r.

Few women have been more loyal to their native country than Elizabeth of
Orleans. A day or two before her death she said: "In everything I am
now, what I have been all my life, wholly German. I despise those
Germans who, from choice, speak and write habitually in a foreign
tongue. Such sycophants are not worth a hair."

More fully than any other woman of her day, Elizabeth of Orleans
represents the nobler side of German womanhood in a period of national
debasement.

CHAPTER IX

WOMAN HELD IN TIGHTENING BONDS

Vice was the keynote of the first half of the eighteenth century in
Europe. The moral miasma rising from that sink of iniquity, the late
court of Louis XIV., and, infinitely more, that of Louis XV., enveloped
Germany. Every little German court imagined itself a Versailles. Each
German princeling esteemed himself a "Sun god." Mistresses were
considered as necessary furnishings to every palace as tables or chairs.
Augustus the Strong, of Saxony, is said to have been the father of three
hundred and fifty-four illegitimate children. Vice spread through all
ranks, often blighting the innocent no less than the guilty woman.
Everywhere woman was man's toy. Faded, broken, ruined, she might be cast
aside at his caprice. Without semblance of law, he might hold her
captive, as in the case of the beautiful Baroness Cosel, a discarded
mistress of Frederick Augustus of Saxony, who was kept in prison for
fifty years by his majesty's command. Later, as we shall see, the wife
of Prince George Louis of Hanover afterward George I. of England
suffered a similar fate.

War continued. There were no long intervals of peace. Drunkenness, if
possible, increased; certainly it did not decrease. Obscene practical
jokes were constantly played. Ordinary conversation was interlarded with
indecent words and the most vulgar phrases. Society was rotten to the
core.

In a dumb, sub-conscious sort of way, the coarse eighteenth century felt
that its balance wheel was badly out of gear, and it attempted, though
futilely, to remedy the lawlessness born of vice and war by hedging in
each class, almost each individual, of the social order by a thousand
petty ceremonials. The eighteenth century was the age of etiquette. Rank
was cringingly worshipped. Titles became of paramount importance in the
eyes of the middle classes. Borne satirizes this title worship:

"I divide the Germans into two classes those who are Aulic Councillors,
and