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.