Читать книгу Court Life From Within онлайн

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I was overtaken there. The lady-in-waiting—who was very shrewd—as soon as she missed me, found out from my sister that I had threatened to run away, and she guessed that I would go to the apple-woman’s farm, since it was the only place near by where I had ever been. They brought me back home, but they had all been frightened, and I began to get my own way. For example, there was always a maid sleeping in our room at night, and I did not wish it—as much, perhaps, because she snored as because I wanted our bedroom for ourselves. When they insisted that the maid must be there, I dragged my bed into the corridor every night, until they gave me a room to myself in which I could at least sleep without being guarded. I would not wear tight clothes, and I put my hands down inside my waist-band when they were dressing me, so that they could not fasten tight things on me; and in this way I avoided many tiresome affairs of ceremony, which I disliked.

These are very trivial matters to recall, but consider that it is one of the chief pleasures of most royal persons to dress themselves in costume and play the parts of resplendent figure-heads that have never been allowed to think, or see, or know anything for themselves. The small restraints against which a healthy body made me struggle in infancy were the attempted beginnings of those impassable walls of isolation and ignorance and inexperience from which, in later years, I should never have escaped.