Karolina-Louisa, The Life of the Archqueen, Philip Gedlmeier (excerpt)

On the fourteenth of March, like a thunderbolt from a clear sky, the news reached Kelenburg that the Republicans of Guntreland had brought the princes Clarence and Rupert before the Court of the National Assembly, condemned them to death, and — before the eyes of the entire world — cast them to hungry dogs to be devoured, and to vampires to drink their blood.

Less than ten Republican hours before that dreadful spectacle, Herman Hensher had, without prior notice, presented before the National Assembly a motion for their immediate trial — a motion to which the startled Assembly, in which any vote of “nay” would have seemed an act of favor toward the princes, responded with near-acclamatory approval.

Through the gilded, mirror-adorned corridors of Erzkoenighaus, there pressed a crowd of nobles and émigrés, their faces stiffened in rehearsed expressions of horror, and from their lips poured oaths of vengeance.

From behind the doors of the Hettin Salon, one could hear the resonant voice of the Archqueen, addressing the national gentlemen of the royalist lands who had come in urgent audience to implore Karolina-Luise to revoke her earlier decision to send only civil aid to the people of Guntreland, and instead to avenge the spilled royal blood with iron and gunpowder.

“I truly do not know what it is you wish of me, gentlemen,” she said, visibly irritated. “I am sorry for the princes — though I do not think they are not, in great part, themselves to blame for their fate. But perhaps it would be better if you addressed Their Majesties Otto, Francis, and Jobst, who beforehand prevented all negotiations with the Republicans concerning the princes’ release.”

At one moment all those royalists in the corridor before the Hettin Salon made way for the person in whom they placed their highest hopes — Baron Sigismund von Austenberg, who strode heavily straight toward the Archqueen.

What followed was a scene almost theatrical. The baron fell to his knees before the Archqueen, declaring:
“Your Majesty, give me a sword which I shall return to you bathed in the blood of those who have shed princely blood!”

At this, the Archqueen at first rolled her eyes; and when the baron declared that he insisted upon it as a matter of his honor, she withdrew into an adjoining salon, took from a cabinet of porcelain animals a porcelain greyhound — one she had herself made — and handed it to Sigismund.

“Mister Baron of Austenberg,” she said, “you have fought enough for the Guntreland king and have shown courage and valor. Therefore, I gift you this greyhound — the very beast that adorns the banner of the Guntreland royalists. And now I, your Archqueen, tell you: seek not your glory in foreign wars, when you may earn far greater honor by placing your abilities and your wealth in the service of your homeland’s peaceful advancement.”

Though grateful for the gift, Sigismund seemed far from content, and continued to press the Archqueen almost pleadingly to send the Archroyal Army to Guntreland.

“It is my will — no, our Archroyal will,” said the sovereign at one point, emphasizing in her words, her voice, and her expression the full majesty of her authority — not to impose her will by force, but rather in hope of satisfying Sigismund’s ultraroyalist temperament, which longed for a ruler whose will none dared question.

“That only food, medicine, clothing, physicians, and engineers be sent to Guntreland — and by no means soldiers or weapons. Do you not wish to fulfill the will of your Archqueen? Is that not what you desire?” she added, with an air as if she had outwitted Sigismund, yet betraying a shade of uncertainty.

But the baron persisted, endeavoring to persuade her what her will ought to be in order to be truly archroyal — until the sovereign, at last unable to endure the pressure, withdrew from her own reception salon.

Having beforehand declared that they would reject any exchange of prisoners whom they led away in chains to their own continents — though those captives were subjects of King Alfons[1] — and that they would consider void every “extorted” concession to the Republicans to which King Alfons, blackmailed by the lives of his sons, might consent; having further proclaimed that they would withhold all ratification of any “forced” disposition of the Congress’ sovereignty that he might in such case attempt; and that, should such concessions occur, they would continue the war against Guntreland so long as any revolutionary authority exercised power upon its soil — the Kings of Tildeland, Neuland, and Bautia had, for all practical purposes, closed every avenue by which the princes might have been saved.

