These words had been written in his wife's lifetime; they remained in force after he was widowed. Celibacy would in the future, just as it had in the past, legitimize their ardor; restraint, well embellished, charmingly straitjacketed, would preserve the impulse forever.
And so Franz Joseph and Frau Schratt continued to be lovers in everything but raw fact. They never met between the sheets. Yet in Vienna or Ischl they practiced the entire range of stagecraft that surrounds the bed: all the ardent preambles of passion and the gallant postscripts, the avowals of desire, denials of indifference, impetuous confidences, embarrassed explanations, and the obligatory sulks and quarrels. These emotions they poured into countless letters. He addressed them to "My Dear Good Friend," she, to "Your Imperial and Royal Majesty, my Most August Lord."
They enacted their roles with a persuasiveness that appeared to obviate consummation. In Vienna, their play unfolded invisibly: behind the garden walls of Schonbrunn Palace or over the coffee table in her breakfast room across the street from Schonbrunn. But in Ischl the octogenarian swain and his fifty-year-old inamorata produced their romance in the open, beneath the summer sun. They simulated to perfection the trappings of a liaison.
It was a way of love, a way of life, that came natural to Franz Joseph, the weathered centerpiece of a patinaed court. Under his reign animation had petrified into decor. Decor-not dynamics-governed his affections as well as his politics. Both the Emperor's empire and the Emperor's affair were artifacts. Neither had much fleshly reality. Therefore both must draw their vigor, their tang, their long lives from etiquette and accoutrement. Both represented the triumph of form over substance. They were both masterpieces of survival through sheer style.
When Franz Joseph strode with Frau Schratt through Ischl's parks, detectives discreetly preceded and followed them. When he walked alone, he forbade all such protection. In Vienna there was his state coach with six snow-white steeds; his braided, epauletted retinue of equerries, adjutants, and chamberlains. In Ischl he furloughed them all. Protocol, too, took a holiday. Several times a week Franz Joseph strolled past the gate guards of the Kaiservilla, entirely by himself. This bearer of seventy-two august titles, this breathing legend that had occupied for sixty-odd years the West's most venerable and resonant throne, this master over life and death of many millions, this symbol holding together, against odds, an improbable empire ranging from yodelers on the Swiss border to muezzins chanting from minarets by the Turkish frontierthis near-divinity joined passers-by on the common sidewalk.
If the hour was very early, before seven, it found him off for his coffee with Frau Schratt in her Villa Felicitas. If it was later in the morning, he'd be wending his way toward the town church for Mass. He would stroll behind a babushka'd maid, laden with shopping, or next to a spa guest puffing a cigar. Often they didn't realize for seconds that The Presence was among them. In his blue uniform but without any of his countless decorations, His Imperial and Royal Majesty looked like any officer, long pensioned but still well barbered, trim, as he stepped with a certain circumspection off and on the curb. He glanced at the store windows as he passed and sometimes, like a typical vacationer, he squinted westward up the Ischl sky to see what the day's weather might bring.
Why? Why this charade of ordinariness? Perhaps for His Apostolic Majesty the ordinary had the allure of the exotic. His letters to Frau Schratt breathe a need for the commonplace. He inquires about the effectiveness of the garbage pick-up on her block in Vienna. And how comfortable were the new taxi cars in Vienna? As for himself, he will confess, in detail, that his corns hurt while he stood up to toast the King of Bulgaria. In other words, the Emperor wished to indulge a little in the plain prose of life-for the most part he was imprisoned in his own exaltedness.
And he may have had other reasons for impersonating a pedestrian in Ischl. In the Emperor's sundry capitalsVienna, Budapest, Prague-the machinery of pomp manufactured the Habsburg charisma. In Ischl, Franz Joseph proved that he needed no courtiers, no supporting players, no footlights, no props. He could wreak magic alone, stepping over a dog turd on the Ischler Hauptstrasse. With a flash of wispy white sideburns on wrinkled cheeks, he could hush each street corner into a throne room. Traffic crunched to a halt at his sight. Drivers whipped off their hats. Women froze in midchat. The street turned into a tableau of bows and curtsies past which the Emperor ambled, responding now and then with a salute that seemed friendly but also a bit puzzled. It was as if he'd just been greeted by a nice fellow-officer whose name escaped him but which he might remember right after appreciating the Doboschtorte displayed there in the Patisserie Zauner's window.
For many years Ischl had seen Franz Joseph conjure impe rial radiance next to a burgher storefront. But by the teens of the twentieth century his saunterings had taken on yet other aspects. In 1898 his Empress had been stabbed to death as she walked unescorted along the quai of Geneva. Since then even the presence of guards had been unable to prevent the spurting of royal blood. Earlier in 1913 an attempt had been made on the life of the Spanish King. The King of Greece had been murdered. Franz Joseph's solo rambles in Ischl were wellknown enough to be downright provocative. Behind every doorway a revolver or a stiletto might be poised. What Franz Joseph was staging, after the gunning-down of Franz Schuhmeier, after the sudden Redl nightmare, was the theater of fatalism.
"If we must go under," he had remarked more than once to an aide-de-camp, "we better go under decently." Mortality was an art in Austria, in 1913. Passing through his mortal eighties, the monarch was its leading adept. He did not show how the end was to be avoided. He showed how it was to be risked and approached: with composure and balance and a certain stoic grace. He walked along the Hauptstrasse, through the homage of his subjects, among mingled scents drifting from the Spa Park: lilac, jasmine, rose, spiced faintly with the perfume of perdition.
On June 30, 1913, the dispute between Serbia and Bulgaria over Macedonian territory reached its boiling point. Serbia, inveterate Habsburg foe, declared war on Bulgaria; Turkey, Greece, and Rumania joined the Serbian side. The Second Balkan War had started.
Throughout the first week of July, General Conrad belabored the telephone from Vienna to Ischl on behalf of yet another ultimatum to be fired at Belgrade. From the Belgian North Sea resort of Blankenberghe, the Crown Prince was on the wire, roaring for prudence and caution. And a cold rain kept coming down on the Alps around Ischl. The Emperor felt triply beleaguered.
"Dearest Friend," said his letter brought by courier on July 9 from his Ischl residence to Frau Schratt's Villa Felicitas a mile away.
Dearest Friend:
Just a few lines to welcome you back at the Felicitas. I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart that you came here despite the inclement skies in order to cheer me up… Let me ask if I may visit you as usual at 7 A.M. No reply will signify that you expect me. Therefore I will report to you tomorrow by telephone if I can come by foot or if the weather will force me into a carriage. In the former case, please leave the small door unlocked. In glad expectation of a much longedfor reunion.
Loving you most deeply, Franz Joseph
He loved her most deeply, and never touched more than the woman's shoulder. Under clearing skies the air remained chill in Ischl; he walked without aides or surcoat to Frau Schratt's villa. Couriers brought him more bulletins from the Balkan War. The telephone ringing in his adjutant's office did not respect either the Alpine idyll in the window or an old gentleman's need for rest. Each day demanded another decision.