Cooks’ Caps and Coronets.

True Stories of Members of the European Nobility Who Were Domestic Servants Before or After Fortune Smiled Upon Them—Several Society Leaders Came from the Kitchen.

Extremes often meet, and probably nothing better illustrates this than the many instances that exist of the elevation of persons of lowly birth to positions of great dignity and importance, while many others who have been delicately nurtured and enjoyed the highest culture have been forced to resort to the humblest forms of hard labor in order to earn the bread which they would eat.

Wicked little Cupid is responsible for many of the former cases, for he dearly loves a joke, and frequently has it at the expense of the rank and traditional glory of some ancient house and name. The world has always been rather democratic when love has stepped in, and some of the great personages of history have contracted alliances which might have been expected to turn things topsy-turvy, yet nothing has been seriously ruffled.

In Paris one of the most influential and popular leaders of society is the Baroness de Waru, the wife of the only son and heir of the multimillionaire president of the Orleans Railroad Company. Her blonde beauty is of the most ethereal kind, and her dainty person is distinguished by so much aristocratic elegance that no one to look at her would ever dream that her father had begun his career as a mere stable-boy, who, in the service of the last reigning Duke of Parma, was promoted from one post to another until he blossomed forth as a general, a baron, and as Prime Minister of the Duchy of Parma, besides being decorated with the grand crosses of most of the orders of chivalry of Europe.

Chambermaid Became Lady Mayoress.

Lady Evans, who, several years ago, as Lady Mayoress of London, was dispensing magnificent hospitality at the Mansion House to crowned heads and royal personages, foreign as well as English, was a chambermaid at the Oak Hotel, at Sevenoaks, in Kent, when her husband first met and married her. Her father was a village plumber, and her mother, until the date of her own marriage, was a cook and general servant.

On the Continent there is no more ancient or illustrious family than that of Kinsky, the chief of which bears the title of Prince of the Holy Roman Empire. Two of its most distinguished members—the Counts Eugene and Octavius, both of them Privy Councilors of the Emperor and Knights of the Golden Fleece—married domestic servants, Eugene taking his wife from the laundry, while the Countess Octavius Kinsky was formerly the chambermaid at a small inn.

The Countess Octavius has rendered herself very obnoxious to her husband’s family by her grasping propensities. But the late Countess Eugene, the ex-washerwoman of Ischal, was a singularly charming woman, universally beloved at Vienna, and, although she never asked for a presentation at court, the names of quite a number of members of the imperial family figured on her visiting list.

Lady Hawkins Was a Cook.

The widowed Princess Alexander of Battenberg, whose husband at one time ruled over Bulgaria, may likewise be said to have sprung from the kitchen, her father having been the valet and her mother the cook of the old Austrian General de Martini. Yet in spite of this parentage, Princess Alexander is treated as a sister-in-law by the similarly widowed Princess Henry of Battenberg, who is a daughter of Queen Victoria. The late queen showed great kindness and consideration toward Princess Alexander of Battenberg, acknowledging her as a kinswoman.

The second wife of the late Lord Bramwell had originally been his cook, while Lady Hawkins, who is the better half of the eminent English judge of that name, and the aunt by marriage of “Anthony Hope,” the novelist, was originally a housemaid, as was also the widow of the “Grand Old Man” of Australia, Sir Henry Parkes.

King Joachim of Naples, from whom the entire princely house of Murat is descended, began life at the close of the last century as a mere stable-boy, while the first Prince Kutusoff, founder of the grand Russian family of that name, achieved his greatness a hundred years ago by the skill which he displayed as the valet and barber to Czar Paul, a monarch whose own great-grandmother, Empress Catherine, was the chambermaid of a village inn, where she first attracted the attention of Peter the Great, who ultimately married her.

Earl Served as Porter.

That the prejudice which formerly existed in exalted circles against menial occupation is rapidly disappearing is abundantly proved by the number of titled personages who are content to take at meal-time their place, not at the table of the master of the house, but at that of the domestics in the servants’ hall.

Thus in the course of a civil suit against Sir Charles Nugent it came out that he was earning his livelihood as a groom, while Lady Nugent was taking in washing. Yet the Nugents are among the most ancient and illustrious of all the grand houses of the nobility of Europe, some of their members being princes of the Austrian Empire, while the head of the family is the Earl of Westmeath.

Here in this country Lord Drummond, the grandson and heir of the British Earl of Perth and the French Duke of Melfort, died several years ago while occupying a menial position—that of door-porter in the establishment of one of the proprietors of the great New York daily newspapers; and the writer can remember having found, a few years ago, Prince Benjamin Rohan, who by virtue of his birth is the titular cousin of every crowned head in Europe, and is descended in a direct line from Godfrey, Duke of Bouillon, leader of the First Crusade, and the first Crusader King of Jerusalem, serving as a waiter in one of the smaller restaurants in Second Avenue, New York City.

Sir Thomas Echlin, head of the ancient house of Echlins, which has been settled in Ireland since the reign of King James I, and whose baronetcy is nearly three hundred years old, recently was employed on the Dublin police force in the humble capacity of an ordinary “bobby” at six dollars a week, and was formerly footman in a London family.

One of the last things that Lord Beaconsfield did before his death was to obtain from the queen a pension of five hundred dollars a year for the widow of the late Lord Kingsland, whom, in spite of her rank as a peeress of the realm, he had discovered earning a bare living as a washerwoman in a large family at Kensington.

Lord Kingsland, prior to his accession to this ancient peerage, had been a waiter in a Dublin hotel, but on becoming a lord, through the death of his uncle, abandoned this calling and preferred to rely upon his wife’s earnings at the washtub.

Happiness.

Happiness in this world, when it comes, comes incidentally. Make it the object of pursuit, and it leads us a wild goose chase, and is never attained. Follow some other object, and very possibly we may find that we have caught happiness without dreaming of it, but likely enough it is gone the moment we say to ourselves, “Here it is!” like the chest of gold that treasure-seekers find.... There is something more awful in happiness than in sorrow,—the latter being earthly and finite, the former composed of the substance and texture of eternity, so that spirits still embodied may well tremble at it.—Nathaniel Hawthorne.