He is fulfilling the
prediction that he made of himself when he was twenty-one: "When I come
to reign I shall have no friends; I shall only have dupes."
More infatuated with himself than ever, the Emperor wears his mystic
helmet _a la_ Lohengrin, tramples the purple underfoot and has the
throne surrounded by his life-guards, wearing the iron-plated bonnets
of the days of Frederick II. Thus he deludes himself with the dream of
absolute authority. His mania for power is boundless, his pride knows
no limits. He recognises only God and Himself.
To his recruits, he says: "After having sworn fidelity to your masters
upon earth, swear the same oath to your Saviour in Heaven!"
But in his moments of solitude, in the privacy of the potentate's
toilet-chamber, must it not be dreadful for him to reflect that his
silver helmet rests on ears that suppurate, that his voice comes from a
mouth afflicted with fistula of the bone, and that there are days when
his sceptre is at the mercy of the surgeon's knife?
December 11, 1890. [17]
The rumour has spread, and has not yet been authoritatively
contradicted, that William is suffering from disease of the brain. Is
not this in itself good and sufficient reason to make him wish to prove
that no one in his Empire can do as much brain work as he can? We,
whose minds are so confused in the endeavour to follow William's
movements at a distance, where little things escape us, can imagine
what it must be to observe them from close at hand!
One of the chief glories of his reign will be to have produced the
diagnosis of a new disease, "locomotor Caesarism" of the restless type.
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