Vienna, Tuesday

Yesterday a petit mot, brought by a shabby Dienstmann came from Princess Metternich, asking me to call; evidently the great lady is no longer served by the gorgeous palace lackeys who in former days ran her errands and did her bidding. I felt I had been remiss in not calling without awaiting an invitation, but the new people with whom I had my contacts were not at all likely to know her whereabouts and so I had assumed, and indeed hoped, that the Princess had been able to escape from the mourning, starving city and taken refuge at one of her many country estates. I knew, of course, that they were all heavily mortgaged, but I also knew that for the time being, at least, a moratorium had been declared on all these ugly legal processes. This afternoon I was setting out to pay the call which I knew was a duty (she had been most kind to the wandering correspondent in former days), and was sure would be a pleasure, when I was advised that the great lady was downstairs and that with the consideration that was her due the manager had shown her into a salon more suitable for her reception than the dark entresol which was my abode. I did not want to talk of the present distressing days we were living, that would not have been tactful, but looking back I am not at all sure that the turn I gave the conversation indicated much savoir faire. I had last seen the great lady in her box at the opera, with the magnificent Count Hübner at her beck and call, so I talked of those gala nights which in the words, the true words, of the half-Viennese poet Metastasio, “non si ritrovano piu.” Then, the broken, almost decrepit woman now before me was a charming, gracious princess and he the very ideal of a grand seigneur. So yielding to a sudden, perhaps an indiscreet, impulse, I asked:

“And how has it fared with your friend, Count Hiibner, in these dark days?”

“Josef has been lucky; he has escaped the catastrophe. He withdrew from the scene in which he played such a great role before the lights went out. Yes, Josef was lucky.”

“A remarkable man, a notable figure,” I commented. “He gave me his book describing his tour of the world—quite an adventure in those days. In it he made an excellent prophecy, which I now recall. He said: When England is in danger, the lion’s whelps will come together from the ends of the earth and save the mother country—even if the whole world is arrayed against her.’ ”

“Yes,” said the Princess, “he was a wise man. But, oh, I am glad he did not live to see the fulfillment of his prophecy. And now, my dear Redman, I shall tell you a secret: In America, and indeed in many other democratic countries, the belief was held that in our Austria no one could rise to power unless he was hoffähig and had the sixteen quarterings of noble birth. (Today we are ruled by buttermen and saddlers, alas!) As a general thing that charge was true, but there were a few exceptions, and of these Josef was the most notable.”

Here the Princess lowered her voice as though in fear of being overheard: “Though he became the leader of our nobility and a favorite of our Emperor-King, he sprang from very common clay. He was ennobled for his achievements and died as the leader of the House of Peers, but he was born a Hasenbredl, or something very plebeian like that, and his father kept a little grocery shop out in Mariahilf.

“How with these handicaps he was able to enter the Foreign Office no one, except himself, ever knew, for at that time I must admit it was a closed preserve to all but the curled and corseted darlings of the Court. He achieved many things in his remarkable career, but the way he surmounted this caste barrier was of all the most remarkable. Within a few months he attracted the attention and the favor of his exacting chief, Metternich. Then his ability won him rapid advancement. He was placed in charge of the negotiations which in 1848 brought about the abdication of the incompetent Emperor Ferdinand. By the skillful way in which he handled this delicate situation he won the confidence of young Francis Joseph. It was a fruitful contact and young Hübner profited by it—as did the young Emperor. When I saw him last in 1914? when the war clouds were gathering, the Emperor said to me:

“ ‘Pauline, how I wish our Hübner stood at my side; he would find a way, an honorable way, out of our dilemma.

For a moment now the unfortunate Princess turned away from the past with all its pomp and pageantry and ease and appraised the dark present and the still more somber future which opened before her and her class.

“How stupidly we managed it,” she exclaimed. “Our good Emperor was living in the last century, he had no understanding of the actual world, and Hübner was not there to advise him, to guide him. How stupidly we played our cards! We were sorry for what had happened to Franz and to Sophie. But could we recall them to life? And was it worth the lives of millions of brave young men to revenge them and to maintain ourselves in those pig-infested provinces which after all belonged to the Serbs? Franz was dead, past recall, and we sacrificed our best and bravest, for what I ask you? Well, they tell me it was to re-establish our prestige. A stupid Dummheit, say I, and those sly fellows in Berlin pushed us into it. Well, they have fallen into the pit they dug for others but Austria, our dear Austria, is lost. To have escaped that I would have given that contemptible Peter Karageorgevitch a Bus el, all the Vienna Madel would have given him a hug, yes, recht gerne.” When she wandered away from her courtly French the Princess spoke a Viennese that was the envy of the flower girls at Mme. Fossatti’s and the songbirds of the Prater cafés.

