CHAPTER VI

My Marriage and the Austrian Court--the Day after my Marriage

I was barely fifteen when it was first decided that I was to be married. On March 25, 1874, I was officially betrothed to Prince Philip of Saxe-Coburg; on February 18 I entered my sixteenth year.

My fiancé certainly showed perseverance. He had already made two proposals for me. His first was repeated after an interval of two years. The King replied to it by advising him to travel. The prince then made a tour round the world; this completed he renewed his request. Again he was asked to wait.

To marry me had become a fixed idea with Philip of Coburg. What sort of love inspired him? Was he attracted by the elusive charm of my virginal youth, or did the definite knowledge of the King's position and the belief in the future of his enterprises fan the flame in the heart of a man who was absolutely engrossed with material things?

The engagement being arranged, the two families interested (mine especially), the Queen on the one hand, and the Princess Clémentine on the other, decided that my marriage was not to be celebrated until twelve months later. I was so young!

My fiancé was fourteen years older than I. Fourteen years' difference is not perhaps of much account between a young woman of twenty-five and a man of thirty-nine; it is a great deal, however, between an innocent girl of seventeen and a lover of thirty-one.

I had only occasional glimpses of my fiancé during his rapid visits to Brussels. Our conversations were of no account; they were merely such as a man of his age would hold with a girl of mine. But I thought I knew him well. We were cousins. This constituted the first difficulty, as the sanction of the Church of Rome was necessary to the marriage. It was asked for and obtained. This is the custom in such cases.

My fiancé left me to complete the studies necessary for my successful début in a strange world. And what a world! The most courtly of Courts in the universe. A Court haunted by the shades of Charles V and Maria Theresa! A Court in which Spanish etiquette was allied to German discipline. An emperor whose greatness had been increased rather than diminished by his military reverses, so well did he bear his misfortunes. An empress who was a Queen of Queens owing to her undisputed perfections. And around them a host of archdukes and archduchesses, princes, dukes and gentlemen bearing the highest titles in the land.

All this was very impressive for a Belgian princess who did not regret her short dresses, because one never regrets them when it is the fashion to wear long gowns, but who was nevertheless very astonished to find herself dressed like a grown-up girl.

However, I was not embarrassed, nor was I nervous; I looked at everything with the eyes of a girl who is only interested in her engagement and her lover.

I would have married the prince, had I been asked to do so, on the same day that I received his first ring. I would have gone before the burgomaster and the cardinal with just the same eagerness as I did a year later.

Healthy in body and pure in spirit, brought up in an atmosphere of sincerity and morality under the care of an incomparable mother, but deprived, owing to my rank, of more or less enlightened friends who would have reposed certain womanly confidences in me, I gave my whole soul to my approaching marriage without troubling myself what marriage might mean. I was no longer a creature of this earth. I created a star where my fiancé and I would live together in a divine atmosphere of happiness. The man who was to be my companion on the enchanted road of life, seemed to me the embodiment of all that was beautiful, loyal, generous, and I deemed him as innocent as myself.

My hours of martyrdom and the distressing quarrels were to come later when the inmost recesses of my heart were disclosed by the barbarians of the police court, who made scandalous use of my letters written after my engagement. These letters expressed my love. I had written to the man who was my parents' choice as I would have written to an archangel destined to marry me. I adorned him with the beauty of my most beautiful desires. I transfigured him.

The savages had the effrontery to deduce from these expressions of affection that I was an unstable and deceitful creature.

I put this question to women. Between love as we conceive it and love as we experience it, is there not very often an abyss?

I have been culpable, criminal and infamous to fall into this abyss. Such is the real truth.

Why did my mother--who was so good--and why did the King--who was so experienced in human nature--wish for this marriage, in spite of the disproportion of our ages, and the few claims to universal admiration which my intended husband possessed, apart from his claims to worldly position?

In the first place his mother, who, rightly, loved and respected him, pleaded for him. She credited him with possessing some of her own good qualities.

In the second place, Prince Frederick of Hohenzollern had expressed a wish to ask me in marriage. The King and Queen, who were told of this, did not want, for various reasons, to become closer allied to the house of Berlin. Other suitors, more or less desirable, might also appear on the scene. Therefore, to put an end to this particular scheme and any future uncertainties, I was plighted to Philip of Coburg.

In addition to this the Queen congratulated herself on sending her eldest daughter to the Viennese Court where she herself had shone. She still possessed influence there, and she thought that I would benefit from it. She was still more satisfied to think that owing to the entailed estates of the Coburgs in Hungary, I should possess material advantages in the country dear to her memory, and where she could often rejoin me, perhaps where she might even retire herself, since she foresaw a future which was gradually to become more and more difficult.

My fiancé again appeared on my horizon. A year passes quickly. The date of my marriage was approaching. I knew all the flowers of rhetoric and the hot-house flowers of a daily courtship. But I asked myself, why did the Queen never leave the archangel and me alone?