(And it must be said that the deposed King of Guntreland, who had repeatedly implored his allies to deliver unto him some of the captured Republicans “so that he might hang at least one traitor a day,” could scarcely have inspired among the Republicans any sympathy for himself or his sons.)

Karolina-Luise could hardly have done anything to preserve Rupert and Clarence Afsen from destruction; and, being well acquainted with their notorious conduct during the time of their power, this justice-loving sovereign, as we read in her private notebook — a notebook at that time hidden from the public and secured in the Archqueen’s desk casket, the golden key of which no one was permitted to touch save Her Majesty — “felt no particular desire to aid them.”

At the meeting of the Ministerial Council that same day, she declared that her will remained unchanged despite every pressure brought upon her, and that the only way by which King Alfons might “deserve military aid” was by demonstrating how far he was prepared to go in conciliating his rebellious people. By this she meant, as she did not conceal, the necessary opening of diplomatic negotiations between the Congress monarchs and the “evil rabble of Eustate,” as the crowned heads were wont to call the authorities of the Republic of Guntreland — in order, as she said, “to give consideration to the arguments of the people,” and that King Alfons might “return to his throne with honor.”

(She even offered Kelenburg as the venue where such negotiations — or even a new general congress — might be held.)

Yet she was not unaware that a king such as Alfons would find more honor in being restored to his throne upon the tide of rebellious blood than upon the foundation of diplomatic compromise and the acknowledgment of popular reasoning.

Still, neither her crowned station, nor her Congressional duties, nor the Archroyalist and counter-revolutionary sentiments of her nobility and of much of her people were the only things that prevented her from adopting a more open attitude of understanding toward the Republicans — even, perhaps, from recognizing the Republic of Guntreland itself, which, by her own inner humanistic convictions, she did not regard as inherently unjust.

Reports of the bloody revelries in Guntreland — from the once again confirmed practice of the Republicans, who cast the condemned enemies of the Republic before ravenous vampires and starving dogs (a cruelty which even this crowned maiden, whose fondness for dogs had been born in childhood, when she secretly, and in defiance of her father’s prohibition, delighted to play with his hunting hounds, could not condone); to the occasional burnings of the castles of the remaining former nobility and the massacres of their inhabitants — mostly those nobles who, from the first day, had acknowledged the Republic and renounced their feudal privileges, and whom the new order had permitted to remain in their homes provided those houses were used for civic festivities of the republican citizenry; to the bloody outrages openly incited by a faction within the Republican Assembly, whose perpetrators were almost never punished; and finally to the frequent attacks by werewolves and vampires upon humans — attacks which often ended fatally for the “classical human” — all these things “did not inspire confidence” in Karolina-Luise regarding the Guntreland people’s capacity truly to be a republic and to govern themselves without a king.

The Archqueen of Sigisland, who had allowed in her own dominions a rather wide liberty of the press, could not look kindly upon the proposals of Guntreland’s ruling faction to forbid all criticism of existing laws outside the National Assembly. She “expressed doubt that a republic in which no one may criticize the laws presently in force can truly be called a free country.”

And when news arrived that from the University of Eustate the leading Guntreland scholar of Balster had been expelled — ostensibly for some improper discourse upon the education of children, but in truth to purge from Guntreland’s spirit every trace of classical Sigislandic literature — the Archqueen was seized by a feeling of national defiance, and that very evening, upon learning the news, she recited aloud to her courtiers Balster’s sonnets from memory, pausing only at times, her eyes moving swiftly in semicircular motion — left-up-right, right-up-left — as she strove to recall the exact line.

In any case, the national gentlemen of the royalist kingdoms declared to the Archqueen that for crowned monarchs, negotiations with the “murderers of princes” would be a greater disgrace than the loss of both head and throne; while for the Republicans, the Archqueen herself was but one more of the crowned tyrants “with whom one speaks only through the edge of the bayonet.” Thus, it appeared that for her ideas of negotiation there existed not the slightest understanding on either side.

