Page "Louise of Mecklenburg-Strelitz" Paragraph 27

By 1808 it was still considered unsafe to return to Berlin, and the royal family consequently spent the summer near Königsberg ; Louise believed that the hard trials of her children's early lives would be good for them: " If they had been reared in luxury and prosperity they might think that so it must always be.

" In the winter of 1808, Tsar Alexander I invited the king and queen to St. Petersburg, where she was treated to sumptuously decorated rooms ; " Nothing dazzles me anymore ", she exclaimed on her return back to Germany.

Near the birth of her youngest child Princess Louise in 1809, Louise wrote to her father, " Gladly ... the calamities which have befallen us have not forced their way into our wedded and home life, rather have strengthened the same, and made it even more precious to us.

" Louise was sick for much of that year, but returned with the king to Berlin near the end of it after an absence of three years ; the queen arrived in a carriage accompanied by her two daughters Charlotte and Alexandrine and younger son Charles, and was greeted by her father at Charlottenburg Palace – the residence was ransacked however, as Napoleon and his commanders had stripped its rooms of paintings, statues, manuscripts, and antiquities.

Returning to a much different Prussia than she left, a preacher observed that " our dear queen is far from joyful, but her seriousness has a quiet serenity ... her eyes have lost their former sparkle, and one sees that they have wept much, and still weep ".