"budget-crushing castle building"

-From Heinrich Kreisel's The Castles of King Ludwig II of Bavaria

"New castles kept appearing in or near the mountains, each more enchanted, more fairy-like than the other. "The King is building" it was whispered, "building is life for him. The King loves the mountain and solitude, and he is building, building fairy castles."

 "If the King's weird night rides fired the people's imagination, the more spectacular excursions he began to take by night in 1870 came straight out of Grimm, especially as the low hunting-gig had now been replaced by an ornate coach, and in winter by a gilded sleigh (see picture on cover). It must have been a fantastic sight to see this midnight procession rushing past; first came an out-rider bearing a torch, and then the royal sleigh, drawn by six dapple-grey horses harnessed in Morocco leather, tossing their blue and white plumes to the jingle of golden bells, while the attendants wore blue and white liveries of the 18th century, with three-cornered hats perched on powdered wigs. The King himself, who wore a big diamond brooch in his hat when dressed in plain clothes, would dress up for these excursions in a blue velvet cloak faced with ermine, or sometimes even in glittering costume in the style of Louis XIV..."

"Like all inhabitants of dreamland, Ludwig II shunned the glare of day. His favourite planet was the moon; an artificial moon shed its light in his bedroom at Hohenschwangau; and the blue globe of the night lamp in Herrenchiemsee Palace was something similar... The King turned day into night, that is to say, he lived only in the night. Many colour effects in his Castles are unintelligible unless we realize that he saw everything only by candle-light. Artificial light was also the light of the theatre, which was a passion with the King, just because it was a world of illusion. Ludwig loved darkness, he hated the brilliant light that revealed him mercilessly to his surroundings. For he was a misanthrope, an eccentric; he did not live as a member of a community, but as an uninhibited individualist. Since he withdrew more and more into his own world of values and ideas, acknowledging no others, his loneliness was bound to increase."

"The King had other strange habits. He used to bow to certain trees; when he rode or drove past them, he would take off his hat to them and call them his "sacred trees"... There was a certain pillar in the hall of his Castle at Linderhof which he would touch, or even embrace, at his departure or on arrival."

"The King was seldom seen in the town, where he would turn up suddenly in the night like a resplendent vision, to disappear again; he lived in the country, in the mountains, in a milieu of hill farmers and woodsmen, unsophisticated people who loved and honoured their king as they found him... It is true that he was not a constitutional, bourgeois monarch, who looked like an ordinary man; he was a king from ancient legend; a king with a crown and velvet cloak, in a coach or sleigh of gold, with rites of his own that had to be kept secret from the common people. Thus, for the population of the country between the Alps and the lakes of Upper Bavaria he was an unreal, and therefore, a genuine king, a king from a fairy-tale."