The life of the emperor Francis Joseph

By Francis Henry Gribble

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Title: The life of the emperor Francis Joseph

Author: Francis Henry Gribble

Release date: November 5, 2024 [eBook #74682]

Language: English

Original publication: London: Eveleigh Nash

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LIFE OF THE EMPEROR FRANCIS JOSEPH ***



Transcriber’s Note

Hyphenations have been standardised.

Footnotes have been renamed in numeric order.

Changes made are noted at the end of the book.

The advertisement which was at the front of the book has been placed at the end.





    THE LIFE OF THE
    EMPEROR FRANCIS JOSEPH

[Illustration:_Photo_ _Bieber_ _The Emperor Francis Joseph_]

    THE LIFE OF THE
    EMPEROR
    FRANCIS JOSEPH

    BY

    FRANCIS GRIBBLE

    LONDON
    EVELEIGH NASH

    1914



PREFACE


There exist plenty of surveys of the modern history and political
conditions of Austria. Mr. Henry Wickham Steed’s “The Habsburg
Monarchy” is the most recent, and probably the best, though Mr. R. P.
Mahaffy’s “Francis Joseph I.: His Life and Times”—a smaller and less
pretentious book—is also very good. One knows equally well where to
turn for gossipy compilations—some of them authoritative, and others
devoid of authority—dealing with the inner life of the Austrian Court.
Sir Horace Rumbold has treated the subject with the dutiful reticence
of a diplomatist in “The Austrian Court of the Nineteenth Century”;
Countess Marie Larisch and Princess Louisa of Tuscany, occupying
positions of greater freedom and less responsibility, have in “My Past”
and “My Own Story” lifted the veil with indignant gestures, and pointed
fingers of scorn at the intimate pictures which they have revealed. M.
H. de Weindel, again, has written of “François-Joseph Intime”; while
the enterprise of an American journalist has contributed “The Keystone
of Empire,” “The Martyrdom of an Empress,” and “The Private Life of
Two Emperors—William II. of Germany and Francis Joseph of Austria.”

This bibliographical list—to which additions could easily be
made—might seem to indicate that the ground has already been well
covered; but that is not the case. There exists no life of Francis
Joseph, and no History of Austria, in which the personal and political
aspects of the subject are considered in their relation to each other.
The assumption of writers who have previously treated the theme has
been that tittle-tattle is tittle-tattle, and that history is history,
and that the two can never meet. The two things, however, are liable to
meet anywhere; and in the country and period here under review they are
continually meeting. Austria is not one of the “inevitable” countries,
like England and Spain, bound to have a separate existence under some
form of government or other because of their geographical situation and
the national characteristics of their inhabitants. There is no Austrian
nation: only a medley of races which detest each other, bound (but by
no means welded) together for the supposed convenience of the rest
of Europe, and unified only by the fact that its component parts all
appertain to the dominions of the House of Habsburg.

It follows that the personality of the Habsburgs matters in a sense in
which the personalities of rulers who are mere figure-heads does not
matter; and that personality—the collective personality as well as the
separate personalities of individual members of the House—can only
be gauged by those who study their private lives in conjunction with
their public performances. The history of the property (seeing that it
comprises peoples as well as lands) includes and implies the history
of the owners of the property. Our spectacle, in so far as one can
sum it up in a sentence, is that of an Empire continually threatened
with dissolution under the control of an historic family continually
displaying all the symptoms of decadence. The political and the
personal factors in the problem are perpetually interacting; and one of
the questions which the political prophet has to consider is: Will not
the decadence of the family hasten the dissolution of the Empire?

Whence it follows, as a secondary sequence, that, in the history of
modern Austria, tittle-tattle matters; for it is only by the careful
study of the tittle-tattle that we can hope to discover whether the
Habsburgs of to-day are true or false to the proud and impressive
traditions of their House. In their case, as in that of any other
House, a stray story of a romantic or scandalous character might
properly be ignored as appertaining to the domain of idle gossip; but
when stories of that kind meet us at every turn—and meet us with
increasing frequency as time proceeds—we are no longer entitled to
dismiss them with superior indifference. They are significant; the
key to the situation is to be found in them. Tittle-tattle, in short,
when one encounters it, not in sample but in bulk, ceases to be
tittle-tattle, but attains to the dignity of history, and furnishes
the raw material for the generalisations of the political philosopher.

The annals of the House of Habsburg furnish a case in point—the best
of all possible cases. There is no House in Europe whose annals are
richer in incident and eccentricity; and the eccentricities, whether
romantic or scandalous, are such as to challenge the scientific
investigator—whether he be a student of eugenics or of politics—to
group them and see what inferences he can draw. The present writer
has decided to take up the challenge; and, in order to take it up, he
will be obliged to deal with a good many matters besides the political
manœuvres of the Emperor and his Ministers. “John Orth” pelting the
Emperor with the insignia of the Order of the Golden Fleece; “Herr
Wulfling” cracking nuts in a tree with Fräulein Adamovics; Princess
Louisa of Tuscany, first bicycling with the dentist in the Dresden
Park, and then appealing to her son’s tutor to come and “compromise”
her in Switzerland—all these are matters which may suggest reflections
quite as far-reaching as anything that we read about Francis Joseph’s
skill in extricating his country from embarrassments with rival
Powers and keeping the peace (in so far as it has been kept) between
Ruthenians and Galicians.

It would be presumption, of course, to represent this biography as
the full and final portrait of Francis Joseph as he really is. The
complete material for such a definite portrait of a sovereign is never
made available during the sovereign’s life-time; and the portraits
drawn by people who have occupied privileged positions at Court are
generally the most colourless of all: misleading—and, as a rule,
designed to mislead—by excess of eulogy. Discretion, in such cases,
takes the place of criticism; the “selection” is not that of the
artist, but of the courtier. The illustrious personage thus officially
or semi-officially portrayed “comes out” not as an individual, but as a
type: as conventional and as unconvincing as the stock “heavy father”
or “gentlemanly villain” of melodrama. Sir Horace Rumbold’s polite
portrait of Francis Joseph is one of many marked by those limitations.
The popular Austrian portraits are still more distinctly marked by them.

One need not wonder, and one must not complain. The path to candour
was blocked by the obligations, in the one case of hospitality, and,
in the other, of loyalty; but there is no reason why the historian who
is not under such obligations should not criticise more freely. His
object is neither depreciation nor flattery, but truth—as much of
the truth as is attainable at the given moment; and he must therefore
resist the common tendency of the biographers of contemporary rulers
to credit their subjects, not only with their own particular virtues,
but with all other people’s virtues as well. The only result, in moral
portraiture, of attributing virtues with too heavy a hand is to produce
a picture in which the wood cannot be seen for the trees.

That error must be avoided, as much in the interest of the subject of
the portrait as in that of the public to which it is to be submitted.
The real virtues will be more conspicuous if no imaginary virtues are
allowed to block our view of them, and if other miscellaneous qualities
which contrast with them are given their due tribute of attention.
Cromwell, it will be remembered, insisted that the artist should paint
him “warts and all,”; and if the Life of an Emperor is not to be
written in that spirit, one might just as well refrain from writing it,
for there would be nothing to be learnt from it when it was written.

  FRANCIS GRIBBLE.




CONTENTS

    PAGE
    CHAPTER I

    The collapse of the Holy Roman Empire—The impossibility
    of reviving it—The German Federation—The Holy
    Alliance—The policy of sitting on the safety valve—The
    consequent explosions—The problems consequently prepared
    for Francis Joseph—The Head of the House of
    Habsburg—Inseparable connection between the events
    of his public and private life      1


    CHAPTER II

    The House of Habsburg from the standpoint of Eugenics—The
    “Habsburg jaw”—Degeneracy the consequence of
    consanguineous marriages—Sound physiological instinct
    of King Cophetua—And of those Habsburgs who have
    followed his example—Morganatic marriages—The
    family organism fighting for its life—Has Francis Joseph
    understood?—Indications that he has understood in part      10


    CHAPTER III

    Francis Joseph’s ancestors—Francis, Duke of Lorraine—Francis
    II.—Leopold II.—Collaterals—The Spanish
    marriages of the Habsburgs—Their alliances with Portugal,
    the various Bourbons, and the Wittelsbachs of
    Bavaria—Moral and mental defects thus perpetuated
    and emphasised—Francis Joseph as the sane champion
    of a mad family      20


    CHAPTER IV

    Francis Joseph’s childhood—The severe education which
    prepared him for his _rôle_—Difficulties of that _rôle_—The
    Liberal revolt against the Metternich system—The idea
    of nationality—Hübner’s surprise that anyone should
    object to Austrian rule—Every Austrian a policeman
    at heart—The Italian rising of 1848—Francis Joseph in
    action—Radetzky’s remonstrances—Francis Joseph’s
    return to his studies      29


    CHAPTER V

    The risings of 1848—Princess Mélanie Metternich’s excited
    account of it—Disorderly flight of Metternich from
    Vienna—The House of Habsburg saved by “three
    mutinous soldiers”—Abdication of the Emperor Ferdinand
    in favour of his nephew, Francis Joseph—Hübner’s
    description of the ceremony      39


    CHAPTER VI

    Attitude of the Hungarians towards Francis Joseph—They
    denounce him as a traitor, and banish him from
    Hungary—Contempt of Austrians for Hungarians—The
    conquest of Hungary with Russian help—Repression and
    atrocities—Women flogged by order of Marshal Haynau—Marshal
    Haynau himself flogged by Barclay and
    Perkins’ draymen in London, and spat upon by women
    in Brussels—Popular song written on that occasion      51


    CHAPTER VII

    Why Francis Joseph was called “The child of the gallows”—His
    affront to Napoleon III., and its consequences—The
    Bach system and the objections to it—Francis
    Joseph’s _bonhomie_—The attempt on his life—Impressions
    formed of him by the King of the Belgians, and Lady
    Westmorland—The story of his romantic marriage      64


    CHAPTER VIII

    The failure of the marriage—Difficulty of explaining it—The
    two conflicting personalities—Francis Joseph’s
    personality obvious—The Empress Elizabeth’s personality
    mysterious—Her sympathy with the Hungarians,
    and its political importance—Her confession of melancholy      77


    CHAPTER IX

    Francis Joseph’s Egeria—Elizabeth’s mother-in-law—Elizabeth’s
    quarrels with etiquette—The beginnings of
    estrangement—The functions of Countess Marie Larisch
    in the imperial household—Captain “Bay” Middleton—Nicholas
    Esterhazy—Elizabeth’s fairy story—Her cynical
    attitude towards life      86


    CHAPTER X

    “The Martyrdom of an Empress”—Correction of inaccuracies
    contained in that popular work—Francis Joseph’s friends—“A
    Polish Countess”—Frau Katti Schratt—Enduring
    attachment—Rumour of morganatic marriage—Interview
    with Frau Schratt on that subject—“Darby and Joan”      99


    CHAPTER XI

    Francis Joseph’s passion for field sports—Enthusiasm of a
    nation of sportsmen for a sportsman Emperor—Anecdotes
    of sport—Estrangement of the Emperor and the
    Empress—The Empress’s departure for Madeira—Her
    _wanderjahre_—Her attitude towards life—The keeping
    up of appearances      113


    CHAPTER XII

    Francis Joseph’s snub to Napoleon III.—Proposal to address
    him as “Sir” instead of “Brother”—The consequences—Napoleon
    asks: “What can one do for Italy?”—Austria
    at war with France and Italy—The crimes committed
    by Austria in Italy—Battles of Magenta and
    Solferino—Francis Joseph compelled to surrender Lombardy,
    but allowed to retain Venetia      122


    CHAPTER XIII

    An interval of peace—Beginnings of trouble with Prussia—Habsburg
    pride precedes a Habsburg fall—Refusal to
    sell Venetia to Italy—Italy joins Prussia—The war of
    1866—The disaster of Sadowa—Benedek’s failure—Shameful
    treatment of Benedek by the Empire—Vain
    attempts to conciliate him—His widow’s comments      132


    CHAPTER XIV

    Francis Joseph comes to terms with Hungary—His famous
    interview with Francis Deák—“Well, Deák, what does
    Hungary demand?”—Dualism—The objection of the
    Slavs to Dualism—Coronation at Buda—Andrassy,
    whom he had hanged in effigy, becomes his Prime
    Minister      143


    CHAPTER XV

    Attitude of Austria in the Franco-German War—Proposed
    alliance of France, Italy, and Austria against Prussia—General
    Türr’s interview with Francis Joseph—Victor
    Emmanuel’s conditions—The bargain concluded—The
    French plan of campaign drafted by the Archduke
    Albert—Beust’s fetter to Richard Metternich—Reasons
    why the Austrian promises were not fulfilled      148


    CHAPTER XVI

    Austrian expansion in the Balkans—Occupation of Bosnia—Problem
    of Servia Irredenta—Postponement of the day
    of reckoning—Luck of the Habsburgs in public life—Calamities
    dog them in private life—List of Habsburg
    fatalities during Francis Joseph’s reign      158


    CHAPTER XVII

    Francis Joseph’s brother Maximilian—Invited to be Emperor
    of Mexico—Hesitates, but consents to please his wife—Resignation
    of his rights as a Habsburg—The _Pacte de
    Famille_ and the quarrel about it—The compromise—The
    last meeting of the brothers—Maximilian’s melancholy—He
    composes poetry—He receives the benediction of
    the Pope and departs for his Empire      164


    CHAPTER XVIII

    Vanity and nervousness of the Empress Charlotte—Evil
    omens which frightened—Her journey to Europe to seek
    help for Maximilian—Her cold reception by Napoleon
    III.—Symptoms of approaching insanity—Her madness—Maximilian
    abandoned by the French—Attacked by
    the Republicans—Captured at Queretaro—Francis
    Joseph’s vain attempt to save him—His trial and execution      176


    CHAPTER XIX

    Habsburgs and Wittelsbachs—Which is the madder House?—Insanity
    of the Empress Elizabeth’s cousin, Ludwig II. of Bavaria—His
    eccentricities—His tragic death—Grief of the Empress—Suicide of
    Elizabeth’s brother-in-law, the Comte de Trani—Tragic death of the
    Archduchess Elizabeth      187


    CHAPTER XX

    The Crown Prince Rudolph—His quarrel with the German
    Emperor—His affability and his hauteur—A spoiled
    child—His search for a wife—Marriage to Princess
    Stéphanie—Disappointment and disillusion—Stéphanie’s
    book—“A long, long, terrible night has gone by for me”—Mary
    Vetsera and her family—How Mary Vetsera
    was taken first to the Hofburg and thence to Meyerling       193


    CHAPTER XXI

    What the Archduchess Stéphanie knew—What Rudolph
    knew that she knew—The search for Mary Vetsera by
    her relatives—The news of the Meyerling tragedy—The
    two official versions—The many unofficial versions—The
    attempt to hush the matter up—Mary Vetsera’s letter
    to Countess Marie Larisch      208


    CHAPTER XXII

    Fantastic legends of the Meyerling tragedy—Talks with the
    Crown Prince’s valet—Foolish story given by _Berliner
    Lokal Anzeiger_—What the Grand Duke of Tuscany
    knew—What Count Nigra knew—What Countess Marie
    Larisch tells—Her story confirmed from a contemporary
    source—Doubts which remain in spite of it—Was it
    suicide or murder?      218


    CHAPTER XXIII

    The Archduke John Salvator—His many accomplishments—His
    criticisms of his superiors—His disgrace at Court—His
    love affair with an English lady—“Your darling
    Archduckling”—His proposal to abandon his rank and
    earn his living as a teacher of languages—His love
    affair with Milly Stübel—He quarrels with Francis
    Joseph, takes the name of John Orth, and leaves
    Austria      232


    CHAPTER XXIV

    John Orth—Had he been plotting with Rudolph?—Indirect
    confirmation of story told by Countess Marie Larisch—Did
    John Orth really marry Milly Stübel?—Failure to
    find the proofs of the marriage—John Orth’s letters
    written on the eve of his departure for America—Disappearance
    of his ship off Cape Horn—Is John Orth
    really dead?—Examination of the reasons for believing
    that he is still alive      244


    CHAPTER XXV

    The revolt of the Archdukes—Instructive analogies—Later
    years of the Empress Elizabeth—Her manner of life
    described by M. Paoli, the Corsican detective—Her fearlessness—Her
    superstitions—Various evil omens—The
    last excursion—Assassination of the Empress at Geneva—How
    Francis Joseph received the news      259


    CHAPTER XXVI

    “Austria’s idiot Archdukes”—A _catalogue raisonné_—The
    Emperor’s brothers—The Archduke Rainer—The Archduke
    Henry and the actress—The Archduke Louis Salvator,
    the Hermit of the Balearic Islands—The Archduke
    Charles Salvator—The Archduke Joseph—The Archduke
    Eugène and his vow to be “as chaste as possible”—The
    Archduke William and his courtship in the _café_—The
    Archduke Leopold—The awful Archduke Otto and his
    manifold vagaries      272


    CHAPTER XXVII

    The centrifugal marriages of the Habsburgs—Francis
    Joseph’s attitude towards them—His attitude towards
    Baron Walburg, the Habsburg who had come down in
    the world—Where he draws the line—His refusal to
    sanction the marriage of the Archduke Ferdinand
    Charles to the daughter of a high-school teacher—The
    Archduke resigns his rank and becomes Charles Burg—Marriage
    of the daughter of Archduchess Gisela to
    Baron Otto von Seefried zu Buttenheim      284


    CHAPTER XXVIII

    The marriage of Archduchess Stéphanie to Count Lonyay—Attitude
    of the King of the Belgians towards that marriage—Attitude
    of Francis Joseph—He sanctions the
    union, but snubs the bridegroom—Marriage of the
    Archduchess Elizabeth to Otto von Windischgraetz—Francis
    Joseph’s approval—The Windischgraetzes
    raised to the rank of Serene Highnesses      294


    CHAPTER XXIX

    The Archduke Francis Ferdinand—An invalid who delayed
    to marry—Report of his betrothal to the Archduchess
    Gabrielle—Announcement of his betrothal to Countess
    Sophie Chotek—Anecdotes of the courtship—Indignation
    of the Archduchess Gabrielle’s mother—Attitude of
    Francis Joseph—He permits the marriage on condition
    that it shall be morganatic—Francis Ferdinand compelled
    to swear a solemn oath that he is marrying
    beneath him, and that his children will be unworthy to
    succeed him—Reason for doubting whether he will
    eventually be bound by his oath      301


    CHAPTER XXX

    The “terrible year” of the Habsburg annals—Proceedings of
    Princess Louisa of Tuscany—The taint inherited from
    the Bourbons of Parma—Princess Louisa’s suitors—Her
    marriage to Prince Frederick August of Saxony—She
    bicycles with the dentist—She runs away to Switzerland
    with her brother, the Archduke Leopold, and her
    children’s tutor—Attitude of the Courts towards her
    escapade—Official notice on the subject in the _Wiener
    Zeitung_      315


    CHAPTER XXXI

    The romantic Quadruple Alliance—The jarring notes—Princess
    Louisa’s objections to her brother’s companion
    Fräulein Adamovics—The sentimental life of the Archduke
    Leopold—He becomes “Herr Wulfling,” and
    marries Fräulein Adamovics—Herr and Frau Wulfling
    run wild in woods—Herr Wulfling divorces his wife and
    marries again—His confidences to Signor Toselli—Princess
    Louisa’s conception of the Simple Life—Her
    manners shock the Swiss—She dismisses M. Giron—Her
    marriage to Signor Toselli      326


    CHAPTER XXXII

    The summing up—The probable future of Austria—The probable
    future of the House of Habsburg—Questions both
    personal and political which will be raised when Francis
    Joseph dies—The extent to which he has been “in the
    movement”—The faithful companion of his old age      341


    INDEX      353



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


    THE EMPEROR FRANCIS JOSEPH (from a recent
    portrait by Bieber)                       _Frontispiece_

    THE EMPEROR FRANCIS JOSEPH AT THE TIME
    OF HIS ACCESSION IN 1848           _To face page_ 52

    THE EMPRESS ELIZABETH OF AUSTRIA                  82

    THE COUNTESS MARIE LARISCH AT THE TIME
    OF HER MARRIAGE                                   96

    THE EMPEROR FRANCIS JOSEPH IN 1866               138

    MAXIMILIAN, EMPEROR OF MEXICO                    166

    CHARLOTTE, WIFE OF MAXIMILIAN, EMPEROR
    OF MEXICO                                        180

    KING LUDWIG II. OF BAVARIA                       190

    THE CROWN PRINCE RUDOLPH                         196

    THE HOFBURG, VIENNA                              204

    THE CROWN PRINCESS STÉPHANIE                     210

    THE BARONESS MARY VETSERA                        224

    THE ARCHDUKE JOHN OF TUSCANY (John
    Orth)                                            254

    THE ARCHDUKE FRANCIS FERDINAND                   302

    THE DUCHESS OF HOHENBERG (wife of the Archduke
    Francis Ferdinand)                               312

    PRINCESS LOUISA OF TUSCANY (Ex-Crown Princess
    of Saxony)                                       338

    FRAU SCHRATT                                     350




THE LIFE OF

THE EMPEROR FRANCIS JOSEPH




CHAPTER I

 The collapse of the Holy Roman Empire—The impossibility of reviving
 it—The German Federation—The Holy Alliance—The policy of sitting
 on the safety valve—The consequent explosions—The problems
 consequently prepared for Francis Joseph—The Head of the House of
 Habsburg—Inseparable connection between the events of his public and
 private life.


In order to clear the way, and set the stage for the drama of the
Emperor Francis Joseph’s life, we must go back to the dissolution of
that Holy Roman Empire of which the Emperor of Austria was, at the end,
the titular head. Happily, we have not very far to go.

The Holy Roman Empire—in fact, as a cynic has said, neither Holy nor
Roman, and scarcely worthy to be called an Empire—collapsed in the
Napoleonic wars. The Battle of the Nations at Leipzig, the “world’s
earthquake” at Waterloo, the Congress of Vienna: none of these things
availed to set the Holy Roman Empire on its feet again.

Perhaps a really great man might even then have been able to restore
it and make something of it, using it as a decorative setting for
glorious achievements; perhaps not. The experiment was not tried,
because there was no great man available to try it. The sovereigns
of those days, with the sole exception of Alexander of Russia, were
pitifully lacking in personal prestige. Whatever Napoleon had failed
to do, he had at least succeeded in destroying the prestige of the
hereditary representatives of ancient dynasties. The House of Habsburg,
in spite of Napoleon’s marriage to a daughter of the House, had
suffered as much indignity as any other royal family, and more than
most. That marriage, indeed, was itself esteemed an indignity; even
the old friends of the House were doubtful whether it still deserved
respect.

Moreover, while Austria was rather weak, Prussia was very jealous—not
altogether without reason. In the earlier stages of the final
combination against Napoleon, Prussia had borne the burden and heat
of the day, while Austria sat, with a double face, shilly-shallying
on the fence. Now, it might be said, Austria represented the Past and
Prussia the Future of the German world; and the Future was in no mood
to tolerate proud airs or lofty pretensions from the Past. In the
absence, therefore, of a commanding personality among the sovereigns,
the revival of the Holy Roman Empire was impossible; and the centre of
gravity of the German world was shifting.

Still, something had to be done; some organisation had to be contrived
to give cohesion to the medley and provide the Continental Concert
with a reasonable prospect of a quiet life. So there sprang into being
two organisations which concern us:—

  1. The German Federation.
  2. The Holy Alliance.

Their detailed history need not delay us; but we must pause to see how
they created the difficulties with which Francis Joseph, coming to
throne as a boy of eighteen, had to cope, and posed the problems which
he would have either to solve for himself or to see roughly, and even
violently, solved for him by others.

Just as the Holy Roman Empire was scarcely worthy to be called an
Empire, so the German Federation was scarcely worthy to be called a
Federation. It was loose and cumbrous, inefficient and inert. There was
no Federal Tribunal, no Federal army, no Federal diplomatic machinery;
in all these matters the component States—ruled by thirty-eight
separate sovereigns—retained their independence. The Federal Assembly,
which met at Frankfurt, was, in effect, only a Congress of the
Ambassadors of those States, with the Austrian Ambassador in the chair.
No important step could be taken without the unanimous consent of the
Ambassadors; and there was no important piece of business on which
they were all of one mind. The position of Austria at the head of the
Assembly was one of dignity without authority, conferring little more
actual power than falls to the president of a debating society.

So loose an arrangement obviously could not endure. One of two things
was bound to happen; the bonds of union must, in the course of time,
either be tightened or be broken. The seeds of destruction were present
in the organisation from the first in the shape of Austro-Prussian
jealousy: that jealousy between the Past and the Future to which we
have referred. The interests and aspirations of these two dominant
States conflicted. Neither of them was strong enough to bring the
other to heel; neither of them was weak enough, or humble enough, to
acquiesce in the other’s hegemony. It remained only for one of them to
turn the other out of the Federation, and fashion a real Federation—a
real Empire, perhaps—out of the remaining constituents. That
inevitable process—delayed for more than fifty years, but eventually
altering the whole outlook of Austrian policy—was to provide the
central problem of Francis Joseph’s reign; but many other problems,
hardly of less significance, were first to arise out of the programme
of the Holy Alliance.

The Holy Alliance, of course, was, in fact, no more Holy than the
Holy Roman Empire, and was, perhaps, hardly worthy to be called an
Alliance. It was an agreement, or mutual understanding, rather than an
Alliance, inspired by hatred and terror of the new ideas disseminated
by the French Revolution; and those are hardly unjust who describe it
as a conspiracy, suggested by Metternich, and acquiesced in by the
principal Continental sovereigns, for keeping all subject peoples in
the places which the Congress of Vienna had assigned to them. And that
in a double sense. In the first place, autocratic forms of government
were to be maintained in all countries which the Holy Three regarded
as within their sphere of influence. In the second place, subject
nationalities were to be kept in subjection to the Powers which the
Settlement of 1815 had placed in authority over them.

It follows that the policy of the Holy Alliance was a policy of
sitting on safety valves; and its history is the history of a series
of Conferences and Congresses held to decide who should sit on which
safety valve in the name of all. It was agreed, for instance, that
Austria should sit on the safety valve in Naples, and that France
should sit on it in Spain; and there was much talk—though also much
difference of opinion—about sitting on the safety valves in Portugal
and Greece. The Holy Alliance fell to pieces, after a much shorter life
than that of the Holy Roman Empire, because Russia maintained against
Austria, and England maintained against France, that certain safety
valves should not be sat upon.

Moreover, safety valves were many, and the upward pressure was of a
continually increasing force. If Metternich and Castlereagh, and the
Emperors of Austria and Russia, and the King of Prussia, had, like the
Bourbons, “learnt nothing” from the French Revolution and its sequel,
the common people, from university professors to artisans, had learnt
much. They might desire a breathing-time before committing themselves
to desperate courses. The breathing-time might be protracted because
the despotisms were reasonably benevolent towards people who did not
meddle with politics; because the administration was honest, and the
taxes were not oppressive. Still, sooner or later intelligent men
were bound to tire of submission, and clamour for Parliaments and the
recognition of “nationalities.” Byron—the friend of the Carbonari
before he was the friend of Greece—was hounding them on to do so.

In England Byron was notorious for his indecorum; but, on the
Continent, he was famous for his audacity. The improprieties of “Don
Juan” did not shock Continental Liberals; but its courageous political
criticisms stirred them. The lines over which they gloated—though they
must have had a difficulty in translating them—were such lines as
these:—

    Lock up the billy bald-coot, Alexander!
      Ship off the Holy Three to Senegal!
    Teach them that sauce for goose is sauce for gander,
      And ask them how _they_ like to be in thrall!

Such passages—and there are plenty of them—express the temper to
which the Continental Liberals were gradually coming. When they came to
it, and found such men as Metternich, and Bomba of Naples, and Charles
X. of France, sitting on the safety valves, explosions could by no
means be prevented. The political history of the period is the history
of those explosions and their consequences; and we all know that there
were two principal series of such explosions—the explosions of 1830,
and the explosions of 1848. The noise of the first detonations was,
as it were, a salute fired in the year of Francis Joseph’s birth; the
louder roar of the second greeted his accession.

First Italy and then Hungary exploded; and Francis Joseph, as a boy of
eighteen, had to face the confusion and try to calm it. The story of
his bearing in the presence of the turmoil must not be anticipated; but
we may look sufficiently ahead to note that a new Austria, differently
constituted, and looking out of a new window in a new direction, had
gradually to be re-created out of what might very well have been a
wreck. The old Austria over which Francis Joseph began to reign in 1848
was a Teuton Power holding the most prosperous provinces of Italy in
its iron grip. That grip has been reluctantly relaxed until only the
pressure of one little finger remains; and the new Austria over which
Francis Joseph rules to-day has only a small Teuton nucleus, associated
with a Magyar nucleus nearly as large, trying in conjunction with it to
assert predominant partnership in a large and increasing community of
Slavs, and casting envious, but not very hopeful, glances across the
Danube towards the Balkan States and the Ægean harbours.

So great has been the evolution accomplished within the reign of a
single ruler: a ruler who, at the beginning of his reign, did not dare
to set his foot in his own capital, and, long before the end of it, had
come to be regarded as the one indispensable man in the Empire—the one
man whose life must be preserved and prolonged at all hazards, for fear
lest his death should entail the collapse of the edifice which he had
reared—the one man who sometimes appeared to command the affection of
all his subjects. It would be a striking story, even if one related
the Emperor’s political achievements without reference to his personal
life; but the two things, though commonly separated by political
historians, are not really separable.

Certainly they are not so separated by his own subjects. They not
only admire the statesman who has acquired a prestige to which he was
not born, and has used it to recover by diplomacy what he has lost in
war; they also cherish an affectionate sympathy for the man at whom
calamity has dealt blow after blow, whom no blow, however cruel, has
struck down, and who, in spite of innumerable sorrows, has continued
to confront the world with a dignified, if melancholy, composure. He
has had, they perceive, no less trouble with his family than with
his Empire; and they have sometimes thought of him—or at least been
tempted to think of him—as the one splendidly sane member of an
eccentric and decadent House.

It follows that one must write of Francis Joseph, not only as an
Emperor, but also as a Habsburg—the head of the most interesting of
all the royal houses: a House whose members, unpredictable in their
insurgent extravagances, have, again and again, moved the Courts and
Chancelleries of Europe to consternation. Our picture must be, not
only of a great and successful ruler, but also of a brave old man,
tried in the fire but not consumed by it, bowed down by sorrows but not
broken by them, maintaining the mediæval majesty of royal caste in the
presence of his peers, at a time when other Habsburgs—one Habsburg
after another—were flinging the prejudices of royal caste to the winds
and making, as it must have seemed to him, sad messes of their lives,
after the manner of those reprobate relatives who, even in middle-class
families, are spoken of, if at all, with bated breath.

That being our theme—or a portion of it—we may next speak of the
Habsburgs collectively; and we will begin by considering what the
eugenists have to say about them.




CHAPTER II

 The House of Habsburg from the standpoint of Eugenics—The “Habsburg
 jaw”—Degeneracy the consequence of consanguineous marriages—Sound
 physiological instinct of King Cophetua—And of those Habsburgs who
 have followed his example—Morganatic marriages—The family organism
 fighting for its life—Has Francis Joseph understood?—Indications
 that he has understood in part.


The House of Habsburg furnishes the “horrible examples” in two recent
works on the new science of Eugenics: _L’hérédité des Stigmates de
Dégénérescence_, by Dr. Galippe, and _L’Origine du Type familial
de la Maison de Habsburg_, by Dr. Oswald Rubbrecht. The arguments
in both cases are based, not only on a study of history, but also
on a collation of portraits; and though the writers differ on some
points of detail, their general conclusions are identical. For both
of them the Habsburgs are “degenerates”; both of them attribute the
degeneracy to the same cause. It is, they agree, the cumulative effect
of what is technically called “in-breeding”—of a long succession of
inter-marriages among comparatively near relatives.

One hears of the physiological law thus violated, whenever the question
of a marriage between cousins is mooted. The tendency of such a
marriage, we are always told, is to perpetuate and accentuate typical
characteristics and weaknesses, both physical and moral. A single
marriage between cousins may produce no perceptible evil result; and
one can cite cases in which it appears to have produced remarkably
brilliant results.[1] But a series of such marriages, continued through
generation after generation, invariably and inevitably tells. The
family, or the community, in which such unions are the rule, loses
vigour and develops peculiarities—a special, readily recognisable,
physiognomy, and an unstable mental equilibrium. The transmitted
eccentricities—more particularly the mental eccentricities—may skip a
generation or leave an individual exempt; but they are always lurking
in the background—always to be expected to reappear.

[Footnote 1: Darwin married his first cousin, and all his sons were men
of remarkable ability.]

It has been so, and is so, according to Drs. Rubbrecht and Galippe,
with the Habsburgs. We have all heard of the “Habsburg jaw”; and Dr.
Rubbrecht traces it to its mediæval source, and, standing before a
long row of family portraits, carefully and scientifically depicts the
Habsburg face:—

 “In addition to the underhung lower jaw and the large lower lip,
 the Habsburg physiognomy presents the following characteristic
 features: excessive length, and, sometimes, excessive size of the
 nose; ‘exorbitism,’ more or less pronounced, with a forehead often
 of considerable height. One would say that the head, squeezed in by
 lateral pressure, had undergone a concomitant vertical allongation,
 and had been stretched, and pulled up and down at the same time.
 According to Dr. Galippe, the lateral flattening of the skull is the
 fundamental characteristic, and all the other abnormalities follow
 from it.”

That is what Dr. Rubbrecht makes of the portraits. He generalises
only as a student of physiognomy, and does not discuss mental and
moral issues, or presume to predict the future. Dr. Galippe is more
outspoken:—

 “The Habsburgs” (he writes), “having, by their intermarriages,
 developed a degenerate taint, and having transmitted it, either
 separately or in conjunction with other taints, both physical and
 psychical, to the families matrimonially allied with them, have
 brought into existence a specific type of human animal, by the same
 means which the breeders of dogs and horses employ for the creation of
 a new sub-species.”

As for the general consequences of such in-breeding, he continues:—

 “Even those aristocratic families which present no original mark of
 degeneracy disappear quickly. It follows, _a fortiori_, that those
 families which, possessing such characteristics, perpetuate them by
 contracting marriages within the degrees of consanguinity, are doomed
 to a still more speedy extinction.”

As for the case of the Habsburgs in particular, he concludes:—

 “The Habsburgs of Spain have long since been swept off the stage of
 history, disappearing in sterility or insanity. The Habsburgs of
 Austria, numerous though the representatives of the House are at the
 present time, will end by disappearing in their turn as an historic
 family, if they persist in their errors,—that is to say, in their
 marriages with blood relations.”

It is a new way of looking at an old problem,—a new thought suggested
by the latest of the sciences; and it opens the door to reflections
of great and urgent moment to many other royal houses besides that
of Habsburg. In a general way, it has long been held to be almost as
improper for Kings and Queens to marry their subjects as for angels
to marry the daughters of men. A purer and bluer blood ran in their
veins than in the veins of their subjects; and to adulterate that
blue blood with red blood was to degrade it. They must, therefore,
seek their brides and bridegrooms within the magic circle. Kings must
marry Queens, and Princes must marry Princesses; and the distinctive
exclusiveness of reigning houses must be maintained by a succession of
unions between cousins.

That view of the matter has continued to prevail in royal circles—and
also in high political and diplomatic circles—long after the students
of heredity have established conclusions unfavourable to such courses.
The arguments can hardly have failed to reach the ears of those whom
they concerned; and the feeling—tacit, if not avowed—has presumably
been that Kings, and Queens, and Princes and Princesses are so great
and good and glorious that the laws of Nature do not apply to them.
But that is not the case. Science shows that Kings cannot override the
laws of Nature even in the countries in which they are permitted to
override the laws of the land; that the price which Nature exacts for
exclusiveness is degeneracy; that hardly any royal family anywhere has
failed to pay that price; that the percentage of insanity has, through
the ages, been higher among hereditary rulers whose blue blood has thus
been protected from admixture than in any other class of the community;
and that the sound physiological instinct is that on which King
Cophetua acted in the legend, when the bare-footed beggar-maid appeared
before him:—

    As shines the moon in clouded skies,
      She in her poor attire was seen;
    One praised her ankles, one her eyes,
      One her dark hair and lovesome mien.
    So sweet a face, such angel grace,
      In all that land had never been:
    Cophetua swore a royal oath:
      “This beggar maid shall be my queen.”

It is this example of King Cophetua—and the moral which the eugenists
read into it—that we shall need to bear in mind when we endeavour to
appreciate those incidents in the latter-day history of the House of
Habsburg which are commonly supposed, whether rightly or wrongly, to
have been most distressing to the head of the family. That history has
largely, and indeed mainly, if not quite entirely, been a history of
revolt on the part of the sons—and even the daughters—of the House
against the splendid restrictions and inherited obligations which
hedged them about as members of an uniquely illustrious race.

The revolt has expressed itself in many ways: some of them, in the
world’s view, creditable and even honourable; others in a greater
or less degree scandalous. We have seen—and we shall see yet again
in these pages—one Habsburg throwing off the panoply of state,
to live his own mysterious life in the remote Balearic Isles, and
another Habsburg disappearing for ever—unless those are right who
assure us that he bides his time, in hiding, for some dark political
reason, and will “come again”—as the navigating officer of a
merchant vessel. There have also been intrigues which have ended in
tragedy, and morganatic marriages with actresses and other persons
deemed “impossible” in imperial circles; and there has been at least
one elopement of a Habsburg Princess, who, having failed to live
harmoniously with a Crown Prince, found that even a professional
pianist could not permanently satisfy her craving for romance.

One knows the ordinary comment on these proceedings: “All the Habsburgs
are mad,—all of them except Francis Joseph; and here is another
Habsburg proving himself (or herself) as mad as the others, if not
madder.” The remark is not profound; but it is often, in a rough way,
true. John Orth, “Herr Wulfling,” Princess Louisa of Tuscany:—all
these (and not these only) have done strange things,—things which one
would hesitate to put forward as the sole and unsupported proofs of
the possession of well-balanced minds. This is not the page for the
detailed account of such proceedings; but it is pertinent and proper,
even here, to remark the startling frequency of their occurrence.
It is not a case of the discovery of a single skeleton in a single
cupboard—a phenomenon which any research into any family history is
apt to bring to light. The impression, when one reviews the recent
annals of the House of Habsburg, is of continuous rattling of skeletons
in all the cupboards, and of one sane and strong man—the accepted
and now the hereditary Head of the House—going gravely through his
troubled life, not unmoved, indeed, by the ghostly noises, but, at
least, without allowing his composure to be too visibly disturbed by
them: a man of whom one may say, giving a somewhat new sense to old and
hackneyed lines:—

    Si fractus illabatur orbis,
    Impavidum ferient ruinae.

But that is not the only view of the matter which it is permissible to
take. One may also, with the conclusions of science to back one, regard
the eccentricities of the more eccentric Habsburgs, if not as the best
proofs of sanity that they are capable of giving, then as instinctive
and desperate, if not always very intelligent, endeavours to escape
from the imminent fate which the eugenists have foretold for them. The
family, we may take it, no less than the individual, is an “organism,”
albeit only partly conscious of itself; and our spectacle, we may
add, is that of an organism blindly fighting for its life. The fight
may not be very wisely conducted, not having been begun until the work
of destruction was too far advanced; but it is nevertheless a fight
worth fighting, and one of which we should follow the vicissitudes,
not with horror or with merriment, but with intelligent sympathy. For
degeneracy _is_ too high a price to pay for haughty exclusiveness; and
it is better to flee from the City of Destruction late in the day,
followed and attended by the cry of scandal, than to remain in it and
be overwhelmed.

That, at any rate, is the appreciation of the Habsburg scandals—or
of a good many of them—which will commend itself to eugenists and
sociologists, who will esteem the revolts sound in principle, even
though they allow them to be occasionally extravagant in detail. The
individual makers of the scandals need not be assumed to have acted
from any higher or deeper motive than the satisfaction of what has
more than once proved to be only a passing inclination. The whole
circumstances of their upbringing, and the precepts of duty and
propriety impressed upon them from childhood, make that unlikely. But
the physiological instinct behind the admitted motive has been a sound
one. Looked at from the viewpoint of the individual, it had been the
instinct of King Cophetua; looked at from the point of view of the
race, it has been the instinct of self-preservation.

It has been the tragedy—or one of the tragedies—of Francis Joseph
that the years of his reign have coincided with the years of this
stage in the Habsburg struggle for continued existence. Chosen for
his august and exalted post as the sanest and healthiest Habsburg
available—albeit the son of an epileptic father and the nephew of
an epileptic uncle—he has looked down from above on the exciting
incidents and varying vicissitudes of that struggle. One does not know
whether to regard his tragedy as the greater on the assumption that
he understood the inner meaning of the spectacle or on the assumption
that he did not understand it. In the former case there would be more
of pathos, in the latter case more of irony, in the drama; but it is
impossible to say for certain whether he has understood or not.

The probability, in the lack of direct evidence, is that he has
understood in part. One might draw that inference from his occasional
indulgence, as well as from his occasional severity, towards the rebels
against the laws, both written and unwritten, of his House; and one has
no right to infer the contrary from the fact that he himself has not
rebelled. He is a Habsburg as well as an Emperor, and may very well
have felt the impulses which appear to have become common to the race,
though he has had both exceptional reasons and exceptional facilities
for repressing them. One knows, at any rate, that he, like so many
other members of his family, has sought, and won, the friendship of
women outside the charmed circle of the royal families, and that the
lady in whose company he seems, in the last years of his long life, to
find the most agreeable respite from the cares of State, is not an
Archduchess, and was once an actress. That fact must surely have helped
him to understand.

But these are matters for subsequent consideration. The ground is now
clear; and we may proceed, without further delay, to genealogy and
biography.




CHAPTER III

 Francis Joseph’s ancestors—Francis, Duke of Lorraine—Francis
 II.—Leopold II.—Collaterals—The Spanish marriages of the
 Habsburgs—Their alliances with Portugal, the various Bourbons, and
 the Wittelsbachs of Bavaria—Moral and mental defects thus perpetuated
 and emphasised—Francis Joseph as the sane champion of a mad family.


The Habsburgs can be traced back to the seventh century before we
lose them in the crowd of common men. The branch of the family to
which the Emperor Francis Joseph belongs is that known as the House of
Habsburg-Lorraine, founded by the marriage of the Empress Maria Theresa
to Francis, Duke of Lorraine, in 1736; and the House of Lorraine has
an independent genealogy, only less ancient and illustrious than that
of Habsburg itself, being descended, through the House of Anjou, from
Hugues Capet, the ancestor of the royal house of France. Anjou was
given, in 1246, by Saint Louis, to his younger brother Charles, whose
grand-daughter married her cousin, Charles de Valois; and the House
of Anjou kept the Duchy of Lorraine until Francis abdicated on the
occasion of his marriage, in favour of Stanilas Lecszinski, whose
daughter married Louis XV.

This Francis seems to have been a mixed character, not entirely
commendable. He is credited with virtue in his private life; but it
is also related of him that he farmed taxes, lent money at usurious
rates of interest, and acted as a kind of army contractor to Frederick
the Great, at a time when that monarch was at war with Austria. He
was the father of Marie-Antoinette, and also of the Emperors Joseph
II. and Leopold II. Joseph left no issue, but Leopold, who married
Marie-Louise, daughter of Charles III. of Spain, had a large family,
only two members of which need be mentioned here:

 1. Francis II., who became Emperor in 1792, and was on the throne when
 Napoleon broke up the Holy Roman Empire.

 2. The Archduke John, whose romantic marriage with the daughter of
 a postmaster set a precedent for those morganatic unions which have
 recently become so frequent in the House of Habsburg.

Leopold II. is described by the historians as a benevolent despot—a
reformer according to his lights—who displayed great intolerance in
religious matters, and died young through the unbridled indulgence of
his amorous proclivities. Francis II. is an Emperor of whom it would
be necessary to speak evil at length, if he, and not his grandson,
were the subject of this narrative: a double-faced and incompetent
ruler, who needed all the help he got from Metternich; a petty domestic
tyrant, who behaved abominably towards his daughter Marie-Louise,
his son-in-law Napoleon, and his grandson the Duc de Reichstadt. How
he deliberately threw Neipperg at his daughter’s head for the express
purpose of undermining the affection which her husband had, to his
disgust, inspired in her, is a story which belongs to other pages than
these. Here we will merely note that he married four wives, and by the
second of them—Marie-Thérèse-Caroline-Josephine de Bourbon—had two
sons, who now concern us:—

 1. The Emperor Ferdinand, who succeeded to the throne in 1835, but
 bowed his head before the storm and abdicated in 1848, though he did
 not die until 1875.

 2. The Archduke Francis Charles, who, as Ferdinand had no children,
 should have succeeded him, but whom his wife, the Archduchess Sophie,
 daughter of Maximilian I. of Bavaria, persuaded to resign his rights
 in favour of his eldest son, the present Emperor, Francis Joseph.

That is all the genealogy which we need for the moment. It shows us
the Habsburgs as a feeble folk—getting feebler as times got more
tempestuous; and it also shows us Francis Joseph launched upon his
stormy political career at the age of eighteen—launched upon it as
the rising hope of a decadent family—a youth of energy and promise,
with no sign of decadence about him, supple but strong, exempt, as far
as could be judged, from the family taints of physique and character,
and designed to restore the threatened dignity of the Austrian Empire,
by confronting the new era in a new spirit. His accession will be
our historical starting point; but, before we come to it, we must
turn aside for a brief glance at some of those collateral ancestors
whose traits, if there be anything in heredity, we may expect to see
reappearing—not invariably, but here and there, and now and then—in
their descendants, the Habsburgs of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries.

The list of the allied houses includes, of course, practically
the whole of Catholic Europe, and a portion of Protestant Europe
as well. To attempt to review them all would be to lose oneself
in an interminable maze; but the collateral sources of particular
contamination can be noted, and we shall see house after house
contributing—some of them only on one, but some of them on several
occasions—its strain of madness to the great family with which it was
its privilege to intermarry. We may begin with the House of Burgundy,
and end with that of Bavaria, taking on our way the Houses of Spain,
Portugal, Medicis, and Bourbon Parma.

Charles the Bold of Burgundy fell into a melancholy madness after
his defeat by the Swiss at Morat, and died a madman. His daughter
Marie, Duchess of Brabant and Countess of Flanders, married Archduke
Maximilian of Austria, son of the Emperor Frederick IV. Their son,
Philippe le Bel, married that daughter of Ferdinand of Arragon who
is known to history as Joanna the Mad. Those are the unfavourable
circumstances in which we see Habsburg blood introduced into the royal
family of Spain; and the subsequent history of the family presents two
features pertinent to our survey:—

 1. A long series of degenerates among the Kings and Infants of Spain.

 2. A long series of marriages between Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs.

No full account of the manifestations of the madness of Spanish rulers,
Princes, and Princesses can be given here; they are too numerous, and
also too gross for general reading. The briefest of summaries must
suffice. Joanna the Mad travelled all over Spain with her husband’s
coffin, wailing and lamenting, at the top of her shrill voice, whenever
the funeral procession halted. Joanna’s son, the great Emperor Charles
V., lived on the border-line which separates genius from insanity,
and was, at any rate, an epileptic, like that Archduke Charles whose
campaigns against Napoleon were punctuated by untimely fits. His son,
Philip II.—known to English history as the husband of our Bloody
Mary—is described by the historians as “half-mad”; and Philip’s
brother Charles was notoriously a homicidal maniac. Philip III. was
comparatively sane; but even he tried to poison his sister. Charles
II. was nicknamed “the bewitched,” and was so afraid of the dark that
three monks had to sit every night at his bedside, in order that he
might sleep in peace. Philip V. was, for years, a bedridden imbecile;
and Ferdinand VI. was a victim of religious melancholia, Etc. The
catalogue is far from complete; but it may suffice as a preface to
the statement that one finds eight or nine Spanish marriages in the
Habsburg matrimonial annals.

One encounters a very similar list of lunatics in the annals of the
royal House of Portugal; and with that house also the Habsburgs
have again and again intermarried. The pathology of the Medicis and
the multitudinous Italian Bourbons, whose blood also runs in the
Habsburg veins, is hardly better; and it can scarcely have been in
the expectation of introducing a healthier strain that they sought
alliances with the Wittelsbachs of Bavaria. Sanity, in that house, is
represented by the King who sacrificed his kingdom to the beautiful
eyes of Lola Montez; madness by the Kings Louis and Otto, whose
extravagances and eccentricities have been related in innumerable
volumes of memoirs and newspaper articles, and who are Francis Joseph’s
cousins.

Assuredly no Eugenist will assert that that heredity is good. On the
contrary, the impression derived from a close examination of it is
that of several strains of insanity and decadence converging, much in
the way in which a multitude of Swiss mountain torrents converge to
form the Rhone. But even that analogy is unduly favourable; for the
sources from which fresh blood has been introduced into the family
have not been indefinitely numerous. The same source has been tapped
over and over again by the renewal of consanguineous marriages in one
generation after another, with the result that the Habsburg type—with
all its peculiar physical, mental, and moral characteristics—has been
perpetuated and emphasised.

The physical characteristics were long ago recognised by the family
itself with pride, and by outsiders with a curious wonder akin to envy
and admiration. Napoleon so remarked it at the time of his betrothal to
Marie-Louise, as M. Frédéric Masson relates:—

 “When” (M. Masson writes) “Lejeune, who had just arrived from Vienna,
 showed him a sketch of the Archduchess which he had made at the
 theatre, ‘Ah!’ he exclaimed in delight, ‘I see she has the Austrian
 lip.’”

In Brantôme, again, we find a much earlier reference to the feature.
He tells us how Eleanor of Austria, the wife of Francis I. of France,
examined the sculptured tombs of her ancestors at Dijon; and he
proceeds:—

 “Some of the bodies were in so good a state of preservation that she
 could distinguish many of their features, and, among other things,
 the shapes of their mouths. Whereupon she suddenly exclaimed, ‘Ah!
 I always thought we got our mouths from our Austrian ancestors; but
 I now see that we get them from Marie of Burgundy and the other
 Burgundians. If ever I see my brother the Emperor I will tell him so.
 Indeed, I think I will write to him on the subject.’ The lady who
 informed me of this told me that the Queen spoke as one who took pride
 in the characteristic; wherein she was quite right.”

That this physical peculiarity was, in the case of the Habsburgs, the
outward sign of mental and moral divergences from the healthy norm was
evidently as little suspected by Napoleon as by Brantôme. It is the
discovery of the students of a comparatively new science; and it is a
discovery of which the biographer must be careful to make neither too
little nor too much. Eugenics is not yet an exact science; and the laws
of heredity remain obscure. They are laws, it would seem, which, though
generally true, cannot be relied upon to operate in any particular
way in any particular case. The life of a family almost invariably
confirms them, whereas the life of an individual may often appear to
confute them; and we may often see genius flowering on the same plant
as insanity.

The history of the Habsburgs in general—and the life of Francis
Joseph in particular—supports that view of the matter. The Archduke
Charles, who was so nearly a match for Napoleon, and actually beat
him at Aspern, was not a very distant relative of the Archduke Otto
who used to dance in a Vienna café, attired only in a képi, a pair
of gloves, and a sword-belt. The Archduchess Christina, who proved
such an admirable mother to the little King of Spain—though she has
transmitted a double portion of the Habsburg jaw to him—was no less a
Habsburg than the Princess who so signally and so publicly failed to
find happiness in the love of Signor Toselli. And so on, and so forth;
for the contrasts of the kind to which one could point are endless. One
is left with the impression that the family, taken as a family, is
mad, but that certain isolated members of it have been as sane as the
rest of us, and abler than the majority; and one needs the impression
before one can justly appreciate the drama of Francis Joseph’s life.

He has stood before Europe, for more than sixty years, as the picked
champion of the Habsburgs: picked not only for his ability, but also
for his strength of character and conciliatory tact—for all those
qualities, in short, which one looks for from a sane man in an exalted
station. He started, as we have seen, under the burden of a singularly
bad heredity; and he has carried that burden through life with patient
endurance—and with an air of dignity—as if personally unconscious of
the taint, while the lives of those nearest and dearest to him were
furnishing undeniable proofs of it at every turn. He has shown himself,
to conclude, the true head of the house, by nature as well as by
pragmatic sanction.

So much made clear, we may proceed to chronicle the bald facts of his
birth and childhood.




CHAPTER IV

 Francis Joseph’s childhood—The severe education which prepared him
 for his _rôle_—Difficulties of that _rôle_—The Liberal revolt
 against the Metternich system—The idea of nationality—Hübner’s
 surprise that anyone should object to Austrian rule—Every Austrian
 a policeman at heart—The Italian rising of 1848—Francis Joseph in
 action—Radetzky’s remonstrances—Francis Joseph’s return to his
 studies.


Francis Joseph was born at Schönnbrunn on August 18, 1830. His father
was the Archduke Francis Charles, and his mother the Archduchess
Sophie, daughter of Maxmilian I. of Bavaria. He grew up and was
educated in the period of peace between the two great revolutionary
storms which shook Europe free from the Metternich system: a period
which begins with Metternich supreme, and ends with Metternich in
flight from an angry mob. He owed his throne, the steps of which he
mounted, as a lad of eighteen, in the midst of the second epoch of
turmoil, to his mother’s influence. She was an able and imperious
woman; she made up her mind that her son would make a better Emperor
than either her brother-in-law or her husband; she pulled the wires
and got her way.

The boy’s education was thorough and practical: just the sort of
education which he would have been given if his destiny had been in
view from his birth. He was taught the whole duty of a soldier in each
of the several branches of the service: to point a cannon as well as he
could mount a horse; to dig a trench as well as he could handle a sabre
or a rifle. He was also taken through complete courses of history,
literature, mathematics, chemistry, astronomy, and natural history,
instructed weekly in the maxims of statecraft by Metternich himself,
and compelled to acquire innumerable modern languages: Hungarian,
Czech, and Polish, as well as French, Italian, and, to a limited
extent, English. It was an intellectual preparation which might easily
have addled his brain, and does appear to have made him prematurely
serious. Even before the troubles of his family compelled him to
shoulder its responsibilities, he was remarked as being grave, earnest,
and reserved: the good boy of his family, it was thought—and as clever
as he was good.

Of course, there are anecdotes indicating that he loved his
people—and, above all, loved his army—from his earliest years. The
most famous of them shows him to us, moved to pity by the sight of
a sentry sweltering in the August sun, stealing up behind him, and
dropping a small coin into his cartridge-box, to the delight and
admiration of his aged grandfather: a subject picture by Kriehuber
keeps the memory of that incident alive. “Poor man! But now he is not
a poor man any longer,” he is said to have said, jumping about with
joy at the thought that he had made someone happy. Very likely it is
true; very likely it is also true that he, who was soon to be one of
the best horsemen in his dominions, began life with a horror of horses.
Those about him knew what sort of a man they wanted him to be, and did
their best to make him such a man. There was a regular Habsburg system
of education, though not all the Habsburgs have done credit to it. The
great Maria Theresa had laid it down that “they must not be coddled or
spoiled”; and the Emperor Joseph had expressed similar sentiments in
emphatic language:—

 “It may be enough for one of my subjects to say that, whereas his son
 will be of service to the State if he is well educated, the neglect to
 educate him does not matter, as he will have no public functions to
 perform. The case of an Archduke—a possible heir to the throne—is
 very different. The most important of all public functions—the
 government of the State—is absolutely incumbent on him. The question,
 therefore, whether he is or is not well educated, is one which it
 should be impossible to raise. He _must_ be well educated; for there
 is no branch of the administration in which he might not do infinite
 harm if he had not the necessary knowledge to cope with his task and
 were unprovided with fixed principles of conduct.”

It is a prescription as admirable as any to be found in the copy-book;
though the rigid application of it has not prevented a good many
Habsburgs from turning out, from the Habsburg point of view, badly. It
is a call to every Habsburg in turn to “be a Habsburg,” in the sense in
which George III.’s mother appealed to him to “be a King”; and it rests
upon a conception of the House of Habsburg as a house specially and
divinely called into being in order to practise the art of government
in central Europe. One may almost say that it assumes a caste of
anointed rulers differing from their subjects as angels differ from
the children of men; but it stops short of the corollary that rulers
are born, not made. It lays down, rather, that the caste, in order to
retain and exalt its qualities as a caste, must always be specialising
from infancy to age. In that way, and in that way alone, its members
might dispense with genius.

On the whole, they have had to dispense with it: their figures do not
tower above the figures of their ministers, like those of Alexander I.
of Russia and Frederick the Great of Prussia. Metternich is not the
only Austrian minister who has been infinitely greater than any of
the Emperors whom he served. Not all of them, again, have continued
to specialise a day after the compulsion of tutors was withdrawn. A
great many of them, on the contrary—a constantly increasing number
of them in these latter times—have openly revolted against every
restriction which made the caste characteristic. But the caste has
continued, buttressed by the system, an object of regard, and almost
of veneration, thanks to certain model Habsburgs, who have consented
to the restrictions, and profited by them. Francis Joseph steps on to
the stage of history as such a one: a specialised Habsburg, approaching
nearer to genius than the others, but also gifted with a tactful
adaptability which has enabled him to realise that the dead past must
be allowed to bury its dead from time to time. Let us indicate the
political troubles which called him into activity.

The revolutions of 1830 had been, in the main, abortive: a symptom of
general discontent, but not its complete and successful expression. The
work done at the Resettlement of 1815 had been shaken by it, but had
not, except here and there—in Belgium, for instance—been upset; and
that resettlement had been planned in the interest of reigning houses,
not of peoples. The reigning houses continued to sit on the safety
valve; and the steam which was trying to find vent through the safety
valve consisted of:—

  1. Liberal ideas in general.
  2. The idea of nationality in particular.

To both those groups of ideas the Austrian Government was bitterly
opposed; with both of them it was to have trouble. Its political
prisons were famous throughout Europe as the homes of distinguished
men, and its subject populations seethed with discontent. The idea of
nationality was particularly obnoxious to it because it did not itself
repose upon a national basis. “Austria,” said Mazzini, with a gesture
of disdain, “is not a country, but a bureaucracy”; and Austria was, in
fact—what Metternich said that Italy was—a geographical ex-pression.
It simply comprised the possessions of the House of Habsburg, which
had, for generations, added field to field by means of prosperous
marriages,[2] or accepted territory as the recompense of services
rendered in war. The Emperor of Austria was also King of Hungary, King
of Lombardy, King of Bohemia, etc., etc.: the head, as it were, of an
ancient firm formed to carry on the general purposes of government in
central Europe, and regarding men and women merely as material to be
governed.

