Most of them, as we know, have been whirled into marriages incompatible with the ideal; but there have been exceptions to that rule, as to any rule which one might endeavour to lay down. The only feature really common to their very various adventures and ways of life is that the force has affected, and the whirl has caught, each one of them. Otto stripping himself in public; Charles Salvator boarding the tram; Louis Salvator hiding his face in the Balearic Islands; Eugène clamouring for an archbishopric; and Rainer sighing for boiled mutton and caper sauce—all these are multifarious manifestations of an identical phenomenon; that phenomenon being Nature’s centrifugal force which is making, and will continue to make, havoc of the imposing Habsburg system.
It is in the matter of matrimony, however, that the manifestations of that force have excited most attention, and promise to be most fruitful of consequences; and it is of those matrimonial divagations from the central ideal that we shall next have to speak in detail.
CHAPTER XXVII
The centrifugal marriages of the Habsburgs—Francis Joseph’s attitude towards them—His attitude towards Baron Walburg, the Habsburg who had come down in the world—Where he draws the line—His refusal to sanction the marriage of the Archduke Ferdinand Charles to the daughter of a high-school teacher—The Archduke resigns his rank and becomes Charles Burg—Marriage of the daughter of Archduchess Gisela to Baron Otto von Seefried zu Buttenheim.
In one’s survey of the centrifugal marriages of the Habsburgs it matters little with which marriage one begins. There can be no orderly scheme of progression in the narrative; and though one sometimes finds the Emperor, in his later years, unbending, resigning himself to the inevitable, and even going half-way to meet it, his condescension has been neither continuous nor graduated, but has proceeded by fits and starts and spasms. At one moment we seem to see good nature triumphing over pride; at another, the supple back once more stiffens itself to the rigidity of the days of old. Conflicting considerations have done battle in his mind. Did he dare resist? Could he afford to yield? Had he any tender feelings towards the individuals who pleaded for the concession? Only by considering how these several questions presented themselves to him can one discover unity of principle in his contradictory responses to the innumerable appeals.
The rule, theoretically absolute, is modifiable by the Emperor’s caprice. Francis Joseph is the Head of the House as well as the Sovereign Ruler of the Empire; his judgment seat is, in all family matters, the ultimate tribunal. He can grant dispensations, like the Pope; and he sits without assessors—to decide whether hallowed principles or personal inclinations constitute the Higher Law. There are times when he feels that he would like to yield but must not; times when he yields, against his will, to a pressure which wears down his resistance; times when, though there is no particular reason why he should not yield, he simply does not choose to. One can easily adduce both earlier and later examples of each of the three attitudes; but one can trace through them all a gradual weakening, due, in part, no doubt, to advancing age, but in part also to a dawning perception of the deleterious effect of the Habsburg system upon human happiness.
Marriage after marriage, arranged in accordance with the prescriptions of the system, has resulted in misery—sometimes to the point of making the welkin ring with scandal. The failure of Rudolph’s marriage was notorious; the failure of Otto’s marriage was hardly repaired by his wife’s dutiful attention to him when he came back to her, a mental and moral, as well as a physical, wreck. There were rumours that the Archduchess Augustine—Francis Joseph’s granddaughter, the daughter of the Archduchess Gisela—suffered violence at her husband’s hands; and the union of the Archduchess Maria Dorothea to the Duc d’Orléans was equally unsatisfactory. That son of St. Louis had in his youth been tracked to a hotel in Paris by the outraged husband of a Queen of Song, attended by a French commissary of police; and he and the Duchesse d’Orléans have sometimes lived separately and talked about divorce. Yet another Archduchess—the consort of Leopold II., King of the Belgians—had reason to complain that she was forsaken for the French dancer, Cléo de Mérode, and many other ladies mostly of low degree and light repute.
Assuredly there is food for reflection on the Habsburg system in this array of connubial facts; and one cannot doubt that it has produced a cumulative effect upon Francis Joseph’s mind and conscience. None the less, it has found other preconceptions and prejudices firmly entrenched in that mind and conscience; and the campaign between the two sets of ideas and points of view has been long and violent—the victory inclining sometimes to the one side and sometimes to the other. Quite recently, for instance—at a date subsequent to several remarkable concessions of which we shall be speaking in a moment—Europe heard of the morganatic principle being discountenanced with such severe success that seven Habsburgs (though they were no longer entitled to call themselves Habsburgs) came, as we say in England, “on the rates.” This is how a Viennese correspondent chronicles the incident:
“Great sympathy has been aroused here by the sad condition of Baron Ernest Walburg, son of the late Archduke Ernest, the Emperor’s uncle, by a morganatic marriage with a tradesman’s daughter. His father gave him £2,000 a year while he lived, but these payments ceased on his death. Baron Walburg was an officer in the Austrian army, but he resigned his commission when he married a poor work-girl. He applied for an audience of the Emperor, who declined to see him. He then stopped the Emperor in the street at Buda-Pesth, and described his sad situation. His creditors had distrained on all his belongings, leaving the Baron, his wife, and six children absolutely destitute. The whole family of eight persons, seven of them having Habsburg blood in their veins, are now dependent on the public poor rate.”
One of them, it was added, in a subsequent communication, obtained a situation as head-waiter in a café at Buda-Pesth.