Inhaltsangabe
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1920 Excerpt: ... HIGH LIFE CHAPTER I 66 I AHE Lac des Alpes is very blue, Papa, is it I not?" remarked the Princess Lydia, standing at the broad French window that looked out upon the terrace of the villa and upon the lake below. "It is blue," replied His Late Royal Highness Georges IV of Constantia-Felix, with a laugh, "but it is not so blue as most of us who have come to live near it are." The witticism, if it be that, was not one of his most famous. But it was not lacking in a certain gallantry, in the circumstances. The conversation was in English. When old Charles of Constantia had been a boy the royal family had always spoken French--it was a tradition from the days when the Margrave of Beyreuth, sister of Frederick of Prussia, naturally wrote all her letters and her memoirs in that tongue. But even as far back as Georges' boyhood the British governess and tutor had begun to invade the courts of Continental Europe and by the time Lydia was growing up English had become the commonest language of royal interiors. There was of course the Constantian dialect, which 1 chauvinistic Constantians tried to pretend was a language. But it had never had great vogue in the palace at Lichtenmont. In the northwestern province, old Constantia, some of His Royal Highness's subjects spoke German. But then, as Georges once lightly said to an American lady at Cannes, one so rarely spoke to one's subjects. In any case, he had further explained, too many Prussians employed the language ever to make it a gentleman's tongue. He had taken something of this snobbish tone in 1914. Whatever his subjects' feelings may or may not have been, Constantia-Felix had not entered the war on the German side. Neither had it gone with the Allies; indeed it was, at the end, although a very tiny one, almost t...
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