Meanwhile, one may salute Francis Ferdinand respectfully as one who has fought a good fight, and has not been content with half successes. His wife is a clever woman who knows how to bide her time, and does not go out of her way to make unnecessary enemies. He himself has his party, which looks likely to be the party of the future. The blow which he has struck at the Habsburg system is the hardest blow which that system has yet sustained, because he has struck it with dignity and self-restraint, gratifying the instinctive Habsburg craving for the infusion of fresh blood without provoking any of those scandals which give the enemy occasion to blaspheme. If the Papacy was in earnest when it admonished the Habsburgs for their consanguineous unions, then he may fairly claim that the Pope is his ally in the battle.
One cannot say the same of the acts of rebellion which have to be reviewed next, though they too have served their purpose as object-lessons: crowning proofs to be cited in support of the thesis that the Habsburg system of in-breeding in order to develop an unique type of man and woman is a failure, and that nature, expelled with a pitchfork, is apt to return—an old friend with a new face, exaggerating even to the point of grotesqueness the normal man and woman’s passion for romance.
CHAPTER XXX
The “terrible year” of the Habsburg annals—Proceedings of Princess Louisa of Tuscany—The taint inherited from the Bourbons of Parma—Princess Louisa’s suitors—Her Marriage to Prince Frederick August of Saxony—She bicycles with the dentist—She runs away to Switzerland with her brother, the Archduke Leopold, and her children’s tutor—Attitude of the Courts towards her escapade—Official notice on the subject in the Wiener Zeitung.
The “terrible year” in the family annals of the House of Habsburg began towards the end of 1902. Before then, though many Archdukes and Archduchesses had caused trouble, they had raised the flag of rebellion independently—one at a time. Now we see a brother and a sister making a simultaneous and concerted demonstration; Princess Louisa of Tuscany embarking on the adventure which united her, for a season (and still legally unites her) to Signor Toselli, and the Archduke Leopold Ferdinand adopting the style of “Herr Wulfling” in order to be free to follow the promptings of an impulsive heart.
Princess Louisa has told her own story. It is the story, of course, of a woman placed on her defence, replying to charges, making out a case for herself, and it therefore requires to be read critically; but the holes which criticism can pick in it do not affect the general verisimilitude of the picture. Most of the facts, after all, were too notorious to be disputed. All that was possible was a manifesto of motives; and Princess Louisa’s exposition of these was entitled to an attentive and respectful hearing. She, at least, might be supposed to know why she did the things which the whole world knew her to have done. It may be, indeed, that she wrote some of her pages as one who desired to deceive; but that desire only related, at the most, to a few points of detail. The net impression of the narrative is one of winning candour. Princess Louisa could not, of course, criticise herself from a detached stand-point; but she explained herself.
There seems, at the first blush, to be a certain confusion of thought in her explanations. One cannot always make out whether she is excusing her conduct on the ground that she is a Habsburg and therefore mad, or patting herself on the back for having followed the sane and sensible, as well as the romantic course; but it is also a little difficult to make out which of the two lines would have been the proper one for her to take. There is a point of view—it has already been expounded in these pages—from which her precipitate descent from dizzy heights of grandeur presents some of the aspects of Christian’s flight from the City of Destruction; but it must in justice be added that Princess Louisa, having been born in the City of Destruction, and having spent her impressionable years in it, had herself acquired some of the characteristics of the inhabitants. The true picture, perhaps, is that of an abnormal character stimulated by a sane instinct to sudden, unexpected, and eccentric action.
It was not on her father’s side only that there was insanity in her house. Her mother was a Bourbon Parma; and about the Bourbons of Parma, Princess Louisa neither has, nor affects to have, any illusions. They are madder than the Habsburgs, and have none of their redeeming qualities. The character sketches which Princess Louisa gives us of her maternal great-grandfather, Duke Charles of Parma, and Lucca, and of her uncle, Duke Robert of Parma, are sketches of lunatics; though the instinctive perception that the royal family party was a City of Destruction from which it was imperative to escape for self-realisation in the atmosphere of romance appears in her account of his relations with his Duchess, who “bored him to tears”:—
“She was dévote and excessively plain, and whenever he returned from a visit to Parma, he was wont to exclaim: ‘Il faut absolument que j’aille me retremper auprès d’une jolie femme après ce tombeau de mon illustre compagne.’”
Nor is that all; for Princess Louisa does not exhaust the subject. She might also have spoken of certain Parma cousins—nineteen children of a single father. Some sixteen of them are said to be, or to have been, of feeble intellect. One hears of one of them wandering about in the pathetic belief that she is Marie-Antoinette, carrying an orange with her, and insisting that it is her head which has recently been cut off. It is not difficult to picture Princess Louisa thinking her way to the conclusion that to be of royal birth was to come of tainted stock. She would be more likely to come to that conclusion if one may assume that the seeds of morbidity were latent in her even when her youthful high spirits concealed them.