THE PRINCE OF ORANGE.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 662, 31 October 1884, Page 6

THE PRINCE OF ORANGE.

Gossip about the recently deceased Heir to the Dutch Throne—other members of his family. The Prince of Orange was a complete antitheses of his elder brother, the gross, rubicund, beer-swilling “ Citron,” to whose position of heir-apparent he succeeded a few years ago, says a Paris letter to the New York Tribune. The Prince was always of a weakly constitution. His father’s sins were visited upon him in a manner so striking as to have filled the heart of the late Queen Sophie with bitterness. He had weak, poorly-developed bones, weak muscles, a weak vascular system, weak eyes, a sickly pale complexion, white hair, and nerves that were always on edge. But his mind was active, and if he was too shy to be sociable he loved tenderly the few intimate friends he had, and not only adored his mother but was her sympathising companion. She was the only woman with whom he ever conversed freely. He had a bashful terror of the fair sex, and kept aloof persistently from them. Since Queen Sophie died he tried to cheat loneliness by filling a great house, in which he sat, with rare birds. He had a passion for ornithology, but, unlike most ornithologists, had an aversion for stuffed birds. The bird that was not the incarnation of joy wa3 to him no bird. Its song, its light hop, its winged flight were what constituted its charm to him.

The Prince of Orange, though of studious habits and of a pensive and sensitive disposition, loved with passionate fondness his elder brother, whose death following so soon that of his mother gave a rude shock to his frail health and threw him into a state of gloom against which he was too weak to react. He published a short time ago a kind of an apology for the complete retirement in which he lived, a pamphlet in which, after unveiling his heart-sores, he recommended the Dutch people to follow the movement of the age and revise their constitution in a democratic sense. Not that he had any personal sympathy with democracy. But he felt that protection might be found in it for the independence of Holland. The Prince, by his weak nerves, refined tastes, delicate nature and birth, was aristocratic. But he saw that the spirit of the times was

against hereditary privileges and that the Netherlands risked being Germanised through the extinction of his branch of the house of Nassau, if they did not get into the democratic current. He refused to be present at his father’s second wedding, and it is said (but of this I am not sure) he never spoke to his stepmother nor saw his little half-sister, the Princess Pauline. Paternal sins are also visited on her in the form of a bad constitution.

The King of the Netherlands is a descendant of Catherine the Great of Russia and the Prince of Orange. Her ruling vice was inherited by his Majesty, who was the Sultan of a singing school for young girls, which he founded. His first passion was for Alalibran, with whom he wanted to elope to Gretna Green, and in whose son, M. de Beriot, the accomplished pianist, he has never ceased to take a paternal interest. Of the King’s unacknowleged sons, one is a Baron and a landscape painter of talent, but a spendthrift and always in pecuniary difficulties. The Prince of Wales has tried to make him fashionable by going to visit his studio here. Another son is a journalist and Paris correspondent for an Amsterdam journal. He is, however, not depending for his living on his pen, and resides in a charming little villa at Passy, with his pretty, simplemannered and very ladylike Dutch wife. This gentleman is the image of the late Czar, to whom he was related through Catherine and the Prussian royal family, a Prussian Princess having been the mother of the Prince of Orange, who married AnnaPaulowna, and an aunt of the Czar Nicholas. Emilie Ambre, was the last favorite of the actual King of the Netherlands, who filled her buffets with rare old Chinese porcelain and delft. He cast her off when he determined to marry a Princess of Waldeck-Pyr-mont. She succeeded Alme. Alusard, n<3e Cook, who deserted the King for his eldestson, and finally went out of her mind. His Majesty gave her the Orange estate in America and jewels which rivaled those of the regalia which the Empress Eugenie used to wear on State occasions.

•‘Lemon” (citron), as the late Prince of Orange was called, was a lo'w scamp. He had a coarse, bloated face and figure, and lived in a licensed lodging-house because if' he had been in a habitation of his own his creditors would have seized his furniture. There was always a keg of beer on tap in his dining-room. He was very fond in the carnival of disguising himself as a waiter and! serving in restaurants which remained open all night and were frequented by authors, artists, gilded Bohemians, and professionallygay beauties. The illness of which he died (pneumonia) was rendered fatal by his incapacity to resist the temptation of getting out of bed and running across from the RueScribe, where he lodged, to the Bal de l’Opera. He remained there a quarter of anhour, fell ill, and went back in the teeth of asharp blast, was taken with a shivering fit, and then became delirious.

A Princess (failing heirs male) can ascend the throne of Holland. But a fear arisesthat Bismarck has chosen to consider the Duke of Nassau as the next inheritor not only to the Duchy of Luxemburg but to the Netherlands. If he came to reign at The Hague he would be brought there by a German army and maintained by one. After Princess Pauline, who is in her third year, come the Grand Duchess of Saxe-Weimar, the Princess of Wied, both sisters of the King, and Prince Albert of Prussia, whose mother was Princess Alarianne of the Netherlands. Prince Henry, the King’s uncle, married a daughter of Frederick Charles of Prussia after he had lost his first wife. He died six months after his second wedding of measles at his seat near Luxemburg, of which Duchy he was viceroy. A will in which he left his enormous personal and other estate to his young wife was stolen, so that she, instead of being the richest widow in Europe, has only an income of 45,000 dels, a year. Prince Leopold wished to marry her, but she preferred not to be hissick nurse and recommended the Princess Helena of Waldeck-Pyrmont, who was also spoken highly of by the Grand Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt.

The King has a nephritic affection forwhich he is taking the waters of Carlsbad. He was too feeble and suffering too much to go back to The Hague, even in a specially constructed car, to take a last farewell of his son. The Prince of Orange was called Alexander, after the late Czar. He was to have followed the example of his father and grandfather in being graduated at Oxford.. But the Queen, his mother, was too much afraid that his weak health would suffer by residence in an English university to let him go there. After she lost her son Alaurice and saw that “ Lemon ” was hopelessly a black sheep, she clung to the poor - Albino Alexander, and he to her. The Prince lived since her death in a small brick house at The Hague. For years he wintered' in the south of France. His friends herewere learned people, and comprised members of the Guizot family, the late Comte d’ Haussonville, and the Orleanists AI. Mohl, Queen Sophie’s tutor, and M. Mignet. He always showed strong patriotic feeling, and took a patriotic pride in the history of Dutch independance and the part his family took in liberating Holland from theSpanish yoke, and keeping it from passing under the domination of Louis Quatorze.