Thus at the beginning of the war of 1866 he had, it was said, planned a campaign which might have changed the face of Europe at this end of the century. Instead he had to risk his life to execute manœuvres whose certain failure he foresaw. Every year, on the anniversary of the famous battle at which he had been wounded, he became literally insane for forty-eight hours. He was equally so whenever he heard mentioned the name of some great revolutionary soldier.
The Archduke did not forgive himself for his weakness in continuing the benefits attached to his title and rank when his tastes for abstract theories and the bitterness of his blighted destiny had led him to embrace the worst convictions of anarchistic socialism. With all that, prodigiously learned, a great reader, and a great conversationalist, he seemed to take revenge upon his own inconsistencies in conduct and in action by the acuteness of his criticism. Never did his lips express admiration without some disparaging and cruel reservation. Only scientific research, with its impregnable certitudes, appeared to communicate to this disordered intelligence a little repose, and, as it were, a steadier equilibrium.
Since the time when his disagreements with his wife had resulted in that species of moral divorce imposed by higher authority, his researches had absorbed him more than ever.
Retired at Cannes, where he was kept by the beginning of an attack of asthma, he had worked so hard that he had transformed himself from an amateur into a professional, and a series of important discoveries in electricity had given him a semi-reputation among specialists. His enemies had spread abroad the report, which Corancez had echoed, that he had simply published under his own name the work of Marcel Verdier, a graduate of the École Normale, attached for some years to his laboratory. In justice to the Archduke, it must be said that this calumny had not lessened the enthusiasm and jealous affection which the strange man felt for his assistant. For the final trait of this being, so wavering, uncertain, and, in consequence, profoundly, passionately unjust, was that his only attachments were infatuations. The story of his relations with his wife was the same as with all the relations formed in a life made up of alternations between passionate sympathy and inordinate antipathy for the same persons, and for no other cause than that incapacity of self-control, an incapacity which had made him, with all his gifts, tyrannical, unamiable, and profoundly unhappy, and, to borrow a vulgar but too justifiable epigram from Corancez, the great Failure of the Almanach de Gotha.
Madame de Carlsberg had had too long an experience with her husband's character not to understand it admirably, and she had suffered too much from it to avoid being, on her side, exceedingly unjust toward him. A bad temper is of all faults the one that women are least willing to pardon in a man, perhaps because it is the most opposed to the most virile of virtues, steadfastness.
She was too keen not to discern in that tormented face the approaching storm, as sailors read the face of the sky and the sea.
When on this evening of her return to Cannes, she found herself sitting at the table in front of the Archduke, she easily divined that the dinner would not end without some of those ferocious words with which he relieved his ill temper. At the first glance she understood that he had another violent grievance against her. What? Had he already been informed by that infamous Judas, in his feline manner, of how she had conducted herself at the gambling-table the night before, and was he, the democratic prince, with one of his customary resumptions of pride, preparing to make her feel that such Bohemian manners were not becoming to their rank? Was he offended—this inconsistency would not have astonished her any more than the other—because she had stayed at Monte Carlo all the week, without sending a word, except the despatch to the maître d'hôtel to announce her return.
Her heart was so full of pain at the thought of her resolution that she felt that kind of insensibility which follows moral suffering. So she did not pay attention during the dinner to the fierce sallies with which the Archduke, addressing Madame Brion, abused in turn Monte Carlo and the women of fashion, the Frenchmen on the coast, and the foreign colony—the wealthy class, in short, and all society. The livery servants were moving silently about the table, and their knee-breeches, silk stockings, and powdered wigs lent a contrast of inexpressible irony to the words of the master of this princely house. The aide-de-camp, with a wheedling mixture of politeness and perfidy, replied to the witticisms of the Archduke in such a way as to exasperate them, while Madame Brion, growing more and more red, submitted to the assault of insolent sarcasms, with the idea that she was suffering for Ely, who scarcely paid the slightest attention to such whimsical outbursts as this:—
"Their pleasures are the measure of a society, and that is what I like on this coast. You see in all their perfection the folly and the infamy of the plutocrats.—Their wives? They amuse themselves like jades, and the men like blackguards.—The taxes, the laws, the magistrates, the army, the clergy—all this social machinery which works for the profit of the rich, accomplishes what? The protection of a gilded debauchery of which we have a perfect specimen on this coast.—I admire the naïveté of socialists, who, before an aristocracy of this kind, talk of reforms! A gangrenous limb should simply be burnt and cut off. But the great fault of modern revolutionists is their respect. Happily the weakness and folly of the ruling class are exposing themselves everywhere with such magnificent ingenuousness that the people will end by perceiving them, and when the millions of workingmen who nourish this handful of parasites make a move—a move—ah! we'll laugh, we'll laugh!—Science will make it so easy to prepare for action. Make all the children of the proletariat electricians and chemists, and in a generation the thing will be done."
Whenever he proffered declarations of this order the Archduke glared around him with a physiognomy so menacing that no one thought of smiling at his paradoxes, as comical as they were ineffectual in these opulent surroundings. Those who were acquainted with the secrets of contemporary history remembered that a legend, though calumnious, associated the name of the "Red Archduke" with a mysterious attempt made upon the life of the head of his own family. The sanguinary dream of a demagogic Cæsarism was too plainly visible in those eyes, which never looked at one without a menace, and one felt one's self to be in the presence of a tyrant whom circumstances had thwarted, but by so little that one trembled.