I must delay a moment over the portrait of my guardian. It cast a friendly radiance over all my childhood and early youth. Friedrich, Landgrave of Fürstenberg, had been the comrade and friend of my deceased father, and he faithfully fulfilled till his death the duties which he had undertaken as guardian and protector and watchful friend to the fatherless child. I simply worshiped him; I regarded him as a being of a higher race, to whom I owed and gladly rendered unconditional obedience, honor, and love. He was an elderly gentleman, past fifty, when I came into the world; and, such being the way of children in judging age, he seemed to me ever so old, but ever so dear. So smiling, so jolly, so lordly, so indescribably kind. That confectionery that he used to bring with him! those rich Christmas presents that he gave me! that care for my education, my health, my future!
Lordly—he was a lord in fact. A member of the proudest Austrian nobility, Master of the Ordnance, ultimately captain of the Arcièrengarde, one of the highest positions at the court. He was never absent at any of the great court functions, and brought me such lovely bonbons from every imperial dinner. His lofty station inspired me with pride rather than awe. For me he was “Fritzerl,” to whom I said du; on whose knee I used to climb, as long as I was little, and pull his mustache.
He died unmarried. His life was so methodically ordered, it ran its course so free from cares and passions, between service and sociality, that the wish to change it never arose in him. In Vienna he occupied handsome bachelor quarters in the Inner City; in Moravia he had a domain where he often spent a few weeks of the summer to see what his factors were doing; but he preferred, instead of living in his own lonely castle, to spend the summer months as a guest at the homes of his old mother and his various sisters. He never took journeys. At the Austrian boundarymonuments the world came to an end for him. Devotion, both churchly and military, had an essential place, I will not say among the virtues of his character, but among the virtues of his station in life. He was never absent at any Sunday mass, any feast of the church, or any parade. He had an enthusiasm for Field Marshal Radetzky, whom he had known well personally. The glory of the Austrian army was in his eyes one of the most admirable constituents of the universe. Society (by this name he distinguished the circle in which he was born and in which he moved) was to him the only class of human beings whose lives and fates interested him; and he always attended all the great functions given at the houses of the Schwarzenbergs, the Pallavacinis, etc. In the Adelskasino he had his regular rubbers of whist with sundry friends of his own rank. He was fond of card-playing in general—not gambling games, for he was in the highest degree steady, but innocent games such as piquet, omber, tarteln. This last he used to play with my mother at his twice-a-week morning visit to our house, and I was allowed to sit by to mark the points of the game with my little pencil. The various marriages in society interested him greatly; he had a troop of nephews and nieces who made more or less successful matches. He himself, though the male line was to become extinct with him, did not think of marrying. The reason was that he cherished an affection for a lady who, while she was the widow of an aristocrat, was not by birth capable of being presented at court, so a marriage with her appeared to be simply out of the question. He would not cause such a vexation to his family—and at bottom it would have been a vexation to him too; for everything that was out of the rut, outside of tradition, outside of “correctness,” went against his grain.
This figure stands before my memory as a type of the old-fashioned Austrian: a type of which there are doubtless some specimens still, but which, as is the fate of all types, is dying out. Our country is now made up of Slavs, Germans, Croats, Italians, (it would not do at all to say Magyars, they would grievously resent it,) and a few more nationalities, but the collective name “Austrian” cannot again become a proudly patriotic conception until—if ever—all the different races, with individual autonomy, form a federative state as do the Germans, French, and Italians in Switzerland. A friend of mine—a middle-class man, but one who is made very welcome at court—was lately telling me of an interview that he had with the Emperor not long ago. In the course of a political conversation the Emperor asked him to what party he belonged: “To the one which has only a single adherent, that is myself.” “And what party is that?” “The Austrian, your Majesty.” “Well, how about me? don’t you count me?” rejoined Franz Joseph, smiling.
