Decidedly this Archduke was frondeur, with inclinations towards Liberalism; and there were precedents for those inclinations in his family. He was the grandson of that Grand Duke of Tuscany who put an end to the Inquisition in his dominions; and an ancestor of his had been the first legitimate potentate to recognise the French Republic after the Revolution. Nothing was more natural, therefore, than that he should have a good word to say for the Austrian rebels of 1848; though it was inevitable that his praise of them should shock conservative circles. So he sulked at Linz, while officialdom sulked at Vienna; and there was further commotion when he posed his candidature, without asking the Emperor’s leave, for the vacant throne of Bulgaria. The Crown Prince was sent to him, to inform him that he had incurred Francis Joseph’s displeasure; and he was stripped even of his rights over his own regiment of artillery.
If he and Rudolph did, as Countess Marie Larisch suggests, put their heads together and talk about a coup d’état and the usurpation of the throne of Hungary, that punishment may well have furnished the starting point of their treasonable confabulations. The two Archdukes were close friends and kindred spirits: among other enterprises, they had combined to expose the spiritualistic medium, Harry Bastian, to the horror and disgust of the superstitious sections of Viennese society. Moreover, the Archduke John Salvator may be supposed to have sympathised with Rudolph’s love affairs, for he had, as we are about to see, a very similar love affair of his own. These facts no doubt furnish a prelude, more or less fitting, to his appearance in Countess Marie Larisch’s narrative as the mysterious stranger to whom she handed Rudolph’s steel casket of compromising documents; and if Countess Marie’s recollection of what he said to her on that occasion is correct, he was himself the principal person whom those documents might have compromised:—
“Never mind,” she reports him as saying. “Things have happened for the best; you could not save a coward like Rudolph, but you’ve saved my life.”
And he added that he was going to “die without dying,” because he was “tired of the hollow things of life”; and her comment is:—
“Has he died without dying? I think so. And I believe that the Archduke, despite all evidence to the contrary, will return in his own good time.”
And Princess Louisa of Tuscany, it is to be noted, says pretty much the same. To her also, and to her brother Leopold, the Archduke John Salvator announced his intentions:—
“I am about to disappear, my dear children, and I shall do so in such a manner that no one will ever find me. When the Emperor is dead I will return, for then Austria will require my services.”
And her comment is:—
“Papa was convinced to the day of his death that his brother was alive; and, as time proves all things, the Emperor’s death will perhaps solve the mystery, for Austria may then require the services of John Orth in the international complications which will no doubt follow.”
But all that is mere conjecture; and the conjectures belong to a later stage of the story. The solid fact to be set down here is that the Archduke John Salvator, having received the signification of Francis Joseph’s displeasure, sought and obtained Francis Joseph’s permission to quit the Austrian army, and retired to live quietly at his Castle of Orth, on the shores of the Lake of Gmunden. But his position and aspirations had, meanwhile, been complicated by a love affair with a fascinating nymph of the ballet.