[Footnote 2: The idea was set forth in the famous hexameter line:
_Bella gerant alii: tu, felix Austria, nube._]

The system had its advantages—it kept the peace provisionally in what
might otherwise have been one of the cockpits of Europe. That was what
the French diplomatist meant when he said that, if the Austrian Empire
had not existed it would have been necessary to invent it. But it was
not popular, and it tended to make every Austrian statesman a policeman
at heart. Even Metternich was a policeman at heart: a policeman of
genius—a policeman of wide culture and charming manners—but still a
policeman. He and his subordinates simply could not understand that
people of other races might object to being policed by Germans. The
Germans, they considered, were the best policemen in the world; and
that should be an end of the matter. Count Hübner—a most intelligent
Austrian—threw up his hands in amazement at the obstinate prevalence
of the contrary opinion:—

 “To-day” (we find him writing in his diary) “the magic word which
 moves the masses—not the proletariate, but the intelligent public—is
 _nationality_. Germans, Italians, Poles, Magyars, Slavs! It is a
 formula capable of throwing the universe off its hinges—the lever
 which Archimedes sought in vain. The ringleaders have discovered it.
 With this lever they have, in the course of a few days, upset the old
 social system, and dazzled the eyes of the purblind with the deceptive
 promise of the perpetual happiness of the human race.”

The peoples of central Europe, in Hübner’s opinion, should have been
as proud of their subjection to the House of Habsburg as the domestic
servants whom Thackeray met on the top of the coach were of their
position as the flunkeys of the Duke of Richmond. Italian national
aspirations, in particular, seemed to him merely comical. He derided
the Italians as mongrels—a medley of Gauls, Celts, Goths, Germans,
Greeks, Normans, and Arabs; he recalled the internecine strife which
had raged among their Republics in the Middle Ages. He comforted
himself with the reflection that they spoke different dialects in
different parts of the Peninsula, and he concluded: “I cannot believe
in a United Italy.”

Yet Italy was being united—and the Austrian Empire was apparently
crumbling into its component parts—at the moment when he wrote, in
July, 1848. Already, from the beginning of that year, anxiety had been
widespread; and, in February, events in France had given a signal of
unmistakable significance. “If Guizot falls,” Mélanie Metternich
exclaimed, “then we are all lost.” Guizot did fall; and Louis-Philippe
fell with him. The news reached Vienna; and it seemed as if Austria
was in the melting-pot, though the trouble began, not in Vienna,
but at Milan, where an Archduke reigned as Viceroy, and that sturdy
octogenarian Radetzky commanded the army of occupation.

Charles Albert, King of Sardinia—the great-grandfather of the
present King of Italy—had promised to be “the sword of Italy,” on
one condition. He would not collaborate with mere conspirators,
but if there were an insurrection he would march to the aid of the
insurgents. His terms were accepted, and there was a riot which became
a revolution, though, in its inception, it presented some of the
distinguishing characteristics of comic opera.

The revolutionists began by decreeing that as the Austrian Government
depended largely for its revenues on the tobacco monopoly, no one in
Italy should smoke. Austrian soldiers retorted by swaggering through
the streets of Milan, smoking several cigars at once. Female patriots
knocked the cigars out of their mouths, and pelted them from the
house-tops with flower-pots and other missiles; while male patriots,
armed with various weapons, molested them in other ways. There was
street fighting, and there were killed and wounded. The patriots were
many; the garrison was small; Charles Albert was known to be coming.
Radetzky had no choice but to withdraw his troops within the famous
Quadrilateral of Fortresses, leaving the provisional government set up
by the revolutionists in possession. It seemed to the sapient Hübner a
case of black ingratitude towards the admirable Austrian police.

But Austria was not, this time, to be beaten. Within the Quadrilateral
Radetzky was safe; and, in due course, he marched out and defeated
Charles Albert at Custozza. Few reinforcements had reached him, but
they sufficed; and among the officers who came to serve under him
was included Francis Joseph—not yet eighteen years of age. It was
his first appearance in the field; and Radetzky was not particularly
glad to see him. The scene which passed between the stripling and the
veteran is best described in the Life of Radetzky included in General
Ambert’s _Cinq Epées_:—

 “Radetzky addressed the new arrival in peremptory military language.
 ‘Imperial Highness,’ he said, ‘your presence here is exceedingly
 embarrassing for me. Consider my responsibility in case anything
 should happen to you! If you should be taken prisoner, for instance,
 the accident would annihilate at a stroke any advantage which the
 Austrian army might have gained.’ ‘Marshal,’ replied Francis Joseph,
 ‘it is quite possible that it was unwise to send me here; but, as I am
 here, honour forbids me to depart without facing the enemy’s fire’;
 and his eyes filled with tears as he spoke.

 “No objection could be taken to an explanation so simple and gallant;
 and it was agreed that the Archduke should take part in the next
 battle, which was fought a few days later (the battle of May 6, at
 Santa Lucia). Here are the precise words of the report, addressed by
 Radetzky, immediately after that sanguinary struggle, to the Minister
 of War: ‘I was myself an eye-witness of the intrepidity displayed by
 the Archduke, when one of the enemy’s shells burst quite close to
 him.’”

“Austria does not lack Archdukes,” he said gallantly, when implored not
to expose himself to danger; but his battle was only of the nature of
a holiday treat. He was still _in statu pupillari_—occupied with the
severe studies by which he was preparing himself for his great _rôle_;
and when he had done enough for honour, he returned to them. It was
then, or soon afterwards, that he was confidentially informed of the
great trust about to be reposed in him; but the intimation neither
puffed him up with pride nor disturbed his diligence. He brought out
his books again—immense tomes dealing with Roman, civil, criminal,
and canonical law—and resumed his reading, almost as if everything
depended upon his passing an examination in high honours. Not if he
could help it should the arrival of his hour find him unready for it.

And his hour was near, for the times were critical. Trouble at home had
followed hard on the heels of the trouble in Lombardy, and, being more
complicated, had been more difficult to deal with.




CHAPTER V

 The risings of 1848—Princess Mélanie Metternich’s excited account
 of it—Disorderly flight of Metternich from Vienna—The House of
 Habsburg saved by “three mutinous soldiers”—Abdication of the
 Emperor Ferdinand in favour of his nephew, Francis Joseph—Hübner’s
 description of the ceremony.


If we want to look at the disturbances which broke up the old order
in Austria through contemporary eyes, our most helpful document will
be the Diary of Metternich’s wife, Princess Mélanie—so called, _tout
court_, as an indication that she ranked, like the Archduchesses, as
one of the Olympian goddesses of Viennese Society. One seems, as one
reads it, to be listening to the shrieks of a fluttered bird; for
Princess Mélanie understood as little as a bird would have understood,
the true significance of the uprising. Sheer wantonness was, for her,
the sole motive of the revolutionists; black ingratitude towards good
rulers was their distinguishing characteristic; and the outcome of the
agitation could only be “the end of all.” All that because the students
and the artisans had announced that they desired a “Constitution.”

Already we have seen Princess Mélanie predicting that, if Guizot fell,
all was lost; and, after the events of February, 1848, in Paris, she
saw horrors accumulating on horror’s head:—

 “Poor Germany is already in a blaze. Never were times graver or more
 solemn. Every hour brings forth a fresh event, and fresh troubles are
 perpetually being added to those already in existence.”

All the thrones in Germany were, in truth, being shaken, though they
were all eventually to recover; and now the privileges of the Austrian
throne itself were being challenged:—

 “Kossuth has moved a resolution which the Chamber of Deputies
 has approved. These people actually demand nothing less than a
 Constitution for Austria!... The agitation is general, and the terror
 is great. People are so alarmed—especially the great financiers—that
 they propose concessions to the popular demand, and see no chance
 of safety except in making them. One would say that Hell had broken
 loose. God alone can dam the torrent which threatens to swallow up
 everything.”

At first, the trouble was confined to Hungary; but the contagion
spread:—

 “Here, too, the public is very much disposed to ask for a
 Constitution, and our various provincial assemblies are beginning to
 pass the most regrettable resolutions. May God enlighten us and give
 us the strength to be firm! That is all that I pray for.”

And then:—

 “The news from Germany gets worse and worse. There no longer _is_ any
 Germany in the true sense of the word, for all the German sovereigns
 have been compelled to make concessions.... One really needs
 superhuman moral force to withstand this popular agitation.”

So the trouble came nearer and nearer; and it became clear that
Metternich himself was the object of popular hostility. Threatening
letters were received. A piece of paper was found affixed to
Metternich’s door, bearing the words: “Down with Metternich. We want
concessions!” Princess Mélanie herself received a significant warning,
at one of her own receptions, from Félicie Esterhazy:—

 “She let fall the following laconic remark: ‘Is it true that you are
 going away to-morrow?’ ‘Why?’ I asked her. ‘Because we were told that
 we had better buy candles in order to be able to illuminate to-morrow,
 as a great event was about to happen.’”

A great event did happen on the morrow—though not the event which
Félicie Esterhazy had in view; and Princess Mélanie witnessed it. She
saw a demonstration on the Ballplatz, and heard an agitator, lifted on
to the shoulders of his companions, shouting:—

 “Long live the imperial house! We want concessions in conformity
 with the spirit of the times (cheers). Give us freedom of the press
 (cheers); let justice be administered publicly (cheers); let there
 be freedom of thought (cheers)! Let those who have outlived their
 usefulness resign and go (tremendous acclamations)!”

And Princess Mélanie complains that “no one interfered with this
indecent demonstration,” and that “no one attempted to silence the
brawlers.”

She called the demonstrations “indecent” because they were obviously
aimed at her husband, who, far more than the Emperor, symbolised that
_ancien régime_ which the students and artisans were resolved to
end. The Emperor, indeed, was merely a weak-minded, good-natured old
gentleman to whom no one wished any harm. He was as ready to grant
concessions as to give alms; and his subjects knew it, cheered him
when he drove through the streets, and decorated their barricades with
his portraits. Their objection was not to him, but to his police, who
took Princess Mélanie’s old-fashioned view of concessions: notably,
therefore, to Metternich, the policeman of genius.

It was idle for Metternich to protest, as he sometimes did, in after
years, that, though he might sometimes have governed Europe, he
certainly had never governed Austria. The people knew—or thought
that they knew—better. The chief article in their simple creed was
that Metternich must go; and the sole question for Ferdinand and his
Court and Ministers was whether Metternich should or should not be
thrown overboard as a Jonah who brought ill luck to the Austrian ship
of state. The upshot appears from these entries in Princess Mélanie’s
Journal:—

 “At half-past six, Clement was sent for to the Palace.”

 “Yes, Clement has resigned.”

The circumstances of the interview in which he did so were afterwards
related by him to Hübner:—

 “The Archduke Louis came to me and said: ‘These gentlemen tell me
 that, if you could make up your mind to resign, order could be
 re-established.’ I asked, ‘What is it that your Highness desires me
 to do?’ He replied, ‘It is for you to decide what to do.’ Thereupon
 I instantly resigned the office of Chancellor, and went into the
 adjoining apartment to inform the Delegates of the States that I had
 done so. One of these gentlemen spoke of generosity, and said that my
 resignation put a worthy coping-stone upon a long career. ‘No, no,’ I
 said. ‘It is merely a concession to the revolution.’”

But he not only had to quit office; he also had to leave Vienna, where
his life, in spite of his resignation, was not safe. He could not even
leave at his leisure, but had to depart in a hurry without packing,
dining with his friends, the Taaffes, and then driving off, in great
haste, to Feldsberg, whence he made his way through Germany and Holland
to England, where he landed just in time for his son Richard to be
sworn in as a special constable, and bludgeon the Chartists, shoulder
to shoulder with the future Napoleon III. The fluttered Diary records
it all in a succession of shrill screams: What has Metternich—once the
policeman of Europe—done to deserve such treatment! How black is the
ingratitude of man! But Princess Mélanie might as well have exclaimed
against the black ingratitude of water, which, under the exciting
influence of heat, expands into steam, and blows up the man who sits on
the safety-valve, without the least regard to his personal charm and
intellectual culture.

So ironical is fate; and there was a still more cruel irony in the fact
that the House of Habsburg, which owed so much to Metternich, seemed
rather relieved to be rid of him, regarding his policy as an asset but
his personality as an incubus. Alone among the members of the Imperial
House, Francis Joseph’s mother remembered to write a polite letter,
inquiring how he was getting on, and confiding to him the hopes which
were concentrated in her son, his political pupil:—

 “My poor Franzi has been my sole consolation in our hours of trouble.
 In the midst of my anguish and despair, I have continued to bless God
 for giving me such a boy. His courage, his firmness, his judgment have
 been unshaken—altogether beyond what one would expect from a lad of
 his age—and have encouraged the hope that God will grant him a great
 career, since He has given him the strength to face all the risks of
 life.”

But though the Archduchess Sophie wrote in that charming vein, she
was herself one of those who had agreed that Metternich had better
be sacrificed, as he was so inconveniently unpopular; and Metternich
replied, not without a sense of bitterness, that he thought very
highly of Francis Joseph, and had a great affection for him, and was
quite confident that he would succeed in life as well as his mother
could wish, if only he remembered and applied the maxims of statecraft
which he himself had taught him. But he also, at the same time,
chuckled through his tears, observing that the jettisoning of the Jonah
did not seem to have saved the ship.

For order did not yet reign in Vienna; on the contrary, the revolution
was going from bad to worse, and the Court had to leave the capital.
First it went to loyal Innsbruck, in loyal Tyrol—whence Francis Joseph
paid his visit, already mentioned, to the Army of Italy. Then it
returned, under the illusion that things were going better; and then
it went off again to Olmütz. Hungary and Bohemia, as well as Italy,
were in open rebellion; and Vienna continued to throw up barricades
from time to time. Unwelcome Ministers were forced on the Emperor, made
concessions, and then gave place to others who promised still more
concessions. The conditions of 1789, said the people who knew history,
were giving place to the conditions of 1793. At any moment they might
expect to see the guillotine “going always,” and the Emperor’s head
rolling from the block into a basket.

Nor did the House of Habsburg, in that dark hour, save itself. On the
contrary. “The monarchy,” as Felix Schwarzenberg put it, “was saved
by three mutinous soldiers”: Radetzky, the octogenarian who would not
grow old; Alfred von Windischgraetz, the unbending aristocrat, who
was vastly more imperialist than the Emperor; Jellaçiç, the swaggering
and self-sufficient Ban of Croatia. They agreed, to put it bluntly,
that the Emperor Ferdinand was an old fool who had been bounced by
his Ministers into giving orders which it behoved them to disobey.
So Radetzky, being ordered to evacuate Lombardy, remained there; and
Windischgraetz, being ordered to hold a portion of his forces at the
disposition of the War Minister, replied that he could not spare them;
and Jellaçiç, being dismissed from his command, refused to give it up.
In that way, they collared the situation and saved it.

The Hungarians, marching on Vienna, were met by Jellaçiç and driven
back. Windischgraetz, after first putting down the rising in Bohemia,
marched down to Vienna and laid siege to it. Radetzky reinforced him,
and then the end was near. Windischgraetz, in truth, had other reasons
besides his loyalty to make him furious. His own wife had been one of
the victims of the insurrection—shot while she stood at an open window
to watch the rioting; so that it was not in the least likely that he
would hesitate to shoot, or allow the insurgents to surrender otherwise
than at discretion. First, therefore, he bombarded Vienna; and then he
forced the gates and stormed the barricades. There was a certain show
of resistance, but then, after a few military executions, order did
really reign, and the House of Habsburg was really saved, except in
so far as the Hungarians were still a menace to it. And the Emperor
Ferdinand’s first act, when his safety was assured, was to abdicate in
favour of his nephew, Francis Joseph.

It was an abdication which had, long since, been contemplated, and even
arranged. Metternich, the Empress, and the Archduchess Sophie had put
their heads together and settled it. None of them had any illusions
about the Emperor, and it does not appear that the Emperor had any
illusions about himself. None the less, the secret had been well kept.
Hübner, Schwarzenberg, and Windischgraetz were the only people who knew
what was going to happen, or for what purpose the members of the royal
family, and the functionaries connected with the Court, were suddenly
summoned to assemble in the imperial residence at Olmütz at eight
o’clock in the morning:—

 “At half-past seven” (writes Hübner, whose function it was to take
 the minutes of the meeting) “the apartments adjoining the throne room
 were gorgeous with civil and military uniforms. There were present
 all the Archdukes and Archduchesses, with their ladies and gentlemen
 in waiting, the Canons of the Chapter of Olmütz, and a few ladies
 belonging to the aristocracy. Intense curiosity was imprinted on every
 countenance. The most remarkable guesses passed from mouth to mouth
 at this brilliant gathering, but—strange to say—no one guessed the
 truth. The Archduke Maximilian asked me what it was all about. The
 Archduke Ferdinand of Este addressed the same question to the War
 Minister, and received, as did the brother of the future Emperor, an
 evasive answer.”

Soon the proceedings began:—

 “Punctually at eight o’clock, the folding doors of the throne-room
 were thrown open to give admission to the Archdukes Maximilian,
 Charles Louis, and Ferdinand of Este, to the Archduchesses Maria
 Dorothea, widow of the Archduke Joseph, and Elizabeth, wife of the
 Archduke Ferdinand, to the Ministers, to Marshal Windischgraetz,
 to the Ban of Croatia, and to Count Grunne, Master of the Horse of
 the Archduke Francis Joseph.... When the door was closed on us,
 their Majesties, followed by the Landgrave Frederick of Furstenberg,
 Prince Lobkowitz, the Emperor’s aide-de-camp, and the Landgravine of
 Furstenberg, grand mistress to the Empress, together with the Archduke
 Francis Charles, the Archduchess Sophia, and their son, the Archduke
 Francis Joseph, entered. Their Majesties took their places on two
 armchairs in front of the throne, and the Archdukes and Archduchesses
 took theirs on chairs arranged in the form of a rectangle on either
 side of the throne. The Ministers, Marshal Windischgraetz, and Ban
 Jellaçiç stood facing the Emperor. There was a deep and solemn
 silence.”

The silence was broken by the Emperor himself, reading the statement
prepared for him: the simple statement that important considerations
had decided him to transmit his crown to his nephew. Then it was the
turn of Felix Schwarzenberg. Ordinarily an impassive man, he now read,
in a voice shaking with emotion, the three documents which gave legal
validity to the transaction: the declaration that Francis Joseph had
attained his majority; the declaration that Francis Joseph’s father
renounced his own rights in his son’s favour; the Emperor’s formal act
of abdication. One after the other, the three documents were signed
by those whom they concerned; and Francis Joseph knelt—for the last
time—to Ferdinand, to receive his blessing.

_Sei brav, es ist gerne geschehen_, were Ferdinand’s words. Literally
it means: “Be good; I did it willingly.” Practically it meant: “Never
mind me. I don’t feel hurt in the least. On the contrary, I’m well out
of it.” He ceased, and the retiring Empress embraced the boy Emperor.
According to Hübner, the Archduchesses sobbed aloud, and there was not
a dry eye in the room; and while the eyes of the company were still
moist, the door was once more opened, and the courtiers, assembled in
the ante-chamber, were informed of what had passed. That done, Francis
Joseph rode out to review the troops, and receive their acclamations;
while the Emperor Ferdinand and the Empress Marianna quietly took the
afternoon train to Prague.

Thus the change was effected, quite simply, and almost without
ceremony. It almost looks as though everything was done in a hurry,
so that no one might have time to question the wisdom of doing it.
“Farewell to my youth!” said Francis Joseph when, addressed for the
first time as “Your Majesty,” he realised the change in his condition,
and the responsibilities to which he was committed, so soon after his
eighteenth birthday. But he had never known what it was to be young, as
boys of humbler station know it; and his opportunities of unbending,
as some monarchs unbend, were to be few. He was the sole hope of the
Habsburgs; he had to shoulder the whole burden of the Habsburgs; and he
was to find it heavy. Princess Mélanie, when the news of his accession
reached her, trembled for him:

 “How is an Emperor of eighteen years of age to steer his course amid
 such conflicting currents? I shudder when I think of him—the last
 hope which now remains to us. May God bless him, and give him energy,
 while giving his counsellors the wisdom which they will need!”

The grounds of her anxiety—particular as well as general—appear on
the same page of her Diary:

 “They tell me that a Republic has been proclaimed in Hungary, with
 Kossuth as Dictator.”

Which meant that Ferdinand had indeed reason to regard himself as “well
out of it,” and that Francis Joseph had not ascended an undisputed
throne, but one for the defence of which he would have to fight
desperately hard.




CHAPTER VI

 Attitude of the Hungarians towards Francis Joseph—They denounce him
 as a traitor, and banish him from Hungary—Contempt of Austrians for
 Hungarians—The conquest of Hungary with Russian help—Repression and
 atrocities—Women flogged by order of Marshal Haynau—Marshal Haynau
 himself flogged by Barclay and Perkins’ draymen in London, and spat
 upon by women in Brussels—Popular song written on that occasion.


The state of things which Francis Joseph found on his accession was
this: In Vienna, all was over except the shooting and the shouting.
Tyrol—the Vendée of Austria—was, as it always had been, loyal. In
Bohemia, Windischgraetz had crushed the insurrection as he might have
cracked a nut. But Italy and Hungary were still formidable, and had to
be reconquered.

In Italy there was a renewal of the fighting; and the work done at
Custozza had to be done over again at Novara—Charles Albert then
taking a leaf out of the book of the Emperor Ferdinand and abdicating
in favour of his son, the famous Victor Emmanuel. In Hungary, the work
of conquest had hardly even been begun; and though Jellaçiç had held
the Hungarians up at the gates of Vienna, they were in a position to
hold him up many times before he could get to the gates of Buda-Pesth.
So that the position was extremely critical.

It had been hastily assumed that Francis Joseph would be popular in
Hungary. He had once been sent there, as a boy, to represent the
Emperor at some public function, had made a fluent speech in the
Hungarian language, and had been vociferously cheered. No doubt the
precocious _bonhomie_ of his manner had made a favourable impression;
but that was not enough at a time when the old Hungarian privileges and
the new Hungarian constitution were at issue. The affability of the
sovereign was no substitute for the rights of his subjects; and the
Hungarians would only consent to love, and be loyal to, the Austrian
Emperor “on terms.”

And those terms could not be granted. Francis Joseph, brought up in the
school of Metternich, would hardly have been disposed to grant them
if his hands had been free; and the men who stood by him—and over
him—such men as Windischgraetz and Felix Schwarzenberg—would not
have let him grant them if he had wanted to. As they had already saved
Vienna for him, so they now proposed to save Austria and Hungary for
him—but in their own way, and not in his. Knowing what they wanted,
they told him what he wanted; and they had control of the machinery. In
order to understand their proceedings, we must define their attitude,
noting that they were, in the first place, aristocrats, and, in the
second place, Teutons.

[Illustration: THE EMPEROR FRANCIS JOSEPH AT THE TIME OF HIS ACCESSION
IN 1848.]

As aristocrats, they held that, as Windischgraetz put it, “mankind
begins with the baron,” and that no men except the nobly born had any
rights which it was proper to take seriously—that they themselves
belonged, in short, to a divinely designated ruling caste. As Teutons
they regarded themselves as belonging to a divinely designated ruling
race—the natural superiors of Italians, Hungarians, and Croats.
Their conception of a sound imperial policy was, therefore, to employ
the Hungarians to cut the throats of the Italians, and the Croats to
cut the throats of the Hungarians; while they, directing operations,
unified and Germanised the Empire.

The Hungarians, however, were a stubborn race who had no desire to
be Germanised. They were, they urged, an independent people whose
relations to the Habsburgs were defined by the Statutes of 1723; and
they should not recognise Francis Joseph as their ruler until he had
been crowned by their Archbishop at Pesth, and had sworn to obey the
laws of the Kingdom of St. Stephen. That was the reply which they flung
in Francis Joseph’s teeth when he issued a proclamation indicating his
intention to “unite all the countries and tribes of the monarchy into
_one integral State_.” Hungary, they maintained, was not part of a
State, but a State in itself, and should remain one. The Habsburgs, in
trying to incorporate them in Austria, were “traitors to the liberties
of Hungary,” and should be banished from Hungarian soil for evermore.
On those pleas issue was joined, and the Hungarian war of 1849 began.

It is one of the forgotten wars of European history: a particularly
savage war, and one of which the issue hung for a long time in the
balance. The heroic Georgei, whose name was then a household word,
proved himself very nearly a match for the swaggering Ban of Croatia;
and it looked, for a time, as though, even if Francis Joseph did
reconquer his Kingdom, the days of Austria as a first-class Power were
numbered. Palmerston, for one, thought so, and said so, declaring,
in the House of Commons, that “if, the war being fought out to the
uttermost, Hungary should, by superior forces, be utterly crushed,
Austria, in that battle, will have crushed her own right arm.”

But Palmerston was wrong; and Austria, neither for the first nor for
the last time in her history, defeated the predictions of the prophets.
She has been called the Sick Woman, as Turkey used to be called the
Sick Man, of Europe; but the Sick Woman has had a wonderfully elastic
constitution, and has been wonderfully favoured by the chapter of
accidents. Again and again in her history we have a vision of _disjecta
membra_ re-attaching themselves, as it were, to the disabled trunk,
so that it could once more get up and walk. It was so in 1849, when,
the Poles having risen to help the Hungarians, the Russians, knowing
what they themselves might have to fear from victorious Poles,
crossed the frontier to Francis Joseph’s rescue. That accident—happy
or unhappy as one likes to regard it—turned the scale in the nick of
time; and the rest was butchery, akin to that of the White Terror in
France, but worse—a blood bath which scandalised Europe: the campaign
of Haynau—called the Hyaena because of his grim chuckles at the
sufferings which he caused—against the defenceless.

Certain excesses had been committed, in the early days of the
revolutionary excitement—the War Minister, Latour, among others, had
fallen a victim to mob violence. Those excesses were now avenged, not
merely on the mob, but on the middle classes and on the Magnates.
Croatian soldiers were turned loose on Hungarian towns, with a free
hand to loot and ravish. Hungarian officers—officers who were also
noblemen—were impressed as private soldiers, and placed in Austrian
regiments, with the deliberate purpose of breaking their spirits. That
was the treatment meted out even to some members of the great Hungarian
houses of Esterhazy and Batthyany; and a Baron Podanitzky, who had been
impressed in the artillery, was actually flogged in the streets of a
Hungarian town on some absurd charge of having lost part of a bag of
corn entrusted to his care.

Even women were flogged. Here is the deposition of one of them,
published at the time in every newspaper in Europe—the truth of the
story being confirmed, after inquiry on the spot, by the special
correspondent of _The Times_:—

 “Some imperialist troops entered Ruskby. It is probable that my
 enviable family happiness had created enemies at Ruskby, and that
 they were resolved to destroy it, for I am not aware that any of us
 had committed any fault. I was suddenly, without a previous trial or
 examination, taken from my husband and children. I was dragged into
 a square formed by the troops, and in the place in which I reside,
 and in the presence of its population, which had been accustomed to
 honour me, not because I was the Lady of the Manor, but because the
 whole tenor of my life deserved it, _I was flogged with rods_. You see
 I can write the words without dying of shame; but my husband took his
 own life. Deprived of all other weapons, he shot himself with a small
 cannon.”

The story was contradicted, on the ground that no such place as Ruskby
could be found on the map; but the only error was the printer’s. The
scene of the outrage was Ruskberg. The punishment was inflicted by the
orders of a Captain Graber; and its victim was Mme. de Madersbach, the
widow of a partner in the ironworks of Hoffmann and Madersbach. It
was, of course, only one of the informal, and, as it were, accidental
outrages. The formal outrages took the form of military executions.
Generals and Colonels of the Hungarian Army, and Members of the
Hungarian Chamber of Deputies were put to death—some of them hanged
and others shot—until hardly one of them was left; and most of those
who were left were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment in irons;
while diplomatic machinery was set in motion—happily in vain—to
obtain the extradition of the few fugitives who had succeeded in taking
refuge with the Turks. The demand for their surrender, addressed to
the Sultan, on behalf of the Austrians, by the Tsar, gave the Moslem
an opportunity which he did not miss of administering a rebuke to the
Christian:

 “Your adjutant” (the Sultan wrote), “has demanded the extradition of
 the Hungarian refugees. The demand being made to excite hate against
 yourself as well as against me, I desire Your Majesty will not insist
 on carrying that point.”

The most cruel of all the cruelties—the one, at all events, which made
the greatest stir in the world—was the execution of Louis Batthyany,
some time Prime Minister of Hungary. He was the grandson of the
Batthyany who had saved the great Maria Theresa, when Frederick the
Great chased her on to Hungarian soil, raising the cry—it was raised
in Latin—_Moriamur pro rege nostro_; but the memory of that great
service did not save him; and Countess Marie Larisch’s statement, in
“My Past,” that “he eluded the executioner by poisoning himself in
prison,” is incorrect. He attempted to cut his throat with a blunt
penknife, and failed; and was only shot, instead of hanged, because
the dragging of a wounded man to the gibbet might have made too
great a scandal. His widow made his son swear an oath that never, in
any circumstances, would he speak to Francis Joseph, or in any way
acknowledge his existence; and the handsome young Elemar Batthyany
kept his oath, and long years afterwards used to cut the Emperor in the
hunting field, while making love to the Empress behind his back.

If one could hold Francis Joseph personally responsible for these
atrocities, one would, indeed, have to regard him as a sinister youth
who has since grown into a sinister old man. One must hope, on the
contrary—and one may fairly hope, as he was less than nineteen at the
time—that he was only the dummy of a sanguinary camarilla, and the
obedient son of a hard-hearted, ambitious, and self-righteous mother.
But he assumed the posture of a sinister youth, whether he assumed
it consciously or not, by refusing mercy even when mothers, who had
succeeded in obtaining audience, knelt weeping at his feet, and pleaded
for the lives of their sons, and replying cynically to a remonstrance
against Louis Batthyany’s execution that “the Imperial word had been
pledged that every Austrian subject without distinction should be equal
in the eye of the law.” So that the Vienna correspondent of the _Kölner
Zeitung_ wrote:—

 “Hanging and shooting—shooting and hanging. Such is at present the
 manner in which the men in power say good morning and good night
 to the nations of Austria. The strong hand in Austria is a bloody
 hand, and the slaughter once begun is so tempting that our rulers
 cannot think of leaving off. The whole of the civilised world
 protests against the present doings in Hungary. Schwarzenberg and his
 fellows cause public opinion to extend its imprecation to a greater
 person—to the Emperor whom the people ought not to be taught to
 associate with cruelties and deeds of blood, violence, and vengeance.
 Under the absolute government of former times, the people of Austria
 were fond of their Emperor; for whatever they suffered they threw
 the blame on the aristocracy and the bureaucracy. They said: ‘If the
 Emperor could but know of it, he would help us.’ At present nobody
 thinks of saying such a thing. They say, ‘The Emperor knows it and he
 does it.’”

Cynicism reached its height—one cannot say whether it was Francis
Joseph’s own cynicism or not—in the attempt to maintain the gaiety of
the Court in the midst of this Reign of Terror. As Baroness von Beck
puts it:—

 “Ball followed ball, _soirées_ were announced, and assemblies were
 held, but Rachel wept still for her children, and refused to be
 comforted. The _Lloyd_ published day after day the most magniloquent
 reports of the Court festivals, long lists of the beauties who
 assisted at them, descriptions of the gorgeous costumes with which
 they were adorned; but they were read without any emotion. It would
 not do; the city was in mourning; such fantastic attempts at mirth
 were out of season. They jarred upon the public feeling. If they ever
 won a moment of public approbation, it was like a smile upon a widow’s
 countenance, speedily followed by a blush of reproach at her momentary
 forgetfulness of the one great sorrow.”

When the Archduchess Sophia drove out, in fact, the common people often
surrounded her carriage, in order to shout the names of the murdered
Hungarians in her ear; and Countess Karolyi, whose son had been one of
the victims of the repression, cursed Francis Joseph in scathing words
which seem to sum up all the possibilities of human hate:—

 “=May Heaven and Hell blast his happiness! May his family be
 exterminated! May he be smitten in the persons of those he loves! May
 his life be wrecked, and may his children be brought to ruin!=”

A memorable curse truly, and one which one might, if one chose, take
for the text of this biography, showing how time has brought the
fulfilment of it, drawing the punishment out slowly, relentlessly,
unceasingly. The tragedy of the Square of Queretaro, where Francis
Joseph’s brother faced a firing party of Republican executioners;
the tragedy of the Vatican, where his sister-in-law lost her reason;
the tragedy of Meyerling, where his only son perished in his shame;
the tragedy of Geneva, where his wife was struck down by the dagger
of the assassin—all these things, and many others also, might be
represented as so many stages in the untiring and undeviating march of
Nemesis—fulfilments of the curse, and illustrations of the familiar
lines:—

  _Raro antecedentem scelestum_
  _Deseruit pede poena claudo._

Perhaps; but, if Francis Joseph’s punishment was to come slowly, that
of his instrument, Marshal Haynau, was to come quickly.

The day soon arrived when the Emperor realised that he must break
his instrument. The butchery could not go on for ever, and the
butcher—this Hyaena of Brescia—could not always be kept in evidence.
When he had served his purpose, he must go. So his command was
withdrawn from him; and he retired into private life, and went upon his
travels. His travels took him to London, whither his reputation had
preceded him. He called upon the banker Rothschild, who gave him an
introduction to the brewers Barclay and Perkins, whose brewery he had
expressed a desire to “go over.”

Whether the banker deliberately set a trap for a hyaena or merely
wished to oblige a client remains uncertain, even after a careful
perusal of the letters of explanation which he sent to _The Times_.
What is quite certain is that the draymen employed by Messrs. Barclay
and Perkins knew that Haynau was coming, knew that he was responsible
for the public flogging of women, and resolved to deal with him
accordingly. Hardly had the brewery gates closed on him, when a truss
of straw fell on his head from above, and then the trouble began.

A coherent account of the adventure might be difficult to give; but
there are certain details of it concerning which all the witnesses
are agreed. Marshal Haynau was beaten with rods, as his victims had
been beaten, and some of the rods were broken across his back. He fled
for refuge into a dustbin, and was pulled out of it by the beard.
Somehow or other, he escaped from the brewery and ran like a hare
down the street; but he was caught, knocked over, and dragged along
the ground by his fierce moustaches. A woman threw a pair of scissors
out of the window of an upper chamber, appealing to the men to cut
those moustaches off. Ultimately he ran into a public house, and there
managed to evade his pursuers until the police delivered him.

The story was a nine days’ wonder. _The Times_ arose in its majesty
and rebuked the draymen for their presumption in imagining that the
misdeeds of people of importance were any concern of theirs; and _The
Times_ might as well have rebuked a volcano for forgetting its dignity
and giving way to eruptions. The general sentiment found expression
in a public meeting—also reported by _The Times_—whereat a vote of
thanks to the draymen was carried unanimously, and Messrs. Barclay and
Perkins themselves were warned that, if any one of their employees was
punished for his part in the transaction, no British workman, from
Land’s End to John o’ Groat’s House, would ever again drink a glass of
Barclay and Perkins’s beer.

Then the writers of popular songs took the matter up, and this sort of
thing was circulated on broad-sheets:—

    There was an Austrian General strong,
    Who flogged the ladies with a thong;
    He had a beard twelve inches long,
        His name was Marshal Haynau.

    He from his country had to run:
    He loved the knife, the cat, the gun,
    And cruel deeds of late was done
        By this old Marshal Haynau.

    From Barclay’s brew-house he did scout;
    The women bawled, the men did shout;
    His hat fell off, and his shirt hung out,
        Oh, poor old Marshal Haynau!

    At length he found a place to hide,
    All at the George by Bankside,
    But not till they’d well tann’d his hide,—
        Barclay and Perkins’s draymen.

    Then for Barclay’s men we’ll give a cheer.
    May they live long to brew our beer!
    And from their masters nothing fear,—
        Barclay and Perkins’s draymen.

Nor was it in England only that Marshal Haynau was visited by public
opprobrium. His offences were still remembered, two years afterwards,
when he ventured to visit Brussels. There also, at the Vauxhall
Gardens, the police had to protect him from the mob; and public
opinion did not allow the punishment of the women who spat in his face
in public, hissing at him the word “Hyaena.” So intensely had the
Austrian excesses stirred the indignation of Europe; and the only way
in which Francis Joseph was able to express his resentment at the rough
handling of the butcher who had done his dirty work was by refusing to
send a representative to London to attend the funeral of the Duke of
Wellington.




CHAPTER VII

 Why Francis Joseph was called “The child of the gallows”—His affront
 to Napoleon III. and its consequences—The Bach system and the
 objections to it—Francis Joseph’s _bonhomie_—The attempt on his
 life—Impressions formed of him by the King of the Belgians, and Lady
 Westmorland—The story of his romantic marriage.


It is a curious fact that Francis Joseph, who was to find the hangman
so much work to do, was given, at his birth, the nickname of “the child
of the gallows.”

The story is that his mother, in the later days of her confinement,
threw the scalding contents of a coffee-cup in her husband’s face, and
declared that she could be safely delivered of a child on one condition
only—that a free pardon were granted to some criminal lying under
sentence of death; and there was nothing for it but to satisfy her
whim. The only Austrian subject fulfilling the conditions was clearly
guilty of the blackest crimes; but he was let out of prison, to his
amazement, at the hysterical request of the Archduchess Sophia, whose
bowels of compassion then closed, never to be reopened.

Assuredly neither she nor anyone else prompted her son to compassion
when Italy and Hungary lay helpless at his feet. The clemency accorded
to a vulgar criminal was not to be extended to political offenders
until the heads of all the tallest poppies had been cut off for the
greater glory of the Habsburgs and their bureaucrats; and the policy of
repression enjoyed an illusory success. If the strong hand was a bloody
hand, the bloody hand was a strong hand; and Austria did not “muddle
through” her difficulties, but carved her way through them. She had
nothing as yet to fear from Prussia; she strode with jack-boots through
Hungary and northern Italy; and the House of Habsburg—bankrupt, but
with the most effective army in Europe—could once more afford to be
arrogant. So that we find Francis Joseph, as soon as his position was
secure, manifesting his family pride by a proposal that Napoleon III.
should be insulted.

Napoleon—the triumph of his _coup d’état_ having been confirmed by a
plebiscite—had written to his royal and imperial cousins to announce
his accession; and the question arose whether he should be welcomed
as a member of the family, or snubbed as a _parvenu_ intruding in
exclusive circles. Should he be saluted, according to the time-honoured
formula, as “Sir and Brother,” or should he be rebuffed by a cold and
contemptuous mode of address? Francis Joseph and his advisers favoured
the latter course. The Emperor, that is to say, who had waded to his
throne through the blood and slaughter of his subjects, despised the
Emperor whose subjects had merely elected him, and proposed to keep
him in his place by addressing him curtly as “Sir.”

It was to have been a concerted insult, simultaneously administered by
the Heads of the Houses of Habsburg, Hohenzollern, and Romanoff; and
the Foreign Ministers of the three countries exchanged despatches on
the subject. In the end, however, only the Romanoff showed the courage
of his arrogance; and the Habsburg, after going far enough to offend,
allowed himself to be intimidated into an appearance of courtesy. But
Napoleon was not conciliated. He bided his time, resolved that the
cousin who had devised the affront should pay for it. We shall see him
presently exacting payment on the fields of Magenta and Solferino;
but we must first follow Francis Joseph as he enters upon the path of
reconstruction at home. It was the period in which his personality
began to count.

He introduced what is called the Bach System—Bach being
Schwarzenberg’s successor in the Ministry of the Interior, a
bureaucrat, who wanted to Germanise everybody and everything, as German
bureaucrats always do: a process which pleased the Czechs and Croats
as little as the Hungarians. “This is good,” chuckled a Hungarian, in
conversation with a Croat. “The Austrians give to you as a reward what
they give to us as a punishment.” That, clearly, was a frame of mind
symptomatic of trouble to come; but two things staved off the trouble
for the moment. Austria was strong, and Francis Joseph was affable,
and could give the impression that his _bonhomie_ was his own and that
his severities were his ministers’.

He travelled about his dominions, making himself as pleasant as he
could; he released two thousand political prisoners, and reduced the
sentences of others. The mere possibility of such a magnanimous act
shows how terribly cruel the previous repression had been; but the
clemency produced a certain effect. No doubt Francis Joseph’s reception
in Hungary was, to some extent, stage-managed; but it was at least
possible to pretend that it had been enthusiastic. The fact that he sat
his horse like a centaur and spoke Hungarian like a native produced
its effect; and he knew what to ignore, and how to turn a compliment.
“I have met many Hungarians,” he said on his return from his first
journey, “and every one of them was a man of heart.” It was what the
French call _le mot de la situation_; and it helped.

Another thing which helped was the attempt made on his life at about
this time by the journeyman tailor Libenyi, who tried to stab him in
the back of the neck while he was walking on the Vienna ramparts, but
struck a bone at the base of the skull, which turned the edge of the
blade. He bore himself gallantly on the occasion, making light of the
wound. “Do not be frightened, dear mother. My neck is merely a little
stiff,” he said to the Archduchess Sophia. “It is no great matter,” he
said to his officers. “After all, I was in no greater peril than my
brave soldiers in Italy.” These, again, were _mots de la situation_,
appealing to the imagination. The Hungarians had a chivalry of their
own which bade them repudiate the dagger as a weapon. Batthyany’s widow
and Karolyi’s mother—she who had uttered the curse—would no doubt
have been equally ready to pray God to smite the Emperor, and to thank
God for sparing him, in order that he might suffer; but the Empire as a
whole—not the Austrian section of it only—saw him as a gallant young
man who had had a fortunate escape. Deputations came from the remotest
parts of his dominions to congratulate him.

He was making a good impression, too, on shrewd observers. Bismarck,
then a young man, being sent on some mission to him, spoke of “the
fire of his twenty years joined to the dignity and thoughtfulness of a
riper age,” adding: “Were he not an Emperor, he would seem to me almost
too grave for his years.” The King of the Belgians, a little later,
reported very favourably of him to Queen Victoria:—

 “The young Emperor” (he wrote), “I confess I like very much, there is
 much sense and courage in his warm blue eye, and it is not without a
 very amiable merriment when there is occasion for it. He is slight and
 very graceful, but even in the mêlée of dancers and Archdukes, he may
 always be distinguished as the _Chef_.... He keeps everyone in great
 order without requiring for this an _outré_ appearance, merely because
 he is the master, and there is that about him which gives authority,
 and which sometimes those _who have the_ _authority cannot succeed
 in getting accepted or in practising_. I think he may be severe _si
 l’occasion se présente_: he has something very _muthig_. We were
 several times surrounded by people of all classes, and he certainly
 quite at their mercy, but I never saw his little _muthig_ expression
 changed either by being pleased or alarmed.”

Lady Westmorland also wrote, at about the same time, to Mr. Hood:—

 “I am very much pleased with the young Emperor, and especially with
 his tender affection for his mother, and his tender and respectful
 manner to her. He looks even younger than he is, and is not
 handsome, but has a well-built, active figure and a most intelligent
 and expressive face. He has a thoughtful face, and is perfectly
 unaffected. His mother is a very interesting person, and is wrapped up
 in this son, who seems likely to justify the pride she takes in him.
 The father is a very poor creature, who cares for nothing but having
 his leisure unmolested.”

The picture, save for the reference to the inadequate Archduke Francis
Charles, is a pleasant one. The portrait of Francis Joseph is the
portrait of a man whose personality was already a great asset to his
country; not at all the portrait of a man who was conscious of having
been cursed by the woman whose son he had slain, and feared that the
blows of fate would smite him—blow after blow from youth to age—in
untiring fulfilment of that curse. On the contrary, it is the portrait
of a fairly strong man who is also a decidedly cheerful man, with a
mind conscious of rectitude; and no doubt it is accurate as far as it
goes, for one cannot expect portraits to be prophetic. But the years
were nevertheless to be full of trouble: political trouble was soon to
strip the Habsburgs of treasured territorial possessions; while family
troubles were to make their name a by-word as that of the most tragic
house in Europe.

The political troubles were to begin with the bungling of Austrian
policy in connection with the Crimean war, when Austria tried to run
with the hare and hunt with the hounds, and gave offence to both. The
Tsar, having saved Francis Joseph’s throne in 1849, now thought himself
entitled to more gratitude than was shown to him. “The two stupidest
Kings of Poland,” he said to Valentine Esterhazy, “were John Sobieski
and myself”; for both of them had helped Austria in her hour of need,
and been deserted by Austria when they were themselves embarrassed.
Austro-Russian enmity in the Near East dates from that desertion; but
the desertion was not complete enough to gain Austria the compensating
friendship of France. So that presently, in 1859, France would help
Sardinia to deprive Austria of the province of Lombardy, and Russia
would stand by, chuckling at her discomfiture. But that, again, is an
anticipation.

For the moment, indeed, all seemed well. Neither the political troubles
nor the family troubles were as yet in sight; and it must have
appeared, to any who gave a thought to the matter, that the Countess
Karolyi had pronounced her curse in vain. Francis Joseph was the most
eligible _parti_ in Europe; and the time having come for him to seek a
wife, he was not to have his marriage arranged for him by statesmen,
to suit their policy, but to fall in love, almost as Princes do in
fairy tales, in very romantic circumstances, though the romance, unlike
so many of the Habsburg romances, was to be consonant with Habsburg
dignity and self-respect.

It was not, of course, a Cophetua story. The Habsburgs are very fond
of imitating King Cophetua; but they do so to their disgrace, and at
their peril. Their names—unless good reason to the contrary can be
shown—are changed. They cease to be Archdukes, become mere Orths or
Wulflings, or Burgs, and are bowed, or kicked, as the case may be, out
of the imperial circle. But a Cinderella story—that is another matter;
and the story of Francis Joseph’s marriage is one of the most famous
Cinderella stories of modern times. Every fresh narrator of it adds
some fresh detail, whether romantic or picturesque; but the essential
facts in all the versions of the story are the same. It is always a
story of a match arranged by a match-making mother, and of Prince
Charming himself taking the matter into his hands at the eleventh hour,
preferring Cinderella to her sisters, insisting upon his own way, and
getting it, amid loud popular acclamations.

The Archduchess Sophia flattered herself that she had settled
everything over her son’s head. She wished to do a good turn to her
poor relations—the Wittelsbachs, Dukes in Bavaria, and cousins of
the reigning Bavarian House to which she herself belonged. There was a
strain of insanity in the House of Bavaria—in both branches of it, in
fact—as well as in the House of Habsburg; but the Archduchess Sophia
did not think of that. The eugenists had not yet spoken, and she might
not have listened to them if they had. Insanity, in those days, was
regarded—especially in royal circles—as the accidental misfortune of
the individual. “Tendencies” to insanity did not count; and any royal
personage who was not mad enough to be locked up was thought sane
enough to be married. Moreover, the Bavarian insanity was not, at the
moment, very pronounced. Ludwig I. was not accounted mad because of
his subjection to Lola Montez; and the vagaries of Ludwig II. and the
raving mania of Otto still belonged to the future. It seemed to the
Archduchess Sophia as right and reasonable as anything could be that
the House of Bavaria and the House of Habsburg should intermarry yet
again.

She talked the matter over with her cousin, Maximilian, Duke in
Bavaria. He had a daughter, Princess Helen, of a suitable age—a very
beautiful and charming girl; and it was settled between them that
Princess Helen should become Empress of Austria. She was trained for
that position as carefully as Francis Joseph was trained for the
position of Emperor; and Francis Joseph quite approved of the plans
which were being made for him—quite understood that his dignity
limited his choice—quite believed that all was being contrived for the
best by the best of all possible matrimonial agents. It was arranged
that Princess Helen should be brought to Ischl to meet him; the
subsequent announcement of his betrothal to her was, as it were, on the
order of the day.

He went to Ischl, and met Princess Helen. She was very charming,
but—still more charming, as it seemed to Francis Joseph, was her
younger sister, Princess Elizabeth: the Cinderella who was kept in the
background.

Elizabeth had not been trained for any great position. She was only
sixteen: a madcap and a child of nature—accustomed, in so far as
anyone in her station might be, to the untrammelled freedom of a
highlander. She roamed the woods and the mountains—though not, as
the author of “The Martyrdom of an Empress” tells us, with a gun in
her hand, in pursuit of game. There are stories of her playing the
zither, at the doors of cottages in remote Bavarian valleys, while
peasant children danced to the music; and she was strangely beautiful,
with haunting eyes and a wonderful wealth of hair. Depths of meaning
looked out of those eyes: indications of those mysteries of her soul
through which she was presently to figure as an unfathomable conundrum
challenging a curious world. Francis Joseph—tall, handsome, blond,
blue-eyed, a proud soldier and a gallant man, with no mystery or
semblance of a mystery about him—looked into the girl’s eyes, and was
conquered.

Elizabeth was not formally presented—it was almost by accident that
Francis Joseph first saw her. He was alone in a room when she entered,
in a simple white dress, with flowers in her hair, and greeted him
with a “Good morning, cousin.” He kept her talking—and, of course,
as he was the Emperor, she could not possibly run away and leave him,
however shy she felt—for quite a long time; and he ended by saying
that he hoped to resume the conversation at dinner, or at the dance
which was to follow. But Elizabeth feared not. She was still “in the
schoolroom”—not yet “out”—had “nothing to wear.” “Still if your
Majesty insists ...” she hesitated. “I do insist,” said Francis Joseph.
“Listen! We’ll play a comedy. Say nothing to anyone, but dress for the
party, and come down to it.” “But I shall be scolded.” “No, you won’t.
I’ll see to that—you can trust me.”

So the comedy was played; and, of course, when the Emperor expressed
his pleasure at seeing the unexpected guest, the scolding flickered
out; and, after that, matters progressed at a great pace, to the great
chagrin, as one cannot doubt, of Sister Helen. The Emperor outraged all
the proprieties by dancing half the night with the school-girl. When
the dance was interrupted for tea to be served, he showed her an album
containing coloured illustrations of the various national costumes worn
in the eighteen States of Austria. “There,” he said. “These are my
subjects. I wonder if you would like them to be your subjects, too.”
Then they danced again; and when the cotillon came, he presented his
little Cinderella with a bouquet of edelweiss, gathered with his own
hands, with the result that everyone except Cinderella herself began to
suspect that his intentions were serious.

His Cinderella, indeed, could hardly believe that his intentions were
serious, even when her mother told her so. “What! Me an Empress! But
I am nobody!” she exclaimed sceptically; but she had not long to wait
before the sense of her importance was brought home to her, for at
ten o’clock the next morning, Francis Joseph’s carriage rattled up
to the door of her hotel. “Is the Princess Elizabeth up?” he asked;
and the reply was that Princess Elizabeth had not finished dressing.
“Then I will see the Duchess,” he said; and he went up and made his
formal demand for his Cinderella’s hand, with the result that, half an
hour later, all the members of the Imperial family then in Ischl were
summoned to the little parish church, and there, to the strains of the
Austrian national anthem, the betrothal was solemnly celebrated. His
words to his affianced bride, as he came out of the church, are said to
have been:—

 “This is the happiest day of my life. I owe my happiness to you, and I
 thank you for the light which you have brought into my life.”

It was very sad, of course, for Sister Helen, who afterwards sought
consolation—but perhaps failed to find it—by marrying the Prince of
Thurn and Taxis. It was not altogether satisfactory to Duke Maximilian,
who raised such objections as Laban raised when Jacob proposed to marry
Rachel and leave Leah a spinster. It did not altogether please the
Archduchess Sophia, who was a masterful woman, and would rather have
got her own way than see her son insist successfully upon his. But
it was a love match; and that, after all, is the main thing in royal
as in other marriages. There was no need for the Court and Society
journalists to rack their brains for reasons for describing the union
as “romantic.” It was romantic on the face of it—as romantic as
anything in any fairy-tale.

And yet——

And yet, as it proved, things were not exactly what they seemed to be;
and that marriage, so romantically contrived and concluded, was to be
the starting-point of tragedies; the beginning—if one is superstitious
and takes that view of things—of the fulfilment of Countess Karolyi’s
curse.




CHAPTER VIII

 The failure of the marriage—Difficulty of explaining it—The two
 conflicting personalities—Francis Joseph’s personality obvious—The
 Empress Elizabeth’s personality mysterious—Her sympathy with the
 Hungarians, and its political importance—Her confession of melancholy.


The failure of a marriage—of a royal marriage as of any other—is
necessarily wrapped in mystery. The full facts are never made known;
and one always feels that the facts kept secret were probably more
important than the facts disclosed. Moreover, personality—that
mysterious thing which none of us ever reveals completely to any one
observer—inevitably counts for more than the tangible events on which
we can lay our fingers. So with this marriage of Francis Joseph’s.
The outcome of it—what the world has been allowed to see of its
outcome—can only be understood, in so far as it is intelligible at
all, if we examine it in the light of a personality which perplexed
Europe for a generation, perplexing it more and more as years went on.

Not two personalities, be it observed, but one. There are some
personalities which fail to create an atmosphere of mystery even
behind an impenetrable screen; and Francis Joseph’s personality is of
that type. One always feels that, beyond what one knows of him, there
is very little to be known. It is characteristic of all the Habsburgs
that they cannot cross the road without striking an attitude which
shows us exactly where they stand and what they think of things; and
it is easy enough to accept the present Emperor as typical of the
Habsburgs at their best. He comes before us, frank and brave, adaptable
and affable, but, at the same time, proud as Lucifer; infinitely
gracious to those who do not presume—readily regarded by such as a
gallant soldier who has grown into a genial old gentleman, anxious to
make things pleasant for everybody—yet seeming, at some crises of his
fate, to mistake himself for God, and the Archdukes for the archangels;
not because they behave as such, but because they are Habsburgs and
ought to.

That is a perfectly simple type; one does not complicate it when one
adds that Francis Joseph has always been a punctual observer of Roman
Catholic ritual, and, taking the _métier_ of Emperor seriously, has
risen early throughout a long life in order to work at it with all the
diligence of a devoted civil servant. All that—down to and including
the occasional ceremonial washing of the feet of the poor, in imitation
of his Master Christ—has been the straightforward fulfilment of an
intelligible programme. If Francis Joseph had washed the feet of the
poor because he had felt that they needed washing, and would not
otherwise get washed, the case would have been different, and one
would have suspected subtlety in his character. But he has only washed
them gingerly—after servants had seen to it that they were already
clean—in the manner of an actor aiming at spectacular display; and one
no more finds anything subtle or elusive in that piece of symbolism
than in anything else that he has done.

About the Empress, on the other hand, it is impossible to read a page
from any pen—whether that page be written by an intimate or by a
stranger—without feeling oneself in the presence of a mystery which
the most favourably placed chroniclers have failed to penetrate.
A novelist of genius might perhaps have invented her—Mr. Maurice
Barrès, for one, is a little prone to write as if he had invented
her; but she was not to be understood by courtiers, secretaries,
and ladies-in-waiting. They recite her traits at great length, but
almost in vain; telling us of her kindnesses, her eccentricities, her
vanities, but still leaving us at sea—puzzled by the melancholy which
preceded the apparent occasions for melancholy, and by the restlessness
which chased her, like a gadfly, from the haunts of men, unless it was
that she herself pursued—she knew not exactly what—and never found
it. Countess Marie Larisch seems to have been more in her confidence
than anyone else; but Countess Marie Larisch only saw what she was
capable of seeing—which assuredly was not all. One may admit all
Countess Marie Larisch’s facts, and yet doubt the completeness of her
portrait.

And if Elizabeth’s confidante, in so far as she had one, did not
understand, how was her husband—a mere man—a mere soldier—a mere
Habsburg—to do so? He, being, as the French say, _tout en dehors_,
could not possibly comprehend her who was _tout en dedans_. His
happiness in marriage—as long as he actually was happy in it—must
have depended on the assumption that his wife was as simple and
translucent as himself: as simple and translucent as Cinderella or
the Sleeping Beauty. He fell in love with her in that belief, as any
other gallant young soldier might have done; and there is no doubt
whatever that he was very passionately in love. “As much in love as any
lieutenant in my army,” was his own way of putting it; and when his
bride came down the Danube to join him, he ran to greet her on her boat
before the gangway was made secure, and very nearly fell into the water.

That, as he did not actually slip in, was an auspicious beginning;
and it is on record that Emperor and Empress and everybody else said,
and sincerely meant, the right and proper and auspicious things. “The
bride,” said the Austrian people—and the Hungarian people too—“is
the most beautiful woman in all Christendom.” “I am glad,” Elizabeth
wrote in the veteran Radetzky’s album, “that I am about to belong to
a country which possesses an Emperor who is so great and good, and a
hero of Radetzky’s valour.” “Never before,” said Francis Joseph to
O’Donnell—the officer who had grappled with the tailor Libenyi, on the
day of the attempted assassination—“did I feel so grateful to you
for saving my life, for never before did I value my life so much”; and
he showed his joy by pardoning prisoners and giving 200,000 florins to
the poor; while the sympathies of the whole people followed the young
couple when they departed on their honeymoon, and gathered edelweiss
together, like any other honeymooning couple:—

 “The recollection of that April day,” wrote a witness of the scene,
 “will never be effaced from my mind. The old among us felt themselves
 young again, the sorrowful became glad, the sick forgot their pains,
 and the poor their poverty. All alike were eager to see the companion
 whom the Emperor had chosen as the partner of his life. God only knows
 how many tears of joy ran down our cheeks, and what ardent prayers
 were uttered by our lips.”

It is easy to say, in the light of subsequent events, that the joy was
too bright to last, and that the hope arose, only to be overcast; but
it is difficult, setting superstition aside, to say why it was so,
though it is not impossible to trace some of the steps by which it
came to be so. In this exalted household two factors which are often
seen at work in humbler households were presently, though not quite
immediately, to play their part: a mother-in-law and an Egeria.

The pity was the greater because, from the point of view of politics
and the dynasty, the Emperor’s beautiful bride promised to be, and
indeed was, an asset of great value. The popularity for which he had to
work hard she achieved without an effort by the indefinable charm of
her youth and loveliness, especially among the romantic and chivalrous
Hungarians, who had not yet forgiven Francis Joseph for the severities
of 1849. She had Hungarian blood in her veins, though her Hungarian
ancestors were remote; and she had no responsibility for the atrocities
of the repression. On the contrary, she made it clear to Hungarians
that she sympathised with their sufferings and delighted in their
country: its vast spaces and its heroic patriots, indomitable even
though conquered.

Amnesties, as we have seen, attended her arrival among them—amnesties
which she may or may not have inspired, but of which she certainly got
all the credit. Whatever she was or was not, she was, at any rate,
tender-hearted and impulsive with the impulsiveness of a generous girl
who feels instinctively that all the people who are locked up ought to
be let out and given a second chance, unless they are really dangerous
criminals. The Hungarians, in consequence, fell in love with her to
a man, with a passion different from, but more enduring than, her
husband’s; and one of them—Count Alexander von Bertha—wrote of her
marriage:—

 “It was the installation on the throne, under the ægis of beauty and
 charm, of the guardian angel of the Magyars, to whom the young Empress
 felt herself specially attracted by the memory of her patron saint who
 belonged to the House of Arpad.”

[Illustration: THE EMPRESS ELIZABETH OF AUSTRIA.]

