ivalry, so long as the first place
(and this she knew) in her husband's heart was unassailably her own.

Picture our Cinderella now in all her new splendours, moving as a Queen
among her courtiers, receiving the homage of princes and ambassadors as
her right, making her voice heard in the Council Chamber, and holding
her _salon_, to which all the great ones of the earth flocked to pay
tribute to her beauty and her gifts of mind. It was a strange
transformation from the barracks-kitchen to the Queendom of one of the
greatest Courts of Europe; but no Queen cradled in a palace ever wore
her honours with greater dignity, grace, and simplicity than this
daughter of an army bandsman.

The days of the empty purse were, of course, at an end. She had now her
ten thousand francs a month for "pin-money," her luxuriously appointed
palace at Charlottenburg, and her Berlin mansion, "Unter den Linden,"
with its private theatre, in which she and her Royal lover, surrounded
by their brilliant Court, applauded the greatest actors from Paris and
Vienna. It is said that many of these stage-plays were of questionable
decency, with more than a suggestion of the garden of Eden in them; but
this is an aspersion which Madame de Rietz indignantly repudiates in her
"Memoirs."

While Wilhelmine was thus happy in her Court magnificence, varied by
days of "delightful repose," at Charlottenburg, France was in the throes
of her Revolution, drenched with the blood of her greatest men and
fairest women; her King had lost his crown and his head with it; and
Europe was in arms against her. When Frederick William joined his army
camped on the Rhine bank, Wilhelmine was by his side to counsel him as
he wavered between war and peace. The fate of the coalition against
France was practically in the hands of the trumpeter's daughter, whose
voice was all for peace. "What matters it," she said, "how France is
governed? Let her manage her own affairs, and let Europe be saved from
the horrors of bloodshed."

In vain did the envoys of Spain and Italy, Austria and England, practise
all their diplomacy to place her influence in the scale of war. When
Lord Henry Spencer offered her a hundred thousand guineas if she would
dissuade her husband from concluding a treaty with France, she turned a
deaf ear to all his pleading and arguments. Such influence as she
possessed should be exercised in the interests of peace, and thus it was
that the vacillating King deserted hi