Habsburgs and Wittelsbachs—Which is the madder House?—Insanity
of the Empress Elizabeth’s cousin, Ludwig II. of Bavaria—His
eccentricities—His tragic death—Grief of the Empress—Suicide of
Elizabeth’s brother-in-law, the Comte de Trani—Tragic death of the
Archduchess Elizabeth.
Archduke Maximilian was dead, and Francis Joseph had to humble himself
to the Indians and half-breeds, and beg their permission to fetch his
brother’s body to Europe and bury it in the tombs of the Habsburgs.
Archduchess Charlotte was stark, staring mad, and all hope of the
restoration of her reason had been abandoned. There was to be no
other tragedy quite so tragic, or quite so intimate, until that of
Meyerling, to which we shall quickly come; but there were intervening
tragedies, tragic and intimate enough, which hit Francis Joseph through
his cousins of Bavaria. Notably there was the tragedy of Elizabeth’s
cousin—who was also Francis Joseph’s cousin—King Ludwig II.
It is a question sometimes debated by the members of the two
families, whether the Wittelsbachs are madder than the Habsburgs, or
the Habsburgs madder than the Wittelsbachs. According to Countess
Marie Larisch, who speaks for the Wittelsbachs, the difference is
that “with the Habsburgs insanity usually shows itself in depravity,
self-effacement, and common marriages, while, in the case of the
Wittelsbachs, it transforms the sufferer into a romantic being who
is quite above the banalities of everyday life, but who occasionally
deteriorates and becomes a gross feeder”; but that is not quite a
true antithesis. Common marriages, as Countess Marie calls them—and
the marriage of her own father, the brother of the Empress Elizabeth,
to the actress, Henrietta Mendel, falls in the category—are not
necessarily unromantic; and Wittelsbachs, as well as Habsburgs, have
contracted them. Still, as an introduction to the story of the career
of Ludwig II., the contrast is not without its point. Ludwig was as
mad as a hatter; and he has also been spoken of as “the last of the
Romantics”—the last, at all events, of the Romantics who have sat on
thrones.
The beginning of his tragedy was the breaking off of his engagement to
the Empress Elizabeth’s sister, Sophie; and the ease with which he was
manœuvred out of that engagement, as the result of a Court intrigue,
is, in itself, a sufficient proof that his intelligence was none too
strong. It was represented to him, quite untruly, that his affianced
bride had been flirting with his Master of the Horse, Count Holnstein.
The Count and the Princess were inveigled into being photographed
together; and this testimony of “the camera which cannot lie” was
brought to Ludwig’s notice. There was also some story of a ring which
Count Holnstein was observed to be wearing, and which was believed to
have been given him by the Princess, though, as a matter of fact, it
had been given to him by an actress who had stolen it from the Princess.
That was the bait; and Ludwig walked into the trap and took it. He
made no inquiries, and asked for no explanations. Instead of doing
so, he made unsatisfactory excuses for postponing his wedding-day;
and when Duke Maximilian charged him with trifling with his affianced
bride’s affections, he lost his temper, smashed Sophie’s bust, tore
up Sophie’s portraits, and declared that Sophie was welcome to marry
anyone she liked provided that she did not marry him. So all was over,
and they were both unhappy; and it does not seem that Sophie found
perfect bliss in her subsequent union to the Duc d’Alençon. The day
came when Sophie clamoured for a divorce: not because she had any
tangible grievances, but because she had conceived the idea that she
would like to marry a doctor in practice at Munich, and devote herself
to philanthropic activities. She had to be kept under restraint for
a season at a private asylum at Graetz, already referred to as “the
rendezvous of princes,” because of the large number of august lunatics
whom it harboured: among others, the Duchess of Augustenburg, Pedro
of Saxe-Coburg, whose mania was a dread of poison, and Charles of
Lichtenstein, who had gone mad on account of his failure to meet the
woman of his dreams.
And Ludwig, meanwhile, was so mad that there could be no mistake
about his madness, though it was a kind of madness which gained him,
as has been said, the title of the Last of the Romantics. He lived,
like William Beckford, in a solitude of fantastic splendour. He had
the table laid, in an empty banqueting hall, for ghostly guests, and
fancied that he was entertaining Marie-Antoinette, and Catherine of
Russia, and Hamlet, and Julius Cæsar. He caused command performances
of the best operas to be given to himself alone in an empty theatre.
He sailed about the Starnberg Lake in a gondola, towed by a swan. He
caused eminent actors to recite to him while he ate, and he went on
eating, and kept them reciting, until five o’clock in the morning. He
outraged the feelings of the Court by bestowing titles of nobility on
his tailor and his barber; and the end of it all was that keepers took
the place of courtiers, and a Regent was appointed.
[Illustration: KING LUDWIG II. OF BAVARIA]
The story goes that Elizabeth refused to believe that he was mad, and,
after vainly imploring Francis Joseph to insist upon his release,
engaged in a plot to rescue him. The King was to dive into the lake,
and swim across it, and a carriage, with swift horses, ready harnessed,
was to be waiting to carry him far away from his keepers to a place
of safety. It sounds like a story built on a foundation of careless
emotional talk; and the end, at any rate, came differently, and
somewhat mysteriously. Ludwig persuaded his doctor to send the keepers
away, declaring that their presence worried him; and the doctor was
a muscular man who believed that he could trust himself to cope with
any emergency. Strong as he was, however, Ludwig was still stronger;
and when the keepers returned, they found that both the King and the
physician had been drowned, after a struggle, of which there was
abundant evidence. Whether the King had murdered his physician, in
order that he might be free to escape, or the physician had perished in
attempting to frustrate the King’s attempt at suicide, remains to this
hour uncertain.
There is a further story to the effect that the Empress Elizabeth saw
the tragedy in a dream, and awoke, screaming, to learn that her dream
was a true vision; but though the dream itself is well accredited, one
may suspect that legend has taken a liberty with the date. There is
something characteristic, however, and therefore probably true, in the
report of the words which the Empress is declared to have spoken as she
bent over her cousin’s corpse:
“Leave the King here! Leave him in his mortuary chapel! He is not
dead. He is only pretending to be dead, in order that he may be left
in peace, and that no one may be able to torture him any more.”
The conception of life as a torture which must be stoically endured
had, by that time, grown upon the Empress; and there were still other
trials in store for her, which were to confirm it, even before the
tragic day on which her sister was to meet her death in the fire at the
Bazaar de la Charité at Paris. There was to be another suicide in the
family, that of the Comte de Trani, at Geneva. The Archduke Joseph’s
son, Archduke Ladislas, was to be killed, accidentally, while shooting.
The Archduchess Elizabeth, daughter of the Archduke Albert, and
granddaughter of the Archduke Charles, who had fought so well against
Napoleon, was to perish in a still more tragic accident.
She was in her ball-dress of lace and muslin, leaning out of one of
the windows at Schönnbrunn, smoking a cigarette. It was a forbidden
pleasure; and hearing her father’s footstep, she made haste to hide the
cigarette, first covering it with her hand, and placing it behind her.
The Archduke stopped to talk to her, and a moment later the ball-dress
was in flames. He could not reach her, and so could do nothing to help
her. She ran, shrieking, down the corridor, and the draught fanned the
flames. Before they could be extinguished, she was burnt almost to
death; and though they placed her in a bath of oil, and took her to
Vienna, the best physicians could do nothing for her, and she died in
agony a few days later.
There we have another example of the poignant sorrows to which Francis
Joseph has been condemned through the sufferings of members of his
family; and now we come to the greatest tragedy of all—the tragedy
which was to deprive him of his only son, the Crown Prince Rudolph.