The allusion is, of course, to the Empress’s namesake, Saint Elizabeth
of Hungary; and the sentiment stirred by the association bore
practical political fruit. It is no depreciation of the work done in
later years by Deák and Beust to say that their task would have been
vastly more difficult if Elizabeth had not charmed the spirits of the
Hungarians, and that it was largely owing to the spell which she had
thrown upon them that Deák was able to announce, when asked to name his
terms after the disasters of 1866, that Hungary demanded no more after
Sadowa than she had asked before.

That was a great achievement—not to be made the less of because it
was due to no conscious statesmanship, but merely came about through
the idealisation of a beautiful and sympathetic woman by a childlike
and romantic race, too long accustomed to be treated as pariahs by the
domineering Teutons. If the laws of romance had governed the business
of the world, it would have set the seal on the happiness of a marriage
which had begun so happily; but it seems that, as a matter of fact, the
happiness had taken wings and fled long before Elizabeth’s charm had
conciliated her husband’s enemies to this good purpose—long, also,
before the occurrence of those specially tragic events which were to
make their reign memorable for tragedy.

At first, no doubt, she showed a naïve delight at her sudden elevation
to imperial dignity. The dramatic change in her fortunes appealed to
her imagination; and it seemed as if all the glories of the world were
hers. But—vanity of vanities! The years passed—a few years only—and
Elizabeth had learnt the Preacher’s lesson. Even then, one suspects,
the desires which haunted her were vague. She did not know exactly what
it was that she wanted; but she knew only too well that, whatever it
was, neither her marriage nor her exalted rank had given it to her; and
we soon begin to hear of her long journeys in pursuit of the fugitive
shadow, and of the mysterious melancholy which had visibly settled
on her. She was still a young woman when she said to a confidante,
_apropos_ of what one is left to guess: “I feel as if something had
died in me.” She was not yet thirty when Countess Marie Larisch—a
child who had climbed a tree—saw her in tears in circumstances which
she has graphically described:—

 “I nearly fell out of the tree when I recognised the Empress, who
 had apparently given up the idea of riding, and was walking quite
 unattended.... Elizabeth came slowly to my tree, under which was a
 stone seat. She sat down, clasped her hands in a despairing kind of
 way, and began to cry silently. I could see that she was greatly
 distressed, for her face wore a hopeless expression, and occasionally
 a sob shook her. She then wept unrestrainedly, and at last I wondered
 whether I dared attempt to comfort her. I bent down, and as the leaves
 rustled with my sudden movement, the Empress looked up and saw me.”

That is, perhaps, the most typical of all the pictures of her
melancholy, though one could take many others from the writings of
other chroniclers. She told the child she had been crying because
her little daughter had been unwell during the night, but the child
did not believe her. She told the child not to tell anyone that she
had seen her cry, which she would hardly have troubled to do if her
tears had had such a simple source. Some speeches attributed to her at
other times would seem to indicate that she cried sometimes for lost
illusions, like a child for a broken toy:—

 “The happiness which men seek in sincerity and ask from it is
 controlled by tragic laws. We all live on the edge of an abysm of
 grief and pain, dug for us by the falsehood of social morality. That
 is the abysm which separates our actual condition from the condition
 in which we ought to find ourselves. An abysm is always an abysm. The
 moment we try to cross it, we fall and break our limbs.”

That is her own confession of melancholy; and we must make what we can
of it in the light of what we know. It is not, perhaps, a melancholy
of which we shall be able to discover all the causes, but we may be
able to arrive at some of them. The quest will bring us back to certain
matters already touched upon, and lead us on to other matters. We shall
have to speak of the Egeria, the mother-in-law, the formal rigidity of
Court etiquette, and the way in which Emperor and Empress endeavoured
to escape in different directions from what they were both, in their
several ways, coming to regard as irksome imprisoning restraints.




CHAPTER IX

 Francis Joseph’s Egeria—Elizabeth’s mother-in-law—Elizabeth’s
 quarrels with etiquette—The beginnings of estrangement—The functions
 of Countess Marie Larisch in the imperial household—Captain “Bay”
 Middleton—Nicholas Esterhazy—Elizabeth’s fairy story—Her cynical
 attitude towards life.


Francis Joseph’s Egeria was the Archduchess Elizabeth, grandmother of
the present King of Spain. It has been written that she “set her cap”
at him; but she was a widow, and it was held that a widow was no proper
bride for a Habsburg Emperor. So she became his Egeria, and a source of
discord. The Empress could not get on with her; nor could the Empress
get on with her mother-in-law.

The Archduchess Sophia was jealous to see this chit of a child winning
the affection of the very people by whom she had herself been hooted
in the streets of Vienna; jealous, too, because the child’s influence
over the Emperor promised to be greater—as it was indubitably
more salutary—than her own. Moreover, she was a woman with many
old-fashioned prejudices; and she disapproved of Elizabeth, pretty
much in the way in which Victorian mothers disapproved of revolting
daughters, and for somewhat the same reasons. She saw this chit of a
child—abominably brought up, as it seemed to her, in free-and-easy
Bavaria—not only chafing under the fetters of immemorial etiquette,
but actually tossing those fetters off with gestures of defiance. War
between them was inevitable—war not the less deadly because it was
not openly declared, but was waged by means of shuns and slights.
Naturally, too, while the common people were in favour of the Empress,
the courtiers of the old school sided with the Archduchess. Let us cite
a few of the details.

Just as Marie-Antoinette had once scandalised the French Court by
riding a donkey, so Elizabeth scandalised the Austrian Court by
calling for beer—the excellent beer of Munich—and, according to
some chroniclers, also for sausages, at the imperial luncheon table.
She scandalised it a second time by refusing to throw her shoes away
after she had worn them once; a third time by going shopping on foot,
attended only by a single lady-in-waiting; a fourth time by taking
off her gloves at a banquet at which etiquette prescribed that gloves
should be worn, and laughing at the regulation when her attention was
called to it. The anecdotes, thus summarised, seem trivial; but they
have an inner significance as a record of an embittered conflict on
that eternal theme: Which are the things that matter?

For the Archduchess Sophia the things that mattered were those rites
and ceremonies which distinguished Habsburgs from inferior members
of the human family. Whatever were the things that mattered to
Elizabeth—and she might have found it difficult to say what they
were—they certainly were not these things. So that her case which, at
the beginning, recalled the story of Cinderella, comes also to remind
us, after the lapse of a little time, of the story of that Village
Maiden, who was wooed and married by the Lord of Burleigh; and one
thinks of the lines which tell us how

          her gentle mind was such
    That she grew a noble lady,
      And the people loved her much.
    But a trouble weighed upon her,
      And perplex’d her, night and morn,
    With the burthen of an honour
      Unto which she was not born.
    Faint she grew, and ever fainter,
      And she murmured, “Oh, that he
    Were once more that landscape painter,
      Who did win my heart from me!”
    So she droop’d and droop’d before him,
      Fading slowly from his side:
    Three fair children first she bore him,
      Then, before her time, she died.

Or rather, as Elizabeth herself put it in the quotation from her
table-talk already given, something died within her.

Mme. de Boigne, it will be remembered, commenting on the story of the
Lord of Burleigh, said that the fate of the Village Maiden served her
right, and was a just and proper vindication of class distinctions.
The Archduchess Sophia’s attitude towards Elizabeth was very similar.
Just as the haughty Windischgraetz laid it down that “mankind
begins with the baron,” so the Archduchess Sophia would seem to have
held that mankind began at the confines of the imperial circle, and
that the traditional manners and tone of that circle depended upon
first principles and universal laws. So she had no sympathy for
Village Maidens who set up their own likes and dislikes against the
prescriptions of Habsburg ritual.

Gossip charges her with doing more than scold—of throwing a mistress
at the head of her son, and a lover at the head of her daughter-in-law,
in order to estrange them from each other; but those who knew
her declare her to have been too pious a woman to engage in such
intrigues. Mischief-makers are often pious; and pious people are often
mischief-makers; so it may have been so. But estrangement nevertheless
soon succeeded to enthusiasm; and the present writer has the word
of Countess Marie Larisch for the fact that Francis Joseph was the
first—whether his mother’s promptings had any influence in the matter
or not—to feel that the marriage had not yielded all that had been
hoped for from it.

He, at any rate, had felt the _coup de foudre_. The Empress had been
too young to feel it, and had accepted an offer of marriage very much
in the spirit in which she would have accepted an invitation to a
ball. So she was not responsive, for they were not born to understand
each other; and he, in his disappointment—keenly conscious of the
very real, but impalpable, barrier between them—let his fancy stray.
Then she, in the course of time, did the same; with the result that,
even at the end of their married life, they were “strangers yet,” not
openly, nor even privately, so far as anyone knows, at variance, but
drifting apart, and each ceasing to take an interest in the other’s
inner life.

The process had already begun when Countess Marie Larisch saw the
Empress weeping under a tree in the Bavarian Highlands. It had reached
a further stage when the Empress sent for Countess Marie Larisch
to live with her and be her confidante, and initiated her into her
delicate duties at Gödöllo, her Hungarian hunting-box, with the
significant warning:—

 “Listen, my child. At Gödöllo there is one thing to remember every
 hour of the day: You must not speak of anything which you hear or see,
 and your answers to questions must be ‘Yes,’ and ‘No,’ or ‘I don’t
 know.’”

The time has since come when it has seemed good to Countess Marie
Larisch to disregard that injunction, in her own defence, and to give
the world rather a full account—albeit in the form of hints and
insinuations—of a good many of the things which she heard and saw.
She had, as she admits, her own very definite and somewhat delicate
functions at Gödöllo; functions with the performance of which the Crown
Prince Rudolph was, some years later, when she quarrelled with him, to
reproach her:

 “You are a fine one” (Rudolph was to say) “to talk of honour or
 morality. You have been the go-between for my mother since you were
 a girl. And yet you dare to mention morality to me, when you have not
 scrupled to stand by and see my father deceived.”

That was the outburst. Of course Countess Marie Larisch protested; but
the general trend of her book shows that the protest was due to anger
rather than to the indignation of outraged innocence. This being the
Life, not of the Empress, but of the Emperor, there is no need to go
into the matter at great length; but some of the scenes pictured and
some of the facts set forth have a symbolic value, which forbids their
omission. Even before Countess Marie was in attendance—as early as
Elizabeth’s long sojourn in Madeira—people seem to have found occasion
to talk:—

 “Count Hunyadi” (writes Countess Marie) “was one of her suite,
 and I do not know what actually happened, but I _do_ know that
 the Chamberlain spied most effectually on my aunt. The Count was
 recalled to Vienna, and Elizabeth’s stay in Madeira came to an abrupt
 conclusion.”

Evidently it was for the purpose of throwing dust in the argus eyes
of Chamberlains and the like that Countess Marie was enlisted in the
Empress’s service. She portrays herself, more than once—though always
with apparent care not to say either too little or too much—in the
act of throwing the dust. The great occasion was the day on which
Captain “Bay” Middleton—sometimes called William Tell because he was
something less than a model of reticence—who had been on a visit to
the Austrian Court, had to say good-bye. Elizabeth (Countess Marie
tells us) “made no attempt to disguise her liking” for the celebrated
English sportsman, whose good looks, athletic prowess, and popularity
with ladies have furnished the theme of many chapters of many volumes
of social gossip.

At all events the Empress’s eyes were swollen with weeping on the day
of Captain Middleton’s departure; and the Emperor came to pay a most
inopportune visit to her apartments at the time when the adieux were
being said. Elizabeth appealed to Countess Marie to find an excuse to
keep him out; and Countess Marie’s powers of invention did not fail
her:—

 “I ran forward. ‘Who is there?’ I asked. ‘The Emperor,’ replied a
 voice; ‘can I come in?’ ‘Oh, Majestat,’ I stammered, ‘how unfortunate
 that Aunt Cissi is not able to see you! She is trying on some riding
 habits.’ ‘Oh, then I’ll return later,’ answered Francis Joseph, and I
 heard the sound of his retreating footsteps in the corridor.”

Whereupon Countess Marie was congratulated by the Empress on “unusual
tact”; and we encounter, a few pages further on, the following
significant paragraph:—

 “The Emperor’s rooms were far away from Aunt Cissi’s, and her doors
 were always guarded by soldiers. Francis Joseph, who was very much
 in love with his wife, was often kept at a distance when Elizabeth’s
 love of solitude obsessed her, and then she was never seen by anyone
 except the members of her immediate _entourage_.”

Another passage of a different kind of significance is that in which
Countess Marie tells us how she herself received a proposal of
marriage from Count Nicholas Esterhazy, and informed the Empress, and
subsequently was visited by the Empress in her bedroom at the dead of
night:—

 “Elizabeth was all in white; her hair was wrapped about her like a
 heavy mantle, and her eyes shone like a panther’s; in fact, she seemed
 so strange that I was quite frightened, and waited, trembling, for her
 to speak.

 “‘Are you awake, Marie?’

 “‘Yes, Aunt Cissi.’

 “‘Well, sit up and listen to what I have to say.’

 “I sat up obediently, and she continued in cold, decisive tones:

 “‘It is my duty to tell you that Count Esterhazy has a _liaison_ with
 a married woman, who loves him. After hearing this, will you accept
 his proposal?’”

What Countess Marie means us to think is clear enough, though she does
not tell us; and equally clear is the inner meaning of that Fairy Story
which she says that the Empress told her by the side of a mountain tarn
at Possenhofen. Countess Marie’s reviewers, occupied mainly with her
new facts about the Meyerling tragedy, seem to have thought that Fairy
Story unworthy of comment; but when one comes to read it carefully,
one finds it a consummate example of the art of conveying a suggestion
without making a definite statement. Observe: it is Elizabeth who is
represented as speaking:—

 “Once there was an unhappy young Queen, who had married a King who
 ruled over two countries. They had one son, but they wanted another to
 succeed to the other kingdom, which was a lovely land of mountains and
 forests, where the people were romantic and high-spirited. No child
 came, and the young Queen used to wander alone in the woods, and sit
 by just such another lake. One day she suddenly saw the still surface
 move, the lilies parted, and then a handsome man appeared, who swam
 towards her, and presently stood by her side.”

And now let us see how the dots drop by themselves on to the i’s.
Austro-Hungary is known to all of us as “the dual monarchy”; and
Hungary—or a portion of it—is justly described as “a lovely land of
mountains and forests.” Elizabeth bore only one son—the Crown Prince
Rudolph. The date of Prince Rudolph’s birth was 1858; and, for a period
of ten years, Elizabeth had no other child. Those indications given, we
return to our Fairy Story.

It relates how the stranger—who announced himself as “the spirit
of the lake”—carried the young Queen down “a crystal staircase” to
a mysterious palace, where she “sat beside her lover on his crystal
throne, and slept in his arms on a bed of lily leaves,” but afterwards
“returned to the King’s palace”; and so we are led along the paths of
poetry and fantasy to this conclusion:—

 “Some months passed, and the Queen knew that she would have a child,
 and she longed for a son like the Water Spirit, who would reign over
 the romantic country of mountains and forests which she loved.

 “But no son came, for when the child was born, the young Queen pressed
 to her heart a little daughter, with her Fairy father’s large black
 eyes.

 “‘Did she ever see him again,’ I asked, much interested.

 “‘I do not think so,’ replied the Empress, ‘when you have more
 experience of the world you will realise that a baby is the end of
 many love-affairs.’

 “‘What did the King say?’ I queried.

 “‘He had too much vanity to say anything, whatever he may have
 suspected,’ said Elizabeth; she laughed her mocking laugh, and was her
 cynical self again.”

All this, Countess Marie would have us think, is an allegory; but it
is safer to leave the veil hanging over the facts, or alleged facts,
which she means it to allegorise. Fairy Stories are not evidence—least
of all when one only gets them, as in this case, at second hand; but,
if this Fairy Story cannot be trusted for facts, at least it can be
trusted for atmosphere, and both Elizabeth’s and Francis Joseph’s
attitudes towards life seem to be displayed in it.

Of his attitude we will speak at the appropriate time; hers strikes
one as that of a woman who could not escape from her emotions and
her longings, and yet never got any lasting satisfaction from the
indulgence of them. Her life, on its sentimental side, one feels, was
not continuous but episodical; not an epic poem, nor even a drama, but
a series of short stories,—each of them ending, as Guy be Maupassant’s
short stories so often do, in anti-climax. Hence the importance which
she attached—and Countess Marie accumulates details about that—to the
preservation of her beauty; for the dwindling of beauty necessarily
made those “beginnings” which Mme. de Staël tells us “are always
happy,” more difficult. Hence also those frequent journeys, apparently
so meaningless, which give one the impression, not of a cultivated
tourist eager to see the world, but of a shadow pursuing shadows, and
brought to melancholy by the repeated failure to capture and hold
them, and then continuing to travel as a means of escape from herself.
Countess Marie quotes a speech which indicates that mood:—

 “Marie, sometimes I believe that I’m enchanted, and that after my
 death I shall turn into a seagull and live on the great spaces of the
 ocean, or sheltered in the crevice of some frowning rock; then I, the
 fettered Elizabeth, shall be free at last, for my soul shall have
 known the way of escape.”

[Illustration: THE COUNTESS MARIE LARISCH AT THE TIME OF HER MARRIAGE.]

Hence, again, the superstition which led her to consult
fortune-tellers, and look for omens in glasses of water. Hence finally
that cynicism already remarked, and further exemplified in another
speech which Countess Marie reports:—

 “What _I_ do not mind doing, nobody else need cavil at,” she often
 said. “Love is no sin,” she would remark. “God created love, and
 morality is entirely a question for oneself. So long as you do not
 hurt anyone else through love, no one ought to presume to judge you.”

There shall be no attempt to judge her here; the attempt is only to
portray.

A good deal would have to be added to make the portrait complete; not
merely those details of the toilette which Countess Marie gives in
such abundance; not merely particulars of the daring horse-woman’s
delight in the tricks of the _haute école_—a delight so intense that
Elizabeth once followed the circus-rider Elisa to Paris, and brought
her back to Austria, paying the forfeit on her broken engagement;
but facts which show her compassion with the sufferings of humanity.
Sustained philanthropic endeavour was not, indeed, much in her way;
but she was easily stirred to those _élans_ of sympathy which are far
more effective than systematic philanthropy in winning the hearts of
the humble. When she visited the hospitals after Sadowa, the wounded
blessed her on their deathbeds.

Still, these facts, though necessary to completeness, are not of the
essence of the portrait. The essence of the picture lies in Elizabeth’s
unavailing pursuit of happiness, and her unavailing flight from
herself—on horseback as long as her health let her ride, and always
with a volume of Heine’s poems in her pocket. It was not, perhaps, a
very sane proceeding; but she came, as we know, of a family which was
not very sane. One of her sisters—the Duchesse d’Alençon—was for
some time under observation in a private asylum at Graetz, known as _le
rendezvous des Princes_, on account of the number of its royal inmates;
and the sister whom Francis Joseph jilted in order to marry her,
became, as Princess of Thurn and Taxis, a victim of religious mania.
Her own eccentricities must not be estimated without reference to these
facts.

Estimate them as we may, however, one thing is certain. Between
Elizabeth, with her fancies and vague cravings for she knew not exactly
what, and Francis Joseph, with his direct, straightforward, soldierly
outlook on life, no enduring bond of sympathy was possible. Fate
forbade it, and ordained that they should drift apart; and Fate had its
way with its playthings. How Francis Joseph’s fancy strayed—and how
Elizabeth, instead of opposing its divagations, encouraged them—we
shall see in the course of a few pages.




CHAPTER X

 “The Martyrdom of an Empress”—Correction of inaccuracies contained in
 that popular work—Francis Joseph’s friends—“A Polish Countess”—Frau
 Katti Schratt—Enduring attachment—Rumour of morganatic
 marriage—Interview with Frau Schratt on that subject—“Darby and
 Joan.”


Of the many Lives of the Empress Elizabeth the most widely circulated
has been the one entitled “The Martyrdom of an Empress”—a work which
purports to give an authoritative “inside” view of the Habsburg Court.
Even M. Jacques La Faye, the author of the very latest of the Lives,
appears to have accepted it as a source of trustworthy information. The
writer, who is known in America as a journalist, and implies that she
was on terms of intimacy with the Empress, has doubtless raked together
a good deal of floating Viennese gossip, but she nevertheless makes,
on nearly every page, statements which it is hard to believe that she
would have made if she had ever conversed with Elizabeth, or even been
in the same room with her.

A copy of “The Martyrdom of an Empress,” annotated in pencil by a
lady once attached to the Austrian Court, is now lying on the writer’s
table. “To read this book,” runs the first note, “is a martyrdom
for one who knows”; and corrections of points of detail follow
quickly—corrections, in many cases, of statements of little importance
in themselves, but none the less completely destructive of the claim
of the writer corrected to have studied the life of the Hofburg, or
even of Gödöllo, from within. The Empress’s eyes, according to the
author of “The Martyrdom of an Empress,” were “glorious dark blue
orbs”—or, in another passage, “luminous sapphire-hued”: her eyes were
actually brown. The Empress, according to the same authority, stamped
“her little foot”; she actually had large feet, as became an energetic
pedestrian, and is reputed to have been very jealous of the tiny feet
of that rival beauty, the Empress Eugénie. Bismarck’s reptile Press, at
one time, derided her for the size of her feet.

And so forth. A few further passages of text, with the annotator’s
gloss appended to each of them, will most effectually show the claim
to inside knowledge evaporating under the incisive examination of one
whose knowledge was really acquired inside:—

 AUTHOR: “The Duke (in Bavaria) was by no means a wealthy man, and all
 his disposable means were lavished upon the education of his older
 daughters.”

 COMMENTATOR: “There was only one older daughter, Helen, Princess of
 Thurn and Taxis.”

       *       *       *       *       *

 AUTHOR: “She hunted and shot with her brothers.”

 COMMENTATOR: “The Empress never took a gun in her hand—never touched
 one.”

       *       *       *       *       *

 AUTHOR: “All her love became centred upon little Archduchess Gisela,
 who had made her appearance in the world in 1856.”

 COMMENTATOR: “She never looked at the baby, and Archduchess Sophia
 took care of it.”

       *       *       *       *       *

 AUTHOR: “A very unpalatable adventure of which her husband was the
 hero ... broke the last restraint upon her indignation, and, without
 informing anybody of her intentions, she hurriedly left the imperial
 palace of Vienna for Trieste, and set sail for the Ionian Islands on
 board her yacht, fully resolved never to allow her husband to approach
 her or to speak to her again.”

 COMMENTATOR: “She had no yacht of her own at that time, and travelled
 with the consent of the Emperor. Her brother accompanied her to
 Trieste.”

       *       *       *       *       *

 AUTHOR: “In the summer following Baby Valérie’s birth, the Empress
 spent several months with the Crown Prince and his two sisters.”

 COMMENTATOR: “Baby Valérie was quite separated from the others, the
 Empress being very jealous about Valérie. Gisela and Rudolph were
 mostly kept in Laxenburg.”

       *       *       *       *       *

 AUTHOR: “Elizabeth walked over to a large harmonium which stood near
 the open window. She sat down before it, and after striking a few
 chords which echoed through the stillness of the chamber, she sang
 Schubert’s ‘Serenade.’ She was a great musician.”

 COMMENTATOR: “The Empress never touched a harmonium nor a piano. She
 was not a bit musical, and _never_ sang.”

       *       *       *       *       *

 AUTHOR: “‘Rudi,’ who was watching them, said suddenly——”

 COMMENTATOR: “The Crown Prince was never called ‘Rudi,’ always
 ‘Rudolph.’ His pet name was ‘Nazi.’”

       *       *       *       *       *

 AUTHOR: “‘Mutzerl,’ as Baby Valérie was called——”

 COMMENTATOR: “Valérie was never called ‘Mutzerl,’ but ‘Shedvesen,’ by
 her mother. It means ‘darling.’”

       *       *       *       *       *

 AUTHOR: “Valérie ... swam like an otter, rode almost as well as her
 mother, fenced and shot with great skill.”

 COMMENTATOR: “Valérie never learnt to ride, as the Empress would not
 allow it, and never fenced or shot.”

       *       *       *       *       *

 AUTHOR: “She was riding alone on that day.”

 COMMENTATOR: “The Empress _never_ went out riding alone.”

       *       *       *       *       *

 AUTHOR: “‘My poor boy! my poor boy!’ she kept repeating. ‘I am afraid
 you do not realise what misery such a marriage as that which you are
 about to make can bring about!’”

 COMMENTATOR: “To _me_ the Empress said, ‘Let him marry whom he likes.
 I don’t mix myself up in Rudolph’s affairs.’”

       *       *       *       *       *

 AUTHOR: “That Rudolph met Marie Vetsera and her mother in London and
 called upon them several times is quite certain.”

 COMMENTATOR: “Rudolph never met the Vetseras in London.”



 AUTHOR: “Mademoiselle Ferenzy read to her from English, French, and
 Hungarian books.”

 COMMENTATOR: “Mademoiselle Ferenzy could only read Hungarian.”

That may suffice; but any reader who has skipped the quotations should
turn back to them. They may not matter very much in themselves—except
to those to whom everything connected with royalty matters; but they do
show us how Court history is sometimes written by journalists, and what
is the historical value of the “revelations” of anonymous pretenders
to the intimacy of Sovereigns. It was worth while, as the opportunity
offered, to elaborate the demonstration, because the book containing
the statements confuted—together with many others of an equally
untrustworthy character—was for a time accepted as authoritative by
the readers of two continents, and passed through several editions, on
the assumption that it presented the authentic depositions of one who
had really been behind the scenes.

The author was, in fact, so little behind the scenes—and so little
qualified in other respects for her task—that she did not even
know her way through the Almanach de Gotha, or remember elementary
facts which anyone without special sources of information could
easily ascertain. She places the scene of the imperial betrothal at
Possenhofen, whereas it actually occurred at Ischl; and she states
that the Empress was not of “royal” birth, whereas she was the
granddaughter of a King. These things being so, it obviously is not
to her writings that one must turn for details of the secret history
of the estrangement between the Empress and the Emperor. That secret
history, in so far as the Emperor’s flirtations are concerned, would
not, in the opinion of those who are nearest to knowing it, make a very
startling tale even if one could know it all.

It is not the rule, of course, for Emperors in the prime of life,
estranged from their consorts, to deny themselves, on principle, all
alternative attachments; and there is no reason to suppose that Francis
Joseph did so. But his volatility was only comparative, and did not
last long. The witnesses who attest the volatility also assure us that,
taking his imperial grandeur as seriously as it deserved to be taken,
he soon “settled down” and became, in the language of less exalted
circles, “steady.” There was a certain Polish Countess; but that is too
old and unimportant a story to be revived. The one lady whose name it
is imperative to mention in connection with this branch of the subject
is, of course, Frau Katti Schratt; and the circumstances in which the
Emperor made Frau Schratt’s acquaintance shed an illuminating light
upon the terms on which he and the Empress came to live.

It was in 1885, when the Empress was about to depart upon one of her
frequent journeys. “Her kind heart,” writes Countess Marie Larisch,
“reproached her when she thought that her husband would perhaps be
lonely during her absence.” So she inquired whether any of the ladies
about her knew of any other lady who would be willing to “entertain”
the Emperor while she was away, but could be trusted not to exercise
any undue influence over him:—

 “I mentioned several ladies” (Countess Marie continues) “who, I felt
 sure, would only be too delighted to console the imperial grass
 widower, but Aunt Cissi did not approve of them, and the matter
 dropped until she suddenly told me one day that she had discovered the
 right person in the actress Katrina Schratt, who was always considered
 to be more interesting off the Burg Theatre than on it.... People
 rather disapproved of Elizabeth’s attitude, but she was quite right
 in thinking well of the actress, who has, since the death of my aunt,
 proved herself to be a devoted friend to Francis Joseph.”

That, assuredly, sounds as improbable as anything in “The Martyrdom of
an Empress.” An Empress sallying into the highways and byways to seek
a guardian angel for the Emperor, and finally extracting one from the
_coulisses_, and presenting her, with the result that she becomes the
friend of the family as well as the Emperor, and the Emperor takes a
continual delight in her society for thirty years—that, indeed, is an
amazing picture, not to be accepted, even on Countess Marie Larisch’s
authority, without corroborative evidence. But the story seems,
nevertheless, to be literally true. The corroborative testimony is
available, and shall be produced.

In the main, indeed, the Emperor’s attachment is as notorious as his
marriage, and stands in as little need of proof. Frau Schratt at once
became, and has ever since remained, a national institution—related
to Court circles, though not exactly of them. It became the recognised
thing that, when the Emperor went to Ischl, she should go to Ischl too;
that she should have a cottage there, and that the Emperor should take
tea at that cottage daily—entertained by Frau Schratt, but not by her
husband, of whom one hears little, though it is understood that he was
given an appointment which kept him usefully and profitably occupied at
a distance from the tea-parties.

Nor was it at tea-time only that Francis Joseph was to be heard of at
Frau Schratt’s domicile. He was occasionally an evening visitor as
well; and one of his evening visits concluded with a dramatic incident.
He had stayed into the small hours, and desired, in consideration for
the feelings of others, to depart without disturbing the household.
Being unaccustomed, however, to stealthy movements, he stumbled over
the furniture and disturbed the cook, who, suspecting that a burglar
had intruded, came courageously downstairs, attired in her nightgown,
and carrying a bedroom candle. Her impulse was to scream, but Francis
Joseph checked it. “Don’t you see that I’m the Emperor, you silly
woman?” he said in a stage whisper. Whereupon the cook, profoundly
loyal, but not knowing exactly what course of conduct a manual of
etiquette would prescribe in the situation, fell on her knees at her
Sovereign’s feet, and began to sing at the top of her voice: _Gott
erhalte Franz den Kaiser!_

Such was life in the early days of this interesting relationship,
which settled down, as the years passed, into a very peaceable
and comfortable domestic alliance. That there have never been any
unfavourable comments is more, of course, than can truthfully be said.
Rebellious members of the House of Habsburg, anxious to go their own
amorous ways without reference to the Habsburg rules, have sometimes
felt that the state of the affections of the head of the house gave
them a handle, and have sometimes pulled that handle. If the Emperor
flaunted his attachment to Frau Schratt, why should not the Archduke
Leopold permit himself to love Fräulein Adamovics, and the Archduke
John permit himself to love Fräulein Stübel—these ladies, at any rate,
not being married women? So they have argued; and the former Archduke
once, on a very dramatic occasion, brought the vials of the Emperor’s
wrath down upon his head by calling him “Herr Schratt” to his face.

But Francis Joseph, being a strong man and a loyal friend, was not to
be moved by such affronts, or turned from the path which he chose to
pursue, by the fear of scandal; and presently there was a battle royal
on the subject in the House of Habsburg. The Emperor’s daughters—the
Archduchesses Valérie and Gisela—expressed themselves as scandalised
and shocked, and conceived it to be their duty to wean their aged
father, who was now more than seventy years of age, from the society
which gave him so much pleasure. They so far succeeded that Frau
Schratt left Ischl in a hurry for Brussels, and a wag braved the perils
of _lèse-majesté_ by inserting in the “agony colum” of the _Neue Freie
Presse_ an advertisement in conspicuous type, running: _Katti, come
back to your sorrowing Franz_.

And she came back, albeit by a circuitous route, honourably attended,
and in triumph. The first hint that she was about to do so appeared as
exclusive information in the Paris _Le Siècle_:—

 “Everyone in Austria knows of the affectionate relations which bind
 Frau Schratt, formerly of the Burg Theatre, to the Imperial Family.
 Some time ago Vienna learned with surprise that she was about to
 retire, and make a journey from Bavaria that would end in Rome. The
 journals soon after announced that she had come back from Rome, and
 that the Pope had given her a lasting benediction. Now it appears,
 though the affair is not yet wholly unveiled, that the Pope not only
 vouchsafed to Frau Schratt, who was accompanied by the Comtesse de
 Trani, sister of the late Empress, a paternal reception, but even
 yielded to pressing instances, supported by diplomatic action, in
 granting her prayer to declare the nullity of her marriage with Baron
 Kisch, by whom she has a son.”

Rumour added that these proceedings were only preliminary to the
celebration of a morganatic marriage between the Emperor and the
actress; morganatic marriages being, as is well known, contrivances
for reconciling the human passion which over-rides the barriers of
rank with that family pride which does not over-ride them. But rumour,
for once, was wrong. A Berlin paper—the _Lokal Anzeiger_—sent its
representative to ascertain what Frau Schratt had to say on the
subject; and Frau Schratt opened her heart freely to the reporter,
and, in doing so, supplied the confirmation of the story which we have
quoted, with provisional scepticism, from Countess Marie Larisch.
All this talk about her marriage with the Emperor, she said, was
“nonsense.” Those who engaged in such talk knew neither her nor the
Emperor. And then came the allusion, for which we have been looking, to
the part played in the matter by the Empress:—

 “That high-minded and noble lady was my most gracious patroness
 and friend. In the unrest caused by the mental and bodily pains
 which drove her from one place to another, it was a comfort to her
 to know that a good-tempered, light-hearted woman cheered up her
 husband, and gave him many a pleasant, harmless hour by chatting
 with him and relating all sorts of anecdotes and stories; attending
 him in his morning walks in the Schönbrunn Gardens whilst he was
 taking his Carlsbad water, and never abusing her extraordinary
 position for intrigues or to push _protégés_. It was the Empress
 herself who, hating the stiff Court life and Court dignitaries and
 ladies-in-waiting, had created my position, which I then maintained
 owing to the gracious confidence and gratitude of the Emperor.

 Every spring I was the first to bring the late Empress, wherever she
 was staying, the first violets, and I always spent a few days with
 her. An Empress, however magnanimous and high-minded she may be,
 remains in certain questions above everything a woman. And is it,
 therefore, really possible to believe that the Empress would have
 honoured me with her grace and confidence in such an extraordinary way
 if even the possibility had existed in her thoughts that, after her
 death, I might marry the Emperor?”

It is really a remarkable interview. One is not, of course, entitled
to say that the whole of Mme. Katti Schratt’s soul is revealed in
it. One may take the liberty of doubting whether her respect for the
memory of her friend, the Empress, was the sole reason why the proposed
morganatic marriage was not concluded. There must also have been
representations from many quarters—from the Emperor’s Ministers as
well as from his daughters—that while such a marriage would cause a
public and family scandal, it would hardly, in the circumstances, add
anything appreciable to the happiness and privileges of either party.
On that point one is certainly entitled to prefer one’s own judgment to
the lady’s account of the self-denying ordinance. But Frau Schratt’s
tacit assumption that the society of frivolous actresses is, of all
kinds of society, the most agreeable to men, is a very delightful
trait, and, though not a universal truth, does appear to have been
supported by the facts of the particular case she was discussing. The
assumption, too, that she was, naturally and necessarily, a good deal
more to the Emperor than the Emperor could ever hope to be to her,
is a pleasing example of the proper pride of the ladies who achieve
distinction on the stage and leave it because they are even more
admirable off the stage than on it.

On the episode of the divorce—and perhaps even on the whole story—a
stern, unbending moralist might have something to say. Such a one might
even contend that the Pope himself does not come out of the story very
well. But then Popes have almost invariably, throughout the course
of history, proceeded on the assumption that the ordinary rules of
morality may properly be waived in favour of Catholic potentates; and a
distinguished French moralist has laid down the rule that a _liaison_
may acquire the dignity of marriage if it lasts long enough.

And this particular alliance has certainly endured for an extraordinary
length of time. It still endures at the time at which these lines are
written; and when one contemplates it, one finds oneself thinking,
not of frivolous gallantries or passionate romances, but of domestic
idylls, such as those of Darby and Joan, Philemon and Baucis, and John
Anderson, my Jo.

One does not know, of course, whether Frau Katti Schratt ever, at any
of her _tête-à-tête_ tea-parties, sings the Emperor the sentimental
ballads which consecrate those legends, but there is no reason why she
should not—unless it be that she does not know them—and there are
many reasons why she should. An unruffled fidelity extending over a
period of nearly thirty years, and lasting until extreme old age, has
surely earned both him and her a full title to the enjoyment of the
emotions which they express.




CHAPTER XI

 Francis Joseph’s passion for field sports—Enthusiasm of a nation of
 sportsmen for a sportsman Emperor—Anecdotes of sport—Estrangement of
 the Emperor and the Empress—The Empress’s departure for Madeira—Her
 _wanderjahre_—Her attitude towards life—The keeping up of
 appearances.


It seemed better to defy chronology, and speak of Frau Schratt at
once. We do not want her continually flitting across the stage, to the
interruption of grave historical discourses; but we do want to realise
that she is there—a fixed domestic institution, bringing Francis
Joseph, in a sense, into line even with the Habsburgs whose vagaries
have caused him consternation. If she had predecessors, she has had
no rivals; and no story arises out of the invitations to the imperial
alcove of which certain other theatrical ladies used to boast in the
earlier years of the reign. We will leave those matters, therefore,
and next give the necessary passing glance at the Emperor’s notorious
passion for field sports—a passion which has contributed more than a
little towards his popularity.

It often is so; such tastes being held to contribute the touch of
nature which makes the whole world kin, and the belief that a good
shot is sure to be a good fellow being deeply rooted in the human
breast—especially if the sportsman respects the rights of property,
and compensates agriculturists for damage done in the pursuit of game.
To some extent, indeed, the mere fact that an Emperor does not go
shooting in his crown and royal robes, but in a costume similar to
that worn by the peasants themselves, conveys to the bucolic mind a
pleasant impression of condescending affability. Moreover, rustics like
to be employed as beaters, and enjoy hearing and handing on stories of
imperial sportsmen wandering, and losing themselves, and being mistaken
for other people, and keeping up the illusion, and laughing at the
mistake.

There has been a good deal of that sort of thing in Francis Joseph’s
reign; and his most popular portraits are those which exhibit him,
alike as a young man, an old man, and a man of middle age, attired
in knickerbockers, heavily nailed boots, and a picturesquely plumed
Tyrolese hat. A certain _rapport_ seems to be established by those
portraits between a sportsman Emperor and a nation of sportsmen.
Habited in the costume indicated, Francis Joseph has sometimes
in the mountains, and even in his own parks, played the part of
Haroun-al-Raschid; and many anecdotes are told about his adventures in
that character.

Not all of them, of course, are true; and we will hope that the more
malicious stories are false. The story, for instance, that Francis
Joseph, taking part in a _battue_ in the midst of the troubles of
1866, asked an aged peasant for a light for his pipe, and was told the
aged peasant’s candid opinion of Emperors who amused themselves by
pursuing game when their subjects were dying for them on the stricken
field, is probably the invention of a political malcontent. A more
agreeable story—and one at which the Emperor himself may chuckle—is
that of his encounter with the farmer who took him for an ordinary
trespasser and threatened that, if he did not clear off his land at
once, he would first shoot him in the posterior parts as a mark of
identification and then inform the police; and he is, no doubt, as
pleased as his people are to remember how he once arrested poachers
with his own hand in one of his own parks, and having satisfied himself
of the truth of their representation that they were honest old soldiers
who had come to poverty through no fault of their own, gave orders
that they should be given appointments as gamekeepers. A ruler of whom
stories of that last kind are told never fails to be popular with
the sporting classes of the community; and the parade of gamekeepers
from all parts of the Empire, which was one of the most picturesque
features of Francis Joseph’s Jubilee celebrations, impresses one as a
most proper sequel thereto. These stories, however, though necessary to
atmosphere, are only incidental. It is enough to glance at them, just
as it is enough to glance at the story of those world-wide wanderings
of the Empress which began, long before she had provided Frau Schratt
to “entertain” the Emperor during her absence, with her sudden
departure for Madeira, in 1860.

Legend has crystallised round that departure: it has been called a
“flight,” and attributed to the cumulative effect of three distinct
domestic disturbances. First of all, we are told, there was a
disturbance caused by the terrible Archduchess Sophia, who would not
allow the Empress to bring up the infant Crown Prince in her own way:
a trouble which may have been bitter at the time, in spite of Countess
Marie Larisch’s assurance that the matter presently became one of
absolute indifference to her. In the second place, we are informed,
there was a disturbance because Francis Joseph made too public a
display of his affectionate regard for a certain Fräulein Roll, of one
of the Viennese theatres; and finally, if the reports may be trusted,
the quarrel reached its climax because Francis Joseph suffered himself
to be fascinated by a peasant girl whom he met when out shooting.

Francis Joseph, on that occasion, according to the story which was
current, stayed out all night after dismissing his retainers; and
one of the retainers told his wife what had happened; and the lady
repeated the story to other ladies of the Court at one of Elizabeth’s
receptions; and Elizabeth overheard, and acted on the impulse of the
moment. She dismissed her ladies, and called her maid, announcing
her intention of setting out at once, secretly, for a long journey.
The maid did her bidding; and she got as far as Trieste, where a
functionary, sent in pursuit, overtook her and induced her to
return—a course to which she consented only on the understanding that,
after appearances had been saved, she should be allowed to set out
again, with the Emperor’s express approval.

Whether things really happened just like that; whether it is true
that the flight was only hindered by the discretion of the captain
of the yacht, who opportunely discovered that his engines were out
of repair; whether it is also true that Francis Joseph threw himself
at Elizabeth’s feet, confessing his fault, imploring her pardon, and
ascribing the blame to his mother—all these are points on which a
conscientious investigator would hesitate to commit himself. The
story—given in M. Weindel’s _François-Joseph Intime_—is more than
fifty years old; and no authoritative correspondence or _procès verbal_
relating to it has been published. All that is positively established
is that the doctor was called in, and certified that Elizabeth was
suffering from a pulmonary weakness which necessitated her removal
to a warmer climate. So she set out for Madeira; and Francis Joseph
accompanied her a part of the way. How she left Madeira in a hurry, in
consequence of reports sent home concerning her manner of life there,
has already been set forth on the authority of Countess Marie Larisch.

That was the beginning of her _wanderjahre_; and there was to be no
end to them until her death. Elizabeth had learnt the importance of
keeping up appearances; and she did not forget it. Francis Joseph
did not need to learn it; for he has always stood out among the
backsliding Habsburgs as a great actor-manager, so to say, keeping
up the imperilled dignity of the House by playing a great part on a
great stage in a manner worthy of the great traditions to which so many
members of his family have proved unfaithful. _Noblesse oblige_ has
been his motto, though not theirs—though he may only have given it a
limited, spectacular application; and, if Elizabeth did not meet him
half way in the matter, at least she went a part of the way to meet him.

The result is known. On great ceremonial occasions Elizabeth consented
to appear, as she put it, “in harness,” and performed imperial
functions with splendid, though perhaps absent-minded, dignity. She
was as beautiful as the Empress Eugénie. She had a grander—a less
skittish—manner; and she quite understood that the frame in which
her beauty and grandeur were set at Schönbrunn and the Hofburg threw
a halo of glory about her head, quite different from that which
adorned the rival beauty who was Queen of the Revels at the Tuileries,
Fontainebleau, Saint-Cloud, and Compiègne. But she was, nevertheless,
always glad when the functions were over and the harness could be
taken off. She was like Little Nell’s grandfather, whose one desire
was to be “further away.” She never lost that impulse; and, if it ever
slackened, something was always sure to happen to renew it. It received
a great impetus from the Tragedy of Meyerling; perhaps—it is hardly
doubtful—an earlier impetus from the incident which drew from her the
bitter remark that “a baby is the end of many love affairs.”

So she wandered as much as she could—though she returned to Vienna
when she felt that she must—and a detailed relation of her wanderings
would almost read like a chapter from a road-book. She saw the Isles of
Greece and the Norwegian Fiords. She bathed on the coast of Norfolk,
and hunted in Ireland and in the Shires. She sojourned, for a season,
at Steephill Castle near Ventnor in the Isle of Wight—the present
dwelling of an American gentleman who sells medicines reputed to be
beneficial to the liver; and a red-brick house in which she passed
another season is pointed out at Cromer. She also went to Amsterdam
for massage, and to Cap Martin to sit in the sun; and she visited
her home in Bavaria, and her sisters’ homes in Paris, and stayed
at Claridge’s in London, and drank the waters at Kissingen. It was
sometimes thought that she deliberately courted death by her daring
feats of horsemanship. Her manner became that of a woman for whom life
had nothing left, except what converse with Nature could offer. She
even spoke of Nature as her “sole mediator with God”; and the scattered
fragments of her table talk which those who knew her have preserved,
are full of detached sentiments of a kind of poetic pessimism:

 “We must try to make islands of ourselves.”

 “When we cannot be happy in the way that we desire, there is nothing
 for it but to fall in love with our sorrows.”

 “In the life of every man there comes a time when his inner life
 becomes extinct.”

 “I know that he who revolts suffers a hundred times more than he who
 is resigned; but resignation is a thing of which I am not capable.”

 “I should like to be buried near the sea, so that the waves might beat
 against my coffin. Then all the stars in Heaven would shine on me, and
 the cypresses would lament for me far longer than either men or women.”

Such phrases sound, as it were, the _leit motif_ of the mystery of
Elizabeth’s life. She seems to have thrown them out, without telling
anyone what sorrow or disappointment had inspired them. Each reporter
who tries to guess at their meaning offers a different conjecture.
The unkindness of Francis Joseph, who was not unkind—the unkindness
of some lover, who was—the tragic deaths of her son, her cousin,
her brother-in-law, and her sister—all these things have been
cited, by one chronicler or another, as explanations of her funereal
gloom. But, as she confided in no one, no one need pretend to know,
or to do more than draw the picture of a woman as unhappy as she
was beautiful—clinging to her unhappiness as she clung to her
beauty—wandering restlessly through Europe like a shadow pursuing
shadows, but running home from time to time to keep up appearances.

And the picture, to be complete, should also show the figure of Francis
Joseph, doing his full share in the keeping up of those appearances,
and taking long journeys in order to pay periodical visits to the
Empress, who was making it so clear, to all who cared to look, that she
was happiest away from home, and always wearing on his countenance
that look of bland and imperturbable serenity with which his
innumerable portraits have made Europe familiar. It is a picture full
of lights and shadows and strange contrasts; but we must not dwell upon
it any more. Our attention is claimed by the supplementary spectacle
of the Emperor at odds with fate, confronting the difficulties which
threatened to tear his Empire to tatters, and gradually getting that
Empire into some sort of order.




CHAPTER XII

 Francis Joseph’s snub to Napoleon III.—Proposal to address him as
 “Sir” instead of “Brother”—The consequences—Napoleon asks: “What
 can one do for Italy?”—Austria at war with France and Italy—The
 crimes committed by Austria in Italy—Battles of Magenta and
 Solferino—Francis Joseph compelled to surrender Lombardy, but allowed
 to retain Venetia.


Other things besides his wife’s secret sorrows—or even his
own—claimed Francis Joseph’s attention through the ’fifties, ’sixties,
and ’seventies. The hour for the fulfilment of Countess Karolyi’s curse
had not yet sounded; but it did seem as if that “break-up” of Austria
which statesmen think about when they lie awake at night was imminent.
Hungary was sullen; Prussia was ambitious and jealous; the Italian
subjects of the Habsburgs hated them. It was the Italians who were
destined to speak first.

They had already spoken in 1848; but then they had been silenced,
because Radetzky had been a good general, and Charles Albert a bad
one. But Victor Emmanuel was a greater man than Charles Albert, and
he had Cavour to guide him. _Italia fara da se_—Italy will work out
her own destiny—had been Charles Albert’s motto. Victor Emmanuel and
Cavour played a more subtle game, and looked out for allies; and in
Napoleon III. they found an ally who was quite willing to help them; a
sympathetic man who had once been involved in the Carbonari movement; a
sensitive man whom the head of the House of Habsburg had snubbed as a
_parvenu_ by proposing to address him as “Sir” instead of “Brother.”

So Napoleon’s sympathies were worked upon, and the wires were pulled.
It is said that the beautiful Countess Castiglioni helped to pull
them, adding the influence of her charms to that of her arguments; and
the statement is probable enough, for the Emperor of the French was
susceptible. At any rate, he presently asked Cavour the point-blank
question: “What can one do for Italy?” and a little later, in July,
1858, he had a quiet talk with Cavour at the Baths of Plombières, and
arranged what should be done, and what should be his own share of the
plunder.

Francis Joseph may have guessed what was coming when he read the
reports of Victor Emmanuel’s speech at the opening of his Parliament,
in January, 1859, containing the pregnant declaration that, “while
respecting treaties, we cannot disregard the cry of grief which
rises to us from so many parts of Italy.” His guesses must have
become certainties when, at the New Year’s reception of the _corps
diplomatique_, Napoleon remarked, with chilly politeness, to Hübner,
now Austrian Ambassador, in the hearing of all the other Ambassadors:—

 “I regret that our relations with your Government are not so good as
 they have been; but I beg you to assure your Emperor that my personal
 sentiments towards him have undergone no change.”

A double-edged saying; for his feelings were hardly likely to be
friendly towards the originator of the scheme for snubbing him as “Sir”
instead of saluting him as “Brother.” In any case it was a saying which
meant war; and war was not long delayed. Francis Joseph, in fact,
anticipated the inevitable by summoning Sardinia to disarm within three
days; but Sardinia refused to disarm, and the French came over the
Alps, beat Francis Joseph at Magenta and Solferino, and turned him out
of Lombardy, though allowing him to retain Venetia.

That was the beginning of the end; and the event contains an important
moral,—the moral that the one permanent peril to European peace arises
out of the hatred invariably felt for persons of German nationality by
the races subjected to their rule.

The trouble with the German, whether of the North or of the South, is
always this: that he regards himself as a heaven-sent ruler of men, but
can, as a matter of fact, only govern in a state of siege. He can win
battles, and organise a civil service; but he can neither conciliate
nor assimilate his subjects. The German Empire is sometimes compared
(by Germans) to the Roman Empire; but the difference between the two
things is wide. The Romans, when they conquered the world, made it
contentedly Roman. The French, similarly, when they took over Savoy
from Italy, made it contentedly French. But no German dependency is
ever contentedly German. Alsace is not; nor is Schleswig-Holstein, or
Prussian Poland. In all these places, the German, in his jack-boots,
strides about among a people who find his language barbarous, his
culture ridiculous, and himself an odious interloper. And it has been
the same thing in Austrian Italy, where, even to this day, the few
Italians who remain “unredeemed” refuse so much as to join the Austrian
Alpine Club, but have preferred to form a smaller Alpine Club of their
own.

In the days of which we are speaking, Austria ruled Lombardy and
Venetia as subject provinces. At the same time, other Habsburgs reigned
in Modena and Tuscany, while the abominable Bomba of Naples was the
Empress Elizabeth’s brother-in-law. Not in his own provinces only, but
throughout Italy, popular representation was roughly refused. Italy, it
was held, was “a geographical expression,” and must behave as such. If
it did not, then leading Italian citizens must be hanged; and, if there
were any difficulty in getting evidence to hang them on, it must be
obtained by torture.

It is a fact, incredible as it may seem, that the Austrians used, in
the ‘fifties, to torture their Italian subjects in prison. It is a
fact that they flogged, and sometimes executed, Italian civilians for
“failing in outward respect” towards the Austrian soldiery. It is a
fact that they flogged women for the comments which they passed on such
proceedings. It is a fact that they shot a butcher, found in possession
of a butcher’s knife, for carrying forbidden arms, and a lunatic for
going through the motions of drill in a public thoroughfare. It is a
fact, finally, that, exasperated at the manner in which every official
Austrian institution was boycotted, they notified the public that “if
anybody by criminal political obstinacy persisted in not frequenting
the theatre, such conduct would be regarded as the silent demonstration
of a criminal disposition, which merited to be sought out and
punished.” The policy was as childish as it was savage, and as savage
as it was childish. Gladstone had it in mind when he made his famous
remark that nowhere on the map of Europe could one lay one’s finger
and say: “Here Austria has done good.” His mistake lay not in offering
that criticism, but in afterwards apologising for having offered it.
What the Italians themselves thought of the matter is best shown by the
written declaration which one of their victims handed in to his judges
after his condemnation to death:—

 “I declare” (he said) “that, rather than deny the sacred principles
 on which the cause of Italian liberty and independence repose, rather
 than adhere to the rapacious policy of Austria, rather than sanction
 its claims by any act which might seem to concede them, or by any
 submission to its authority, I, Pietro Fortunato Calvi, once officer
 of the Austrian Army, and late Colonel of the Italian Army during
 the War of Independence, now condemned to death for the crime of high
 treason, go joyfully to this death, declaring from the scaffold that
 what I have done I have done knowingly, and that I would be ready to
 do it again in order to drive the Austrians out of the States which
 they have infamously usurped.”

His judges asked him, in their arrogance, whether he would ask the
pardon of the Austrians for his disloyalty to them. His reply was that
he desired neither their pardon nor any other favour:

 “I hate, and will always hate, the Austrians, until the end of my
 life, for all the ill they have done to Italy.”

The Austrians, that is to say, behaved as shamefully in Italy as in
Hungary; and this time Francis Joseph was held responsible. When he
took his bride to pay his Italian dominions a ceremonial visit, the
Italians made it clear to him, as they subsequently made it clear to
the Archduke Maximilian and the Archduchess Charlotte, that what was
desired was not his condescension, or that of any member of his family,
but both his and their ejection.

They made it clear in various ingeniously offensive ways. When the
Archduke Maximilian appeared, with the Archduchess, in the Piazza at
Venice, the whole population withdrew, leaving them alone there, as if
they were lepers who might spread contamination. When Francis Joseph,
accompanied by the Empress Elizabeth, drove through the streets of
Milan, not a head was uncovered, and not a cheer was heard; all the
acclamations being pointedly reserved for the Italian Syndic, who was
compelled, as an official, to follow in the procession. The Italian
ladies, at the same time, dressed so as to display, by a cunning
arrangement of stuffs, the colours of the Italian flag; and, when the
“Guerra, guerra” chorus, from _Norma_, was sung in the Scala, the
audience applauded it as if they would never stop.

It seemed, therefore, to be Victor Emmanuel’s clear mission to help the
Italians to fulfil an obvious destiny; and Victor Emmanuel’s mission
was Napoleon’s opportunity to show Francis Joseph, as he had already
shown the Tsar, that Emperors who treated him as a _parvenu_ did so at
their peril. So he and Victor Emmanuel fought shoulder to shoulder,
and made a typical little bit of Austrian history: typical because,
as we shall see when we proceed, Italia Irredenta is only one of many
districts whose inhabitants regard themselves as “unredeemed,” and
desire to work out their salvation with the help of their “nationals”
over the border. There is also, as we shall note presently, a Servia
Irredenta and a Roumania Irredenta, of which we are likely to hear
a good deal in the immediate future, though this is not the place
for speaking of them. Here we will merely note that Francis Joseph
himself took part in the Italian campaign, heading a charge with the
cry: “Forward, my lads! I, too, am a married man with a family!”—an
exclamation not without its irony for those, if there were any, among
his hearers who knew the particulars of his married life.

Though a brave soldier, however, he was by no means a soldier
of genius. Apparently, indeed, it is only as a linguist and a
figure-head—the sublime figure-head of the Habsburgs who need a
figure-head so badly—that he possesses genius; in other respects
he seems to have been, as Herr Wulfling was, at a later date, to
the Princess Louisa of Tuscany, “a very ordinary man.” In any case,
he proved himself a very ordinary general, whom very ordinary
generals were able to defeat—partly, perhaps, because his Hungarian
soldiers showed great alacrity in deserting him; but he sulked, with
characteristic Habsburg sullenness, over the terms of peace. In
particular, he sulked over the following article:—

 “The Emperor of Austria cedes his rights over Lombardy to the Emperor
 of the French, who, in accordance with the wishes of the population,
 will hand them over to the King of Sardinia.”

What, he asked Prince Napoleon, who was charged with the negotiations,
was the meaning of that odd expression—“the wishes of the population”?
Prince Napoleon replied that it meant just what it seemed to mean—that
there was not an Italian in Lombardy who was not eager to see the
Austrians turned out of that province. Whereupon Francis Joseph smote
the table and raised his voice:

 “For my own part” (he said) “I recognise no rights except those which
 are incorporated in treaties. According to the treaties, Lombardy
 belongs to me. My arms having been unfortunate, I am quite willing to
 cede the territory to the Emperor Napoleon; but I cannot recognise
 the wishes of the population, for that is only another phrase for
 the right of revolution. Use the phrase if you must in your treaty
 with the King of Sardinia, and in your proclamations to the Italian
 people—that is no business of mine; but you must clearly understand
 that I, the Emperor of Austria, emphatically refuse to put my
 signature to such a form of words.”

It did not matter; so Napoleon did not insist. The Head of the
Habsburgs was quite welcome to make the gestures of pride while
munching the pie of humility—a way of keeping up their dignity in
depressing circumstances in which the Habsburgs are the worthy rivals
of the Bourbons, and Francis Joseph in particular is the worthy rival
of Louis XVIII., who treated the allied sovereigns as his lackeys when
they restored him to his throne. A more important matter was that,
though Francis Joseph had been given his lesson, he had not learnt it,
and that Napoleon, owing to dangers near home, had not been able to
make the lesson as complete as he would have liked.

Napoleon had promised that Italy should be free “from the Alps to the
Adriatic”; but he heard that Prussia was mobilising on the Rhine, and
left his work unfinished. Not only was Venetia left to Austria; but
Habsburg Dukes of Tuscany and Modena were also restored to the States
from which their subjects had expelled them, though the latter had
actually shot his political prisoners, after first flogging them,
before taking to flight. Whence, of course, two consequences followed.
In the first place Francis Joseph was confirmed in his stubborn view
that he did really possess the right of ruling over Italians who
loathed him. In the second place, the Italians continued to loathe him;
and it was as certain as anything could be that, when his struggle with
Prussia for the German hegemony came to a head, he would have to face a
second day of reckoning with Victor Emmanuel.




CHAPTER XIII

 An interval of peace—Beginnings of trouble with Prussia—Habsburg
 pride precedes a Habsburg fall—Refusal to sell Venetia to
 Italy—Italy joins Prussia—The war of 1866—The disaster of
 Sadowa—Benedek’s failure—Shameful treatment of Benedek by the
 Empire—Vain attempts to conciliate him—His widow’s comments.


Between 1859 and 1866 Francis Joseph had a seven years’ respite in
which to solve his problems; but 1866 found them still unsolved.
At home he had advanced a little way towards Liberalism, and then
withdrawn; abroad, he had let himself become entangled in the net
spread by Bismarck. Nor can the two mistakes be separated; for it was
largely because he had failed to conciliate his subjects that he could
not face his enemies. The fact that the Hungarians were still sullen
made it comparatively easy for Prussia to turn Austria out of the
German Confederation.

