The life of the emperor Francis Joseph

by Francis Henry Gribble

5. The Archduke Joseph—one of the Emperor’s cousins—was clever in more ways than one, being a man of learning and also a man of business. He counted among the authorities on the folk-lore of the Hungarian gypsies; and he was a valuable administrator of commercial and industrial concerns. His name figured on the official list of registered licensed victuallers; and he distilled an admirable brandy. Moreover, he was the titular head of a Casino on the Danube near Buda-Pesth: a versatile Archduke, in short, who made himself generally useful, and was appreciated.

6. The Archduke Eugène—the Archduke Joseph’s brother—has specialised in religion, though he was educated as a soldier, and was, at one and the same time, a colonel of cavalry and a doctor of divinity. At one time he was anxious to resign his commission in the hussars in order to become an Archbishop, like Beethoven’s patron, the Archduke Rudolph; but Francis Joseph would not permit the transformation. As a compromise, he undertook to make him Grand Master of the Teutonic Order, as soon as that office fell vacant: an office the taking up of which is preluded by the singular vow to be “as chaste as possible.” It is said that the Archduke Eugène, who looks his part to the life, has taken the vow as well as the office seriously.

7. The Archduke William—the uncle of the Archduke Eugène—preceded him in the Grandmastership; but, in his case, the possibilities of chastity appear to have been limited. The stories of his assignations with ladies in the cabinets particuliers of restaurants are numerous, and some of them are diverting. The landlord, on one occasion, was so proud of his patronage that he could not keep the secret of it. Not realising what the consequences might be, he whispered to a friend that the Archduke William was, at that moment, doing him the honour of pursuing a courtship in an upper chamber. The consequence was that, when the Archduke descended with the lady from the upper chamber, to take his carriage, he found a vast crowd of loyal supporters assembled on the pavement, to receive him with musical honours. His case must have been even more embarrassing than that of Francis Joseph, when the cook knelt at his feet and sang the national anthem, in the small hours of the morning, in Frau Schratt’s villa.

8. The Archduke Leopold—brother of the Archduke Rainer—was, at one time, commander-in-chief of the corps of engineers; but he suddenly disappeared, and people wondered what had become of him. Epilepsy—that curse of the House of Habsburg—had struck him down. He was removed to the remote castle of Hornstein, where he had to be kept in the seclusion of a mental invalid until he died.

9. The Archduke Otto—brother of the present heir-apparent, and consequently Francis Joseph’s nephew—was the most amazing of all the Archdukes, and the one whose case most fittingly illustrates the usual generalisations about Habsburg degeneracy. The common people rather liked him; for he had the negative merit of not being proud, and was, in the main, the sort of gay and festive buffoon to whom the hearts of the common people, when untrammelled by considerations of morality, go out. But people who were not so common took a different view of him; and Austria was filled with stories of his misdeeds and the discomfiture which they brought him.

Meeting a funeral procession, when he was out riding, he insisted that the coffin should be laid upon the ground in order that he might leap his horse over it. Getting drunk in a fashionable café, he more than once executed a dance, apparelled in nothing except a képi, a sword-belt, and a pair of gloves; and once, in order to express his contempt for things in general and Habsburgs in particular, he poured the contents of a dish of spinach over the Emperor’s bust. A furious lady cyclist once assailed him with a whip for breaking up a cycle race on the high road on which he was driving; and the Austrian journalists who aspersed his private character were acquitted by the juries when he ventured to take proceedings against them.

The worst thing that he ever did was to invite his boon companions to pay a surprise visit to his wife’s bedchamber, at two o’clock in the morning, at a time when she was just about to become a mother, and to strike the one boon companion who was sober enough to draw his sword and protect the Archduchess from the indignity. The matter was reported; and, as it was impossible for the offended officer to avenge his honour by challenging a member of the Imperial house, the Emperor took the matter under his own hands. He thanked the officer, it is said, in Otto’s presence for the service which he had rendered; he smacked Otto’s face in the officer’s presence; and he put Otto under arrest.

And so on, and so forth; for the scandalous stories about Otto are endless. It need only be added that he died young, as the result of his dissipations—the structure of his once handsome nose having first collapsed.

There we may end our catalogue raisonné of those Archdukes whose connection with this biography is only incidental. Decidedly it is difficult to generalise about them, for they are, and have been, no more like each other than like other people. There have been good Archdukes as well as bad; clever Archdukes as well as stupid ones; and, at the end of the list, one finds oneself asking: Is there any single trait on which we can lay our fingers, declaring that it is common to them all?

At the first blush one would be disposed to say that there is none; that the recluses, and the rowdies, and the students, and the men of business of the House of Habsburg are like a fortuitous collection of incongruous atoms. But when one looks again, and looks more carefully, one becomes conscious of a common force which is at work among them all. One may describe it, in the language of the physicists, as a centrifugal force: Nature’s reply, as it were, to that centripetal force which has been at work from a distant past through the media of the doctrine of divine right, and the systems of specialised princely education, and consanguineous marriages. There is, to sum the matter up, a Habsburg ideal, forming the centre of the circle—an ideal to which Francis Joseph himself has remained as faithful as possible for as long a time as possible; but there is also that centrifugal force whirling all the individual Habsburgs away from that centre in all imaginable directions.