In 1744, the new Crown Princess Lovisa Ulrika wrote to her sister in Berlin making fun of an elderly Maid of Honour she had inherited on her arrival in Sweden a few months earlier. Did her sister remember someone at the Prussian court who was known as the Old Dragon, who overdid the finery and went about bedecked with pompoms and orange ribbons? ‘I have an old Maid of Honour called Sjöblad who resembles her like two drops of water. […] She rarely comes to me as she is always ill.’ When Lovisa Ulrika did meet Miss Sjöblad she always thought of the Old Dragon. The Princess was careful to assure her sister that not all her Maids of Honour were dressed up (fagotée) like Miss Sjöblad, and ‘I have very pretty girls who have esprit and monde’.

A few years later, Lovisa Ulrika told her mother to talk to a diplomat in Berlin, Count Fick, who was a gifted raconteur and ‘will tell the most beautiful tales in the world, but which, to be honest, are not palatable’. Distasteful, perhaps, but entertaining, for ‘There are two antiquities at court, who are a century and a half old between them. One has been bedridden for 30 years and the other never steps outside her chamber. If my dear Maman wishes to be amused, she can talk to Count Finck about Miss Sjöblad.’ A little later one of the two antiquities, Countess Greta Torstenson, died, and Lovisa Ulrika noted pleased that ‘now I only have one old relic of the old Queen left; after her there will be only young beauties at court’.