But, for once, Frederick found that he had made a mistake.  The Prince, robbed of the woman he loved, took the bit in his teeth, and plunged so deeply into extravagant dallying with ballet-dancers and stars of the opera that the King was glad to choose the lesser evil, and to summon Wilhelmine back to her Prince’s arms.  One stipulation only he made, that she should make her home away from the capital and the dangerous allurements which his nephew found there.

Now at last we find Cinderella happily installed, with the King’s august approval, in a beautiful home which has since blossomed into the splendours of Charlottenburg.  Here she gave birth to a son, whom Frederick dubbed Count de la Marke in his nurse’s arms, but who was fated never to leave his cradle.  This child of love, the idol of his parents, sleeps in a splendid mausoleum in the great Protestant Church of Berlin.

As a sop to Prussian morality and to make the old King quite easy, a complaisant husband was now found for the Prince’s favourite in his chamberlain, Herr Rietz, son of a palace gardener; and Frederick William himself looked on while the woman he loved, the mother of his children, was converted by a few priestly words into a “respectable married woman”—­only to leave the altar on his own arm, his wife in the eyes of the world.

The time was now drawing near when Wilhelmine was to reach the zenith of her adventurous life.  One August day in 1786 Frederick the Great drew his last breath in the Potsdam Palace, and his nephew awoke to be greeted by his chamberlain as “Your Majesty.”  The trumpeter’s daughter was at last a Queen, in fact, if not in name, more secure in her husband’s love than ever, and with long years of splendour and happiness before her.  That his fancy, ever wayward, flitted to other women as fair as herself, did not trouble her a whit.  Like Madame de Pompadour, she was prepared even to encourage such rivalry, 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.”