“I tried, however, to disguise my annoyance, and to put some warmth into my greeting, but she was quite impossible, and I subsequently discovered that she had not even been trained in the rudiments of the art of behaving at table.”
It was a bad beginning; and it was not made any better by the representations of the Vienna newspapers that “the flight of the Crown Princess was exclusively due to her brother Leopold’s influence.” Their cue seems to have been to depreciate Leopold; and this is the place in which to reproduce the character sketch of him printed in the Neue Freie Presse:—
“Archduke Leopold Ferdinand” (we there read) “is a very intelligent man, but somewhat eccentric, whimsical in a high degree, and difficult to manage. A prominent feature of his character is irony and sarcasm. He has in this way given much displeasure to officers of high rank, and this is the only reason why, in spite of his jovial and agreeable manner, he has made no friends in the army. While at Iglau he was constantly in conflict with the commander of the regiment. Thus, one day he went out riding disguised as a lady, in company with another officer, and was seen and recognised by his commanding officer, who, of course, took him to task. He hates etiquette, loves free and easy manners, and has always had little intercourse with the aristocracy, preferring lively young people of the middle class.”
The free-and-easiness of the Archduke’s manners had, indeed, manifested itself in the presence of Francis Joseph himself, on the day on which he was summoned to the Emperor’s presence to be told that his way of life was dissolute and indecorous. He did not, like John Orth, pelt the Emperor with the insignia of his Orders; but he found another means, not less effective, of carrying the war into the enemy’s camp, bowing politely and responding:
“I hear what you say, sir, but I fail to see why I should pay any attention to it. If there is a mote in my eye, there is a beam in yours. When you speak of such matters as these, I do not regard you as the Emperor of Austria—I merely regard you as Herr Schratt.”
And so saying, he ceremoniously bowed himself out before Francis Joseph could lay his finger on the electric button which would have summoned the secret police.
Thus, by that tu quoque, he justified his own preference for “lively young people of the middle-class”; but it nevertheless seems that, in Switzerland, the particular liveliness of Fräulein Adamovics, after jarring from the first upon his sister’s taste, came eventually to jar upon his own. It transpired in the course of time—in the course of a very short time, in fact—that the tastes, manners, and customs of Fräulein Adamovics deviated from the healthy norm no less than those of the more eccentric of the Habsburgs, albeit in a different direction. Her passion for the simple life and the return to nature lured her on to proceedings hardly compatible with sanity. The goal of self-realisation, it seemed to her, could only be attained if men and women divested themselves of their clothing, and climbed trees in order to crack nuts.
A strange doctrine truly, and one to be condemned by those pragmatists who bid us test every doctrine by the touchstone question: “Will it work?” It found its condemnation in this case, when “Herr Wulfling” began to translate theory into practice. After running wild in woods for a season, he was persuaded by the jeers of a passer-by to visit a barber’s shop; and the sudden sight which he got of himself in the barber’s mirror—the spectacle of a hirsute savage suggesting a Wild Man from Borneo—decided him to return to civilisation by the shortest cut available. He ran to the nearest slop-shop, put himself into a reach-me-down check-suit, engaged rooms in a pension, and shortly afterwards divorced the wife who had lured him into his amazing courses, and sought another wife of a more commonplace kind.
His second wife was a Swiss lady—Fräulein Ritter—and his union to her appears to have been more fortunate. He acquired the rights of citizenship in the Canton of Zug; and he presently obtained damages in a Swiss Court of Law against a journalist, who circulated the report that he had always lived, and was still living, a disorderly life, and had refused to pay his rates. The dispute about the rates was only a dispute about an assessment; and the tribunal endorsed counsel’s favourable estimate of Herr Wulfling’s personal worth. It is interesting to compare that estimate with the depreciatory paragraph quoted from the Neue Freie Presse; and we may borrow the report of the Indépendance Belge:—
“In Austria” (we there read) “M. Leopold Wulfling was indifferent to the attractions of fashionable life, but enjoyed himself in middle-class society. He was understood to be one of the most cultivated members of the archducal house. He speaks and writes ten or a dozen languages correctly, and has a knowledge of mathematics and astronomy which would qualify him to occupy a professorial chair in any University in the world. He is also an experienced navigator of the seas. At Salzburg, where he lived for a long time, he became very popular. His superiors considered him too considerate to the soldiers serving under his orders. His relations with his father continued to be extremely cordial even after he had retired from the army. It is absolutely untrue to say that he has been compelled to abandon the profession of arms; but the resignation of his titles involved the resignation of his commission. Note that of all his Orders he has kept only the modest Cross of Merit bestowed upon the young Archduke by the Emperor himself for saving two men from drowning.”