It is conducted with no small comfort and splendour. When there are
balls, though there may be four hundred people at supper, there is a
servant in scarlet and lace to attend upon every four, and every one is
served on silver. There are festivals and entertainments going
continually on, and the Duke has his chamberlains and equerries, and
the Duchess her mistress of the wardrobe and ladies of honour, just
like any other and more potent potentates.
The Constitution is or was a moderate despotism, tempered by a Chamber
that might or might not be elected. I never certainly could hear of
its sitting in my time at Pumpernickel. The Prime Minister had
lodgings in a second floor, and the Foreign Secretary occupied the
comfortable lodgings over Zwieback's Conditorey. The army consisted of
a magnificent band that also did duty on the stage, where it was quite
pleasant to see the worthy fellows marching in Turkish dresses with
rouge on and wooden scimitars, or as Roman warriors with ophicleides
and trombones--to see them again, I say, at night, after one had
listened to them all the morning in the Aurelius Platz, where they
performed opposite the cafe where we breakfasted. Besides the band,
there was a rich and numerous staff of officers, and, I believe, a few
men. Besides the regular sentries, three or four men, habited as
hussars, used to do duty at the Palace, but I never saw them on
horseback, and au fait, what was the use of cavalry in a time of
profound peace?--and whither the deuce should the hussars ride?
Everybody--everybody that was noble of course, for as for the bourgeois
we could not quite be expected to take notice of THEM--visited his
neighbour. H. E. Madame de Burst received once a week, H. E. Madame de
Schnurrbart had her night--the theatre was open twice a week, the Court
graciously received once, so that a man's life might in fact be a
perfect round of pleasure in the unpretending Pumpernickel way.
That there were feuds in the place, no one can deny. Politics ran very
high at Pumpernickel, and parties were very bitter. There was the
Strumpff faction and the Lederlung party, the one supported by our
envoy and the other by the French Charge d'Affaires, M. de Macabau.
Indeed it sufficed for our Minister to stand up for Madame Strumpff,
who was clearly the greater singer of the two, and had three more notes
in her voice than Madame Lederlung her rival--it sufficed, I say, for
our Minister to advance any opinion to have it instantly contradicted
by the French diplomatist.
Everybody in the town was ranged in one or other of these factions. The
Lederlung was a prettyish little creature certainly, and her voice
(what there was of it) was very sweet, and there is no doubt that the
Strumpff was not in her first youth and beauty, and certainly too
stout; when she came on in the last scene of the Sonnambula, for
instance, in her night-chemise with a lamp in her hand, and had to go
out of the window, and pass over the plank of the mill, it was all she
could do to squeeze out of the window, and the plank used to bend and
creak again under her weight--but how she poured out the finale of the
opera! and with what a burst of feeling she rushed into Elvino's
arms--almost fit to smother him! Whereas the little Lederlung--but a
truce to this gossip--the fact is that these two women were the two
flags of the French and the English party at Pumpernickel, and the
society was divided in its allegiance to those two great nations.