Emperors

An Intimate Glimpse at the Private Life of Franz-Josef, and Stories of Other Royal Rulers

FERENC MOLNÁR

THE following little anecdotes about the old Emperor Franz-Josef of Austria are related here without any ultimate aim or motive, without being in any way given a literary flavour. The late Emperor's chief gamekeeper told them to me some fifteen years ago and they have value just as rare objects, antiques, and limited editions have value, for there are really very few anecdotes about Emperor Franz-Josef in circulation. (Which fact is at least as characteristic of a ruler as a good anecdote.)

The old gamekeeper had been a faithful companion to Franz-Josef for decades. Whenever the Emperor went hunting in the huge forests of Godollo, the gamekeeper was with him. He was a white-haired, delightful, charming old Hungarian, and he knew more about royal forests and royal game preserves than anybody else in the entire Empire. This is the first anecdote:

FRANZ-JOSEF and his companion usually started like this: An open victoria would drive up in front of the main entrance to the Godollo castle and the old gamekeeper would wait by the side of the carriage, hat in hand, until the Emperor appeared. His Majesty was punctual to the second. The chief gamekeeper would bow. His Majesty would return his greeting by lifting his hand to his hat and then would enter the carriage. The gamekeeper would wait until the Emperor had been seated, then step, with his right foot, onto the hub of the right front wheel of the carriage. He did so in order to lift himself to the driver's seat, to take his place next to the driver. When, on his way to climb to the driver's seat, he would reach a position where his right foot was resting on the hub and his left just off the ground, then when he was thus dangling in mid-air between earth and the driver's seat, His Majesty would speak up:

"Be good enough to take a seat in the carriage."

The old gentleman used then to alight, bow, and thank His Majesty for his gracious invitation, and sit down in the carriage opposite the Emperor on a folding seat.

This procedure was repeated every time the king went a-hunting, year after year, decade after decade. It was repeated so often that the old gamekeeper's act of stepping onto the hub and attempting to climb to the driver's seat mellowed down to a mere pretense. For he was quite sure that his partial ascent would be followed, with absolute certainty, by the invitation:

"Be good enough to take a seat in the carriage."

It was quite natural, therefore, that, in course of years, the old gamekeeper's act of climbing had lost some of its intensity, not to say, some of its sincerity, honesty and enthusiasm. Any keen-eyed observer could have noticed that the old gamekeeper only pretended to ascend, as they say in the theatre, he merely "climbed over".

Then, one day, a curious thing happened.

The Emperor sat down in the carriage. The gamekeeper began to make the attempt of climbing but he did not act it well enough. Perhaps he was not in the right mood that day. To be sure he did put his right foot on the hub, but he did not pull up his left leg immediately afterwards. He stopped for a second, obviously waiting for the invitation to be extended.

Franz-Josef noticed this. A painful half a minute passed by. Franz-Josef did not say a word. The chief gamekeeper began to sweat; he realized that he had fallen from His Majesty's good graces. When he finally lifted his left leg, it was already too late: the Emperor remained silent. The chief gamekeeper sat down next to the driver and the carriage rolled away.

Never again, until his dying day, did the Emperor invite the gamekeeper to take a seat in the carriage.

And this is the second anecdote: FranzJosef liked to go boar hunting, but even on these excursions he was accompanied only by the chief gamekeeper. In the vicinity of Godollo, the boars came and went as if their movements had been regulated by timeschedules. The gamekeepers put out their food always at the same places and always at the same time. Thus the boars were trained to arrive at these feeding stations with the precision of express trains. The stations were not very far from each other and since His Majesty's boar-hunts began only when the beasts were thoroughly trained and when the chief gamekeeper possessed a complete and punctual time-schedule of their movements, the initiated used to call the boars "the three-twenty", "the four-forty", the "fivefifteen", etc.

SO, when they started out one day—the Emperor and his chief gamekeeper—it was poor "three-twenty's" fate to arrive punctually at his feeding station in the shade of a tree just when the Emperor got there too. Franz-Josef lifted his rifle and fired. But he merely wounded the boar. The beast stopped for a second, then ferociously charged him.

The moment was a serious one; the Emperor's life was in danger. The chief gamekeeper, when he told me the story, remarked: "I swear to you, we were in immediate danger of a royal funeral." Realising this, the gamekeeper, before the Emperor had a chance to shoot for a second time, lifted his gun and fired. He felled the boar with one sure shot.

