Still, he was a spoiled child, and precociously cynical; and perhaps, in view of the way in which he was brought up, it would have been hard for him to be anything else. The legend of his mother’s devotion to him is found at the circumference of his circle, but cannot be traced to its centre. From an early age, he saw and understood too much for innocence. Among other things he saw the “go-between,” and knew for what purpose she went between. There was no example before his eyes to lead him to look upon happiness in marriage as an easily attainable ideal; and he held women cheap, because so many of them made themselves cheap with him. One of Countess Marie’s stories is to the effect that she boxed his ears for laughing at “love-sick girls,” and boasting of his conquests, and saying of a certain Elizabeth T——: “The silly goose thinks I adore her, and so I can do anything I like with her.”
It was, therefore, as a young man who had already lost his illusions that Rudolph set out in search of a wife. The story has been told that another lady travelled with him as a provisional companion while he was looking for a wife, and was, at least once, caught in his company in compromising circumstances by his prospective mother-in-law. He was too eligible a parti for any prospective mother-in-law to attach more importance than she could help to such a contretemps; and after Rudolph had rejected the suit of Princess Mathilde of Saxony, on the ground that her style of beauty was of too luxuriant an effulgence, then, “weary,” to quote Countess Marie, “of a choice of many evils, he decided to take the least of them, as represented by the Princess Stéphanie of Belgium.” And Stéphanie said, or is said to have said, “He asked me for my hand so prettily that I could not possibly refuse it to him.”
THE CROWN PRINCE RUDOLPH.
That in spite of the compromising discovery of the provisional lady companion in his rooms. His manner must indeed have been charming if it removed the impression of that surprise; but Rudolph could be fascinating when he chose, and his ready wit may have prompted a plausible explanation. Moreover, Stéphanie was little more than a child—too young to understand; and her father, Leopold II., was not a man into whose calculations either sentiment or morality entered. We all know him as the King who neglected the Austrian Archduchess to whom he was married for such persons as Cléo de Mérode and the Baroness Vaughan; and he may well have said to himself that he saw no reason why his daughter should expect to be any happier in her marriage than his wife, or why his younger daughter should expect to be any happier in her marriage than her elder sister.
It is notorious, at any rate, that no love was ever lost between Leopold and either of his daughters. The marriages of both of them were failures; and anyone who has ever lived in Brussels knows how many stories are current there as to his callous indifference to their matrimonial calamities. Again and again the story ran round Brussels that Princess Louise of Saxe-Coburg had run away from her husband and taken refuge at Laeken, and that her eyes were not only red but black: that Philip of Saxe-Coburg, in fact, had been knocking her about, and that she had vowed, with tears streaming down her cheeks, that nothing would induce her to return to him. But Leopold always sent her back; for why—one pictures him asking—should his daughter Louise expect to be any happier than his wife Henrietta, and why should his son-in-law be expected to behave any better than he himself behaved? No doubt there was logic of a kind—though not of the best kind—in the argument. No doubt, too, the same logic was brought into play when Stéphanie’s marriage was arranged.
Countess Marie protests that Stéphanie was plain, and had no style. She speaks of her red arms, her deplorable figure, her unbecomingly dressed hair; but that is not the verdict of contemporary Brussels, where she was to be seen daily in the Park and the streets. What Brussels remembers is a little girl—a “flapper,” as people say nowadays—simple and exceedingly attractive: a little girl who reminded Brussels of a Dresden china statuette; a little girl in short frocks, with her hair hanging down her back. She was not grown up, Brussels declares, when she was married; she was only dressed to look as if she were grown up. She was put into long skirts, and her hair was done up, du jour au lendemain, before the proper time, because this chance of a brilliant marriage had suddenly come her way.
Presumably there was something of the gawkiness of the schoolgirl about her when she was thus first dressed as a woman. Presumably that gawkiness did not entirely vanish in the course of the journey from Brussels to Vienna, where she was certain, as a foreigner, to encounter far more captious criticism; Vienna being nearly as chic as Paris, quite as quizzical in a heavier way, and decidedly less disposed to make smooth the path of the stranger. Stéphanie, in short, must at first have seemed a little “provincial” to the Viennese; and there were plenty of Viennese ladies—Palast Damen and others—whose cue it was to make the worst of her, and to rejoice that, as Rudolph had married such a wife, “there was no possibility,” to quote Countess Marie, “of his ever becoming a model husband.”
Assuredly he did not become one, and there does not even seem to have been an interlude of sunshine before the gathering of the clouds. Even the daughter presently born to the Archduke and the Archduchess is said to have been a cause of contention between them; and Stéphanie, with that passion for self-expression which she shared with almost every member of the House of Habsburg except Francis Joseph, has written out and published a confession of the emotions which her experiences of marriage brought her, and the lessons which she drew from them. This is the essential passage:—
“Two quite young persons see each other for the first time, know each other a quarter of an hour, and speak the binding word which death alone can untie.