On November 17th he deplores the death of Colonel Valentine Baker.
The Empress now arrived at Miramar for a little rest and seclusion.
His journal continues:—
"On the 1st of December my wife and I, accompanied by Dr. Grenfell Baker, returned to Abbazia to avoid the fearful Boras of Trieste, and to shelter in the supposed mild climate of the Austrian Riviera. It is only a few hours' rail distant, but you must rise at four a.m., though with a decent train it could be done in two hours. We were, however, doomed to disappointment. On December 7th the snow began and lasted two months; the earth was covered, and the pine and bay trees, the local boast of the place, were so broken and bent under its weight, that many of the undergrowths did not recover. There are two sorts of cur-orts (health resorts); the first is when everything is planned out for the comfort and cheeriness of the invalid, as in Switzerland and the Riviera, and the second one is when ambition upstarts barely out of its swaddling clothes, unformed and without a prospect of ever becoming better. Then they are expensive, uncomfortable, and are merely traps laid by money-grubbers for unhappy invalids, who ought never to go where they cannot rough it, but where healthy people may manage to live in dullness and discomfort, and of this category are Abbazia and Hammám R'irha in N. W. Africa.
"At Abbazia you rise early, drink coffee, walk, breakfast at twelve in the restaurant, siesta, walk or drive, dine at 7.30, and retire to your bedroom. There is no public room or meeting-place, no newspapers, except in a tiny room. There is charming society, the Austrian and Hungarian cousinhood, some of which we enjoyed very much; but it is a clique. The Jews and Americans doré theirs. The harmless and inoffensive people who go there for imaginary baths and waters creep in to meals and out again and disappear. Hence a serious occupation or a study is a necessity. I got Father Josef Janc, the Catholic priest, to come and read German with me in the evenings, and I had my literature—my two last volumes of supplemental 'Arabian Nights;' my wife the same. We varied our time by driving to Castua, Moschenizza, Ika, Sovrana, and to Fiume to see the Count and Countess Hoyos and family and Mr. and Mrs. Whitehead (whose father gave us an occasional field-day with the torpedos), and our colleague, the English Consul Mr. Faber and his family. We walked, drove, lounged about smoking in the grounds. The views are beautiful. The winds are not boisterous, as at Trieste. Fiume is an hour away, and the boundary between my jurisdiction and Faber's lies halfway—Abbazia being in my jurisdiction. Fiume is as dull as ditchwater, with one fifth-class hotel. Your room in the hotel at Abbazia may be comfortable, but the food becomes worse and worse as the visitors increase, and the sanitary arrangements, the bread and water, are fearfully bad.
"To give some idea of its primitive state in 1887-88, although I had been Consul here for fifteen years, they refused to take my cheque, because 'they did not know who "Coutts" was.' There is no promenoir, no wandelbahn, no kur-salon, in fact no public rooms. There is a fine large dining-room, where, unless you are an archduke, you may not smoke for fear of spoiling the gilding; consequently you are driven into a kind of estaminet, where at 8.30 you can cut the reek of tobacco and food with a knife. A head director often visits Abbazia, but he is never at home to strangers, knowing that they only seek him to make complaints. The management is under an Austrian, not a Swiss. The appointment is always given to an employé of the Südbahn, which owns the place, and not to a hôtelier, therefore he naturally does not know his work. And Austria in such matters is fifty years behind Switzerland. The British grumbler (who has made Switzerland) is still more almost unknown in the dual kingdom. The dullness of life is almost incredible, and what gaieties there are—the Christmas tree, the New Year's Day ball, the concert of Tyrolians, and the gypsy band—as in all irregulated establishments, turned everything topsy-turvy, and converted stagnation into utter misery."
We had a visit at Abbazia from the Dowager Lady Galway, and Richard had an attack of gout when the snow came on, and on the 19th we had an earthquake.
On the 14th he got another slight attack of gout in both feet. Gout now became a trimestral attack, which the doctor considered to be a safety-valve for the head and general health, provided it was a healthy gout in the feet. The thermometer was at zero, and we had almost perpetually such awful snow for two months, and the comforts were so primitive, that we disliked it, and we wrote together a little pamphlet on it.
On the 9th of January, 1888, we were made very unhappy by reading Lady Marian Alford's death in the papers, which we felt very badly. She was the kindest friend we had in London, and Richard said, "I believe by the time we get back to London nearly all our old friends will be dead."
It is a custom here on Shrove Tuesday night to ring all the church bells at eleven o'clock, to make the rich people leave off eating meat preparatory to Ash Wednesday (Lent), and to give the poor time to eat up the refuse before midnight.
Richard was gouty off and on all this snow-time. On the 18th the Crown Prince, poor Prince Rudolf, came to the hotel and stayed forty-eight hours; on the 21st we were further put in sorrow by the news of the death, at the early age of forty-one, of dear Anna Kingsford. She was a lady doctor, Anti-vivisectionist, advocate of vegetarianism, President of the Theosophical Society, and founder of the Hermetic Society for the study of religion and philosophy. Both Richard and I became very nervous as the 26th came round, the anniversary of his fit, but it passed off without any trouble.