a 
Kaspar Hauser, 
legends of the people, contain a long list of fatalities arising from 
the intrigues and revenges of a dissolute Court. | 
The present capital, Karlsruhe, was founded by Karl Wilhelm, 
who reigned from 1709 till 1738. 
He was notorious for his licentiousness. Although married to 
an estimable princess, and father of two sons, he scandalised all 
Europe by keeping a harem of one hundred and sixty beautiful 
girls, and indulging in various excesses which tended to the corrup- 
tion of social morals and the embarrassment of the public funds. 
He was succeeded in 1738 by his grandson, Karl Friedrich, 
who reigned seventy-three years. 
It was during his rule, in 1801, that Baden was raised by 
Napoleon to the rank of a Grand Duchy. 
Karl Friedrich married Princess Caroline of Hesse-Darmstadt, 
who bore him three sons: Karl Ludwig, born in 1751; Friedrich, 
horn in 1756 ; and Ludwig Wilhelm August, born in 1763. 
Princess Caroline died in 1783, and four years after her death 
Karl Friedrich married, morganatically, a young lady, only 
nineteen years old, belonging to the Court, Louise Caroline Geyer 
von Geyersberg, upon whom he conferred the title of Countess of 
Hochberg. At the time of his second marriage, the Grand-Duke 
was sixty years old, and unusually infirm for that age. 
His young wife had, previously, for a considerable period, 
indulged in a secret intimacy with Margrave Ludwig, her husband’s 
youngest son, who, knowing that they would never be allowed to 
marry, had advised her to accept his father’s offer, to which her 
boundless ambition had already inclined her to lend a willing ear. 
However, although wife to the ruling monarch, she continued to be 
the mistress of his son, and as this relation was known to many of 
the courtiers and suspected by everybody, excepting the one 
person most concerned, it was natural that the paternity of the 
five children born by the Countess in quick succession should 
have been ascribed to the youthful lover, instead of to the old and 
prematurely decrepit husband. The first child, Leopold, was 
born in 1790 (the Grand-Duke being then sixty-three years old); 
the second, Wilhelm, in 1792; a third prince was born in 1793,