For the greater part of two centuries after the close of the Thirty Years War there existed in Germany some two hundred independent states. It is with two of these, lying in the midst of what was once the Hercynian forest, which tract even then, although in slow process of clearing, retained much of its primitive, desolate wildness, that the events of the following story are concerned.
And it may be well to premise, seeing that nowadays in story-telling the realms of imagination have often a two-fold meaning, literal as well as metaphorical, that, though the embroidery of this tale may be fanciful, the ground upon which it is worked is of the substance called fact. For the once secret chronicles of these two hundred kingdoms, principalities, palatinates, bishoprics, duchies, landgravates and what not form very pretty reading to the student of humanity; and the dull atmosphere of much pettiness and fatuous pomp is lighted up in welcome fashion by occasional stars of romance. And, after all, apart from the favourable soil they find in that traditional land of the romantic, these flowers which continually spring up amid the dull herbage are easily accounted for. For what is romance but the opposite of the humdrum? And is not human nature the same all the world over, flourishing even when found in the stifling confinement of a formal and etiquette-bound court? And does not young and healthy humanity rebel against the humdrum, and fight tooth and nail against its own repression?
Thus it came about that the somewhat dramatic romance of the following pages was played upon a fitting stage, with a change of scenes, the royal palace, and the castle in the wood, homes respectively of the heroine and the villain of the piece. The actors have been dead and forgotten for more than a century, although they live in their types to-day, the style of their playing alone being changed. The weak sovereign, the ambitious, astute, unscrupulous minister, the brave, chivalrous hero, the heroine for whom pride and love and policy are desperately fighting—at least we all know her—the cold, imperious beauty with the burning heart. And the unprincipled man-of-the-world, self-indulgent and scheming to his own gratification, at least he is not extinct, nor is the weakly ambitious plotter who would grasp the fruit but fears to climb the tree, and the evil councillor who for the benefit of his own desperate fortunes eggs him up.
With quieter methods they are in our midst to-day. They are walking through their parts with just as much determination of spirit as was theirs who fought and strutted and fretted and postured in the days before life was so carefully toned down—in the days of this story. And that the story is in the main true the annals above mentioned can vouch, even if the events may not in the reality have welded themselves together just as here set down with a mind for the reader’s patience as well as his hoped-for entertainment.
