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as an asset. There is nothing Hapsburgian about her lower lip and her jaw is anything but prognathous. She has a print of a Stieler portrait of the Archduchess Sophie which looks like a picture of her in fancy dress. If she herself seldom wears anything fancier or more voluminous than slacks and a shirt, only the wives of certain French officials have expressed disapproval.
Mal elevée
is their verdict.
    I suppose it could be argued that few Hapsburgs have ever been anything but badly brought up, though not perhaps in the sense that the officials’ ladies are using the phrase. Elizabeth, well informed by her maternal grandmotherwho as a young girl knew the court of Franz Josef, can be eloquent on the subject. The King of Hungary who sneered that, while wars were fought by strong nations, ‘happy Austria’ could usually get what it wanted by marriage, was not far wrong. When one hears about those wretched little archdukes and archduchesses with their pet names – the Franzis, the Maxis, the Bubis, the Sisis, the Lisls – all being taught deportment and court etiquette almost as soon as they could walk, and having their marriage contracts negotiated long before they reached puberty, it is hardly surprising that as adults most of them were more than a trifle neurotic. What
is
surprising is that over the centuries so few were manifestly insane.
    Hearing Elizabeth speak of such things it is easy to assume that she shares one’s own abhorrence of them. To do so, however, is to misunderstand her. If she does not live in her family’s past to the extent of approving its grosser stupidities, she never wholly disapproves. For her the lovers of Mayerling were a disgraceful pair of fools who caused the poor old Emperor intolerable pain and inconvenience. The notion that they might be deserving of some pity is unacceptable. True, mistakes were made with Rudolph’s education. There was that fool of a tutor who locked the boy in a zoo with wild animals to teach him courage. Clearly not the way to teach a boy of six anything. But Rudolph was the Crown Prince, the Throne Heir. His sense of responsibility should have been innate. ‘Oh yes, I know you think I’m talking nonsense, but still …’
    Elizabeth’s own formal education may have been of the kind appropriate to the daughter of a prosperous Belgian manufacturer, but her thinking in certain areas remains that of the maternal grandmother who curtsied to Franz Josef.
    Her attitude towards her parents’ divorce is characteristic. It goes like this: since her father was a Protestant and always intended to remain one, the marriage was doomedfrom the start and ought never to have been sanctioned. It would have been better if she had been born a bastard.
    Her parents’ reception of this pronouncement has been mixed. Martens père, who has two other children by his second marriage, now accepts it with a resigned, kindly sort of amusement. On the other hand, her mother, who now lives with her second husband in Paraguay, resents it deeply. On her last visit to St Paul there was a bitter quarrel, with both sides hurling what appeared to be deadly insults at one another. I say ‘appeared to be’ because both charges and counter-charges involved historical allusions which were to me largely incomprehensible. It was for this reason that my attempts at mediation met in the end with some success. My abject ignorance became so evident that ultimately both disputants were driven to laughter.
    On the subject of her own marriage Elizabeth is no less dogmatic. She has been legally separated from her husband for five years now. There are no children of the marriage. She neither needs him nor even uses his name. Yet – though to my certain knowledge she never goes near a church or a priest – she still considers herself irrevocably married to the man. She will not even consider divorce, and if he were ever to bring, as he could, a civil action for annulment of the marriage, she would contest