Democratic Sentinel, Volume 7, Number 35, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 September 1883 — Royal Children. [ARTICLE]

Royal Children.

Ordinary children who envy the lot of Princes and Princesses may console themselves with the reflection that these favored young mortals have a terrible number of things to learn. The curriculum of a Prince’s studies would dismay any public-school boy. Very little time is left him for play, and still less for that solitary loafing about and meditation in which most boys delight. If he disappeared for a couple of hours to go on some frolicsome expedition by himself, he would arouse an alarm throughout the palace where he resided, and possibly cause his governor or tutor to be dismissed. The late Prince Imperial of France, when he was 10 years old, once walked out of the Tuileries for a ramble in the streets, having been seized suddenly with an irresistible temptation to go and join some boys whom he had seen snow-balling. He returned after an absence of four hours, but in the meantime a hundred detectives had been scouring Paris for him, and he found his parents almost frantic with terror. The little King of Rome, Napoleon I.’s son, once wanted to play truant in the same way, but was checked in time. He then declared, with much weeping, that he wanted to go and make mud-pies with some dirty boys who were playing on one of the quays of the Seine. Napoleon IH.’s heir was also sorely teased by a couple of most accomplished but too earnest tutors, Gen. Frossard and M. Monnier. One day he had been sent out to see a regatta on the Seine. “Well, what have you been doing?” said his father when he returned heine. “Oh, we have been talking of triremes, said the boy, wearily, “and I have heard the story of Duilius over again.” The Prince Imperial, however, was quite intelligent (enough to understand that in these days the heir apparent to a throne must not ( be a dunce, and he was perhaps one of the most amiable pupils any court tutor ever had. It is a custom in the Prussian royal family that every Prince shall ba apprenticed to a trade, in order that he might be able to earn his living in case ■of a revolution. The present Crown Prince was taught watchmaking, but whether he could obtain the wages of a skilled journeyman, if his father’s crown failed him, is another question. During the French Revolution the Duke of Orleans, who afterward became “King of the French,” by the .title of Louis Philippe, had for a time to earn his living as a schoolmaster in If only a little occasional joelity were allowed to relieve the tedium of these lessons, the lot of a young Prince might pstill be regarded as a pleasant one; but, by all accounts, it seems that some of the German Princes are brought up .with a military strictness that would have commended itself to the approval of a Spartan. The King of Bavaria when Crown Prince was made to live .on beef and njutton, and his ration of (the latter food was never allowed to ‘exceed one mutton chop. It is related that on the day when he became King, his first act of royal prerogative was to say to his equerry: “I mean to have two chops this morning!”— Lutheran.