Both these elevated ladies, it will be recalled, wrote or talked in self-justification and with the usual stupidity of the guilty. We may dismiss their yarns as mere women’s gabble and return to the solid fact that Johann Salvator, impetuous, a little mad and smarting under his military humiliations, tried to mix into Balkan politics with the result that he found himself in the position of a bungling interloper, almost a betrayer of his country’s interests.
Less than two years ago some further light was thrown upon the affair of the missing archduke through what have passed as letters taken from the Austrian archives after the fall of the Hapsburgs. These letters were published in various European and American newspapers and journals and they may be, as asserted, the veritable official documents. The portions I quote are taken from the Sunday Magazine of the New York World of January 10 and January 17, 1926. I must remark that I regard them with suspicion.
The first letter purports to be a report on the violent misconduct of Johann Salvator at Venice, as follows:
“Consul General Alexander, Baron Warsberg, to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Count Kalnoky:
“I regarded it to be my duty to obtain information about the relations and meetings of Archduke Johann, and am sorry to have to report to Your Excellency that, in a rather unworthy manner, he had intercourse on board and in public with a lady lodged on board of the yacht, which intercourse has not remained unobserved and which he could not be induced to veil in spite of the remonstrances of (the President of the Chamber) Baron de Fin—Baron de Fin was so offended that, after much quarrel and trouble which made him ill, he left the ship and lodged in a little inn. He, on his part, reported to His Majesty the Emperor, and the Archduke is said to have, after five months of silence, written for the first time to His Majesty in order to complain of his Chamberlain. This unpleasant situation, still more troublesome abroad than it would have been at home, has been solved last Sunday, the 20th inst, by the sudden advent of Field Marshal Lieut. Count Uxküll, who brought the Imperial Order that His Imperial Highness immediately return to Orth at the Sea of Gmünden—to which he immediately submitted.
“Baron de Fin, who is still living here and is on friendly terms with me, can give to the Archduke no certificate that would be bad enough. According to his experience and observation, His Highness does not know any other interests in the world than those of his person, and even this only in the common sense; that he, for instance, wished to ascend the throne of Bulgaria, not out of enthusiasm for the people or for the political idea but only in order to lose the throne after a short time and in this way to be freed from the influence of His Majesty, the Emperor. Baron de Fin pretends that there would be no other means to cure that completely undisciplined and immoral character but by dismissing him formally from the imperial family and by allowing him, as it is his desire, to enjoy under an adopted name, that liberty that he pretends to deem as the highest good. He believes him (the Archduke) to have such a 'dose’ of pride that he would return with a penitent heart, if he then would be treated according to his new rank. I also have observed this haughtiness of the Prince despite his talks of liberalism.”
Then follows what may well have been the recreant archduke’s letter of abdication, thus:
“Your Majesty:
“My behavior for nearly two years will have convinced Your Majesty that, abstaining from all interests that did not concern me, I have lived in retirement in the endeavor to remove Your Majesty’s displeasure with me.
“Being too young to rest forever and too proud to live as a paid idler, my situation has become painful, even intolerable, to me. Checked by a justified pride from asking for re-employment in the army, I had the alternative either to continue the unworthy existence of a princely idler or—as an ordinary human being, to seek a new existence, a new profession. I was finally urged to a decision in the latter sense, as my whole nature refused to fit into the frame of my position and my personal independence must be compensation for what I have lost.