Space forbids one to say more of the difficulty between Austria and
Prussia than that it was the difficulty which arises when two men
have to ride the same horse, and both of them want to ride in front.
It was brought to a head by dissensions over the settlement of that
complicated Schleswig-Holstein question concerning which a British
statesman once remarked that only two men had ever understood it, and
that one of the two was dead and the other in a lunatic asylum. An
agreement on the question, concluded at a personal interview between
Francis Joseph and the King of Prussia, was described by Bismarck as
“no better than a piece of sticking plaster”; and no doubt Bismarck
made it his business to see that the sticking-plaster did not stick. He
first secured French neutrality at a famous interview at Biarritz; and
then he proceeded to negotiate with Italy.

Here again we see an instructive example of Habsburg pride preceding a
Habsburg fall. Italy had recently proposed to buy Venetia from Austria.
Francis Joseph, knowing that the Venetians loathed him to a man, had
nevertheless replied, in a scornful communication, that Austria’s
military honour and dignity as a first-class Power required him to
retain them as his subjects:—

 “She would be unaffected by an offer of money or by any kind of moral
 pressure. She could only abandon the territory of her own free will
 in the event, not specially desired by her, of a war which terminated
 gloriously for Austrian arms, and facilitated the extension of the
 Austrian Empire in the direction of Germany.”

In one and the same despatch, that is to say, Austria insulted
Italy, and invited Italy to help her in despoiling Prussia. That was
a rash temptation of Providence; and the result of it was that an
Italian envoy went to Berlin to negotiate a treaty. Then Austria was
frightened, and offered to eat her words and cede Venetia, if only
Italy would leave her free to deal separately with Prussia. It was a
tardy and clumsy piece of suppleness, and it did not answer. Victor
Emmanuel liked fighting, had promised to fight, and fought.

We all know what happened: how the defeat of the Italians at Custozza
by the Archduke Albert was more than counterbalanced by the defeat of
the Austrians at Sadowa; and how Austria had to accept her humiliation,
submit to be turned out of the German Federation, and surrender
Venetia to Italy, after a _plébiscite_ had been taken to ascertain
those “wishes of the population” which Francis Joseph had so haughtily
refused to recognise. The figures give eloquent evidence of the
feelings of alien races towards Austrian rule. They were as follows:

  For annexation     640,000
  Against                 40
                     ———————
  Majority for       639,960
                     ———————

The result, one may be sure, would have been pretty much the same if
a _plébiscite_ had been taken in the Trentino, and South Tyrol. There
also Austrian rule was unsympathetic; and that sore still remains
open, with the result that, though Austria and Italy are now nominally
allied, they are very far from being friends, and Italy still awaits
her chance of responding to the lamentations which continue to
reach her from the Purgatory of the Unredeemed. We shall see what we
shall see in this connection when Austria is next embarrassed; but
meanwhile we must return to Francis Joseph’s part in this great drama
of 1866. His sphere of action was not the battlefield, but the council
chamber; but there his prestige was felt, even in the hour of his
discomfiture. Europe was still, to some extent, a family party in which
the sentiment prevailed that Kings and Emperors must not be too hard
on each other; and German Europe, at any rate, was still fascinated
by the spectacle of the magnificent façade of the House of Habsburg,
and reluctant to damage it in the spirit of Goths and Vandals. Even
Bismarck’s “realistic politics” had to allow for that sentiment; and
it was a sentiment of which Francis Joseph, on his part, instinctively
perceived the value. His perception of it is the solid fact at the back
of the strange story of his shameful behaviour towards General Benedek:
a story in which he figures as the Jesuit convinced that the end
justifies the means and that individuals must be sacrificed ruthlessly
to the interests of the Order.

“One cannot expect much of a man who has been educated by the Jesuits,”
said the late Prince Consort, summing him up with curt scorn; and there
will be no pleasant disappointment of expectations in the story which
is to follow.

       *       *       *       *       *

The interest of the Order, in this instance, meant the interest of
the dynasty: whatever happened to Austria, the House of Habsburg
must not suffer. Francis Joseph did not enter upon the struggle in a
spirit of blind confidence: the Prussians, he knew, were armed with
the new needle-gun, which might work surprising wonders. Defeat was
possible; and if defeat occurred, a scapegoat would be wanted. Francis
Joseph, as a young soldier, had been ready to take risks, and had
gallantly assured Radetzky that “Austria had no lack of Archdukes.”
But Francis Joseph in his maturity did not want it to be possible for
anyone to say that an Archduke had led the Austrian army to disaster,
lest his subjects should lose their illusions about his House, and the
revolutionary spirit should revive.

His best general was the Archduke Albert; and he dared not risk him in
conflict with Von Moltke. That Archduke had played an odious part, not
yet forgotten, in the street fighting at Vienna. His men might follow
him with reluctance; his defeat would disgust Austria with the dynasty
itself; and the interest of the dynasty was, in Francis Joseph’s view,
“the thing.” So the Archduke was given a comparatively easy task in
Italy, and the really difficult work in Bohemia was forced upon General
Benedek, who knew that he was unfit for it, and said so. He was too
old, he pleaded; he did not know the country in which he would have to
fight. As the Prussian General von Schlictling afterwards put it:—

 “His experience was like that of a pilot who has all his life guided
 small boats over the shallows and by the rocks of his native bay with
 unsurpassable skill and knowledge of the locality, and has now for the
 first time to take a warship of the first class across strange seas
 and through cyclones of which he has no experience.”

It was a perilous, and almost a hopeless attempt; but Francis Joseph
insisted upon his making it. He wanted to be sure, in case of disaster,
of a scapegoat, who could be sent out into the wilderness, leaving
the honour and dignity of the Habsburgs intact. So he sent Benedek a
message through Adjutant-General Count Crenneville, begging him to
accept the command as a personal favour, saying that, if he refused
it, and the war turned out badly, his own abdication would probably
be forced upon him. “In such circumstances,” wrote Benedek, “I should
have acted very wrongly if I had refused the command”; and no doubt the
dictates of discipline did necessitate his acceptance of it.

So Benedek marched to Sadowa: the battle which hit Austria as hard as
Sedan was afterwards to hit France. His losses there were 7 flags, 160
guns, 4,861 killed, 13,920 wounded, and about 20,000 prisoners. He
was “broken like an old sword,” and there was nothing for him to say,
except:—

 “How could we face the Prussians? They are men of study, and we have
 learned little.”

Or rather, though there was a good deal more which he might have
said, he was persuaded not to say it either before the Military Court
which reviewed his conduct, or elsewhere. As Adjutant-General Count
Crenneville had been sent to him before, so the Archduke Albert was
sent to him now, at Graetz, in Styria, whither he had retired after
being deprived of his command. He was asked to give a written promise
that he would not publish any of the correspondence which had passed
between himself and his generals or himself and the Emperor, or
publicly vindicate himself in any way. He gave that promise; and the
proceedings begun against him were suspended. But then—we come to
Francis Joseph’s perfidy.

Francis Joseph wanted a scapegoat badly; and he paid Benedek the
compliment of believing him to be a more honourable man than himself.
He acted indirectly instead of directly—semi-officially instead of
officially; hitting at the man who was down, and had promised to make
no attempt to rise, by means of an article in the _Wiener Zeitung_.
The article began by stating that there was no law in Austria which
punished incompetence; and it continued:—

 “For the rest, the loss of the confidence of his imperial master, the
 destruction of his military reputation before the world of to-day and
 of the future, the recognition of the immeasurable misfortune that,
 under his command, has befallen the army, and, through its defect,
 has befallen the whole monarchy, must be a heavier penalty for the
 high-minded man that Benedek always was, than any punishment that
 could have come upon him by the continuation of legal proceedings.”

[Illustration: THE EMPEROR FRANCIS JOSEPH IN 1866.]

One can imagine Benedek’s anger at this black treachery; but he did
not allow it to sting him into the retractation of his pledged word.
He maintained to the end the attitude of an honourable man whom a
dishonourable Emperor had tricked; and he bore contumely in silence. It
was only in his will that he spoke out; but then he gave full vent to
the indignation which he had so long suppressed. This is his last word
on the matter:—

 “That the Austrian Government, having in its hand my promise of
 silence (given to the Archduke Albert on November 19, 1866) and
 believing in the honourableness of my promise, should publish this
 strange article, in which my whole past was ignored, and that this
 Government article, which it is impossible to qualify, was conceived
 in the presidential chancellery of the General Staff, corrected
 and improved by Field-Marshal Lieutenant Baron John, Field-Marshal
 Archduke Albert and others, and finally published by order of the
 Government in all its peculiar features—all this surpasses my ideas
 of right, decency, and propriety. I suffered it in silence, and I have
 now, for seven years, borne my hard lot as a soldier with philosophy
 and self-denial. I take credit to myself that, in spite of it all, I
 feel no anger against anybody and am not soured. I am at peace with
 myself and the whole world and have a clear conscience; but it has
 cost me all my poetic feeling for soldiering. I should like to be
 borne to my grave with the utmost simplicity and without any military
 honours. A plain stone, or an iron cross, without any epitaph, must be
 put over my grave.”

Meanwhile Benedek refused ever again to put on his uniform, and lived
as a lodger in a boarding-house at Graetz. Francis Joseph did not
like it—it was a reflection on him, especially after Von Moltke had
complimented Benedek as a commander of courage and merit; but all the
overtures which Francis Joseph’s pride permitted him to make were met
in a spirit of sullen resentment. When the Archduke Albert was directed
to write to Benedek as to an “old campaigner and a brother-in-arms,”
he replied “with cold respect.” The Crown Prince Rudolph was then
directed to write to him; but he neither asked for an audience, as he
was expected to do, nor even answered the letter, merely permitting
the Crown Prince’s military tutor to fabricate and carry a message,
thanking the Emperor “for the graceful way in which he has remembered
me.”

 “I am an isolated man” (he then said). “I need no external honour,
 and I feel that my internal honour is unstained. In this matter I
 acknowledge no earthly judge.”

Not long afterwards he died of cancer of the larynx; and even then
the memory of the wrong lingered. This is what his widow wrote to
her nephew in reference to the letters of condolence which she had
received:—

 “Bismarck’s letter, written throughout with his own hand, was the only
 one from a high personage which touched me; the telegrams from the
 Emperor and the Archduke left me very cold. When the Emperor sent the
 Crown Prince to us in 1873 as an apostle of conciliation, Benedek had
 suffered so much during the seven years that he refused everything and
 begged that they would not disturb the repose he had at last attained.
 The Emperor, always generous, had at least the goodness to ask if
 there was nothing he could do for me. He is generous. I thanked him
 sincerely: I need nothing.”

So the story ends; and it has been necessary to tell it at some length
because of the luminous light which it throws on Francis Joseph’s
character. Some historians have spoken of it as an isolated stain upon
an otherwise blameless personality; but it is, in fact, of a piece
with the whole personality, though the occasions which have called
for such disagreeable manifestations of the personality have happily
been rare. Francis Joseph was always able to give his equals, and has
gradually learnt to be able to give his inferiors, the impression that
he is genial affability incarnate. It is not natural to him to be mean
or paltry—he very much prefers to be splendid. But there is, and has
always been, at the bottom of his mind, a certain confusion of thought.
If he has not mistaken himself for God, at least he has mistaken the
interests of the House of Habsburg for that Higher Law to which the
ordinary laws of honour and morality which bind ordinary men must be
subordinated.

In the case under review the interests of the House of Habsburg needed
a scapegoat; and therefore Benedek had to go out into the wilderness.
He did not go out of his own accord; he was not driven


out; he was tricked out by false pretences, and then pointed at with
the finger of scorn. His widow’s letter, which we have just read, reads
like a quiet, measured echo of Countess Karolyi’s curse, to the various
fulfilments of which we shall come in the course of a few chapters. If
she had less reason than Countess Karolyi to curse Francis Joseph, at
least she had reason enough.




CHAPTER XIV

 Francis Joseph comes to terms with Hungary—His famous interview with
 Francis Deák—“Well, Deák, what does Hungary demand?”—Dualism—The
 objection of the Slavs to Dualism—Coronation at Buda—Andrassy, whom
 he had hanged in effigy, becomes his Prime Minister.


Defeated by the Prussians, Francis Joseph felt that he must come to
terms with the Hungarians. Their sullen and enduring disaffection had
been one of the causes of his discomfiture. They seemed to be looking
on, rather pleased than otherwise, at the spectacle of the Habsburg
Empire in the melting-pot, and there were even Hungarian exiles helping
the enemies of the Habsburgs. It was necessary to win them over, even
at the cost of giving them what they wanted.

The popularity of the Empress helped to make them approachable. It
would be an exaggeration to say that the Hungarians loved the Emperor
because they had first loved the Empress, and loved the Empress because
of her friendship for Nicholas Esterhazy; but that, nevertheless, was
the trend of Hungarian sentiment. Elizabeth was, at all

events, a friend at Court, and since she had been Empress there had
been far more Hungarians about the Court than previously. So now,
after Sadowa, but before his acceptance of the Prussian terms, Francis
Joseph sent for the Hungarian leader, Francis Deák: a stubborn man, but
moderate, and with a statesman’s eye for the practical.

Deák obeyed the summons, and was ushered into a room in which he saw
the Emperor alone, absorbed in thought. After a short silence, a short
dialogue passed between them:—

 “Well, Deák, what does Hungary demand?”

 “No more than she demanded before Sadowa—but no less.”

 “And what have I to do now?”

 “Your Majesty must first make peace, and then give Hungary her rights.”

 “If I give Hungary a constitution at once, will the Hungarian
 Parliament vote me money to carry on this war?”

 “No, your Majesty, the Hungarian Parliament will do nothing of the
 kind.”

For two reasons: because Hungary had no quarrel with Prussia, and
because the hour of Francis Joseph’s embarrassment was the hour in
which it would be easiest to bargain with him. So Francis Joseph
realised that Deák had him at an advantage. He remained silent for a
few moments, and then said simply: “Very well. I suppose it must be as
you insist.”

That was the quiet origin of the present Austro-Hungarian
constitution—the system known as

Dualism. It solved one Austrian problem with a stroke of the pen;
but there were a good many other problems which it left unsolved.
Notably it left unsolved the pressing problem of the Slavs, whom the
Hungarians, no less than the Austrians, regarded as inferior people,
only fit to be oppressed. What the Hungarians had wanted—and now
obtained—was not equal rights all round, but an invitation to go into
partnership with the oppressors, and Magyarise one-half of the Empire
while the Austrians were Germanising the other half. Whereupon there
came a furious protest from a Slav historian:—

 “If it is decided” (wrote Palacky) “to reverse the natural policy
 of Austria; if this Empire, composed of a medley of different
 nationalities, refuses to accord equal rights to all, and organises
 the supremacy of certain races over the others; if the Slavs are to
 be treated as an inferior people, and handed over to two dominant
 peoples as mere material to be governed by them; then Nature will
 assert herself and resume her rights. An inflexible resistance will
 transform hope into despair, and a peaceful into a warlike spirit; and
 there will be a series of conflicts and struggles of which it will be
 impossible to foresee the end. We Slavs existed before Austria; and we
 shall continue to exist after Austria has disappeared.”

That is hardly doubtful. “Imprison a Slav idea,” it has been written,
“in the deepest dungeon of a fortress, and it will blow up the fortress
in order to get out.” But that peril belonged to the future. For the
moment Austria was once more saved; and the Emperor’s coronation in the
cathedral, in 1867, was a magnificent ceremony, every detail of it
fraught with significance to those who knew their history. We have to
picture Francis Joseph, mounted on a snow-white horse, ascending the
ancient hill, and brandishing his sword to the four points of Heaven as
a sign that he would confound his subjects’ enemies, whether they came
from north, south, east, or west; a very different experience truly
from that of the days when Milan had received him and the Empress,
with their heads covered, in stony silence, and the people of Venice
had shunned the Archduke Maximilian and the Archduchess Charlotte as
if they were lepers who had escaped from quarantine. A part of the
ceremony consisted in the presentation to him of a purse of money,
and he ordered its contents to be distributed among the families of
those who had fallen fighting against him in 1849. It was one of those
magnificent gestures which, like kind words, are worth much and cost
little.

So that Francis Joseph, having turned a rebuff to his advantage, was
stronger after Sadowa than before it; and he soon showed his skill in
conciliating individuals by bestowing the office of Prime Minister
upon the Count Andrassy who had been condemned to death, and hanged
in effigy, for his share in the Hungarian rebellion. “I am so glad
I didn’t really hang you,” he said genially, “for, in that case, I
should have deprived myself of the most capable and amiable of my
Prime Ministers”; and he did as good a day’s work when he said that as
when he promoted the old soldiers whom he had caught poaching to be
game-keepers. Moreover, he displayed a similar readiness to let bygones
be bygones and to fight shoulder to shoulder with his old enemies when
Prussia fell out with France in 1870.

That, however, is an intricate story, and demands a separate chapter.




CHAPTER XV

 Attitude of Austria in the Franco-German War—Proposed alliance of
 France, Italy, and Austria against Prussia—General Türr’s interview
 with Francis Joseph—Victor Emmanuel’s conditions—The bargain
 concluded—The French plan of campaign drafted by the Archduke
 Albert—Beust’s letter to Richard Metternich—Reasons why the Austrian
 promises were not fulfilled.


What was Austria doing in 1870? What did she mean to do? What did she
promise to do? Was there a sudden right-about face? And, if so, why?
Those are our problems, and the solution of them is supposed to be
one of the secrets of the political _coulisses_. Doors and windows
have been opened here and there, however, affording peeps at the
mystery; and enough can be seen to make it clear that, just as Austria
astonished the world with her ingratitude in 1854, so, if the full
truth had been made known, she would have astonished the world with her
perfidy in 1870.

There is, of course, an official Austrian version of the events:
that any promises made were contingent upon conditions which were
not fulfilled. There is also an official French version: that France
was lured on, and treacherously left in the lurch. By no means all
the documents bearing on the matter have been made public,—there may
still be surprises in store for us; but future revelations are likely
to throw light upon motives rather than facts. This much, at any rate,
is certain: that an Austrian Archduke—Archduke Albert, the victor of
Custozza—drafted the French plan of campaign against Prussia for the
French War Office, on the assumption that Austria would take part in
that campaign, and that the Austrian pledge of assistance was only
withdrawn at the eleventh hour.

Now let us go back and note the circumstances and atmosphere in which
the plot was laid.

Long before the Franco-Prussian War came, the feeling that it was
bound to come was in the air. It was understood that Prussia, having
fought Austria for the hegemony of Germany, would fight France for
the hegemony of Europe. What the pretext would be was doubtful, but
it was certain that a pretext would be found. The quarrel about
Luxembourg was a symptom of a deeply-seated rivalry. Napoleon foresaw
the peril, and determined to anticipate it by forming an irresistible
Triple Alliance with Italy and Austria for his partners. The story of
that alliance—and of its failure—can be pieced together from the
“indiscretions” of various persons charged with the negotiations.

It was in 1869 that Napoleon began to negotiate with both Victor
Emmanuel and Francis Joseph; and Francis Joseph and Victor Emmanuel,
either simultaneously or soon afterwards, entered into negotiations
with each other. The actual phrase Triple Alliance occurs in this
connection in a letter from Victor Emmanuel to Napoleon, first printed
in the _Giornale d’Italia_. This is the essential passage:—

 “I cannot possibly refuse to give my adherence to the idea of a Triple
 Alliance between France, Austria, and Italy; for the union of these
 Powers will present a strong barrier against unjust pretensions, and
 so help to establish the peace of Europe on a more solid basis.”

Peace, of course, is always the ostensible object of alliances of the
kind. It is very seldom their real object; and it was not in this
case. Victor Emmanuel desired as little as Napoleon to limit it in
that way. What was at the back of Victor Emmanuel’s mind appears from
his negotiations with Francis Joseph—negotiations which he entrusted
to General Türr, a Hungarian officer in the Italian service. General
Türr is one of those who have been indiscreet. He eventually told the
correspondent of a German newspaper what had passed between him and
Francis Joseph, and how, after reviewing the subject in its general
aspects, he went into details from the Italian point of view, and
raised the inevitable question of Italia Irredenta:—

 “I mentioned the Trentino to Francis Joseph, and he interrupted me.

 “‘Ah!’ he objected, ‘it is always I who am expected to give something
 up.’

 “‘Naturally,’ I replied. ‘But it is also clearly understood that your
 Majesty will obtain compensation for the surrender in some other
 quarter.’”

It was a proposal by which Francis Joseph might very well have been
tempted, especially as he had not yet realised that the future of
Austria was in the Balkans. We have already seen him hinting that he
might be able to give up Venetia if he could obtain “an extension of
the Empire in the direction of Germany”; and the same bribe might very
well have induced him to part with the Trentino. Of course, too, the
memory of Sadowa rankled; and, with the French and the Italians for his
allies, he could hardly fail to avenge that humiliation. The chance of
thus playing off his various enemies against each other was not one to
be scoffed at.

He did not scoff at it, but the three-cornered bargain was too
intricate to be settled in a hurry. In particular, Victor Emmanuel was
in no hurry, but was hanging back in order to make conditions with
France as well as with Austria. With him, the position of the Pope was
the obstacle. He wanted the Pope’s temporal dominions in order that
he might fix his capital at Rome; and the Pope was protected in those
temporal dominions by French bayonets. Victor Emmanuel, therefore,
stipulated that the French troops should be withdrawn from Rome.

Napoleon himself was willing enough to withdraw them, but the
Clericals, with the Empress Eugénie at their head, objected. He was
afraid of the Clericals; and so the negotiations hung fire. When he
did recall his troops, because he wanted them in the field, it was too
late. Victor Emmanuel had heard the news of the French defeat at Wörth,
and he uttered the memorable words:—

 “The poor Emperor! I am very sorry for him; but I have had a narrow
 escape.”

Even so, however, Victor Emmanuel would have signed the proposed treaty
if his Ministers would have let him, as he told the German Emperor
frankly when he met him in 1873:—

 “Your Majesty knows, no doubt, that if it had not been for these
 gentlemen (Minghetti and Visconti-Venosta) I should have declared war
 on you in 1870.”

But “these gentlemen” had only held Victor Emmanuel back because they
were themselves held back by the counsels of the Austrian Cabinet. “Too
late!” was their verdict; for they, too, had heard of Wörth. But if
they drew back when Victor Emmanuel was willing to go on, they could
also be reproached for having pledged themselves more deeply than he:
a piece of secret history which those who held the secret have only
recently revealed.

The essential “new fact” is that already set forth in this chapter:
that on the eve of the declaration of war the Archduke Albert,
whose success at Custozza had gained him the reputation of a great
strategist, was sent to Paris by Francis Joseph to concert a joint plan
of campaign against Prussia. He conferred there with Lebœuf, Lebrun,
Frossard, Jarras, and other leading French soldiers, and Lebrun was
sent off to pursue the negotiations at Vienna.

France, it transpired in the course of the discussions, was much
readier to take the field than either of her allies. She claimed to
be able to mobilise in a fortnight, whereas it was admitted that it
would take both Austria and Italy about six weeks to mobilise. The
Archduke proposed, therefore, that the three Powers should begin their
mobilisation simultaneously, but that Austria, instead of declaring war
before she was ready, should affect neutrality while concentrating two
army corps at Pilsen and Olmütz. Lebrun did not altogether like the
arrangement. He smelt a rat, and suspected a disposition on the part
of the Austrians to wait and see which way the cat would jump. Still,
there was something to be said for it; for it could be no advantage to
France that her ally should be crushed while in the act of mobilising.
So a formal agreement between France and Austria was concluded on June
13th, 1870.

That was the occasion on which the Archduke Albert drafted the plan
of campaign: not merely a general scheme of joint action between the
two Powers, but a detailed plan of campaign for the distribution and
employment of the French army. His draft still lies in the archives of
the French War Office, though naturally it is not shown to everyone;
and the plan itself conforms in almost every particular to the plan
which Napoleon adopted. The criticism passed on it by the few military
experts who have since reviewed it is this: that it was an excellent
plan on paper—excellent on the assumption that the French generals
could direct the enemy’s movements as well as their own, but that it
was composed without regard to the actual conditions of the case,
allowing nothing for independent Prussian initiative, and therefore
was, on the whole, a bad plan.

The premature attack on Saarbrücken—the first skirmish of the
war—was undertaken in accordance with the plan. It was a good move
on the assumption that the French were ready to follow it up; but
they were not ready to follow it up, and therefore it was a bad move.
The failure to follow it up was as fatal in the diplomatic as in the
military sense, for it gave point to the Archduke Albert’s report that
the French army did not seem to him as strong as he had been led to
expect. It served, consequently, as a starting-point for hesitations;
but Austria was nevertheless committed, though she drew back from her
commitments; and the Archduke’s visit to Paris and his proceedings
there give special point to Grammont’s grandiloquent words, addressed
on July 15th to the Finance Commission, which he had kept waiting:—

 “If I have kept the members of the Commission waiting, my excuse
 is that I had with me, at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, the
 Austrian Ambassador and the Italian Minister. I am confident that the
 Commission will not require me to say any more.”

Grammont, when he spoke thus, believed, and had reason to believe, that
the proposed Triple Alliance was a real thing. The Austrian contention
is that he had mistaken courteous expressions of sympathy for specific
pledges; but that view can hardly be maintained in the face of the
facts disclosed as to the Archduke Albert’s mission; and other
correspondence which has been published is equally at variance with it.

Only two days after his speech to the Finance Commission, Grammont
wrote a request to Austria for the help promised. He asked that 70,000
or 80,000 Italian troops should be allowed to march through Austria to
Bavaria, and that Austria should herself send 150,000 men to Bohemia.
If that were done, he said, the peace would be signed in Berlin, and
the memories of 1866 would be effaced. But everything depended upon
promptitude:—

 “Never again” (Grammont concluded) “will such an opportunity present
 itself. Never again will you obtain such effective support. Never will
 France be so strong as she is to-day, or better armed and equipped, or
 animated by a more intense enthusiasm.”

Whereto Beust replied in a letter addressed to Count Richard
Metternich, the Austrian Ambassador, in Paris:—

 “Be so good as to assure the Emperor and his Ministers once again
 that, faithful to the engagements defined in the letters exchanged
 by the two Sovereigns at the end of last year, we consider the cause
 of France our own, and shall contribute in every way possible to the
 success of French arms. Our neutrality is only a means towards the
 true end of our policy: the sole means of completing our armaments
 without exposing ourselves to a premature attack on the part of
 Prussia or Russia.”

“Or Russia”: those are the words which hold the key to the position.

Austria, acting in conjunction with France and Italy, had no reason to
be afraid of Prussia; but if Russia should side with Prussia, she might
have a good deal to be afraid of. Count Nigra has specifically stated
that Russia intimated her intention of doing so, and that it was by
that intimation that the Triple Alliance was brought to nothing. Its
collapse, it must be added, was a triumph not only for Prussia, but
also for Hungary. Up to the last hour Austria was willing to take the
risks, but Hungary declined them. An extension of the Austrian Empire
in the direction of Germany was the last thing which the Hungarians
desired, for its result would obviously be to increase German, at
the expense of Magyar, influence in the dual monarchy. Moreover, the
Hungarians, owing to their geographical position, had more to fear than
the Austrians from a Russian invasion.

So Andrássy argued, putting his foot down, and Francis Joseph gave way
to him. Our chapter, therefore, concludes with the ironical spectacle
of Francis Joseph reversing his foreign policy and breaking his word
to a friendly Power in deference to the wishes of a rebel whom he had
hanged in effigy: a spectacle which we may view as a humiliation or a
proof of sagacious flexibility, as we prefer.




CHAPTER XVI

 Austrian expansion in the Balkans—Occupation of Bosnia—Problem of
 Servia Irredenta—Postponement of the day of reckoning—Luck of the
 Habsburgs in public life—Calamities dog them in private life—List of
 Habsburg fatalities during Francis Joseph’s reign.


The four great dates in modern Austrian history are 1859, 1866, 1870,
and 1878—the year of the Russo-Turkish war. The events of those years
gradually made it clear that the future of Austria was not in Italy,
nor in Germany, but in the Balkans: that the real rival of Austria
was Russia, and that the real contest would be for the hegemony,
not of Germany, but of the Slav subjects of the Sultan of Turkey.
Thenceforward the central principle of Austrian foreign policy was
that, for every step which Russia took towards Constantinople, Austria
should take a corresponding step towards Salonica; and its first
tangible expression was the secret treaty which, in 1878, allowed
Austria to occupy Bosnia as the price of her neutrality.

It took an army of 200,000 men, with 480 guns, to pacify that little
strip of land; and the occupation, and the subsequent events in the
peninsula, have brought Austria up against another problem, uncommonly
like the old one which disturbed the beginning of Francis Joseph’s
reign. For the inhabitants of Bosnia are of Servian race; and there are
many other Servians in other parts of the Austrian dominions; and there
is a Kingdom of Servia, full of fiercely patriotic men, from whom the
cry of Servia Irredenta is going up. Austria once despised them, as she
once despised the Italians; but they have proved, like the Italians,
that they can fight; and they demand, as loudly as the Italians, to be
taken seriously. So that Austria, in spite of her losses and gains,
retains her essential character as the Purgatory of the Unredeemed.

It is not a quiet purgatory—perhaps no purgatory is ever quiet—but
a purgatory in which order is only kept by the strenuousness of the
police, and the frequent declaration of martial law. Consequently it
is a purgatory in which startling things may happen at any time; but
speculation as to what will happen there may be deferred until a later
chapter. Probably nothing in particular will happen during Francis
Joseph’s lifetime; but the matter needs nevertheless to be mentioned
here as a part of the spectacle of trouble perpetually dogging Francis
Joseph’s footsteps alike in public and in private life. People speak of
him as a lover of peace; and it is likely enough that he has learnt to
love peace through sheer weariness of war and rumours of war. But it is
none the less true that, whenever he has sought to extend his paternal
sway, he has not brought peace but a sword; and it was mainly with
reference to the events of his reign that Gladstone said: “Nowhere on
the map of Europe can you lay your finger and say: ‘Here Austria has
done good.’” It has already been demonstrated to him, more than once,
that the Servians are of Gladstone’s opinion; and the demonstration
will not become less emphatic with the lapse of time.

We must let that pass, however, though we shall have to return to
it. The day of reckoning is not yet; and it will not come in Francis
Joseph’s life-time if either he or his Ministers can help it. One’s
continual impression, when reading modern Austrian history, is of a
day of reckoning always imminent, yet repeatedly by some happy hazard
adjourned.

In public affairs, that is to say, Francis Joseph has enjoyed, and
continues to enjoy, a luck like that which is said to attend the
British Army and save it from the consequences of its blunders. It is
only in his private life that misfortune has pursued him so closely and
incessantly that, when the news of the assassination of the Empress
Elizabeth was broken to him, he covered his face with his hands and
broke down, exclaiming: “What! Is there no sorrow possible to man which
I am to be spared?”

The time has come to speak of these sorrows; and the black series
began, curiously enough, in the very year in which Francis Joseph
achieved his most signal triumph as a ruler. It was in 1867, as we have
seen, that he pulled his Empire out of the fire after the disaster
of Sadowa, conciliated Hungary, and was crowned with gorgeous and
impressive ceremony in the Buda Cathedral. It was also in 1867 that
his brother, the Archduke Maximilian, was shot for pretending to be
Emperor of Mexico; and that execution was the first of the series of
tragedies which never fail to strike one as due to happen in fulfilment
of Countess Károlyi’s curse. Since we have come to the theme, we must
have the text of that curse before us once again: the curse of a mother
whose son had forfeited his life as a rebel:—

 “=May Heaven and Hell blast his happiness! May his family be
 exterminated! May he be smitten in the persons of those he loves! May
 his life be wrecked, and may his children be brought to ruin!=”

And now let us set beside that curse a newspaper cutting, taken from
one of the Vienna journals at the time of the assassination of the
Empress Elizabeth. It is a bald summary, headed “The Sorrows of the
House of Habsburg,” and it runs thus:—

 “On January 30, 1889, Crown Prince Rudolph took his own life in his
 hunting-box at Meyerling. In May, 1897, Sophie, Duchess d’Alençon, at
 one time the affianced bride of Ludwig II. of Bavaria, was burnt to
 death, in Paris. On June 16, 1867, the Emperor Maximilian of Mexico,
 the Empress’s brother-in-law, was shot by a firing-party at Queretaro.
 His consort, the Belgian Princess Marie-Charlotte, lost her reason,
 and has been, for the last thirty years, under restraint at the
 Château of Bouchout. Archduke William Francis Charles died, in the
 summer of 1894, at Baden near Vienna, from injuries sustained through
 a fall from his horse. Archduke John of Tuscany, who had resigned his
 rank and taken the name of John Orth, disappeared on the high seas off
 the coast of South America. King Ludwig II. of Bavaria, the Empress’s
 cousin, committed suicide on June 13, 1886, drowning himself in the
 Lake of Starnberg in a fit of insanity. Count Ludwig of Trani, Prince
 of the Two Sicilies, husband of Duchess Matilda in Bavaria, and sister
 of the Empress, committed suicide at Zurich. Archduchess Matilda,
 daughter of Field-Marshal Archduke Albert, was burnt to death in her
 father’s palace as the result of a blazing log from the fire having
 set alight to her ball dress. Archduke Ladislas, son of the Archduke
 Joseph, came to grief while hunting by an accidental discharge of his
 gun. And now we learn that the Empress Elizabeth has been murdered.”

A mere list, it will be seen, eloquent in his simplicity: a list which
takes cognisance of nothing except violent deaths, but enumerates ten
such deaths among the near relatives of the Emperor and Empress. It is
a list which we shall have to lengthen by the inclusion of calamities
of other kinds: scandals due to the proceedings of those whom Bismarck
styled “Austria’s idiot Archdukes,” and of more than one Archduchess;
and outrageous marriages, as they generally seemed to Francis Joseph,
on the part of scions of his house—some of them quite close to the
throne—who made light jests about his agreeable relations with
Katti Schratt, and left him alone in his glory, turning their backs
upon the exclusive magnificence which seemed to him essential to the
time-honoured grandeur of the House of Habsburg, and quitting imperial
for theatrical and bourgeois circles, not reluctantly, but with an
eagerness which suggested a hurried flight from a plague-stricken city.

All these catastrophes will have to be reviewed; and we will speak
first of the bitter fate of that young Archduke Maximilian, who, at the
very time when his brother was adding a kingdom to an Empire in Europe,
was led out into the Square of Queretaro and shot for pretending to be
an Emperor in Mexico.




CHAPTER XVII

 Francis Joseph’s brother Maximilian—Invited to be Emperor of
 Mexico—Hesitates, but consents to please his wife—Resignation of his
 rights as a Habsburg—The _Pacte de Famille_ and the quarrel about
 it—The compromise—The last meeting of the brothers—Maximilian’s
 melancholy—He composes poetry—He receives the benediction of the
 Pope and departs for his Empire.


The tragic circumstances of the death of the Emperor Maximilian—pulled
off his imperial pinnacle to be shot to death in a public square—have
encircled his memory with a halo to which the bald facts of his case
do not entitle him. The word “martyr” has even been used in the
connection; and a letter has been published in which his wife, quoting
Scripture, compares him to “the Good Shepherd who lays down his life
for the sheep.” He was, in truth, if metaphor be wanted, merely the
titular leader of a pack of wolves who came to a violent end in
conflict with another pack of wolves; and, if metaphor be dropped, the
best that can be said for him is that he was a weak and vain man who
allowed himself to be fooled into undertaking a task for which he had
no qualifications except an agreeable manner and an historic name.

If an ornamental Emperor had been all that Mexico wanted, Maximilian
might have filled the post and shone in it; but he was grossly unfit,
both intellectually and temperamentally, to be an Emperor of any other
kind. He seems to have felt that, and to have tried to turn back
before even setting his hand to the plough; but various considerations
impelled him to the hopeless enterprise. He was jealous of Francis
Joseph, who had snubbed him in Italy, and made his position in Austria
unpleasant. His wife, the Archduchess Charlotte, daughter of the King
of the Belgians, was ambitious, and urged him on. Napoleon, and the
Mexican exiles of the clerical party, flattered him; and he allowed
himself to be made their tool. He did not understand that Napoleon
himself had only interfered in Mexico as the tool of unscrupulous
cosmopolitan financiers—notably the notorious Baron Jecker, who had
bribed de Morny—and was now chiefly anxious to build a golden bridge
over which he could withdraw from an untenable position.

We have met Maximilian already as Francis Joseph’s Viceroy in Lombardy
and Venetia. We have seen the Italians turning their backs on him,
and leaving him and the Archduchess to stand alone, like lepers, in
the Square of Saint Mark at Venice; and we have seen Francis Joseph
dismissing him from his governorship, because, trying to be sympathetic
towards the Italians, he did not govern with a sufficiently high hand.
He felt his disgrace, and retired to sulk on his estate, at Miramar,
on the Adriatic, where, like so many of the Austrian Arch-dukes, he
abandoned himself to the composition of poetry and political pamphlets.
He was far more a dreamer than a man of action; but action—or, at
least, the attempt at action—was the inevitable outcome of his dreams.
The Archduchess Charlotte, being vain and ambitious, saw to that.

Legend—for she has passed into legend, though she is still
alive—represents Charlotte as Maximilian’s superior in energy and
capacity,—the sort of woman who is resolved to keep her husband up
to the mark and make a man of him; but it is hard to see upon what
evidence that estimate of her rests. Assuredly, she was more anxious
to be an Empress than Maximilian was to be an Emperor; but that proves
nothing. She merely egged her husband on in the spirit in which the
wife of a city magnate urges her husband to accept a knighthood which
he does not particularly want. She foresaw the glory; she did not
foresee the responsibilities and the danger. When she did perceive the
danger it frightened her, quite literally, out of her wits whereas
Maximilian, however incompetent, at least contrived to be calm and
dignified in the extreme hour when the penalty of his error was
exacted. Then, though hardly till then, he showed himself worthy of the
great House which, when it does not defy appearances, keeps them up
with admirable magnificence.

[Illustration: MAXIMILIAN, EMPEROR OF MEXICO.]

There is no need to relate the story of his many interviews with
the Mexican delegates who, at Napoleon’s instance, lured him from
his retreat at Miramar. It is merely, in brief, the story of
Maximilian’s “I dare not” overcome by Charlotte’s “I would.” In
the first place, he said that he would go to Mexico if it were the
unanimous wish of the Mexicans that he should do so, but not otherwise.
In the second place, he accepted ridiculously inadequate evidence of
Mexican unanimity. The pressure of Charlotte, who appears to have
desired an Imperial crown as ardently as humbler women desire gorgeous
hats, had evidently intervened. So Maximilian learnt Spanish, and
toured Europe, to ascertain what potentates thought of his enterprise,
and concluded a treaty with Napoleon, and entered into negotiations
with Francis Joseph with regard to his future status as a Habsburg.

The text of his Treaty with Napoleon is sufficient proof of
Maximilian’s knowledge that he was called to the throne by a faction,
and not by a nation. He stipulated for the support of French bayonets,
which he obviously would not have needed if the Mexicans had been
unanimous in their desire that he should rule over them: a fact which
it will be important to bear in mind when the question whether he
should be regarded as a usurper or a rightful sovereign, dethroned by
murderous rebels, comes to be considered. Meanwhile, his negotiations
with his brother resulted in something uncommonly like a family
quarrel. It was a question there of the text of the Family Compact
which he should be required to sign, before he could be allowed to set
out for Mexico with his brother’s blessing.

They were not brothers between whom there had latterly been any
superfluity of affection. On the contrary, Maximilian had been making
himself popular at Francis Joseph’s expense in Austria as well as
Italy. The citizens who cried “Hurrah for Maximilian!” were taken to
mean “Down with Francis Joseph!”; and if the Crown Prince Rudolph, who
was a delicate child, had died, Maximilian would have been Francis
Joseph’s heir. It suited Francis Joseph perfectly, therefore, that
Maximilian’s name should be erased from the list of members of the
royal family. The Family Compact was drafted so as to erase it,
depriving Maximilian of all his rights as an agnate of the House of
Habsburg; and the matter was debated with great heat and violence—to
the amazement of the Mexican delegates, who protested that what they
required was a permanent Emperor, not an Emperor leased to them for a
term of years.

Never, said Maximilian, would he put his signature to that degrading
document. Very well, replied Francis Joseph. Maximilian could sign it
or leave it unsigned as he preferred; but, if he did not sign it, then
he would not receive the sanction of his sovereign to go to Mexico. In
that case, rejoined Maximilian, he should dispense with his sovereign’s
sanction, and start from Antwerp on a French boat. The answer to that,
retorted Francis Joseph, would be a message to the Austrian Parliament,
charging him with disloyalty, and formally depriving him of all the
rights which he now declined to renounce.

So the domestic battle raged: and various people were dragged into
it. Maximilian complained to his mother, who took his side; but the
Archduchess Sophia, once so influential, could obtain no concession
from the Emperor, and left his cabinet, slamming the door behind her.
Maximilian threatened to appeal to the Pope; and the Archduchess
Charlotte appealed to Napoleon, who sent General Frossard to Vienna
with an autograph letter for Francis Joseph. Then Charlotte went to
Vienna, saw Francis Joseph, herself, and arranged something which could
be called a compromise. The Pact must be signed—there could be no
question of that; but Francis Joseph consented to express his regret
for the necessity which compelled him to insist upon its signature, and
proposed that the ceremony should take place at Miramar, “where the
Emperor of Austria would only be the guest of the Emperor of Mexico.”
Those were the terms which Maximilian and Charlotte accepted.

Maximilian did not really care, and made no secret of his indifference.
The dream of Empire had dazzled him; but the prospect of the
realisation of that dream alarmed him. While his wife rushed to and
fro, sending off and receiving telegrams, negotiating with feverish
excitement, he, on his part, sat at Miramar, writing poetry which gave
eloquent utterance to his apprehensions and regrets:—

    What! Must I quit my fatherland for ever,—
      The country where my first delights were seen?
    Those sacred ties am I condemned to sever,
      Which link the present with the might-have-been?

And so on and so forth through six stanzas, in which Maximilian
expresses deep disdain for sceptres and crowns and palaces, and a
marked preference for the tranquil paths of literature, science, and
art. It is not a mood in which a man enters with much prospect of
success upon such an enterprise as that of founding a European Empire
in Central America, in the face of opposition from blood-thirsty
Republicans; and it is to be noted that what Maximilian said to himself
in verse he also said to his intimates in prose:—

 “For my own part,” he is reported to have told one of them, “if anyone
 came and told me that the negotiations had been broken off, I should
 lock myself up in my room and dance with joy. But Charlotte...?”

It is his admission that he was accepting the Empire, as men profess to
accept knighthoods, for his wife’s sake, rather than his own. Charlotte
had made up her mind that the Imperial crown would suit her, and she
meant to wear it. She stirred Maximilian up, if not to enthusiasm, at
least to the point of saying:—

 “The establishment of an Empire in Mexico is an enterprise which may
 possibly fail; but the experiment is one worth trying.”

So the die was cast; and Francis Joseph fulfilled his promise with
the affability which distinguishes him when he has got his own way
in essentials. He repaired to Miramar with Archdukes, Ministers,
Chancellors, Vice-Chancellors, Chamberlains, Vice-Chamberlains,
Aides-de-camp, Field-Marshals, Governors, Lieutenant-Governors—all the
_dramatis personæ_ of ceremony. After the Pact had been signed, the
lunch was served; and then the two Emperors parted in the dignified
manner of Emperors, neither embracing nor shaking hands, but merely
exchanging military salutes—albeit, it is said, with the red eyes of
men who found it difficult to pay their tribute to appearances, and
whose hearts harboured dark forebodings.

Maximilian’s heart, at all events, harboured them. At the very time
when the Mexican flag was flying from the topmost tower of Miramar,
his emotions proved too much for him, and he broke down. His emotions
prevented him from appearing at the lunch which he gave to his Mexican
supporters; and the Empress had to preside at it in his place, while
he paced moodily up and down an arbour in the remotest corner of the
garden. A congratulatory telegram from Napoleon which Charlotte brought
to him was the cause of a nervous explosion. “I forbid you to speak to
me of Mexico,” he snapped out; and the date of his departure had to be
postponed, to give him time to recover his composure. Even so, he wept
as the coast of Austria sank out of sight, first weeping in public on
the deck, and then retiring to his cabin to weep unobserved. Assuredly
Maximilian had his full share—if not more than his full share—of that
neurosis which the Habsburgs inherit.

And so, in the first instance, to Rome, where Pius IX. bestowed a
benediction on his enterprise: a benediction which has an ominous ring
in the ears of those who read it in the light of subsequent events:—

 “Behold the Lamb of God, who taketh away the sins of the world! It is
 through Him that Kings reign and govern. It is through Him that Kings
 do justice; and if He sometimes permits Kings to pass through sore
 trials, He is the source of their power.

 “I recommend to you in His name the happiness of the Catholic peoples
 who are confided to you. Great are the rights of peoples, and they
 should be satisfied, but greater and far more sacred are the rights of
 the Church, the immaculate bride of Jesus Christ, who has redeemed us
 with His precious blood.”

An exhortation, it will be observed, to Maximilian to go to Mexico as
the elect, not of the nation, but of the clericals: those clericals
whose prevailing principle of conduct was that money ought to be taken
away from laymen and given to clergymen; who had introduced ridiculous
laws to the effect that no one must work on a Sunday without the
permission of a priest, and that, when the Host was carried through the
streets, everyone must kneel, and remain kneeling until the clerical
procession was out of sight, and the tinkling of the clerical bell
could no longer be heard. A prediction, further, that the clerical
policy which the Pope pressed upon the Emperor might get the Emperor
into trouble; so that Maximilian went to his mission with shaky nerves,
and in the spirit of a missionary who fears that his cross will prove
too heavy for him.

Charlotte, it seems, kept up his spirits during the voyage. She was
going to be an Empress—that was enough for her. She knew nothing
about Mexico, except that El Dorado lay thereabouts—nothing of the
imperial status, except that it was outwardly splendid. She believed
the people who told her that she was going to lie in a bed of roses in
a gold mine. The things to which she looked forward were the banquets,
the levées, the drawing-rooms, and the Court balls. Her talk—and
Maximilian’s talk also when she launched him on the subject—was of
rules of precedence, the creation of new Orders of Nobility, and new
and lucrative offices for the benefit of personal friends. In short, as
Emmanuel Domenech puts it in his History of Mexico:—

 “One saw renewed on the _Novara_ the story of the Frenchman who,
 having decided to open up trade with the Redskins of North America,
 stocked his shop with ostrich feathers, the most delicate linen of
 Belfast, and a number of costly porcelain tea-services.”

But the reality was widely different from the dreams; and disillusion
followed quickly. Maximilian, like Charlotte, was puffed up with pride.
He was even proud at Charlotte’s expense, and told her that, now
that he was an Emperor, it would be unbecoming for her to enter his
presence, without first asking permission, unless he sent for her; but
that regulation was of no service to him in the practical conduct of
Mexican affairs. His actual business as an Emperor consisted, and had
to consist, in the waging of a civil war. So long as he had Bazaine
and the French Army of Occupation to help him, he was able to wage his
civil war successfully; but it was not long before Napoleon heard the
voice of the President of the United States drawing his attention to
the Monroe doctrine. Breaking his word to Maximilian, he withdrew his
troops; and, after that, Maximilian’s position was hopeless.

So that we see misfortune and peril assailing the two Emperors of the
House of Habsburg simultaneously: Maximilian fighting for his throne
in every corner of his Empire in the very year in which Francis Joseph
had to fight for his throne at Sadowa and Custozza. Only there was an
important difference between the two cases. Francis Joseph’s enemies
wished him no particular harm. They had certain affairs of honour and
precedence to settle with him, and they meant to settle them; but, when
those affairs were settled, they meant to shake hands and be friends.
They did not thirst for his blood, but regarded his position as rather
a convenience to Europe than otherwise, provided that he did not
presume on it. He might suffer, but he would be left strong, and—above
all—safe.

His brother Maximilian, on the contrary, was in personal peril, and
knew it. Civil wars in Mexico were waged in a very different spirit
from dynastic wars in Europe. There had once before been an Emperor
of Mexico—the adventurer Iturbide—and he had been shot. There was
a large party in Mexico—the party of Benito Juarez and Porfirio
Diaz—which refused to recognise Maximilian, declaring that he was
only pretending to be an Emperor, and that the real Government of the
country was still Republican. The French had never quite subdued
that party; and it began to lift its head again as fast as the French
retired. If Maximilian was a nervous man, he had every reason to feel
frightened.

He was a nervous man, and he did feel frightened. Charlotte was a
nervous woman, and she was frightened too. It does not seem to have
occurred to either of them that, if they could not maintain themselves
in Mexico without French bayonets, they had no business there—ideas
of that sort do not occur to Habsburgs who have tasted power: their
accumulated pride—which is their substitute for strength—forbids. The
idea was rather that, if they could not maintain themselves without
French bayonets, those bayonets must be supplied; and it was agreed
that Charlotte should go to Europe and lay that view of the matter
before the Emperor of the French.

Her journey, in the year of Sadowa, was the occasion of the first of
those blows which have since fallen, almost without cessation, on
Francis Joseph’s head.




CHAPTER XVIII

 Vanity and nervousness of the Empress Charlotte—Evil omens which
 frightened—Her journey to Europe to seek help for Maximilian—Her
 cold reception by Napoleon III.—Symptoms of approaching insanity—Her
 madness—Maximilian abandoned by the French—Attacked by the
 Republicans—Captured at Queretaro—Francis Joseph’s vain attempt to
 save him—His trial and execution.


It must be repeated that the common view of the Empress Charlotte as
a valiant woman who took matters into her own hands when the Emperor
Maximilian was timorous and hesitating cannot stand. She was, in the
first place, a vain woman who took purely frivolous views of Imperial
responsibilities; in the second place, a woman who lost her mental
balance when she discovered that the position for which she had longed
had its duties as well as its pleasures, and its perils as well as its
privileges.

The legend has grown up that she came to Europe to plead for the life
of a husband who was in the hands of his enemies, and lost her reason
in despair at Napoleon’s decision to leave him to his fate; but that
is not the case. At the time when she started for Europe, Maximilian
was still free to walk out of Mexico at any moment; and her purpose
in coming to Europe was to ask Napoleon for more soldiers to keep him
there against the will of the majority of the Mexican people. Moreover,
the first signs of insanity had already shown themselves before her
embarkation at Puebla, where, no one could imagine why, she woke up the
whole of her escort in the middle of the night and insisted upon their
all going with her to call upon the Prefect. That assuredly was the
action of a woman whose wits were already taking flight through terror!

It used to be whispered that her Mexican enemies tried to poison her,
and that the drug, though it failed to kill, drove her mad; but that
is another story unsupported by any shred of evidence. Charlotte was
simply scared; one needs—and one can find—no other explanation.
Warnings to which she attached no importance at the time now rang like
alarm-bells in her ear. There was the warning of Louis-Philippe’s
consort, Queen Marie-Amélie, who was Charlotte’s grandmother. “They
will be assassinated,” Marie-Amélie had said, and repeated daily to her
little Court, when she heard of her granddaughter’s adventure. There
was the warning of the Archduchess Sophia. “Remember, my son,” she had
said to Maximilian—forgetting what she had previously said to the
Emperor Ferdinand—when bidding him farewell, “one does not descend
from a throne except to mount a scaffold.”

Charlotte remembered these things, and remembered also the stories
she had heard of the savage temper of the Mexicans: Indians and
half-breeds who had no bowels of compassion, but were capable of
torture as well as murder. Those memories, and the apprehensions
roused by them, were so many haunting phantoms; and the news which
Charlotte heard when she landed at St. Nazaire, and the circumstances
of her reception at Paris, were like a further series of evil omens.
At Saint-Nazaire she was told of the catastrophe of Sadowa; and at
Saint-Lazare she found no representative of the French Court awaiting
her on the platform—an omission not the less painful because
it was due to a misunderstanding. There would have been no such
misunderstanding if Napoleon had not been indifferent. An Empress whose
regard Napoleon valued would not have been left to drive to the Grand
Hotel and ask for a bed in that great caravanserai.

The Empress Eugénie, hearing of her arrival, hurried to see her at
the Grand Hotel, and the two women cried together. General Castelnau,
who was in attendance on the Empress, tells us that when she left
Charlotte’s apartment her eyes were red. The interview with Napoleon
himself followed; but, though he kissed Charlotte’s hand with proper
gallantry, he would do nothing for her. He was “gentle but obstinate,”
as his mother, Queen Hortense, had always declared him to be. When
Charlotte knelt at his feet, sobbing and supplicating, he was moved
to kind words, but he would make no promises. The Mexican expedition,
he pointed out, had become unpopular in France. It had already cost
him too much money and too many men. He must get out of it—as he
probably had always meant to do from the hour at which he had inveigled
Maximilian and Charlotte into their false position:—

“Then we shall abdicate,” said Charlotte, believing that this menace
would intimidate the Emperor.

“Yes, I suppose you had better abdicate,” was Napoleon’s polite reply.

That was all she could get out of him; and she got still less out of
his Ministers. One of these, indeed, begged her to grant him permission
to retire, “lest your Majesty’s eloquence should induce me to make
promises incompatible with my position as a Cabinet Minister.” It
was Maximilian’s sentence of death if he still insisted upon obeying
his mother’s injunction: never to descend from his throne unless
pulled off it to mount a scaffold. Charlotte, in full flight from her
terror, hurried to her old home at Miramar; and Miramar was only a
halting-place on the road to Rome.

What comfort she expected to find at Rome it might be difficult
to say. The Pope, so far as his temporal power went, was the mere
creature of Napoleon; even more dependent on the support of Napoleon’s
bayonets than Maximilian himself. Perhaps Charlotte expected him
to intercede with Napoleon; perhaps she expected him to work a
miracle—she was quite mad enough by this time to take the pastoral
staff for a magician’s wand. At Miramar, as at Puebla, her proceedings
betokened irresponsible frivolity. She paused there to give a _fête_
in celebration of the anniversary of Mexican independence: that
independence for which the Mexicans were, at that very hour, fighting
against her husband. She told the President of the Trieste Chamber of
Commerce that Maximilian might, in the course of the next year, “take a
little trip to Europe,” in which case he would not fail to pay a visit
to Trieste. Francis Joseph sent his brother, the Archduke Louis Victor,
to see her there; but sympathy was all that he could offer. He lay at
the proud foot of the Prussian conqueror, and was helpless.

So Charlotte at last went on to Rome, and there the crisis came. There
was no lack of ceremony, no lack of consideration. The Pope received
her in a manner befitting her rank, and went to her hotel to return her
visit. She went to see him again, and then, in a Vatican ante-chamber,
broke out into a violence of word and action which permitted of no
doubt as to her mental state, though the attempt was made to mask the
truth:—

 “The words ‘mental alienation,’” wrote an official, “have been
 pronounced. The truth is that the Empress is in a state of excitement
 which indicates serious nervous agitation, but does not preclude the
 exercise of her reasoning faculties. This excitement is specially
 remarked whenever Mexico and the Mexicans are mentioned in her
 presence.”

 [Illustration: CHARLOTTE, WIFE OF MAXIMILIAN, EMPEROR OF MEXICO.]

 “The crisis demands rest—mental as well as bodily; and the Pope
 has, for that reason, assigned the Empress an apartment in the
 Vatican, close to his own, while awaiting the arrival of the Comte de
 Flandre, who will conduct his august sister to Miramar.”

But rest was of no avail. Charlotte was not only mad, but a monomaniac.
She had the delusion that there was a conspiracy to poison her; she was
insisting upon trying all her food on the cat before she would touch
it. A telegram had to be sent to Maximilian:—

 “Her Majesty the Empress Charlotte was seized, on October 4th, at
 Rome, by a cerebral congestion of the gravest character. The august
 Princess has been taken back to Miramar.”

That was the end of Charlotte’s tragical odyssey; and Maximilian’s
struggle was also nearing its close. No one wanted to prevent him from
abdicating, and one may fairly say that nothing but Habsburg pride
stood in the way of his abdication. He had all that pride without any
of the strength of character which ought to go with it. It was the
creed of the family—the creed, in particular, as we have seen, of
the Archduchess Sophia—that a Habsburg might yield his throne of his
own free will to another Habsburg, but must on no account resign it
for the paltry reason that his people did not want him to rule over
them. Maximilian decided to be true to the tradition—to throw himself
into the arms of the Clericals, and with their help, and in conformity
with the simple Papal doctrine that the rights of the Church were more
sacred than the rights of peoples, make a fight for it.

So long as the French were with him, he could not do everything that
the Clericals would have liked him to do; for France, while remaining
Catholic, had ceased to be ultramontane and obscurantist. Now he could
embrace them, and even restore the Inquisition if he chose—on the one
condition that he defeated the Republicans. On the day of the departure
of the French from the city of Mexico he shut himself up in his Palace,
with all the blinds drawn, peeping out from behind the blinds to
watch them march away, while remaining himself unseen. When the last
of them had gone, he reopened the blinds and the windows, exclaiming
dramatically:

“Now at last I am free!”

Free to do what?

Free to give orders that if Benito Juarez and certain other Republican
leaders were caught in arms against him, a court-martial should
sentence them to be shot; but not free to carry out his threat, for the
order never reached General Miramon, to whom it was addressed, but fell
into the hands of Juarez himself, to be produced against Maximilian at
his own trial by court-martial. Free to march, with his Clerical host,
into Queretaro, but not free to get out again; for it was on Queretaro
that Juarez, and Diaz, and Escobedo, and Corona, and Regules, and Riva
Palacio converged to take him prisoner, and bring him to judgment in
the Theatre of Iturbide—that name of evil omen—on the charge of
pretending to be an Emperor.

It all happened quickly—almost in the twinkling of an eye. The date
of the departure of the last French detachment was February 5th, 1867;
and it was on the following day that Maximilian dispatched his letter
instructing Miramon to condemn Juarez to death. On February 13th,
he left the city of Mexico, and on February 17 he entered Queretaro
amid the acclamations of the Clerical inhabitants. On February 26th
he decreed a forced loan, and actually got the money; but on March
2nd his enemies began to arrive. Roughly speaking, there were 40,000
Republicans against 7,000 Imperialists; and, after sustaining a siege
of rather more than two months’ duration, Maximilian had to surrender
in the early morning of May 15th.

The news came to Europe. A Habsburg—the brother of the head of the
House of Habsburg—was in the hands of Indians and half-breeds, who
threatened to treat him as he himself had threatened to treat their
leaders, under that notorious Black Decree which his own hand had
signed. It was an urgent question for Francis Joseph what steps, if
any, he should take in order to try to save his brother’s life.

He could have made excuses to himself if he had decided to take no
steps at all; for he, no less than the Mexicans, had his grievances
against Maximilian. At a time when Francis Joseph seemed to have been
compromised by disaster, Maximilian had been cheered in the streets
of Vienna. There had been a party in Vienna which had entertained the
idea of putting Maximilian on Francis Joseph’s throne. Maximilian
had himself spoken imprudent words on that occasion; and the
imprudent words had been reported. Moreover, even after Maximilian’s
elevation to the throne of Mexico there had been stormy diplomatic
passages-at-arms between the brothers.

