impugning the legitimacy of the only child of the princess, being thus
circulated far and wide. This vile fabrication alleged that Charlotte
had been married off in a hurry to Prince Bernhardt of Saxe-Meiningen,
in order to avoid a public scandal. It is only necessary to recall the
fact that the sole child of Princess Charlotte, Princess Fedora, now
married to Prince Henry of Reuss, was born twelve months after her
mother's marriage, in order to show how utterly without foundation was
this shameful slander. At least a dozen anonymous letters sent to the
emperor and to various other personages dealt with an episode said to
have taken place during a trip undertaken by the princess in Norway
and Sweden. She was attended on that occasion by a Captain von Berger,
and his wife, who were her gentleman and lady-in-waiting, and there
was also in her suite a diminutive officer holding the rank of
lieutenant, and bearing the old Silesian name of Count Schack, who
acted as aid-de-camp.

According to the anonymous letters, Princess Charlotte made a kind
of toy of the little officer, and behaved in a most volatile manner.
There was evidence of such intense malignity in these letters against
Princess Charlotte that they were attributed to a jealous woman,
and that if not actually written by one, they had at any rate been
inspired by a member of the fair sex.

There can be no doubt that Princess Charlotte and her husband ended by
sharing the opinion entertained by the Schrader-Hohenau clique, about
the letters being inspired by Baroness Kotze, and written by her
husband, and it must be confessed that there was a certain amount of
ground for their doing so. The blotting pads used by Baron Kotze,
both at the Union Club and elsewhere, were subjected to much the
same microscopic examination as those of Duke Ernest-Gunther of
Schleswig-Holstein, and when at length a distinct degree of similarity
was discovered to exist between the caligraphy of the anonymous
letter writer and the impressions which figured on the blotting pads
habitually used by Baron Kotze, Baron Schrader drew up a report on the
subject, charging Baron Kotze with being the author of the letters,
and presented it to the emperor. The latter hesitated a little before
taking any action in the matter, and would doubtless have yielded
to the advice of the minister of the imperial household, Prince
Stolberg-Wernigrode, who urged him to institute a very careful secret
investigati