From Kürschdorf the news had come to him that the King was going to die. He remembered then, possibly with a stricken conscience, that he was partly if not wholly responsible for the fact that His Majesty would leave no son to succeed him. If at this juncture he were able to produce the heir, what might he not expect in the way of honours? But the Crown Prince was dead and therefore not producible.
the lines of the story as it was opened up to him, and he perceived the birth just here of the temptation to produce the heir to the throne by constructing a replica of the deceased Maximilian. Had he been going about such a business himself, he would probably have chosen some conscienceless fellow to personify the departed one. But with Schlippenbach his science was always pre-eminent. As, years before, he had endeavoured by means of this to build up from the real infant heir a prince that286 should meet his views of what a prince should be, so now he chose to make, from a young man possessed of certain fitting physical and mental attributes, a prince to order it is inevitable that the country must suffer..
The raw material must be tall, erect and of dignified bearing, of intelligence and education. The Crown Prince had been dark-eyed, but flaxen-haired. To secure this latter natural combination was not easy. But while his knowledge of chemicals left him powerless to change blue eyes to brown, his familiarity with the potency of peroxide of hydrogen made it quite possible for him to change black hair to blond. And so he set about finding a gentleman of the desired type. Daily he must have passed hundreds on the street, but seeing them and getting them within the radius of his ministration were two different things. In his circle of acquaintances he knew of no one that would answer. But from one of his acquaintances, Lutz, the valet, he had heard much of the valet’s employer, and the valet’s employer evidently seemed to him to be very nearly what he required.