A certain Prince who was occupying the suite during the Jubilee of 1887--when the Grand Babylon had seven persons of Royal blood under its roof--sent a curt message to Felix that the portrait must be removed.
Felix respectfully declined to remove it, and the Prince left for another hotel, where he was robbed of two thousand pounds' worth of jewellery.

The Royal audience chamber of the Grand Babylon, if people only knew it, is one of the sights of London, but it is never shown, and if you ask the hotel servants about its wonders they will tell you only foolish facts concerning it, as that the Turkey carpet costs fifty pounds to clean, and that one of the great vases is cracked across the pedestal, owing to the rough treatment accorded to it during a riotous game of Blind Man's Buff, played one night by four young Princesses, a Balkan King, and his aides-de-camp.
In one of the window recesses of this magnificent apartment, on a certain afternoon in late July, stood Prince Aribert of Posen.

He was faultlessly dressed in the conventional frock-coat of English civilization, with a gardenia in his button-hole, and the indispensable crease down the front of the trousers.

He seemed to be fairly amused, and also to expect someone, for at frequent intervals he looked rapidly over his shoulder in the direction of the door behind the Royal chair.
At last a little wizened, stooping old man, with a distinctly German cast of countenance, appeared through the door, and laid some papers on a small table by the side of the chair.
'Ah, Hans, my old friend!' said Aribert, approaching the old man.

'I must have a little talk with you about one or two matters.