* * * * * * * *
The withdrawal of the French troops from Rome in 1870 to take part in the war against Germany, put an end to the temporal power of the Popes. Pius the Ninth was forced to relinquish the Quirinal to the same bold conqueror who had deprived Francis and Maria Sophia of their kingdom, and thereafter they had no permanent residence in Rome. As long as the Duke and Duchess Max lived, they spent the summers in Bavaria, travelling about from place to place during the Winter. The greater part of Francis the Second’s property, some twenty million lire, had been confiscated by the new Italian Government, which offered to refund it on condition of his formally renouncing all rights to the crown he had already lost; but this he refused to do. “A man does not sell his honor,” was his unfailing reply. Eventually he was paid back his mother’s dowry; but the immense sum that King Ferdinand had settled on his eldest son at the time of his marriage to Maria Sophia was appropriated by Victor Emanuel, as were the contents of the royal palace. Many of the paintings and works of art are still shown at “Capo di Monte” in Naples, to the indignation of many of the sovereigns of Europe.
Although the climate of Rome had never agreed with Maria Sophia, both she and her husband often declared that they had never really known the terrors of exile till they were forced to leave Italy. Francis never quite gave up hope that some turn of events would pave the way for his return to his own and his father’s throne; but the heroine of Gaeta never looked backward. The pomp and show of royalty had never appealed to her, and she indulged in no vain regrets.
The lives of the Wittelsbach sisters had proved a source of grief and anxiety to their parents. Hélène, left a widow in 1867, after ten years of unhappy married life, had managed the vast estates of the Thurn and Taxis family with great ability during the minority of her eldest son, Maximilian. This prince, a most promising youth, died in 1885, at the early age of twenty-three, and the blow almost cost his despairing mother her reason, while the following year, Count Ludwig of Trani drowned himself in one of the Swiss lakes.
The youngest daughter of the ducal pair, Sophie Charlotte, had been first betrothed to Ludwig the Second of Bavaria; but the King jilted his cousin in the most heartless fashion, and she afterward married Ferdinand d’Alençon, an uncle of Louis Philippe of France. Banished from France with the rest of the house of Orleans, the Duke and Duchess spent their time travelling from place to place, and Sophie was sickly and discontented, a victim to fits of melancholia. By his death on the fourteenth of November, 1888, good Duke Max was spared the tragedy of Mayerling, where his favorite grandson and the hope of the Austrian Empire, Rudolf of Hapsburg, met with a violent and mysterious death three months later. On the twenty-fourth of January, 1890, the Duchess Ludovica was seized with an attack of influenza at her palace in Munich, which developed into pneumonia. The physicians at once pronounced her condition serious on account of her advanced age, and the absent daughters were telegraphed for. Sophie was already in Munich, as were the three sons. The next afternoon the Duchess grew so much worse that the sacrament was administered; but in spite of the evident approach of death the indomitable old lady refused to go to bed. She insisted upon remaining in the reclining chair which she had occupied from the beginning of her illness, and where she soon sank into unconsciousness, passing away quietly at four o’clock in the morning, surrounded by children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, at the age of eighty-three. The death of the Duchess Ludovica was an irreparable loss to her family. They had leaned on her in joy as in sorrow, and as long as she lived she had held them together, widely scattered as they were, with a firm and loving hand. Her children’s troubles and pleasures had been her own, and their devotion, her joy and reward.
Chapter XV
Conclusion
After the funeral of the Duchess Ludovica, Maria Sophia returned to Paris, where the ex-King of Naples had bought a residence some years before, and where they were living very quietly, seeing no one but old friends or relatives. Her grief at her mother’s loss was deep and sincere, and for a time she was inconsolable. For her it meant the severing of all the old ties and associations; and henceforth she rarely visited the home of her childhood.
A few months later Hélène of Thurn and Taxis died after a long and painful illness, at the age of fifty-eight. The Empress Elizabeth had hastened to her and was with her when she died, but none of the three younger sisters were able to be present.
In the Autumn of 1894 the ex-King of Naples went to the baths at Arco in the Tyrol for his health, while his wife remained in Paris. Francis had suffered for several years with an incurable complaint, and it was reported that his illness had recently taken a serious turn; but this had been denied. Death came sooner than any one expected, however, to the unfortunate monarch, for he expired on the twenty-seventh of December—alone, as he had lived. Maria Sophia started at once for Arco on the news of his illness, but arrived too late to find him alive.
Not a flag was lowered in the kingdom of his fathers to mark the death of Francis the Second of Naples, nor was his body even allowed to rest in the land he had loved. In all his vicissitudes, the long years of exile, and the hours of loneliness and pain, Italy had been ever in his heart. Through all his wanderings he had been haunted by memories of the blue skies and sunny gardens of his childhood days. His love for his native land extended even beyond the grave, for in his will he bequeathed a million lire to charitable institutions in Naples and Palermo.