Princesses Behaving Badly by Linda Rodriguez McRobbie Page B
Authors: Linda Rodriguez McRobbie
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husband back in equal measure. During his frequent absences, she wrote him constantly, sparing no detail of her days, the children’s health, and life at court. She wrote, “My Lord, your absence has kindled a fire in me that does not abate.”
When Roxolana died in 1558 (of causes unknown), Suleiman was heartbroken. He built her a beautiful mausoleum, making her the first harem woman to be buried in such grandeur. The sultan died eight years later, suffering from gout, arthritis, an ulcer on his leg, and a blood feud for the throne between his two remaining sons.
Catherine Radziwill
T HE S TALKER P RINCESS
M ARCH 30, 1858–M AY 12, 1941
G ERMANY AND S OUTH A FRICA
O ver a few weeks in 1884, fashionable Europeans were shocked and scandalized, as well as highly amused, by the letters of one Count Paul Vasili published in a French magazine. The “count” was supposedly a diplomat at the Berlin court of Kaiser Wilhelm I, though everyone knew the name was a pseudonym.
Whoever he was, he appeared to have access to all the most important people, whom he ruthlessly skewered, calling them out by name and revealing their every fault. On Empress Augusta: “She is intriguing, false, and affected. She has no dignity and notion of propriety.… She surrounds herself with courtiers and favorites who are the first to speak ill of theirImperial mistress.” And the court: “Adultery flourishes like a plant in its chosen soil.… Virtue is among the number things regarded as useless. As to love, one meets with it rarely. In Berlin society, they take and quit each other according to their fancy.” About Berlin’s well-to-do
Frauen
: “The high-class Berlin woman neither reads, works, nor has any occupation. She passes her time in chattering, dressing and undressing, and seeking who will help her in these things. She has neither a serious idea in her head, not a worthy thought in her heart.… She is wanting in grace, education, and tact.” In short, Berlin was a tar pit of intolerance, provincial manners, sexual intrigue, gossip, and dissolution. The letters proved so popular that they were reprinted in a book called, appropriately enough,
Berlin Society
.
Not surprisingly, Berlin society wasn’t pleased. The royal court, seat of the German Empire, was only about 15 years old, and the city itself only lately raised from a unsophisticated, dirt-road backwater. Its inhabitants were a bit touchy about that fact, and to see themselves mocked by someone who’d been allowed into the inner circle was just too much. The real writer, however, was not a diplomat at all but one of their own—26-year-old Princess Catherine Radziwill.
B ITING THE H AND T HAT F EEDS
Born Countess Ekaterina Adamevna Rzewuska, the daughter of an exiled Polish noble in what is now Ukraine, Catherine grew up in a castle haunted since the days when a family member decided to brick his mother alive in the tower in order to get his inheritance. At age 15, Catherine was married off to Prince Adam Karl Wilhelm Radziwill, a 28-year-old Polish exile living in Berlin. It was a quick and drab ceremony. In 1873 Catherine, who’d spent time in Paris and St. Petersburg, made her entrance into Berlin society; she was not impressed.
Catherine always had an acerbic wit, which she now used to show her disdain for the kaiser’s newly established court; one British ambassador noted that she was feared in court for her “mordant tongue.” Encouraged by her aunt (widow of the French writer Honoré de Balzac), Catherine turned her sharp observations into words, first through letters and thenlater in the scathing and anonymous
Berlin Society
.
Gossip was all well and good, but what Catherine was really passionate about was politics, a sphere that, as a woman, she could never fully inhabit. When not pregnant (she had five children by age 22), she spent her days listening to speeches at the German Parliament. Her thwarted political ambitions turned her toward journalism, and
When Roxolana died in 1558 (of causes unknown), Suleiman was heartbroken. He built her a beautiful mausoleum, making her the first harem woman to be buried in such grandeur. The sultan died eight years later, suffering from gout, arthritis, an ulcer on his leg, and a blood feud for the throne between his two remaining sons.
Catherine Radziwill
T HE S TALKER P RINCESS
M ARCH 30, 1858–M AY 12, 1941
G ERMANY AND S OUTH A FRICA
O ver a few weeks in 1884, fashionable Europeans were shocked and scandalized, as well as highly amused, by the letters of one Count Paul Vasili published in a French magazine. The “count” was supposedly a diplomat at the Berlin court of Kaiser Wilhelm I, though everyone knew the name was a pseudonym.
Whoever he was, he appeared to have access to all the most important people, whom he ruthlessly skewered, calling them out by name and revealing their every fault. On Empress Augusta: “She is intriguing, false, and affected. She has no dignity and notion of propriety.… She surrounds herself with courtiers and favorites who are the first to speak ill of theirImperial mistress.” And the court: “Adultery flourishes like a plant in its chosen soil.… Virtue is among the number things regarded as useless. As to love, one meets with it rarely. In Berlin society, they take and quit each other according to their fancy.” About Berlin’s well-to-do
Frauen
: “The high-class Berlin woman neither reads, works, nor has any occupation. She passes her time in chattering, dressing and undressing, and seeking who will help her in these things. She has neither a serious idea in her head, not a worthy thought in her heart.… She is wanting in grace, education, and tact.” In short, Berlin was a tar pit of intolerance, provincial manners, sexual intrigue, gossip, and dissolution. The letters proved so popular that they were reprinted in a book called, appropriately enough,
Berlin Society
.
Not surprisingly, Berlin society wasn’t pleased. The royal court, seat of the German Empire, was only about 15 years old, and the city itself only lately raised from a unsophisticated, dirt-road backwater. Its inhabitants were a bit touchy about that fact, and to see themselves mocked by someone who’d been allowed into the inner circle was just too much. The real writer, however, was not a diplomat at all but one of their own—26-year-old Princess Catherine Radziwill.
B ITING THE H AND T HAT F EEDS
Born Countess Ekaterina Adamevna Rzewuska, the daughter of an exiled Polish noble in what is now Ukraine, Catherine grew up in a castle haunted since the days when a family member decided to brick his mother alive in the tower in order to get his inheritance. At age 15, Catherine was married off to Prince Adam Karl Wilhelm Radziwill, a 28-year-old Polish exile living in Berlin. It was a quick and drab ceremony. In 1873 Catherine, who’d spent time in Paris and St. Petersburg, made her entrance into Berlin society; she was not impressed.
Catherine always had an acerbic wit, which she now used to show her disdain for the kaiser’s newly established court; one British ambassador noted that she was feared in court for her “mordant tongue.” Encouraged by her aunt (widow of the French writer Honoré de Balzac), Catherine turned her sharp observations into words, first through letters and thenlater in the scathing and anonymous
Berlin Society
.
Gossip was all well and good, but what Catherine was really passionate about was politics, a sphere that, as a woman, she could never fully inhabit. When not pregnant (she had five children by age 22), she spent her days listening to speeches at the German Parliament. Her thwarted political ambitions turned her toward journalism, and
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