They did it, subtly and persistently, by pretending from the first that I was Carl Gustaf and spending hour after hour reminding me about myself I suppose to approach the thing in any other way would have been useless, for it would have been constant admission of the imposture, and what an idiot, hare-brained scheme it was. They took me through that Danish bastard’s life a hundred times, from the cradle upwards, until I swear I must have known more about him than he did himself His childhood ailments, his relatives, his ancestors, his tutors his homes, his playmates, his education, his likes his dislikes, his habits—there wasn’t a call of nature that he had answered in twenty years that I wasn’t letter-perfect in by the time they had done. Hour after hour, day after day, they had me sitting at that long table while they poured fact after fact into me—what food he liked what pets he had had, what he read, what colour his sister’s eyes were, what nursery name his governess had called him (Tutti, of all things), how long he had lived at Heidelberg, what his musical tastes were (“Fra Diavolo”, by one Auber, had apparently impressed him. and he was forever whistling an air from it; it says something for their teaching that I’ve whistled it off and on for fifty years now.) Where they had got all their information, God only knows, but they had two huge folders of papers and drawings which seemed to contain everything that he had ever done and all that was known about him. I couldn’t tell you my own grandmother’s Christian name, but God help me I know that Carl Gustaf’s great-uncle’s mastiff was called Ragnar, and he lived to be twenty-three.

“And what was your highness’s favourite game when you were little?” Rudi would ask.

“Playing at sailors,” I would reply.

“What was the English ship you boasted to your mother you had captured at Copenhagen?”

“The Agamemnon.”

“How did you come to capture it?”

“How the blazes do I know? I was only three, wasn’t I? I can’t remember.”

“You have been told. It was stuck in a mudbank. In your infant re-enactment you covered yourself in mud in a garden pond, don’t you remember?”

That was the kind of thing I had to know, and when I protested that no one was ever likely to ask me what games I had played when I was little, they wouldn’t argue, but would pass patiently on—to remind me of the fever I had had when I was fourteen, or the time I broke my arm falling from an apple tree.

All our talk was conducted in German, at which I made capital progress—indeed, Rudi’s one fear was that I might be too proficient, for Carl Gustaf apparently didn’t speak it too well, for all his Heidelberg education. Bersonin, who despite his taciturnity was a patient teacher, instructed me in Danish, but possibly because he himself only spoke it at second hand, I didn’t take to it easily. I never learned to think in it, which is unusual for me, and I found it ugly and dull, with its long vowels that make you sound as though you had wind.