Kaiserin's Crown

Some three years ago the jeweled crown of H. M. Augusta Victoria, late Kaiserin of Germany, vanished mysteriously from the Imperial palace, Unter den Linden. Since this pompous trinket of gold and jewels is valued at $875,000, many a detective has been vainly seeking it. Last week a clue was found.

The former court jeweler of Wilhelm II confessed to the police that the crown was brought to him in a leather hatbox, shortly after its disappearance, by a man who claimed to represent Wilhelm of Doorn. The jeweler was instructed to contract the circumference of the crown. Dutifully he set to work. When he began it was of a size to encompass the swelling blond mane of Augusta Victoria, daughter of the Duke of Schleswig-Holstein. When he completed his task, it had shrunk to a nice fit for the modish head of Hermine, Princess von Reuss, present consort of Wilhelm, one-time Imperator et Rex.

The jeweler expressed his belief that when Hermine and Wilhelm were married (1920), she was secretly crowned Kaiserin of Germany, by which title she is said to be addressed at Doom. The detectives, having pondered well this tale, reflected that it brought them no nearer to recovering the crown, which was originally seized by the provisional government after the Kaiser's flight from Germany.

Augusta Victoria. Memories stimulated by this incident recalled that the late Kaiserin was one of the best intentioned and least fortunate of loving mothers, consorts, empresses. Her futile attempts to hold the fickle love or even the attention of Wilhelm II became a byword and a jest at court.

While Wilhelm earned his nickname "the Route Kaiser" by traveling and philandering about Europe, his dutiful consort busied herself at Berlin or Potsdam with the preparation of some "pleasant surprise" to divert him on his return.

Once, it is told, she painted with her own hands all the furniture in the antechamber of Their Majesties' bedroom a bright and cheerful green. Characteristically, Wilhelm chanced to return, 48 hours before he was expected from the particular little journey which had given the Kaiserin this opportunity to please him. He returned in the night and with a sufficiently bad cold not to notice the smell of fresh paint. Flinging his clothes upon a chair in the anteroom, he donned his night garments, sat down for a moment upon another chair, slipped within the snowy Imperial sheets. . . .