It would not have mattered—or, at any rate, it would have mattered less—if the truths of eugenics had been revealed to her in time, and she had fought, while still a girl, for the right to dispose of her heart as she chose. That is to say that a genuine romance, at that age, might have saved her from a great deal. But love did not come; and she was only a girl, and a sufficiently “good girl” to do as she was told, though not without a high-spirited girl’s disposition to laugh at uncongenial suitors. She laughed at Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg, now King of Bulgaria, though she would probably have married him if there had not been a division of opinion in her family as to the desirability of the alliance; and she sums up the matter in retrospect thus:—
“I do not wish to imply that a princess is forced to accept the first suitor who presents himself. She can choose her future husband within certain limits, but as most princes and kings are very much alike, choice is not a difficult matter after all. Part of our education is to accept without question whatever lies upon the knees of the gods, and although every princess doubtless at some time dreams of an ideal Prince Charming, she rarely meets him, and she usually marries someone quite different from the hero of her girlhood’s dreams.”
There was some talk of marrying Princess Louisa to Dom Pedro—a sort of a cousin, the nephew of the Empress of Brazil; and she tells us what became of that suitor:—
“Poor Dom Pedro! Three years after our meeting he went mad, and he is now under restraint in a castle somewhere in Austria.”
Then Frederick August of Saxony—the present King of Saxony—was presented. Princess Louisa rather liked him, and she married him; and it is noteworthy that, though she ran away from him—impelled by something not herself which made for liberty—she speaks of him in her book without any trace of bitterness. He meant well, one gathers, but was not intelligent enough to understand his wife, who certainly appears to have had many perplexing characteristics, and allowed the well of his natural affection to be poisoned by evil counsellors. The details are set forth in “My Own Story”; but it is, of course, necessary to remember, when reviewing them, that, though Princess Louisa has told her story, the King of Saxony has not yet told his.
One’s first impression is of a conflict between natural instincts and artificial conventions. What with their devotion to religion and etiquette—and their inability to distinguish the one thing from the other—the Heads of the Saxon House were doubtless difficult companions for an impulsive child of nature. They were stiff and pompous out of all proportion to their importance—as if they had all swallowed pokers in the cradle; and Princess Louisa came among them like a Daughter of Heth, and behaved accordingly—but more so. It would be hopeless to attempt to make separate catalogues of the things which she did and the things which she is only said to have done; but it is clear that she was a romp deficient in veneration for the common objects of worship in royal and Catholic circles.
She had a gallery to play to. The common people admired and applauded; and there have, from time to time, been many indications that Princess Louisa’s passion for publicity is not less strong and instinctive than her passion for romance. In a Protestant country ruled over by Catholic sovereigns, her obstinate refusal to confess to a Jesuit was naturally a popular demonstration. Protestants everywhere regard Jesuits as the most odious of all ecclesiastics, and confession as the most ridiculous of all modes of religious activity. In advanced democratic circles, too, enthusiasm was naturally aroused by the report that she had chosen a dentist for the companion of her bicycle rides in the Dresden Park. It was high time, in view of the democrats, that the royal family accepted the dentist as a man and a brother; for whereas several civilised countries had contrived to get on without Kings, a country without dentists would be intolerable.
The royal family, however, blinded by superstitious prejudices, declined to take that view of the matter. Whether friendship for dentists or dislike of Jesuits was the more reprehensible trait in Princess Louisa’s character, they either did not know or did not think it worth while to say. They summed the matter up by declaring that that was what came of reading Nietzsche; and one hears of an attempt to stem the tide of evil influence by tearing up Princess Louisa’s copy of “Thus Spake Zarathustra.” It was about as effective as the famous attempt to stop an earthquake by taking a pill; and the drama was quickly advanced another stage. The members of the royal family, putting their heads together, came to the conclusion that a woman who preferred bicycling with dentists to confessing her sins to Jesuits must be mad, and must, without delay, be locked up in a lunatic asylum. Whereupon Princess Louisa, having got an inkling of what was about to happen, took to flight.
No one will blame her; for no one will believe that her fears were illusory. If there is one circumstance which suggests scepticism of the fact that the percentage of insanity is higher in royal than in other families, it is the fact that members of royal families are unscrupulously ready to accuse each other of insanity, and place each other under restraint. The case of Princess Louise of Saxe-Coburg, whom Count Mattatich rescued from her prison like a gallant knight of old, is only one of many cases of which Princess Louisa of Tuscany may have bethought herself. Bethinking herself of it, she fled to her father’s house at Salzburg; and when her father refused to help her—being one of those stupid old men to whom it is too much trouble to do anything definite—she fled, yet again, to Switzerland. But not alone, and not, it must be added, with the dentist. With her went her brother, the Archduke Leopold; after her came her son’s tutor, M. Giron. We will say what needs to be said about M. Giron in a moment; but a word about the Archduke Leopold must come first.
Leopold, like Louisa, was, at that hour the hero of a romance; though it was not his first romance, and was not to be his last. His first love had been Elvira, the daughter of the Spanish Pretender, Don Carlos. The proposed marriage had, for some reason, fallen through; and Elvira had consoled herself for her disappointment by eloping with a married man. Now, Leopold was determined to marry Wilhelmina Adamovics, the daughter of a post office official at Iglau: a minor lady of the theatre, with two sisters, one of them on the stage, and the other married to an unimportant employé in one of the State tobacco factories. He had been sent to Egypt, to be out of the way of temptation; but he had returned to the temptation as soon as he got back to Austria. For the sake of Wilhelmina Adamovics he was prepared, not only to take the humble name of Herr Wulfling, but also to sacrifice his allowance of forty thousand crowns a year and his pay as a colonel in the Austrian army. He and she, and Princess Louisa, and M. Giron—a most respectable young man, and the nephew of the Professor of Public and Administrative Law at Brussels—were to face the cold world together as a Romantic Quadruple Alliance. And, meanwhile, Princess Louisa was being pursued with Olympian thunders from the various homes which she had left: thunders which took the various forms of denunciation, punishment, and prayer.