The late Regent's sister, Princess Alexandra, was very mad indeed, and gossip attributed this to an unhappy love-affair. She was devoted to a young officer, but the bare idea of such a marriage was regarded as impossible, and the lovely girl became morose and moody, like King Ludwig under similar circumstances.
The particular mania which possessed the Princess was the delusion that she was covered with dust; so she and her clothes were brushed all day by relays of maids, and even her food and drink had to be dusted before her eyes. Another of her odd delusions was that a sofa had taken up its permanent abode in her head, and the Princess considered that it was most dangerous for her to go through a door in case she knocked the ends of the sofa. This awkward state of things was happily put an end to, for some master-mind hit upon the idea of placing a doll's sofa in the basin which was used when the Princess had a bilious attack, and she was told that her sufferings had been occasioned by the sofa's struggles for freedom, which were now at an end owing to its fortunate escape from her mouth.
Countess Marie Larisch, My Past
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Detail of Ichnographia Ottopia
1999
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