rness is
frivolous, if not altogether reprehensible.

* * * * *

_March 10, 1895._

Frederick Augustus drinks. He says I drive him to drink by my attitude
towards his beloved family. What the beloved family does to me doesn't
count, of course.

Drinking was one of the vices of his youth. Love for me cured him of the
dreadful habit. As this love wanes, the itch for alcohol increases.

I can't do anything with him when he is drunk, and at such times I am
afraid of him. He both nauseates me and frightens me. Sometimes he comes
home "fighting drunk." The fumes of wine, beer and _Schnapps_, mixed
with tobacco, upset my stomach and I try to avoid his coarse embrace as
any decent woman would.

What does this royal drill-ground bully do? He unsheathes his sword and
threatens to cut my liver out, unless I instantly doff my clothes and go
to bed with him.

Prince George's evil counsel wasn't powerful enough to procure me
beatings, but my husband's military education, his love of discipline,
backed by alcohol, thrusts a sword into his hand, and, if I refuse to
comply with his atrocious demands, I am liable to be treated like so
many "mere" civilians that are sabred in the public streets for refusing
to do some spurred and epauletted blackguard's bidding, or entertain his
insults.

If the Socialists, who are forever railing against these self-same army
poltroons, only knew it! An Imperial Highness threatened like a small
"cit" with a four-foot sword in the hand of a drunken Royal Highness and
dragged to a couch with no more ceremony than a street-walker passing a
Cossack barracks!

The howl that would go up in the Diet, or the _Reichstag_, the fulminant
denials by prince and king and government! And if I really did get hurt
in one of these fracases, Frederick Augustus would be sure of a "severe
reprimand" by father and uncle, and perhaps by the Kaiser, too, but
would that heal my wounds, would it save me from death? Would it even
prevent Prince George from saying that I myself was to blame?

No, no, I like a whole skin and prefer an embrace to a sword-thrust any
day, like my ancestress, the Queen of Naples, who consummated the
marriage forced upon her on the spot and in sight of the army rather
than have her head cut off. Too bad she was hanged in the end despite
her complacency.[5]

Indeed, if Frederick Augustus shows the mailed fist, I don't stand on
ceremony, but I do wish he wou