Secret Number One: The Tragedy of the Leutenbergs Secret Number Two: The Crown-prince's Revenge Secret Number Three: How The Kaiser Persecuted a Princess Secret Number Four: The Mysterious Frau Kleist Secret Number Five: The Girl Who Knew the Crown-prince's Secret Secret Number Six: The Affair of the Hunchbacked Countess Secret Number Seven: The British Girl Who Baulked the Kaiser Secret Number Eight: How the Crown-prince Was Blackmailed Secret Number Nine: The Crown-prince's Escapade in London

"Veneux Nadon, "par Moret-sur-Loing "(Seine-et-Marne). "February 10th, 1917. " My dear Le Queux , " I have just finished reading the proofs of your book describing my life as an official at the Imperial Court at Potsdam, and the two or three small errors you made I have duly corrected. " The gross scandals and wily intrigues which I have related to you were, many of them, known to yourself, for, as the intimate friend of Luisa, the Ex-Crown-Princess of Saxony, you were, before the war, closely a

You will recollect our first meeting on that sunny afternoon when, in the stuffy, nauseating atmosphere of perspiration and a hundred Parisian perfumes, we sat next each other at the first roulette table on the right as you enter the rooms at Monte Carlo? Ah! how vivid it is still before my eyes, the jingle of gold and the monotonous cries of the croupiers. Ah! my dear friend! In those pre-war days the Riviera—that sea-lapped Paradise, with its clear, open sky and sapphire Mediterranean, grey-gr

The Trautmann affair was one which caused a wild sensation at Potsdam in the autumn of 1912. In the Emperor's immediate entourage there was a great deal of gossip, most of it ill-natured and cruel, for most ladies-in-waiting possess serpents' tongues. Their tongues are as sharp as their features, and though there may be a few pretty maids-of-honour, yet the majority of women at Court are, as you know, my dear Le Queux, mostly plain and uninteresting. I became implicated in the unsavoury Trautman

The truth of the dastardly plot which caused the downfall of the unfortunate and much-maligned Imperial Princess Luisa Antoinette Marie, Archduchess of Austria, and wife of Friedrich-August, now the reigning King of Saxony, has never yet been revealed. I know, my dear Le Queux, that you had a good deal to do with the "skittish Princess," as she was called, and her affairs after she had left the Court of Saxony and went to live near you in the Via Benedetto da Foiano, in Florence. You were her fr

The clever intrigues of Frau Kleist were unknown to any outside the Court circle at Potsdam. She was indeed a queer personage, "only less of a personality than His Majesty," as that shiftiest of German statesmen, Prince Bülow, declared to me one day as we sat together in my room in the Berlin Schloss. Frau Kleist was the Court dancing-mistress, whose fastidious judgment had to be satisfied by any young débutante or officer before they presumed to dance before Royalty at the State balls. Before e

Late on the night of November 18th, 1912, I was busily at work in the Crown-Prince's room—that cosy apartment of which I possessed the key—at the Marble Palace at Potsdam. I, as His Imperial Highness's personal-adjutant, had been travelling all day with him from Cologne to Berlin. We had done a tour of military inspections in Westphalia, and, as usual, "Willie's" conduct, as became the heir-apparent of the psalm-singing All-Highest One, had not been exactly exemplary. With his slant eyes and sar

I suppose that none of your British friends have ever heard the name of Thyra Adelheid von Kienitz. She was a funny little deformed person, aged, perhaps, seventy, widow of the great General von Kienitz, who had served in the Franco-German campaign, and who, before his death, had been acknowledged to be as great a strategist as your own Lord Roberts, whom every good German—I did not write Prussian—salutes in reverence. Countess von Kienitz was the daughter of a certain Countess von Borcke, and a

"How completely we have put to sleep these very dear cousins of ours, the British!" His Imperial Highness the Crown-Prince made this remark to me as he sat in the corner of a first-class compartment of an express that had ten minutes before left Paddington Station for the West of England—that much-advertised train known as the Cornish-Riviera Express. The Crown-Prince, though not generally known, frequently visited England and Scotland incognito, usually travelling as Count von Grünau, and we we

The Crown-Prince had accompanied the Emperor on board the Hohenzollern on his annual cruise up the Norwegian fjords, and the Kaiserin and the Crown-Princess were of the party. I had been left at home because I had not been feeling well, and with relief had gone south to the Lake of Garda, taking up my quarters in that long, white hotel which faces the blue lake at Gardone-Riviera. A truly beautiful spot, where the gardens of the hotel run down to the lake's edge, with a long veranda covered with

It was five o'clock on a bright September morning when His Imperial Highness climbed with unsteady gait the three flights of stairs leading to the handsome flat which he sometimes rented in a big block of buildings half-way along Jermyn Street when he made secret visits to London. As his personal-adjutant and keeper of his secrets I had been awaiting him for hours. I heard him fumbling with the latch-key, and, rising, went along the hall and opened the door. "Hulloa, Heltzendorff!" he exclaimed

"The Emperor commands you to audience at once in the private dining-room," said one of the Imperial servants, entering the Kaiser's study, where I was awaiting him. It was seven o'clock on a cold, cheerless morning, and I had just arrived at Potsdam from Altona, the bearer of a message from the Crown-Prince to his father. I knew that the Emperor always rose at five, and that he was breakfasting, as was his habit, alone with the Empress in that coquettish private dining-room of the Sovereigns, a

I propose, with the assistance of my friend the Commendatore William Le Queux, to issue in Great Britain a further instalment of my revelations of "The Secrets of Potsdam" at an early date....