In silence, eyes closed, he sat hunched in his compartment, and so I finally decided to go several cars down the train, where I met Maria with several of the servants. The loud merriment here made the silence in the king’s private car all the more uncanny.
“If you know the king so well,” I said, sitting down beside Maria on the wooden bench, “then tell me what Ludwig thinks he’s doing. He acts like a man from another world.”
Maria smiled and looked out at the landscape passing by us. “He is a man from another world,” she replied. “He comes from a time long before ours. At heart he’s a boy acting in his own play. With knights, castles, and wicked dwarves. Those are the ministers as he sees them, wicked dwarves.” She laughed and pointed to a couple of the footmen in our compartment who were standing at the windows, open-mouthed, while putting their heads outside to feel the wind. “We race through the world, drawn by iron horses. We build machines and factories. But Ludwig stands still and lets all that pass him by. He’s like a king from one of those Brothers Grimm fairy tales. Sometimes he reads them to me, and then I’m Snow White and he is the prince turned into a shaggy bear by a bad fairy’s spell.”
“Prince? Bear?” I shook my head in dismay. “Maria, the king is not a child anymore. He has a country to rule . . .”
“A country that has stopped dreaming,” Maria said, interrupting me. “Don’t you understand, Theodor? Ludwig dreams for us because we have forgotten how to dream. To him, a king is not just someone who signs documents and moves armies from place to place; he is a dream, an idea.”
“An idea?” I said skeptically. “Did he tell you so? Does he teach you such things?”
“At least he doesn’t treat me like a stupid woodcarver’s daughter, as you do.”
Maria fell silent and stared out of the window.
Sighing, I decided not to continue this conversation. After a while I returned to the king, who was still sitting with his eyes closed. He looked like a monument to himself.
In the evening we reached Prien on the Chiemsee, and from there we crossed to Herrenchiemsee by water. While Maria and the rest of the domestic staff drove to the castle in a jolting cart, I stayed with Ludwig at the island’s little harbor.
I soon noticed that the building work was not far advanced. A little locomotive, whistling and hissing noisily, towed a few trucks laden with stones and timber up to the castle. But even from the bank it was clear that large parts of the building were not yet completed. The side wings looked curiously naked, mere shells, and what would be an avenue in the future was nothing but a dirty transport road. On the western side of the castle, craftsmen were at work hammering and filing the basin of the fountain, and the canal was only half dug. Nonetheless, you could already guess at the design of this castle, in which Ludwig hoped to emulate and honor his great example, the Sun King, as a Bavarian Versailles.
“The sun rises exactly here and sets over there, on the other side of the island.” Ludwig, now in high good humor again and leaping about among the workmen like an excited child, indicated a place on an imaginary axis leading from the avenue to the canal. “The castle lies exactly between them,” he called to me, laughing. “I can see the chariot of the heavens rising and falling from my bedroom. Isn’t that wonderful, Marot? Mon Dieu!”
All at once Ludwig’s expression changed. Imperiously, he beckoned to an overseer of the building work in a black coat. “Here, you! What’s gone wrong with the figures there on the Fountain of Fortuna? The triton is holding his hand up. Didn’t I give clear instructions for him to hold it down, like the one in Versailles?”
Looking anxious, the man made him a deep bow. “Majesty, forgive us, but there were several different designs, and . . .”
“Different designs?” Ludwig’s face flushed red as a lobster. “What’s the meaning of this? Only the latest design counts, the one I commissioned myself. What impertinence! By God, this is lèse majesté!” And with his strong arms he suddenly snatched up an easel lying on the ground and began belaboring the overseer with it. “Take that figure away!” he cried like a man possessed. “This instant! Ruemann must cast a new one, the way I damn well told him to.”
I hurried over to Ludwig and tried to get the little wooden easel away from him before he beat the poor man to death. “Stop, Your Majesty!” I cried. “It wasn’t his mistake. Stop before there’s an accident!”
Ludwig suddenly stopped beating the man and looked at me in surprise. For a moment, I thought he was about to thrash me in the same way. But he dropped the easel and turned away from the unfortunate overseer. “You . . . you’re right, Marot,” he gasped. “I mustn’t let myself get so carried away. But there’s so much at stake here, an idea towering above all human conceptions. Do you understand? One sometimes must exercise severity.”