Yet even more than for the fate of Guntreland, her heart was filled with care for the problems of the realm over which she ruled directly, and toward which, for that reason, she felt a far deeper responsibility—though she bore a sincere desire to do good to all mankind. The unhappy Ruze affair—an act of irrational audacity and useless provocation by a visionary whose folly cost him his head—a piece of news which, according to her counsellors, Karolina-Luise received with the sorrowful exclamation “Ooooh” and a look of compassionate melancholy in her blue eyes, placed the Archqueen in a peculiar and most delicate position.

On the one hand stood the traditions of Sigisland, that which Karolina-Luise knew to be the foundation of her subjects’ pride and, by that very token, the surest guarantee of her own absolute authority. On the other hand, her innate humanity would not allow her to accept that a man should die merely because he had drunk from a fountain reserved for her alone.

“The law shall not be altered merely because one unfortunate fool has broken it,”
she declared to her ministers with a resolute and severe countenance.
“These are our traditions, and not everyone may violate them at will.
He who breaks the law must, and shall, be punished.
If anyone desires that the law be changed, there is a way to do so:
let them write a petition, address the Assembly,
and we shall weigh the arguments for and against, and then decide.”

As for the purple gendarme Gebrer, who with a single stroke of his sabre had curtailed the sacrilegious act of the student Ruze—and for whom a petition from the citizens of Ferdinandshafen demanded the title of honorary citizen, even a patent of nobility, and to whom an inspired poet had already dedicated an ode—he was, by order of the Archqueen, transferred from the Guard of the Coronation Cathedral to an office position with equal salary, so as to diminish the likelihood that a similar incident might again end in bloodshed.

“Nevertheless,” she added,
“the punishment must correspond to the crime;
and for drinking from the fountain, the death penalty can by no means be a fitting one.
This we must change at once.”

She decreed, therefore, that should such an offence against majesty be repeated, the offenders should not be executed, but imprisoned for a sufficiently long term to learn that the Archroyal traditions and laws were not things one might choose whether to obey or not.

Having decided (still) not to send military aid to the deposed King of Guntreland, Karolina-Luise re-allocated a substantial portion of the military budget to cultural, artistic, architectural, and public works, and dispatched a number of soldiers to assist the builders upon the great civic projects.

Furthermore, she commanded that the press of Kelenburg loudly extol those wealthy Sigislanders who had chosen to devote a portion of their fortune to the erection of endowments—schools, hospitals, and public libraries—and to the patronage of artists. Among these benefactors and patrons were many from the former two estates, who, still living in unreformed leisure thanks to the possession of broad tracts of land, helped create a new social atmosphere in which such generosity was deemed a matter of common decency and loyalty to a sovereign whose motto was “The Community First.”

Toward those rich Sigislanders who idled away their days without aiding the public good by means of their wealth—wherein the payment of a heavy tax for each creature killed in the hunt was not considered true benefaction, but merely a fee owed to the Archqueen as the owner of all animals within her realm—society began to look with open disapproval. Anyone mindful of his reputation as an Archroyalist would take care not to be seen at the reception or ball of one of these misers, in whose company there seemed to remain more bearers of Guntreland royalist passports than of those adorned with the Crown and Torches.

Even the Archqueen herself sent to such families, on their holidays, only the briefest letters of courtesy, unaccompanied by gift or visit; which was not merely a political gesture, but an expression of her personal disdain for “self-seekers and idlers,” for she had often declared her wish to learn to perform with her own hands the work of all ten categories of her people.

From the second of March, when by Arch-royal legislation all factories producing counterfeit Guntrelandic currency within the Archkingdom were converted into workshops producing exquisite correspondence cards adorned with miniature reproductions of paintings from the Arch-Royal Gallery, Karolina-Luise found a new means to convey her sentiments to the great nobility. Thus, Count von Brillstein, the benefactor of a literary academy, received for his birthday a royal congratulation inscribed upon the reverse of a card depicting Lerobel’s Triumph of Ferdinandite Glory; whereas Duchess von Farengel, of whom rumor said that she had once remarked she “saw no reason to aid the poor in abandoning the natural station of their estate,” likewise received an illustrated card from her sovereign on the anniversary of her birth—but this one bearing the motif of The Miser of Hederburg.