“Josef was always a friend of the English,” explained the Princess; “he understood their worth, he appreciated their immense reserves of strength. He kept Austria on friendly terms with England and her allies during the Crimean War, and he represented us at the Congress of Paris which ended this episode in 1856. But I must tell you that Josef, wide-awake and keen-sighted though he was generally, on one occasion was caught napping. But how unpredictable was Napoleon Third. Of that my husband and I myself had bitter experiences during our Paris mission in later years. Josef did not believe—to me he admitted it—that Napoleon was planning his Italian adventure that brought us into the first of our unfortunate wars. He told me that for a moment he could not believe his ears when at the famous historic diplomatic reception on New Year’s Day 1859 the Emperor of the French stood before him and said: ‘I regret that our relations with your government are not so good as they have hitherto been.’ Of course that meant war, and we were caught napping, as usual, and in 1914 we were simply playing our traditional role,” added the Princess, with some bitterness.¹

The dear old lady’s flow of reminiscences was here interrupted by a spell of coughing and this was followed by a severe chill. A leaky water bottle, a relic of the tourist days, was found by the hotel manager and army blankets were also available. An hour later a Red Cross ambulance turned up and, placing the Princess in it, I escorted her back to the now-dark palace out on the Rennweg, once the meeting place of all who counted in the society of the Holy Roman Empire.

* * *

To escape the importunities of men who would lure me, and above all my flag, into their endangered palaces, I not seldom slipped out of the hotel and closing my eyes to the misery all about me, which I could not help, I would walk through the Graben and around the Ring conjuring up memories of the friends and companions of long ago who have disappeared in the whirlwind of war. One, and certainly not the least of those with whom in happier days I had sauntered through these historic streets, was the Cavaliere Constantino Nigra, the Italian Ambassador. What an opportunity I had, and how completely I muffed it! I still recall the weariness in his voice as he replied when in my role of an ardent news gatherer I subjected him to the modem questio:

“Well, if ypu must talk about the Yugoslavi, this is what we Italians think.” Here was an affascinatore of the vanishing age which, as it recedes from view, exerts such a fascination upon all who are condemned to live in a prosaic world, and yet I talked to him about the Yugoslavi in an attempt to secure ephemeral copy about the ever-changing panorama of the Balkans!

After his retirement Nigra lived in Rome and Venice and was supposed to be writing his memoirs, which, however, so far as I know, have never been published. He certainly had a self-control which his great friend and chief, Cavour, lacked, and he was never misled by a feeling of gratitude. In the years in which I knew him, he was on the closest terms of intimacy with the Emperor Francis Joseph, although as a boy in the Bersagliere, before he was sent to Paris to win the friendship of the Empress Eugénie, he received at the battle of Rivoli a bullet in his right arm, and this wounded arm vexed him by always remaining a little stiff. Certainly it was not as supple as his tongue. He admitted to me on one occasion that he had made a few memoranda pour servir, but that he would never publish them. He confessed, however, that he was a secret poet and a diligent philologist.

In Vienna as elsewhere there was much gossip in these days as to what was behind the extraordinary promotion which Nigra received that brought the romantic-looking lieutenant of Bersagliere from the tented field to head the Italian mission in Paris as Ambassador—certainly at the time the most important post in the foreign service of the rising state. Concerning this enigma, and a few others, the aged and weather-beaten Countess P—, after a hearty dinner, and with a long black cigar in her mouth, would delight the young people, who gathered about her table in the dining room of the Imperial Hotel, with her memories of the days that are gone. Her language was rather Elizabethan in its coarse frankness (I shall permit myself to bowdlerize it).

The old Countess would generally introduce her hair-raising yarns with this profession of faith, followed by the frank admission that sometimes, like many others, she strayed from the narrow path of verified truth.

“Believe me, Kindershe would begin, “I try to keep separate Geschicte—which is history, from Geschicten—which is tittle-tattle. But I’m not sure I always succeed. Indeed, who can be? While Nigra had an insinuating way with the skirts, and his conquests were notorious, I would not venture to say that the wily Cavour sent him to Paris with the purpose of seducing the beautiful but neglected Empress Eugénie, but I do think that he reasoned this way. If Eugénie decides to punish her imperial husband for his notorious infidelities, it would be to the advantage of Piedmont to have the fascinating Nigra on hand to co-operate and assist her in her natural purpose, as any woman with hot blood in her veins will readily understand. But what actually happened, no one really knows except the good Lord, and what He knows is never communicated to us creeping terrestrial worms—and that is a good thing. If only He published memoirs!”