Queen Victoria and Marie Theresia
Rarely, indeed, does the student in history come across two personalities so entirely in unison at almost all points as those of the Austrian Empress Marie Theresia and our own Queen Victoria. Both were essentially great Sovereigns, both essentially good women. Our own Queen exercised an authority which was in one sense even more remarkable than that of the Empress; for whereas the latter was a commanding figure in an age when the glamour of autocracy had not yet faded away, Queen Victoria, by sheer force of character, maintained the prestige of royalty against the flowing tide of a democracy which was becoming daily more and more self-asserting. Indeed, she did more than maintain it—she summoned it from the dead; for in the two reigns which preceded hers it had perished, as men then thought, without hope of resurrection.
In all save their outward appearance the likeness between the two august ladies was such that it almost seemed as if the one was the reincarnation of the other; as if the soul of the mighty Austrian had passed into the Queen. An earnest and deep piety was the foundation of both characters, though they would have been utterly opposed in the form of its exercise. Marie Theresia was the faithful daughter of the Church of Rome, Queen Victoria the no less faithful and loving child of the Reformation. In both religion was a passion.
There has been a recent republication of the “Memoirs of Frau Pichler,” the Viennese poetess and authoress, whose salon at the end of the eighteenth and during the early part of the nineteenth century was so famous that people said that there were two things which no stranger coming to Vienna could afford to miss seeing—St. Stephen’s Cathedral and Frau Pichler. Those memoirs, admirably edited and furnished with copious notes by one Emil Blümml, throw an interesting light upon the private and intimate life of Marie Theresia, and as we follow these reminiscences, we cannot but be struck by the many links in the chain of similarity of which I have spoken above.
Both Queen Victoria and the Empress were deeply penetrated with that sense of the Royal Caste which is too apt to raise an insurmountable boundary against social intercourse. But if Royalty itself stands apart, there is also an instinctive aloofness from it in those who are of high position but yet subjects; so that the intimacies of Sovereigns and royal personages are found rather among their personal attendants than among the nobles and powerful officials who form their courts. Especially is this bound to be the case where princesses are concerned. Their tirewomen and dressers are far more capable than chamberlains and secretaries of state of judging their private idiosyncrasies; so, in order to know what manner of woman this or that queen may have been, we are fain to climb the backstairs—where such a way is open to us, as it is in the case of Marie Theresia.
The adoption of Frau Pichler’s mother by the great Empress is just such a pathetic story, not without a pinch of the salt of romance, as would have touched the kind heart of Queen Victoria, and, indeed, we can well fancy her in like circumstances behaving exactly as Marie Theresia did.
In the month of May, 1744, the Wolfenbüttel Regiment of Infantry was moved from Hungary to Vienna. A poor old lieutenant, fifty years of age, named Friedrich Hieronymus, a widower, had contrived—with what pains and anxiety who can tell?—to take with him on the march his only child, a little daughter aged four. Hardly had he reached Vienna when he caught a chill, inflammation of the lungs set in and he died, full of terror for the future of his little Charlotte, whom he was to leave penniless and destitute in what was to him a foreign country, among strangers professing a religion which was abhorrent to him—for he was a Protestant. His last tender words were for her. “Poor child! what will become of thee?” Throughout her long life those painfully uttered words, torn from the dying man’s soul, remained graven in her heart, unforgettable. His brother officers, good charitable souls, probably themselves none too well furnished with this world’s goods, took charge of the babe, who became from thenceforth the “fille du Régiment.” The pathetic story came to the ears of Marie Theresia, who had a soft place in her heart for the Wolfenbüttel Regiment, which was named after the family of her mother, the Empress Elizabeth. She sent for the child, but the officers of the regiment, deeply imbued with a sense of loyalty to their dead comrade, did all that was in their power to hinder the babe from falling into the hands of an aggressively religious Catholic.
