The failure of a marriage—of a royal marriage as of any other—is necessarily wrapped in mystery. The full facts are never made known; and one always feels that the facts kept secret were probably more important than the facts disclosed. Moreover, personality—that mysterious thing which none of us ever reveals completely to any one observer—inevitably counts for more than the tangible events on which we can lay our fingers. So with this marriage of Francis Joseph’s. The outcome of it—what the world has been allowed to see of its outcome—can only be understood, in so far as it is intelligible at all, if we examine it in the light of a personality which perplexed Europe for a generation, perplexing it more and more as years went on.
Not two personalities, be it observed, but one. There are some personalities which fail to create an atmosphere of mystery even behind an impenetrable screen; and Francis Joseph’s personality is of that type. One always feels that, beyond what one knows of him, there is very little to be known. It is characteristic of all the Habsburgs that they cannot cross the road without striking an attitude which shows us exactly where they stand and what they think of things; and it is easy enough to accept the present Emperor as typical of the Habsburgs at their best. He comes before us, frank and brave, adaptable and affable, but, at the same time, proud as Lucifer; infinitely gracious to those who do not presume—readily regarded by such as a gallant soldier who has grown into a genial old gentleman, anxious to make things pleasant for everybody—yet seeming, at some crises of his fate, to mistake himself for God, and the Archdukes for the archangels; not because they behave as such, but because they are Habsburgs and ought to.
That is a perfectly simple type; one does not complicate it when one adds that Francis Joseph has always been a punctual observer of Roman Catholic ritual, and, taking the métier of Emperor seriously, has risen early throughout a long life in order to work at it with all the diligence of a devoted civil servant. All that—down to and including the occasional ceremonial washing of the feet of the poor, in imitation of his Master Christ—has been the straightforward fulfilment of an intelligible programme. If Francis Joseph had washed the feet of the poor because he had felt that they needed washing, and would not otherwise get washed, the case would have been different, and one would have suspected subtlety in his character. But he has only washed them gingerly—after servants had seen to it that they were already clean—in the manner of an actor aiming at spectacular display; and one no more finds anything subtle or elusive in that piece of symbolism than in anything else that he has done.
About the Empress, on the other hand, it is impossible to read a page from any pen—whether that page be written by an intimate or by a stranger—without feeling oneself in the presence of a mystery which the most favourably placed chroniclers have failed to penetrate. A novelist of genius might perhaps have invented her—Mr. Maurice Barrès, for one, is a little prone to write as if he had invented her; but she was not to be understood by courtiers, secretaries, and ladies-in-waiting. They recite her traits at great length, but almost in vain; telling us of her kindnesses, her eccentricities, her vanities, but still leaving us at sea—puzzled by the melancholy which preceded the apparent occasions for melancholy, and by the restlessness which chased her, like a gadfly, from the haunts of men, unless it was that she herself pursued—she knew not exactly what—and never found it. Countess Marie Larisch seems to have been more in her confidence than anyone else; but Countess Marie Larisch only saw what she was capable of seeing—which assuredly was not all. One may admit all Countess Marie Larisch’s facts, and yet doubt the completeness of her portrait.
And if Elizabeth’s confidante, in so far as she had one, did not understand, how was her husband—a mere man—a mere soldier—a mere Habsburg—to do so? He, being, as the French say, tout en dehors, could not possibly comprehend her who was tout en dedans. His happiness in marriage—as long as he actually was happy in it—must have depended on the assumption that his wife was as simple and translucent as himself: as simple and translucent as Cinderella or the Sleeping Beauty. He fell in love with her in that belief, as any other gallant young soldier might have done; and there is no doubt whatever that he was very passionately in love. “As much in love as any lieutenant in my army,” was his own way of putting it; and when his bride came down the Danube to join him, he ran to greet her on her boat before the gangway was made secure, and very nearly fell into the water.
That, as he did not actually slip in, was an auspicious beginning; and it is on record that Emperor and Empress and everybody else said, and sincerely meant, the right and proper and auspicious things. “The bride,” said the Austrian people—and the Hungarian people too—“is the most beautiful woman in all Christendom.” “I am glad,” Elizabeth wrote in the veteran Radetzky’s album, “that I am about to belong to a country which possesses an Emperor who is so great and good, and a hero of Radetzky’s valour.” “Never before,” said Francis Joseph to O’Donnell—the officer who had grappled with the tailor Libenyi, on the day of the attempted assassination—“did I feel so grateful to you for saving my life, for never before did I value my life so much”; and he showed his joy by pardoning prisoners and giving 200,000 florins to the poor; while the sympathies of the whole people followed the young couple when they departed on their honeymoon, and gathered edelweiss together, like any other honeymooning couple:—
“The recollection of that April day,” wrote a witness of the scene, “will never be effaced from my mind. The old among us felt themselves young again, the sorrowful became glad, the sick forgot their pains, and the poor their poverty. All alike were eager to see the companion whom the Emperor had chosen as the partner of his life. God only knows how many tears of joy ran down our cheeks, and what ardent prayers were uttered by our lips.”
It is easy to say, in the light of subsequent events, that the joy was too bright to last, and that the hope arose, only to be overcast; but it is difficult, setting superstition aside, to say why it was so, though it is not impossible to trace some of the steps by which it came to be so. In this exalted household two factors which are often seen at work in humbler households were presently, though not quite immediately, to play their part: a mother-in-law and an Egeria.
The pity was the greater because, from the point of view of politics and the dynasty, the Emperor’s beautiful bride promised to be, and indeed was, an asset of great value. The popularity for which he had to work hard she achieved without an effort by the indefinable charm of her youth and loveliness, especially among the romantic and chivalrous Hungarians, who had not yet forgiven Francis Joseph for the severities of 1849. She had Hungarian blood in her veins, though her Hungarian ancestors were remote; and she had no responsibility for the atrocities of the repression. On the contrary, she made it clear to Hungarians that she sympathised with their sufferings and delighted in their country: its vast spaces and its heroic patriots, indomitable even though conquered.
Amnesties, as we have seen, attended her arrival among them—amnesties which she may or may not have inspired, but of which she certainly got all the credit. Whatever she was or was not, she was, at any rate, tender-hearted and impulsive with the impulsiveness of a generous girl who feels instinctively that all the people who are locked up ought to be let out and given a second chance, unless they are really dangerous criminals. The Hungarians, in consequence, fell in love with her to a man, with a passion different from, but more enduring than, her husband’s; and one of them—Count Alexander von Bertha—wrote of her marriage:—