In short, the result was soon manifest: more and more of the wealthy loosened their purses, and Karolina-Luise could, with undisguised satisfaction, listen to the news of new public edifices and artistic works arising throughout her Archkingdom. Among these structures, perhaps special mention should be made of the Library of Rissendorf-on-Vedl, in the region of Otterlon, opened on the eleventh of March, notable because its inauguration fulfilled one of the aims the Archqueen had set herself at the very beginning of her reign: that every inhabited settlement should possess a public library.

She who had spent the greater part of her youth in reading, whose spirit had matured upon more than a hundred novels by the most eminent authors adorning the libraries of Erzkoenighaus and Waldkelen, desired that every man and woman in her realm should have access to good literature—not only Sigislandic but foreign as well; for despite her patriotism she could not believe that all things of worth had been written upon a single continent.

Each time new local libraries were inscribed upon the great map displayed in the hall of the Arch-Royal Library, a bright gleam came into the Archqueen’s eyes, and serenity returned to her countenance—for her benevolence found a peculiar joy in making something as beautiful as diverse and noble literature accessible to all.

Together with the building of libraries, among the sovereign’s priorities were also the printing and acquisition of a great number of volumes with which those libraries should be enriched.

In this vast cultural enterprise of the Archqueen, in her so strongly manifested solicitude for her people, and in the fact that she had opened to them opportunities hitherto undreamed of, we may discern the grounds of the veneration which the Sigislandic common folk then felt toward her. The advance of culture not only contributed to the objective improvement of her subjects’ lives but inflamed in the nation a proud sense of superiority over others, and thus confirmed within them that loyalty to the Sovereign which all the old and new masters of Sigisland’s noble culture alike exhorted by their works.

[1] The reasoning of the kings of Tildeland and Bautia to take captured Guntrelandenite Republicans to their continents, where these prisoners - mostly crews of Republican balloons who were forced to surrender when they met in the sky with more numerous, faster and more superior enemy groups of balloons - were used as free labor, was that Tildeland and Bautia were entitled to these spoils of war by right of arms, since some of their subjects were also captured in the "sovereign territory of the King of Guntreland" (that is, in the territory under Republican control).

On the fourteenth of March, like a thunderbolt from a clear sky, the news reached Kelenburg that the Republicans of Guntreland had brought the princes Clarence and Rupert before the Court of the National Assembly, condemned them to death, and — before the eyes of the entire world — cast them to hungry dogs to be devoured, and to vampires to drink their blood.

Less than ten Republican hours before that dreadful spectacle, Herman Hensher had, without prior notice, presented before the National Assembly a motion for their immediate trial — a motion to which the startled Assembly, in which any vote of “nay” would have seemed an act of favor toward the princes, responded with near-acclamatory approval.

Through the gilded, mirror-adorned corridors of Erzkoenighaus, there pressed a crowd of nobles and émigrés, their faces stiffened in rehearsed expressions of horror, and from their lips poured oaths of vengeance.

From behind the doors of the Hettin Salon, one could hear the resonant voice of the Archqueen, addressing the national gentlemen of the royalist lands who had come in urgent audience to implore Karolina-Luise to revoke her earlier decision to send only civil aid to the people of Guntreland, and instead to avenge the spilled royal blood with iron and gunpowder.

“I truly do not know what it is you wish of me, gentlemen,” she said, visibly irritated. “I am sorry for the princes — though I do not think they are not, in great part, themselves to blame for their fate. But perhaps it would be better if you addressed Their Majesties Otto, Francis, and Jobst, who beforehand prevented all negotiations with the Republicans concerning the princes’ release.”

At one moment all those royalists in the corridor before the Hettin Salon made way for the person in whom they placed their highest hopes — Baron Sigismund von Austenberg, who strode heavily straight toward the Archqueen.

What followed was a scene almost theatrical. The baron fell to his knees before the Archqueen, declaring:
“Your Majesty, give me a sword which I shall return to you bathed in the blood of those who have shed princely blood!”

At this, the Archqueen at first rolled her eyes; and when the baron declared that he insisted upon it as a matter of his honor, she withdrew into an adjoining salon, took from a cabinet of porcelain animals a porcelain greyhound — one she had herself made — and handed it to Sigismund.

