Later. The dispute was resolved as follows: we shall ride north past French lines to Maestricht and take passage on a canal-boat down the river to Nijmegen, where the Meuse and the Rhine almost kiss each other. That is some hundred miles north of here, yet it may be a quicker way to reach the Rhine than to cut east cross-country through God knows what perils and complications. In Nijmegen, Hans and Joachim can get the latest news from passengers and boatmen who have lately come down the Rhine from Heidelberg and Mannheim.
It did not take long, once we left our camp near Liege, to pass out of the zone of French military control. We rode over an area of torn-up ground that, until a few days ago, was the permanent camp of a French regiment. Ahead of us are a few French companies left along the border as a facade. They stop and interrogate travelers trying to come in, but ignore those like us who are only trying to pass out towards Maestricht.
On a canal-boat bound from Maestricht to Nijmegen. Conditions not very comfortable, but at least we do not have to ride or walk any more. Am renewing my acquaintance with soap.
I am in a cabin of a canal-ship making its way west across the Dutch Republic.
I am surrounded by slumbering Princesses.
The Germans have a fondness for faery-tales, or Marchen as they call them, that is strangely at odds with their orderly dispositions. Ranged in parallel with their tidy Christian world is the Marchenwelt, a pagan realm of romance, wonders, and magical beings. Why they believe in the Marchenwelt has ever been a mystery to me; but I am closer to understanding it today than I was yesterday. For yesterday we reached Nijmegen. We went direct to the bank of the Rhine and I began looking for a canal-boat bound in the direction of Rotterdam and the Hague. Hans and Joachim meanwhile canvassed travelers debarking from boats lately come from upstream. I had no sooner settled myself in a comfortable cabin on a Hague-bound canal-ship when Joachim found me; and he had in tow a pair of characters straight out of the Marchenwelt. They were not gnomes, dwarves, or witches, but Princesses: one full-grown (I believe she is not yet thirty) and one pint-sized (she has told me three different times that she is five years old). True to form, the little one carries a doll that she insists is also a princess.
They do not look like princesses. The mother, whose name is Eleanor, has something of a regal bearing. But this was not obvious to me at first, for when they joined me, and Eleanor noticed a clean bed (mine) and saw that Caroline-for that is the daughter’s name-was under my watch, she fell immediately into (my) bed, went to sleep, and did not awaken for some hours, by which time the boat was well underway. I spent much of that time chatting with little Caroline, who was at pains to let me know she was a princess; but as she made the same claim of the dirty lump of stuffed rags she bore around in her arms, I did not pay it much mind.
But Joachim insisted that the disheveled woman snoring under my blankets was genuine royalty. I was about to chide him for having been deluded by mountebanks, when I began to recollect the tales I had been told of the Winter Queen, who after being driven out of Bohemia by the Pope’s legions, wandered about Europe as a Vagabond before finding safe haven at the Hague. And my time at Versailles taught me more than I wished to know about the desperate financial straits in which many nobles and royals live their whole lives. Was it really so unthinkable that three Princesses-mother, daughter, and doll-should be wandering about lost and hungry on the Nijmegen riverfront? For war had come to this part of the world, and war rends the veil that separates the everyday world from the Marchenwelt.
By the time Eleanor woke up, I had mended the doll, and I had been looking after little Caroline for long enough that I felt responsible for her, and would have been willing to snatch her away from Eleanor if the latter had proved, upon awakening, to be some sort of madwoman (this is by no means my usual response to small children, for at Versailles, playing my role as governess, I had been put in charge of many a little snot-nose whose names I have long since forgotten. But Caroline was bright, and interesting to talk to, and a welcome relief from the sorts of people I had been spending time with for the last several weeks).
When Eleanor had arisen, and washed, and eaten some of my provisions, she told a story that was wild but, by modern standards, plausible. She claims to be the daughter of the Duke of Saxe-Eisenach. She married the Margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach. The daughter is properly called Princess Wilhelmina Caroline of Ansbach. But this Margrave died of smallpox a few years ago and his title passed to a son by an earlier wife, who had always considered Eleanor to be a sort of wicked stepmother (this being a Marchen, after all) and so cast her and little Caroline out of the Schlob. They drifted back to Eisenach, Eleanor’s place of birth. This is a place on the edge of the Thuringer Wald, perhaps two hundred miles east of where we are now. Her position in the world at that time, a few years ago, was the reverse of mine: she had a lofty title, but no property at all. Whereas I had no titles other than Slave and Vagabond, but I did have some money. At any rate, she and Caroline were suffered to dwell in what sounds like a family hunting-lodge in the Thuringer Wald. But she does not seem to have been much more welcome in Eisenach than she had been at Ansbach following the death of her husband. And so, while spending part of each year at Eisenach, it has been her practice to roam about and pay extended visits to shirttail relatives all over northern Europe, moving from time to time lest she wear out her welcome in any one place.
Recently she paid a brief visit to Ansbach in an effort to patch things up with her hostile stepson. Ansbach is within striking distance of Mannheim on the Rhine, and so she and Caroline next went there to look in on some cousins who had shown them charity in the past. They arrived, naturally, at the worst possible moment, a few days ago, just as the French regiments were swarming over the Rhine on the barges built at Haguenau, and bombarding the defensive works. Someone there had the presence of mind to pack them on a boat full of well-heeled refugees, bound down the river. And so they passed quickly out of the area of danger, though they continued to hear cannon-fire for a day or more, echoing up the valley of the Rhine. They reached Nijmegen without incident, though the boat was so crowded with refugees-some of them with suppurating wounds-that she was unable to take more than the occasional catnap. When they debarked, Joachim-who is a Person of Quality in the Palatinate-recognized them as they stumbled down the gangplank, and brought them to me.
Now the current of the Rhine slowly flushes us, and a lot of other war-flotsam, downstream towards the sea. I have oft heard French and Germans alike speak disparagingly of the Netherlands, likening the country to a gutter that collects all the refuse and f?ces of Christendom, but lacks the vigor to force it out to sea, so that it piles up in a bar around Rotterdam. It is a cruel and absurd way to talk about a noble and brave little country. Yet as I look on my condition, and on that of the Princesses, and review our recent travels (blundering about in dark and dangerous parts until we stumbled upon running water, then drifting downstream), I can recognize a kind of cruel truth in that slander.