There shall be no attempt to judge her here; the attempt is only to portray.
A good deal would have to be added to make the portrait complete; not merely those details of the toilette which Countess Marie gives in such abundance; not merely particulars of the daring horse-woman’s delight in the tricks of the haute école—a delight so intense that Elizabeth once followed the circus-rider Elisa to Paris, and brought her back to Austria, paying the forfeit on her broken engagement; but facts which show her compassion with the sufferings of humanity. Sustained philanthropic endeavour was not, indeed, much in her way; but she was easily stirred to those élans of sympathy which are far more effective than systematic philanthropy in winning the hearts of the humble. When she visited the hospitals after Sadowa, the wounded blessed her on their deathbeds.
Still, these facts, though necessary to completeness, are not of the essence of the portrait. The essence of the picture lies in Elizabeth’s unavailing pursuit of happiness, and her unavailing flight from herself—on horseback as long as her health let her ride, and always with a volume of Heine’s poems in her pocket. It was not, perhaps, a very sane proceeding; but she came, as we know, of a family which was not very sane. One of her sisters—the Duchesse d’Alençon—was for some time under observation in a private asylum at Graetz, known as le rendezvous des Princes, on account of the number of its royal inmates; and the sister whom Francis Joseph jilted in order to marry her, became, as Princess of Thurn and Taxis, a victim of religious mania. Her own eccentricities must not be estimated without reference to these facts.
Estimate them as we may, however, one thing is certain. Between Elizabeth, with her fancies and vague cravings for she knew not exactly what, and Francis Joseph, with his direct, straightforward, soldierly outlook on life, no enduring bond of sympathy was possible. Fate forbade it, and ordained that they should drift apart; and Fate had its way with its playthings. How Francis Joseph’s fancy strayed—and how Elizabeth, instead of opposing its divagations, encouraged them—we shall see in the course of a few pages.
CHAPTER X
“The Martyrdom of an Empress”—Correction of inaccuracies contained in that popular work—Francis Joseph’s friends—“A Polish Countess”—Frau Katti Schratt—Enduring attachment—Rumour of morganatic marriage—Interview with Frau Schratt on that subject—“Darby and Joan.”
Of the many Lives of the Empress Elizabeth the most widely circulated has been the one entitled “The Martyrdom of an Empress”—a work which purports to give an authoritative “inside” view of the Habsburg Court. Even M. Jacques La Faye, the author of the very latest of the Lives, appears to have accepted it as a source of trustworthy information. The writer, who is known in America as a journalist, and implies that she was on terms of intimacy with the Empress, has doubtless raked together a good deal of floating Viennese gossip, but she nevertheless makes, on nearly every page, statements which it is hard to believe that she would have made if she had ever conversed with Elizabeth, or even been in the same room with her.
A copy of “The Martyrdom of an Empress,” annotated in pencil by a lady once attached to the Austrian Court, is now lying on the writer’s table. “To read this book,” runs the first note, “is a martyrdom for one who knows”; and corrections of points of detail follow quickly—corrections, in many cases, of statements of little importance in themselves, but none the less completely destructive of the claim of the writer corrected to have studied the life of the Hofburg, or even of Gödöllo, from within. The Empress’s eyes, according to the author of “The Martyrdom of an Empress,” were “glorious dark blue orbs”—or, in another passage, “luminous sapphire-hued”: her eyes were actually brown. The Empress, according to the same authority, stamped “her little foot”; she actually had large feet, as became an energetic pedestrian, and is reputed to have been very jealous of the tiny feet of that rival beauty, the Empress Eugénie. Bismarck’s reptile Press, at one time, derided her for the size of her feet.
And so forth. A few further passages of text, with the annotator’s gloss appended to each of them, will most effectually show the claim to inside knowledge evaporating under the incisive examination of one whose knowledge was really acquired inside:—
AUTHOR: “The Duke (in Bavaria) was by no means a wealthy man, and all his disposable means were lavished upon the education of his older daughters.”