Royal Highness (Philosophy Classic). Thomas Mann

finds the knob it's an old-fashioned lock, and he doesn't understand it and fiddles and dislocates his arm and tires himself out and keeps bowing all the time in his agitation, until at last his Highness graciously lets him out with his own hand. Yes, that's the door-opening joke! But that's nothing to what I'm going to tell your Highness….”

      They had been so deep in conversation that they had scarcely noticed where they were going, had gone down the stairs and reached the ground-floor, close to the Albrechtstor. Eiermann, one of the Grand Duchess's grooms-of-the-chamber, came towards them. He wore a violet coat and side-whiskers. He had been sent out to look for their Grand Ducal Highnesses. He shook his head while still at a distance, in lively concern, and pursed his mouth up like a funnel. But when he noticed Shoemaker Hinnerke walking with the children and tapping with his umbrella, all the muscles of his face relaxed and his jaw dropped.

      There was scarcely time for thanks and farewells, Eiermann was in such a hurry to part the children from the shoemaker. And with many a gloomy prophecy he led their Grand Ducal Highnesses up to their room to the Swiss governess.

      Eyes were turned to heaven, hands were wrung about their absence and the state of their clothes. The worst of all happened, they were “looked at sadly.” But Klaus Heinrich confined his contrition to the bare minimum. He thought: “So the lackeys took money and let the tradesmen wander about the corridors if they did not get any, kept the goods back, that the tradesmen might get blamed, and did not open the folding-doors, so that the suitor had to scrabble. That's what happened in the Schloss, and what must it be outside? Outside among the people who stared at him so respectfully and so strangely, when he drove by with his hand to his hat …? But how had the man dared to tell it him? Not one single time had he called him Grand Ducal Highness; he had forced himself on him and offended his birth and upbringing. And yet, why was it so extraordinarily pleasant to hear all that about the lackeys? Why did his heart beat with such rapt pleasure, when moved by some of the wild and bold things in which his Highness bore no part?”