My fiancé told me about his travels. He had, he said, brought back some wonderful collections of souvenirs. But I only knew how wonderful these were later. He also told me about his plans for the future, the numerous properties of the Coburgs, etc. I gave myself up to delightful hopes, and described the magnificence of my trousseau, which was enriched with fairy-like gifts of Belgian lace and intricate embroideries.

Finally I tried on the symbolical white robe, under a heavenly veil, a _chef d'oeuvre_ of Brussels lace, and I was acknowledged fit to manage my long train and to make my curtsies equally as well as the most graceful of the famous young ladies of Saint Cyr.

Loaded with jewels, I soared higher and higher, flattered by homage, congratulations and good wishes, without perceiving that, although my fiancé was so much older than myself, I had now become a certain personality in his dreams and in his thoughts.

I was praised on all sides in verse and in prose, with or without music, and it seemed that I was a "flower of radiant beauty." I was quite taken with this phrase.

As for my husband--his bearing, his nobility and his prestige were also praised. I remember that he wore his Hungarian military uniform when we received the burgomaster of Brussels, the celebrated M. Ausbach, who came on February 4, 1873, to marry us by the civil code. Then with great pomp we appeared before the Cardinal Primate of Belgium.

An altar was erected in the large drawing-room next the ballroom. I will say nothing about the decorations. The chants and the prayers carried me to heaven, although I by no means forgot the ritual of my marriage and that I was the cynosure of all eyes. It was not a public of kings, but of princes. In the place of sovereigns, whose greatness kept them away, their next of kin were present; the Prince of Wales, the Crown Prince Frederick, the Archduke Joseph, the Duc d'Aumale, the Duke of Saxe-Coburg, and, finally, a large crowd of those notables who figure in the pages of the _Almanach de Gotha_.

If I once began to describe the details of a ceremony of this magnitude I should never finish. Personally I was not much attracted by it. I am always surprised when, on opening a modern novel, I notice the pains which clever people take to describe the sumptuous ritual of modern marriage. I only know one appropriate description of this nature: that of the "Sleeping Beauty." Fortunate Beauty, whose Court and herself were put to sleep just at the crucial moment of a marriage which might not have been a happy one.

But where are the fairies now and where are the beasts who know how to talk?

Alas! the fairies have vanished and the beasts speak no more, except the hidden beasts in our souls, and they do not relate pretty fables and stories. They indulge rather in unpleasant realities.

I have taken a long time in coming to the point, but no matter at what cost, it is necessary for me to speak about things which have as yet never been told, but which will explain how the foundations were laid for the drama of my life.

There were hints as to this drama in former days, but I will not refer to the vague tittle-tattle which amused rather than saddened Brussels and its Court.

I am not, I am sure, the first woman who after having lived in the clouds during her engagement, has been as suddenly hurled to the ground on her marriage night, and who, bruised and mangled in her soul, has fled from humanity in tears.

I am not the first woman who has been the victim of false modesty and excessive reserve, attributable perhaps to the hope that the delicacy of a husband, combined with natural instincts, would arrange all for her, but who was told nothing by her mother of what happens when the lover's hour has struck.

However, the fact remains that on the evening of my marriage at the Château of Laeken, whilst all Brussels was dancing amid a blaze of lights and illuminations, I fell from my heaven of love to what was for me a bed of rock and a mattress of thorns. Psyche, who was more to blame, was better treated than myself.

The day was scarcely breaking when, taking advantage of a moment when I was alone in the nuptial chamber, I fled across the park with my bare feet thrust into slippers, and, wrapped in a cloak thrown over my nightgown, I went--to hide my shame in the Orangery. I found sanctuary in the midst of the camellias, and I whispered my grief, my despair, and my torture, to their whiteness, their freshness, their perfume and their purity, to all that they represented of sweetness and affection, as they flowered in the greenhouse, and lit up the winter's dawn with a warmth, silence and beauty which gave me back a little of my lost Paradise.

A sentry had noticed a grey form scurrying past him in the direction of the Orangery. He approached, and listening, recognized my voice. He hastened to the château. No one knew what had become of me. Already the alarm had been discreetly raised. A messenger galloped to Brussels. The telephone was not then invented.

The Queen came to me without any delay. My God! what a state I was in when I regained my apartment; I would not let anyone approach me except my maids. I was more dead than alive.

My mother stayed with me for a long time; she was as motherly as she alone could be. There was no grief which her arms and voice could not assuage. I listened to her scolding me, coaxing me and telling me of duties which it was imperative for me to understand. I dared not object to these on the ground that they were totally different from those which I had been led to expect.

I finished by promising to try and conquer my fears, to be wiser and less childish.

I was scarcely seventeen years old; my husband had completed his thirty-first year. I had become of his "goods and chattels." One can see, alas! how he has treated me.