Franz Ferdinand had a Hungarian lesson every day; but, in spite of this, he continued to suffer from the feeling that he would never be able to learn the language, and he vented his annoyance at this on the entire Hungarian people.  “Their very language makes me feel antipathy for them,” was a remark I constantly heard him make.  His judgment of people was not a well-balanced one; he could either love or hate, and unfortunately the number of those included in the latter category was considerably the greater.

There is no doubt about it that there was a very hard strain in Franz Ferdinand’s mentality, and those who only knew him slightly felt that this hardness of character was the most notable feature in him and his great unpopularity can doubtless be attributed to this cause.  The public never knew the splendid qualities of the Archduke, and misjudged him accordingly.

Apparently he was not always like that.  He suffered in his youth from severe lung trouble, and for long was given up by the doctors.  He often spoke to me of that time and all that he had gone through, and referred with intense bitterness to the people who were only waiting day by day to put him altogether on one side.  As long as he was looked upon as the heir to the throne, and people reckoned on him for the future, he was the centre of all possible attention; but when he fell ill and his case was considered hopeless, the world fluctuated from hour to hour and paid homage to his younger brother Otto.  I do not for a moment doubt that there was a great deal of truth in what the late Archduke told me; and no one knowing the ways of the world can deny the wretched, servile egotism that is almost always at the bottom of the homage paid to those in high places.  More deeply than in the hearts of others was this resentment implanted in the heart of Franz Ferdinand, and he never forgave the world what he suffered and went through in those distressful months.  It was chiefly the ostensible vacillation of the then Minister for Foreign Affairs, Count Goluchowski, that had so deeply hurt the Archduke, who had always imagined that Goluchowski was deeply attached to him.  According to Franz Ferdinand’s account, Goluchowski is supposed to have said to the Emperor Francis Joseph that the Archduke Otto ought now to be given the retinue and household suitable for the heir to the throne as he—­Franz Ferdinand—­“was in any case lost.”  It was not so much the fact as the manner in which Goluchowski tried “to bury him while still living” that vexed and hurt him whom a long illness had made irritable.  But besides Goluchowski, there were numberless others whose behaviour at that time he took greatly amiss, and his unparalleled contempt of the world which, when I knew him, was one of his most characteristic features, appears—­partly, at any rate—­to date from his experiences during that illness.