Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [66]
The first death took place by dagger on September 10, 1898, alongside the lake steamer at the Quai Mont Blanc in Geneva. Here met, in mortal junction, as meaningless as when a stroke of lightning kills a child, two persons so unconnected, so far apart in the real world, that their lives could never have touched except in a demented moment. One was the Empress Elizabeth of Austria, wife of the Emperor Franz Joseph, the other Luigi Lucheni, a vagrant Italian workman.
The most beautiful and the most melancholy royal personage in Europe, married and crowned at sixteen, Elizabeth was still, at sixty-one, forever moving restlessly from one place to another in endless escape from an unquiet soul. Renowned for her loveliness, her golden-brown hair a yard long, her slender elegance and floating walk, her sparkling moods when she was the “incarnation of charm,” she suffered also from “court-ball headaches,” and could not appear in public without holding a fan before her face. She was “a fairies’ child,” wrote Carmen Sylva, the Queen of Rumania, “with hidden wings, who flies away whenever she finds the world unbearable.” She wrote sad romantic poetry and had seen her son’s life end in the most melodramatic suicide of the century. Her first cousin, King Ludwig of Bavaria, had died insane by drowning; her husband’s brother, Maximilian, by firing squad in Mexico; her sister by fire at a charity bazaar in Paris. “I feel the burden of life so heavily,” she wrote her daughter, “that it is often like a physical pain and I would far rather be dead.” She would rush off to England or Ireland to spend weeks in the hunting field riding recklessly over the most breakneck fences. In Vienna she took lessons in the most dangerous tricks of circus riding. At times she adopted frenetic diets, reducing her nourishment to an orange or a glass of milk a day, and when her health could no longer sustain hunting, she indulged in orgies of walking for six or eight hours at a time at a forced pace no companion could keep up with. What she was seeking was plain: “I long for death,” she wrote her daughter four months before she reached Geneva.
On September 9 she visited the lakeside villa of the Baroness Adolfe de Rothschild, a remote, enchanted world where tame miniature porcupines from Java and exotic colored birds decorated a private park planted with cedars of Lebanon. As she left her hotel next morning to take the lake steamer, the Italian, Lucheni, was waiting outside on the street.
He had come from Lausanne, where he recently had been reported to the police as a suspicious character. The orderly of a hospital where he had been taken for an injury suffered during a building job had found among his belongings a notebook containing Anarchist songs and the drawing of a bludgeon labeled “Anarchia” and underneath, in Italian, “For Humbert I.” Accustomed to misfits, radicals and exiles of all kinds, the Swiss police had not considered this sufficient cause for arrest or surveillance.
According to what he told the hospital orderly, Lucheni’s mother, pregnant at eighteen with an illegitimate child, had made her way to Paris to give birth among the anonymous millions of a great city. Later she was able to return to Italy, where she left her child in the poorhouse in Parma and disappeared to America.
At nine the boy was a day laborer on an Italian railroad. Later when drafted into a cavalry regiment of the Italian Army, he made a good record and was promoted to corporal. Upon his discharge in 1897, having neither savings nor prospects, he became manservant to his former Captain, the Prince d’Aragona, but on being denied a raise, left in anger. Later he asked to come back, but the Prince, considering him too insubordinate for domestic service, refused. Resentful and jobless, Lucheni took to reading L’Agitatore, Il Socialista, Avanti and other revolutionary papers and pamphlets whose theme at the moment was the rottenness of bourgeois society as demonstrated by the Dreyfus case.