What wonder if Signor Toselli, being only twenty-four, was persuaded by such exclamations that all the fairy-tales were coming true? And that though he was warned.
“Do you really know the Crown Princess of Saxony, sir?” said Countess Fugger to him. “Do you realise her character and the life she has led? Rather than commit such folly I would advise you to go into the garden, this very instant, and put a bullet through your brain.”
But the warning fell upon deaf ears; and it is impossible to feel surprise at its having done so—not only because a child was about to be born, but also for a good many other reasons. Rank does not cease to dazzle because the high-born condescend, but often dazzles all the more effectively, by causing the lowly-born to feel at ease in their preferment, as well as proud of it. The chances of really romantic adventure, too, are rare in modern life; and a young musician is even less likely than most other young men to turn his back on them in a calculating spirit of sober self-restraint. The blaze of publicity is not a thing from which the conditions of his calling have taught him to shrink.
Signor Toselli did not shrink from it, and doubtless he enjoyed his hour of rapture. He and his bride changed their names with the rapidity of genius. At the office of the London Registrar, they were, of course, Signor Toselli and Princess Louisa of Tuscany; but at the Hotel Cecil they were Signor and Signora San Marcellino, and at the Norfolk Hotel they were M. and Mme. Dubois. When they started for their honeymoon, their railway carriage was besieged by reporters; and they may well have believed that the acclamations of the world’s Press saluted their definite entrance into the joys of an earthly Paradise.
But, if that was their belief, then they were mistaken in it. In Princess Louisa’s case, as we have said, the hour of revolt had struck too late. Her spiritual revolution was, in some respects, rather like the great French Revolution, which continued to proceed from excess to excess, and from extravagance to extravagance, long after its ostensible purpose had been achieved. She might be able to “do sculpture”; but there were certain other things, more important than sculpture, which she found it impossible to do. Above all, she could not settle down and keep her allegiance fixed. She had no sooner settled down in one place than she wanted to move on and settle down somewhere else. Like Little Joe, she was “allus a-moving on”; and the meaningless migrations were a weariness of the flesh to her husband, and a hindrance to his professional prospects. “You are killing the artist in me,” he said to the woman who had once assured him that artists were, of all men, the noblest and the worthiest to be loved.
Photo Dover Street Studios
PRINCESS LOUISA OF TUSCANY
(Ex-Crown Princess of Saxony).
After that there was estrangement, culminating in separation, but mitigated by collaboration in a comic opera—the plot of it based upon Princess Louisa’s recollection of certain incidents in her career as Crown Princess of Saxony. The proof is clear that, in her case—if not also in his—the passion for publicity has survived the passion for romance; but the end is not yet, and is not likely to prove of a significance which would warrant the suspension of the publication of this work until it occurs. Princess Louisa’s story has been an excursus, albeit a necessary one, seeing that it illustrates, even to the point of absurdity, the Habsburg habit of doing melodramatic things melodramatically, as if they felt conscious that, whether they sat on thrones or slid off them, they owed at once an entertainment and an object lesson to the admiring curiosity of the world.