the Seven Years' War the French king demanded the promised troops; and
so it came about that the Suabian Protestants were compelled, in
defiance of public sentiment, to make war against their co-religionists
of Prussia. In the inglorious campaigns which followed, the Duke of
Wuerttemberg cut a rather sorry figure, but criticism only exasperated
him. He promised another large body of troops to France, and the men
were raised by harsh measures of conscription. The Estates of the duchy
protested against this autocratic procedure, and, as Stuttgart sided
with the opposition, the duke determined to punish his unruly capital by
removing his court to Ludwigsburg, where an ancestor of his, early in
the century, had founded a city to match Versailles and serve the
express purpose of a 'Trutz-Stuttgart'.

The removal of the court to Ludwigsburg took place in 1764, three years
before the Schiller family found a home there. From the first a purely
artificial creation, the little city had been going backwards, but it
now leaped into short-lived glory as the residence of a prodigal prince
who was bent on amusing himself magnificently. The existing ducal palace
was enlarged to huge dimensions and lavishly decorated. Great parks and
gardens were laid out, the market-place was surrounded with arcades, and
an opera-house was built, with a stage that could be extended into the
open air so as to permit the spectacular evolution of real troops.
Everything about the place was new and pretentious. The roomy streets
and the would-be gorgeous palaces, flaunting their fresh coats of yellow
and white stucco, teemed with officers in uniform, with blazing little
potentates of the court and with high-born ladies in the puffs and
frills of the rococo age. Here Karl Eugen gave himself up to his dream
of glory, which was to rival the splendors of Versailles. He maintained
a costly opera, procuring for it the most famous singers and dancers in
Europe, and squandered immense sums upon 'Venetian nights' and other