The moral example of Maria Theresa did not, however, in any great degree affect her gallant husband, Francis of Lorraine. His mistress, Princess Auersperg-Neipperg, had all the noble vices of her exalted position. The prime minister, Kaunitz, was utterly immoral, and even dared to take with him in his equipage his mistresses, who waited till his audience with the empress was over. When the latter once ventured to remonstrate with him, he replied: "Madam, I have come here to speak with you about your affairs, not about my own." The so-called chastity commission established by the empress to supervise the morals of Vienna succeeded in compelling those who persistently indulged in vices at least to exercise more caution and discretion; for she remained inexorable against scandalous debauch and inflicted ignominious chastisement upon the offenders, according to the Draconic code of the time. The result was that Vienna had its "Messalinas in toned down colors," as the British traveller Wraxall says, and that "the superstition of Austrian women, though it be traditional and immense, is by no means an obstacle to excesses; they sin, pray, confess, and begin anew."
The brilliant court at Vienna found its counterpart in the frugal, economical bourgeois court of Berlin, while that of Dresden, as mentioned in the foregoing chapters, was sunk in a mire of moral corruption. The memoirs of Marquise Sophie Wilhelmine of Baireuth, sister of Frederick the Great, describe, with humor and sometimes with ingenuous malice, the condition of the court at Dresden. The wife and children of the coarse soldier-king were treated with great harshness and almost deprived of the necessities of life. The marquise tells of a visit to Dresden in 1738, where Frederick fell in love with Countess Orzelska, a natural daughter and mistress of August the Strong. The pen refuses to record the history of the incest practised at that court with and among the three hundred and fifty-four "natural" children of August. August was jealous of the Crown Prince of Prussia, and therefore substituted for Countess Orzelska the beautiful Italian Formera, who became Frederick's first mistress. Later, however, at the return visit of the Saxon court to Berlin, as Scherr reports, Frederick again met the Countess Orzelska, a meeting which did not remain without consequences. Other details of the court life of the time cannot be put on paper: we must refer the reader to Scherr's discussion of Eighteenth Century Court Society, to Lessing's Emilia Galotti, in which in Italian disguise the great classicist chastises German princely rape, and to Schiller's drama, Cabal and Love, which proves that, unfortunately, the victims of princely lust were not always the willing courtesans; but frequently victims chosen from the people.