His crime was that he actually married the girl. It had always been the fashion for an Austrian Archduke to keep an opera-dancer, whether he liked it or not, just as he always kept a racehorse, even though he cared nothing about racing. For any scion of the Imperial House she was a necessary part of the surroundings, an item in the entourage of Court. He maintained her just as our Royal Family pay subscriptions to charities, or lay the foundation-stone of a church. It was expected of him. _Noblesse oblige_. Descent from the House of Hapsburg involves its duties as well as its rights. The opera-dancer was as essential to Archducal existence as the seventy-seventh quartering on the Hapsburg arms. She was the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual Imperialness. She justified the title of "Transparency." She was the mark of true heredity, like the Hapsburg lip. As the advertisements say, no Archduke should be without one.
But really to love an opera-dancer was a scandal for derision, moving all the Courts of the Empire to scorn. Actually to marry her was a crime beyond forgiveness. It shook the Throne. It came very near the sin of treason, for which the penalties prescribed may hardly be whispered in polite ears. To mingle the Imperial blood with a creature born without a title, and to demand human and divine sanction for the deed! It brought a blush to the cheek of heraldry. What of the possible results of a union with a being from the stage? Only if illegitimate, could such results legitimately be recognised; only if ignoble in the eyes of morality, could they be received without censure among the nobility. It was not fair to put all one's Imperial relations, to say nothing of the Court officials, the Lord High Chamberlain, the Keepers of the Pedigree, the Diamond Sticks in Waiting, the Grooms of the Bedchamber, and the Valets Extraordinary--it was not fair to put their poor brains into such a quandary of contradiction and perplexity. And who shall tell the divine wrath of that august figure, obscurely visible in the recesses of ancestral homes, upon whose brow had descended the diadem of Roman Emperors, the crown of Christ's Vicar in things terrestrial, and who, when he was not actually wearing the symbol of Imperial supremacy, enjoyed the absolute right to assume the regalia of eight kingdoms in turn, including the sacred kingdom of Jerusalem, and possessed forty-three other titles to pre-eminent nobility, not counting the etceteras with which each separate string of titles was concluded? Who, without profanity, shall tell his wrath?