"Recalled!" cried Count Schwarzenberg, starting up amazed. "But, Count
Lesle, you do not know the Electoral Prince. You do not know the danger
that would accrue now if this restless, ambitious, and fiery young man
were to return home. My enemies and the secret opponents of the Emperor
here desire nothing more ardently than just this very thing, and the
Rochows and Schönungs and all the reformers have already brought matters
to such a pass that the Elector himself presses most urgently for his
son's return home, and has even peremptorily required it of him. It is a
plot of all the Swedish wellwishers, all the anti-imperialists of this
court, believe me. They wish to place the Electoral Prince at their head,
and hope by this means to bring it about that the weak and vacillating
Elector shall secede from the Emperor and ally himself with the Swedes.
They teased and goaded the Elector, until he even sent his Chamberlain von
Schlieben to The Hague in order to fetch the Prince, and the latter has
but to-day returned from his vain expedition."

"From his vain expedition, do you say? The Electoral Prince remains at The
Hague, then, despite the strict commands, the pressing messages of his
father? You see by that what fruit his stay at The Hague has already
produced, and that the poison which he has imbibed there is even now at
work. The Electoral Prince seems to be thoughtful and studious. And so
much the more dangerous is it to leave him any longer at The Hague, where
all are ill disposed toward the Spaniards, where is to be found the real
hearthstone of the great European opposition to the house of Hapsburg,
where the Prince of Orange is his instructor in the art of war, and can
educate him to be a skillful and dangerous warrior and an enemy of the
Emperor."

"All that is very true!" said Schwarzenberg gloomily. "But for all that he
is less to be dreaded there than here, where he would cross all our plans