The “terrible year” of the Habsburg annals—Proceedings of Princess
Louisa of Tuscany—The taint inherited from the Bourbons of
Parma—Princess Louisa’s suitors—Her Marriage to Prince Frederick
August of Saxony—She bicycles with the dentist—She runs away to
Switzerland with her brother, the Archduke Leopold, and her children’s
tutor—Attitude of the Courts towards her escapade—Official notice on
the subject in the _Wiener Zeitung_.
The “terrible year” in the family annals of the House of Habsburg
began towards the end of 1902. Before then, though many Archdukes and
Archduchesses had caused trouble, they had raised the flag of rebellion
independently—one at a time. Now we see a brother and a sister
making a simultaneous and concerted demonstration; Princess Louisa of
Tuscany embarking on the adventure which united her, for a season (and
still legally unites her) to Signor Toselli, and the Archduke Leopold
Ferdinand adopting the style of “Herr Wulfling” in order to be free to
follow the promptings of an impulsive heart.
Princess Louisa has told her own story. It is the story, of course,
of a woman placed on her defence, replying to charges, making out a
case for herself, and it therefore requires to be read critically;
but the holes which criticism can pick in it do not affect the general
verisimilitude of the picture. Most of the facts, after all, were too
notorious to be disputed. All that was possible was a manifesto of
motives; and Princess Louisa’s exposition of these was entitled to an
attentive and respectful hearing. She, at least, might be supposed to
know why she did the things which the whole world knew her to have
done. It may be, indeed, that she wrote some of her pages as one who
desired to deceive; but that desire only related, at the most, to a few
points of detail. The net impression of the narrative is one of winning
candour. Princess Louisa could not, of course, criticise herself from a
detached stand-point; but she explained herself.
There seems, at the first blush, to be a certain confusion of thought
in her explanations. One cannot always make out whether she is excusing
her conduct on the ground that she is a Habsburg and therefore mad, or
patting herself on the back for having followed the sane and sensible,
as well as the romantic course; but it is also a little difficult to
make out which of the two lines would have been the proper one for her
to take. There is a point of view—it has already been expounded in
these pages—from which her precipitate descent from dizzy heights of
grandeur presents some of the aspects of Christian’s flight from the
City of Destruction; but it must in justice be added that Princess
Louisa, having been born in the City of Destruction, and having spent
her impressionable years in it, had herself acquired some of the
characteristics of the inhabitants. The true picture, perhaps, is that
of an abnormal character stimulated by a sane instinct to sudden,
unexpected, and eccentric action.
It was not on her father’s side only that there was insanity in her
house. Her mother was a Bourbon Parma; and about the Bourbons of Parma,
Princess Louisa neither has, nor affects to have, any illusions.
They are madder than the Habsburgs, and have none of their redeeming
qualities. The character sketches which Princess Louisa gives us of
her maternal great-grandfather, Duke Charles of Parma, and Lucca, and
of her uncle, Duke Robert of Parma, are sketches of lunatics; though
the instinctive perception that the royal family party was a City of
Destruction from which it was imperative to escape for self-realisation
in the atmosphere of romance appears in her account of his relations
with his Duchess, who “bored him to tears”:—
“She was _dévote_ and excessively plain, and whenever he returned from
a visit to Parma, he was wont to exclaim: ‘_Il faut absolument que
j’aille me retremper auprès d’une jolie femme après ce tombeau de mon
illustre compagne._’”
Nor is that all; for Princess Louisa does not exhaust the subject. She
might also have spoken of certain Parma cousins—nineteen children of
a single father. Some sixteen of them are said to be, or to have been,
of feeble intellect. One hears of one of them wandering about in the
pathetic belief that she is Marie-Antoinette, carrying an orange with
her, and insisting that it is her head which has recently been cut
off. It is not difficult to picture Princess Louisa thinking her way to
the conclusion that to be of royal birth was to come of tainted stock.
She would be more likely to come to that conclusion if one may assume
that the seeds of morbidity were latent in her even when her youthful
high spirits concealed them.
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.
First of all, there was the official notification of her departure.
It said nothing about the peril of the lunatic asylum from which she
had escaped, but simply charged her with having “ignored all her
family ties and proceeded abroad.” Then came the Court Chaplain, who,
similarly avoiding all reference to the essential fact, invited the
prayers of the congregation for the Princess’s return to “virtuous
courses.” He must have known that she could only return to those
courses at the peril of her liberty; but he may be assumed to have
taken the view that it is the function of a Court Chaplain to pray
as he is told. Next followed the intimation that the Crown Prince of
Saxony was considering by what means he could obtain the divorce to
which, according to the law of his Church, he clearly was not entitled;
and there also came a telegram from Grand Duke Ferdinand—“Nous avons
d’autres enfants, nous ne pouvons nous occuper de toi”—and finally
Francis Joseph himself took the steps which he considered incumbent on
him. The following notice appeared in the _Wiener Zeitung_ on January
28, 1903:—
“We learn that the Emperor, in virtue of the powers vested in him
as Head of the Reigning House, has considered it incumbent on him
to direct that all the rights, honours, and privileges hitherto
appertaining to the Consort of the Crown Prince of Saxony as an
Archduchess of Austria by birth shall be suspended, and that this
suspension shall also be maintained in the event of the impending
divorce proceedings leading to the results provided for in paragraph
1577 of the Civil Code for the Empire; that the Princess shall again
receive her original family names, and that she shall accordingly
be prohibited henceforth from making use of the title of Imperial
Princess, Archduchess, or Royal Princess of Hungary, etc., and from
using her ancestral archducal arms with the archducal emblems.
Furthermore, she shall no longer have any claim to the title of
Imperial and Royal Highness, and all rights connected with such title
shall in future be relinquished by her.”
What does it all amount to?
On cold analysis it amounts to this: that, if Princess Louisa could
have been caught, she would have been placed in an asylum on the
assumption that she was mad, and that, as she could not be caught, she
was to be punished, _in contumaciam_, on the assumption that she was
sane. Whether she was actually sane or mad may be a point which it is
beyond the province of Francis Joseph’s biographer to settle; but he
may, at least, permit himself to point out that she cannot have been,
at one and the same time, both responsible and irresponsible for her
actions, and that the readiness of the heads of both her own and her
adopted family to pass from the one assumption to the other, to suit
their convenience, betokens a shiftiness incompatible with the doctrine
that Kings, Princes, and Emperors are necessarily upright, honest, or
honourable men.
We will let that point go, however, and turn back to follow the
fortunes of the members of the Romantic Quadruple Alliance in
Switzerland, where their war against the House of Habsburg was
witnessed by innumerable war correspondents from two hemispheres.