They hid her in a suburb of Vienna, but the Empress’s agents were too clever for them, and the child was brought to Court, where, as the Wolfenbüttlers had foreseen, she was brought up in the strictest doctrines of the Roman Church, under the charge of a Spanish lady, Isabella Duplessis, and was specially educated with a view to entering the Empress’s service as tirewoman. Her life was now very different from what might have been expected for the baby that followed the drum. She became the playmate of the Imperial children, amongst them of the unhappy Queen Marie Antoinette, and so the years went by in all the luxury of a sumptuous court.
Little Charlotte proved herself worthy of her good fortune; indeed, so quick and nimble-witted was she, that when she had reached the age of thirteen she was already deemed fit to enter upon her duties about her great mistress, not only as tirewoman, but also as reader. To this end she had been early handed over to the care of Gräfin Fuchs, the tenderly-loved nurse and governess of the Empress, who had such an affection for her that when she died she was buried in the vault of the Capucins, the last home of the Imperial Family.
In spite of the advice given by Hippolochus to Glaucus, it is not always an unmixed advantage so to excel as to make oneself indispensable. This little Charlotte soon found out, for her skill in hairdressing was such that the Empress, who was so particular about her hair that she would sometimes have it done and undone four or five times before she was satisfied, could not do without her. Marie Theresia, who was without a spark of coquetry and had neither eyes nor thought for any man but her husband, had all a woman’s instinctive love of display, and took a great delight in her beauty for its own sake.
None of the other tirewomen had Charlotte’s cunning fingers, and the same thing applied to her reading. German, French, Italian and Latin came to the child with equal facility, and all these were found in the dispatches which she had to read aloud to the Empress. French and Italian were the languages of the Opera and of the elegances of the Court. On one occasion when the Empress was expecting a baby, she had a bet with Count Dietrichstein as to the sex of the infant. She wagered for a girl, he for a boy—the Empress won. The Count sent her a piece of porcelain with a portrait of himself kneeling, and these words written by Metastasio, the Poet Laureate of the Court:
“Perdo, è ver, l’ augusta figlia
A pagar m’ ha condannato,
Ma s’ è ver che a te somiglia
Tutto il mondo ha guadagnato.”
A pretty compliment! The babe, Marie Antoinette, born to be Queen of Beauty and of Sorrow, was worthy of it.
Talking of languages, it is strange to read of how small account German was at the Court of Vienna. The Emperor Francis I., as a Lorrainer, hardly understood it and never spoke it, and the people of his service were mostly Lorrainers or Netherlanders. The Empress herself did not speak correct German; she used the vulgarest Viennese patois, and Frau Pichler tells an amusing story of how a young Saxon lady, who had been appointed as one of her mother’s colleagues, came to her in despair one morning to beg her help. The Empress had ordered her to go and fetch “das blabe Buich.” What could her Majesty mean? Charlotte laughed, and told her to go and get “das blaue Buch.” The Saxon girl, Karoline Mercier, would not believe her—but the blue book it was. If she could not master German, the Empress, like Queen Victoria, was familiar with French and Italian. Our Queen was very fond of showing her fluency in German and French, and on her drives would often stop her carriage for the joy of a chat with some poor Italian organ-grinder in his own soft tongue. Latin, which the Empress knew intimately, was the means of communication with her Hungarian magnates. She loved the language and them, for so she was reminded of the day—the 11th of September, 1741—when she, threatened by half Europe with the loss of the states which the hostile Powers had once guaranteed, went to Pressburg, met the nobles of Hungary in their parliament, and appealed to them for protection for herself and her child, the future Emperor Joseph. Her cry for help was not in vain. Touched to the quick by the sight of the lovely weeping Empress, the proud Magyars, old and young, the flower of a noble chivalry, drew their swords and swore to die for the beautiful woman, who was their King. A universal conscription was decreed. It was a triple triumph, upon which she loved to look back—the triumph of Virtue, of Right, and last, but not least, of Beauty.