Maximilian had resented Francis Joseph’s allusion, in his speech at
the opening of the Reichsrath, to his resignation of his Austrian
privileges, and had addressed an indignant protest to his diplomatic
representative at Vienna: a protest in which he set forth that
he had consulted the most eminent jurists of the day about the
Family Compact which he had been induced to sign, and that they had
unanimously advised him to treat it as null and void. The protest
had been published in the Viennese newspapers, but had not been
formally presented at the Austrian Foreign Office. The Austrian
Foreign Minister, taking unofficial cognisance of it, had unofficially
intimated that if it were so presented, the Mexican Minister would
be conducted to the frontier. It would have been easy, therefore,
for Francis Joseph to excuse himself for bearing malice and leaving
Maximilian to his fate.

He bore no malice, and he did what he could. The Austrian Minister at
Washington was instantly instructed to solicit the intercession of the
Government of the United States. As a guarantee that, if Maximilian
were spared, he would definitely abandon his ambitions, it was proposed
to offer formally to restore him to his old status as a Habsburg, and
a family council was convoked for that purpose. One of the Archdukes
present raised objections, recalling Maximilian’s ambitions as an
Austrian Pretender, and predicting trouble; but Francis Joseph would
not listen. “That question,” he said, “is not before us. Our only
question is: how to save human life.”

But Maximilian’s life was not to be saved. The man who had him in his
power was a man whose life he had threatened. Juarez might play with
Maximilian as a cat with a mouse, but he would not let go. He used fine
phrases about it—“high considerations of justice,” and the like; he
most punctiliously accorded Maximilian the benefit of all the forms
of law. But the law was against Maximilian; there was no way through
that Black Decree which he himself had promulgated. Legally and morally
alike, Juarez had as good a title to execute him as he had ever had
to execute Juarez; and Juarez stood upon his rights. He laughed—or
rather the President of the court-martial laughed on his behalf—at
Maximilian’s naïve invocation of “the immunities and privileges which
appertain in all circumstances to an Austrian Archduke.” The Indians
and half-breeds knew nothing and cared nothing for those privileges and
immunities. The Austrian Archduke had pretended to be their Emperor,
and had killed some of them and threatened to kill others, and for
those offences he should be shot. They shot him in the early morning of
June 19th, 1867. For Charlotte, who still had occasional glimmerings of
sanity, he was “the good Shepherd who gave his life for the sheep”; but
for his Mexican subjects he was merely the foreigner who had presumed
to come among them and pretend to be an Emperor.

Such was the first of the long series of tragedies which were to
punctuate Francis Joseph’s personal life; and there is a moving irony
in the fact of its occurrence in the very year of his first great
political triumph. One can imagine that the shame of it was an even
heavier blow to him than the sorrow. A Habsburg, close to the Habsburg
throne, tried like a criminal and shot like a dog by Indians and
half-breeds; the head of the House of Habsburg unable to help him, and
curtly told, almost without the formula of politeness, that his attempt
to interfere was an outrage on “high considerations of justice”! Truly
Francis Joseph must have felt in that hour that the curse of Countess
Karolyi, called forth because he too had tried his enemies like
criminals and shot them like dogs, had not been unavailing.




CHAPTER XIX

 Habsburgs and Wittelsbachs—Which is the madder House?—Insanity
 of the Empress Elizabeth’s cousin, Ludwig II. of Bavaria—His
 eccentricities—His tragic death—Grief of the Empress—Suicide of
 Elizabeth’s brother-in-law, the Comte de Trani—Tragic death of the
 Archduchess Elizabeth.


Archduke Maximilian was dead, and Francis Joseph had to humble himself
to the Indians and half-breeds, and beg their permission to fetch his
brother’s body to Europe and bury it in the tombs of the Habsburgs.
Archduchess Charlotte was stark, staring mad, and all hope of the
restoration of her reason had been abandoned. There was to be no
other tragedy quite so tragic, or quite so intimate, until that of
Meyerling, to which we shall quickly come; but there were intervening
tragedies, tragic and intimate enough, which hit Francis Joseph through
his cousins of Bavaria. Notably there was the tragedy of Elizabeth’s
cousin—who was also Francis Joseph’s cousin—King Ludwig II.

It is a question sometimes debated by the members of the two
families, whether the Wittelsbachs are madder than the Habsburgs, or
the Habsburgs madder than the Wittelsbachs. According to Countess
Marie Larisch, who speaks for the Wittelsbachs, the difference is
that “with the Habsburgs insanity usually shows itself in depravity,
self-effacement, and common marriages, while, in the case of the
Wittelsbachs, it transforms the sufferer into a romantic being who
is quite above the banalities of everyday life, but who occasionally
deteriorates and becomes a gross feeder”; but that is not quite a
true antithesis. Common marriages, as Countess Marie calls them—and
the marriage of her own father, the brother of the Empress Elizabeth,
to the actress, Henrietta Mendel, falls in the category—are not
necessarily unromantic; and Wittelsbachs, as well as Habsburgs, have
contracted them. Still, as an introduction to the story of the career
of Ludwig II., the contrast is not without its point. Ludwig was as
mad as a hatter; and he has also been spoken of as “the last of the
Romantics”—the last, at all events, of the Romantics who have sat on
thrones.

The beginning of his tragedy was the breaking off of his engagement to
the Empress Elizabeth’s sister, Sophie; and the ease with which he was
manœuvred out of that engagement, as the result of a Court intrigue,
is, in itself, a sufficient proof that his intelligence was none too
strong. It was represented to him, quite untruly, that his affianced
bride had been flirting with his Master of the Horse, Count Holnstein.
The Count and the Princess were inveigled into being photographed
together; and this testimony of “the camera which cannot lie” was
brought to Ludwig’s notice. There was also some story of a ring which
Count Holnstein was observed to be wearing, and which was believed to
have been given him by the Princess, though, as a matter of fact, it
had been given to him by an actress who had stolen it from the Princess.

That was the bait; and Ludwig walked into the trap and took it. He
made no inquiries, and asked for no explanations. Instead of doing
so, he made unsatisfactory excuses for postponing his wedding-day;
and when Duke Maximilian charged him with trifling with his affianced
bride’s affections, he lost his temper, smashed Sophie’s bust, tore
up Sophie’s portraits, and declared that Sophie was welcome to marry
anyone she liked provided that she did not marry him. So all was over,
and they were both unhappy; and it does not seem that Sophie found
perfect bliss in her subsequent union to the Duc d’Alençon. The day
came when Sophie clamoured for a divorce: not because she had any
tangible grievances, but because she had conceived the idea that she
would like to marry a doctor in practice at Munich, and devote herself
to philanthropic activities. She had to be kept under restraint for
a season at a private asylum at Graetz, already referred to as “the
rendezvous of princes,” because of the large number of august lunatics
whom it harboured: among others, the Duchess of Augustenburg, Pedro
of Saxe-Coburg, whose mania was a dread of poison, and Charles of
Lichtenstein, who had gone mad on account of his failure to meet the
woman of his dreams.

And Ludwig, meanwhile, was so mad that there could be no mistake
about his madness, though it was a kind of madness which gained him,
as has been said, the title of the Last of the Romantics. He lived,
like William Beckford, in a solitude of fantastic splendour. He had
the table laid, in an empty banqueting hall, for ghostly guests, and
fancied that he was entertaining Marie-Antoinette, and Catherine of
Russia, and Hamlet, and Julius Cæsar. He caused command performances
of the best operas to be given to himself alone in an empty theatre.
He sailed about the Starnberg Lake in a gondola, towed by a swan. He
caused eminent actors to recite to him while he ate, and he went on
eating, and kept them reciting, until five o’clock in the morning. He
outraged the feelings of the Court by bestowing titles of nobility on
his tailor and his barber; and the end of it all was that keepers took
the place of courtiers, and a Regent was appointed.

[Illustration: KING LUDWIG II. OF BAVARIA]

The story goes that Elizabeth refused to believe that he was mad, and,
after vainly imploring Francis Joseph to insist upon his release,
engaged in a plot to rescue him. The King was to dive into the lake,
and swim across it, and a carriage, with swift horses, ready harnessed,
was to be waiting to carry him far away from his keepers to a place
of safety. It sounds like a story built on a foundation of careless
emotional talk; and the end, at any rate, came differently, and
somewhat mysteriously. Ludwig persuaded his doctor to send the keepers
away, declaring that their presence worried him; and the doctor was
a muscular man who believed that he could trust himself to cope with
any emergency. Strong as he was, however, Ludwig was still stronger;
and when the keepers returned, they found that both the King and the
physician had been drowned, after a struggle, of which there was
abundant evidence. Whether the King had murdered his physician, in
order that he might be free to escape, or the physician had perished in
attempting to frustrate the King’s attempt at suicide, remains to this
hour uncertain.

There is a further story to the effect that the Empress Elizabeth saw
the tragedy in a dream, and awoke, screaming, to learn that her dream
was a true vision; but though the dream itself is well accredited, one
may suspect that legend has taken a liberty with the date. There is
something characteristic, however, and therefore probably true, in the
report of the words which the Empress is declared to have spoken as she
bent over her cousin’s corpse:

 “Leave the King here! Leave him in his mortuary chapel! He is not
 dead. He is only pretending to be dead, in order that he may be left
 in peace, and that no one may be able to torture him any more.”

The conception of life as a torture which must be stoically endured
had, by that time, grown upon the Empress; and there were still other
trials in store for her, which were to confirm it, even before the
tragic day on which her sister was to meet her death in the fire at the
Bazaar de la Charité at Paris. There was to be another suicide in the
family, that of the Comte de Trani, at Geneva. The Archduke Joseph’s
son, Archduke Ladislas, was to be killed, accidentally, while shooting.
The Archduchess Elizabeth, daughter of the Archduke Albert, and
granddaughter of the Archduke Charles, who had fought so well against
Napoleon, was to perish in a still more tragic accident.

She was in her ball-dress of lace and muslin, leaning out of one of
the windows at Schönnbrunn, smoking a cigarette. It was a forbidden
pleasure; and hearing her father’s footstep, she made haste to hide the
cigarette, first covering it with her hand, and placing it behind her.
The Archduke stopped to talk to her, and a moment later the ball-dress
was in flames. He could not reach her, and so could do nothing to help
her. She ran, shrieking, down the corridor, and the draught fanned the
flames. Before they could be extinguished, she was burnt almost to
death; and though they placed her in a bath of oil, and took her to
Vienna, the best physicians could do nothing for her, and she died in
agony a few days later.

There we have another example of the poignant sorrows to which Francis
Joseph has been condemned through the sufferings of members of his
family; and now we come to the greatest tragedy of all—the tragedy
which was to deprive him of his only son, the Crown Prince Rudolph.




CHAPTER XX

 The Crown Prince Rudolph—His quarrel with the German Emperor—His
 affability and his hauteur—A spoiled child—His search for
 a wife—Marriage to Princess Stéphanie—Disappointment and
 disillusion—Stéphanie’s book—“A long, long, terrible night has gone
 by for me”—Mary Vetsera and her family—How Mary Vetsera was taken
 first to the Hofburg and thence to Meyerling.


The name Rudolph had not been borne by a Habsburg ruler for five
hundred years. A curious fatality seemed to attach to it, and probably
had inspired a superstitious fear of it. Rudolph II. had died mad.
Rudolph III. and Rudolph IV. had died young—the one at twenty-seven
and the other at twenty-six. But people had ceased, as it seemed with
good reason, to think of such ominous things; and the Crown Prince
Rudolph inspired great hopes as well as great affection.

That he was really a degenerate, touched by the hereditary taint, is
hardly, indeed, to be doubted; but the symptoms of degeneracy were
not conspicuous, and, on the whole, passed unobserved. He must be
classed with the brilliant Habsburgs, or, at least, among those who
had literary and artistic tastes, which they cultivated, and were
proud of. He travelled, and wrote a book about his travels; he edited
a monumental work on the scenic beauties of the Austrian Empire; he
consorted, on very affable terms, with artists and men of letters. He
was also one of the friends of the late King Edward, who remarked of
him that he was a good German—“at all events in the sense of being
anti-Prussian”; and he showed character in a passage-at-arms with the
German Emperor, who spoke contemptuously of his preoccupation with the
fine arts:

 “Nonsense of that sort,” the Emperor is reported to have said, “is
 unworthy of a soldier and a Crown Prince.”

 “There is only one thing,” Rudolph is reported to have replied, “which
 is unworthy of a Crown Prince, and that is to aspire to the throne
 during his father’s life-time.”

And yet, when Countess Marie Larisch came to tell what she knew of the
Meyerling tragedy, her “secret” was to the effect that Rudolph himself
had not only aspired to, but also conspired for, the throne of Hungary
during Francis Joseph’s life-time. But neither story can be said to
disprove the other; for one can discover no grounds for crediting
Rudolph with firm and consistent principles.

He was capable of affability; but he was also capable of _hauteur_. One
might compare him, as one might compare a good many of the Habsburgs,
to a poker which will unbend itself, but declines to be unbent by
others. Some workmen employed in the Palace discovered that, when
he came among them, as a child, and talked to them while they were
engaged in decorations and repairs. “Well, what is your name, young
fellow?” they presumed to ask him; and the little boy drew himself up.
“Papa and mamma call me Rudolph,” he answered. “Other people call me
Monseigneur.” He was young enough for the snub to amuse without giving
pain. Most likely the workmen declared him to be whatever is the German
for “a chip off the old block.” At any rate he grew up to be popular
with people who did not know him, or only knew him slightly. He was
“unser Rudi,” just as the German Emperor Frederick was “unser Fritz.”

Still, he was a spoiled child, and precociously cynical; and perhaps,
in view of the way in which he was brought up, it would have been hard
for him to be anything else. The legend of his mother’s devotion to
him is found at the circumference of his circle, but cannot be traced
to its centre. From an early age, he saw and understood too much for
innocence. Among other things he saw the “go-between,” and knew for
what purpose she went between. There was no example before his eyes to
lead him to look upon happiness in marriage as an easily attainable
ideal; and he held women cheap, because so many of them made themselves
cheap with him. One of Countess Marie’s stories is to the effect that
she boxed his ears for laughing at “love-sick girls,” and boasting of
his conquests, and saying of a certain Elizabeth T——: “The silly
goose thinks I adore her, and so I can do anything I like with her.”

It was, therefore, as a young man who had already lost his illusions
that Rudolph set out in search of a wife. The story has been told that
another lady travelled with him as a provisional companion while he
was looking for a wife, and was, at least once, caught in his company
in compromising circumstances by his prospective mother-in-law. He was
too eligible a _parti_ for any prospective mother-in-law to attach
more importance than she could help to such a _contretemps_; and after
Rudolph had rejected the suit of Princess Mathilde of Saxony, on the
ground that her style of beauty was of too luxuriant an effulgence,
then, “weary,” to quote Countess Marie, “of a choice of many evils,
he decided to take the least of them, as represented by the Princess
Stéphanie of Belgium.” And Stéphanie said, or is said to have said, “He
asked me for my hand so prettily that I could not possibly refuse it to
him.”

[Illustration: THE CROWN PRINCE RUDOLPH.]

That in spite of the compromising discovery of the provisional lady
companion in his rooms. His manner must indeed have been charming
if it removed the impression of that surprise; but Rudolph could be
fascinating when he chose, and his ready wit may have prompted a
plausible explanation. Moreover, Stéphanie was little more than a
child—too young to understand; and her father, Leopold II., was not
a man into whose calculations either sentiment or morality entered.
We all know him as the King who neglected the Austrian Archduchess to
whom he was married for such persons as Cléo de Mérode and the Baroness
Vaughan; and he may well have said to himself that he saw no reason
why his daughter should expect to be any happier in her marriage than
his wife, or why his younger daughter should expect to be any happier
in her marriage than her elder sister.

It is notorious, at any rate, that no love was ever lost between
Leopold and either of his daughters. The marriages of both of them
were failures; and anyone who has ever lived in Brussels knows how
many stories are current there as to his callous indifference to their
matrimonial calamities. Again and again the story ran round Brussels
that Princess Louise of Saxe-Coburg had run away from her husband and
taken refuge at Laeken, and that her eyes were not only red but black:
that Philip of Saxe-Coburg, in fact, had been knocking her about,
and that she had vowed, with tears streaming down her cheeks, that
nothing would induce her to return to him. But Leopold always sent her
back; for why—one pictures him asking—should his daughter Louise
expect to be any happier than his wife Henrietta, and why should his
son-in-law be expected to behave any better than he himself behaved?
No doubt there was logic of a kind—though not of the best kind—in
the argument. No doubt, too, the same logic was brought into play when
Stéphanie’s marriage was arranged.

Countess Marie protests that Stéphanie was plain, and had no style. She
speaks of her red arms, her deplorable figure, her unbecomingly dressed
hair; but that is not the verdict of contemporary Brussels, where
she was to be seen daily in the Park and the streets. What Brussels
remembers is a little girl—a “flapper,” as people say nowadays—simple
and exceedingly attractive: a little girl who reminded Brussels of a
Dresden china statuette; a little girl in short frocks, with her hair
hanging down her back. She was not grown up, Brussels declares, when
she was married; she was only dressed to look as if she were grown up.
She was put into long skirts, and her hair was done up, _du jour au
lendemain_, before the proper time, because this chance of a brilliant
marriage had suddenly come her way.

Presumably there was something of the gawkiness of the schoolgirl
about her when she was thus first dressed as a woman. Presumably that
gawkiness did not entirely vanish in the course of the journey from
Brussels to Vienna, where she was certain, as a foreigner, to encounter
far more captious criticism; Vienna being nearly as _chic_ as Paris,
quite as quizzical in a heavier way, and decidedly less disposed to
make smooth the path of the stranger. Stéphanie, in short, must at
first have seemed a little “provincial” to the Viennese; and there were
plenty of Viennese ladies—Palast Damen and others—whose cue it was to
make the worst of her, and to rejoice that, as Rudolph had married such
a wife, “there was no possibility,” to quote Countess Marie, “of his
ever becoming a model husband.”

Assuredly he did not become one, and there does not even seem to have
been an interlude of sunshine before the gathering of the clouds. Even
the daughter presently born to the Archduke and the Archduchess is
said to have been a cause of contention between them; and Stéphanie,
with that passion for self-expression which she shared with almost
every member of the House of Habsburg except Francis Joseph, has
written out and published a confession of the emotions which her
experiences of marriage brought her, and the lessons which she drew
from them. This is the essential passage:—

 “Two quite young persons see each other for the first time, know each
 other a quarter of an hour, and speak the binding word which death
 alone can untie.

 “If there is something beautiful in the thought that two human beings
 who love and respect one another are joined before God in holy
 matrimony, so there is something uncommonly repulsive in the idea that
 such a union can be formed without any preparation and remain a lie
 from the altar to the grave.

 “I regret I was not born in humble circumstances in some fisherman’s
 hamlet on the seashore. There one is nearer to happiness and peace
 than in our high positions and in our complex society. Happiness
 depends on living naturally, and what increases our distance from
 nature decreases our happiness.

 “Is it possible? A long, long, terrible night has gone by for me, and
 I see a rosy dawn of hope on the clouded sky, a ray of light which
 tells of the rising sun of joy. Will the sun rise in full glory? Will
 he warm me with his rays, and dry the tears from my cheeks? Come,
 my sun, come! You find a poor faded flower whose freshness has been
 destroyed by the hard frost of fate.”

So Stéphanie wrote, after the tragedy had set her free, and at the
hour when she was about to make use of her freedom and seek in a
marriage of her own choice the happiness of which she had not enjoyed
even the illusory semblance in the marriage into which she was hurried
“without any preparation”—suddenly transformed from a schoolgirl into
a grown woman—by a father to whom no sacrifice was too precious to be
offered up on the altar of the Mammon of Unrighteousness. She was too
young and innocent—too _bourgeoise_, perhaps—to enter into the spirit
of the sacrifice. It was idle for anyone to tell her that Crown Princes
would be Crown Princes, and that Crown Princesses who raised jealous
objections to their doing so only made themselves ridiculous; that her
splendid position was the substance, and love only the shadow. Taught
by instinct, she knew better. She was too simple to wear a mask—or,
if she did sometimes wear one, it was continually falling off; and she
was too proud to pretend not to see the things which were happening
under her nose. Moreover, just as there were women whose cue it was to
make her feel provincial, so there were women—in many cases the same
women—whose cue it was to make her feel neglected.

The list of the women for whom Rudolph neglected Stéphanie would be
long and difficult to make out; but Mary Vetsera is the only one who
matters. All the world knows—and knew at the time—that Mary Vetsera
died with Rudolph on the day of the mysterious Meyerling tragedy;
but there was a good deal of unnecessary reticence about her in the
narratives written at the time. She figured as “Marie V——,” as “a
beautiful Jewess,” etc., etc.; but she was, as a matter of fact, a
well-known member of a family which was at that time very well known
indeed in Vienna.

Her mother, the Baroness Vetsera, was _née_ Baltazzi; and the Baltazzis
were people who were in Viennese society without being of it. Their
precise position in that society may be fixed by the fact that they
received invitations to the _bal beim Hof_, but not to the more
intimate and exclusive _bal am Hof_. The people who did not like them
called them “rastas,” meaning that they cut a dash, but that the
account which they gave of their antecedents was not quite satisfactory
to inquisitive aristocrats. They came from Constantinople by way of
London, and they threw their money about. One always finds such people
even in the most exclusive societies: people whom Society accepts,
without taking them to its bosom.

Some of the brothers were—and still are—tolerably well known in
England, as well as in their own country. Alexander Baltazzi won the
Derby with the Hungarian horse Kisber in 1876. Hector Baltazzi is now
connected with the picture-dealing business, and is sometimes to be
met at the Ritz Hotel in London—a dapper little man, standing with
his hands in his pockets. One of the brothers is prosperously engaged
in some mercantile undertaking in Roumania; and both the sisters made
good marriages. Evelyn married Count George Stockau; and Helen, with
whom we are more immediately concerned, married Baron Vetsera. But the
reputation of Helen, Baroness Vetsera, was not without its flaws; and
Viennese society did not always exercise charity in determining its
attitude towards her. It frequented her entertainments; but it also
called her _la Baronne Cardinal_.

Readers of Halévy’s _M. et Madame Cardinal_ and _Les petites Cardinal_
will understand the significance of that _sobriquet_. The Madame
Cardinal of fiction was the typical _mère d’actrice_: a well-known
French type, distinguished by taking a purely business-like view of
a daughter’s attraction for wealthy patrons of the drama. Countess
Marie Larisch, who was everybody’s confidante in the matter, depicts
the Baroness Vetsera as a woman of exactly that character—albeit, of
course, on a more exalted plane. She was not rich, she says, but was
living on her capital, relying on her daughters as her assets. They
must make wealthy marriages, or failing that——

 “Will you,” she asked Countess Marie, “undertake a very difficult
 mission for me? I want you to talk plainly to the Prince about Mary.
 You might even give him a hint that matters might be arranged if he is
 really desperately in love with her. At any rate, I’ve no objection to
 discussing the matter with the Crown Prince.”

There we have the dots on the i’s in so far as Mary’s mother is
concerned. Mary, for her, was an article of merchandise; and Countess
Marie was, for her as for the Empress, a heaven-sent “go-between.”
Unfortunately, however, from the mother’s point of view, Mary was not
an ideal daughter. It is not impossible, Countess Marie thinks, that
she might, in cold blood, have fallen in with her mother’s plans.
It is certainly not by considerations of morality, Countess Marie
maintains, that she would have been restrained from doing so; for
those considerations had already gone by the board in the course of an
“affair” with an English cavalry officer in Cairo. But Mary’s blood
was, at the moment, anything but cold. She was at once infatuated,
and vain, and wilful; and all three emotions—wilfulness, and vanity,
and infatuation—had combined to prompt her to the same rash course
of action. She had a chance—or, at all events, believed that she had
one—of marrying Miguel of Braganza; but she preferred Rudolph. She
threw herself at Rudolph’s head, and stuck to him like a leech. Rudolph
himself declared that she was not like the others—she could not be
shaken off.

She had begun by writing to Rudolph, imploring him to see her; and
he had plunged into the adventure, as he had plunged into so many
previous adventures, with a light heart, not guessing whither it would
lead him. She had gone on to insult the Crown Princess—staring her
full in the face, and not recognising her presence in a ball-room. Her
mother, crimson with anger—for her own social position was obviously
imperilled by such behaviour on her daughter’s part—had hurried her
off and locked her up in her room; and then Rudolph, hearing what had
happened, went to see Countess Marie, and required a service of her:

 “Listen. I want you to bring Mary to me at the Hofburg.”

 “I assure you it is necessary for me to see Mary. Besides, I myself am
 in great danger.”

 “I must speak to Mary _alone_; it may possibly help me to escape the
 trouble which threatens me.”

Those are the essential sentences; and they strike one as madly
inconsequent. For why should a private interview with Mary be
necessitated by the fact that Rudolph was “in danger”? How could such
an interview help him to escape the trouble which threatened him,—that
trouble being, as he went on to explain to Countess Marie, political?
Countess Marie does not answer these questions; she writes as if she
did not even perceive them to be questions which a sceptical critic of
her narrative would inevitably ask. She goes on, instead, to speak of
Rudolph’s political troubles, and of the part which he called upon her
to play in covering them up:

 “‘Listen!’ he said. ‘If I were to confide in the Emperor, _I should
 sign my own death warrant_.’ My heart nearly stopped beating at this
 dreadful disclosure, and I could say nothing.”

[Illustration: THE HOFBURG, VIENNA.]

Then Rudolph handed Countess Marie a steel casket which he asked her to
take charge of, saying:

 “It is imperative that it should not be found in my possession, for at
 any moment the Emperor may order my personal belongings to be seized.”

And then:—

 “How long am I to keep this dreadful thing in my possession?”

 “Until I ask for it,” answered Rudolph, “or until someone else asks
 for it. If it should come to that,” he added gravely, “you must know
 how to act. There is one person who knows the secret of this casket,
 and he alone has the right (failing me) to ask for its return.”

 “His name?”

 “Never mind his name. You can deliver it to the person who can tell
 you four letters. Write them down now, and repeat them after me.
 Listen: R.I.U.O.”

It is as mysterious, and apparently as meaningless, as any conspiracy
in a melodrama or a comic opera; and it may be permissible to mention
here that Countess Marie was warned, before her story was printed, that
nobody would believe it. She nevertheless insisted. She could not be
positive that the casket was of steel, because it was wrapped up in a
covering which she did not undo. But it was a casket—or at any rate
a box of some kind; and it was heavy. She afterwards handed it over,
in circumstances to which we shall come, to the mysterious person who
gave the mysterious password; and she related all this in London in a
very matter-of-fact manner, which gave her interlocutors the impression
that, if her story were not true, it would have been absolutely beyond
her capacity to invent it. But, true or false, what relation did it
bear to the necessity for a private interview with Mary at the Hofburg?

That is what Countess Marie does not explain; and her failure to see
that any explanation is required and will be demanded may perhaps be
taken as an indirect proof of her _bona fides_. An inventor would
not have failed to supply the missing link, which neither a criminal
investigator nor a sensational novelist would have any difficulty
in conjecturing. Granted that Rudolph had involved himself in a
political plot—whether to get himself crowned King of Hungary or for
any other purpose—then the whole of the evidence relating to the
plot cannot have been contained in the mysterious steel casket. Some
further evidence—a letter or some other scrap of paper—must have
been in Mary Vetsera’s possession. She must have been holding it over
Rudolph’s head as an instrument of blackmail—demanding, perhaps, that
he should divorce his wife and marry her; or, at all events, he must
have suspected her of the intention to do so, and have wanted to get
the document back from her. On that assumption—but on no other—the
political necessity of the interview on which Rudolph insisted is clear.

In any case, he did insist; and Countess Marie yielded to his
entreaties. The allegation has been made that he offered her a
pecuniary inducement to do so; but there is no reason for believing
that. It would have been worth his while; but it can hardly have been
necessary. So she found a pretext, drove Mary to the Hofburg, and left
her there. “I want,” Rudolph said, “to keep Mary with me for two days,
in order to come to an easy understanding with the Baroness over her.”
He also said, alluding to the political trouble: “A great deal may
happen in two days, and I want Mary to be with me”—for what reason
(seeing that, according to the same narrator, he had spoken of Mary as
a woman who refused to be shaken off) we are left to guess.

And so Mary was whisked away to Meyerling; whence the telegraph
presently sped the first intimation of the famous and mysterious
tragedy.




CHAPTER XXI

 What the Archduchess Stéphanie knew—What Rudolph knew that she
 knew—The search for Mary Vetsera by her relatives—The news of the
 Meyerling tragedy—The two official versions—The many unofficial
 versions—The attempt to hush the matter up—Mary Vetsera’s letter to
 Countess Marie Larisch.


Meyerling was Rudolph’s hunting-box in the forest, not many miles
from Vienna: a hunting-box not used for purposes of sport alone. The
Crown Prince had his boon companions, as well as his artistic and
intellectual friends; and he used to revel and drink deep with them
in this secluded and beautiful resort. It was also whispered that his
hunting-box was his Parc-aux-Cerfs: the place, at all events, at which
he made romantic assignations. Rumour credited him with a good many of
these: assignations with society ladies, assignations with gamekeepers’
daughters, &c., &c. It may be, of course, that rumour exaggerated, but
there certainly was fire as well as smoke.

Stéphanie had been taken to Meyerling, and had admired its beauties.
“What a lovely place to live in!” she had exclaimed. “Yes, and what a
lovely place to die in!” Rudolph had replied, speaking morbidly, but
without any deliberately ominous intention. That in the course of the
honeymoon, and before estrangement had begun; but estrangement had come
quickly, and had continued without intermission. Rudolph complained
that the love-light had never shone in Stéphanie’s eyes; but it does
not seem that he tried very hard or very long to kindle it. Those
eyes, he confided to a friend, “seemed incapable of expressing any
feelings save those of wariness and suspicion”; and the time came when
Stéphanie, as little in love with him as he with her, but more obedient
to duty, not only suspected, but knew.

And Rudolph knew that she knew. The ball-room scene, described in the
last chapter, would have proved that to him, even if there had been no
other evidence; but he was aware, as a matter of fact, that Stéphanie
had been not only watching him, but following him. There was a day when
Rudolph went to visit Mary Vetsera in a hired carriage, and Stéphanie
drove behind him, but unseen by him, in a carriage from the Imperial
stables. She stopped outside the house which he had entered, and there
changed carriages, returning to the Palace in his hired conveyance, and
instructing the driver of the Imperial carriage to wait for him. It
was quite impossible for Rudolph, after that, to flatter himself that
his wife was ignorant of his proceedings; but there is no reason for
supposing that he cared very much whether she was ignorant of them or
not.

People have said that he wanted Stéphanie to divorce him in order that
he might be free to marry Mary Vetsera. The story is also told—we
have already spoken of it—that he was plotting for the throne of
Hungary in the belief that the Hungarians, who loved him, would have
been willing to accept Mary Vetsera as their Queen; but Countess Marie
Larisch, who is our sole first-hand authority for the plot, disclaims
all personal knowledge of it. She was pressed on the point before her
much-discussed book appeared, and her replies to the questions put to
her were explicit. “No,” she said, “I have no first-hand knowledge
of the matter. I only repeat what I was told—what I heard from the
Archduke John Salvator—what Julius Andrassy hinted—what was current
among those who were in a position to know. The existence of a plot to
seize the throne of Hungary was the only possible inference from their
confidences.”

[Illustration: THE CROWN PRINCESS STÉPHANIE.]

That is very indirect evidence, and, in the strict sense of the word,
it is not evidence at all; but we shall have to return to the story
when the Archduke John Salvator comes upon the scene. Most likely there
was, at any rate, some loose talk on the subject; most likely Mary
Vetsera herself had heard the talk and been impressed by it. A man will
sometimes, as we all know, confide to a slip of a girl secrets which
he jealously withholds from his most intimate male friends; and such a
girl is very prone to believe anything which she wishes to believe—her
imagination quickly transforming a vague possibility into a precise
certainty. There is nothing, therefore, absurd on the face of it
in the theory that Mary Vetsera went to Meyerling in the belief that
she would presently leave Meyerling to be crowned at Buda. Nor is it
unlikely—for reasons given in the last chapter—that her hopes, and
her disposition to chatter about them, made it urgently necessary for
Rudolph to see her on the subject and find a means of putting a bridle
on her tongue.

At any rate, Mary Vetsera did go to Meyerling; and Countess Marie
Larisch, who had taken her to the Hofburg and lost her there, had to
explain her disappearance to the members of her family, and see if
she could put them in the way of finding her. She describes a family
gathering at which the Baroness Vetsera, justifying the sobriquet of
Baronne Cardinal, displayed complete indifference to her daughter’s
adventures, but her brother, Alexander Baltazzi, was furious, and
insisted that Countess Marie should accompany him to the prefecture
of police. She complied; and she describes that interview too: a
remarkable interview at which Alexander Baltazzi inquired indignantly
whether the Habsburgs were to be “allowed to behave like common
ravishers,” and the Chief of the Secret Police replied that it was no
part of his constabulary duty to interfere with the Crown Prince’s
amours. And then:—

 “But perhaps you don’t realise,” said I, “that this young lady belongs
 to the aristocracy?”

 “Then it’s not one of the _bourgeoisie_? Oh, that’s quite another
 story,” replied the functionary. “Very well, I will see what I can do.”

For the policeman, as for Windischgraetz, mankind evidently began with
the baron; and he gave the information. “His Imperial Highness is
at Alland,”[3] he announced; but the announcement came too late. It
had hardly been made—and no action had yet been taken on account of
it—when the telegraph flashed its startling news from Meyerling to
Vienna. The Crown Prince had died suddenly at Meyerling—of apoplexy.

[Footnote 3: Alland is quite close to Meyerling.]

That was the first story, officially given out; but it was found that
it could not be maintained. People did not believe it—naturally
enough, seeing that it is almost an unknown thing for a man of
Rudolph’s age to die of apoplexy. It might have obtained credence—or,
at all events, it might have been upheld in the face of scepticism—if
it could have been substantiated by a medical certificate; but that
certificate could not be procured. The doctors were asked to draft
and sign it; but they refused to do so. They were then asked at least
to give a certificate of death from heart failure on the ground that
failure of the heart’s action played its part in every death; but they
would not do that either. So that violence had to be admitted; and an
amended official version of the story was issued to the effect that the
Crown Prince had committed suicide by shooting himself.

Even so, public opinion was not satisfied. The medical certificates
were called for; and when they were published they were severely
criticised. There were two such certificates, and they contradicted



each other; and neither of them would have been accepted in an English
criminal court as compatible with the theory of suicide. According to
one certificate, the bullet entered the head behind the ear and carried
off the top part of the skull; according to the other, it had entered
by the left temple and issued by the right temple. The critics pointed
out that Rudolph was most unlikely to have shot himself in the left
temple, because he was not left-handed, and that it was materially
impossible for him to have shot himself from behind.

The inference was clear. If Rudolph had been shot, and had not shot
himself, then he must have been shot by some other person. That is to
say, either there had been an accident or he had been murdered. But if
there had been an accident, there would have been no need to envelop
it in mystery or tell certificated lies about it; so the hypothesis of
murder held the field. But who could have murdered him, and why should
he have been murdered? Conjecture fastened itself on those problems,
and found solution for them: solutions which varied accordingly, as the
speculators knew, or did not know, that Mary Vetsera, as well as the
Crown Prince, was involved in the tragedy, and that her death, as well
as his, had to be accounted for. The theories which obtained the widest
credence were the following:—

1. Rudolph had been killed in the course of a drunken quarrel by one of
his boon companions.

2. Rudolph had been pursuing the daughter of a gamekeeper with his
attentions. The gamekeeper had caught him _in flagrante delicto_, and
had shot him without waiting to ascertain who he was. His body had been
carried into his bedroom in the hunting-box, and the suicide _tableau_
had been arranged in order to cover up the scandal.

3. One of the Baltazzis, jealous of his niece’s honour, had tracked
Mary Vetsera to Meyerling, and had there committed the double murder.

Not one of these three theories will hold water, in view of the facts
which have since been brought to light. The first and second may be set
aside on the ground that there is nothing in either of them to account
for the death of Mary Vetsera. The third theory is incompatible with
statements, the truth of which there is no reason to doubt, made by
Countess Marie Larisch in “My Past.”

That, in Countess Marie’s book, we have “the secret of Meyerling
disclosed” is an exaggerated claim; and there are weak points in her
narrative which it is important to enumerate. She was not at Meyerling
at the time of the tragedy, nor was she present when the dead bodies
were discovered. All that she tells us on that branch of the subject is
second-hand evidence, derived from Count George Stockau and the Court
physician, Dr. Wiederhofer. But there were two things, not known to the
general public, which she did know. She knew:—

1. That the Baltazzis had tried in vain to discover Mary Vetsera’s
whereabouts.

2. That they knew nothing of the tragedy until Alexander Baltazzi and
his brother-in-law, Count George Stockau, were ordered to proceed
to Meyerling, in a closed carriage, accompanied by a member of the
secret police, and remove Mary Vetsera’s body for secret burial in the
cemetery of the Cistercian Abbey of Heiligenkreuz.

“And,” said the policeman, “you are to support the body between you in
such a way as to make it appear that the Baroness still lives.”

The purpose of that order was clear enough. The matter was to be hushed
up and the truth to be concealed, no matter whose feelings suffered in
the process, in order that scandal might be avoided and the remnants of
the Crown Prince’s reputation be preserved. Mary Vetsera’s name was not
to be mentioned in connection with the Meyerling affair, but it was to
be given out—all her relatives being parties to the deception—that
she had died a natural death elsewhere. But that end was not achieved.
It leaked out—as such things do leak out—that Mary Vetsera and the
Crown Prince had died together; and the next thing to be done was to
get rid of the theory of murder, and produce evidence in support of the
theory of suicide. And here it is important to note that we are faced
by a direct conflict of testimony.

The medical certificates, as we have seen, demonstrate that Rudolph did
not shoot himself, but was shot; but the inference which they compel
was never formally drawn from them in any court of investigation; and
presently letters were handed to the Press, in which both Rudolph and
Mary Vetsera appeared to have announced their intention of taking
their own lives. The first letter was from Rudolph to the Duke of
Braganza:—

 “DEAR FRIEND,

 “It is necessary that I should die. No other course is open to me. I
 hope you are well.

  “I remain,
  At your service,
  RUDOLPH.”

The other letter was from Mary Vetsera to her mother:—

 “DEAR MOTHER,

 “I am going to die with Rudolph. We love each other too much. I ask
 your forgiveness and say farewell.

  “Your very unhappy
  MARY.”

Nobody has ever regarded those letters—or other similar letters which
have been circulated—as anything but forgeries. They impress one,
indeed, not only as forgeries, but as clumsy forgeries. But here again
Countess Marie Larisch makes a new contribution to the inquiry. Three
weeks after Mary Vetsera’s death, she says, she received the following
letter, found on the bedside table at Meyerling, but held back by the
police:—

 “DEAR MARIE,

 “Forgive me all the trouble I have caused. I thank you so much for
 everything you have done for me. If life becomes hard for you, and I
 fear it will after what we have done, follow us. It is the best thing
 you can do.

  “Your
  MARY.”

It is a thousand pities that Countess Marie Larisch did not reproduce
that letter in facsimile; for that is clearly the manner in which such
documents should be put in evidence. Had that course been adopted, the
critic, in attempting to reconstruct the story, would have been able to
treat the scrap of manuscript as the sole authoritative deposition. As
it has not been adopted, other critics would be entitled to deny his
right to do so; and he can only give it its due place together with
other evidence derived from other sources. Perhaps the ultimate result
will be pretty much the same; but we will see.




CHAPTER XXII

 Fantastic legends of the Meyerling tragedy—Talks with the Crown
 Prince’s valet—Foolish story given by _Berliner Lokal Anzeiger_—What
 the Grand Duke of Tuscany knew—What Count Nigra knew—What Countess
 Marie Larisch tells—Her story confirmed from a contemporary
 source—Doubts which remain in spite of it—Was it suicide or murder?


There are, as has been said, innumerable Meyerling legends, most of
them fantastic, and not all of them of contemporaneous origin. The
mystery has continued to fascinate the world; fresh solutions of it
are continually turning up. In every newspaper office some stranger
presents himself, from time to time, offering to tell the truth, as he
has heard it from one of the very few who knew it; now and again the
stranger’s offer is accepted. But, as a matter of fact, all the queer
stories thus circulated can be traced to one of two sources,—neither
of them sources in which any confidence can be placed.

The boon companions who were with Rudolph at Meyerling were Prince
Philip of Saxe-Coburg, Count Hoyos, and Count Bombelles; and they, at
any rate, have never taken the newspapers into their confidence. There
were also present the Crown Prince’s confidential valet, Loschek, and
the coachman nicknamed Bratfisch (or Fried Fish), who had endeared
himself to the Crown Prince by his talents as a whistler. It has been
stated that Bratfisch was sent to America, and died in a lunatic asylum
in New York; but, as a matter of fact, he died of pneumonia in Vienna,
in 1892. It is possible that he talked; but no specific statement can
be traced to him. The case of Loschek is different.

Loschek was indubitably a babbler. The world is full of men who claim
to have heard the truth about the Meyerling tragedy from Loschek.
The late Robert Barr, the novelist, told the present writer that he
had heard the truth about Meyerling from Loschek while walking over
an Alpine pass with him. The happy thought has often occurred to
journalists of all nations that, if they could make Loschek drunk,
they might extract the truth from him. But Loschek was wise in his
generation, and discreet in a manner of his own. He knew that he could
not trust himself to hold his tongue under the combined influence of
good cheer and genial company; so he adopted the alternative policy of
telling a different story to every interlocutor. It is possible that
one of his stories may have been true; but it naturally passed the wit
of journalists to decide which of them to credit. The testimony of
Loschek, therefore, may be dismissed.

One story in particular in which Loschek’s name appears may be
dismissed with Countess Marie Larisch’s assistance. It was telegraphed
from Vienna to the _Berliner Lokal Anzeiger_, and purported to be
based upon statements contained in a letter received from “Baron Louis
Vetsera, brother of Mary Vetsera, who recently died in Venezuela.” This
Louis Vetsera, it was set forth, was one of those who forced the door,
and discovered the dead bodies. The newspaper cutting was shown to
Countess Marie, who courteously supplied the following comment:—

 “Mary Vetsera’s brother was not called Louis, but Ferenz (Ferry). Her
 eldest brother, Laszlo, was one of those burnt, many years ago, in the
 Ring Theatre. Ferry Vetsera was, at the time of the tragedy, only a
 boy of fourteen or fifteen years of age. He was not at Meyerling, nor
 was he one of those summoned there afterwards.”

That is conclusive, and shows us how history is sometimes made. Our
other sources of information—trustworthy as far as they go—are in
the so-called “confidences” of Count Nigra, the Italian Ambassador
at Vienna, and Princess Louisa of Tuscany’s father, the Grand Duke
Ferdinand. They both saw Rudolph’s body when laid out for burial;
and they both brought from the spectacle, if not a story, at least a
theory, and the material for a story.

 “Papa said” (writes Princess Louisa), “that when he arrived at Vienna,
 Rudolph had been dead barely eight hours. He went into the room at the
 Hofburg where the body lay, and was horrified to see that the skull
 was smashed in, and that pieces of broken bottle-glass protruded from
 it.”

With which account we may compare the longer and more detailed story
of Count Nigra, communicated to a representative of the Italian
_Corriera della Sera_:—

 “He was killed—and in the most awful manner. I had the good or bad
 fortune—I do not know which to call it—to be the first of the
 ambassadors to arrive at Meyerling on that fatal morning. The Emperor
 was not yet there. The Prince was laid out on his bed; a large
 white bandage covered his forehead and temples. At the sound of my
 footsteps, his valet Loschek ran up and led me close to the dead body.
 With looks rather than with words, I interrogated him as to the cause
 of this tragedy; and the faithful servant, in order to give the lie
 to the rumour of suicide which had already been spread, lifted up the
 bandage. Inside either the right or the left temple—my recollection
 on that point is vague—there was a hole so large that you could have
 thrust your fist into it.

 “The skull appeared to be smashed—shattered as if from a blow of a
 bottle or a big stick. It was horrible. The hair, the fragments of
 bone, had been driven into the brain. The wound gaped open beneath and
 behind the ear in such a fashion that it seemed materially impossible
 that it could have been self-inflicted. A suicide? Surely not! It was
 an assassination—I am absolutely positive of that.”

Count Nigra, it will be observed, confirms the medical certificate
with regard to the position of the wound, but does not confirm the
Grand Duke’s statement that broken bottle-glass protruded from it. Yet
Count Nigra could hardly have failed to mention the bottle-glass if
he had seen it. Probably it was not there; probably the reference to
it is due to Princess Louisa’s conjectural emendation of her father’s
story—or it may be that her father came to believe that he had seen
it, because it fitted in with the popular legend which had become
current.

That legend was, as is well known, that Rudolph had been killed with
a blow from a champagne bottle in a quarrel which broke out in the
course of a drunken orgy. According to some witnesses—if one can call
them witnesses—the blow was struck by one of the boon companions.
According to others, it was struck by Mary Vetsera herself, after a
scene of jealousy; and the part which the boon companions played in the
drama was to shoot Mary Vetsera. It cannot be said that Count Nigra’s
description of the wound really confirms either version of the story.
He made no scientific examination of the skull, but only glanced at it
hurriedly; and the inferences which he drew from his hurried inspection
may very well have been mistaken. But he talked; and his talk was
obviously the ultimate source of all the various versions of the
champagne bottle legend. They are all based upon that talk; and one can
find no corroborative evidence of any one of them.

There is, in particular, no evidence that there was any drunken orgy
whatsoever at Meyerling, or that, if there was, either Rudolph or Mary
Vetsera took part in it. On the contrary, it was alleged by the boon
companions, and assumed by the physicians, that the tragedy took place
behind closed doors: that Rudolph, declaring himself to be fatigued,
retired early to the apartment in which Mary—of whose presence at
Meyerling the boon companions were unaware—was awaiting him. That
is what Countess Marie Larisch says—her informant being Professor
Wiederhofer; and her narrative corresponds, in all essentials, with the
story told by the special investigator of the French paper _L’Eclair_.
This is what the latter inquirer tells us:—

 “The guests came home late from shooting, and soon retired to their
 several rooms, the Crown Prince having complained of fatigue. He left
 them to go to his own room, where Mary Vetsera had been brought,
 without their knowledge, by the coachman Bratfisch. The party did not
 sup together, and no one else was at Meyerling that night.

 “In the morning the Duke and the Count, astonished that the Archduke
 did not come down, and feeling uneasy because there was no response
 when they knocked at his door, caused the door to be forced. They saw
 the two corpses lying on the bed. The double suicide was evident. In
 their amazement, and in the hope of avoiding scandal, they wished
 to hush the matter up. They wished it to be believed that there had
 been an accident in the hunting field; so they spread a report to
 that effect, and, in order to gain credence for it, they caused Mary
 Vetsera’s body, fully dressed, to be removed in circumstances of
 mystery.”

The differences between this narrative and that of Countess Marie
Larisch are of minor importance; the resemblances are striking. In
particular it is to be noted that we get from the French journalist a
contemporary confirmation of Countess Marie’s account of the mysterious
disposal and burial of Mary Vetsera’s body.[4] Countess Marie adds
many gruesome details; but the story which she supports is one which
had already been published, albeit in an obscure quarter and without
attracting attention. Even the detail that the body was dressed for
removal was, as we have seen, in the Frenchman’s narrative.

[Footnote 4: The same story was also told, long ago, in Paris, to Mrs.
Clarence Andrews, by Alexander Baltazzi.]

We may take it as established, therefore, that the tragedy—whether
murder or suicide—did, in fact, take place behind closed doors. There
were no witnesses of what happened there; and the circumstantial
evidence is, as we have seen, conflicting—the considerations which
have to be balanced against each other being these:—

1. Both Rudolph and Mary Vetsera are said to have written letters
announcing their intention of dying together.

2. The description of Rudolph’s wound, given in the medical
certificates, indicates that it could not have been self-inflicted; and
this view is confirmed by the testimony of Count Nigra.

On the whole it is the medical testimony which inspires the greater
confidence. The certificates were challenged at the time; and the
doctors then pledged their professional honour that they had signed
nothing which was not in accordance with the facts—though they had no
responsibility for the inferences drawn from the facts. The letters, on
the other hand, are not all genuine; and even Countess Marie Larisch’s
letter is, at the most, only evidence of what the lovers intended,
or of what Mary Vetsera wished to be believed, but not conclusive proof
of the way in which things actually happened. So that we are obliged to
consider a possible alternative to the theory of double suicide. Did
Mary Vetsera kill her lover and then take her own life—after first
writing a letter to throw dust in the eyes of the world? Can we find
any motive which might have induced her to do so?

[Illustration:

  _Photo_      _Adèle_

THE BARONESS MARY VETSERA.]

A motive can be found; and it is in Countess Marie Larisch’s narrative
that one finds it. That story which she tells of a conspiracy to usurp
the throne of Hungary may perhaps supply the clue.

Suppose there had been, if not a plot in the full sense of the word,
at least some loose talk and some compromising correspondence. Suppose
Mary was “in it,” and really believed what she wished to believe—that
the conspirators meant business, and that Rudolph was really working to
have her crowned Queen of Hungary. Suppose Rudolph had said things—and
written things—which gave some encouragement to that belief. Suppose
Rudolph had realised the impossibility of the enterprise before
finally embarking on it, and had contrived this secret interview for
the purpose of telling Mary that he could not keep his promise—that
she could only be his mistress on the same footing as any other
mistress—and of recovering from her any documentary proof of his
disloyal designs which she may have held.

If we may make those suppositions—and we need them all if we are
to attach any meaning to Rudolph’s representation to Countess Marie
that an interview with Mary might help him to avoid a mysterious
peril—then we have all the material for a credible reconstruction of
the drama. We picture Mary going to the _rendez-vous_ with gloriously
ambitious hopes, only to find the promised cup of happiness dashed
from her lips; and we picture love momentarily turned to hate by the
bitter blow of the disappointment. We see her pleading with Rudolph and
reproaching him, and Rudolph, on his part, protesting his affection,
but nevertheless opposing a sullen resistance to her entreaties. The
rest of the scene proceeds as in a melodrama.

On the table by the bedside lies Rudolph’s pistol—the pistol which
Rudolph always carried. Mary picks it up in an access of frenzy—or
possibly of jealousy, for it is quite possible that she, as well as
Stéphanie, had grounds for jealousy—vows that she will be avenged, and
pulls the trigger. Rudolph falls, and she is horrified at the spectacle
of her crime. She had forgotten—but now she realises—all that it
means and all the consequences which it must entail for her. Love and
fear impel her in the same direction, and drive her to the same act.
She feels that she has no choice but to follow Rudolph into eternity,
whether by firing a second shot or by swallowing a dose of poison. That
assuredly is how a _Juge d’Instruction_, given the facts which we have
had before us, would be tempted to “reconstitute the crime”—and also
to explain the letter.

A melodramatic reconstitution doubtless; but that fact does not deprive
it of credibility. Melodramas do happen, in real life as well as on the
stage. We read of them in newspapers nearly as often as we witness them
in theatres. Moreover, in this case, the whole story is melodramatic,
and no interpretation of it is so improbable that it must necessarily
be rejected. There are, of course, alternative possibilities. The first
shot _may_ have been fired by accident; and Mary Vetsera _may_ have
fired it as the first act in a concerted double suicide. But that she
did fire it—whether by accident or by design—whether in a fit of
passion or deliberately by agreement—seems as certain, if we believe
the medical _procès-verbaux_, as anything connected with the mystery
can ever be.

That is all that there is to be said about it; and perhaps it is all
that can ever be known about it. What happened behind closed doors
can, in the nature of the case, only be a matter of inference; and one
is bound to come back to the fact that all the documentary evidence
indirectly bearing on the tragedy is open to suspicion. The evidential
difficulties, in short, may be summed up thus:—

1. Two medical certificates give two different descriptions of the
wound.

2. The description of the wound given in both medical certificates
differs from the description of it by Count Nigra, who, at any rate,
had no motive for deceiving anyone.

3. While the descriptions of the wound are incompatible with the theory
of suicide, correspondence in which the intention to commit suicide is
clearly set forth has been published; but

4. The only one of those letters of the authenticity of which there is
any evidence, may have been written with deliberate intent to deceive.

5. There is no agreement among those who quote the letters as to their
exact text. The versions of the letters given in these pages are by
no means the only versions which have been current. There are other
longer versions, and versions which differ from those here preferred in
various particulars. Even, therefore, if we could be sure that we had
to do with genuine documents, the question would still remain whether
the documents had not been doctored.

So we must leave the mystery, offering our own reconstruction of the
drama for what it may be worth, but, at the same time, declining to
accept without reserve the story currently told that the full and
final solution of the secret is locked up, at the Hofburg, in an iron
chest, which is to be opened after the lapse of fifty years. And yet
even that story is not quite impossible; for there are two secrets,
indicated by rumour, which may conceivably be guarded thus, with a view
to disclosure at a time when the events to which they relate are remote
enough to be treated as history:—

1. It was whispered, at one time, that the tragedy of Meyerling was
due to the discovery that Rudolph and Mary were really brother and
sister: that is to say, that Francis Joseph was really Mary’s father.
The alleged iron chest might conceivably contain Francis Joseph’s
acknowledgment of that relationship/

2. There is the rumour of which Countess Marie Larisch makes so much,
of the plot to seize the Hungarian throne; and it is not inconceivable
that the alleged iron chest may contain some secret police report
bearing upon that subject.

Those are the possibilities—one can think of no others; and they
are, both of them, exceedingly remote. The former of the two rumours,
which is not, in any case, at all well accredited, strikes one as
incompatible with the Baroness Vetsera’s alleged willingness that
a _liaison_ between her daughter and the Crown Prince should be
“arranged.” Not only might the idea of such a thing have been expected
to revolt her, she would also have felt that she had “claims” on
the Emperor which dispensed her from the necessity of exploiting
her daughter by such means. The latter rumour must be regarded as
improbable on the ground that, if the alleged conspiracy had really
existed, the secret would hardly have been so well kept for so long.

And yet the suggestion, though improbable, is not quite impossible. The
secret police of Vienna are very suspicious and acute; and they are
also as unscrupulous as they are polite. The idea that there ever was
an actual plot worthy to be called a plot must indeed be discarded for
the reasons already set forth; but the idea that there was loose talk
and compromising correspondence of a quasi-seditious character is not
so fantastic. The secret police may have opened letters, or overheard
conversations, or even received information. If they had done so, they
would naturally have reported their discoveries, even if these were
rather intangible; and if it be true that there is, at the Hofburg,
an iron chest, to be opened in the fulness of time, bearing upon the
Meyerling affair, a report of the kind indicated is, after all, the
thing most likely to be found in it.

The blow, however—whatever he knew or did not know—was bound, in any
case to be a terrible one to Francis Joseph. When Count Hoyos drove
up in a sleigh in the early morning with the news, he broke down and
sobbed. Then he mastered himself, and gave the necessary orders, and
presently issued this proclamation to his people:—

 “Deeply moved by a sorrow too profound for words, I humbly bow before
 the inscrutable decrees of a Providence which has chosen to afflict
 myself and my people, and I pray to Almighty God to grant to us all
 the courage to bear the load of our irreparable loss.”

And to his Hungarian Prime Minister Tisza, he wrote:—

 “I have lost everything. I had placed my hope and my faith in my son.
 There remains to me now nothing but the sentiment of duty, to which I
 hope to remain faithful as long as my aged bones support me.”

He must have thought, indeed, at that hour, that the cup of his sorrows
was full, and that the curse at last had done with him. But it was not
so. In spite of that devotion to duty to which he had pledged himself,
calamity after calamity was still to be heaped upon his head. Our story
of the Tragedy of Meyerling has to be followed by the story of the
tragic disappearance of John Orth.




CHAPTER XXIII

 The Archduke John Salvator—His many accomplishments—His criticisms
 of his superiors—His disgrace at Court—His love affair with an
 English lady—“Your darling Archduckling”—His proposal to abandon his
 rank and earn his living as a teacher of languages—His love affair
 with Milly Stübel—He quarrels with Francis Joseph, takes the name of
 John Orth, and leaves Austria.


“John Orth,” as we shall have to call him, was the Archduke John
Salvator: the brother of the Grand Duke of Tuscany—the uncle of the
Archduke who was to become “Herr Wulfling,” and of the Princess who was
to marry Signor Toselli. This is the branch of the House of Habsburg
which has been most conspicuous in its revolt against the Habsburg
traditions; and the Archduke John Salvator’s place among them is that
of the first of the family rebels. He was not only a rebel in love; he
also caused trouble, and got into trouble, as soldier and politician.

He was a man of many accomplishments: one who “fancied himself,” not
only as a soldier, and a sailor, and a pamphleteer, but also as a
musical composer. He composed a waltz, which enjoyed a great vogue,
not only in Vienna; and then, suspecting that its popularity might
be due to his rank, he decided to compose something more ambitious,
and produce it anonymously. The great work was a ballet—_Les
Assassins_—which was duly staged at the Vienna Opera as the production
of a new and unknown man. Its anonymity would not have impaired
its prospects if the Vienna Opera had had a Press agent who knew
his business as the modern Press agents know theirs. Dark hints,
mysteriously whispered, would then have stimulated the curiosity of
the public and invited the applause of the connoisseurs and leaders
of opinion. But the Press agents did not know their business—perhaps
there were no Press agents in those days; and the ballet itself,
though pretty good for an Archduke, did not come up to the standard
of professional musicians. Its reception was chilly, and its run was
short; so the Archduke John Salvator turned his activity into other
channels.

While little more than a boy he became a military critic and a
political agitator, publishing his first pamphlet on the organisation
of the Austrian army when he was no more than twenty-one. The gist of
his remarks was that the Austrian military system had got into a rut,
and that the Austrian artillery was defective. Incidentally, too, he
criticised the conduct of the Austrian Foreign Office; and the Foreign
Minister made representations, with the result that the Archduke was
sent to Cracow, to be out of the way. In his exile, however, he wrote
more pamphlets, setting forth that the frontier fortifications were
valueless, and that the War Minister did not know his business. He
also lectured at the Military Club on the Austrian system of military
education, which he declared to be wooden, and to deprive the soldiers
of all initiative and resource. That lecture was a veiled attack upon
the Archduke Albert, the victor of Custozza; so the Archduke John
Salvator was once more politely exiled—this time to a command at Linz.

Decidedly this Archduke was _frondeur_, with inclinations towards
Liberalism; and there were precedents for those inclinations in his
family. He was the grandson of that Grand Duke of Tuscany who put an
end to the Inquisition in his dominions; and an ancestor of his had
been the first legitimate potentate to recognise the French Republic
after the Revolution. Nothing was more natural, therefore, than that he
should have a good word to say for the Austrian rebels of 1848; though
it was inevitable that his praise of them should shock conservative
circles. So he sulked at Linz, while officialdom sulked at Vienna; and
there was further commotion when he posed his candidature, without
asking the Emperor’s leave, for the vacant throne of Bulgaria. The
Crown Prince was sent to him, to inform him that he had incurred
Francis Joseph’s displeasure; and he was stripped even of his rights
over his own regiment of artillery.

