[3] Consequently, he participated but rarely in court festivities and state functions; George also carefully held himself aloof from politics, and saw little of his relatives, save at purely private and family dinners.

[4] After the war however, Prussian and French emotions were heightened, and George found it difficult to reconcile his private pleasures with the opinions of his family.

Despite the distance, Prince George made an effort to closely follow the literary scene in Paris thereafter, and acquaintances were often shocked at how well he knew what was occurring artistically in France.

[5] A contemporary of George's later remarked that though he liked to dabble in poetry, "his efforts were better appreciated in the circle of the court, where some of his pieces have been represented, than by the outer world".

[6] In the mid-1870s, reports emerged in the press concerning Prince George and Empress Eugénie, the widowed wife of the deposed Napoleon III of France, whose fate had been the result of the German invasion.

To solve this dilemma, Prince George sent her flowers, and made it known to her secretary that if she so wished, he would attend an audience with her to "lay his homage at the feet of her majesty".

Soon after however, the empress left Carlsbad and made it known to the press that her departure was due to the undesirable attentions of Prince George.

It cannot be denied that he has a few harmless and kindly eccentricities which would attract no attention whatever in an ordinary septuagenarian, but which excite comment merely by reason of his rank as a prince of the blood.

He is [a] gentle, brilliantly accomplished, chivalrous old fellow, without an enemy in the world, and is a great favorite with the emperor's children, who will deeply miss him when he passes over to the majority, and is laid to rest in the family vault of the house of Hohenzollern".