The service of Marie Theresia’s handmaidens was no sinecure. In summer she rose at five o’clock—in winter a little later—and rang for her girls, who had to appear fully dressed in hoop-petticoats, and with the marvellous edifices of hair which the fashion of the day exacted. To achieve this, the young ladies had to get up in the middle of the night, and this was especially hard upon Charlotte, who had night after night to read aloud for long hours after the Empress had gone to bed. But Charlotte was so quick, and knew the Empress’s taste so well that, whatever happened, she must be present at the morning toilette, and ready to attend upon her mistress during and after supper—a light meal, of which Her Majesty always partook in her private room. Busy worker as the Empress was, she seems to have depended entirely upon having her State papers read aloud to her, and so Charlotte became acquainted very early in life with many important State secrets. But she was a discreet little soul and knew how to hold her tongue, and so retained the confidence of her Imperial mistress so long as that wonderful woman lived.
The portrait which Frau Pichler has left behind her of the great lady, partly drawn from her mother’s stories of her, partly from her own memories of the days when as a little girl she used to be taken by special command to Schönbrunn or the Burg in Vienna, is fascinating. In her youth the Empress had been extremely beautiful, and though in middle life she grew large and unwieldy, and had to be taken up to her rooms in a lift—wafted through the air by fairies, as it seemed to the child whom she took with her—she retained to the end that wonderful gift of grace and of what is called “presence,” which is so keenly felt and so impossible to describe. Kindly she was, too, and of a motherly sweetness with children. Frau Pichler tells us how on one occasion, when the Empress had sent her to an adjoining room on some small errand, she slipped and fell, breaking her fan, and burst into tears. The kind Empress hurried after her, comforted her, and gave her a new fan—a precious relic, to be treasured as we may well believe for a lifetime.
Marie Theresia was the daughter of the Emperor Charles the Sixth, who, being without a male heir, named her as his successor by “pragmatic sanction”—a Byzantine term for an ordinance issued arbitrarily by the head of an empire or kingdom. She succeeded to the various thrones of her father on his death in 1740, and associated with herself as Emperor her husband, Duke Francis of Lorraine, who had been her play-fellow and whom she had married in 1736. In spite of his numerous infidelities, she adored him. Albeit, so far as politics were concerned, he was no great help to her; so though he bore the title of Emperor, she remained unaided at the helm. Hers was no easy task. In spite of scraps of paper and guarantees, a coalition between Prussia, France, Bavaria, the Palatinate, Saxony, Sardinia, Naples and Spain—a pack of hungry war-dogs, all tearing at her on every side, each howling for his pound of flesh—threatened to devour her. She had only England and Hungary on her side; but, like Abdul Hamid in our own times, she could count upon the quarrels between her foes. Prussia was the arch-enemy. Prussia, which we are now told, was the original subject of the “Hymn of Hate,” written, teste the Morning Post, by the revolutionary Herweg in 1841, for which Herr Lissauer, who substituted England for Prussia, has been decorated by a grateful Kaiser.12 Prussia, of which Heine wrote: “I utterly loathe this Prussia, this stiff, hypocritical, sanctimonious Prussia, this Tartuffe among the nations.”13
Like our own Queen, Marie Theresia was essentially a woman of business. She personally directed the affairs of her Empire, issuing her commands to her ministers, and the little orphan Charlotte, as we have seen, for many years acted as her secretary and reader. The duties were no sinecure, and although no doubt the position of a young lady of the Court was one of great luxury in some respects and greatly coveted, there were also some hardships with which those chosen maids had to put up. The Empress was large and corpulent; she could not bear warmth, and so her ladies had to perform their duties in a thorough draught, even when snow was being driven in at the windows, falling on to the State papers which Charlotte was reading aloud to her.
In spite of her dread of heat, so long as her limbs would carry her, the Empress, devout and exact in all religious observances, would on Corpus Christi day, in the height of summer, piously accompany the sacred procession on foot. One broiling June day she came back from this ceremony violently heated and tired, having walked half across the town under the sun, had to be undressed, and have her hair taken down, and sat in a thorough draught, eating strawberries and drinking lemonade, while Charlotte brushed and combed out her hair, which was so wet that the poor girl had to keep wiping her hands. How Marie Theresia would have enjoyed one of Queen Victoria’s picnics on Lochnagar in a November blizzard!
