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Updated: April 30, 2025
You are merely allowed a choice of two outcomes: first, marriage with Prince Roland; second, imprisonment in Pfalz Castle, situated in the middle of the Rhine." "What is that?" demanded the Countess. "I am tired of repeating my statements." "You would imprison me me, a Countess of Sayn?"
"My Lord, my Lord!" cried Roland, raising his hand, "you do not know all." "Patient Heaven!" cried the irritated Archbishop, "you make too much of us as father confessors. Do not tell us now you have been guilty of assassination!" "No, my Lord, but you should know that I have married the Lady Hildegunde, Countess von Sayn, whom you have already rejected as Empress."
Always they were in the shade, a comforting feature of a midsummer journey, an advantage, however, soon to be lost when they crossed the Rhine by the ferry to Coblentz. The distance from Sayn Castle to Schloss Stolzenfels was a little less than four leagues, so their early start permitted a leisurely journey. The Archbishop and the Countess rode side by side.
This being done, and Treves once more returned, Mayence said: "I am sure we all realize that the Countess von Sayn, however admirable in other respects, possesses an independent mind and a determined will rendering her quite unsuited for the station we intended her to occupy.
All that has been related happened generations before the time when the Countess Hildegunde reigned as head of the House of Sayn, but Father Ambrose formed a link with the past in that he was the present scion of Sayn who, as a Benedictine, daily offered prayer for the repose of the wicked Henry III. The gold which Henry's immediate successor so craftily deflected from the monks seemed to be blessed rather than cursed, for under the care of that subtle manager it multiplied greatly in Frankfort, and scandal-mongers asserted that besides receiving the usury exacted, the pietistic Count tapped the treasure-casks of upward-sailing Rhine merchants quite as successfully, if more quietly, than the profane Henry had done.
"Countess von Sayn," he began, and thus his ward realized how deeply she had offended, "in all my life I never met any young man who impressed me so favorably as Prince Roland of Germany. If I possessed a daughter whom I dearly loved, I could wish her no better fortune than to marry so honest a youth as he.
The Archbishop of Cologne did not reply, but stood with bent head and frowning brow. It was the Countess von Sayn who, rising, spoke: "My Lord Archbishop of Mayence," she said, "I could never forgive myself if through action of mine a fatal struggle took place between my countrymen. I have no desire to enact the part of Helen of Troy.
These letters, written in French, have been translated and published in the "Allgemeine Musik Zeitung," to which they were given by the Princess Marie Hohenlohe, the daughter of Princess Caroline Sayn Wittgenstein, Liszt's universal legatee and executor, who died in 1887. His frail, weak body was visibly unfitted for the strength and force of his genius.
Any one man is little missed in this world, and my comrades supposed that I was invited to the Court, and had forgotten them as I saw they had forgotten me, so I said nothing of my adventure, but mounted my waiting horse and journeyed back to the Castle of Sayn." For a long time there was silence between the two, then the younger spoke.
The tension this astonishing revelation caused was relieved by a laugh from the Archbishop. "My dear Hildegunde, you are forgetting your own ancestors. I venture that no woman of the House of Sayn talked thus when the Emperor Rudolph marched Count von Sayn to the scaffold.
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