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John Quincy had allowed her to carry. On Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, she and her husband visited royal advisers, or princesses, or one count or another. Wednesday was reserved for the old king’s widow. Fridays offered some relief, when Louisa went to the home of Luise, known as Princess Ferdinand, where the dinners were a little less pretentious, and where Princess Ferdinand’s sister, the Landgravine of Hesse-Kassel, “the most elegant woman I ever beheld,” made Louisa feel “at
home.
” On Sundays, John Quincy and Louisa joined the company of the king and queen.
    She was supposed to dislike being part of the “elegant mob.” She and John Quincy had already argued during their engagement, after all, about her impressionability, the lures of luxury, and the corrupting influence of a court. She was wise, then, to bemoan the “almost constant dissipation.” And it was true: the treadmill of court parties would become “very irksome.” She had to settle into a chair without shoving her hoop into the knee of the prince sitting next to her, and to demurely deny a baron’s request that they breakfast in his garden tête-à-tête
.
She had no choice of where to go, nor what to do once she was there, except when she was sick (and, in fact, she was often sick). If there were games of cards, she played cards. If summoned by royalty, she stepped forward. If she was dismissed, she had to figure out how to walk away without turning her back. It was exhausting, to be out past midnight night after night, rarely in perfect health, and to eat rich meals she did not enjoy. She was not completely lying when she wrote, to satisfy those who suspected her of harboring a fondness for silks and quadrilles, that “these duties were a torment.” She grew sick of the quivering joints of meat marbled with fat.
    Her frequently poor health gave her a reason and excuse to form real and deep relationships in more intimate places. Away from the court, she learned who her true friends were. She would go to the house of herphysician, Charles Brown, a few doors away from her apartment, for suppers of bread and cheese without ceremony. The Browns’ house was a refuge, “the resort of all the English foreigners of distinction.” It was familiar to her—a glimpse of Britain in Berlin. Charles Brown was Scottish and his wife Welsh. Their children were not so unlike her own siblings, and the family had a hum she would have recognized. There was bookish Margaret; little golden Fanny; William, “very handsome and very wild”; and pretty, sweet Isabella, who worshipped her.
    Louisa also spent countless hours at the home of Countess Pauline Neale, who welcomed her into her large circle of intimates. The young women drank tea, half attended to their embroidery, chatted about “the scandal of the town,” or amused themselves by “satirizing the vagaries of the court belles, or the follies of the court dowdies, or the prank of the young foreigners.” They gossiped about the secret marriage of the queen’s sister (“her brute of a husband said to receive all his officers while in bed with her, at five o’clock in the morning, smoking a Meerschaum”); they talked about the “
roué
” British ambassador, Lord Elgin, who made a deal with Miss Dorville: a pair of diamond earrings in exchange for a very public kiss. On inky winter nights they told ghost stories. Pauline was “highly educated; remarkably well read; enthusiastic in her religion; was full of German mysticism in its most exaggerated sense; and a sincere and true believer,” by which Louisa meant she believed in ghosts. It was the age of the great gothic novel, of
The Mysteries of Udolpho
, Friedrich Schiller’s
The Ghost-Seer
, Matthew Gregory Lewis’s
The Monk
, the novels of E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
. When Louisa heard a story