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.”
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.