One of the difficulties with which those responsible for the management of the public ceremonials in which our Queen took part had to deal, was the regulation of the temperature. The enduring of heat was to her as to Marie Theresia, a misery and an impossibility. She could put up with any other discomfort and fatigue; but heat was unbearable. The Emperor Joseph, who did not inherit his mother’s imperviousness to cold, had to visit her in furs. Kaunitz, a privileged minister, was the only person who dared to shut the window. “How do you manage when you go to Balmoral?” I once asked Lord Beaconsfield, who was a chilly mortal. “The Queen is very gracious,” was the answer, “she excuses me from going there.”
In dealing with the affairs of State both rulers showed themselves to be women of strong character and indefatigable industry. Their methods, of necessity, differed widely. The one, as I have said above, was an autocrat; the other, a constitutional Sovereign, deeply imbued with the sense of her own limitations, and yet such a mistress of public business, of constitutional law and of precedent, that she often dominated the councils of her ministers, many of whom recognized in her their guide and instructress in cases of difficulty. Nowhere was this more evident than in her treatment of foreign affairs. There she was no more a negligible quantity than Marie Theresia had been; no matter who might be Secretary of State, there was always a very real power in the background, and that power was the Queen. It would be easy to multiply instances, but we need only point to two cases: the Danish Duchies’ question in 1864, where, in obedience to what she believed to be the wishes of her dead husband, she took what is now shown to have been an unfortunate line; and, secondly, the dispute with the United States on the Trent question in 1861, where she, with the assistance of the Prince Consort, used all her influence to hinder what would have been a disastrous war, an unthinkable calamity.
The mention of the Prince Consort brings into strong relief two pictures, in which it is difficult to say whether we are more startled by the likeness or puzzled by the violence of the contrasts. In both cases we see a marriage of true love, in each of which a prince of a small reigning family was raised, not for reasons of State, but by pure affection, to share the glories of a vast empire and a throne before which countless peoples bowed. There the likeness between the two husbands comes to an end.
In Prince Albert Queen Victoria found not only a faithful and devoted lover, but a helpmate, who was ever at her side, and, young as he was, shared the heavy burthens which she had to bear, and brought to her councils all the store of wisdom and statesmanship with which he had been endowed by that astute mentor, Baron Stockmar. Not the least part of his merit was his self-effacement; yet in spite of it he aroused unreasoning jealousies, for which his intimacy and the Queen’s with the same old German physician was in no small measure accountable. The Emperor Francis, on the contrary, was of no assistance to Marie Theresia. Strikingly handsome, physically as grand a man perhaps as Prince Albert, he had none of the Prince’s serious qualities. He was essentially and fatally charming, but of politics and the affairs of State he took no heed; all that he cared for were his flirtations, his bric-à-brac, and his collection of coins and medals.
He was what is called “a dangerous man,” and when “a dangerous man” is an Emperor to boot—Well! But such as he was, his Empress loved him with all her soul, content to take upon her own shoulders the drudgery of sovereignty, and leaving to him its gewgaws and the enjoyment of a brilliant idleness. If she ever knew of them she forgave him his infidelities, and, like our Queen, worshipping the ground upon which her husband trod, she never looked at another man, nor cared for any admiration but his. As Frau Pichler rather quaintly observes, had she done so her maidens must have known of it. We are told that no man is a hero to his valet. For a woman to be virtuous to her Abigail, she must be as chaste as Diana before those compromising visits to Endymion, of which we may be sure that her nymphs were well aware.
No breath of scandal ever dimmed the mirror of the Empress’s fair fame. Queen Victoria herself was not more stern in the repression of anything approaching loose or unseemly talk. She considered it to be the duty of persons in high places to repress any lack of decorum, and their privilege to set an example to be followed by others. To her daughter, the Queen of Naples, she wrote: “It is our duty to remember that a word in season or a grave look will silence those who indulge in unlicensed speech, and have an excellent general effect.” Nothing better nails to the counter the lies of Frederic the Great, so characteristically Prussian, than the fact that the capital, which up to her time had been notorious for the laxity of its morals, was described by Sir John Moore towards the end of her reign in very laudatory language. “I can imagine,” he says, “no city in Europe where a young gentleman would see fewer examples, or have fewer opportunities of deep gaming, open profligacy, or gross debauchery than in Vienna.” This, as her biographer, Mary Maxwell Moffat, says, is a great testimony to the uplifting influence of the Empress-Queen. That the influence was personal is proved by the relapse of Vienna during the nineteenth century. By precept and example, she cast out the swine, but when she was gone they came back again.
