In late 1913, Vignerte, nearly broke and at an impasse, is contemplating giving up his dream of an academic career and accepting a dreary provincial teaching job when he by chance runs into an old university classmate who has risen high in the civil service.
Dazzled by the generosity of the honorarium being offered, Vignerte dismisses the misgivings of his beloved mentor, Professor Thierry, who believes that there is something ominous about the archducal household - though he cannot give further details, except a hint that the death of the Grand Duke's first wife may not have been due to natural causes, and a warning to have nothing to do with a certain baron von Boose.
During this time, Vignerte thinks about Philip Christoph von Königsmarck, who mysteriously disappeared in 1694 .The young nobleman is thought to have been murdered while conducting an affair with Sophia Dorothea of Celle, the unhappily-married Electrix of Hanover.
She describes her childhood in a palace on an island on the Volga, her love of shooting, riding, and the hunt, and - ominously - an incident in which her father brutally murdered her Italian piano teacher after he had made an advance on her.
He had immediately asked for her hand, an offer which she initially spurned, but relented to please her ambitious father and to satisfy her own bemused guilt after leading Rudolf on a hard ride during a court hunt, which resulted in his breaking his leg.
In accepting his proposal, however, she had warned Rudolf that all he could expect from her was loyalty and friendship, not love; in the year after the marriage, when his secret hope that he might gain her romantic affection does not bear fruit, the Grand Duke grows melancholy and withdraws into his hobby, the study of geology.
He is delighted when the Kaiser assigns him a secret mission to study potential mineral deposits in a disputed part of Cameroon, and travels there with his adjutant von Boose, dying of sunstroke mid-expedition.
Of these, the tibia bears a characteristic fracture mark; the unspoken implication is that Rudolf had never left Lautenburg for Africa, but had been murdered (at Friedrich's behest) by von Boose, who had afterward forged the Grand Duke's African correspondence.
Later that morning, the French conduct a successful raid across no-man's land, and the narrator is ordered to his battalion's command post to help interrogate a captured German officer, whom he is shocked to recognize as von Boose.