everything was taken, and besides, the Grand Duke of Hesse1 was to travel on it with his suite, without prior notice. Katharina and I had the choice of spending the night either in the second-class dining saloon or in the common sleeping quarters with eight waiters. With a cabin of our own, admittedly, staked out with bed sheets. We preferred the waiters. By day I wandered about on deck, still thoroughly short of sleep, got up in enormous Greek pointed shoes of red leather. I passed a gentleman who was reading German newspapers. He looked at me and smiled. Then we fell into conversation. “I imagine you must be Hermione von Preuschen,” he said. And I: “Just as I believe I have His Royal Highness the Grand Duke of Hesse before me.”
“Quiet,” he said, “I am travelling incognito.”
And then we came into an ever more searching conversation. The prince, who was just back from India, said he could no longer bear the sight of “pale faces,” they seemed to him like dug-up “mealworms.”
Then I told him of the picture that was occupying me deeply at that moment, which I meant to paint shortly: “Moloch Love,” swinging the firebrand before a sea of skulls2. He seemed delighted by the idea; I said that I had already made the first studies for it in the cypress woods of Corfu. I was to be sure to send the picture to Darmstadt when it was finished, the prince would see what he could do for it.
We chatted for hours, of all the heights and depths, until the dinner bell sounded and parted us. The next day I went ashore with Katharina — still quite enraptured.
But in the night I had written a few lines besides, that I begged His Royal Highness to be allowed to lay my poems at his feet and — here my imagination ran away with me — that, as Michelangelo and Vittoria Colonna had been friends, I too hoped that a bond of friendship might join woman artist and prince for all time to come.
That I ought not to have done. That broke my neck with the Grand Duke. From that time on he no longer knew me; he even had two flower pieces of mine, which he had bought on his accession3, banished from the museum into back rooms. It cost me the favour of the Princess of Erbach as well. In Darmstadt I was from then on placed on the index for all time.
The humane Empress Frederick had made me forget that one may never speak to crowned heads — however gracious they may be — as one speaks to one's equals.
That was one more experience to deepen my bitterness.
Notes
Sources, identifications, and points where the German carries something English cannot. Added by this project; not in the original.
- ↑the Grand Duke of Hesse — Ernst Ludwig (1868–1937), Grand Duke of Hesse and by Rhine — Queen Victoria's grandson, the patron of the Darmstadt artists' colony on the Mathildenhöhe, and the sovereign of the city Preuschen was born in. The chapter says he was “gerade von Indien” — just back from India, travelling incognito. Ernst Ludwig's documented Indian journey was the winter of 1902–03, for the Delhi Durbar, which does not sit easily where the memoir puts this meeting, on the way back from her second Greek journey: her own dated articles put that journey in the first months of 1904, Corfu in January and Corinth in April (Berliner Tageblatt, 19 March and 20 April 1904), a year after his return. Three ways out, and the dates now favour the first, though only by inference: this return may belong to her first Greek journey rather than her second; the Grand Duke may have made a later eastern journey that is not recorded; or “just back from India” may be loose, twenty years after. It is a good example of the memoir's standing trap — it is arranged by place and theme, and its sequence is not a chronology. (Ernst Ludwig, Grand Duke of Hesse)
- ↑“Moloch Love,” swinging the firebrand before a sea of skulls — One of the four Symbolist titles known only from a list — and here is its origin, its subject and its date. She paints it in the next chapter. German Wikipedia names Moloch Liebe among her paintings with nothing attached: no description, no date, no image. This paragraph supplies all three. Moloch is the god of the Hebrew Bible to whom children were burned; she makes him Love, with a torch, in front of a sea of skulls, and the first studies are made in the cypress woods of Corfu in the year of the affair with a man half her age. The next chapter opens with her at work on it at the Villa Waldfrieden and mentions “das vollendete Molochmodell.” So the picture was finished. Whether it ever went to Darmstadt is answered, brutally, at the end of this chapter.
- ↑two flower pieces of mine, which he had bought on his accession — The most traceable fact in the chapter: two paintings bought for the Grand Ducal collections at Darmstadt in or about 1892, and demoted to a back room some ten years later on the sovereign's private grudge. Ernst Ludwig succeeded in March 1892, so the purchase belongs to his first year, when she was at the height of her Berlin reputation. The Grand Ducal museum's collections are now the Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt, and acquisitions of that period are documented: two flower pieces by Preuschen ought to be findable in the inventory books whether or not they still hang. It would be the only documented public purchase of her work we have, and the reason for its disappearance is here in one sentence — she wrote to a sovereign as to a colleague.