I know now that the whisperings I heard meant that he was not faithful to her and that this was something which wounded her deeply. Yet, although she would have done a great deal for him, she would not give him what he wanted—a little of her power.
As for myself, I was feather-brained. I know I had the excuse of youth, but I was naturally like this. I was full of high spirits, very healthy, and loved being out of doors, playing . always playing. I could not sit still for five minutes at a time. I could never concentrate for a moment; my mind would fly off at a tangent; I just wanted to laugh and chatter and play all the time. Looking back I can see what great dramas were going on in our household —and there was I playing with my dogs, whispering my little-girl secrets with Caroline and not being aware of them.
I must have been seven when my brother Joseph married, for he was twenty-one. He did not want to get married, and said:
That surprised me, for I had not thought marriage was something to fear. But like everything else I heard, it went in at one ear and out of the other; I never concerned myself about anything or wondered very much. I was absorbed by what ribbons Aja would put out for me and whether I could change for Caroline’s if I did not like the colour.
Now I can visualise the drama clearly. His bride was quite the loveliest creature we had ever seen. We were all so fair and she was dark. Our mother loved Isabella, and Caroline confided to me that she was sure our mother wished we were all like her. Perhaps she did, for Isabella was not only beautiful, she was very clever—which none of us was. But she had one other characteristic, which we lacked. She was melancholy. I might have been frivolous; I might have known little about books; but there was one thing I did know and that was how to enjoy life; and this was something which, for all her learning, was beyond Isabella’s powers. The only rime I ever saw her laugh was with our sister Maria Christina, who was a year younger than Joseph.
Isabella would go into the gardens when Maria Christina was there; they would walk together arm in arm, and then Isabella looked as nearly happy-as she ever could. I was glad that she liked one of us, but it was a pity it was not Joseph, for he had fallen deeply in love with her.
There was a great deal of excitement when she was going to have a baby; but when the child was born it was a weakling, and it did not live long. She had two children and they both died.
Caroline and I were too busy with our own affairs to think much about Joseph and his. I must have noticed that he looked very sad, always, and it certainly made some impression on me even then, because it comes back so clearly all these years later. What a dark tragedy that was! And there was I living under the same roof with it.
Isabella was constantly talking about death and how she longed for it.
That seemed strange to me. Death was something which happened to old people—or little babies whom one did not really know. It had little to do with us.
Caroline and I, hiding ourselves behind a clipped hedge in the gardens, once heard Isabella and Maria Christina talking together.
“What right have I in this world?” Isabella was saying.
“I am no good.
If it were not sinful I would kill myself. I should already have done so. “
Maria Christina laughed at her. Maria Christina was not the kindest of our sisters and on the rare occasions when she did notice us she would say something spiteful, so we avoided her.
“You suffer from a desire to seem heroic,” she retorted.
“It’s utter selfishness.”
Then she walked away and left Isabella looking after her, stricken.
I thought about that scene tor five whole minutes, which was a long rime for me.
And Isabella did die just as she had said she wanted to. She was in Vienna for only two years in all. Poor Joseph was heartbroken. He was constantly writing letters to Isa bella’s father in Parma and they were all about Isabella, how wonderful she had been, how there was no one like her.
I have lost everything,” he told my brother Leopold.
“My beloved wife my love … has gone. How can I survive this terrible separation?”
One day I saw Joseph with Maria Christina. Her eyes were Sashing with hatred and she was saying: “It’s true. I will show you her letters.
They will tell you all you want to know. You will see that I not you was the one she loved. “
It falls into place now. Poor Joseph! Poor Isabella! I understand why Isabella was so sad and wished for death, ashamed of her love and yet unable to suppress it; and Maria Christina, who would always want her revenge, had betrayed her to poor Joseph.
Immersed as I was then in my own affairs I saw this tragedy as through a misted glass, but because my own suffering has now made of me a different person from the careless creature I was in my youth, I understand so much and I have sympathy to give to others who suffer. I brood on their sufferings perhaps because I cannot bear to contemplate my own.
Joseph was very unhappy for a long time, but because he was the eldest and more important than any of us he must have a wife. He was so angry when a new wife was selected for him by our mother and Prince Wenzel Anton Kaunitz that when she arrived in Vienna he scarcely spoke to her. She was very different from Isabella, being small and fat, with brown uneven teeth and red spots on her face. Joseph told Leopold, in whom he used to confide more than in anyone else at our mother’s court, that he was wretched and he was not going to pretend to be anything else for it was not in his nature to pretend. Her name was Josepha and she must have been unhappy too, for he had a barrier built across the balcony on to which their separate rooms opened so that he would never meet her if she stepped from her room at the same time as he stepped from his.
Maria Christina said: “If I were Joseph’s wife, I’d go and hang myself on a tree in the Schonbrunn gardens.”
When I was ten years old I was aware of tragedy, which was real even to me because it concerned me deeply.
Leopold was going to be married. There was nothing very exciting to Caroline and me about this, because with so many brothers and sisters there were other weddings; and it was only one which was held in Vienna which would have interested us; but Leopold was being married in Innsbruck. < Father was going to the wedding, but Mother could not leave Vienna as her state duties kept her there, i I was in the schoolroom tracing a picture when one of my father’s pages came to say that my father wanted to say goodbye to me at once.
I was surprised because I had said goodbye to him half an hour earlier and I had seen him ride off with his attendants.
Aja was in a fluster.
“Something has happened,” she said.
“Go at once.”
So I went with the servants. My father was on his horse looking back at the Palace, and when he saw me coming his eyes lit up and he seemed very pleased. He did not dismount but I was lifted up and he held me against him so tightly that it was painful. I felt he was trying to say something and did not know how to, but he hated to let me go. I thought he was going to take me to Innsbruck with him, but this could not be, for my mother would have arranged that if it were so.
His hold loosened and he looked at me tenderly. I threw my arms about his neck and cried: “Dear, dear Papa.” There were tears in his eyes and he gripped me with his right arm while he touched my hair with his left. He had always liked to touch my hair, which was thick and light in colour—auburn, some called it, though my brothers Ferdinand and Max called me “Carrots.” His servants were watching, and abruptly he signed to one of them to take me from him.
He turned to the friends who were beside him and said in a voice shaken with emotion: “Gentlemen, God knows how much I desired to kiss that child.”
That was all. Father smiled goodbye and I went back to the schoolroom, puzzled for a few minutes, and then characteristically forgot the incident.
That was the last I saw of him. In Innsbruck, he felt rather ill and his friends begged him to be bled, but he had arranged to go to the opera with Leopold that afternoon and he knew that if he were bled he would have to rest and cancel the opera, which would worry Leopold, who, like all his children, loved him dearly. It was better, he said, to go to the opera and be quietly bled afterwards without disturbing his son.
