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?

It was the Archduke Johann Salvator of Austria, head of the Tuscan branch of the House of Hapsburg, who confronted in his own person that Imperial wrath, and committed the inexpiable crime of marriage.  It is true that he was not entirely to blame.  He did not succumb without a struggle, and his efforts to resist the temptation to legality appear to have been sincere.  Indeed, as has so often happened since the days of Eve, it was chiefly the woman’s fault.  He honestly endeavoured to make her his mistress, in accordance with all Archducal precedent, but she persistently, nay, obstinately, refused the honour of Imperial shame.  With a rigidity that in other circumstances might, perhaps, have been commended, but, in relation to an Archduke, can only be described as designing, she insisted upon marriage.  She was but Fraulein Milli Stubel, light-skirted dancer at the Court Opera-House, but, with unexampled hardihood, she maintained her headlong course along the criminal path of virtue.  What could a man do when exposed to temptation so severe?