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.