Fortunately, Carl Gustaf was a cheerful, easy-going chap, much as I am myself, but I had to work hard to try to correct the sulky look I get when I’m out of sorts, and my habit of glowering and sticking out my lower lip. This ray of Danish sunshine didn’t glower, apparently; when he was in the dumps he showed it with an angry frown, so of course I had to knit my brows until they ached.

How well I learned my lessons you may judge when I tell you that to this day I have his trick of rubbing one hand across the back of the other (when thinking deeply), and that I entirely lost my own habit of scratching my backside (when puzzled). Royalty—I have Bersonin’s solemn word for it—never claw at their arses to assist thought.

Now the result of all this, day after day, and of the unbroken pretence that my cantors kept up, was remarkable and sometimes even frightening I suppose I’m a good actor, to begin with—after all, when you’ve been shamming all your life, as I have, it must come pretty natural—but there were times when I forgot that I was acting at all, and began to half-believe that I was Carl Gustaf. I might be practising before the long cheval glass, with Rudi and Bersonin watching and criticising, and I would see this bald-headed young fellow in the green hussar rig flashing his smile and stabbing his forefinger, and think to myself, “Aye, that’s me”—and then my mind would try to recapture the picture of the dark, damn-you-me-lad-looking fellow with the curly hair and whiskers—and I would discover that I couldn’t do it. That was when I found it frightening—when I had forgotten what my old self looked like.

Mind you, my character didn’t change; these flashes were only momentary. But I certainly began to believe that we would carry off the imposture, and the terror that I had originally felt about it subsided to a mere craven apprehension of what the end of it all might be—when payday came and the real Carl Gustaf had come back into his own.

However, that was in the future, and in the meantime I was floating with the tide, as is my habit, and letting my puppet-handlers think that butter wouldn’t melt in my mouth. For their part, they seemed to be delighted with my progress, and one day, about three weeks after I had come to Schönhausen, on an evening when Bismarck joined the rest of us at supper, I did something which convinced Rudi and Bersonin that the first round was won at least.