The Secrets of the Notebook by Eve Haas

Author:Eve Haas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Published: 2013-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

14

GOING to the BALL

WE WERE AGAIN GETTING NOWHERE WITH our questions, and, only too aware of how little time we had left in the archive, we put aside our speculations for the moment and went back to reading. I was excited to have discovered that Emilie von Ostrowska was in fact my great-great-grandmother, and I was now being whisked back more than a century to the actual scene where the incredible love story between Emilie and August started.

Berlin must have been full of stories about the balls that August threw, with much gossiping about the daughters of officers and the pretty girls from Berlin he invited. He was the first to introduce the waltz to Berlin and would invite members of the public in to watch the dancing.

La Notte, his famous chef, was reported to lay on sumptuous buffets for the guests. I imagined myself being there. It was 1832 and I was in the prince’s grand ballroom, at one of his most lavish balls. I had now actually arrived at the place and time where they met, there at the heart of Berlin’s social scene, in the fabulous Wilhelmstrasse Palace designed by the famous architect and painter, Karl Schinkel. I was meeting the young Fraulein Ostrowska for the first time.

It may well have been the first high society event that Emilie had ever attended, and we knew from having read so much about August’s domestic arrangements that it would have been a dazzling affair. The grand staircase would have been lavishly decorated with flowers, and white silk blinds would have been lowered in front of the mighty windows. There would have been three sparkling crystal chandeliers hanging from the ceiling, their light multiplied by the mirrors on the walls in between the lapis lazuli pillars. The side walls of the room were lined with crimson sofas, and two open mahogany doors would have displayed the great dining room where fleets of servants put their finishing touches to the small round tables where the guests would later be taking supper, the violet tones of the walls set off by the white of the tables and chairs. More tables and sideboards had been set up in adjoining rooms to ensure that everyone could be seated. They would all be laid out with silver from the royal plate room as well as with a hundred of August’s own silver plates; the Blue Room, its walls covered in luminous silk interwoven with small yellow stars, its sofas and chairs upholstered in white silk, and the State Room with its crimson damask walls and heavy white curtains.

I imagined the crowds of partygoers as they strolled from room to room, drinking in the intricate decorative details. One room was dominated by a life-sized portrait of a woman we had already read about, the famous beauty, Juliette Récamier, one of the few women who had been able to hold the prince’s affections for many years, despite rejecting him as a lover. Most of the sophisticated crowd would have heard the rumors and smiled discreetly to one another when they saw the portrait.

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