That Landgrave of Hesse who wished to create a
second Potsdam in Pirmasens, and was made blissful by the thought that
he could hold his court in the tobacco-reeking guard-room, who
celebrated the greatest triumph of his reign when he had his entire
grenadier regiment manoeuvre in the pitch-dark drill-hall without the
least disorder occurring in the ranks, he is a real Rococo figure, for
by his mad fancies he humorously destroyed the long pigtail appended to
his actions.
A prince in those days had to be a virtuoso of personality. At the same
time the etiquette of the Courts, which amounted to the most rigid
conformity to rules, formed a strange contradiction to the ambition of
the individual prince to shine as an original. It is this same
contradiction which also characterizes the art and science of that time,
the contradiction between academic conformity to rules and the most
arbitrary scroll work, the contradiction between the Pigtail and the
Rococo. An old hack-blade of a German prince of the Empire, finding at a
state dinner that a foreign prince had loaded too much meat upon his
plate, without more ado took away half of it, and this incident
admirably denotes the struggle of the age between arbitrariness and
etiquette. In order to revenge the slight offense committed against
etiquette by the prince, and guest, the host is guilty of a far greater
one, and his act was without doubt admired as a real stroke of genius.
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