—To come back to the past and my dear Fritzerl. It is a good thing that he did not live to see the events of 1866. The defeats in Bohemia, the severance of Venetia,—it would have cut him to the heart. And he would have found it simply incomprehensible, as it were a calamity violating all the laws of nature, and especially all divine ordinance. In that conception of the world which characterizes the type that I refer to, an essential point is the belief that Austria is the center of the world, and that any disaster which befalls it—especially any disaster in war—means an unnatural neglect of duty on the part of Providence. Unless such defeats be meant as punishment, as merited chastisement for the spread of unbelief, the dissolution of morals,[[1]] the dissemination of revolutionary ideas. Then, surely, there is no help but by introducing strict discipline, reorganizing the army vigorously; then perhaps the Creator can be reconciled and the history of the world corrected by future reconquests. Fritzerl was spared these pains and these reflections.
If I said just now that there were still living some specimens of that type, I was probably mistaken. It is simply impossible that to-day the world is still mirrored in any head as it was mirrored in the heads of those who were born within the eighteenth century, who lived during the first introduction of the railway, who held the first photograph in their hands, who saw with some repugnance the displacement of oil lamps by petroleum. Essential to that old Austrian type (and it is the same with the old English and other old national types) is a certain limitation of experience and knowledge which to-day can no longer exist even in the most conservative circles.
That types alter from generation to generation, that outlooks, views, feelings change, is a fact of which one can best judge by one’s self when one looks back into the past. For every man, though in most cases he hugs the delusion of being a uniform continuous ego with definite qualities of character, is himself a chain of the most diverse types. Every new experience—leaving quite out of account the bodily changes of blooming and fading, of health and disease—modifies the mental essence. How much one sees, whether with the bodily eye as a landscape or with the mental as an outlook on the world, is not a matter of stronger or weaker eyesight, but peculiarly a matter of horizon.
If I look back into my childhood and youth, I do not see myself as the same person, as having altered, but see standing side by side the most diverse girl forms, each with a different horizon of ideas and filled with different hopes, interests, and sensations. And if I set beside them the forms from my maturer womanhood, or my present age, what have I (beyond the mere recollection, as faint as the recollection of pictures long since seen, or books long since read) in common with those phantoms, or they with me? Dissolving mists, flying shadows, a passing breath, is what life is.
My first love was no meaner a person than Franz Joseph I, Emperor of Austria. To be sure I had never seen him,—only his picture,—but I idolized him ardently. That he would marry me did not seem to me at all beyond the bounds of possibility; on the contrary, fate owed me something of the sort. Of course I should have to wait five or six years yet, for I recognized that a ten-year-old child could not be made empress. I should have to have bloomed out into a maiden of fifteen or sixteen, the most beautiful maiden in the land; the young sovereign would sometime espy me, enter into a conversation with me, be ravished with my qualities of mind, and immediately lay his august person at my feet. That was the time when I was convinced that the world had a fairy-tale fortune ready for me. I exerted myself sincerely to deserve it and to be ready to show brilliantly, when it came, that I had found my right place; learning, learning, practicing, practicing, amazing myself with my progress and knowledge. I was a real infant prodigy—in my own eyes. It is true that I spoke French and English well (from my earliest childhood I had had French and English bonnes), I played the piano remarkably well, I had read an enormous deal: the Abbé Fleury’s Histoire de France, Le Siège de la Rochelle; Victor Hugo’s Ruy Blas and Marie Tudor; half of Schiller, Fladung’s Physics; “Jane Eyre,” “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,”—those were the books (not children’s books, it will be seen) in which I reveled at that age. Besides, I loved to dip into the cyclopedia and pluck blossoms of all branches of knowledge. From love of learning? I will not assert it; I think those lovely blossoms seemed to me desirable only to make a wreath of for my adornment.
As an evil chance would have it, so soon as the year 1854—consequently I was only eleven years old—Emperor Franz Joseph espied his cousin Elisabeth, engaged in conversation with her, and laid his august person at her feet. I was not exactly unhappy (there are plenty more fairy princes), but thenceforth I took a lively interest in Elisabeth of Bavaria, sought for portraits of her, thought she bore some resemblance to me, and imitated her way of doing her hair. You see, my actual vehement passion for my young liege had died out some time since. Chiodo caccia chiodo; the Italians use this proverb to illustrate the fact that one love expels another.