It was the irony of fate that neither the Empress’s virtues, her great beauty, her sweet disposition, nor the prestige of her glorious position were able to clip the wings of her flighty and too attractive husband. That she had some inkling of her failure is clear from the advice that she once gave to her favourite maiden Charlotte: “Be warned and do not marry a man who has nothing to do.” Queen Victoria was more fortunate. Her marriage remained a union of hearts, of which time itself had no power to relax the bonds.
In all that concerns art Queen Victoria was essentially a woman of her own time, and it is in no sense derogatory to her to say that it was certainly not a happy time. In the plastic arts she had not the talent of her two brilliant daughters, the Empress Frederic and Princess Louise. It is true that her sketch-book was the constant companion of her holidays, and illustrated the diary of her travels; but her execution did not go much beyond the boundaries of the school-girl’s album. The painters whom she chose to employ as portraitists—Winterhalter, Landseer, Von Angeli—were unluckily chosen. She admired and patronized Leighton, but she would not hear of being painted by Millais or Watts. Music was her delight, and so it was with Marie Theresia; both ladies loved the Italian school, both were themselves gifted with lovely voices and had been well trained. Indeed, in the Hapsburg family the talent was hereditary; all the older members of it were capable musicians, and Charles the Sixth would himself accompany their chamber music on the harpsichord.
Mrs. Moffat quotes a letter of Marie Theresia, in which she writes: “As for dramatic music, I confess that I would rather have the slightest Italian thing than all the works of our composers, Gaisman, Gluck and others. For instrumental music we have a certain Haydn, who has good ideas, but he is just beginning to be known.” Strange words, coming from the Sovereign of the capital which was to be the home, above all others, of the greatest composers of the world. Mozart she knew as a child of six, when he sat upon her lap to play, and, tumbling down, was picked up by the little Archduchess Marie Antoinette, to whom in gratitude he at once proposed marriage!
The tender care and loving kindness with which Queen Victoria treated all those, from the highest to the humblest, who were in any sense dependent upon her, is a matter of common knowledge. She shared in their joys, she sympathized with their sorrows, interesting herself in all the everyday changes and chances of their lives. The unclouded happiness of her own all too brief married life had penetrated her soul with the belief that nothing could compare with the bliss of a loving union. This she showed even in a case where a young man in whom she took a deep interest, and for whom she had destined what would have been a very advantageous marriage, disappointed her by making an unsuitable match. Her answer to one who spoke unkindly of this was characteristic and touching. “After all,” she said, sweetly excusing him, “perhaps they loved one another.” That in her mind was obviously the essential.
The account of the marriage of the Austrian Empress’s favourite tirewoman is worth recording, not only as showing a parallel to this sweetly indulgent nature of our Queen, but also as giving us a curious picture of the formalities of the old Court of Vienna.
Upon her maidens the Empress spent an almost motherly care. When not on duty they might go out, but must tell Her Majesty whither they were bound, and then an Imperial carriage was placed at their disposal; when not on duty, they were always allowed to receive visitors—even men, but their names must be submitted to their mistress, and the privileged swains must be of unblemished repute. It was in that way, during the Seven Years’ War, when the detested Prussian Drill-Sergeant Frederic was pushing forward and yet further forward in Moravia and was besieging Olmütz, that Charlotte made the acquaintance of Herr von Greiner, at that time a secretary in the Bohemian-Austrian Chancellerie. He was accepted as a suitor, but must wait till he could offer his wife a better position.
