s. The last known favourite was
Prince Max Egon von Fuerstenberg, a man now about fifty-four years
old, tall, handsome, possessed at one time of great wealth and a
commanding position in Austria as well as Germany, with the
privilege of citizenship in both countries. The Prince in his
capacity as Grand Marshal accompanied the Emperor, walking in
his train as the latter entered the White Hall at a great ball
early in the winter of 1914. The Emperor was stopping at the
Prince's palace in southern Germany at Donnaueschingen when the
affair at Zabern and the cutting down of the lame shoemaker there
shook the political and military foundations of the German
Empire. Prince Max together with Prince Hohenlohe, Duke of Ugest,
embarked, however, on a career of vast speculation in an
association known as the Princes' Trust. They built, for
instance, the great Hotel Esplanade in Berlin, and a hotel of the
same name in Hamburg, and an enormous combined beer restaurant,
theatre and moving picture hall on the Nollendorff Platz in
Berlin. They organised banks, and the name of the princely house
of Fuerstenberg appeared as an advertisement for light beer. They
even, through their interest in a department store on the east
end of the Leipziger Strasse, sold pins and stockings and ribbons
to the working classes of Berlin. As this top-heavy structure of
foolish business enterprise tumbled, the favour of Prince Max at
the Imperial Court fell with it. For the Emperor never brooks
failure.

During the present war Von Gontard, related by marriage, I
believe, to brewer Busch in St. Louis; von Treutler, who
represented the Foreign Office; von Falkenhayn, for a while head
of the Great General Staff and Minister of War, and the Prince of
Pless, and von Plessen with several minor adjutants, have
constituted the principal figures in the surroundings of the
Emperor. Falkenhayn fell because of his failure in the attack of
Verdun, ordered by him or for which he was the responsible
commander. Von Treutler probably told the truth; he was against
the breaking of the submarine pledges to America; and Prince
Pless, who remains still in favour, never took a decided stand on
any of these questions. Prince Pless, as Prince Max was, is rich.
His fortune before the war, represented mostly by great landed
estates in Silesia, mines, etc., amounted approximately to thirty
million dollars. His wife is an Englishwoman, once celebrated as
one of the great beauties