“Mister Baron of Austenberg,” she said, “you have fought enough for the Guntreland king and have shown courage and valor. Therefore, I gift you this greyhound — the very beast that adorns the banner of the Guntreland royalists. And now I, your Archqueen, tell you: seek not your glory in foreign wars, when you may earn far greater honor by placing your abilities and your wealth in the service of your homeland’s peaceful advancement.”

Though grateful for the gift, Sigismund seemed far from content, and continued to press the Archqueen almost pleadingly to send the Archroyal Army to Guntreland.

“It is my will — no, our Archroyal will,” said the sovereign at one point, emphasizing in her words, her voice, and her expression the full majesty of her authority — not to impose her will by force, but rather in hope of satisfying Sigismund’s ultraroyalist temperament, which longed for a ruler whose will none dared question.

“That only food, medicine, clothing, physicians, and engineers be sent to Guntreland — and by no means soldiers or weapons. Do you not wish to fulfill the will of your Archqueen? Is that not what you desire?” she added, with an air as if she had outwitted Sigismund, yet betraying a shade of uncertainty.

But the baron persisted, endeavoring to persuade her what her will ought to be in order to be truly archroyal — until the sovereign, at last unable to endure the pressure, withdrew from her own reception salon.

Having beforehand declared that they would reject any exchange of prisoners whom they led away in chains to their own continents — though those captives were subjects of King Alfons[1] — and that they would consider void every “extorted” concession to the Republicans to which King Alfons, blackmailed by the lives of his sons, might consent; having further proclaimed that they would withhold all ratification of any “forced” disposition of the Congress’ sovereignty that he might in such case attempt; and that, should such concessions occur, they would continue the war against Guntreland so long as any revolutionary authority exercised power upon its soil — the Kings of Tildeland, Neuland, and Bautia had, for all practical purposes, closed every avenue by which the princes might have been saved.

(And it must be said that the deposed King of Guntreland, who had repeatedly implored his allies to deliver unto him some of the captured Republicans “so that he might hang at least one traitor a day,” could scarcely have inspired among the Republicans any sympathy for himself or his sons.)

Karolina-Luise could hardly have done anything to preserve Rupert and Clarence Afsen from destruction; and, being well acquainted with their notorious conduct during the time of their power, this justice-loving sovereign, as we read in her private notebook — a notebook at that time hidden from the public and secured in the Archqueen’s desk casket, the golden key of which no one was permitted to touch save Her Majesty — “felt no particular desire to aid them.”

At the meeting of the Ministerial Council that same day, she declared that her will remained unchanged despite every pressure brought upon her, and that the only way by which King Alfons might “deserve military aid” was by demonstrating how far he was prepared to go in conciliating his rebellious people. By this she meant, as she did not conceal, the necessary opening of diplomatic negotiations between the Congress monarchs and the “evil rabble of Eustate,” as the crowned heads were wont to call the authorities of the Republic of Guntreland — in order, as she said, “to give consideration to the arguments of the people,” and that King Alfons might “return to his throne with honor.”

(She even offered Kelenburg as the venue where such negotiations — or even a new general congress — might be held.)

Yet she was not unaware that a king such as Alfons would find more honor in being restored to his throne upon the tide of rebellious blood than upon the foundation of diplomatic compromise and the acknowledgment of popular reasoning.

Still, neither her crowned station, nor her Congressional duties, nor the Archroyalist and counter-revolutionary sentiments of her nobility and of much of her people were the only things that prevented her from adopting a more open attitude of understanding toward the Republicans — even, perhaps, from recognizing the Republic of Guntreland itself, which, by her own inner humanistic convictions, she did not regard as inherently unjust.

