[7] Apparently healthy, though there is, unhappily, a strain of insanity in the Chotek family also. Nothing was known or suspected of it at the time of the marriage; but the Duchess of Hohenberg’s father had to be placed under restraint before his death. One may hope that the weakness was developed too late in life to be transmitted.
The superstition of caste would, indeed, be strong in Francis Ferdinand if he regarded that as a right and proper state of things; and the mere fact that he married as he did, in the face of the opposition which he encountered, shows clearly that, whatever superstitions may still retain a hold on him, that particular superstition has relaxed its grip. Is he likely—human nature being what we know it to be—to accept an affront inflicted in the name of a superstition which he has abandoned? Can we expect his wife and his children to press him to do so?
Obviously we cannot. The thing might have happened in bygone ages—or even in comparatively recent ages—when universal opinion drew a religious as well as a social distinction between hereditary sovereigns and their subjects, and the personal dignity of the individual counted for nothing in comparison with that great impersonal principle. It cannot happen now that all impersonal principles are in the melting-pot and so many postulates which men used to grant as they now grant the law of gravitation are being brought to the bar of opinion to be cross-examined. The postulate which bids the progeny of an Emperor who married for love take a lower seat than the son and grandsons of the family scapegrace will assuredly be questioned by the next Emperor of Austria; and it will be found that it has nothing to say for itself. It may die fighting; but it will die; and the whole of the Habsburg superstition will die with it. What will happen then lies in the lap of the Gods.
It is, however, precisely because of its gradual approach to such problems as these that one finds the reign of Francis Joseph such an intensely interesting period of history. It is interesting from the personal point of view as the story of Nemesis overtaking the oppressor; the story which we have presented symbolically as the story of the fulfilment of Countess Karolyi’s curse. Philosophically it is interesting as the age of transition from mediæval to modern ideas: the age in which both nationalities and individuals have stormily asserted their right to live their own lives in their own way. In both these matters we see, in Austria more clearly than anywhere else, the hungry generations treading down the past.
It is seldom that so complete an evolution of outlook is co-extensive with the life of a single sovereign; perhaps, indeed, Francis Joseph’s reign has been unique in that respect. In any case, he has witnessed all these changes, and lived through all these intellectual and emotional experiences. His rôle, while doing so, has been to keep up appearances; but, if we could penetrate to the realities behind the appearances, we should assuredly find that he had not himself been unaffected by the transformations going on around him. That is the true moral of the story of his affection for Frau Schratt, and of the rumour of his desire to give that lady his left hand in marriage. He felt what the other Habsburgs felt, though he controlled his feelings better. Seeing what the other Habsburgs were doing, he had the impulse to be “in the movement,” though he resisted it. He, like the rest, has sometimes had the intuition that happiness lay in living one’s own life rather than the corporate life of one’s country; and there are moments when his biographer feels that, in spite of all the pomp and glory which have attended his public career, the day of days for him must have been the day on which he met Frau Schratt, who, after twenty-eight years of mutual devotion, now totters down the hill with him at the journey’s end.
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FRAU SCHRATT.
Daily, for a little while, when health permits, he sits with her and wonders.... We will leave him wondering.