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Konopischt has become the cradle of manifold legends.  The lord of the castle was the first victim of the terrible world conflagration, and the part that he played before the war has been the subject of much and partly erroneous commentary.

The Archduke and heir to the throne was a man of a very peculiar nature.  The main feature of his character was a great lack of balance.  He knew no middle course and was just as eager to hate as to love.  He was unbalanced in everything; he did nothing like other people, and what he did was done in superhuman dimensions.  His passion for buying and collecting antiquities was proverbial and fabulous.  A first-rate shot, sport was for him a question of murdering en masse, and the number of game shot by him reached hundreds of thousands.  A few years before his death he shot his 5,000th stag.

His ability as a good shot was phenomenal.  When in India, during his voyage round the world, and while staying with a certain Maharajah, an Indian marksman gave an exhibition of his skill.  Coins were thrown into the air which the man hit with bullets.  The Archduke tried the same and beat the Indian.  Once when I was staying with him at Eckartsau he made a coup double at a stag and a hare as they ran; he had knocked over a fleeing stag, and when, startled by the shot, a hare jumped up, he killed it with the second bullet.  He scorned all modern appliances for shooting, such as telescopic sights or automatic rifles; he invariably used a short double-barrelled rifle, and his exceptionally keen sight rendered glasses unnecessary.

The artistic work of laying out parks and gardens became in latter years his dominating passion.  He knew every tree and every bush at Konopischt, and loved his flowers above everything.  He was his own gardener.  Every bed and every group was designed according to his exact orders.  He knew the conditions essential to the life of each individual plant, the quality of the soil required; and even the smallest spot to be laid out or altered was done according to his minute instructions.  But here, too, everything was carried out on the same gigantic lines, and the sums spent on that park must have been enormous.  Few people had the varied artistic knowledge possessed by the Archduke; no dealer could palm off on him any modern article as an antique, and he had just as good taste as understanding.  On the other hand, music to him was simply a disagreeable noise, and he had an unspeakable contempt for poets.  He could not bear Wagner, and Goethe left him quite cold.  His lack of any talent for languages was peculiar.  He spoke French tolerably, but otherwise no other language, though he had a smattering of Italian and Czech.  For years—­indeed, to the end of his life—­he struggled with the greatest energy to learn Hungarian.  He had a priest living permanently in the house to give him Hungarian lessons.  This priest accompanied him on his travels, and at St. Moritz, for instance,