The second despatch added that the injuries had proved fatal; but the two arrived simultaneously. Count Paar had them both in his hands when he waited on the Emperor, who gathered from his face the nature of the news he bore. He read the messages, and sank into his chair like a man stunned. When he mastered himself, and looked up, he saw the Archduke Francis Ferdinand standing beside him. “What!” he cried to him bitterly. “Is there no calamity known to this world which is to be spared to me?”
None, it would seem; and the accumulation of tragedies on the bent white head may well have seemed the more rather than the less overwhelming, because of the dearth, in each case, of those endearing memories which can be relied upon to mellow grief after the first sharp shock of calamity has passed. The brother who had been shot for pretending to be Emperor of Mexico had been, in Austria, the leader of a hostile faction. The son who took his own life so ignobly at Meyerling had at least toyed with treason. The more distant relative who died at sea had defied him and insulted him. Between him and the memory of his early romantic love for his wife there loomed other interrupting memories. So that it was in a double sense that time had brought the fulfilment of the curse of the mother who prayed God to punish the Emperor for taking the life of her son by smiting him in the person of every member of his family.
His language, nevertheless, was that of a man who had really loved the wife whom he had lost. One of his intimates has reported it:
“No one” (he said) “can ever know how great is the loss which I have sustained. I can never tell you how much I owe to my well-beloved wife, the Empress, and how great a support she was to me during the years in which I endured so much. I never can thank God sufficiently for having given me such a companion in life. Repeat what I say to you; tell every one; I shall be grateful.”
The speech may seem, indeed, an unnatural sequel to some of the facts related in these pages: an unnatural sequel, in particular, to the account given of the Empress’s restless wanderings—her ceaseless search for something which she could neither discover nor define—and her long and frequent absences from the home of her adoption. But we need not, for all that, read it with any suspicion of insincerity. Francis Joseph, it is quite clear, set forth in it, not only what he wished to be believed, but also what he wished to believe. He had dreamed love’s young dream in his youth, and had not merely pretended that he was dreaming it. It had seemed to him, in those years of illusion, that the dreaming of it was not incompatible with the Habsburg system of consanguineous marriages with the members of houses as tainted as their own.
Nor was it through any overt act of his that incompatibilities irreconcilable with that dream had come to light. The handsome young man, united to a beautiful young woman, had only by degrees discovered that his case was also that of a simple man of soldierly directness, united to a woman who was a mysterious enigma, living an inner life into which it was impossible for him to penetrate. He had done his best, and hoped against hope that the dream which he had dreamed would come true. There is no reason to suppose that he abandoned the hope because he found himself taking a keen pleasure in the society of Frau Schratt; and there is every reason to believe that he liked to recall the dream, and live in it again, and deceive himself.
But his marriage had, nevertheless, been a proof of the failure of the Habsburg matrimonial system; and further proofs of its failure, together with many instances of revolt against it, were to be pressed upon his notice in the years immediately in front of him. His future trouble with the Archdukes and the Archduchesses was to be trouble mainly of that kind.
CHAPTER XXVI
“Austria’s idiot Archdukes”—A catalogue raisonné—The Emperor’s brothers—The Archduke Rainer—The Archduke Henry and the actress—The Archduke Louis Salvator, the Hermit of the Balearic Islands—The Archduke Charles Salvator—The Archduke Joseph—The Archduke Eugéne and his vow to be “as chaste as possible”—The Archduke William and his courtship in the café—The Archduke Leopold—The awful Archduke Otto and his manifold vagaries.
“Austria’s idiot Archdukes”—that is the scornful phrase in which Bismarck summed up the pillars of the House of Habsburg; but we must neither adopt it as a definition nor discard it as an insult.