Albert of Prussia,
who is now Regent of the Grand Duchy of Brunswick. Old Prince Albert
of Prussia, his father, was married to the eccentric and half-crazy
Princess Marianne of the Netherlands. Not long after the birth of
the present Prince Albert, she lost her heart to such an extent to a
chamberlain in her household that her husband was compelled to divorce
her, whereupon she contracted a morganatic marriage with the gentleman
in question, and lived and died at an advanced age only about twelve
years ago.

Prince Albert, the elder, thereupon married morganatically a young
girl of noble birth of the name of Baroness Rauch, whose family had
for more than one hundred and fifty years occupied leading positions
at the Court of Berlin. On the occasion of her marriage to the prince,
she received from the Prussian Crown the title of Countess of Hohenau,
and the children whom she bore to Prince Albert the elder are now
known as Counts and Countesses of Hohenau. The elder of these Counts
Hohenau bears the name of Fritz, and his wife, before their banishment
from the capital, was one of the most dashing and brilliant figures
in the ultra-aristocratic society of Berlin. No entertainment was
regarded as complete without her presence, and in every social
enterprise, no matter whether it was a flower corso, a charity fair,
a hunt, a picnic, or amateur theatricals, she was always to the
fore, besides being the leader in every new fashion, and in every new
extravagance. Although eccentric--she was the first member of her sex
to show herself astride on horseback in the Thiergarten--and in spite
of her being famed as a thorough-paced coquette, and as a flirt,
yet no one ventured to impugn her good name, until the disgraceful
anonymous letter scandal; and both her husband and herself naturally
resent most keenly that without any hearing or explanation they should
have been banished from the court, and sent to live, first at Hanover,
then at Dresden, but always away from Berlin and Potsdam, solely on
account of an anonymous letter.

The sympathy of society in the affair was all with the Hohenaus, who
although absent from Berlin, may be said to have taken the leading
part in that great controversy which is known to this day as "the
anonymous letter scandal," and which not only divided all Berlin
society into separate hostile camps, but led to innumerable duels,
some of them with fatal results; to the imprisonment of some great
personag