They paid her or her mother a kind of base court, on the tacit assumption that she--Vivie--had placed Colonel von Giesselin under special obligations.

If in rare instances, out of sheer pity, she took up a case and von Giesselin granted the petition or had it done in a higher quarter, his action was clearly a personal favour to her; and the very petitioners went away, with the ingratitude common in such cases, and spread the news of Vivie's privileged position at the Hotel Imperial.

It was not surprising therefore that in the small circles of influential British or American people in Brussels she was viewed with suspicion or contempt.

She supported this odious position at the Hotel Imperial as long as possible, in the hope that Colonel von Giesselin when he had realized the impossibility of using herself or her mother in any kind of intrigue against the British Government would do what the American Consul General professed himself unable or unwilling to do: obtain for them passports to proceed to Holland.
Von Giesselin, from December, 1914, took up among other duties that of Press Censor and officer in charge of Publicity.

After the occupation of Brussels and the fall of Antwerp, the "patriotic" Belgian Press had withdrawn itself to France and England or had stopped publication.