If he and Rudolph _did_, as Countess Marie Larisch suggests, put their
heads together and talk about a _coup d’état_ and the usurpation of
the throne of Hungary, that punishment may well have furnished the
starting point of their treasonable confabulations. The two Archdukes
were close friends and kindred spirits: among other enterprises, they
had combined to expose the spiritualistic medium, Harry Bastian, to
the horror and disgust of the superstitious sections of Viennese
society. Moreover, the Archduke John Salvator may be supposed to
have sympathised with Rudolph’s love affairs, for he had, as we are
about to see, a very similar love affair of his own. These facts no
doubt furnish a prelude, more or less fitting, to his appearance in
Countess Marie Larisch’s narrative as the mysterious stranger to whom
she handed Rudolph’s steel casket of compromising documents; and if
Countess Marie’s recollection of what he said to her on that occasion
is correct, he was himself the principal person whom those documents
might have compromised:—

 “Never mind,” she reports him as saying. “Things have happened for the
 best; you could not save a coward like Rudolph, but you’ve saved my
 life.”

And he added that he was going to “die without dying,” because he was
“tired of the hollow things of life”; and her comment is:—

 “Has he died without dying? I think so. And I believe that the
 Archduke, despite all evidence to the contrary, will return in his own
 good time.”

And Princess Louisa of Tuscany, it is to be noted, says pretty much
the same. To her also, and to her brother Leopold, the Archduke John
Salvator announced his intentions:—

 “I am about to disappear, my dear children, and I shall do so in such
 a manner that no one will ever find me. When the Emperor is dead I
 will return, for then Austria will require my services.”

And her comment is:—

 “Papa was convinced to the day of his death that his brother was
 alive; and, as time proves all things, the Emperor’s death will
 perhaps solve the mystery, for Austria may then require the services
 of John Orth in the international complications which will no doubt
 follow.”

But all that is mere conjecture; and the conjectures belong to a later
stage of the story. The solid fact to be set down here is that the
Archduke John Salvator, having received the signification of Francis
Joseph’s displeasure, sought and obtained Francis Joseph’s permission
to quit the Austrian army, and retired to live quietly at his Castle
of Orth, on the shores of the Lake of Gmunden. But his position and
aspirations had, meanwhile, been complicated by a love affair with a
fascinating nymph of the ballet.

It was not his first love affair: the woman who first taught the
Archduke John Salvator to love was English. He met her, when he was
only a lieutenant of hussars, on an Austrian Lloyd steamer, in the
course of a journey from Port Said to Trieste. One of his letters
to her has got into the hands of those who collect such things; and
it shows us the Archduke already cherishing the dream dreamt by so
many Habsburgs of flying from pomp in order to indulge an honourable
passion, and proving himself as capable as any meaner man of supporting
a family by honest toil. It will be seen that he expresses his contempt
for his illustrious title by a pretty play upon words. This is the
communication:—

 “Most darlingest of angel girls. I must lavish on you terms of
 endearment. You are my loveliest love, _mia cara carissima_, _ma petite
 chérie_, my own sweet rose of Kent. I thought myself often in love
 before I had the happiness to meet you, but was mistaken. You fill
 my soul as nobody else has ever done. I am in despair at being told
 I must not pay you further attention. My Imperial rank stands in the
 way, say you and your honoured mother, of courtship _pour le bon
 motif_. It should, did I not realise the utter vanity of being penned
 up with a tribe of seventy relatives on an isolated peak. I hate my
 position, and am determined to live as a man should, and not like a
 poor creature who must be spoon-fed from the cradle to the grave. It
 depends on you whether I shall go on as an ‘arch-duckling’ or not.
 You spoke of the sad life of Penny Smith. Yes, it was a sad one; but
 why? The Prince of Capua had not the manliness to go and work for a
 living for himself and his wife. My courage is equal to emigrating
 to Australia, where I am sure I should fall on my feet. I could be a
 manager of a theatre, a teacher of French, German, Italian, or the
 curator of a zoo or a botanical garden, or I could be a riding-master
 or a stock-rider. Without going so far as Australia, I might get
 married in Italy to the girl of my choice. I was born a Tuscan, and
 the statutes of the grand-ducal family are dead letters there. As you
 can never be an Archduchess, I shall be only too happy to cease to be
 an Archduke, but hope ever to be counted your darling Archduckling.

  “JOHANN.

 “——or, since you like my soft Italian name, Giovanni—but not on any
 account (Don) Juan.”

It is, in very truth, a remarkable document; but it is the sort of
document which never surprises one when emanating from a Habsburg
pen—and perhaps ought not to surprise one when emanating from any
royal or imperial pen. In the House of Habsburg, as in many other royal
and imperial houses—and notably those of the Wittelsbachs and the
Neapolitan Bourbons—we find many men and women who have combined great
ardour in love with a passionate desire for the domestic tranquillity
of the common lot, and the lives of obscure citizens of the middle
classes. Examples which occur on the spur of the moment are those of
Queen Cristina of Spain, who married ex-Private Muñoz, the son of a
Madrid tobacconist, and played parlour games in the Palace with that
tobacconist and his family; of Queen Cristina’s sister, the Duchesse
de Berry, who married, _en secondes noces_, the impecunious young
diplomat, Lucchesi-Palli, and bore him innumerable children; of that
Archduke John, who was united so happily to the daughter of the village
postmaster; of that Archduke Henry, whose wife, Leopoldine Hoffmann,
the actress, was created Countess of Waldeck.

Such were the exemplars—though one could name many more—whose
temperament and tastes the Archduke John Salvator shared; but his
advances, as both the letter and the sequel show, did not this time
inspire confidence. The lady, it seems, did not love him for himself
alone—saw no beauty in the prospect of becoming the bride of a teacher
of languages, or a riding-master, or the curator of the Zoological
Gardens at Sydney or Melbourne; and perhaps she was, from the worldly
point of view, wise. Habsburgs who are ready to turn their hands
to anything have sometimes had to turn their hands to very menial
occupations. Within the last few years an appeal was made to Francis
Joseph to do something for a Habsburg—a descendant of the Archduke
Ernest—who had fallen (or risen) to be head waiter in a _café_ at
Buda-Pesth. The lady whom the Archduke John Salvator had once proposed
to support in modest comfort by means of honest toil may since perhaps
have heard of that incident with curiously mixed emotions.

At all events, she did not marry the Archduke—her mother, as appears
from the letter, intervening; and he, on his part, did not keep single
for her sake—or, at all events, did not keep unattached. Princess
Louisa tells us that he wanted to marry her, his niece, the future
bride of Signor Toselli; but that is as it may be. His desire to do
so was, at any rate, kept under control. One thinks of him rather as
one of those Habsburgs whom the bare idea of consanguineous marriage
revolts; and one knows that he met his fate, in a sentimental sense,
while shooting with some of his brother officers in the Semmering
district. One cannot do better than borrow the poetical picture of the
scene presented to us by his biographer, Mme. de Faucigny-Lucinge:—

 “It was one of those moments when the human soul feels the need of
 fusion and communion with the mysteries of nature. The Prince was
 walking in a favourite path of his—a discreet refuge in which his
 companions had always been accustomed to leave him alone. Of a sudden
 he found himself in the presence of a girl whose delicate features
 and pensive gaze attracted his attention. Her eyes were gentle, and
 her lips were lighted with a smile. As he overheard her talking with
 her parents, it seemed to the Archduke that he had long been familiar
 with that melodious voice, so fraught with enchantment to all who
 listened to it; for the things which most delight us always seem like
 reminiscences of some previous life.”

Nothing happened, however, at the moment. The Archduke passed by
without speaking—too shy to speak, perhaps, though that, in the light
of the letter which we have just read, is not very easy to believe; but
he did not forget. To quote the same narrator:—

 “His thoughts came back, again and again, to the girl who had appeared
 to him in such poetical circumstances, in an Autumn twilight. He
 wanted to know who she was; and having learnt that her home was in
 Vienna, where she lived with her parents, and that her name was Milly
 Stübel, and that she was one of the artistes employed at the Opera, he
 sought and found an opportunity of meeting her again. Every time that
 he met her, it was a fresh pleasure to him to remark the originality
 and the attractive complexity of her gifted nature. Soon they were
 passing long hours in each other’s society; and it was the unspeakable
 joy of musical harmony which attached him, for ever more, to Milly;
 for music is far more eloquent than words.”

One has no difficulty in believing it; for that is what the Habsburgs
are like. One after another, they find their way to the common lot
by taking a perfectly sincere and simple interest in the ordinary
occupations and amusements of ordinary people. Sometimes those
interests are domestic, as in the case of the Archduke Charles
Ferdinand, who is said to have proposed marriage in the kitchen; they
sometimes are artistic, as in the case of Princess Louisa of Tuscany,
who was at the piano when she first spoke of love to Signor Toselli.
So that it was quite in conformity with the family traits that the
Archduke John Salvator should forget his rank, in order to talk musical
criticism with the ballet-girl; and it was equally in accordance with
the family traits that the talk should soon become affectionately
intimate.

They talked of marriage: to the Austrian ballet-girl, as to the English
lady, the Archduke spoke of his ability to earn a competence by the
sweat of his brow—not, this time, as a teacher of languages or a
keeper of wild beasts, but as a skipper in the merchant service. In a
sense it was idle talk, for he had money enough in the bank to keep
both himself and a wife in comfort; but he wanted the common lot, and
labour, as well as matrimony, was a part of it. Nor was he making an
empty boast; for he had passed the tests, and held a master mariner’s
certificate. That was the condition of things with him when, not long
after the Meyerling tragedy, he had his final quarrel with Francis
Joseph.

The ultimate grounds and the immediate occasion of that quarrel remain
uncertain. From Countess Marie Larisch’s narrative one would gather
that, whatever the proximate cause may have been, the final cause was
the Hungarian plot. Princess Louisa, on the other hand, has a story
that Francis Joseph ordered him to apologise for language which he had
used to the Archduke Albert, and that he refused to do so. Both stories
may be true; and the Archduke’s determination to marry an opera nymph
may also have been a contributory cause of disagreement. The actual
scene is described by Princess Louisa, who may be supposed to have had
her information from the Archduke himself:—

 “Uncle John” (she tells us) “said in his bold way that he would leave
 the army and the Court rather than be dictated to, and he concluded by
 declaring that he did not care in the least whether he was a member
 of the Imperial House. A storm followed this rank apostasy, and my
 uncle, in a fit of ungovernable rage, tore off his Order of the Golden
 Fleece, and flung it at the Emperor.”

The Emperor, as may be supposed, was not melted, but rather hardened,
by that appeal to his feelings; so that, when the Archduke presently
announced his desire to resign his rank and titles, take the name of
“John Orth,” and leave Austria, Francis Joseph replied that he might
take any name he chose, and go where he liked, but that, if he ever
attempted to return, he would find that the Austrian police had orders
to arrest him as soon as he crossed the frontier. Those were the
circumstances in which he departed; and Milly Stübel departed with him.
He could not marry her in Austria, but he had promised to marry her in
London.




CHAPTER XXIV

 John Orth—Had he been plotting with Rudolph?—Indirect confirmation
 of story told by Countess Marie Larisch—Did John Orth really marry
 Milly Stübel—Failure to find the proofs of the marriage—John Orth’s
 letters written on the eve of his departure for America—Disappearance
 of his ship off Cape Horn—Is John Orth really dead—Examination of
 the reasons for believing that he is still alive.


We will now definitely call John of Tuscany John Orth; but a cloud
of uncertainty overhangs both his assumption of that name and his
subsequent adventures. Ostensibly he assumed the name, and shook the
dust of Austria off his feet, to please himself; but there are not
wanting those who declare that, if he had not resigned his rank, he
would have been deprived of it, and that he only banished himself
because the Emperor had threatened to banish him.

The narrative of Princess Louisa does not help us much. Princess
Louisa only knows what her uncle told her, and he evidently told her
very little. It is reasonable to trust her for the passionate scene
in Francis Joseph’s cabinet; but that is all. She was only a girl of
twenty when she heard of it, and there was no reason why the hidden
causes of the scene should be confided to her. Nor does one get much
light from Countess Marie Larisch’s story of the plot to seize the
throne of Hungary, if one accepts her version of that story; for, if
all the evidence relating to that plot was contained in the mysterious
steel casket, then Francis Joseph would have known nothing of it, and
John Orth would have had nothing to fear when once the casket was in
his hands.

But was all the evidence of that plot contained in that steel casket?
Had not a portion of it found its way, by some means or other, into the
hands of the Austrian secret police? That is our problem; and it will
be useful to turn back to the half-forgotten gossip of the time, and
see if we can find in it any indications that Countess Marie Larisch’s
“revelation” has, at least, “something in it.”

We can. It was assumed by Countess Marie’s reviewers, when her book
appeared, that her story connecting John Orth’s departure with the
Meyerling tragedy was, whether true or not, at all events quite new.
But that assumption was erroneous. Countess Marie was only putting the
dots on the i’s—whether she put the right dots on the right i’s or
not—of a contemporaneous rumour. One may find the rumour in a work
entitled _The Private Life of Two Emperors—William II. of Germany and
Francis Joseph of Austria_—published in the United States, nine years
ago, and written, as the publisher’s note states, as far back at 1899.
It possesses no sort of authority; one dares not go to it for “inside
information”; but it does reflect—for what it is worth—the gossip of
the hour. This is what the writer says:—

 “There is, it may be added also, a story as to the Archduke’s
 disappearance which I have never yet seen in print. It connects his
 exile and his disappearance from the ranks of the members of the
 Imperial family of Austria with the tragedy of Meyerling and the death
 of Crown Prince Rudolph. It is difficult to account for the origin
 thereof, except for the fact which I have just mentioned that the two
 Archdukes had already once quarrelled, and had been prevented from
 fighting a duel only by the intervention of the Emperor. There could,
 therefore, be no longer any love lost between them. Moreover, Archduke
 Rudolph died at Meyerling in the early part of 1889; Archduke John
 left Austria and relinquished his military and imperial dignities
 during that same year, after having been suspended from his divisional
 command just about the time of the tragedy at Meyerling.”

What is important here is the rumour itself; the inferences drawn
from it by the writer do not matter. The suggestion that John Orth
was directly concerned with Rudolph’s death is obviously no more than
a conjectural explanation of the rumour. How, people were evidently
asking themselves, could John Orth’s departure be associated with
Rudolph’s death except on the assumption that he had done, or procured,
a deed of violence? Countess Marie’s story at least accounts for the
association without invoking that hypothesis; and it also accounts for
the quarrel between the two Archdukes. It was a quarrel, according
to her, between conspirators—the one eager to press forward, and the
other frightened into wishing to hang back; and though one gathers from
one page of Countess Marie’s book that the secret of the conspiracy
was locked up in the steel casket, one reads on another page that the
Ministers had an inkling of it. That fact transpires in her account of
her interview with Count Julius Andrassy:

 “Count Andrassy” (she writes) “said plainly that something beyond
 a love drama was responsible for the tragedy; the Archduke John
 corroborated this statement, and the affair of the steel box makes me
 absolutely certain of it.”

Count Andrassy, that is to say, knew something, but did not choose
to tell Countess Marie how much he knew. What was known to him was
presumably known to the Emperor too; and their joint knowledge may have
been enough to induce them to drive John Orth into exile with menaces.
Still, though the conjecture is plausible, certainty is unattainable.

Nor is certainty attainable with regard to John Orth’s alleged marriage
to the ballet-girl, Milly Stübel. The stock statement is to the effect
that he married her in London; but none of those who make the statement
have seen the “marriage lines.” They have been sought for; but the
search has been unavailing.[5] One suspects that a ceremony of some
sort was performed somewhere—_pour acquit de conscience_—but that
it was a ceremony without legal value. One only gets back to certainty
when one comes to speak of John Orth’s voyage to the New World, whither
he set sail, on his own ship, the _Sainte-Marguerite_, on March 26,
1890. But he had passed by way of Switzerland; and it was while he
was in Switzerland that he and Francis Joseph exchanged their last
communications. That story has been told, in the _Berliner Tagblatt_,
by Marshal Czanadez, at that time attached to the Emperor’s military
cabinet:—

[Footnote 5: Mr. Eveleigh Nash, the publisher, assures the author that
he has himself engaged in the investigation very carefully, but with
purely negative results.]

 “John Orth” (Marshal Czanadez wrote) “had hardly left the Empire
 for Switzerland when the Emperor instructed me to follow him, to
 deliver a letter to him, and to induce him to return to Vienna. I
 fulfilled my mission; but I could not influence the Archduke. He told
 me that he wished to live on his private means in accordance with
 his tastes. He said that he had a capital sum of 70,000 florins, and
 proposed to lay it out to the best advantage. Seeing that he would
 not listen to my arguments, I took Francis Joseph’s letter from my
 pocket and handed it to him. He ran his eyes over it and turned pale.
 Trembling with emotion, he handed the letter back to me and pointed
 to a passage in which the Emperor told him that his renunciation of
 the title of Archduke was accepted, but that he must never set foot
 in Austria-Hungary again. My mission was terminated. I returned to
 Vienna. I told the Emperor its result, and informed him of the details
 of my conversation with the Archduke. The Emperor made no remark.”

It seems a little confused. The bearer of a letter forbidding John Orth
to return to Austria can hardly have been instructed to try to persuade
him to return there; so one scents inaccuracy. All that is established
is that there were negotiations of some sort, even after John Orth
had passed the frontier. We must make what we can of that imperfect
information; and we must also make what we can—which is not much—of
the letters in which John Orth himself bade his friends farewell.
In a letter written to Herr Heinrich, on December 8, 1889, we find
him protesting against constructions which have been placed upon his
conduct:—

 “I give you my word of honour” (he writes) “that my relations with our
 illustrious and benevolent sovereign have undergone no change. The
 impossibility of my return to the army must not, any more than my own
 resolution, be attributed to him....

 “Francis Joseph’s behaviour in the matter has been that of a
 magnanimous, just, and noble monarch. I have received from the hands
 of M. Csanadez of the Military Chancellery, the letter granting my
 request; but that letter forbade me to return to my own country
 without special permission. Hard as I find that condition, I recognise
 that it is not an act of excessive or exaggerated severity. No dynasty
 can allow one of its members to live the life of a _bourgeois_ in his
 own country without his Emperor’s leave.

 “What really troubled me was the order intimated to me by the order of
 the Minister of the Imperial Household to get myself naturalised in
 Switzerland. What a cruel dilemma was that! On the one hand I should
 have liked to demonstrate my gratitude and affection to the Emperor by
 acting in accordance with his wishes. On the other hand I was anxious
 to continue to be his subject, partly on account of my admiration for
 his august person, and partly on account of my passionate desire to
 continue to be a citizen of my beloved fatherland. I made an appeal,
 therefore, to the Emperor’s gracious kindness; and I have been a whole
 month without a reply letting me know whether I am or am not to be
 permitted to be an Austrian.”

The letter, which was published, was obviously written for publication.
It was a manifesto rather than a confidence—designed to tell Austria,
not the truth, but what John Orth wished to be accepted as the truth.
We seem to see the writer laying his hand upon his heart and bowing,
as he makes his exit speech. He goes on to speak of his intention to
obtain a master mariner’s certificate; and then he becomes poetically
vague:—

 “My longings and my dreams will doubtless disappear among the ocean
 waves: not so the ideal which I cherish in my heart. Shall I be happy?
 I do not know; but at least I am satisfied that I have no reason to
 blush for anything that I have done. What will become of me if I do
 adopt the Swiss nationality? That, too, I do not know. The time for
 idle and empty dreams is past....

 “... Need I add that, even if I have to become Swiss, my heart and
 soul will continue to be entirely Austrian?

 “Perhaps my words are the outcome of morbid excitement. However that
 may be, I hide my thoughts from no one, and cling to the hope that,
 some day, I shall be able to seal my fidelity to my country by my
 actions. In truth, my impatience to do so is great—especially great
 in view of the impossibility of bringing my plans to realisation.”

There are also a few later letters. In one of them, written on the eve
of departure, we read:—

 “To-day I bid farewell to Europe—the quarter of the globe in which
 the first years of my life have been passed; and I am now beginning
 to realise, in the shadow of my old flag, my project of a voyage to
 the New World. The tug which awaits me will slowly and silently tow my
 ship out to sea, without any firing of salutes. And so we shall float
 down the Thames—the golden Thames; and, in a few hours’ time, we
 shall be unfurling our sails in the midst of fog and rain.”

The last letter is written after the arrival in South America:—

 “Once away from Vienna, I find everything peaceful. My loyalty to
 my fatherland cannot be shaken. Across the wide waters I waft it a
 salute.”

That is the final gesture; and one can get little out of it beyond
the fact that John Orth was a true Habsburg, who must needs strike an
attitude. His exit speeches to Herr Heinrich are, _mutatis mutandis_,
in the same tone as his exit speeches to Countess Marie Larisch and
Princess Louisa. We have already given a portion of his farewell
speech to the latter; and the rest of it may be quoted here:—

 “My uncle looked at us tenderly, for we were on the verge of tears at
 the idea of losing our kind and brilliant kinsman, and he then said,
 with calm gravity: ‘I am about to disappear, my dear children, and
 I shall do so in such a manner that no one will ever find me. When
 the Emperor is dead, I will return, for then Austria will require my
 services.

 “‘I wish, Louisa and Leopold, that you could come with me, for
 we three should live the life best suited to us. It cannot be,
 however, and our ways must part here. You are both, like myself,
 individualities, and, like me, you will work out your destinies. But
 we shall become forces that will eventually be felt.’”

One suspects here, of course, that Princess Louisa’s self-consciousness
has impaired the exactitude of her recollections. She wants us to
believe that the seal of mystery was imprinted, at an early age, on her
own brow, and that the Man of Mystery among the Habsburgs recognised
her, even in her childhood, as a kindred spirit. Perhaps he did, and
perhaps he did not—it matters very little. What really matters is
the impression which John Orth left behind him—the impression of a
man with dark secrets and deep designs, which he hinted at but would
not communicate; one who meant to evaporate like a subtle essence—to
be materialised again when there once more was work for him to do in
the flesh. That was how he impressed Countess Marie Larisch, when he
kissed her hand and left her standing alone on that dark night in the
Ring:—

 “I watched John of Tuscany as he passed into the fog and disappeared
 in the gloom of the night. And, when I read later that he had been
 drowned at sea, I thought of that evening in Vienna when he bade me
 farewell. Has he died without dying? I think so. And I believe that
 the Archduke, despite all evidence to the contrary, will return in his
 own good time.”

But what became of him?

The actual known facts are very few. The _Sainte-Marguerite_,
navigated, not, as Princess Louisa says, by John Orth, but by Captain
Sodich, set sail on March 26, 1890, and duly reached La Plata. There
she took a fresh crew, and started, with John Orth himself in command
and Milly Stübel on board, on a voyage to Valparaiso. Furious gales
were raging round the Horn at the time of her passage; and she never
reached her destination. The presumption that she had gone down, with
her captain and all hands, was very strong; but still hope was not
abandoned. There was just a chance that she might have been wrecked on
one of the desolate islands off the coast of Chili—islands which have
no harbours and no means of communication with the rest of the world.
The thing had happened to other ships, and it was just possible that it
might have happened to the _Sainte-Marguerite_. So Don Agostino Aroyo,
Minister of the Argentine Republic at Vienna, argued; and Francis
Joseph sent an Austrian cruiser to search the coast, in accordance with
his suggestions. But without result. The cruiser searched diligently,
and found nothing. The sea guarded its secret, and the mystery was as
deep as ever.

And then legend got to work, and refused to be stifled, alleging that
John Orth was still alive.

There were those who declared that the _Sainte-Marguerite_ had not
been lost at sea, but had been given another name, and had either been
marooned or entered another port than that for which she was cleared;
but that is quite incredible, if not materially impossible. The ship
could hardly have been marooned anywhere where she would not, by this
time, have been found; and one can imagine no means whereby the silence
of the survivors could have been secured. Moreover, the police of the
seas and the ports does its work very effectively; and every sailor
man is a potential detective who boasts that he can recognise any
ship known to him, without needing to read the name painted on her
stern. This first theory, therefore, will not by any means hold water;
and it was quickly supplanted by the second theory that, though the
_Sainte-Marguerite_ was lost, with all hands, John Orth was not on
board of her. That is the theory to which Princess Louisa adheres:—

 “The chief officer of this vessel” (she writes) “came to Salzburg
 expressly to see papa, and this man told me he was positive John
 Orth was alive, and had never gone to Valparaiso. He described how,
 as the old crew stood watching the _Margherita_ disappear into the
 evening mists, the person who stood on the bridge, enveloped in a
 great-coat, and muffled to the eyes, was NOT John Orth, but some one
 impersonating him. The crew in question returned to Trieste, and one
 and all believed the evidence of their own eyes at La Plata, and
 refused to put any credence in the report that their captain had been
 drowned at sea.”

[Illustration: THE ARCHDUKE JOHN OF TUSCANY

(John Orth.)]

That was the starting-point of the legend; and it was soon embroidered,
as such legends always are. From this, that, and the other source came
reports that this, that, and the other traveller had met John Orth and
recognised him. One may as well make out a list of these stories:—

1. A visitor to a Spanish convent recognised John Orth there in the
garb of a monk.

2. A French immigrant to the Argentine Republic, returning to France in
1893, declared that he had met John Orth at Buenos Ayres, and again at
Rio Quarto.

3. A citizen of Trieste claimed to have met John Orth at Buenos Ayres
in 1894.

4. An explorer of the Polar regions related that he had encountered
John Orth in the midst of the eternal snow and ice, carrying a
pocket-book on which the arms of the House of Habsburg were emblazoned
in gold.

5. An explorer of the Chaco discovered John Orth, living in a lonely
hut, sixteen miles from the nearest house, in the disputed territory
close to the Chilian frontier. The man, who spoke German, called
himself Frederick Otten; but the traveller was not to be deceived by
his false name.

Some of these stories are more plausible than others; and the one of
them which has stuck in the minds of men is that which identifies John
Orth with Frederick Otten, or, as some versions of the story style him,
Baron Ott. But another story, never before printed, may be added here.
A gentleman who spoke English fluently with a German accent, was in
England a little while ago, attended by a well-known London solicitor,
and prepared to negotiate with publishers. The solicitor invited Mr.
Eveleigh Nash to meet him; and he dropped the hint which gave the
opening for overtures, by saying something about “my niece.” “Then
you,” said Mr. Nash, “must be the Archduke John of Tuscany.” “I am,”
replied the mysterious stranger; and then the conversation turned on
literary matters. “I can’t write my life under my own name,” said the
stranger, “but if you want reminiscences of the House of Habsburg, I
can provide you with plenty of them.”

There, for the moment, the matter was left; but presently there was
a sequel. Information was received that the same traveller had also
visited Paris, and, there also, had been invited to a little dinner in
a restaurant; but, in Paris, the inquiry into his representations was
pursued more carefully. Princess Louise of Saxe-Coburg, who was then in
Paris, and who had known John of Tuscany well, consented to come to
the restaurant, and look at the stranger, without making herself known
to him. He did not recognise her, and she did not recognise him. “That
man,” she said, “is no more John of Tuscany than I am”; and when Mr.
Nash subsequently tried to get into communication with his mysterious
acquaintance at the address which had been given to him, his letter was
returned to him.

So that that identification falls to the ground; and, indeed, the
plausibility of the most plausible of the identifications weighs but
little in the balance when set against the difficulty of vanishing,
as John Orth is supposed to have vanished, from human ken. What Jabez
Balfour failed to do, in the same part of the world, with considerably
stronger motives for doing it, John Orth is not in the least likely
to have done. Nor need his melodramatic exit speeches—if he really
delivered them—influence our judgment in the matter; for there is
nothing in a determination to “die without dying” which can avail to
save a sailor from the perils of the sea.

Nor is anything proved by the fact that John Orth’s mother, believing
one or other of the stories, suddenly ceased to wear mourning for her
son. Her case, in that respect, was only like that of the mother of Sir
Roger Tichborne; and, like the mother of Sir Roger Tichborne, she gave
large sums of money to an impostor who claimed to be her son. So we may
take it as proved beyond all reasonable doubt that John Orth is really
and truly dead; and the law courts recently took that view, and gave
leave to presume his death, to the advantage of his heirs. His death
is the second of the major tragedies of Francis Joseph’s reign. The
assassination of the Empress was to be the third.




CHAPTER XXV

 The revolt of the Archdukes—Instructive analogies—Later years of
 the Empress Elizabeth—Her manner of life described by M. Paoli, the
 Corsican detective—Her fearlessness—Her superstitions—Various evil
 omens—The last excursion—Assassination of the Empress at Geneva—How
 Francis Joseph received the news.


Many Archdukes besides John Orth were destined to surprise and shock
Francis Joseph by their aspirations after the common lot, and their
repudiation of family pride in their conduct of the affairs of their
hearts. We shall see them all in a moment—Archdukes and Archduchesses
as well—placing love on the pedestal which the Head of their House
assigned to rank, and rising, like a cloud of witnesses, to testify
against the Habsburg principles and system.

The revolt is instinctive, though the vast number of the rebels
sometimes gives it the appearance of being concerted. There are no
precedents for it in history, and the most luminous analogies are
religious ones. One may be reminded of the case of those Essayists and
Reviewers who, in the ‘sixties, split the tight vestments of the Church
of England by the impatient movements of their broad shoulders, and
were denounced as the Seven against Christ; or of the case of those
Modernists of the Roman Catholic Church whom Pius X. from time to
time rebukes for bringing scholarship and intelligence to bear upon
theological propositions. In any case, the attack is, and has been, an
attack from within,—the deadliest kind of attack; and the resulting
spectacle is strange, and, to many, painful.

Here, it seems, is the House of Habsburg betrayed by the members of the
household; here are the very pillars of the temple, getting up, one
after the other, and walking—or even running—away, careless whether
the roof falls in, so long as they are not involved in the ruin; while
Francis Joseph is left to sit almost alone in the midst of the scene
of desolation: a pathetic figure, like Marius alone among the ruins of
Carthage—or perhaps an heroic figure, like that strong man of whom
Horace wrote that even the collapse of the universe would find him
undismayed. We are coming to that spectacle in a moment; but the time
for ringing up the curtain on it is not quite yet. The _tableau_ must
be preceded by the scene of the assassination of the Empress.

We are told that the Empress wrote Reminiscences, which will some day
be published. Until they appear—if they ever do appear—the full
history of her inner life cannot be written; and it may be impossible
to write it even then. The gift of self-revelation is as rare as
genius, if it is not, indeed, a kind of genius; and the men and women
who have the art of communicating the secrets of their souls are far
fewer than those who have secrets to communicate. It often happens that
the world, asking for bread, is given a stone; asking, that is to say,
for a confession, is given dark hints, and trivial tittle-tattle. It
may prove to be so in this case; but no one knows.

For Elizabeth guarded her secret to the end; and the world has no
real knowledge of her, but only an impression, arising out of dark
sayings, and a curious way of life. She was restless, and she sought
solitude—one can say little more of her than that. What gadfly stung
her, and drove her continually from place to place, one can but guess;
and one is tempted, from time to time, to contradictory guesses.
Perhaps the contradictions could be reconciled; perhaps more than
one gadfly tortured her. She spoke of herself as a woman who dreaded
death and yet saw nothing in life worth clinging to. She said that she
had religious beliefs, and yet her favourite poet was Heine, who had
none; and when Countess Starztay spoke to her of a peace beyond all
understanding awaiting her when death had done its worst, she turned on
her with the retort:

 “What do you know about that? No traveller who has taken that journey
 has ever returned to tell us what he found at the end of it.”

That is hardly the language of Pantheism; and yet there were pompous
believers who pointed at Elizabeth reproachfully as a Pantheist.
One may conjecture that she tried to be a Pantheist, and succeeded
sometimes, for a little while, and relapsed, from time to time, into
uneasiness, and the sense of her personality as an Old Man of the
Sea always on her back, and by no means to be thrown off. It often
happens so when personalities are very pronounced, and experiences have
been vividly individual. Inherited superstitions naturally confirm
the tendency; and Elizabeth—sceptic though she seemed in orthodox
circles—must have inherited more superstitions than she abandoned.

She evidently felt herself to be—and, in a sense, doubtless was—a
woman who had survived herself. Something, as she said, had died
in her; and life, after that death, was no more than a mechanical
physiological round. Ill health may have helped to fix a sensation
which, in good health, would only have been transitory; she was an
invalid—albeit rather a vigorous invalid—during her later years. Her
knowledge that there was madness in her family—the consequent sense of
doom impending—may have conjured up the picture of Nemesis in pursuit
of her; and she was not without reasons for telling herself that her
failure in life had been signal. Even if she did not know just what it
was that she had wanted, she must have been quite sure that, whatever
it had been, she had failed to get it. There had been no happiness for
her in family life, and as little happiness in love. In the former she
had had the sense of tragedy without the compensation of affection;
and, if the obvious interpretation of Countess Marie Larisch’s story
be the true one, she had known what it was for a lover to ride away,
leaving her to cynical reflections. So she went through life wearing a
mask, and letting everyone see that she was wearing it.

So far as externals go, the picture can, of course, be given more
detail. M. Xavier Paoli, of the Sûreté, whose function it was to shadow
royalties in France, and protect them from assassins, has recorded
many particulars of her eccentricities. She resented his attentions
at first, and wanted to be left alone. “We shan’t want anybody,”
were General Berzeviczy’s words to M. Paoli when he first introduced
himself, and offered his services; but M. Paoli was a discreet man who
knew how to make himself acceptable, always there when wanted, and
never in the way when not wanted; and he observed what he saw with the
keen eye of a detective for whom nothing is too minute to be remarked.
From him we learn that the Empress bathed daily in distilled water,
and took only one biscuit with her tea at breakfast, and refreshed
herself later in the morning with “meat juice extracted daily from
several pounds of fillet of beef by means of a special apparatus which
she always carried with her,” and dined off iced milk, raw eggs, and a
glass of Tokay.

M. Paoli also speaks of her long walks; for these, of course, were
occasions on which the burden of his responsibilities weighed heavily
upon him. Elizabeth often walked as much as fifteen or twenty miles in
a day, with no one but her “Greek Reader”—some student, as a rule,
of the University of Athens—in attendance. His function was not only
to read Greek, but also to carry the Empress’s spare skirt. She walked
“clad in a black serge gown of so simple a character that no well-to-do
trades-woman would have cared to be seen in it”; and she often changed
her skirt in the midst of her perambulations, behind trees, or any
other screen which the landscape afforded, while the reader dutifully
looked the other way. Sometimes, too, she perambulated the streets of
Paris with equal recklessness. Once, M. Paoli recalls, she went to see
Notre Dame by moonlight, and insisted upon being taken afterwards to
eat onion soup in a popular _café_.

Biarritz and the Riviera, however, were the places at which M. Paoli
saw most of her. At both resorts she was known as “the lady in black”
who went about with a full purse, dispensing charity when the fit came
upon her. Whenever she visited Biarritz, she never failed to buy a cow,
to be sent to her farm in Hungary. At Cap Martin, where the Empress
Eugénie recommended her an hotel, Francis Joseph sometimes came to
see her; but he does not seem to have seen very much of her when he
did come. Elizabeth “sometimes,” but by no means always, dined with
him; and she invariably lunched alone. The visits, one cannot help
feeling, were little more than tributes to those appearances which
are so terribly important in imperial circles. It is added that the
billiard-room was consecrated as a chapel; and perhaps in that act also
a regard for appearances may be discerned.

A more important fact, from M. Paoli’s point of view, was Elizabeth’s
reluctance to let him know where she was going, when she started for
one of her walks. He generally managed to find out; but he nevertheless
remonstrated, and received a characteristic reply:

 “Set your mind at rest, my dear M. Paoli. Nothing will happen to me!
 what would you have them do to a poor woman? Besides, not one of us is
 more than the petal of a poppy or a ripple on the water.”

He assured her that there really was danger—that he had heard rumours;
but she still refused to let herself be scared:

 “What!” she exclaimed. “Still more of your fears. I repeat, I am not
 afraid; and, mind, I make no promises.”

But there were omens which others noticed even if Elizabeth herself was
blind to them. It was observed that, while her reader was reading aloud
from Marion Crawford’s _Corleone_—a romance dealing with the crimes
of the Mafia—a raven wheeled and circled round the Empress, returning
as often as it was driven away; and she told her suite, one morning,
that the moon, seen at midnight from her bedroom window, had looked
like the face of a woman weeping. Moreover, the Parisian sorceress who
prophesied under the name of the Angel Gabriel had made a significant
prediction: that one of the sensational events of the year would
be—_l’assassinat d’une souveraine au cœur malade_. No Queen or Empress
of the time was known to be suffering from physical heart disease;
but Elizabeth was living as a woman whose heart was bowed by grief
and sickened by disappointments. It must be to her, the superstitious
whispered to each other, that the warning of the Angel Gabriel pointed.

The fatal year was spent, as usual, in whirling about Europe: from
Biarritz to San Remo; from San Remo to Caux; from Caux to Kissingen;
from Kissingen to Bruckenau; from Bruckenau to Vienna—where Elizabeth
shut herself up, and refused even to receive a newly-accredited
ambassador; from Vienna to Lainz; from Lainz to Ischl; from Ischl
to Nauheim; and from Nauheim back again to Switzerland, where she
established herself in one of the hotels at Caux. At Caux she had, or
thought she had, a vision which foreboded evil. A mysterious woman in
white appeared in the hotel grounds, when the Empress was sitting on
her balcony, and stared up at her with a fixed and menacing gaze. The
sight made her nervous, and she told one of her retinue to send the
woman away; but though every path in the hotel grounds was searched,
and every bush was beaten, no woman in white could be discovered
anywhere, and people remembered and recalled an old Austrian legend:
that a woman in white always appeared on the eve of a Habsburg
tragedy—had appeared at Schönnbrunn in 1867, and again in 1889, on the
eve of the tragedies of Queretaro and Meyerling.

Whether the suite believed in that legend none can say; the normal
attitude of unphilosophic mankind towards such a legend is to
discredit it, and yet, at the same time, to wonder whether there may
not be “something in it.” The thing really to be dreaded was its
possible effect on the Empress’s mind, already impressed by the omen
of the circling raven, and the resemblance of the midnight moon to
the countenance of a weeping woman. It was thought unwise, in the
circumstances, to let her pay a promised visit to Baroness Adolphe
Rothschild, in her villa at Prégny, near Geneva. But, though she was
nervous, she was also obstinate. She spoke, as it was her habit to
speak, as a fatalist:

 “I am always on the march,” she said, “to meet my fate. Nothing can
 prevent me from meeting it on the day on which it is written that
 I must do so. Fate often closes its eyes; but, sooner or later, it
 always opens them again, and sees us. The steps which one ought to
 avoid in order that one may not encounter Fate are precisely those
 which one inevitably takes. I am well aware that I am taking such
 steps every day of my life.”

So she insisted, and set out; and, this time, Fate was indeed waiting
on the road which she chose to travel. She met Fate, just as one may
meet any chance acquaintance when going on any journey. She was not
the object of any individual hatred; she was merely the tallest poppy
in the path of one of those anarchists who conceive it to be their
function to lay the tallest poppies low. The assassin said as much to
M. Paoli, who went to see him in prison:

 “I struck” (he said) “at the first crowned head that came along. I
 don’t care. I wanted to make a demonstration, and I succeeded.”

His name was Luccheni; he made his demonstration while Elizabeth was
walking along the Quai du Mont Blanc towards the landing-stage of
the steamer. His weapon was a shoemaker’s awl, sharpened to a deadly
point; he sprang like a panther, and drove it into her heart; then he
ran for his life—soon to be overtaken, and caught, and held. It was
all done so quickly that no one—not even the victim—realised what
had happened. She could still speak, and supposed that she had been
hustled by a pickpocket with a view to theft. “What is it?” she asked,
with rather a dazed manner; and it was not until she had got on board
the boat that she first sat down, and then fainted. There was only
a single spot of blood—the weapon having closed the wound it made;
but Elizabeth was now unconscious—dying of internal hæmorrhage. The
steamer, which had started, was put back; a litter was improvised with
the oars and sail of one of the boats; but it was all over by that
time, and the doctors could do nothing. Luccheni, in custody, was
already boasting cynically:

 “I struck well. I feel sure I must have killed her. I hope I didn’t
 bungle it. I hope she’s really dead.”

Such was her end: as sudden and tragic as her son’s, though not, like
his, enveloped in any shroud of mystery. It only remained to break the
news to Francis Joseph; and Countess Starztay despatched two telegrams
to Count Paar. The first ran thus:

 “Her Majesty has sustained a serious injury. I hope you will announce
 the fact to the Emperor with all possible consideration for his
 feelings.”

The second despatch added that the injuries had proved fatal; but the
two arrived simultaneously. Count Paar had them both in his hands when
he waited on the Emperor, who gathered from his face the nature of
the news he bore. He read the messages, and sank into his chair like
a man stunned. When he mastered himself, and looked up, he saw the
Archduke Francis Ferdinand standing beside him. “What!” he cried to
him bitterly. “Is there no calamity known to this world which is to be
spared to me?”

None, it would seem; and the accumulation of tragedies on the bent
white head may well have seemed the more rather than the less
overwhelming, because of the dearth, in each case, of those endearing
memories which can be relied upon to mellow grief after the first
sharp shock of calamity has passed. The brother who had been shot for
pretending to be Emperor of Mexico had been, in Austria, the leader
of a hostile faction. The son who took his own life so ignobly at
Meyerling had at least toyed with treason. The more distant relative
who died at sea had defied him and insulted him. Between him and the
memory of his early romantic love for his wife there loomed other
interrupting memories. So that it was in a double sense that time had
brought the fulfilment of the curse of the mother who prayed God to
punish the Emperor for taking the life of her son by smiting him in the
person of every member of his family.

His language, nevertheless, was that of a man who had really loved the
wife whom he had lost. One of his intimates has reported it:

 “No one” (he said) “can ever know how great is the loss which I have
 sustained. I can never tell you how much I owe to my well-beloved
 wife, the Empress, and how great a support she was to me during the
 years in which I endured so much. I never can thank God sufficiently
 for having given me such a companion in life. Repeat what I say to
 you; tell every one; I shall be grateful.”

The speech may seem, indeed, an unnatural sequel to some of the facts
related in these pages: an unnatural sequel, in particular, to the
account given of the Empress’s restless wanderings—her ceaseless
search for something which she could neither discover nor define—and
her long and frequent absences from the home of her adoption. But we
need not, for all that, read it with any suspicion of insincerity.
Francis Joseph, it is quite clear, set forth in it, not only what he
wished to be believed, but also what he wished to believe. He had
dreamed love’s young dream in his youth, and had not merely pretended
that he was dreaming it. It had seemed to him, in those years of
illusion, that the dreaming of it was not incompatible with the
Habsburg system of consanguineous marriages with the members of houses
as tainted as their own.

Nor was it through any overt act of his that incompatibilities
irreconcilable with that dream had come to light. The handsome young
man, united to a beautiful young woman, had only by degrees discovered
that his case was also that of a simple man of soldierly directness,
united to a woman who was a mysterious enigma, living an inner life
into which it was impossible for him to penetrate. He had done his
best, and hoped against hope that the dream which he had dreamed would
come true. There is no reason to suppose that he abandoned the hope
because he found himself taking a keen pleasure in the society of Frau
Schratt; and there is every reason to believe that he liked to recall
the dream, and live in it again, and deceive himself.

But his marriage had, nevertheless, been a proof of the failure of
the Habsburg matrimonial system; and further proofs of its failure,
together with many instances of revolt against it, were to be pressed
upon his notice in the years immediately in front of him. His future
trouble with the Archdukes and the Archduchesses was to be trouble
mainly of that kind.




CHAPTER XXVI

 “Austria’s idiot Archdukes”—A _catalogue raisonné_—The Emperor’s
 brothers—The Archduke Rainer—The Archduke Henry and the actress—The
 Archduke Louis Salvator, the Hermit of the Balearic Islands—The
 Archduke Charles Salvator—The Archduke Joseph—The Archduke Eugéne
 and his vow to be “as chaste as possible”—The Archduke William and
 his courtship in the _café_—The Archduke Leopold—The awful Archduke
 Otto and his manifold vagaries.


“Austria’s idiot Archdukes”—that is the scornful phrase in which
Bismarck summed up the pillars of the House of Habsburg; but we must
neither adopt it as a definition nor discard it as an insult.

Archdukes, it is true, have been bred to deviate from the normal human
type; but they have not all deviated from it in the same direction.
Brilliance, as well as beauty, may go with decadence. Genius and
madness are allied, and eccentricity is the cousin of both of them; the
diseased fruit of a diseased stock may sometimes seem to make up in
splendour for what it lacks in strength. We shall see how the various
cases of the Archdukes and Archduchesses confirm that truth—Francis
Joseph alone among them combining a fair endowment of ability with a
plausible resemblance to the average man.

Indeed, we have already seen him doing so. In his married life we have
seen him as the average man puzzled by the exceptional woman—puzzled
but pursuing to the last. In his political life we have seen him
flexible rather than strong, wise in his selection of counsellors, but
sometimes knowing better than they did, and always, in later years at
least, cutting the right figure in the eyes of the world: an Emperor,
indeed—“something like an Emperor,” as people say—magnificent,
authoritative, genial, and affable, though of an affability on which
none must venture to presume. It may be, of course, that there is
more here of appearance, carefully kept up, than of the reality which
compels appearance to conform to it; but one’s impression, in any case,
is of an Emperor whom the discipline of a strict education and early
responsibilities has, as it were, standardised.

But, if the Emperor has been standardised, the Archdukes have not.
They have gone as they have pleased, differing from other people as
Habsburgs must, but not differing from them in the pursuit of any
uniform ideal—often, indeed, striking extraordinary attitudes in their
strenuous endeavours to get back to the manners and methods of ordinary
mankind. Already we have met a few of them: the Crown Prince Rudolph,
a man of letters, a rake, and perhaps a potential rebel; “John Orth,”
a musician, a pamphleteer, and a hot-tempered visionary pelting the
Emperor with the insignia of the Golden Fleece. It remains, leaving
those stories behind us, to complete our picture of the Habsburg Court
with a review of the proceedings of some of the others.

We may even go back a little way for the purpose; for, though
the memory of the more distant events has been effaced by recent
excitements, Francis Joseph has had trouble with his brothers as
well as his son, his grandchildren, his nephews and nieces, and his
cousins. Maximilian, as we have seen, wounded his feelings by more than
one offensively pointed bid for popularity at his expense. Charles
Louis is described by Countess Marie Larisch as “a fat old man with
brutish instincts,” and accused by her of ill-treating his wife, who,
on her part, was understood to be in love with her Chamberlain. The
proceedings of the third brother, Louis Victor, are still wrapped in
a shroud of mystery which it might be indiscreet to try to tear; but
his career as a butterfly of fashion was cut suddenly short by Francis
Joseph’s peremptory command to him to leave Vienna for Salzburg and
stay there.

That is the end of the list of brothers, but only the beginning of
the list of eccentric or otherwise unsatisfactory Archdukes. Whether
any general impression of an abstract Archduke will result from an
enumeration of the performances of several concrete Archdukes is
dubious; but it will nevertheless be worth while to make out a list in
the hope that the figures will somehow group themselves into a subject
picture.

1. The Archduke Rainer, a second cousin, was long the most brilliant
representative of Habsburg culture: a Doctor of Philosophy of the
University of Vienna, the Head, for fifty years, of the Imperial
Academy of Sciences, the organiser of more than one International
Exhibition, and a collector who ransacked the Coptic monasteries of
the Lybian Desert for papyri, and brought two entire ship-loads of
them home with him to Trieste—a collection which Orientalists have
not yet finished sorting, though they have been at the task for half
a century. His marriage caused no trouble, for he was united in time
to an Archduchess who shared his simple tastes. He always, indeed,
had his aspirations after the simple life and the common lot; but his
manifestations of those longings did not cause much inconvenience.
Just as the Empress Elizabeth once startled the company at a Court
banquet by calling for a slice of sausage and a glass of beer, so
the Archduke Rainer is said to have expressed a desire, on a similar
occasion, for boiled mutton and caper sauce—a dish first served to
him by the landlady of a Brighton lodging-house. But there certainly
was no harm in that; nor was there any harm in the Archduke’s passion
for travelling in Switzerland under an assumed name, dining at _table
d’hôte_, and so hearing at first hand the gossip current about his
more lively relatives. The Archduke Rainer was an Archduke for whom
his collection of papyri was Archdukedom large enough; and he was an
ornament to the House of Habsburg, as he would have been an ornament of
any house of which he was a member.

2. The Archduke Henry—Archduke Rainer’s brother—was chiefly
distinguished for his morganatic marriage with the actress, Leopoldine
Hoffmann; and that story is chiefly interesting for the light which it
throws upon the gradual evolution of Francis Joseph’s attitude towards
such marriages. He accepted such a union in the case of the brother
of the Empress who married the actress Henrietta Mendel; but Bavarian
_mésalliances_ were, of course, outside his purview. Habsburgs,
he considered, should maintain a higher standard of matrimonial
exclusiveness than Wittelsbachs. He expressly forbade the Archduke
Henry’s marriage; and the priest who performed it is said only to have
been entrapped into doing so by a trick played on him at a luncheon
party. However that may have been, the Archduke fell into disgrace, and
was absent from Vienna for fifteen years, spending most of the time in
Switzerland. Then he was recalled, and pardoned, and restored to the
dignities of which he had been deprived. A title of nobility was, at
the same time, bestowed upon his wife; and when both he and she died,
as they did almost immediately afterwards, the Archduke Rainer, who had
no children of his own, adopted their orphaned daughter. The promotion
of the “unclassed” bride and her child—unclassed, of course, only from
the haughty Habsburg viewpoint—may be said in some measure to have
foreshadowed events which were to befall thereafter.

3. The Archduke Louis Salvator—John Orth’s elder brother—has
acquired for himself a kind of renown as the student hermit of the
Balearic Islands. He lives the simple life there, attired, according
to his niece, Princess Louisa, in “sandals and loose linen trousers,”
toiling like a labourer, with a sunburnt visage, in a vineyard of
his own, with a yacht always at hand, ready to take him to sea
whenever a fit of restlessness comes upon him. They speak of him as
a pagan in his tastes, a worshipper of the sun, and of what else
one knows not—perhaps of houris, for he is a bachelor, and perhaps
not. He has erected statues in his mysterious grounds to a private
secretary, to whom he was attached; he has been shipwrecked, and he
has written books. The Empress Elizabeth was the only member of the
House who showed much sympathy with him, sharing, as she did, his
love of solitude, his aversion from splendour, and his detestation
of the well-dressed crowd which has so little to do, except to be
well-dressed. What the Russian novelists—or their French critics—call
_impuissance de vivre_ would seem to be the note of his passion for
undisturbed seclusion; and he has written of his yacht as his sole
place of refuge:

 “It was the only place which I could call my home—the only place in
 which I really felt at home. In all my palaces and places of residence
 in Austria and Hungary, and even on my beloved Island of Majorca,
 I feel just as if I were in a hotel, and almost as if I were in a
 prison. There is no sense of home in such places—no sense of home
 whatsoever.”

4. The Archduke Charles Salvator—another of John Orth’s brothers—also
fled from splendour, but fled in another direction. His manner of
seeking the common lot was to mingle with the common people; and he
mingled with them in third-class railway carriages, and on the tops of
omnibuses and tram-cars. He also taught himself a trade—Louis XVI.’s
favourite trade of locksmith—and is said to have excelled at it. The
police did not like him, for his habits gave them trouble; but the
accidents which they feared never happened. A traitor to the Archducal
ideal, perhaps, he was a traitor to nothing else; and he lived and died
harmlessly.

5. The Archduke Joseph—one of the Emperor’s cousins—was clever
in more ways than one, being a man of learning and also a man of
business. He counted among the authorities on the folk-lore of the
Hungarian gypsies; and he was a valuable administrator of commercial
and industrial concerns. His name figured on the official list of
registered licensed victuallers; and he distilled an admirable brandy.
Moreover, he was the titular head of a Casino on the Danube near
Buda-Pesth: a versatile Archduke, in short, who made himself generally
useful, and was appreciated.

6. The Archduke Eugène—the Archduke Joseph’s brother—has specialised
in religion, though he was educated as a soldier, and was, at one and
the same time, a colonel of cavalry and a doctor of divinity. At
one time he was anxious to resign his commission in the hussars in
order to become an Archbishop, like Beethoven’s patron, the Archduke
Rudolph; but Francis Joseph would not permit the transformation. As
a compromise, he undertook to make him Grand Master of the Teutonic
Order, as soon as that office fell vacant: an office the taking up of
which is preluded by the singular vow to be “as chaste as possible.” It
is said that the Archduke Eugène, who looks his part to the life, has
taken the vow as well as the office seriously.

7. The Archduke William—the uncle of the Archduke Eugène—preceded him
in the Grandmastership; but, in his case, the possibilities of chastity
appear to have been limited. The stories of his assignations with
ladies in the _cabinets particuliers_ of restaurants are numerous, and
some of them are diverting. The landlord, on one occasion, was so proud
of his patronage that he could not keep the secret of it. Not realising
what the consequences might be, he whispered to a friend that the
Archduke William was, at that moment, doing him the honour of pursuing
a courtship in an upper chamber. The consequence was that, when the
Archduke descended with the lady from the upper chamber, to take his
carriage, he found a vast crowd of loyal supporters assembled on the
pavement, to receive him with musical honours. His case must have been
even more embarrassing than that of Francis Joseph, when the cook knelt
at his feet and sang the national anthem, in the small hours of the
morning, in Frau Schratt’s villa.

8. The Archduke Leopold—brother of the Archduke Rainer—was, at one
time, commander-in-chief of the corps of engineers; but he suddenly
disappeared, and people wondered what had become of him. Epilepsy—that
curse of the House of Habsburg—had struck him down. He was removed
to the remote castle of Hornstein, where he had to be kept in the
seclusion of a mental invalid until he died.

9. The Archduke Otto—brother of the present heir-apparent, and
consequently Francis Joseph’s nephew—was the most amazing of all the
Archdukes, and the one whose case most fittingly illustrates the usual
generalisations about Habsburg degeneracy. The common people rather
liked him; for he had the negative merit of not being proud, and was,
in the main, the sort of gay and festive buffoon to whom the hearts of
the common people, when untrammelled by considerations of morality,
go out. But people who were not so common took a different view of
him; and Austria was filled with stories of his misdeeds and the
discomfiture which they brought him.

Meeting a funeral procession, when he was out riding, he insisted that
the coffin should be laid upon the ground in order that he might leap
his horse over it. Getting drunk in a fashionable _café_, he more
than once executed a dance, apparelled in nothing except a képi, a
sword-belt, and a pair of gloves; and once, in order to express his
contempt for things in general and Habsburgs in particular, he poured
the contents of a dish of spinach over the Emperor’s bust. A furious
lady cyclist once assailed him with a whip for breaking up a cycle race
on the high road on which he was driving; and the Austrian journalists
who aspersed his private character were acquitted by the juries when he
ventured to take proceedings against them.

The worst thing that he ever did was to invite his boon companions
to pay a surprise visit to his wife’s bedchamber, at two o’clock in
the morning, at a time when she was just about to become a mother,
and to strike the one boon companion who was sober enough to draw his
sword and protect the Archduchess from the indignity. The matter was
reported; and, as it was impossible for the offended officer to avenge
his honour by challenging a member of the Imperial house, the Emperor
took the matter under his own hands. He thanked the officer, it is
said, in Otto’s presence for the service which he had rendered; he
smacked Otto’s face in the officer’s presence; and he put Otto under
arrest.

And so on, and so forth; for the scandalous stories about Otto are
endless. It need only be added that he died young, as the result of
his dissipations—the structure of his once handsome nose having first
collapsed.

There we may end our _catalogue raisonné_ of those Archdukes whose
connection with this biography is only incidental. Decidedly it is
difficult to generalise about them, for they are, and have been, no
more like each other than like other people. There have been good
Archdukes as well as bad; clever Archdukes as well as stupid ones; and,
at the end of the list, one finds oneself asking: Is there any single
trait on which we can lay our fingers, declaring that it is common to
them all?

At the first blush one would be disposed to say that there is none;
that the recluses, and the rowdies, and the students, and the men of
business of the House of Habsburg are like a fortuitous collection of
incongruous atoms. But when one looks again, and looks more carefully,
one becomes conscious of a common force which is at work among them
all. One may describe it, in the language of the physicists, as a
_centrifugal_ force: Nature’s reply, as it were, to that centripetal
force which has been at work from a distant past through the media of
the doctrine of divine right, and the systems of specialised princely
education, and consanguineous marriages. There is, to sum the matter
up, a Habsburg ideal, forming the centre of the circle—an ideal to
which Francis Joseph himself has remained as faithful as possible for
as long a time as possible; but there is also that centrifugal force
whirling all the individual Habsburgs away from that centre in all
imaginable directions.

Most of them, as we know, have been whirled into marriages incompatible
with the ideal; but there have been exceptions to that rule, as to any
rule which one might endeavour to lay down. The only feature really
common to their very various adventures and ways of life is that the
force has affected, and the whirl has caught, each one of them. Otto
stripping himself in public; Charles Salvator boarding the tram; Louis
Salvator hiding his face in the Balearic Islands; Eugène clamouring
for an archbishopric; and Rainer sighing for boiled mutton and caper
sauce—all these are multifarious manifestations of an identical
phenomenon; that phenomenon being Nature’s centrifugal force which
is making, and will continue to make, havoc of the imposing Habsburg
system.

It is in the matter of matrimony, however, that the manifestations of
that force have excited most attention, and promise to be most fruitful
of consequences; and it is of those matrimonial divagations from the
central ideal that we shall next have to speak in detail.




CHAPTER XXVII

 The centrifugal marriages of the Habsburgs—Francis Joseph’s attitude
 towards them—His attitude towards Baron Walburg, the Habsburg who
 had come down in the world—Where he draws the line—His refusal
 to sanction the marriage of the Archduke Ferdinand Charles to the
 daughter of a high-school teacher—The Archduke resigns his rank and
 becomes Charles Burg—Marriage of the daughter of Archduchess Gisela
 to Baron Otto von Seefried zu Buttenheim.


