Antonia (her MIL): "My future mother-in-law's looks were a great disappointment to me. Having heard that she had been a great beauty, I was all eagerness to see her, but I could not reconcile myself to this pale-faced, pale-lipped, Grecian-nosed woman with the too-small bust and too-long legs. These proportions can occasionally be beautiful, but in her case, the hips being enormous, there was something about her figure which made you feel positively uncomfortable. Had I been older, I would no doubt have understood how handsome her features still were. She was most loving and charmingly kind to me, which I later realized must have been somewhat of an effort, because, being an ardent Catholic, it was a great distress to her to have a Protestant daughter-in-law...MY MOTHER-IN-LAW was an interesting, if not altogether a lovable, personality. She was profoundly artistic, an excellent painter, and deeply learned on certain subjects, such as botany, biology and natural history. But in other ways she had remained very narrow and her religion cramped instead of widening her heart, mind and sympathies. She was one of those people who knew no forgiveness of sinners unless it was imposed upon her in the confessional. She was a curious mixture of dignity and childish futility, vain, self-centered, small in her judgment of others; she had no wider sympathies. Life, with its broader human understanding, lay outside her field of comprehension. She lived in a small circle of rules, prejudices and conventions which she considered perfection. It was her love of beauty in general and of flowers in particular that made her congenial to me. But I never dared touch upon general subjects; human conflicts she was unable to grasp; she lived so protected, so out of the world, hedged in by her church, nursing her delicate health, everybody serving her, caring for her, spoiling her, that she was more like an old and very exigent child than a woman who had lived a real woman's life, with its temptations, conflicts, doubts, joys, passions and pain. This I learned little by little as the years went by, for our natures were made to clash, but at that first meeting she was merely an unexpectedly impressive, middle-aged lady who showered upon me every kindness and attention. I really think she liked me then, but there was also something else in this; I was to be shown off as favorite so as to spite Mädi, her eldest daughter-in-law. Of course, then I had no idea of this or I would have been less flattered by her manifestations of affection; but little by little I was to learn that Fürstin Antonia was a woman who could hate and resent in a way little in keeping with her religious principles, and the unfortunate Mädi was one of those who had known how to awaken her most lasting dislike."
Madi (her SIL): "Maria Theresa, born Princess Trani, was of the race of the Bavarian Wittelsbachs, and had some of their eccentricity; though exceedingly blue-blooded and occasionally even fascinating, there was something a bit odd and not quite to be reckoned with about Mädi. Life threw us little together; she showed me neither affection nor dislike. If I had known that I was being used to emphasize the disfavor in which she was held, I should have done everything to make friends, for my whole soul would have revolted against being unfairly played off against her. Ever so many years later, in the only heart-to-heart talk we ever had together, she confessed to me that she had imagined that I had been conscious of the way I was being used to humiliate her. This was a horrible revelation to me; and by the pain I felt, I think she was convinced that I had been utterly unaware of my mother-in-law's tactics. But the harm had been done....Somehow, Mädi could not fit in with the Hohenzollern family; she seemed actually to take pleasure in shocking them whenever she could. To all outward appearances her husband was patient and long-suffering; but they drifted apart, as their characters were fundamentally different. Mädi, without being good-looking, had what the French call "beaucoup de race." She was exceedingly thin, with pale blue eyes and a pathetic voice. Her health was not robust and she was quite an invalid, wheeled about in a chair, before she died at the age of forty-two. In those days she hardly ever came to Sigmaringen, and the saddest of all was that she saw very little of her children, to whom she was mother in name more than in fact, which made them rather sad and lonely little creatures. Mädi's one great love was her mother, Countess Trani, sister of the Empress Elisabeth of Austria, of the Queen of Naples and of the Duchess of Alençon. Countess Trani had the same wonderful figure as the Empress, tall, upright and incredibly slim; she was, however, much less beautiful. She, too, was a lover of solitude, somewhat of a hermit, living far away from her kind, proud, original, aristocratic, but difficult to get on with—a specialty her daughter had inherited. Poor Madi, she was a pathetic figure that but seldom crossed my path. We lived too far apart."