The life of the emperor Francis Joseph

by Francis Henry Gribble

It is a question sometimes debated by the members of the two families, whether the Wittelsbachs are madder than the Habsburgs, or the Habsburgs madder than the Wittelsbachs. According to Countess Marie Larisch, who speaks for the Wittelsbachs, the difference is that “with the Habsburgs insanity usually shows itself in depravity, self-effacement, and common marriages, while, in the case of the Wittelsbachs, it transforms the sufferer into a romantic being who is quite above the banalities of everyday life, but who occasionally deteriorates and becomes a gross feeder”; but that is not quite a true antithesis. Common marriages, as Countess Marie calls them—and the marriage of her own father, the brother of the Empress Elizabeth, to the actress, Henrietta Mendel, falls in the category—are not necessarily unromantic; and Wittelsbachs, as well as Habsburgs, have contracted them. Still, as an introduction to the story of the career of Ludwig II., the contrast is not without its point. Ludwig was as mad as a hatter; and he has also been spoken of as “the last of the Romantics”—the last, at all events, of the Romantics who have sat on thrones.

The beginning of his tragedy was the breaking off of his engagement to the Empress Elizabeth’s sister, Sophie; and the ease with which he was manœuvred out of that engagement, as the result of a Court intrigue, is, in itself, a sufficient proof that his intelligence was none too strong. It was represented to him, quite untruly, that his affianced bride had been flirting with his Master of the Horse, Count Holnstein. The Count and the Princess were inveigled into being photographed together; and this testimony of “the camera which cannot lie” was brought to Ludwig’s notice. There was also some story of a ring which Count Holnstein was observed to be wearing, and which was believed to have been given him by the Princess, though, as a matter of fact, it had been given to him by an actress who had stolen it from the Princess.

That was the bait; and Ludwig walked into the trap and took it. He made no inquiries, and asked for no explanations. Instead of doing so, he made unsatisfactory excuses for postponing his wedding-day; and when Duke Maximilian charged him with trifling with his affianced bride’s affections, he lost his temper, smashed Sophie’s bust, tore up Sophie’s portraits, and declared that Sophie was welcome to marry anyone she liked provided that she did not marry him. So all was over, and they were both unhappy; and it does not seem that Sophie found perfect bliss in her subsequent union to the Duc d’Alençon. The day came when Sophie clamoured for a divorce: not because she had any tangible grievances, but because she had conceived the idea that she would like to marry a doctor in practice at Munich, and devote herself to philanthropic activities. She had to be kept under restraint for a season at a private asylum at Graetz, already referred to as “the rendezvous of princes,” because of the large number of august lunatics whom it harboured: among others, the Duchess of Augustenburg, Pedro of Saxe-Coburg, whose mania was a dread of poison, and Charles of Lichtenstein, who had gone mad on account of his failure to meet the woman of his dreams.

And Ludwig, meanwhile, was so mad that there could be no mistake about his madness, though it was a kind of madness which gained him, as has been said, the title of the Last of the Romantics. He lived, like William Beckford, in a solitude of fantastic splendour. He had the table laid, in an empty banqueting hall, for ghostly guests, and fancied that he was entertaining Marie-Antoinette, and Catherine of Russia, and Hamlet, and Julius Cæsar. He caused command performances of the best operas to be given to himself alone in an empty theatre. He sailed about the Starnberg Lake in a gondola, towed by a swan. He caused eminent actors to recite to him while he ate, and he went on eating, and kept them reciting, until five o’clock in the morning. He outraged the feelings of the Court by bestowing titles of nobility on his tailor and his barber; and the end of it all was that keepers took the place of courtiers, and a Regent was appointed.

KING LUDWIG II. OF BAVARIA

The story goes that Elizabeth refused to believe that he was mad, and, after vainly imploring Francis Joseph to insist upon his release, engaged in a plot to rescue him. The King was to dive into the lake, and swim across it, and a carriage, with swift horses, ready harnessed, was to be waiting to carry him far away from his keepers to a place of safety. It sounds like a story built on a foundation of careless emotional talk; and the end, at any rate, came differently, and somewhat mysteriously. Ludwig persuaded his doctor to send the keepers away, declaring that their presence worried him; and the doctor was a muscular man who believed that he could trust himself to cope with any emergency. Strong as he was, however, Ludwig was still stronger; and when the keepers returned, they found that both the King and the physician had been drowned, after a struggle, of which there was abundant evidence. Whether the King had murdered his physician, in order that he might be free to escape, or the physician had perished in attempting to frustrate the King’s attempt at suicide, remains to this hour uncertain.

There is a further story to the effect that the Empress Elizabeth saw the tragedy in a dream, and awoke, screaming, to learn that her dream was a true vision; but though the dream itself is well accredited, one may suspect that legend has taken a liberty with the date. There is something characteristic, however, and therefore probably true, in the report of the words which the Empress is declared to have spoken as she bent over her cousin’s corpse:

“Leave the King here! Leave him in his mortuary chapel! He is not dead. He is only pretending to be dead, in order that he may be left in peace, and that no one may be able to torture him any more.”

The conception of life as a torture which must be stoically endured had, by that time, grown upon the Empress; and there were still other trials in store for her, which were to confirm it, even before the tragic day on which her sister was to meet her death in the fire at the Bazaar de la Charité at Paris. There was to be another suicide in the family, that of the Comte de Trani, at Geneva. The Archduke Joseph’s son, Archduke Ladislas, was to be killed, accidentally, while shooting. The Archduchess Elizabeth, daughter of the Archduke Albert, and granddaughter of the Archduke Charles, who had fought so well against Napoleon, was to perish in a still more tragic accident.