In spite of what her daughter says, Charlotte, unless her portraits wickedly malign her, was no beauty, and she was tocherless to boot; but she was clever and the favourite protégée of the Empress. What could not a capable man of business in the public service hope from such an alliance? We are told that, doubtless in view of this advantage, there had been many suitors for her hand, but the Empress had always stood in the way. Charlotte was in terror lest in this case also she should interfere. She was too useful to her mistress to be lightly spared. There was nothing for it but patience.
Meanwhile, in the year 1765 the Court moved to Innsbruck for the marriage of the second prince, afterwards the Emperor Leopold II., and there suddenly the Emperor Francis fell a victim to an apoplectic stroke. The Empress was stricken dumb with grief. She could not weep, but passed the night in spasmodic sobbing, till at last in the morning the doctors, who were alarmed at her condition, bled her, and then the merciful tears came and brought relief. Charlotte was ordered to cut off all her mistress’s hair, and in her dress, as well as in the furniture of her apartments, the widow put on the trappings of woe. Of the beauty that largely remained to her, since her husband was no longer there to see, she took no account. On every 18th of August, the day of his death, she remained shut up in her room, confessed, fasted, and passed the day in sad remembrances, in prayer and in pious exercises. If the stones of Windsor Castle could prate, they might tell just such a story.
Now that the lovely fair hair, that crown of glory, had been shorn off, and the Empress no longer cared for her old elaborate toilette, there was less for the favourite tirewoman to do, and the wedding with Herr von Greiner was allowed. The future bridegroom was presented to the great lady, who was surprised to find in him a rather commonplace man, and said afterwards to Charlotte: “I thought that you would have chosen some gallant gentleman—a Chevalier.” However, the commonplace man was one in whom she later recognized a thoroughly honest and capable official, whom she respected and promoted for his worth.
The year of mourning for the dead Emperor was not yet at an end, and the Court had laid aside none of the trappings and the suits of woe. But Charlotte, as bride that was to be, was allowed to dress in colours. The wedding was celebrated with all the ceremonies which were at that time prescribed by Court etiquette. It was still the fashion to make a special function of the betrothal, which in Charlotte’s case was celebrated eight days before the marriage. On the wedding day she had to go and show herself in her bridal attire to the Empress, who added several presents of jewellery to what she was wearing, and lent her a priceless rope of pearls from the Imperial Treasury, to be returned after the ceremony, an ornament which was commonly used on such occasions.
The service was held in the private chapel, and the Mistress of the Robes led the bride to the altar. When the priest came to the place where the bride is told to answer “Yes,” she was compelled by etiquette to curtsey to the Mistress of the Robes and ask her permission to do so. Then the Mistress of the Robes stood up, turned herself round to face the chapel in which the Empress was, and in her turn curtsied, and in dumb show asked Her Majesty’s consent. This was also given by signs, and the Mistress of the Robes, in the same silent way, transmitted the pleasure of the Empress, who had taken upon herself the duties of mother, upon which the bride gratefully curtsied, turned to the priest and uttered the fateful “Yes.”
There is something touching in the way in which the Empress mothered the orphan whom she had almost kidnapped from the Wolfenbüttel officers. She surely did not perform her duty by halves! When I read the account of the wedding ceremony, my mind went back fifty-two years to another wedding, when in St. George’s Chapel another Queen, recently widowed, sat in a little gallery and acknowledged the curtsey of her new daughter-in-law, one of the loveliest brides that ever sun shone upon. At every step in this sketch of the Austrian Empress we are met by something that speaks of our own great Queen.
In this wise was the wedding of one of the Imperial handmaidens celebrated in the days of Marie Theresia. Charlotte, now Frau von Greiner, entered happily upon her new life. The change from the excitement and publicity of the brilliant Austrian Court, to the quiet and narrower society of the upper middle-class, for whom the Imperial surroundings were a thing of awe and mystery, must have been very striking. But the bride found her account in it, and, as we shall see, Herr von Greiner, being a man of quite exceptional talent and artistic gifts, was able to attract to his house all that was most brilliant among the literary and musical celebrities of that time.
