MY UNPLEASANT YOUTH
Father hard to get along with--Royal imaginations--Kings cursing
other kings--Poverty and pretense--Piety that makes children
suffer--Up at five to pray on cold stones--Chilblains and prayer.
CASTLE WACHWITZ, _March 11, 1893_.
It occurs to me that, if this is intended as a record of my
life--somewhat after the fashion of the _Margravine_ of Bayreuth's
Memoirs--I ought to tell about my girlhood.
Let me admit at once that my marriage to the Crown Prince of Saxony was,
politically speaking, a stroke of good luck. My father, the Grand-duke
of Tuscany, had been deprived of land and crown ten years before I was
born, and, though he likes to pose as a sovereign, he is, as a matter of
fact, a mere private gentleman of limited resources, whom the head of
the family, the Austrian Emperor, may coax or browbeat at his sweet
pleasure. If papa had been able to save his thronelet, I have no doubt
he would be a most agreeable man, open-handed and eager to enjoy life,
but instead of making the best of a situation over which he has no
control, he is forever fretting about his lost dignities and about "his
dear people" that don't care a snap for his love and affection. This
makes him a trying person to get along with,--mention a king or prince
in the full enjoyment of power, and father gets melancholy and calls
Victor Emanuel, the second of his name, a brigand.
He seldom or never visits his _confreres_ in the capitals of Europe, but
when I was a girl our gloomy palace at Salzburg saw much of the ghosts
of decaying royalty. The Dukes of Modena and Parma, the King of Hanover,
the _Kurfurst_ of Hesse, the King of Naples and other monarchs and
toy-monarchs that were handed their walking papers by sovereigns
mightier than themselves, visited us off and on, filling the air with
lamentations and cursing their fate.
And, like papa, all these _ex'es_ are ready to fly out of their very
skins the moment they notice the smallest breach of etiquette concerning
their august selves. If they had the power, the Imperial Highnesses
would execute any man that called them "Royal Highness," while the Royal
Highnesses would be pleased to send to the gallows persons addressing
them as "Highness" only.
And papa has other troubles, and the greatest of them, lack of money.
Poverty in private life must be hard enough, but a poor king, obliged to
keep up the pretense of a court, is to be pitied indeed.
Add to what I have said, father's share of domestic unhappiness. Mother
is a Bourbon of Parma, serious-minded and hard like my father-in-law,
and almost as much of a religious fanatic.
Oh, how we children suffered by the piety of our mother. There were
eight of us, myself the oldest of five girls, and seven years older than
my sister Anna. Yet this baby, as soon as she could walk, was obliged to
rise, like myself, at five o'clock summer and winter to go to the chapel
and pray. The chapel was lighted only by a few wax candles and, of
course, was unheated like the corridors of the palace. And like them it
was paved with stones. Many a chilblain I carried away from kneeling on
those granite flags.
And the stupidity of the thing! Instead of saying our prayers we
murmured and protested, and as soon as we were old enough we slipped
portions of novels in our prayer-books, which we read while mass was
said. That trick was not unfraught with danger though, for mother's
spies were always after us, and the bad light made reading difficult.
I am sure that if mother had found us out, she would have whipped us
within an inch of our lives.