In one’s survey of the centrifugal marriages of the Habsburgs it
matters little with which marriage one begins. There can be no orderly
scheme of progression in the narrative; and though one sometimes finds
the Emperor, in his later years, unbending, resigning himself to the
inevitable, and even going half-way to meet it, his condescension has
been neither continuous nor graduated, but has proceeded by fits and
starts and spasms. At one moment we seem to see good nature triumphing
over pride; at another, the supple back once more stiffens itself to
the rigidity of the days of old. Conflicting considerations have done
battle in his mind. Did he dare resist? Could he afford to yield?
Had he any tender feelings towards the individuals who pleaded for
the concession? Only by considering how these several questions
presented themselves to him can one discover unity of principle in his
contradictory responses to the innumerable appeals.

The rule, theoretically absolute, is modifiable by the Emperor’s
caprice. Francis Joseph is the Head of the House as well as the
Sovereign Ruler of the Empire; his judgment seat is, in all family
matters, the ultimate tribunal. He can grant dispensations, like
the Pope; and he sits without assessors—to decide whether hallowed
principles or personal inclinations constitute the Higher Law. There
are times when he feels that he would like to yield but must not; times
when he yields, against his will, to a pressure which wears down his
resistance; times when, though there is no particular reason why he
should not yield, he simply does not choose to. One can easily adduce
both earlier and later examples of each of the three attitudes; but
one can trace through them all a gradual weakening, due, in part, no
doubt, to advancing age, but in part also to a dawning perception of
the deleterious effect of the Habsburg system upon human happiness.

Marriage after marriage, arranged in accordance with the prescriptions
of the system, has resulted in misery—sometimes to the point of making
the welkin ring with scandal. The failure of Rudolph’s marriage was
notorious; the failure of Otto’s marriage was hardly repaired by his
wife’s dutiful attention to him when he came back to her, a mental
and moral, as well as a physical, wreck. There were rumours that the
Archduchess Augustine—Francis Joseph’s granddaughter, the daughter of
the Archduchess Gisela—suffered violence at her husband’s hands; and
the union of the Archduchess Maria Dorothea to the Duc d’Orléans was
equally unsatisfactory. That son of St. Louis had in his youth been
tracked to a hotel in Paris by the outraged husband of a Queen of Song,
attended by a French commissary of police; and he and the Duchesse
d’Orléans have sometimes lived separately and talked about divorce.
Yet another Archduchess—the consort of Leopold II., King of the
Belgians—had reason to complain that she was forsaken for the French
dancer, Cléo de Mérode, and many other ladies mostly of low degree and
light repute.

Assuredly there is food for reflection on the Habsburg system in this
array of connubial facts; and one cannot doubt that it has produced
a cumulative effect upon Francis Joseph’s mind and conscience. None
the less, it has found other preconceptions and prejudices firmly
entrenched in that mind and conscience; and the campaign between the
two sets of ideas and points of view has been long and violent—the
victory inclining sometimes to the one side and sometimes to the
other. Quite recently, for instance—at a date subsequent to
several remarkable concessions of which we shall be speaking in a
moment—Europe heard of the morganatic principle being discountenanced
with such severe success that seven Habsburgs (though they were
no longer entitled to call themselves Habsburgs) came, as we say
in England, “on the rates.” This is how a Viennese correspondent
chronicles the incident:

 “Great sympathy has been aroused here by the sad condition of Baron
 Ernest Walburg, son of the late Archduke Ernest, the Emperor’s uncle,
 by a morganatic marriage with a tradesman’s daughter. His father
 gave him £2,000 a year while he lived, but these payments ceased on
 his death. Baron Walburg was an officer in the Austrian army, but he
 resigned his commission when he married a poor work-girl. He applied
 for an audience of the Emperor, who declined to see him. He then
 stopped the Emperor in the street at Buda-Pesth, and described his sad
 situation. His creditors had distrained on all his belongings, leaving
 the Baron, his wife, and six children absolutely destitute. The whole
 family of eight persons, seven of them having Habsburg blood in their
 veins, are now dependent on the public poor rate.”

One of them, it was added, in a subsequent communication, obtained a
situation as head-waiter in a café at Buda-Pesth.

The story,[6] it must be admitted, does not display Francis Joseph
in a sympathetic light; and there are several other stories of
the same sort concerning which the same thing may be said. One
observes him, as it were, drawn this way and that by his feeling
that an Emperor—especially if he be a Habsburg—must draw the line
somewhere, and his doubts as to the precise point at which he ought
to draw it. Presumably, too, he draws it in different places on
different occasions, relating the drawing of it, whether wittingly or
unwittingly, to the state of his temper and affections. The Archduchess
Maria Henrietta was, of course, well on the right side of it when she
married Prince Gottfried zu Hohenlohe Schillingfurst; and so, though
by no means so much as a matter of course, was the Archduchess Eleanor
when she married Naval Lieutenant Alfons von Kloss. On the other hand,
the Archduke Ferdinand Charles—nephew of the Emperor and brother to
the Archdukes Otto and Francis Ferdinand—found himself decidedly on
the wrong side of it when he announced his desire to marry Fräulein
Czuber, daughter of a teacher of mathematics in the Technical High
School of Vienna.

[Footnote 6: The responsibility for the story rests with the Vienna
correspondent of the _Daily Mail_. It was not contradicted.]

His case is perhaps of all our cases the most provocative of sympathy;
even respectable people of the upper middle classes may properly
permit themselves to be moved by it. It was no case, this time, of a
precociously dissipated youth haunting the stage doors of the theatres
given over to musical comedy, and suffering his inexperience to be
beguiled by the meretricious attractions of a minx. The daughter of
a high-school teacher is—the daughter of a high-school teacher; one
need add nothing, for the rest is understood. The description implies
culture conjoined with decorum, and set in a frame of homeliness—a
high moral tone, and an atmosphere of useful respectability. Whatever
one may think of the theatrical ladies whose fascinations have been so
fatal to the Habsburg system, one cannot but admire and respect a lady
who induces an Archduke to prefer an educational environment to the
purposeless frivolities of the gayest Court in Europe.

And that was what Fräulein Czuber achieved. For some time Viennese
Society had been diverted by the rumours which reached it of Archduke
Ferdinand Charles’s homely tastes and habits. He liked, it was said,
to mix with the middle classes—not condescendingly, but as if he
were one of them; he liked to retire to a middle-class kitchen, and
help a homely girl to shell the peas or make the jam; he did not mind
being seen looking out of the window of a middle-class flat, with his
arm round a homely girl’s waist. So gossip whispered; and presently
gossip was reinforced by the solid fact that the Archduke, taking his
middle-class friends as seriously as he took himself and the Imperial
family, had sworn King Cophetua’s royal oath that the homely girl
should be his bride, and had asked her father’s permission, just like
any middle-class suitor, to pay his addresses to her.

Nothing, surely, could be more admirable; and yet Francis Joseph did
not admire. He had not always drawn the line at actresses, though he
knew that he ought to have done so. He had been on terms of personal
friendship with more than one actress; and it is not unlikely that
his particular friend Frau Schratt found occasional opportunities
of putting in a good word for the ornaments of an unjustly aspersed
profession. But the daughter of a high school teacher—a lady who
was not even notorious—in whose favour there was nothing to be said
except that she was well bred, well brought up, well educated, modest,
domesticated, and respectable—that was another matter altogether.
There are men, as we all know, to whom the open scandal of marriage
with a woman of the town seems less discreditable than the commonplace
ignominy of union to a well-conducted social inferior; and Francis
Joseph seems to have analogous habits of thought.

At all events, in this particular case, he put his foot down. One must
draw the line somewhere—that was generally admitted; and he proposed
to draw it at the daughters of high-school teachers. They might come
of healthier stock than Archdukes and Archduchesses; their blood might
be freer from the taint of insanity; and they might be less likely to
leap their horses over poor people’s coffins when they were sober and
undress to dance in cafés when they were drunk. Nevertheless they were
unfit—grossly and impossibly unfit—to be married by Archdukes; and
if the Archduke Francis Charles did not take that view of the matter,
then he should be an Archduke no longer, but should depart—an imperial
castaway—and hide his shame in a foreign land.

But the Archduke Ferdinand Charles had not Francis Joseph’s reverence
for caste, and was not to be browbeaten. His rights as a man and a
lover were more to him than his rights as an Archduke and a possible
heir to the throne; and his instinct told him that he was choosing the
better part. Fräulein Czuber had never hoped to be an Archduchess;
and he would be delighted to relieve her of awkward embarrassment by
ceasing to be an Archduke. If he needed a new name, he had a little
property at Burg which would supply one. Fräulein Czuber would love him
as Charles Burg just as much as she had loved him as Archduke Ferdinand
Charles—better, perhaps, seeing that he would have made a sacrifice
for her sake. As Herr and Frau Burg, therefore, he and she would face
the world together.

So he spoke; and the thing which he said that he would do he
did—renouncing, and then disappearing. He passes out of our narrative
as an ordinary passenger, driving in an ordinary cab to catch an
ordinary train, bound for the Riviera—starting without even a crowd to
note whether rice fell when he shook himself or luck-bearing slippers
pursued him. May all good things attend him in the middle-class retreat
which he has found! His demonstration against the Habsburg system
has been a fine one, and has been made in time: a safe escape from
decadence before the doom was yet in sight; a sane escape, and not one
of those—too frequent among the Habsburgs—of which the true nature
and underlying motive have been obscured by bizarre eccentricities and
crying scandals. Whether Francis Joseph classes the case among those
in which Nemesis has smitten him through the members of his family is
more than one can presume to say. We will pass from it to some of those
cases in which Francis Joseph has given his consent—sometimes with
his blessing, and sometimes without it.

The first case was that of Princess Elizabeth, his granddaughter—the
eldest daughter of the Archduchess Gisela, and the sister of that
Princess Augustine, already mentioned as the wife of the Archduke
Joseph. She sought a private interview with her grandfather, in order
to tell him a secret which she had not ventured to tell her mother; and
the secret was that she had given her heart to Baron Otto von Seefried
zu Buttenheim, a dashing young lieutenant of cavalry in the Bavarian
army. It was very objectionable—the more so because love, in this
instance, was laughing not only at rank, but also at religion. Otto von
Seefried zu Buttenheim was a Protestant; and the Houses of Wittelsbach
and Habsburg resemble each other, not only in their liability to mental
derangement, but also in the soundness of their Catholic principles.

Still the case was one in which excuses and allowances could be made.
Princess Elizabeth, though a granddaughter, was not an Archduchess;
the disgrace, if disgrace there was, would fall not on Austria, but on
Bavaria. Moreover, Otto von Seefried zu Buttenheim, though a subaltern,
was a baron; and we have several times noted the ancient maxim of
the Austrian aristocracy that “mankind begins with the baron.” Creed
may count for more than lineage in church, and before the throne of
grace; but lineage counts for more than creed at Court and in Society.
If principles might be tampered with at all, this was a proper time
for tampering with them—especially as Princess Elizabeth pleaded
very pitifully and prettily. So Francis Joseph tampered—showing, as
it were, that the Habsburgs could afford to be more tolerant than
the Wittelsbachs because they were greater and grander. He not only
consented to the marriage, but gave the young Bavarian bridegroom a
refuge in his dominions and a commission in his army. Nor has he had
any reason to regret his indulgence; for this is one of the happy
marriages which have no history.

And what one says of that marriage—the one which made the first
effective breach in the wall of Habsburg pride and prejudices—one may
say of the marriages of various other bridal couples who presently
insisted on following through the breach which had been made: the
marriage of Archduchess Stéphanie to Count Lonyay; of Stéphanie’s
daughter, the Archduchess Elizabeth, to Otto von Windischgraetz; and of
the Archduke Francis Ferdinand to Countess Sophie Chotek.

Even against those marriages—or against some of them—the breach which
Princess Elizabeth and Otto von Seefried zu Buttenheim had made was to
be defended; but the stories are of sufficient interest and importance
to be related separately.




CHAPTER XXVIII

 The marriage of Archduchess Stéphanie to Count Lonyay—Attitude of
 the King of the Belgians towards that marriage—Attitude of Francis
 Joseph—He sanctions the union, but snubs the bridegroom—Marriage of
 the Archduchess Elizabeth to Otto von Windischgraetz—Francis Joseph’s
 approval—The Windischgraetzes raised to the rank of Serene Highnesses.


Through the breach which Princess Elizabeth had made the Archduchess
Stéphanie presently insisted upon marching; and it would indeed have
been cruel to have hindered her from doing so. Her life had been an
unhappy and a lonely one; she had been made to feel that, wherever
she might be, she was not really wanted. She wished, after Rudolph’s
death, to return to Brussels; but the King of the Belgians would not
have her there—his treatment of her being only less shameful than his
treatment of her sister, Princess Louise of Saxe-Coburg. Remaining in
Austria, she realised that neither the Emperor nor the Empress liked
her, though they had no grievance against her beyond the fact that
she had not attracted Rudolph sufficiently to save him from himself.
Her estrangement from Rudolph was perpetuated after his death by the
discovery that his will deprived her of the guardianship of her only
child.

Of course there was talk to the effect that she was consoling
herself—there always is such talk in such cases, and there is no
need to attach importance to it. Presently all the other rumours were
silenced by the announcement that she loved, and was resolved to marry,
Count Lonyay, a gentleman of her household. His quarterings were few;
but experience had not taught Stéphanie to associate blue blood with
devotion and fidelity. Nothing was more natural than her desire to make
a dash for happiness without reference to equality of rank; and as her
imperial relatives were treating her as a person of no importance,
there was no particular reason why they should object. As a matter
of fact Francis Joseph did object, and did defend the breach; but
his resistance was weakened, and his surrender precipitated, by the
uninvited appearance of Stéphanie’s father as his ally.

For who, after all, was this King of the Belgians that he should make
himself the champion of royal and imperial exclusiveness? He was a mere
_parvenu_ among Kings: one whose territory had, within quite recent
times, formed a portion of the Austrian dominions, and whose subjects
were such aggressive democrats that they did not even allow him to
possess a crown; a scandalous King, too, whose ostentatious intrigues
with dancing girls were derided in all the comic papers of Europe, and
who punished no one for _lèse-majesté_ when his portrait and theirs
were offered for sale side by side in the kiosks at Ostend. How
could the Head of the House of Habsburg stand shoulder to shoulder in
support of his caste with such a man as that? The cause was obviously
compromised by the alliance, and the dignified course for Francis
Joseph was to show that he could afford to be magnanimous, even if
Leopold II. could not.

He took that dignified course, and made that magnanimous gesture.
“In the name of tradition,” Leopold II. stopped his daughter’s
allowance—it was only £2,000 a year—and deprived her of her title of
Royal Highness. Francis Joseph retorted by giving his daughter-in-law
a considerable sum of money, and announcing that she might retain her
imperial dignities. He cut the nobler figure of the two; and praise
of his magnanimity rewarded him. But his pride nevertheless had to
find utterance; he had to make it clear that, though he consented, he
did not approve, but regarded Count Lonyay as an intruder in a family
infinitely above him. When Stéphanie came to Court, she had to come
without her husband; and when Stéphanie’s daughter was married, Count
Lonyay, though suffered to be present in the crowd at the religious
ceremony, received no invitation to the subsequent luncheon.

It sounds petty; and one need not suppose that Stéphanie did not care.
But if Francis Joseph could make her unhappy for a day, he could not
make her unhappy on the whole. One cannot leave the subject of her
marriage without quoting once again her own joyous anticipation of
it:—

 “Is it possible? A long, long terrible night has gone by for me, and I
 see a rosy dawn of hope on the clouded sky, a ray of light which tells
 of the rising sun of joy. Will the sun rise in full glory? Will he
 warm me with his rays, and dry the tears from my cheeks? Come, my sun,
 come! You find a poor faded flower whose freshness has been destroyed
 by the hard frost of fate.”

With that we may leave Stéphanie, and pass to the story of her
daughter’s marriage—the marriage to which Count Lonyay received no
invitation.

       *       *       *       *       *

Of all his relatives the Archduchess Elizabeth was probably the one
whom the Emperor loved the best. She saw but little of her mother,
who travelled a great deal, both before her marriage to Count Lonyay
and afterwards. Her principal companions were the daughters of the
Archduchess Isabella; and her tastes are said to have been simple. She
was fond of gardening—selling vegetables, to give the proceeds to the
poor; and a pleasant story is told of her devotion to her foxterrier.
The place was the Schönnbrunn Park, and the time was winter; her only
attendant was a footman:—

 “The lively little dog jumped on the fresh ice of a fountain, which
 broke under him. The little animal struggled in the water, and
 Princess Elizabeth called to the footman to save it. The man found
 an excuse and did not move a hand. Then the Princess screamed at the
 top of her voice: ‘You nasty coward! I’m not half so big as you, but
 I’ll go in, even if I get drowned.’ The man held her fast, although
 she shrieked and struggled, and, a gardener coming to the rescue, the
 little dog was saved. But Princess Elizabeth dislikes all footmen and
 flunkeys since that day.”

It seemed as if a destiny of great distinction was in store for her.
There was even talk of marrying her to the German Emperor’s son,
Prince Eitel Fritz, and raising her to the Austrian throne. Whether
that plan would have proved agreeable to public opinion is doubtful;
but a circumstance soon occurred which removed it from the sphere of
practical matrimonial projects. At her very first ball Elizabeth met
young Otto von Windischgraetz, a lieutenant in the lancers. She met him
again at tennis-parties at Laxenburg; and presently she announced to
one of her aunts that she meant to marry Otto von Windischgraetz, and
that, if she were not allowed to marry him, she should spend the rest
of her days in a convent. “Tell your grandfather about it,” said her
aunt; and she went into the next room and told him.

Otto von Windischgraetz was one of _the_ Windischgraetzes, and Francis
Joseph owed a great deal to them. To Alfred von Windischgraetz, indeed,
as was shown in an earlier chapter, he may almost be said to have
owed his throne. But no one expected that fact to count with Francis
Joseph—especially as Otto only belonged to a junior branch of the
family; and it is quite likely that it did not count with him. What did
count was his affection for his granddaughter. As a rule he inspired
his relatives with awe rather than affection; but Elizabeth was really
fond of him, and he was fond of her, and could not bear to see her cry.
So he listened patiently, and promised to see what could be done. For
the sequel we may quote Sir Horace Rumbold’s “Austrian Court in the
Nineteenth Century”:—

 “A few days later he sent for the father, Prince Ernest
 Windischgraetz, and talked the matter over with him, ending what
 must have been a somewhat trying conversation for the parent of the
 aspiring young man, by telling him that he trusted his granddaughter
 would receive as kindly a welcome ‘_im Windischgraetzchen Hause_’ as
 Prince Otto might be assured of from him and the Imperial family. On
 the occasion of the marriage, the entire junior branch of this old
 Bohemian house to which the bridegroom belonged was given the rank of
 ‘_Durchlaucht_,’ or Serene Highness.”

So love triumphed again, and triumphed, this time, not only without
opposition, but also without the accompaniment of petty annoyances. One
would be glad if it were possible to leave this matrimonial branch of
the subject on that note; but it is not. We have already seen that the
measure meted out to the Archduchess who loved the lancer was by no
means meted out to the Archduke who loved the daughter of the professor
of mathematics. The story of Francis Joseph’s severe attitude towards
the romances of “Herr Wulfling” and Princess Louisa of Tuscany has
still to come; and before we reach those stories we have to hark back,
and consider the case of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand and Countess
Sophie Chotek. That, of all the matrimonial encounters, has been the
most interesting and the most important. It was not a single battle,
but a prolonged campaign, in which we see Francis Joseph giving ground
step by step. The final result of the conflict is still uncertain; and
the full consequences of the victory gained by human affection over
the Habsburg system cannot be measured and known until after Francis
Joseph’s death.




CHAPTER XXIX

 The Archduke Francis Ferdinand—An invalid who delayed
 to marry—Report of his betrothal to the Archduchess
 Gabrielle—Announcement of his betrothal to Countess Sophie
 Chotek—Anecdotes of the courtship—Indignation of the Archduchess
 Gabrielle’s mother—Attitude of Francis Joseph—-He permits the
 marriage on condition that it shall be morganatic—Francis Ferdinand
 compelled to swear a solemn oath that he is marrying beneath him,
 and that his children will be unworthy to succeed him—Reasons for
 doubting whether he will eventually be bound by his oath.


Francis Ferdinand is the son of Francis Joseph’s brother, Charles
Louis, and himself the brother of the Archduke Otto whose outrageous
eccentricities we have reviewed, and of the Archduke Frederick Charles
who wooed and won the homely daughter of the mathematical master, after
helping her to shell the peas. He was not classed in his youth with the
Archdukes who matter, for he was a delicate boy, and it seemed unlikely
that he would live to grow up. Though he grew up, he remained delicate,
and it was still assumed that he would die young. Hence the talk, which
came to nothing, of marrying the Archduchess Elizabeth to Prince Eitel
Fritz, and securing the succession to the throne to her by a fresh
Pragmatic Sanction.

Whether we regard him as having been well or badly brought up depends
upon our educational ideals. If it be good to be a Catholic, and better
still to be a bigoted Catholic, then his upbringing was admirable. From
his earliest years he was taught to walk, if not with God, at least
with the Jesuits: the worthy son of a father of limited intelligence,
who combined (if his portraits are to be trusted) the smug appearance
of a sinister family solicitor with the fanaticism of an Ultramontane
reactionary. There are those, to this day, who sum him up with the
statement that he is “in the hands of the Jesuits”; but that is a
phrase which may, in practice, mean anything or nothing. When princes
and priests form a Holy Alliance, the wisdom of the serpent is quite as
likely to be found in one partner of the combination as in the other.
Their interests are seldom identical, and exploitation is a game at
which two can play.

[Illustration:

  _Photo_      _Adèle_

THE ARCHDUKE FRANCIS FERDINAND.]

It mattered little as long as Francis Ferdinand was expected to die,
at any instant, of consumption; but he did not die of that disease,
and perhaps he never really had it. He wintered in warm climates; he
took cod liver oil; he travelled. Treatment and medicine produced the
desired effect. Francis Ferdinand became as well able as any of his
relatives to take his place in public life, and had to be reckoned
with. The question of finding a wife for him became urgent. There were
plenty of Archduchesses available; why did he not choose one of them
and beget an heir? That was what Francis Joseph wanted to know when he
saw his nephew thirty-five or more, and still a bachelor. The resulting
dialogues are said to have been rather heated.

Presently rumour began to whisper that Francis Joseph had got his
way. It was observed that Francis Ferdinand paid frequent visits to
the house of the Archduke Frederick and the Archduchess Isabella at
Presburg. They had charming daughters—the Archduchess Gabrielle was
particularly charming. Here, it was felt, well within the Habsburg
ring-fence, was the opportunity of an ideal betrothal; and here, at any
rate, was the journalist’s opportunity for the intelligent anticipation
of events before they occurred. Various newspapers, though not the
official ones, grasped that opportunity and announced the betrothal.
Official confirmation, they did not doubt, would come later, enabling
them to boast: “I told you so.” But those readers of the newspapers who
had been admitted to the Archduchess Isabella’s family circle shook
their heads. They had seen what they had seen, and they anticipated
quite other eventualities.

The Archduchess Isabella had a lady-in-waiting—Countess Sophie Chotek:
a member of a Bohemian family, which, though old, was poor, and not of
the highest order of nobility. Her father had held a governorship in
Bohemia; her brother was a provincial official of moderate, but not
excessive, dignity. But Francis Ferdinand, while charmingly polite to
the Archduchess Gabrielle, was more often to be seen sitting in cosy
corners with Countess Sophie Chotek. Often and often he sat a whole
evening with her in a cosy corner, talking gloomily about his health,
and complaining of the rigorous prescriptions of the doctors. Cod-liver
oil, he said, was horrid stuff. It did him no good; he should stop
taking it.

And Countess Sophie Chotek reasoned and pleaded with him, as womanly
women do. Of course, cod-liver oil was good for him—he mustn’t be
silly, and pretend that he knew better than the doctors; a peppermint
lozenge would take away the taste. Anyhow, take it he really must, not
only for his own sake, but for the sake of those to whom his life was
precious.

“For my sake—to please me,” she concluded coaxingly; and Francis
Ferdinand promised, and found that the medicine did work the promised
miracle. He got better and better, until he was quite well; and
there was joy in the House of Habsburg, and all the Archdukes and
Archduchesses were grateful to Countess Sophie Chotek. It delighted
the Archduchess Isabella in particular to see that her lady-in-waiting
had such a good influence over the heir-apparent, and had succeeded,
after everyone else had failed, in modifying his attitude towards his
medicine. It did not occur to her that cod-liver oil was a potion which
could operate as a love philtre, or that the conversations conducted in
the cosy corners might have run on from cod-liver oil to other and more
intimate themes.

But so it was; and while the Archduchess Isabella was giving Countess
Sophie Chotek great credit for her tact, Countess Sophie Chotek was,
in truth, displaying even more tact than the Archduchess was giving
her credit for. For it came to this: that while the Archduke Francis
Ferdinand was supposed to be nursing himself with a view to proposing
marriage to the Archduchess’s daughter, he was, in fact, offering the
devotion of a lifetime to the Archduchess’s lady-in-waiting. He was
not only taking his oil three times a day for her sake; he was also
declaring that, if it cured him, he should feel that he owed his life
to her, and should show his gratitude by begging her to unite her life
to his. It was understood between them that, when he did ask her to do
this, she would not refuse; but meanwhile they kept their counsel until
an accident disclosed their secret.

That secret came to light because Francis Ferdinand—or perhaps his
valet—was a careless packer. He had been at Halbthurn on a visit
to the Archduke Frederick; and when he had taken his departure, a
servant came to the Archduchess Isabella and told her that he had left
a quantity of jewellery behind him on the dressing-table. It had, of
course, to be sent after him; and the Archduchess thought it better
to see to the matter herself. She went to the bedroom, therefore, to
collect and review the jewellery, and the inspection gave her a shock.
She spoke to a servant:

“Tell Countess Chotek I desire to see her immediately.”

Countess Sophie Chotek obeyed her summons, and was greeted with:

“This calls for an explanation, miss. Pray, what have you to say for
yourself?”

“This” being a medallion portrait of the Countess discovered among
Francis Ferdinand’s personal effects.

One can imagine that the blow was a severe one to an Imperial mother
who had cherished the hope of marrying her Imperial daughter to the
heir-apparent. One can further easily believe that the explanation, if
any, which was offered was unacceptable. One can almost fancy that one
hears the climax of the dialogue:

“That will do. You need say nothing more; but you will leave my house
at once. I give you half an hour in which to pack.”

Of course, Countess Sophie could not pack in half an hour, but had to
go without her luggage; of course, too, the discovery of a portion
of her secret entailed the revelation of the whole of it, though so
far as the public were concerned it was only made known by degrees.
First came the report that Francis Joseph and Francis Ferdinand were,
for some unknown reason, not on speaking terms, and that the Court
officials were snubbing Francis Ferdinand with educated insolence.
Then came the rumour that Francis Ferdinand was going to renounce his
archducal rights, marry Countess Sophie Chotek, leave Austria, and take
up his residence with her at the Villa d’Este, at Rome. Finally came
the official notification that the marriage would take place—that the
Emperor had sanctioned it—but on terms.

And the nature of those terms?

This is not a Court history, and there is no need to gloss them
over,—they shall be described with absolute frankness, and in plain
language. The stipulation which the prestige of the House of Habsburg
was held to require was this: that affronts should be publicly put on
the bride before, during, and after the ceremony. The view officially
taken of her may be said to be summed up in the carefully worded speech
which the Emperor, gorgeously attired in his Field-Marshal’s uniform,
read at a special meeting of his Privy Council. Every phrase in it
should be noted with care:—

 “I have invited the members of my House, my Privy Councillors, and my
 Ministers to attend to-day’s ceremony because the declaration which
 will be made is of the highest importance to the monarchy. Inspired
 by the wish always to provide as best I can for the members of my
 high House, and to give my nephew a new proof of special love, I have
 consented to his marriage with Countess Sophie Chotek. The Countess
 descends, it is true, from noble lineage; but her family is not one of
 those which, according to the customs of our House, we regard as our
 equals. Now, as only women from equal Houses can be regarded as equal
 in birth, this marriage must be regarded in the light of a morganatic
 marriage, and the children which, with God’s blessing, will spring
 from it cannot be given the rights of members of the Imperial House.
 The Archduke will, therefore, to make this certain for all time,
 to-day take an oath to the effect that he recognises all this, that he
 recognises his marriage with Countess Chotek to be a morganatic one,
 that the consequences are that the marriage cannot be regarded as one
 between equals, and that the children springing from it can never be
 regarded as rightful children, entitled to the rights of members of
 our House. I beg the Minister of my Imperial House to read the oath
 which the Archduke will swear.”

The Emperor’s voice is said to have been “full of emotion” while he
recited this solemn manifesto. One would like to attribute at least a
little of the emotion to regret that his family pride required him to
insult a woman who, far from doing him any harm, had saved his nephew’s
life by coaxing him to obey his physicians; but it is difficult to
picture Francis Joseph as melted to tenderness by the idyll of the
cod-liver oil. In any case, his emotion, whatever it may have been, was
not allowed to interfere with the ceremony, which was continued with
an ecclesiastical pomp indicating that Francis Joseph does, indeed, at
times, mistake himself for God and the Archdukes for archangels, who
are failing to behave as such.

It was Francis Ferdinand’s turn. Bowing to the Emperor, he advanced to
the table, on which stood a crucifix, laid his first and middle fingers
on the Testament which was held up to him by the Archbishop of Vienna,
and read the oath from a paper which he held in his left hand. This is
the remarkable text of it:—

 “I, Francis Ferdinand, by the grace of God, Archduke of Austria, swear
 to God the Almighty that I recognise the House Laws always, and, in
 the case of my marriage with Sophie, Countess Chotek, specially; that
 I accept the oath read to me, with all its clauses, and therefore
 recognise that my marriage with Sophie Chotek is a morganatic one;
 that the children which, with God’s blessing, may spring from this
 marriage, will not be equal in birth, and, according to the Pragmatic
 sanction, will not be entitled to succeed to the throne, either in
 Austria or in Hungary.”

The two speeches sound like the last lingering echoes of mediævalism;
and Francis Joseph, in spite of the successive shocks which experience
has given him, probably retains more mediæval ideas than any other
contemporary ruler. The superiority of the Habsburgs to the rest
of mankind—at all events, of Austrian mankind—is not, for him, a
proposition which needs to be demonstrated; it is a law of thought.
He does not argue about it, or expect others to argue about it, but
finds it in his consciousness together with his conceptions of space
and time. What others may do counts for nothing in comparison with what
the Habsburgs _are_; and that though a simple-minded seeker after truth
who should ask _what_ they are, could be told little in reply except
that they are the Habsburgs. Gold similarly is esteemed a nobler metal
than iron, though it cannot be fashioned into such effective swords or
ploughshares.

On that principle, therefore—the principle that to be is more than
to do, and that the function of those who can do is to serve those who
are—Francis Joseph took his stand: thoroughly believing in it—himself
at once the worshipper and the worshipped; no more regarding his
declaration of his own immeasurable superiority to other men as an
insult to those to whom he declared himself superior than the judge so
regards his admonition of the convicted prisoner in the dock. One can
only insult one’s equals. Any day on which the Head of the House of
Habsburg decides a point of precedence takes rank as a Judgment Day—a
day on which there can be only one answer to the question: Shall not
the Judge of All the Earth do right? It was a matter of course that the
prelates of the State Church lent themselves to the doctrine; for that
is what the prelates of a State Church are for.

So that it was a matter of course that Francis Ferdinand should be
required to proclaim _urbi et orbi_ that he was marrying beneath him;
that the marriage should be condemned to be a hole-and-corner affair
which even the bridegroom’s brothers did not attend; that the bride’s
status should be left so undignified that it was not permissible to her
to attend the opera with her husband, or to sit in the Imperial stand
with him at the races. But though that was Francis Joseph’s official
attitude as an Emperor and a Habsburg, he was also a man and a brother,
capable of tolerance and condescension—increasingly capable of it as
the years went by. Flexibility, good nature, weariness of the long
struggle with the Zeit Geist—one does not know to which of these
things to attribute the modification of his tone; but he has modified
it. Francis Ferdinand has been taken back into favour and allowed to
hold the highest offices suitable for him; and Countess Sophie Chotek
has been promoted to be Duchess of Hohenberg. She does not yet rank
with the Archduchesses, but she does take her place in the hierarchy
immediately after them.

How will she rank eventually, after the inevitable day on which Francis
Joseph is gathered to his fathers? That is a question which must soon,
in the course of nature, present itself; and it would be a great
mistake to suppose that it was settled, once and for all, when Francis
Ferdinand stood before the crucifix and swore that his wife was, and
that his children would be, inferior persons, unworthy to be related to
him. It is not merely that “Jove laughs at lovers’ perjuries,” or that
Francis Ferdinand’s heart rejects the Habsburg superstition to which we
have seen him rendering lip service. One must also remember that knots
of this kind can never be tied so tightly that no way of untying them
can be found by adroit and willing hands.

No doubt the Archduke is a religious man who understands the nature
of an oath; but he was “brought up by the Jesuits,” and one suspects
that he has not been brought up by them for nothing. All Catholics are
addicted to casuistry, and the Jesuits specialise in it; nor does one
need any extra-ordinary shrewdness to divine the insidious questions
which may be invoked as solvents of a situation which Francis Joseph
believed himself to have made hard and fast. Let us set them forth in
order:—

1. Granted that Francis Ferdinand had the right to swear away his own
rights, had he any right to swear away the potential rights of persons
still unborn?

2. Granted that Francis Ferdinand is personally bound by his oath,
on what grounds can that oath fetter the freedom of action of the
Hungarian and Austrian Parliaments?

3. Cannot the Pope, to whom God has given the power to loose and bind,
free any man from any obligation, even though he has sworn by bell,
book, and candle to bow to it?

4. Would it not be right and reasonable for the Pope to accord that
dispensation to such a religious man as Francis Ferdinand? Would it not
be to the interest of the Church that he should do so?

5. Is there any particular reason why the Austrian and Hungarian
Parliaments should not petition him to take that course?

[Illustration:

  _Photo_      _Adèle_

THE DUCHESS OF HOHENBERG

(Wife of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand).]

Upon the answers given to those questions, and not upon the text of the
oath which Francis Ferdinand swore, the ultimate inheritance of the
Empire will depend. They are questions to which, so far as logic goes,
one answer is as good as another; which means that the answer actually
given to them will be dictated by expediency and the wishes of the
influential. Those who picture Francis Ferdinand dutifully abiding by
his pledges because he is a religious man not only misjudge him, but
misjudge religious people generally. There is always a Higher Law—the
universe is full of Higher Laws. One can always appeal to them; and, if
one is an Emperor, one may have the advantage of being judge in one’s
own case. Francis Ferdinand will enjoy that advantage presently; and it
remains to be seen what use he will make of it. The issue is not yet,
though it cannot be long delayed.

Meanwhile, one may salute Francis Ferdinand respectfully as one who
has fought a good fight, and has not been content with half successes.
His wife is a clever woman who knows how to bide her time, and does
not go out of her way to make unnecessary enemies. He himself has his
party, which looks likely to be the party of the future. The blow which
he has struck at the Habsburg system is the hardest blow which that
system has yet sustained, because he has struck it with dignity and
self-restraint, gratifying the instinctive Habsburg craving for the
infusion of fresh blood without provoking any of those scandals which
give the enemy occasion to blaspheme. If the Papacy was in earnest when
it admonished the Habsburgs for their consanguineous unions, then he
may fairly claim that the Pope is his ally in the battle.

One cannot say the same of the acts of rebellion which have to
be reviewed next, though they too have served their purpose as
object-lessons: crowning proofs to be cited in support of the thesis
that the Habsburg system of in-breeding in order to develop an
unique type of man and woman is a failure, and that nature, expelled
with a pitchfork, is apt to return—an old friend with a new face,
exaggerating even to the point of grotesqueness the normal man and
woman’s passion for romance.




CHAPTER XXX

 The “terrible year” of the Habsburg annals—Proceedings of Princess
 Louisa of Tuscany—The taint inherited from the Bourbons of
 Parma—Princess Louisa’s suitors—Her Marriage to Prince Frederick
 August of Saxony—She bicycles with the dentist—She runs away to
 Switzerland with her brother, the Archduke Leopold, and her children’s
 tutor—Attitude of the Courts towards her escapade—Official notice on
 the subject in the _Wiener Zeitung_.


The “terrible year” in the family annals of the House of Habsburg
began towards the end of 1902. Before then, though many Archdukes and
Archduchesses had caused trouble, they had raised the flag of rebellion
independently—one at a time. Now we see a brother and a sister
making a simultaneous and concerted demonstration; Princess Louisa of
Tuscany embarking on the adventure which united her, for a season (and
still legally unites her) to Signor Toselli, and the Archduke Leopold
Ferdinand adopting the style of “Herr Wulfling” in order to be free to
follow the promptings of an impulsive heart.

Princess Louisa has told her own story. It is the story, of course,
of a woman placed on her defence, replying to charges, making out a
case for herself, and it therefore requires to be read critically;
but the holes which criticism can pick in it do not affect the general
verisimilitude of the picture. Most of the facts, after all, were too
notorious to be disputed. All that was possible was a manifesto of
motives; and Princess Louisa’s exposition of these was entitled to an
attentive and respectful hearing. She, at least, might be supposed to
know why she did the things which the whole world knew her to have
done. It may be, indeed, that she wrote some of her pages as one who
desired to deceive; but that desire only related, at the most, to a few
points of detail. The net impression of the narrative is one of winning
candour. Princess Louisa could not, of course, criticise herself from a
detached stand-point; but she explained herself.

There seems, at the first blush, to be a certain confusion of thought
in her explanations. One cannot always make out whether she is excusing
her conduct on the ground that she is a Habsburg and therefore mad, or
patting herself on the back for having followed the sane and sensible,
as well as the romantic course; but it is also a little difficult to
make out which of the two lines would have been the proper one for her
to take. There is a point of view—it has already been expounded in
these pages—from which her precipitate descent from dizzy heights of
grandeur presents some of the aspects of Christian’s flight from the
City of Destruction; but it must in justice be added that Princess
Louisa, having been born in the City of Destruction, and having spent
her impressionable years in it, had herself acquired some of the
characteristics of the inhabitants. The true picture, perhaps, is that
of an abnormal character stimulated by a sane instinct to sudden,
unexpected, and eccentric action.

It was not on her father’s side only that there was insanity in her
house. Her mother was a Bourbon Parma; and about the Bourbons of Parma,
Princess Louisa neither has, nor affects to have, any illusions.
They are madder than the Habsburgs, and have none of their redeeming
qualities. The character sketches which Princess Louisa gives us of
her maternal great-grandfather, Duke Charles of Parma, and Lucca, and
of her uncle, Duke Robert of Parma, are sketches of lunatics; though
the instinctive perception that the royal family party was a City of
Destruction from which it was imperative to escape for self-realisation
in the atmosphere of romance appears in her account of his relations
with his Duchess, who “bored him to tears”:—

 “She was _dévote_ and excessively plain, and whenever he returned from
 a visit to Parma, he was wont to exclaim: ‘_Il faut absolument que
 j’aille me retremper auprès d’une jolie femme après ce tombeau de mon
 illustre compagne._’”

Nor is that all; for Princess Louisa does not exhaust the subject. She
might also have spoken of certain Parma cousins—nineteen children of
a single father. Some sixteen of them are said to be, or to have been,
of feeble intellect. One hears of one of them wandering about in the
pathetic belief that she is Marie-Antoinette, carrying an orange with
her, and insisting that it is her head which has recently been cut
off. It is not difficult to picture Princess Louisa thinking her way to
the conclusion that to be of royal birth was to come of tainted stock.
She would be more likely to come to that conclusion if one may assume
that the seeds of morbidity were latent in her even when her youthful
high spirits concealed them.

It would not have mattered—or, at any rate, it would have mattered
less—if the truths of eugenics had been revealed to her in time, and
she had fought, while still a girl, for the right to dispose of her
heart as she chose. That is to say that a genuine romance, at that age,
might have saved her from a great deal. But love did not come; and
she was only a girl, and a sufficiently “good girl” to do as she was
told, though not without a high-spirited girl’s disposition to laugh at
uncongenial suitors. She laughed at Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg, now King
of Bulgaria, though she would probably have married him if there had
not been a division of opinion in her family as to the desirability of
the alliance; and she sums up the matter in retrospect thus:—

 “I do not wish to imply that a princess is forced to accept the first
 suitor who presents himself. She can choose her future husband within
 certain limits, but as most princes and kings are very much alike,
 choice is not a difficult matter after all. Part of our education
 is to accept without question whatever lies upon the knees of the
 gods, and although every princess doubtless at some time dreams of an
 ideal Prince Charming, she rarely meets him, and she usually marries
 someone quite different from the hero of her girlhood’s dreams.”

There was some talk of marrying Princess Louisa to Dom Pedro—a sort of
a cousin, the nephew of the Empress of Brazil; and she tells us what
became of that suitor:—

 “Poor Dom Pedro! Three years after our meeting he went mad, and he is
 now under restraint in a castle somewhere in Austria.”

Then Frederick August of Saxony—the present King of Saxony—was
presented. Princess Louisa rather liked him, and she married him;
and it is noteworthy that, though she ran away from him—impelled by
something not herself which made for liberty—she speaks of him in
her book without any trace of bitterness. He meant well, one gathers,
but was not intelligent enough to understand his wife, who certainly
appears to have had many perplexing characteristics, and allowed the
well of his natural affection to be poisoned by evil counsellors.
The details are set forth in “My Own Story”; but it is, of course,
necessary to remember, when reviewing them, that, though Princess
Louisa has told her story, the King of Saxony has not yet told his.

One’s first impression is of a conflict between natural instincts
and artificial conventions. What with their devotion to religion and
etiquette—and their inability to distinguish the one thing from the
other—the Heads of the Saxon House were doubtless difficult companions
for an impulsive child of nature. They were stiff and pompous out of
all proportion to their importance—as if they had all swallowed pokers
in the cradle; and Princess Louisa came among them like a Daughter of
Heth, and behaved accordingly—but more so. It would be hopeless to
attempt to make separate catalogues of the things which she did and the
things which she is only said to have done; but it is clear that she
was a romp deficient in veneration for the common objects of worship in
royal and Catholic circles.

She had a gallery to play to. The common people admired and applauded;
and there have, from time to time, been many indications that Princess
Louisa’s passion for publicity is not less strong and instinctive than
her passion for romance. In a Protestant country ruled over by Catholic
sovereigns, her obstinate refusal to confess to a Jesuit was naturally
a popular demonstration. Protestants everywhere regard Jesuits as the
most odious of all ecclesiastics, and confession as the most ridiculous
of all modes of religious activity. In advanced democratic circles,
too, enthusiasm was naturally aroused by the report that she had chosen
a dentist for the companion of her bicycle rides in the Dresden Park.
It was high time, in view of the democrats, that the royal family
accepted the dentist as a man and a brother; for whereas several
civilised countries had contrived to get on without Kings, a country
without dentists would be intolerable.

The royal family, however, blinded by superstitious prejudices,
declined to take that view of the matter. Whether friendship for
dentists or dislike of Jesuits was the more reprehensible trait in
Princess Louisa’s character, they either did not know or did not think
it worth while to say. They summed the matter up by declaring that
that was what came of reading Nietzsche; and one hears of an attempt
to stem the tide of evil influence by tearing up Princess Louisa’s
copy of “Thus Spake Zarathustra.” It was about as effective as the
famous attempt to stop an earthquake by taking a pill; and the drama
was quickly advanced another stage. The members of the royal family,
putting their heads together, came to the conclusion that a woman who
preferred bicycling with dentists to confessing her sins to Jesuits
must be mad, and must, without delay, be locked up in a lunatic asylum.
Whereupon Princess Louisa, having got an inkling of what was about to
happen, took to flight.

No one will blame her; for no one will believe that her fears were
illusory. If there is one circumstance which suggests scepticism of
the fact that the percentage of insanity is higher in royal than in
other families, it is the fact that members of royal families are
unscrupulously ready to accuse each other of insanity, and place each
other under restraint. The case of Princess Louise of Saxe-Coburg, whom
Count Mattatich rescued from her prison like a gallant knight of old,
is only one of many cases of which Princess Louisa of Tuscany may have
bethought herself. Bethinking herself of it, she fled to her father’s
house at Salzburg; and when her father refused to help her—being one
of those stupid old men to whom it is too much trouble to do anything
definite—she fled, yet again, to Switzerland. But not alone, and not,
it must be added, with the dentist. With her went her brother, the
Archduke Leopold; after her came her son’s tutor, M. Giron. We will say
what needs to be said about M. Giron in a moment; but a word about the
Archduke Leopold must come first.

Leopold, like Louisa, was, at that hour the hero of a romance; though
it was not his first romance, and was not to be his last. His first
love had been Elvira, the daughter of the Spanish Pretender, Don
Carlos. The proposed marriage had, for some reason, fallen through;
and Elvira had consoled herself for her disappointment by eloping
with a married man. Now, Leopold was determined to marry Wilhelmina
Adamovics, the daughter of a post office official at Iglau: a minor
lady of the theatre, with two sisters, one of them on the stage, and
the other married to an unimportant _employé_ in one of the State
tobacco factories. He had been sent to Egypt, to be out of the way of
temptation; but he had returned to the temptation as soon as he got
back to Austria. For the sake of Wilhelmina Adamovics he was prepared,
not only to take the humble name of Herr Wulfling, but also to
sacrifice his allowance of forty thousand crowns a year and his pay as
a colonel in the Austrian army. He and she, and Princess Louisa, and M.
Giron—a most respectable young man, and the nephew of the Professor of
Public and Administrative Law at Brussels—were to face the cold world
together as a Romantic Quadruple Alliance. And, meanwhile, Princess
Louisa was being pursued with Olympian thunders from the various
homes which she had left: thunders which took the various forms of
denunciation, punishment, and prayer.

First of all, there was the official notification of her departure.
It said nothing about the peril of the lunatic asylum from which she
had escaped, but simply charged her with having “ignored all her
family ties and proceeded abroad.” Then came the Court Chaplain, who,
similarly avoiding all reference to the essential fact, invited the
prayers of the congregation for the Princess’s return to “virtuous
courses.” He must have known that she could only return to those
courses at the peril of her liberty; but he may be assumed to have
taken the view that it is the function of a Court Chaplain to pray
as he is told. Next followed the intimation that the Crown Prince of
Saxony was considering by what means he could obtain the divorce to
which, according to the law of his Church, he clearly was not entitled;
and there also came a telegram from Grand Duke Ferdinand—“Nous avons
d’autres enfants, nous ne pouvons nous occuper de toi”—and finally
Francis Joseph himself took the steps which he considered incumbent on
him. The following notice appeared in the _Wiener Zeitung_ on January
28, 1903:—

 “We learn that the Emperor, in virtue of the powers vested in him
 as Head of the Reigning House, has considered it incumbent on him
 to direct that all the rights, honours, and privileges hitherto
 appertaining to the Consort of the Crown Prince of Saxony as an
 Archduchess of Austria by birth shall be suspended, and that this
 suspension shall also be maintained in the event of the impending
 divorce proceedings leading to the results provided for in paragraph
 1577 of the Civil Code for the Empire; that the Princess shall again
 receive her original family names, and that she shall accordingly
 be prohibited henceforth from making use of the title of Imperial
 Princess, Archduchess, or Royal Princess of Hungary, etc., and from
 using her ancestral archducal arms with the archducal emblems.
 Furthermore, she shall no longer have any claim to the title of
 Imperial and Royal Highness, and all rights connected with such title
 shall in future be relinquished by her.”

What does it all amount to?

On cold analysis it amounts to this: that, if Princess Louisa could
have been caught, she would have been placed in an asylum on the
assumption that she was mad, and that, as she could not be caught, she
was to be punished, _in contumaciam_, on the assumption that she was
sane. Whether she was actually sane or mad may be a point which it is
beyond the province of Francis Joseph’s biographer to settle; but he
may, at least, permit himself to point out that she cannot have been,
at one and the same time, both responsible and irresponsible for her
actions, and that the readiness of the heads of both her own and her
adopted family to pass from the one assumption to the other, to suit
their convenience, betokens a shiftiness incompatible with the doctrine
that Kings, Princes, and Emperors are necessarily upright, honest, or
honourable men.

We will let that point go, however, and turn back to follow the
fortunes of the members of the Romantic Quadruple Alliance in
Switzerland, where their war against the House of Habsburg was
witnessed by innumerable war correspondents from two hemispheres.




CHAPTER XXXI

 The romantic Quadruple Alliance—The jarring notes—Princess Louisa’s
 objections to her brother’s companion Fräulein Adamovics—The
 sentimental life of the Archduke Leopold—He becomes “Herr Wulfling,”
 and marries Fräulein Adamovics—Herr and Frau Wulfling run wild
 in woods—Herr Wulfling divorces his wife and marries again—His
 confidences to Signor Toselli—Princess Louisa’s conception of the
 Simple Life—Her manners shock the Swiss—She dismisses M. Giron—Her
 marriage to Signor Toselli.


There were wheels within wheels; and the members of the Romantic
Quadruple Alliance were not absolutely united. They could hold together
in the presence of alarums and excursions; but intimacy and reflection
discovered weak points in the combination. The dissidence was not
quite so sudden or pronounced as in the case of those Balkan States
which temporarily made common cause against Turkey; but lines of
cleavage were nevertheless soon revealed, impairing the solidity of the
_entente_, and introducing an appearance of comedy, not to say farce,
into what should have been a drama of sustained and purely serious
interest.

The first jarring note was struck when Princess Louisa made the
acquaintance of Wilhelmina Adamovics. The ex-actress ran into the
bedroom of the ex-Archduchess at Zurich, bursting with affection, and
eager to take a new sister to her arms; but the ex-Archduchess was not
so democratic as all that. Though she had bicycled with the dentist and
made assignations with the tutor, she could not forget that she was a
Habsburg, but retained enough family pride to feel that it should have
been left to her to take the initiative in emotional demonstration.
“The newcomer,” she tells us, “was obviously not of my world”; and she
continues:—

 “I was taken aback. I had not expected this, and I did not want it. I
 knew, indeed, that Leopold had fallen in love with a beautiful girl
 of the people, but it never crossed my mind that he intended to marry
 her, and I felt instinctively that her arrival in our midst would
 upset all our plans.

 “I tried, however, to disguise my annoyance, and to put some warmth
 into my greeting, but she was quite impossible, and I subsequently
 discovered that she had not even been trained in the rudiments of the
 art of behaving at table.”

It was a bad beginning; and it was not made any better by the
representations of the Vienna newspapers that “the flight of the Crown
Princess was exclusively due to her brother Leopold’s influence.” Their
cue seems to have been to depreciate Leopold; and this is the place in
which to reproduce the character sketch of him printed in the _Neue
Freie Presse_:—

 “Archduke Leopold Ferdinand” (we there read) “is a very intelligent
 man, but somewhat eccentric, whimsical in a high degree, and difficult
 to manage. A prominent feature of his character is irony and sarcasm.
 He has in this way given much displeasure to officers of high rank,
 and this is the only reason why, in spite of his jovial and agreeable
 manner, he has made no friends in the army. While at Iglau he was
 constantly in conflict with the commander of the regiment. Thus, one
 day he went out riding disguised as a lady, in company with another
 officer, and was seen and recognised by his commanding officer, who,
 of course, took him to task. He hates etiquette, loves free and easy
 manners, and has always had little intercourse with the aristocracy,
 preferring lively young people of the middle class.”

The free-and-easiness of the Archduke’s manners had, indeed, manifested
itself in the presence of Francis Joseph himself, on the day on which
he was summoned to the Emperor’s presence to be told that his way of
life was dissolute and indecorous. He did not, like John Orth, pelt the
Emperor with the insignia of his Orders; but he found another means,
not less effective, of carrying the war into the enemy’s camp, bowing
politely and responding:

 “I hear what you say, sir, but I fail to see why I should pay any
 attention to it. If there is a mote in my eye, there is a beam in
 yours. When you speak of such matters as these, I do not regard you as
 the Emperor of Austria—I merely regard you as Herr Schratt.”

And so saying, he ceremoniously bowed himself out before Francis
Joseph could lay his finger on the electric button which would have
summoned the secret police.

Thus, by that _tu quoque_, he justified his own preference for “lively
young people of the middle-class”; but it nevertheless seems that, in
Switzerland, the particular liveliness of Fräulein Adamovics, after
jarring from the first upon his sister’s taste, came eventually to
jar upon his own. It transpired in the course of time—in the course
of a very short time, in fact—that the tastes, manners, and customs
of Fräulein Adamovics deviated from the healthy norm no less than
those of the more eccentric of the Habsburgs, albeit in a different
direction. Her passion for the simple life and the return to nature
lured her on to proceedings hardly compatible with sanity. The goal of
self-realisation, it seemed to her, could only be attained if men and
women divested themselves of their clothing, and climbed trees in order
to crack nuts.

A strange doctrine truly, and one to be condemned by those pragmatists
who bid us test every doctrine by the touchstone question: “Will it
work?” It found its condemnation in this case, when “Herr Wulfling”
began to translate theory into practice. After running wild in woods
for a season, he was persuaded by the jeers of a passer-by to visit
a barber’s shop; and the sudden sight which he got of himself in the
barber’s mirror—the spectacle of a hirsute savage suggesting a Wild
Man from Borneo—decided him to return to civilisation by the shortest
cut available. He ran to the nearest slop-shop, put himself into a
reach-me-down check-suit, engaged rooms in a _pension_, and shortly
afterwards divorced the wife who had lured him into his amazing
courses, and sought another wife of a more commonplace kind.

His second wife was a Swiss lady—Fräulein Ritter—and his union to
her appears to have been more fortunate. He acquired the rights of
citizenship in the Canton of Zug; and he presently obtained damages
in a Swiss Court of Law against a journalist, who circulated the
report that he had always lived, and was still living, a disorderly
life, and had refused to pay his rates. The dispute about the rates
was only a dispute about an assessment; and the tribunal endorsed
counsel’s favourable estimate of Herr Wulfling’s personal worth. It is
interesting to compare that estimate with the depreciatory paragraph
quoted from the _Neue Freie Presse_; and we may borrow the report of
the _Indépendance Belge_:—

 “In Austria” (we there read) “M. Leopold Wulfling was indifferent
 to the attractions of fashionable life, but enjoyed himself in
 middle-class society. He was understood to be one of the most
 cultivated members of the archducal house. He speaks and writes ten or
 a dozen languages correctly, and has a knowledge of mathematics and
 astronomy which would qualify him to occupy a professorial chair in
 any University in the world. He is also an experienced navigator of
 the seas. At Salzburg, where he lived for a long time, he became very
 popular. His superiors considered him too considerate to the soldiers
 serving under his orders. His relations with his father continued to
 be extremely cordial even after he had retired from the army. It is
 absolutely untrue to say that he has been compelled to abandon the
 profession of arms; but the resignation of his titles involved the
 resignation of his commission. Note that of all his Orders he has kept
 only the modest Cross of Merit bestowed upon the young Archduke by the
 Emperor himself for saving two men from drowning.”

Decidedly the Archduke Leopold had the _beau rôle_ on that occasion.
Not only did he leave the Swiss Court without a stain on his character,
but his calumniator narrowly escaped imprisonment for defamation, and
had to pay a heavy fine. It was at about this date that Signor Toselli
made his acquaintance, and was inspired to the following pen portrait
of the Archduke:—

 “He was a tall, fine man, fair, stout, loud-voiced, and genial. He
 lived in an English boarding-house, where he did exactly as he liked.
 He trailed about most of the day in carpet slippers.”

Some may think that that was carrying liberty to the verge of licence;
but it is perhaps not less natural for an Archduke unwittingly to
infringe the etiquette of boarding-houses than for a _parvenu_ to
infringe the etiquette of Courts. In Austria, it has been said, the
aristocracy dare not ask the professors to dinner for fear lest, if
they were worldly enough to dress for the banquet, they should wear
green ties with their dress clothes. Herr Wulfling, at any rate, spoke
his mind about Courts and Kings—and also about his sister:—

 “Court life is stupid, dull, and wretched. Everything about it is
 insufferable. I cannot breathe at Court. A free man has the world at
 his feet, but a Prince or King is the puppet of his surroundings.”

And also, on another occasion:—

 “Kings are just like other men. Not one in a hundred is worth a cent;
 perhaps even that is an exaggerated estimate. As for my sister, she is
 a crazy creature. At her age she might surely keep out of mischief.”

That was rather an unkind criticism, especially so soon after he and
Princess Louisa had made the plunge into the simple life together; but
it appears that, though Princess Louisa had, like her brother, the
courage of her convictions, she was more a creature of impulse, more
inclined to pose, and less consistent in her view of the obligations of
simplicity. Half the journalists of Europe had assembled at Geneva, as
we have seen, to give her a gallery to play to; and she played to that
gallery like an operatic star, taking the air with M. Giron daily, amid
the applause of the collected populace, and thereby somewhat shocking
the opinion of the rigid City of Calvin. This is how, speaking to the
wife of an artist who called on her, she manifested her joy in her
emancipation:—

 “What a happy woman you must be to be married to an artist who has a
 high standard, and tries to make his life square with it! Then you
 are free to do as you please, to dress as you like, to wear out your
 clothes. I have often to dress six times a day.”

Perhaps. But Princess Louisa had engaged the whole of the first floor
of the Hotel d’Angleterre for herself and her suite; and it was
remarked that this proceeding seemed to reflect an Archduchess’s rather
than an ascetic’s conception of simplicity. It was remarked, too, that
her literary tastes, in so far as these could be inferred from the
books which she borrowed from the Geneva libraries, appeared to be of a
decadent modernity. Her favourite authors were discovered to be Gérard
de Nerval and Baudelaire: excellent authors, indeed, but not authors
whose message is for the simple and unsophisticated.

But let that pass: this work is not the life of Princess Louisa of
Tuscany. Nor need we dwell upon the withdrawal of M. Giron from
the Princess’s _entourage_, or upon her own nervous breakdown and
consequent retreat into a _maison de santé_. Very possibly the two
events had some connection with each other; but it does not matter. Nor
does the behaviour of M. Giron himself matter, though it is impossible
not to commend him, before one dismisses him, for the chivalry with
which he has kept silence. At the height of the romantic battle,
indeed, he was no more discreet than the rest, and could hardly be
expected to be so. He was very young; and he evidently believed that
great things had happened, and that still greater things were about
to happen. If he and Princess Louisa were going to defy the Habsburg
system by living happily together ever afterwards, there was no reason
why their gestures should not be as defiant as their actions; but that,
as it turned out, was not to be.

Once more there were wheels within wheels; once more there was an
interposition of some sort which threw the machinery out of gear. There
is some reason to believe that the interposition was of a pecuniary
character, though none for believing that M. Giron himself was “bought
off.” But the day nevertheless came when M. Giron discovered that his
mission was terminated. As Princess Louisa puts it:—

 “M. Giron did not remain long in Switzerland. My reputation being
 thoroughly compromised by his presence, my object was achieved, and he
 therefore returned to Brussels.”

