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.
[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.