A moment of deep silence ensued. The chief gamekeeper emitted a sigh of satisfaction and awaited His Majesty's grateful thanks. The Emperor, who had already taken aim, now slowly lowered his gun, turned around, and in a severe tone of voice, emphasizing every word separately, asked the gamekeeper:

"Which one of us is amusing himself here: you or I?"

II

Among the little known anecdotes concerning Napoleon which one can discover only when perusing French memoirs, I like most the one recorded in the memoirs of the Duchess d'Abrantès, the wife of Junot:

During the Restoration, when Napoleon was a prisoner at Elba, Prince Berri, a Bourbon, was commander-in-chief of the Army. One day, the new master inspected Napoleon's old soldiers. As he rode past the troops, an old grenadier shouted:

"Long live the Emperor!"

The royal prince stopped, went to the old soldier, and asked him:

"Why in the devil's name do you cheer the Emperor? Did you have such a good time under him? Why, he still owes you your back pay!"

The old soldier looked darkly at the Prince and with fire in his eyes answered:

"Well, then, I am damn glad to extend credit to him!"

III

THE late Odon Salamon, known in Budapest as "king of journalists", lived on Margit Island for something like twenty years. He was a protege of the old Archduke Josef and it was the Archduke's special order that the sickly Salamon should have a room in the hotel which differed from all other hotel rooms in all the world: it was unaccompanied by bills. The management—the Island was then the private property of the Archduke— faithfully adhered to Josef's orders throughout the twenty years. It had very nearly become a tradition with them. He, poor fellow, was a gentleman from head to foot and would not accept presents even from an Archduke. He "paid" for the room by writing little announcements which the major domo's office sent once in a great while to the newspapers.

But one Summer, a new clerk came and the manager forgot to tell him that Salamon's room was never billed. The following Saturday morning, Salamon received a bill for forty crowns.

Salamon was shocked. He was poor and what little he earned with his articles he spent on fashionable clothes and on warding off debts. But he did not say a, word—he even strictly forbade his friends to interfere or do anything about it—took the ferry, went to the city and by dinner time the bill was paid.

But the matter became annoying. The next Saturday he got another bill and he had to pay another forty crowns. And from then on a bill came every Saturday.

"No," he told us one day, "this can't go on any longer. I am not Rothschild to pay a hundred and sixty crowns a month! "

"What will you do?" we asked him.

"You just wait. I'll fix it up! And without humiliating myself before the management." "But with whom will you arrange things?"

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"Higher up!" he answered with a mysterious smile. "Watch me tomorrow, and you will see how an affair such as this should be settled with the Archduke himself, in a dignified manner, as befits a gentleman."

Next day, the Archduke's family had luncheon in the restaurant of the hotel. After luncheon, all those who were acquainted with Josef, assembled in a little group just in front of the entrance to the restaurant. It was the Archduke's custom to shake hands with them and ask every one of them: "How are you, my dear So-and-so?" Then he would go for his accustomed after-luncheon walk with his family. Those of us who did not know him just stood around and watched.

Well, on that particular day something happened that had not happened before in the history of the world. Perhaps it will never happen again. For when the Archduke, after a long row of "how are you's", finally reached Salamon, the journalist replied:

"Badly, Your Highness, very badly."

Josef was astounded. Emperors, kings and archdukes are not accustomed to such answers. When a member of the noblesse asked anyone how he was there was but one possible answer, "Thank you, very well."

"Badly? Well, and what's your trouble?"

"I have no trouble, Your Highness."

"Then who has?"

"My room has, Your Highness."

"And what ails your room?"

"It's too expensive, Your Highness."

The moment that followed was usually described in the papers thus: "the Archduke smiled graciously." He shook hands with Salamon.

"That's all right, Salamon, we'll charge less for it in the future."

The reader has guessed by this time that there were no more bills. But there is something else to be said— which is, that when the Archduke departed Salamon turned to us:

"Friends, when I die, don't forget to mention in my obituary that I was the first Hungarian since the beginning of the world who, when asked by an Austrian archduke how he was, replied, badly."

He had a thick notebook into which he put down his thoughts (in the form of aphorisms) every evening. He published them later. That evening, he wrote this down:

"The greatest impertinence in the world—a poor newspaperman, in reply to a king's query: "How are you?", says: "Badly!"

This was his comment on the incident—and this is the true story of the incident that served as the background for this particular aphorism.