It is rather a cold-blooded way of putting it. M. Giron may well have
felt that Princess Louisa was resuming as a woman all the rights which
she had forfeited as an Archduchess. But he raised no public protest at
the time, and he has raised none since, though the wealthy proprietors
of sensational newspapers have often tempted him to do so. One need
seek no other explanation than the fact that he was a gentleman, too
chivalrous to bear malice if there was any to be borne, conscious that
his chivalry had led him into mistaken courses, and only anxious that
the world should forget his error. After all, how many private tutors
of his tender age, however respectably connected, can lay their hands
upon their hearts and vow that they, in his place, would have been
irresponsive to the appeal of a fascinating Crown Princess?

But let that pass too; for our business is only with Princess Louisa,
and with her only in so far as her case illustrates the failure of the
Habsburg system, and the impulse of the family to revolt, as it were,
against itself. No theory of her possessing a double dose of original
sin can justly be invoked to account for her proceedings. The impulse
to revolt was as physiologically sound in her case as in any of the
others; but it was stirred in her too late. She was too radically
affected to be saved by it. There is something pathetic in the picture
of her efforts to recover her balance—so desperate, yet so unavailing.

In her restlessness, if in nothing else, she reminds one a little of
the Empress Elizabeth. One sees her, as one sees the Empress, driven
continually from place to place, seeking she knows not exactly what,
but always failing to find it; but one does not see her, as one sees
the Empress, guarding her secret like a delicate flame which must at
all costs be sheltered from the wind. Her disposition is, rather,
to expose the flame to all the winds which blow, in the hope that
one or other of them may fan it to a blaze. For she is, after all, a
Habsburg; and that is how the Habsburgs differ from the Wittelsbachs.
The contrast has been pointed out already; but the point may be made
again—in French, because there is no exact equivalent in English for
the French phrases. The typical Wittelsbach, sane or insane, is _tout
en dedans_; the typical Habsburg, conventional or unconventional, is
_tout en dehors_.

Princess Louisa’s career exemplified the distinction when she bicycled
in the Park with the dentist, and when she summoned M. Giron to
Switzerland to compromise her. A further illustration of it was
furnished when she affianced herself to that promising young pianist,
Signor Toselli. The contrast leaps to the eyes in Signor Toselli’s
report of the first compliments which she paid him:—

 “I love the society of artists. Their views are so noble and so
 generous. They are far above the petty prejudices of other men. Their
 conversation is stimulating and inspiring. You cannot imagine how
 badly they are treated at the Court of Dresden. They are simply paid
 their fee and dismissed.”

Even M. Paderewski, the Princess added, would have been simply paid his
fee and dismissed, if she had not herself run forward, with tears in
her eyes, and clasped him by the hand.

The Wittelsbachs do not talk like that, but, entertaining similar
sentiments, act on them more quietly, and more as a matter of course.
Nor does one hear of the Wittelsbachs making their declarations of
love with that dramatic directness with which, if one may trust Signor
Toselli, who has not M. Giron’s instinct for reticence, Princess Louisa
made hers. One does not picture a Wittelsbach putting to a comparative
stranger the straight questions: “Have you ever loved?... Tell me, do
you feel capable of love?” Nor could one readily credit a Wittelsbach
with the naïve vanity of the following announcement of artistic aims
and gifts:—

 “I shall write the words to your music. I feel a hitherto unused
 talent stirring within me. I can also do sculpture.”

What wonder if Signor Toselli, being only twenty-four, was persuaded by
such exclamations that all the fairy-tales were coming true? And that
though he was warned.

 “Do you really know the Crown Princess of Saxony, sir?” said Countess
 Fugger to him. “Do you realise her character and the life she has
 led? Rather than commit such folly I would advise you to go into the
 garden, this very instant, and put a bullet through your brain.”

But the warning fell upon deaf ears; and it is impossible to feel
surprise at its having done so—not only because a child was about to
be born, but also for a good many other reasons. Rank does not cease
to dazzle because the high-born condescend, but often dazzles all the
more effectively, by causing the lowly-born to feel at ease in their
preferment, as well as proud of it. The chances of really romantic
adventure, too, are rare in modern life; and a young musician is even
less likely than most other young men to turn his back on them in a
calculating spirit of sober self-restraint. The blaze of publicity is
not a thing from which the conditions of his calling have taught him to
shrink.

Signor Toselli did not shrink from it, and doubtless he enjoyed his
hour of rapture. He and his bride changed their names with the rapidity
of genius. At the office of the London Registrar, they were, of course,
Signor Toselli and Princess Louisa of Tuscany; but at the Hotel Cecil
they were Signor and Signora San Marcellino, and at the Norfolk Hotel
they were M. and Mme. Dubois. When they started for their honeymoon,
their railway carriage was besieged by reporters; and they may well
have believed that the acclamations of the world’s Press saluted their
definite entrance into the joys of an earthly Paradise.

But, if that was their belief, then they were mistaken in it. In
Princess Louisa’s case, as we have said, the hour of revolt had struck
too late. Her spiritual revolution was, in some respects, rather
like the great French Revolution, which continued to proceed from
excess to excess, and from extravagance to extravagance, long after
its ostensible purpose had been achieved. She might be able to “do
sculpture”; but there were certain other things, more important than
sculpture, which she found it impossible to do. Above all, she could
not settle down and keep her allegiance fixed. She had no sooner
settled down in one place than she wanted to move on and settle down
somewhere else. Like Little Joe, she was “allus a-moving on”; and the
meaningless migrations were a weariness of the flesh to her husband,
and a hindrance to his professional prospects. “You are killing
the artist in me,” he said to the woman who had once assured him that
artists were, of all men, the noblest and the worthiest to be loved.

[Illustration:

  _Photo_      _Dover Street Studios_

  PRINCESS LOUISA OF TUSCANY
  (Ex-Crown Princess of Saxony).
]

After that there was estrangement, culminating in separation, but
mitigated by collaboration in a comic opera—the plot of it based upon
Princess Louisa’s recollection of certain incidents in her career as
Crown Princess of Saxony. The proof is clear that, in her case—if
not also in his—the passion for publicity has survived the passion
for romance; but the end is not yet, and is not likely to prove of a
significance which would warrant the suspension of the publication
of this work until it occurs. Princess Louisa’s story has been an
excursus, albeit a necessary one, seeing that it illustrates, even to
the point of absurdity, the Habsburg habit of doing melodramatic things
melodramatically, as if they felt conscious that, whether they sat on
thrones or slid off them, they owed at once an entertainment and an
object lesson to the admiring curiosity of the world.

And that, of course, is the reason why the Habsburgs have been at once
so interesting and so troublesome to the Head of their House. When they
have sinned, as he would account it—offended, at all events, against
the ancient traditions of the House—they have not been contented
to go out and sin quietly. They have, on the contrary, sinned, if
not strongly, at least demonstratively, as if their business was
everybody’s business, and it behoved both the Courts and the peoples
to take note. And Francis Joseph, on his part, has not failed to
take note, protesting, as it were, against Habsburg side-shows, and
re-asserting those Habsburg principles which the rebels have rejected,
with a vigour which sometimes reminds one of the last roar of a dying
lion.

We must return to him, though, in truth, there remains but little to be
said.




CHAPTER XXXII

 The summing up—The probable future of Austria—The probable future
 of the House of Habsburg—Questions both personal and political which
 will be raised when Francis Joseph dies—The extent to which he has
 been “in the movement”—The faithful companion of his old age.


Francis Joseph, at the moment of writing, has passed not only his
eighty-third birthday, but the sixty-fifth anniversary of his
accession. Since the death of the late Regent of Bavaria, he has been
the _doyen_ of European rulers; and his reign has been longer than
that of any modern monarch except Louis XIV., who came to the throne
as a small child. His health is naturally the subject of constant
preoccupation and infinite precaution on the part of his _entourage_;
and last year he was kept indoors at Schönnbrunn from the middle of
October until the middle of April. To what extent he is now able
to govern, as well as to reign, only his Ministers know; but it is
understood that, while they mobilise the army, he prays that there may
be peace in his time.

Most likely he will get his way. There prevails throughout Europe, as
well as throughout Austria, a sentimental feeling that he has suffered
enough, and that it would be cruel to disturb his last days with war or
civil commotion. That sentiment may be expected to count for more than
the impatience of those Ruthenian deputies who have taken to silencing
their German rivals in the Reichsrath by banging gongs and sounding
motor-horns. It might not be so if the problems to the discussion of
which the sounding of those motor-horns is an emotional contribution
were quite ripe for settlement; but the day of reckoning must still be
deferred a little. It is not before the blowing of motor-horns that the
walls of Jericho will fall down flat; and it is improbable that Francis
Joseph will live to see the solution of the problem which their tumult
heralds.

Still, there the problem is; and we must take a final glance at it
before we quit the subject. It is an old problem in a new form: a
fresh presentation of the problem propounded by that Resettlement of
Europe in 1815, which served as our historical starting-point—the
problem arising out of the claims of ignored but inextinguishable
nationalities. The shifting of the orientation of the Austrian outlook
from the Italian to the Balkan peninsula, so often acclaimed as an act
of wise statesmanship, has only restated that problem in a fresh shape.
For the Italia Irredenta which was a thorn in the side of Austria in
the past, it has substituted a Servia Irredenta which will prove a
thorn in the side of Austria in the future.

In the days when the change was effected, the Servians were a despised
people; and the Austrians and Hungarians believed the Turks, who
declared that, in their many battles with the Servians, they had only
seen their backs. They took that view alike of the Servians within
the Empire—the Servians of Illyria, Dalmatia, Croatia, and other
regions—and of the Servians of the independent kingdom of Servia. The
former, it seemed to them, were naturally their slaves; the latter
were a feeble folk, incapable, and never likely to be capable, of
delivering those slaves from servitude. But now they are not so sure.
Their Bosnian war established the unexpected truth that men of Servian
race not only hated Austrian domination, but could make a good fight
for their independence. The recent Balkan war has renewed the warning;
and it remains to be seen what will happen now that there is a strong
Servia—at least as strong as the old kingdom of Sardinia—to which the
unredeemed Servians can look for their redemption. The situation, in
short, reproduces in almost every particular the conditions which led
to the formation of the kingdom of United Italy.

It is a situation in which there is one incalculable factor: the
internal dissensions of the Balkan peoples. Those enmities are
undeniably acute; and Austria is clearly determined to foment them,
in order to postpone, if not to frustrate, the welding together of a
formidable Balkan Confederation. That is the obvious inwardness of
her recent support of Bulgaria and Albania. The plan may answer for
the moment; but it can hardly avail in the long run, for two reasons.
Albania is too disorganised to count; Bulgaria is too weak to have any
future except as a member of a Balkan Confederation; and there is also
Roumania to be reckoned with—Roumania, which may prove to be at once
a consolidating influence in the Balkans, and an influence hostile to
Austria.

The fact that there is a Roumania Irredenta as well as a Servia
Irredenta may be expected to draw the Servians and the Roumanians
together; and their ultimate purpose in drawing together would
obviously be to raise the questions of the two unredeemed territories
simultaneously. If that should happen, the history of United Italy can
hardly fail to repeat itself in the Danubian States. That it would so
repeat itself there was one of Mazzini’s political predictions; and he
exhorted his countrymen, when the day came, to go over to Macedonia
and help the Slavs. If they should ever do so, they will certainly
want to help themselves to the Trentino at the same time; and they
might alternatively—Triple Alliance or no Triple Alliance—demand the
Trentino as the price of their neutrality.

The danger is perceived, of course, in Vienna; and there are those
in Vienna who have their plan for meeting it. The Archduke Francis
Ferdinand himself is generally understood to have a plan: the
transformation of the Dual Monarchy into a Triple Monarchy—the third
of his Trinity of Kingdoms to be a Kingdom of Slavs. To some the idea
seems a brilliant inspiration; to others a counsel of despair. It
derives most of the value which it has from the fact that a majority
of the Slavs within the Empire are Catholics, whereas a majority of
the Slavs without the Empire belong to the Orthodox Church, and that
the Catholics despise the Orthodox as their inferiors in piety and
civilisation. The Archduke, as a very religious man—the sort of man
whom people speak of as being “in the hands of the Jesuits”—relies,
apparently, upon differences of creed to keep the Slavs divided and
weak, in spite of the brotherhood of race.

He may be right; but there are not wanting indications that he is
wrong. Even in the Balkans religious fanaticism is no longer the force
that it used to be; and the Austrian police has recently had all
its work cut out to prevent inopportune explosions of sympathy with
Servian successes, in Croatia. There, and in Bosnia, and in Dalmatia,
just as of old in Lombardy and in Venetia, explosions have only been
prevented—perhaps one should say have only been deferred—by the
policy of sitting on the safety-valve; and when that policy has to be
adopted, things never fail to happen which make the oppressed difficult
to reconcile. Moreover, there is a further difficulty, already
indicated on a previous page: the difficulty which has its double root
in Slav numbers and Austro-Hungarian pride.

Of all the races which make up the composite Empire, the Slavs are the
most numerous. Admitted to the Empire on equal terms, they will be in
a position to control it—to control, that is to say, the Austrians
and Hungarians who have hitherto controlled them. If that were allowed
to happen, the condition of things created might be as intolerable
to the Austrians and Hungarians as is the existing state of things
to the Slavs. Foreseeing this, they will be reluctant to take the
step which will compel them to bow their necks; and, if they do take
it, yet another “unredeemed” question will be raised: the question
whether the Teutonic portion of the Habsburg dominions should not be
regarded as Germania Irredenta. The Pangermanists of Prussia already,
as we know, take that view of it; and Slav predominance might easily
create a Pangermanist party in Austria also. Indeed, the nucleus of a
Pangermanist party already exists there.

One doubts, therefore, whether the plan of the Archduke Francis
Ferdinand—bold though the conception is—will prove to be a panacea.
It strikes one as an artifice—a piece of diplomatic jugglery; and
the forces which really determine the course of history are forces
which mere juggling is powerless to control. The real rivalry of the
Europe of to-day and to-morrow is the rivalry between Teuton and Slav;
and that is a rivalry which has its origin, not merely in conflicting
material interests, but in fundamental antipathies of character. As
long as Teutons are anywhere ruling over Slavs, no policy of “live
and let live” is feasible; and as the Slavs increase in numbers and
in racial self-consciousness, the clash is bound to come. When it
does come—when the unredeemed Slavs, assisted by the unredeemed
Roumanians, insist upon their redemption—Austria will have played her
part on the stage of European history, and the curtain may be rung down.

That is one of the predictions with which we may leave our subject; but
there is also another speculation which it would be difficult to avoid.
What of that House of Habsburg which has so long been the personal
incarnation of the Austrian Empire? Whither is it tending? On what will
its ultimate destiny depend? Will the family problems prove to be more
easily soluble than those of the Empire itself? Will it still be in the
future, as it has been in the past, the unifying principle of a complex
political system? One doubts it—one cannot help doubting it—for
various reasons.

The question before us—before Austria, rather—is the question of
the importance which the world of the immediate future will attach
to family pride and the exclusiveness of an imperial caste; and that
is a question about which the world of to-day does not quite seem to
have made up its mind. It has gained a little knowledge without losing
an equal proportion of prejudice, and has reached a point at which
it finds it equally difficult to live either with its superstitions
or without them. It is moved—it cannot help being moved—by the
formidable array of facts by which the Eugenists demonstrate that the
path to degeneracy is paved with consanguineous marriages; but, at the
same time, it cannot easily shake off its instinctive reluctance to
accord imperial dignity to the offspring of a healthy young woman of
what it regards as the “lower orders.” It is, the world feels, very
embarrassing to have to choose between a degenerate and a person of
inferior social status.

That, nevertheless, is the choice which lies before Austria in the
immediate future. Francis Ferdinand, as we have seen, has married
beneath him; his marriage is “morganatic.” That is to say that, when he
comes to the throne, the heir to the throne will not be his son, but
his nephew. That nephew is a young man about whom comparatively little
is known; but when Francis Ferdinand goes into the matter, he will do
so with the following facts before him:—

1. The heir to the throne is the son of the family scapegrace, who used
to dance in cafés _in puris naturalibus_.

2. This heir is married to a lady who comes of the decadent Bourbon
Parma stock.

3. This young man, and his wife, and his family are taking precedence
of his own wife, whom he loves, and the healthy[7] children whom she
has borne him.

[Footnote 7: Apparently healthy, though there is, unhappily, a
strain of insanity in the Chotek family also. Nothing was known or
suspected of it at the time of the marriage; but the Duchess of
Hohenberg’s father had to be placed under restraint before his death.
One may hope that the weakness was developed too late in life to be
transmitted.]

The superstition of caste would, indeed, be strong in Francis Ferdinand
if he regarded that as a right and proper state of things; and the mere
fact that he married as he did, in the face of the opposition
which he encountered, shows clearly that, whatever superstitions may
still retain a hold on him, that particular superstition has relaxed
its grip. Is he likely—human nature being what we know it to be—to
accept an affront inflicted in the name of a superstition which he has
abandoned? Can we expect his wife and his children to press him to do
so?

Obviously we cannot. The thing might have happened in bygone ages—or
even in comparatively recent ages—when universal opinion drew a
religious as well as a social distinction between hereditary sovereigns
and their subjects, and the personal dignity of the individual counted
for nothing in comparison with that great impersonal principle. It
cannot happen now that all impersonal principles are in the melting-pot
and so many postulates which men used to grant as they now grant the
law of gravitation are being brought to the bar of opinion to be
cross-examined. The postulate which bids the progeny of an Emperor who
married for love take a lower seat than the son and grandsons of the
family scapegrace will assuredly be questioned by the next Emperor of
Austria; and it will be found that it has nothing to say for itself.
It may die fighting; but it will die; and the whole of the Habsburg
superstition will die with it. What will happen then lies in the lap of
the Gods.

It is, however, precisely because of its gradual approach to such
problems as these that one finds the reign of Francis Joseph such
an intensely interesting period of history. It is interesting from
the personal point of view as the story of Nemesis overtaking the
oppressor; the story which we have presented symbolically as the story
of the fulfilment of Countess Karolyi’s curse. Philosophically it is
interesting as the age of transition from mediæval to modern ideas: the
age in which both nationalities and individuals have stormily asserted
their right to live their own lives in their own way. In both these
matters we see, in Austria more clearly than anywhere else, the hungry
generations treading down the past.

It is seldom that so complete an evolution of outlook is co-extensive
with the life of a single sovereign; perhaps, indeed, Francis Joseph’s
reign has been unique in that respect. In any case, he has witnessed
all these changes, and lived through all these intellectual and
emotional experiences. His _rôle_, while doing so, has been to keep up
appearances; but, if we could penetrate to the realities behind the
appearances, we should assuredly find that he had not himself been
unaffected by the transformations going on around him. That is the
true moral of the story of his affection for Frau Schratt, and of the
rumour of his desire to give that lady his left hand in marriage. He
felt what the other Habsburgs felt, though he controlled his feelings
better. Seeing what the other Habsburgs were doing, he had the impulse
to be “in the movement,” though he resisted it. He, like the rest, has
sometimes had the intuition that happiness lay in living one’s own
life rather than the corporate life of one’s country; and there
are moments when his biographer feels that, in spite of all the pomp
and glory which have attended his public career, the day of days for
him must have been the day on which he met Frau Schratt, who, after
twenty-eight years of mutual devotion, now totters down the hill with
him at the journey’s end.

[Illustration:

  _Photo_      _Adèle_

FRAU SCHRATT.]

Daily, for a little while, when health permits, he sits with her and
wonders.... We will leave him wondering.




INDEX


  Adamovics, Fräulein Wilhelmina, viii, 107, 322, 326, 327, 329

  Albert, Archduke, 134, 136, 138-140, 149, 152-155, 162, 192, 234, 242

  Albert, Prince Consort, 135

  Alençon, Sophie, Duchesse d’, under restraint at Graetz, 98, 169;
    affianced to Ludwig II. of Bavaria, 161, 188;
    photographed with Count Holnstein, 188;
    the engagement broken off—married to Duc d’Alençon, 189;
    her death, 161, 191

  Alexander I., Czar of Russia, 2, 32, 57, 70

  Ambert, General, _Cinq Epées_, 37

  Amsterdam, 119

  Andrassy, Count Julius, 146, 156, 210, 247

  Andrews, Mrs. Clarence, 224

  Anjou, Charles of, 20

  Aroyo, Don Agostino, 253

  Arragon, Ferdinand of, 23

  _Assassins, Les_, ballet by Archduke John Salvator, 233

  Augustenburg, Duchess of, 189

  Augustine, Princess, 286, 292

  Austria, a medley of races, not a nation, vi;
    its history only to be understood in conjunction with the personality of its sovereign, vi, vii;
    its position in the Holy Roman Empire, 2;
    the formation of the Empire its chief problem, 4;
    a Teuton Power when Francis Joseph commenced his reign—its Italian provinces, 7;
    opposed to the liberal ideas of the period, 33;
    all its statesmen policemen at heart, 34;
    the revolution in Lombardy, 36-38;
    the popular demand for a constitution, 40;
    risings in Vienna, 41;
    wonderfully favoured by accidents, 54;
    bungling policy of, in connection with the Crimean War, 70;
    at war with France and Italy, 123-130;
    like all Germans, can only govern in a state of siege, 124, 125;
    tortured her Italian subjects in prison, 125, 126;
    an Italian’s opinions of, 126, 127;
    at war with Prussia, 134-137;
    surrenders Venetia to Italy, 134;
    her attitude in the Franco-Prussian War, 148-157;
    her future not in Italy or Germany, but in the Balkans—occupies Bosnia, 158;
    her coming troubles in the Balkan States, 342-346

  Austrian Alpine Club, 125

  _Austrian Court of the Nineteenth Century_, _see_ Rumbold, Sir Horace


  Bach, Alexander A., Baron von, 66

  Baden, 162

  Balfour, Jabez, 257

  Baltazzi, Alexander, 201, 211, 214, 224

  Baltazzi, Evelyn, 201

  Baltazzi, Hector, 201

  Ban of Croatia, the, _see_ Jellaçiç, Baron Von

  Barclay’s brewery, Marshal Haynau’s reception by the draymen at, 61-64

  Barr, Robert, 219

  Barrès, Maurice, 79

  Batthyany, Elemar, 57

  Batthyany, Louis, 57, 58

  Bavaria, 155

  Bazaine, Marshal, 173

  Beck, Baroness von, on the cynicism of the Court during the Hungarian War, 59

  Beckford, William, 190

  Benedek, General, 135-142

  Berlin, 134, 155

  _Berliner Lokal Anzeiger_, interviews Frau Schratt on the rumour of the morganatic marriage of Francis Joseph, 109;
    story of the death of Crown Prince Rudolf in, 219, 220

  Berry, Duchesse de, 238

  Bertha, Count Alexander von, 82

  Berzeviczy, General, 263

  Beust, F. F. von, 83, 155

  Biarritz, 133, 264, 266

  Bismarck, Prince, 68, 132, 133, 135, 140, 162, 272

  Bohemia, 46, 51, 136, 155

  Boigne, Mme. de, 88

  Bomba, _see_ Francis II., King of Naples

  Bombelles, Count, 218

  Bosnia, Austrian occupation of, 158

  Brabant, Marie, Duchess of, 23

  Bratfisch, coachman to the Crown Prince Rudolf, 219

  Bruckenau, 266

  Brussels, 63, 108, 197, 198, 294, 322

  Buda-Pesth, 52, 53, 146, 161, 211, 239, 287

  Buenos Ayres, 255

  Burg, Charles, 71, 291;
    _see also_ Archduke Ferdinand Charles

  Byron, Lord, 6;
    _Don Juan_, 6


  Cairo, 203

  Calvi, Colonel, 126, 127

  Capet, Hugues, 20

  Cap Martin, 119, 264

  Capua, Prince of, 237

  Carlos, Don, 322

  Castiglioni, Countess, 123

  Castlereagh, Lord, 5

  Caux, 266

  Cavour, Count, 122, 123

  Chaco, 255

  Charles II. of Spain, 24

  Charles III. of Spain, 21

  Charles V., Emperor, 24

  Charles X. of France, 6

  Charles, Archduke, 24, 27

  Charles, Duke of Parma, 317

  Charles of Lichtenstein, 189

  Charles Albert, King of Sardinia, 36, 51, 122, 123, 130

  Charles Ferdinand, Archduke, 241

  Charles Louis, Archduke, brother of the Emperor, 48, 274, 301

  Charles Salvator, Archduke, 278, 283

  Charles the Bold of Burgundy, 23

  Charlotte, Archduchess, wife of Archduke Maximilian: unpopularity in Venice, 127, 146, 165;
    her ambition causes her to persuade Maximilian to accept the crown of Mexico, 165-167, 170;
    seeks Napoleon’s influence over the _pacte de famille_, 169;
    keeps up Maximilian’s spirits during the voyage, 172, 173;
    returns to Europe to persuade Napoleon to leave the Army of Occupation in Mexico, 175-179;
    her mind was already unhinged before she left Mexico, 177;
    heard of Sadowa on her arrival—was not met at the station—Empress Eugénie came to call on her, 178;
    her interview with Napoleon, 178, 179;
    goes to her old home at Miramar, 179;
    and thence to Rome, 179, 180;
    suffers from mental alienation, 180-181;
    taken back to Miramar, 181;
    had occasional glimmerings of sanity, 185

  Chotek, Countess Sophie, 293, 300, 303-309, 311, 313

  Christina, Archduchess, 27

  _Cinq Epées_, _see_ Ambert, General

  Corona, 182

  _Corriera della Sera_, Count Nigra’s account of the Crown Prince Rudolf’s death in, 221

  Cracow, 233

  Crenneville, Count, 137, 138

  Crimean War, 70

  Cristina, Queen of Spain, 238

  Cromer, 119

  Custozza, 37, 51, 134, 234

  Czanadez, Marshal, 248, 249

  Czuber, Fräulein, 288-291


  _Daily Mail_ on Baron Ernest Wallburg, 287

  Darwin, Chas., 11

  Deák, Ferencz, 83, 144

  Diaz, Porfirio, 174, 182

  Domenech, Emmanuel, _History of Mexico_, 173


  _Eclair, L’_, account of the Meyerling tragedy in, 223

  Eitel Fritz, Prince, 298, 301

  Eleanor, Archduchess, 288

  Eleanor of Austria, wife of Francis I. of France, 26

  Elisa, the circus-rider, 97

  Elizabeth, Archduchess, at the abdication of the Emperor Ferdinand, 48;
    sets her cap at Francis Joseph, 86;
    burned to death at Schönnbrunn, 192

  Elizabeth, Archduchess, daughter of Crown Prince Rudolf, 293, 294, 297-299, 301

  Elizabeth, Empress, wife of Francis Joseph, making love to Elemar Batthyany, 58;
    the tragedy of her death at Geneva, 60;
    not trained for her position—stories of her early years, 73;
    her first meeting with Francis Joseph—his proposal, 74;
    her betrothal, 75;
    the marriage a failure, 77;
    the impenetrability of her character—her melancholy, 79;
    her beauty and popularity with all classes, 80, 82;
    factors in their estrangement, 81;
    a valuable asset in the government of the Empire, 81-83;
    did not get on with her mother-in-law, nor with the Archduchess Elizabeth, 86;
    her free-and-easy manners, 87;
    her instructions to Countess Marie Larisch, whom she chose to live with her as _confidante_, 90;
    her name coupled with that of Count Hunyadi, 91;
    her adieux with Capt. Middleton, 93;
    comes to Countess Marie’s bedroom at night to dissuade her from marrying Count N.

  Esterhazy, 93;
    her own experiences allegorised in a fairy-tale, 94, 95;
    her roving disposition, her melancholy and cynicism, 96;
    her attention to the _toilette_, and daring horsemanship, 97;
    the insanity in her family, 97, 98;
    _The Martyrdom of an Empress_, an untrustworthy life of her, 99-105;
    never used a gun—yachting in the Ionian Islands, 101;
    not at all musical—never rode alone, 102;
    introduces Frau Schratt to the Emperor, 104, 105, 109, 110;
    supposed reasons for her trip to Madeira, 116, 117;
    her indifference as to the training of the Crown Prince, 116;
    her constant wanderings and ceremonial appearances at Court, 116-119;
    specimens of her poetic pessimism, 119, 120;
    her popularity in Hungary helped the settlement, 143, 144;
    her murder, 162;
    refuses to believe her brother Ludwig mad—suggests a plan for his escape, 190;
    did not believe him dead, 191;
    said to have written reminiscences, 260;
    her outlook on life and her religious beliefs, 261, 262;
    M. Paoli’s account of her when in France, 263-265;
    omens preceding her assassination, 265-267;
    stabbed at Geneva, 268

  Elizabeth of Hungary, Saint, 83

  Elizabeth, Princess, granddaughter of the Emperor, 292-293

  Elizabeth, Princess, of Bavaria, _see_ Elizabeth, Empress

  Ernest, Archduke, 239

  Escobedo, 182

  _Essays and Reviews_, 259

  Esterhazy, Félicie, 41

  Esterhazy, Count Nicholas, 93, 120, 143

  Esterhazy, Valentine, 70

  Eugéne, Archduke, 278, 279, 283

  Eugénie, Empress, 118, 152, 178, 264


  Faucigny-Lucinge, Mme., 240, 241

  Faye, M. Jacques La, his life of the Empress, 99

  Federal Assembly, the, 3

  Ferdinand, Emperor, uncle of Francis Joseph, 22;
    his character, 42, 46;
    his abdication, 47-51

  Ferdinand, King of Bulgaria, 318

  Ferdinand, Grand Duke of Tuscany, 220, 221, 323

  Ferdinand VI. of Spain, 24

  Ferdinand Charles, Archduke, 288-291, 301

  Ferdinand of Este, Archduke, 47, 48

  Ferenzy, Mdlle., 103

  France, war with, 123-130

  Francis I. of France, 26

  Francis II., Emperor, grandfather of Francis Joseph, 21, 22

  Francis II., King of Naples, 6, 125

  Francis Charles, Archduke, father of Francis Joseph, 22, 29, 48, 49, 69

  Francis Ferdinand, Archduke, 269, 288, 293, 300;
    nephew to the Emperor—delicate boy and grew up delicate, 301;
    educated amongst Jesuits—medical treatment has its effect on him, 302;
    is expected to marry Archduchess Gabrielle, 303;
    but was courting a lady-in-waiting, Countess Sophie Chotek, 303-305;
    Archduchess Isabella’s discovery of their affection, 305, 306;
    the Emperor sanctions the marriage as a morganatic one, 305;
    the Archduke’s oath, 309;
    possible ways of evading it, 311-313;
    his plan for settlement of Balkan troubles, 344-346;
    his morganatic marriage stands in the way of the natural succession after him, 348, 349

  Francis Joseph I., Emperor of Austria, materials for a full biography not available, viii;
    short-comings essential to previous biographies, viii-x;
    the difficulties with which he was met on ascending the throne, 3;
    the formation of the Austrian Empire the central problem of his reign, 4;
    the risings in Italy and Hungary in the beginning of his reign, 7;
    his present popularity, 7, 8;
    to be considered both as Emperor and Habsburg, 8, 9, 18;
    the only sane member of the family, 15, 16;
    the tragedies of his position, 17, 18;
    his ancestors, 20-22;
    and collateral branches of the family, 23-26;
    ascends the throne at eighteen, the rising hope of a decadent family, 22;
    his birth and parentage, 29;
    his education and love for his people, 30;
    his first engagement with the army, 37, 38;
    his return to his studies, 38;
    at his uncle’s abdication, 48;
    succeeds to the throne, 49;
    the impression he had made in Hungary on an early visit did not insure popularity, 52;
    was bound to follow the advice of Windischgraetz and Schwartzenberg, 52;
    Hungarians refuse to recognise his authority till he takes the constitutional oath, 53;
    cut in the hunting field by Elemar Batthyany—was he responsible for the atrocities of the Hungarian War? 58;
    nicknamed at birth “the child of the gallows,” 64;
    his affront to Napoleon III., 65;
    and its result, 66, 123;
    his travels through his dominions—releases political prisoners—an attempt on his life, 67;
    Bismarck’s opinion of him, 68;
    the King of Belgium’s, 68, 69;
    Lady Westmorland’s description of him, 69;
    his romantic marriage, 71-76;
    first sees the Princess Elizabeth by accident, 73;
    his proposal, 74;
    their betrothal, 75;
    his marriage a failure, 77;
    the obviousness of his personality, 78, 79;
    the happiness of his early married days, 80, 81;
    factors in their estrangement, 81;
    he comes to visit the Empress whilst she is saying adieu to Capt. Middleton, 92;
    his rooms far from those of the Empress, 92;
    his flirtations make no startling tale, 104;
    his friendship with Frau Schratt, 104-113;
    his love of field sports, 113-115;
    story of his attentions to a peasant girl, 116;
    at war with France and Italy, 123-130;

  summons Sardinia to disarm, 124;
    took part himself in the war, 128, 129;
    his  sullenness over the terms of peace, 129, 130;
    Italian hatred of him, 131;
    refuses Italy’s offer to buy Venetia, 133;
    Offers to cede Venetia if Italy will leave him free to deal with Prussia—has to surrender it as result of the defeat at Sadowa, 134;
    his treatment of General Benedek, 135-141;
    sends for Deák, 144;
    and comes to terms with Hungary, 144, 145;
    his coronation at Buda-Pesth, 145, 146;
    he was stronger after Sadowa than before, 146;
    in negotiation with Napoleon on the Triple Alliance, 149;
    and with Victor Emmanuel, 150;
    in public affairs has the luck which saves him from his blunders, 160;
    in private is spared no sorrows, 161-163;
    his attitude as head of the family to Maximilian’s acceptance of the throne of Mexico, 167-171;
    helpless to aid Maximilian, 180;
    he might excuse himself had he taken no steps to aid him, 183, 184;
    but he did all he could without avail, 184-186;
    rumour that he was father of Mary Vetsera, 229;
    his reception of the news of the Meyerling tragedy, 230;
    his displeasure with Archduke John Salvator, 236, 242, 243;
    his last communication with him, 248;
    sends a cruiser to search the coast of Chili for John Orth, 254;
    sometimes visited the Empress at Cap Martin, 264;
    his reception of the news of the Empress’s death, 269-271;
    his varying attitude to morganatic marriages, and marriages between the Habsburgs and commoners, 286-293;
    permits the marriage of Princess Stéphanie to Count Lonyay, 294-296;
    and of her daughter Elizabeth to Otto von Windischgraetz, 297-299;
    his anxiety for his nephew, Francis Ferdinand to marry, 303;
    he

  sanctions the marriage with Countess Sophie Chotek as morganatic—his speech to the Privy Council, 307, 308;
    he retains more mediæval ideas than any ruler of to-day, 309, 310;
    his interview with Archduke Leopold Ferdinand, 328;
    his long reign and great age, 341;
    his unique reign, 350

  _Francis Joseph I., His Life and Times_, _see_ Mahaffy, R. P.

  _Francois Joseph Intime_, _see_ Weindel, H. de

  Franco-Prussian War, 148-157

  Frederick, Archduke, 303, 305

  Frederick IV., Emperor, 23

  Frederick August, King of Saxony, 319

  Frederick the Great, 21, 32, 57

  Frederick, Landgrave of Furstenberg, 48

  “Fried Fish,” _see_ Bratfisch

  Frossard, General, 153, 169

  Fugger, Countess, 337


  Gabrielle, Archduchess, 303, 304

  Galippe, Dr., _L’hérédité des Stigmates de Dégénérescence_, 10, 12, 13

  Geneva, 60, 267

  Georgei, 54

  German Federation, the, 3, 132, 134

  _Giornale d’Italia_, Victor Emmanuel’s letter to Napoleon in, 150

  Giron, M., 322, 332-334, 336

  Gisela, Archduchess, daughter of Francis Joseph, 101, 102, 107, 286, 292

  Gladstone, W. E., 126, 160

  Gödöllo, 90

  Graber, Captain, 56

  Graetz, 98, 138, 140

  Gramont, Duc de, 154, 155

  Greece, Isles of, 119

  Grunne, Count, 48

  Guizot, F. P. G., 35, 36, 40


  Habsburg, House of, its characteristics essential to the understanding of Austrian history, vi, vii;
    the eccentricities of its members, viii;
    marriage of a daughter of, to Napoleon, 2;
    eugenist’s opinions of, 10-13;

  revolt from family traditions, 14, 15;
    the effect upon the head of the house, 16-19;
    their origin and pedigree, 20-23;
    inter-marriages with the Spanish and Portuguese branches, 23-25;
    physical characteristics, 26, 27;
    some members have justified their _liaisons_ by the Emperor’s friendship with Frau Schratt, 107;
    recent tragedies in the family, 161, 162;
    the difference between their madness and that of the Wittelsbachs, 188;
    some of the family who have tried to be ordinary men, 273;
    the only characteristic common to them all, 282;
    their centrifugal marriages, 284-286;
    their superiority to the rest of mankind, 309;
    what will be the future of the house? 347

  _Habsburg Monarchy, The_, _see_ Steed, H. W.

  Halbthurn, 305

  Halévy, Leon, _M. et Madame Cardinal_, 202, 211

  Haynau, Marshal, the cruelties of his campaign in Hungary, 55-60;
    his command withdrawn from him, 61;
    his adventure at Barclay’s brewery, 61-63

  Heiligenkreuz, Abbey of, 215

  Heinrich, Herr, 249, 251

  Helen, Princess, of Bavaria, afterwards Princess of Thurn and Taxis, 72-75, 98, 100

  Henrietta, consort of Leopold II., King of the Belgians, 197, 286

  Henry, Archduke, 238, 276

  Hoffmann, Leopoldine, 238, 276

  Hohenlohe Schillingfürst, Prince Gottfried zu, 288

  Holnstein, Count, 188, 189

  Holy Alliance, the, 3-5

  Holy Roman Empire, its collapse, 1;
    the impossibility of reviving it, 2

  Hoyos, Count, 218, 230

  Hübner, Count, his amazement that anyone should value nationality, 34, 35;
    his account of Metternich’s resignation, 43;
    his account of the proceedings at Ferdinand’s abdication, 47-49

  Hungarian War (1849), 54-60

  Hungary, 40, 45, 46, 51, 53-58, 82, 83, 143-147, 156, 160, 211, 225

  Hunyadi, Count, 91


  Iglau, 322

  In-breeding, results of, 13-15

  _Indépendance Belge_ on M. Leopold Wulfing (Archduke Leopold Ferdinand), 330, 331

  Ionian Islands, 101

  Isabella, Archduchess, 297, 303-306

  Ischl, 73, 103, 108, 266

  Italy, War with, 123-130;
    offers to buy Venetia, 132;
    Venetia surrendered to, 134


  Jarras, 153

  Jecker, Baron, 165

  Jellaçiç, Baron von, Ban of Croatia, 46, 48, 52, 54

  Joanna the Mad, 23, 24

  John, Archduke, 21, 238

  John, Field-Marshal Baron, 139

  John Salvator, Archduke of Tuscany, afterwards John Orth, viii, 15, 71, 107, 162, 210;
    the first of the family rebels, a man of many accomplishments, 232;
    his musical compositions and military pamphlets, 233;
    his liberalism, 234;
    his close friendship with the Crown Prince, 234, 235;
    Countess Marie Larisch’s account of his parting with her, 235;
    account by Princess Louisa of Tuscany, 235, 236, 252;
    his love affairs with an Englishwoman, 236-239;
    and with Milly Stübel, 240-243;
    his interview with the Emperor, 242, 243;
    had he been plotting with Rudolf? 244-247;
    the uncertainty of his marriage with Milly Stübel, 247, 248;
    the Emperor’s last communication with him, 248;
    his farewell to his friends, 248-251;
    his last voyage, 253;
    was he lost at sea? 254;
    legends of his being seen since, 255-257

  Johnson, Andrew, President of the United States, 174

  Joseph II., Emperor, 21, 31

  Joseph, Archduke, 48, 162, 278, 292

  Juarez, Benito, 174, 182, 183, 185


  Karolyi, Countess, her curse on Francis Joseph, 60, 68, 71, 76, 122, 142, 161, 186

  _Keystone of Empire, The_, v

  Kisch, Baron, 108

  Kissingen, 119, 266

  Kloss, Alfons von, 288

  _Kölner Zeitung_ on Austrian cruelty in Hungary, 58

  Kossuth, L., 40, 50


  Ladislas, Archduke, 162, 192

  Laeken, 197

  Lainz, 266

  Larisch, Countess Marie, more in the Empress’s confidence than anyone else, 79;
    a story of the Empress before she was her companion, 84;
    says that the Emperor was the first to be dissatisfied with the marriage, 89;
    the Empress’s instructions to her when she sent for her to be her companion, 90;
    she prevents the Emperor from entering the Empress’s room whilst she is saying adieu to Capt. Middleton, 92;
    she is asked in marriage by Count Nicholas Esterhazy, and the Empress dissuades her from accepting him, 93;
    she repeats a fairy-tale told her by the Empress, 94, 95;
    her corrections of _The Martyrdom of an Empress_, 100-103;
    she tells of the Empress’s introduction of Frau Schratt to the Emperor, 104, 105, 109;
    on the Empress’s indifference as to the training of the Crown Prince, 116;
    her description of the difference between the madness of the Habsburgs and the Wittelsbachs, 188;
    her account of the Meyerling tragedy, 194, 197, 204-207, 210, 214, 216, 217;
    her refutation of an account of the tragedy in the _Berliner Lokal Anzeiger_, 219, 220;
    her own account, 223, 224;
    her account of the Archduke John Sebastian’s farewell, 235, 253

  Larisch, Countess Marie, _My Past_, v, 57, 84, 85, 90, 91, 97, 104, 105, 194, 197, 204-207, 210, 214, 216, 217, 235, 253

  Latour, Austrian War Minister, 55

  Laxenburg, 101, 298

  Lebœuf, Marshal, 153

  Lebrun, 153

  Leipzig, Battle of the Nations at, 1

  Leopold I., King of the Belgians, 68

  Leopold II., Emperor, 21

  Leopold II., King of the Belgians, 196, 197, 286, 294-296

  Leopold, Archduke, 280

  Leopold Ferdinand, Archduke, viii, 15, 71, 107, 129, 232, 252, 299, 315, 322, 327-332

  _L’hérédité des Stigmates de Dégénérescence_, _see_ Galippe, Dr.

  Libenyi, attempts to assassinate the Emperor, 67, 80

  Linz, 234

  Lobkowitz, Prince, 48

  Lombardy, 34, 38, 46, 125, 165

  London, 119, 243, 247

  _L’Origine du Type familial de la Maison de Habsburg_, _see_ Rubbrecht, Dr. O.

  Lorraine, Francis, Duke of, 20, 21

  Loschek, valet to the Crown Prince Rudolf, 219, 221

  Louis IX. of France (St. Louis), 20

  Louis XIV., 341

  Louis XVI., 278

  Louis, Archduke, 43

  Louis Philippe, 36

  Louis Salvator, Archduke, 277, 283

  Louis Victor, Archduke, brother of the Emperor, 180, 274

  Louisa, Princess of Tuscany, viii, 15, 27, 129, 220, 222, 232, 235, 236, 239, 241, 242, 244, 251-255, 277, 299, 315-327, 332-340

  Louisa, Princess of Tuscany, _My Own Story_, v, 318, 319

  Louise, Princess, of Saxe-Coburg, 197, 256, 294, 321, 339

  Luccheni assassinates the Empress Elizabeth, 268

  Lucchesi-Palli, 238

  Ludwig I. of Bavaria, 25, 72

  Ludwig II., King of Bavaria, his madness, 72;
    affianced to Sophie, afterwards Duchess d’Alençon, 161;
    breaks off his engagement, 187-189;
    smashes her bust, 189;
    his solitary life in fantastic splendour—the Empress refused to believe in his
    madness, and was ready to assist his escape, 190;
    his suicide, 162, 191

  Luxemburg, 149


  Madersbach, Mme. de, 56

  Madiera, 91, 116, 117

  Magenta, Battle of, 66, 124

  Mahaffy, R. P., _Francis Joseph I., His Life and Times_, v

  Majorca, 277

  Maria Dorothea, Archduchess, 48, 286

  Maria Henrietta, Archduchess, 288

  Maria Theresa, Empress, 20, 31, 57

  Marianna, Empress, 47, 49

  Marie of Burgundy, 26

  Marie-Amélie, Queen, consort of Louis-Philippe, 177

  Marie-Antoinette, 21

  Marie Louise, Archduchess, wife of Napoleon I., 26

  _Martyrdom of an Empress, The_, vi, 99-105

  Mary I. of England, 24

  Mathilde, Princess of Saxony, 196

  Matilda, Archduchess, 162

  Matilda, Duchess, in Bavaria, _see_ Trani, Countess de

  Mattatich, Count, 321

  Maximilian, Archduke, brother of Francis Joseph, afterwards Emperor of Mexico, at the abdication of the Emperor Ferdinand, 47, 48;
    the tragedy of his death, 60, 161, 163, 164, 185;
    his unpopularity in Venice, 127, 146, 165;
    invited to be Emperor of Mexico, 164;
    unfitted for post—the tool of Napoleon and the Mexican exiles—dismissed from his government of Venetia, 165:
    retires to Miramar and writes poetry—egged on by his wife to accept the Mexican throne, 166;
    stipulates for French military support, 167;
    the _pacte de famille_, 167, 168;
    he objects to renouncing his Austrian rights, 168;
    the _pacte_ signed at Miramar, 169, 170;
    his gloomy forebodings, 170, 171;
    Pius IX. blesses the enterprise, 171, 172;
    his wife keeps up his spirits on the voyage, 172;
    looking to the ceremonial aspect of the enterprise, and the disillusionment, 173;
    French Army of Occupation withdrawn, 173, 175, 182;
    nothing but pride prevented his abdication, 181;
    exclaims that he is free when the French Army had gone—he goes to Queretaro and is captured, 182;
    he had instructed Miramon to condemn Juarez to death, 183;
    is shot in the public square at Queretaro, 185;
    his body brought to Europe and buried in the tombs of the Habsburgs, 187

  Maximilian I. of Bavaria, grandfather of Francis Joseph, 22, 29

  Maximilian, Duke, in Bavaria, 72, 75, 100, 189

  Mazzini, G., 344

  Mélanie, Princess, _see_ Metternich, Princess

  Mendel, Henrietta, 188, 276

  Mérode, Cléo de, 196, 286

  Metternich, Clemens, Prince, the author of the Holy Alliance, 4;
    instructs Francis Joseph in statecraft, 30;
    a greater man than any whom he served, 32;
    a policeman at heart, 34;
    the object of popular hostility, 41;
    his resignation, 42;
    Archduchess Sophie’s letter to him, 44;
    his reply—his flight to England, 45;
    had been concerned in advising Ferdinand’s abdication, 47

  Metternich, Princess Mélanie, 35, 36, 39-44, 50

  Metternich, Count Richard, a special constable in London, 43, 155;
    Austrian Ambassador in Paris, 155

  Mexico, 60, 161, 163-186

  Meyerling, 60, 93, 118, 161, 187, 194, 207, 208, 211-216, 218-231, 242, 245, 246, 266, 269

  Middleton, Capt. “Bay,” 91

  Miguel of Braganza, 203

  Milan, 36, 128, 146

  Minghetti, Marco, 152

  Miramar, 165, 166, 169-171, 179, 181

  Miramon, General, 182, 183

  Moltke, Baron von, 136, 140

  Montez, Lola, 25, 72

  Morny, Comte de, 165

  _My Own Story_, _see_ Louisa, Princess of Tuscany

  _My Past_, _see_ Larisch, Countess Marie


  Napoleon I., 2, 22, 24, 26, 27

  Napoleon III., 43, 65, 66, 123-125, 128-130, 149-151, 154, 165, 167, 169, 171, 175, 177-179

  Nash, Eveleigh, 247, 256, 257

  Nauheim, 266

  _Neue Freie Presse_, a bogus advertisement in its agony column, 108;
    on the character of the Archduke Leopold Ferdinand, 327, 328

  Nigra, Count, 156;
    his account of the death of the Crown Prince Rudolf, 220-222, 224, 227

  Norwegian Fiords, 119

  Novara, 51


  O’Donnell, 80

  Olmütz, 44, 47, 153

  Orleans, Duc d’, 286

  Orleans, Duchess d’, _see_ Maria Dorothea, Archduchess

  Orth, John, _see_ John Salvator, Archduke

  Ott, Baron, 256

  Otten, Frederick, 256

  Otto, Archduke, 27, 280-282, 285, 288, 301

  Otto, King of Bavaria, 25, 72


  Paar, Count, 269

  Palacio, Riva, 182

  Palacky, F., his protest for the Slavs against their position as inferior to the Hungarians, 145

  Palmerston, Lord, 54

  Paoli, Xavier, 263-265, 267

  Paris, 119, 153, 161, 191, 264

  Parma, 327

  Pedro, Dom, 319

  Pedro of Saxe-Coburg, 189

  Philip II. of Spain, 24

  Philip III. of Spain, 24

  Philip V. of Spain, 24

  Philip of Saxe-Coburg, 197, 218

  Philippe le Beau, 23

  Pilsen, 153

  Pius IX., 108, 111, 151, 169, 171, 172, 180

  Pius X., 260

  Plombières, 123

  Podanitzky, Baron, 55

  Port Said, 236

  Possenhofen, 103

  Prégny, 267

  Presburg, 303

  _Private Life of Two Emperors, The, William II. of Germany and Francis Joseph of Austria_, vi, 245

  Prussia, 4, 130-137, 148-157

  Puebla, 177, 179


  Queretaro, 60, 161, 163, 182, 183, 266


  Radetzky, Marshal, 36-38, 45, 46, 80, 122, 136

  Rainer, Archduke, 275, 276, 283

  Regules, 182

  Reichstadt, Duc de, 22

  Revolution of 1848, the;
    In Italy, 36-38, 45, 46, 51
    In Austria, 39-42, 45, 46, 50-53
    In Hungary, 40, 45, 46, 51, 54
    In Germany, 40, 41
    In Bohemia, 46, 51

  Rio Quarto, 255

  Ritter, Fräulein, 330

  Robert, Duke of Parma, 317

  Roll, Fräulein, 116

  Rome, 60, 108, 151, 171, 180, 181, 306

  Rothschild, Baroness Adolphe, 267

  Rothschild, Nathan Meyer, 61

  Rubbrecht, Dr. Oswald, _L’Origine du Type familial de la Maison de Habsburg_, 10-12

  Rudolf, Archduke, 279

  Rudolf, Crown Prince, reproaches Countess Marie Larisch for acting as go-between for the Empress, 90;
    errors about, in _The Martyrdom of an Empress_, 101-103;
    directed to write to General Benedek, 140;
    his the only life between Maximilian and the throne of Austria, 168;
    the fatality of the name Rudolf—his literary and artistic tastes, 193;
    his quarrel with the German Emperor—conspiring for the throne of Hungary, 194, 206, 210;
    capable of both affability and hauteur, 194, 195;
    popular with the people, a spoiled child and precociously cynical, 195;
    whilst seeking a wife had a lady as provisional companion travelling with him—rejects the suit of Princess Mathilde of Saxony and asks the hand of Princess Stéphanie of Belgium, 196;
    neglects her for Mary Vetsera, 200, 201;
    whom he says he could not shake off, 203;
    asks Countess Marie Larisch to bring Mary to him at the Hofburg, says he is in political danger, hands the Countess a steel casket, 204;
    the person to whom it is to be delivered, 205;
    his hunting box at Meyerling, 208;
    the Princess taken there, 208, 209;
    the Princess follows him when he goes to visit Mary Vetsera and changes his carriage for hers, 209;
    his death, 60, 161, 212—and the various official accounts, 212-214;
    his last letter, 216;
    various accounts of the tragedy, 218-231;
    his association with Archduke John Salvator, 234, 235;
    was the latter concerned in his death? 246

  Rumbold, Sir Horace, _The Austrian Court of the Nineteenth Century_, v, 299

  Ruskberg, 56

  Russia, 156

  Russo-Turkish War, 158


  Saarbrücken, 154

  Sadowa, Battle of, 134, 137, 144, 146, 151, 160, 174, 176, 179

  Saint-Nazaire, 178

  Salzburg, 254, 274, 321

  San Remo, 266

  Santa Lucia, Battle of, 37

  Sardinia, 124, 129

  Schleswig-Holstein, 125, 133

  Schlictling, General, von, 136

  Schönnbrunn, 29, 109, 192, 266, 341

  Schratt, Frau Katti, 104-113, 162, 271, 289, 350

  Schwartzenberg, Felix, 45, 47, 48, 52, 58

  Seefried zu Buttenheim, Baron Otto von, 292, 293

  Servia, and Austria’s Servian subjects, 159, 342-345

  _Siècle, Le_, on Frau Schratt’s mission to Rome, 108

  Slav problem not solved by the granting of the Hungarian Constitution, 145, 158

  Smith, Penny, 237

  Sobieski, John, King of Poland, 70

  Sodich, Captain, 253

  Solferino, Battle of, 66, 124

  Sophia, Archduchess, mother of Francis Joseph, 22, 29;
    her letter to Metternich on his resignation, 44;
    her concern in securing the throne for her son on his uncle’s abdication, 22, 47, 48;
    the names of murdered Hungarians shouted at her in the streets, 59;
    her strange declaration during her confinement with Francis Joseph, 64;
    arranges for her son’s marriage, 71-73;
    her disappointment, 76;
    her jealousy of the Empress, 86;
    she is charged with throwing a mistress at the head of her son, and a lover to the Empress, 89;
    had the care of Archduchess Gisela when a child, 101;
    objects to the Empress’s training of the Crown Prince, 116;
    sides with Maximilian over the _pacte de famile_, 168, 169;
    her warning to Maximilian, 177

  Starnberg, Lake of, 162, 190

  Starztay, Countess, 261, 269

  Steed, H. W., _The Habsburg Monarchy_, v.

  Stéphanie, Princess of Belgium, wife of the Crown Prince Rudolf, 196-200, 203, 208-210;
    her marriage to Count Lonyay, 293-297

  Stockau, Count George, 201, 214, 215

  Stübel, Fräulein Milly, 107, 240-243, 247, 253


  Taaffe, Count von, 43

  Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, _The Lord of Burleigh_, 88

  Thurn and Taxis, Prince of, 75
    Princess of, _see_ Helen, Princess of Bavaria

  Tichborne, Sir Roger, 257

  _Times, The_, confirms the reports of Austrian cruelty in Hungary, 55;
    prints Rothschild’s letter on the Haynau affair at Barclay’s, 61;
    and rebukes the draymen, 62

  Tisza, M., 230

  Toselli, Signor, 27, 232, 239, 241, 315, 331, 336-340

  Trani, Ludwig Count de, 162, 192

  Trani, Matilda, Countess de, 108, 162

  Trentino, The, 150, 151, 344

  Trieste, 101, 116, 180, 236, 255

  Triple Alliance, The, 149-151, 155, 156

  Turkey, Sultan of, 57

  Turr, General, 150

  Tyrol, 51


  United States, President of, _see_ Johnson, Andrew


  Valérie, Archduchess, daughter of Francis Joseph, 101, 102, 107

  Valois, Charles de, 20

  Valparaiso, 253, 255

  Vaughan, Baroness, 196

  Venetia, 125, 130, 133, 134, 151, 165

  Venice, 127, 146, 165

  Ventnor, 119

  Vetsera, Baroness, 201-203, 211, 229

  Vetsera, Ferenz, 220

  Vetsera, Laszlo, 220

  Vetsera, Louis, 220

  Vetsera, Mary, did not meet the Crown Prince in London as the author of _The Martyrdom of an Empress_, says, 102, 103;
    died with him at Meyerling, 200;
    belonged to a family well known in Vienna, 201;
    her character, had started her acquaintance with Rudolf by writing asking him to see her, insulted the Crown Princess, 203;
    Rudolf asked the Countess Marie Larisch to bring her to him at the Hofburg, 205;
    which she did, 206;
    she was taken by Rudolf to Meyerling, 207;
    a former occasion on which the Prince had visited her, 209;
    her belief that Rudolf would become King of Hungary and marry her, her parents seeking for her, 211;
    her death with Rudolf, 213;
    theories about the tragedy, 213-215;
    her last letters, 216;
    her reputed part in the tragedy, 222-227

  Victor Emmanuel, King of Italy, 51, 122, 123, 128, 131, 149-152

  Vienna, 41, 43, 45, 46, 51, 52, 108, 136, 169, 183, 184, 192, 198, 208, 212, 219, 229, 234, 251, 253, 254, 266, 274, 276, 288

  Vienna, Congress of (1814-15), 1, 4

  Visconti-Venosta, Marquis, 152


  Waldeck, Countess of, 238

  Walburg, Baron Ernest, 287

  Waterloo, Battle of, 1

  Weindel, H. de, _François Joseph Intime_, v, 117

  Wellington, Duke of, 63

  Wiederhofer, Dr., 214, 223

  _Wiener Zeitung_ on General Benedek, 138;
    on the degradation of Princess Louisa of Tuscany, 323, 324

  William I., King of Prussia, 133, 152, 194

  William, Archduke, 279

  William Francis Charles, Archduke, 161

  Windischgraetz, Alfred von, 46-48, 52, 53, 88, 298

  Windischgraetz, Prince Ernest von, 299

  Windischgraetz, Prince Otto von, 293, 297-299

  Wittelsbach, House of, family to which the Archduchess Sophia and the Empress Elizabeth belonged, insanity in both branches of it, 72;
    which are madder, they or the Habsburgs? 187;
    the difference in description, 188;
    Ludwig II., 188-191;
    Duchesse d’Alençon, 191;
    Comte de Trani, Archduke Ladislas, Archduchess Elizabeth, 192

  Wörth, 152

  Wulfling, Herr, _see_ Leopold Ferdinand Archduke


  Zurich, 162



BIOGRAPHICAL WORKS BY FRANCIS GRIBBLE.

  MADAME DE STAEL AND HER LOVERS.
  [8]GEORGE SAND AND HER LOVERS.
  ROUSSEAU AND THE WOMEN HE LOVED.
  CHATEAUBRIAND AND HIS COURT OF WOMEN.
  THE PASSIONS OF THE FRENCH ROMANTICS.
  THE LOVE AFFAIRS OF LORD BYRON.
  RACHEL: HER STAGE LIFE AND HER REAL LIFE.
  THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY.
  THE COMEDY OF CATHERINE THE GREAT.
  ROMANCES OF THE FRENCH THEATRE.
  THE TRAGEDY OF ISABELLA II.
  THE COURT OF CHRISTINA OF SWEDEN AND THE LATER ADVENTURES OF THE QUEEN IN EXILE.

[Footnote 8: Popular Edition at 2_s._ net.]


Transcriber’s Notes

Page ix—changed depreciaton to depreciation
Page 108—changed Siècle to Le Siècle
Page 149—changed Luxemburg to Luxembourg
Page 215—changed herself to himself
Page 265—changed yould to would






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