Literary interests In the 1850s, he came to Berlin, where the prince encountered the salon of Minna von Tresckow. It was she who encouraged him to publish his plays. In 1872 he anonymously published his autobiography "Yellowed leaves", but further insight into his privacy was not forthcoming. When the General Association of German literature was formed, he took over in 1873 the founding protectorate from 1874, and was also protector of the Historical Museum of the City of Düsseldorf. In the same year he became president of the non-profit Academy Sciences. Upon his death, he would bequeath his extensive library of approximately 6,000 titles to the University Library of Bonn. Prince George was of a modest, retiring nature, and cared little for the show royal society typically demanded. Prior to the
Franco-Prussian War, Prince George was very close to many French writers, poets, and other literary figures such as
Alexandre Dumas; many of them gathered annually at
Ems with the prince to discuss artistic topics. 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".
Empress Eugénie 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. Before the war, the prince had been a frequent and welcome visitor to Napoleon's court; thus when Eugénie took up residence at the same hotel he was residing in
Carlsbad, Prince George was faced with little choice but to visit her. On the one hand, he was obligated to pay his attentions or else be exposed for gross discourtesy; on the other hand, he felt that any public knowledge of her meeting with a German prince might prove unpleasant to her, as she was eager to recover the French throne for her son
Louis Napoléon. 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. Newspapers made the most of the story, abusing the prince by declaring that he was mentally unbalanced. One defended these claims: "Nothing can be further from the truth. 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". After his death his body was brought to the castle
Rheinstein, which he had inherited in 1863 with his only brother
Prince Alexander and for which he always cherished a predilection; on 9 May 1902 he was buried in the chapel of the castle. In 1906 the newly established state school as Düsseldorf Royal Prince Georg-Gymnasium was named in his honor. ==List of works==