In the year 1769 Caroline—afterwards Frau Pichler—was born. In the meantime the Empress had by no means relaxed her friendship for her mother. The von Greiners were not “hoffähig,” they could not go to court officially, but Frau von Greiner constantly visited her old mistress privately, and Von Greiner himself had, as I have said, won the great lady’s favour, and she not only kept him in her eye for advancement, but frequently sent for him and sought his advice. With a salary of four thousand gulden—two hundred pounds, I suppose—and a spacious official residence, the family was well able to maintain a good appearance, and Herr von Greiner’s exceptional attainments and artistic gifts as pastelist and poet made the house a trysting-place for all that was most notable in literature and music—especially music; for at Frau von Greiner’s weekly assemblies were frequently seen and heard Haydn, Beethoven, Mozart, Paesiello and Cimarosa. Painters and sculptors, poets and authors less known to fame than those great musicians, were welcome visitors, and the salon became so popular that even a sprig of nobility—the condescension duly acknowledged—might now and then be found there. It is curious to see what a hard and fast line Vienna drew (and, to a certain extent, still draws) between the upper middle-class and the aristocracy—a line as deferentially recognized on the one side as it was haughtily imposed on the other. We know how to this day, in an Austrian ballroom, “die kleinen Komtessen” look with supercilious eyes upon any would-be partner who may be introduced to them unless his quarterings are fully satisfactory. The favour in which Frau von Greiner was held in high quarters had no doubt some effect in bridging over the gulf which was fixed between the noblesse and the bourgeoisie.
But I have been straying far away from the goal which I set before me. It would be fascinating to follow Frau Pichler’s story, for it is the story of a woman who lived through stirring times, who was present during the three attacks upon Vienna, who tells us the one story of courteous chivalry of the young Napoleon; who heard Haydn, Weber, Mozart, Beethoven play their own compositions, and, living on till near the middle of the last century, could compare their execution with that of Liszt and Thalberg. She knew and rather disliked Madame de Staël, despising her for tricking out the charms of a woman “fair, fat and forty” in a too youthful attire; but was charmed by the music of a speaking voice, her description of which reminds us of Sarah Bernhardt. She corresponded at least once with Goethe, and was snubbed by the Humboldts, which rankled not a little. But all this is beside the mark. I am only concerned to show how to the end the lives of the two great Queen-Empresses followed similar lines.
Life is like a drawing in black and white, in which, of necessity, the black predominates. The stronger the drawing, the darker are the shadows; as in an etching by Rembrandt—the more powerful the life, the more violent the contrasts. The high lights were high indeed in the early days of the two august ladies; the deep gloom of the long night of widowhood, which in each case followed some twenty years of ideal home sunshine, must have weighed all the more heavily for the glory of the mornings which had ushered in their young days; for true it is that “the sorrow’s crown of sorrow is the remembering happier things!” In facing the inevitable, women sometimes show higher courage than men. Nothing could be more brave than the way in which these two Queens bowed to the decrees of fate. The world’s work must be done, though hearts be broken and the joy of life extinguished. They felt that they had duties to their people, and they braced themselves to harness. The death of the Prince Consort was really a far heavier blow to the Queen than that of the Emperor Francis was to Marie Theresia—or, rather, perhaps I should say a more searching blow, with much further-reaching consequences. The Queen lost not only a tenderly worshipped husband and lover, but a mainstay upon which she leant, an adviser in all matters of State, a guiding hand in trouble. Marie Theresia lost a husband whom, little as he deserved it, she loved with all her soul; a man who was all in all to her in her home life, but who in her public life was a mere cypher, playing no part in her queendom. It was, therefore, a braver act of devotion for our great lady in that loneliest of all solitudes, the solitude of a widowed queen, immediately to take up the threads of her complicated statecraft without the assistance of her loving helper, than it was for the Empress to remain as pilot, bereaved indeed, but no more unaided than she had always been. Both laid aside their personal and poignant grief to devote themselves to their work. What remained to them of life—a cruel length of years: in the one case fifteen, in the other forty—was given without reserve to the promotion of the welfare of the fatherland. Duty was to them the supreme call, a voice that only became silent in death. Both are held in grateful and undying memory, for surely no women ever went to their rest with cleaner consciences or with better claim to be hailed as good and faithful servants.