Reports of the bloody revelries in Guntreland — from the once again confirmed practice of the Republicans, who cast the condemned enemies of the Republic before ravenous vampires and starving dogs (a cruelty which even this crowned maiden, whose fondness for dogs had been born in childhood, when she secretly, and in defiance of her father’s prohibition, delighted to play with his hunting hounds, could not condone); to the occasional burnings of the castles of the remaining former nobility and the massacres of their inhabitants — mostly those nobles who, from the first day, had acknowledged the Republic and renounced their feudal privileges, and whom the new order had permitted to remain in their homes provided those houses were used for civic festivities of the republican citizenry; to the bloody outrages openly incited by a faction within the Republican Assembly, whose perpetrators were almost never punished; and finally to the frequent attacks by werewolves and vampires upon humans — attacks which often ended fatally for the “classical human” — all these things “did not inspire confidence” in Karolina-Luise regarding the Guntreland people’s capacity truly to be a republic and to govern themselves without a king.

The Archqueen of Sigisland, who had allowed in her own dominions a rather wide liberty of the press, could not look kindly upon the proposals of Guntreland’s ruling faction to forbid all criticism of existing laws outside the National Assembly. She “expressed doubt that a republic in which no one may criticize the laws presently in force can truly be called a free country.”

And when news arrived that from the University of Eustate the leading Guntreland scholar of Balster had been expelled — ostensibly for some improper discourse upon the education of children, but in truth to purge from Guntreland’s spirit every trace of classical Sigislandic literature — the Archqueen was seized by a feeling of national defiance, and that very evening, upon learning the news, she recited aloud to her courtiers Balster’s sonnets from memory, pausing only at times, her eyes moving swiftly in semicircular motion — left-up-right, right-up-left — as she strove to recall the exact line.

In any case, the national gentlemen of the royalist kingdoms declared to the Archqueen that for crowned monarchs, negotiations with the “murderers of princes” would be a greater disgrace than the loss of both head and throne; while for the Republicans, the Archqueen herself was but one more of the crowned tyrants “with whom one speaks only through the edge of the bayonet.” Thus, it appeared that for her ideas of negotiation there existed not the slightest understanding on either side.

Yet even more than for the fate of Guntreland, her heart was filled with care for the problems of the realm over which she ruled directly, and toward which, for that reason, she felt a far deeper responsibility—though she bore a sincere desire to do good to all mankind. The unhappy Ruze affair—an act of irrational audacity and useless provocation by a visionary whose folly cost him his head—a piece of news which, according to her counsellors, Karolina-Luise received with the sorrowful exclamation “Ooooh” and a look of compassionate melancholy in her blue eyes, placed the Archqueen in a peculiar and most delicate position.

On the one hand stood the traditions of Sigisland, that which Karolina-Luise knew to be the foundation of her subjects’ pride and, by that very token, the surest guarantee of her own absolute authority. On the other hand, her innate humanity would not allow her to accept that a man should die merely because he had drunk from a fountain reserved for her alone.

“The law shall not be altered merely because one unfortunate fool has broken it,”
she declared to her ministers with a resolute and severe countenance.
“These are our traditions, and not everyone may violate them at will.
He who breaks the law must, and shall, be punished.
If anyone desires that the law be changed, there is a way to do so:
let them write a petition, address the Assembly,
and we shall weigh the arguments for and against, and then decide.”

As for the purple gendarme Gebrer, who with a single stroke of his sabre had curtailed the sacrilegious act of the student Ruze—and for whom a petition from the citizens of Ferdinandshafen demanded the title of honorary citizen, even a patent of nobility, and to whom an inspired poet had already dedicated an ode—he was, by order of the Archqueen, transferred from the Guard of the Coronation Cathedral to an office position with equal salary, so as to diminish the likelihood that a similar incident might again end in bloodshed.

“Nevertheless,” she added,
“the punishment must correspond to the crime;
and for drinking from the fountain, the death penalty can by no means be a fitting one.
This we must change at once.”

She decreed, therefore, that should such an offence against majesty be repeated, the offenders should not be executed, but imprisoned for a sufficiently long term to learn that the Archroyal traditions and laws were not things one might choose whether to obey or not.

Having decided (still) not to send military aid to the deposed King of Guntreland, Karolina-Luise re-allocated a substantial portion of the military budget to cultural, artistic, architectural, and public works, and dispatched a number of soldiers to assist the builders upon the great civic projects.

