I used to read piquant articles about his embroglio in an American paper that devoted itself to matters of the sort.

All sorts of international difficulties were to arise if de Mersch were ejected.
There was some other obscure prince of a rival house, Prussian or Russian, who had desires for the degree of royalty that sat so heavily on de Mersch.

Indeed, I think there were two rival princes, each waiting with portmanteaux packed and manifestos in their breast pockets, ready to pass de Mersch's frontiers.
The grievances of his subjects--so the Paris-American _Gazette_ said--were intimately connected with matters of finance, and de Mersch's personal finances and his grand ducal were inextricably mixed up with the wild-cat schemes with which he was seeking to make a fortune large enough to enable him to laugh at half a dozen elective grand duchies.
Indeed, de Mersch's own portmanteau was reported to be packed against the day when British support of his Greenland schemes would let him afford to laugh at his cantankerous Diet.
The thing interested me so little that I never quite mastered the details of it.

I wished the man no good, but so long as he kept out of my way I was not going to hate him actively.

Finally the affairs of Holstein-Launewitz ceased to occupy the papers--the thing was arranged and the Russian and Prussian princes unpacked their portmanteaux, and, I suppose, consigned their manifestos to the flames, or adapted them to the needs of other principalities.