And she did. Back came a voice of jubilation:
“Glorious! my best friend, my poet and thinker Kurt, is a young woman, and Doris—I must tell it now—is an officer in his Royal and Imperial Majesty’s navy.”
The end of the story was that soon afterward Elvira married Doris, alias Joseph Tiefenbacher, ensign on a ship of the line in the Austrian navy, and was perfectly happy in her short married life.
PART TWO
1862–1872
V
ENTERING THE WORLD
Engaged · The engagement ended · Baden · Marietta · Season in Rome · Carnival at Venice
And now I was to be taken “into the world.” Our name might have given us the right to move among the highest aristocracy, for there is doubtless not a family of the high nobility of Austria with which we were not connected by blood or by marriage. But one is ill acquainted with this high nobility if one thinks that name and kinship suffice to get one received. For this there is required (it was especially so in my youth; now they have come to be somewhat less exclusive) first and foremost the possession of sixteen great-great-grandparents; in other words, the right of admission to court. This we had not—my mother was not Geborene; besides, our means were also very modest; so it was not possible for us to attain to the first society—the société, as it styled itself—of Vienna. That stung me; oh, what a vain, superficial thing I was! To think it was essential to the happiness of life to move among the crème, and to think I was suffering an unmerited wrong by the withholding of this happiness!
Now it came to pass that one of the richest men in Vienna sued for my hand through the mediation of the author Joseph von Weilen, who used to call at our house. Mother and guardian declared themselves favorable. To be sure the suitor was not an aristocrat, and already fifty-two years old. But he was willing to surround my existence and my mother’s with the utmost splendor, villas, castles, palaces,—I was dazzled and said “yes.”
I do not attempt to put a good face on this fact. It is an ugly fact when an eighteen-year-old girl is willing to give her hand to an unloved man so much older than herself, just because he is a millionaire! to call it by its right name, it is selling herself. If I were writing a novel I should certainly not tell such a story of its heroine, if she was intended to be attractive; but what I am setting down here is the experiences of a real person, for whose actions I am not by a long way so responsible as I should be for those of a figure drawn from fancy. For the latter would be fashioned according to my own present views and feelings, while this eighteen-year-old Bertha Kinsky—though it is I myself—is nothing more than a vague picture in memory. What the original of the picture experienced is retained in bare outlines in my recollection; it has also contributed to the shaping of my present character; but what sort of character that original itself had at that time appears to me as a thing in which I have as little part as in the caprices of Cleopatra or Semiramis.
A few pictures from this engagement episode:
The presentation: Herr von Weilen brings the suitor for a morning call. Stiff conversation in the drawing-room. Each studies the other. Pleased? No, the elderly gentleman scarcely pleases me—but does not displease me. Invitation to dinner the next day; Fürstenberg also there. Still stiff. On the fourth or fifth day a letter to my mother asking for my hand. I hesitate. That same evening we were to go to a ball—my coming out. An aristocratic picnic: the crème used to appear at this ball, but not exclusively—elements of less consequence are also present. I can still see my toilet, a white dress sprinkled all over with little rosebuds. Full of joyous anticipation I entered the hall. Full of piqued disappointment I left it. I had found but few partners; I should have been left to sit out the cotillion had not a homely infantry officer, who had had his matrimonial proposals rejected in numerous quarters, taken pity on me. The aristocratic mothers sat together, my mother sat alone; the countesses stood in groups and chattered, I knew none of them; at the supper merry little coteries were formed, I was left out. On the way home I said to my mother, “Mamma, I have made up my mind now, I will accept the proposal.”