Furthermore, she commanded that the press of Kelenburg loudly extol those wealthy Sigislanders who had chosen to devote a portion of their fortune to the erection of endowments—schools, hospitals, and public libraries—and to the patronage of artists. Among these benefactors and patrons were many from the former two estates, who, still living in unreformed leisure thanks to the possession of broad tracts of land, helped create a new social atmosphere in which such generosity was deemed a matter of common decency and loyalty to a sovereign whose motto was “The Community First.”

Toward those rich Sigislanders who idled away their days without aiding the public good by means of their wealth—wherein the payment of a heavy tax for each creature killed in the hunt was not considered true benefaction, but merely a fee owed to the Archqueen as the owner of all animals within her realm—society began to look with open disapproval. Anyone mindful of his reputation as an Archroyalist would take care not to be seen at the reception or ball of one of these misers, in whose company there seemed to remain more bearers of Guntreland royalist passports than of those adorned with the Crown and Torches.

Even the Archqueen herself sent to such families, on their holidays, only the briefest letters of courtesy, unaccompanied by gift or visit; which was not merely a political gesture, but an expression of her personal disdain for “self-seekers and idlers,” for she had often declared her wish to learn to perform with her own hands the work of all ten categories of her people.

From the second of March, when by Arch-royal legislation all factories producing counterfeit Guntrelandic currency within the Archkingdom were converted into workshops producing exquisite correspondence cards adorned with miniature reproductions of paintings from the Arch-Royal Gallery, Karolina-Luise found a new means to convey her sentiments to the great nobility. Thus, Count von Brillstein, the benefactor of a literary academy, received for his birthday a royal congratulation inscribed upon the reverse of a card depicting Lerobel’s Triumph of Ferdinandite Glory; whereas Duchess von Farengel, of whom rumor said that she had once remarked she “saw no reason to aid the poor in abandoning the natural station of their estate,” likewise received an illustrated card from her sovereign on the anniversary of her birth—but this one bearing the motif of The Miser of Hederburg.

In short, the result was soon manifest: more and more of the wealthy loosened their purses, and Karolina-Luise could, with undisguised satisfaction, listen to the news of new public edifices and artistic works arising throughout her Archkingdom. Among these structures, perhaps special mention should be made of the Library of Rissendorf-on-Vedl, in the region of Otterlon, opened on the eleventh of March, notable because its inauguration fulfilled one of the aims the Archqueen had set herself at the very beginning of her reign: that every inhabited settlement should possess a public library.

She who had spent the greater part of her youth in reading, whose spirit had matured upon more than a hundred novels by the most eminent authors adorning the libraries of Erzkoenighaus and Waldkelen, desired that every man and woman in her realm should have access to good literature—not only Sigislandic but foreign as well; for despite her patriotism she could not believe that all things of worth had been written upon a single continent.

Each time new local libraries were inscribed upon the great map displayed in the hall of the Arch-Royal Library, a bright gleam came into the Archqueen’s eyes, and serenity returned to her countenance—for her benevolence found a peculiar joy in making something as beautiful as diverse and noble literature accessible to all.

Together with the building of libraries, among the sovereign’s priorities were also the printing and acquisition of a great number of volumes with which those libraries should be enriched.

In this vast cultural enterprise of the Archqueen, in her so strongly manifested solicitude for her people, and in the fact that she had opened to them opportunities hitherto undreamed of, we may discern the grounds of the veneration which the Sigislandic common folk then felt toward her. The advance of culture not only contributed to the objective improvement of her subjects’ lives but inflamed in the nation a proud sense of superiority over others, and thus confirmed within them that loyalty to the Sovereign which all the old and new masters of Sigisland’s noble culture alike exhorted by their works.

[1] The reasoning of the kings of Tildeland and Bautia to take captured Guntrelandenite Republicans to their continents, where these prisoners - mostly crews of Republican balloons who were forced to surrender when they met in the sky with more numerous, faster and more superior enemy groups of balloons - were used as free labor, was that Tildeland and Bautia were entitled to these spoils of war by right of arms, since some of their subjects were also captured in the "sovereign territory of the King of Guntreland" (that is, in the territory under Republican control).