They went to England, where she
outlived him ten years, and wrote her memoirs.
The custodian of the Schloss came at last, and the Marches saw instantly
that he was worth waiting for. He was as vainglorious of the palace as
any grand-monarching margrave of them all. He could not have been more
personally superb in showing their different effigies if they had been
his own family portraits, and he would not spare the strangers a single
splendor of the twenty vast, handsome, tiresome, Versailles-like rooms he
led them through. The rooms were fatiguing physically, but so poignantly
interesting that Mrs. March would not have missed, though she perished of
her pleasure, one of the things she saw. She had for once a surfeit of
highhoting in the pictures, the porcelains, the thrones and canopies, the
tapestries, the historical associations with the margraves and their
marriages, with the Great Frederick and the Great Napoleon. The Great
Napoleon's man Bernadotte made the Schloss his headquarters when he
occupied Ansbach after Austerlitz, and here he completed his arrangements
for taking her bargain from Prussia and handing it over to Bavaria, with
whom it still remains. Twice the Great Frederick had sojourned in the
palace; visiting his sister Louise, the wife of the Wild Margrave, and
more than once it had welcomed her next neighbor and sister Wilhelmina,
the Margravine of Baireuth, whose autobiographic voice, piercingly
plaintive and reproachful, seemed to quiver in the air.
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