Early Life
As a young woman Marie became pregnant by a palace servant. The servant, a married man named Hecht, was responsible for turning off the gas-lights in the bedrooms of the grand ducal children. Several of Marie's cousins, including the future King George V of the United Kingdom and William II, German Emperor, thought that Marie had been "hypnotised", while Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom thought that Marie had been "drugged". Hecht was dismissed from service on the charge of stealing; his subsequent law-suit against the grand ducal family made the details of the story public. The story made radical newspaper headlines in its day.
A daughter was born to Marie in 1898; she was raised under the protection of Marie's grandmother, Grand Duchess Augusta of Mecklenburg-Strelitz (born Princess Augusta of Cambridge).
Read more about this topic: Duchess Marie Of Mecklenburg
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early and/or life:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“The early Christian rules of life were not made to last, because the early Christians did not believe that the world itself was going to last.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“We quaff the cup of life with eager haste without draining it, instead of which it only overflows the brim—objects press around us, filling the mind with their magnitude and with the throng of desires that wait upon them, so that we have no room for the thoughts of death.”
—William Hazlitt (1778–1830)