The Prince had been in his youth one of the bravest and most handsome of the incomparable cavaliers of his country, and the old soldier was recognizable in the figure of this scientific maniac, which had remained slender in spite of the fact that he was approaching his sixtieth year, in the tone of command which his slightest accents retained, in his martial face, scarred by a sabre at Sadowa, in his long mustache of grizzly red. But what one never forgot after seeing the singular man was his eyes--eyes of an intense blue, very bright and almost savagely restless, under the pale, reddish brows of formidable thickness. The Archduke had the eccentric habit of always wearing, even with his evening dress, heavy laced shoes, which permitted him, as soon as the dinner was over, to go out on foot, accompanied sometimes by his aide-de-camp, sometimes by Verdier, for an endless nocturnal walk. He prolonged them at times till three o'clock in the morning, having no other means of gaining a little sleep for his morbid nerves. This extreme nervousness was betrayed by his delicate hands, burned with acids and deformed by tools of the laboratory, whose fingers twitched incessantly in uncontrollable movements. From all his actions could be divined the dominant trait of his character, a moral infirmity for which there is no precise term, the inability to continue any sensation or to persist in any effort of the will. That was the secret of the singular uneasiness which this man, so distinguished in certain ways, imparted to those around him, and from which he was the first to suffer. One felt that in the hands of this strangely irritable person every enterprise would fail, and that a kind of inward and irresistible frenzy prevented him from putting himself in harmony with any environment, any circumstance, any necessity. This superior nature was incapable of submission to facts. Perhaps the secret of his unbalanced condition lay in the fixed idea that he had been at one time so near the throne and had lost it forever, that he had seen irreparable faults committed in politics and in war, that he had known of them while they were taking place and had not been able to prevent them. Thus at the beginning of the war of 1866 he had, it was said, planned a campaign which might have changed the face of Europe at this end of the century. Instead he had to risk his life to execute manœuvres whose certain failure he foresaw. Every year, on the anniversary of the famous battle at which he had been wounded, he became literally insane for forty-eight hours. He was equally so whenever he heard mentioned the name of some great revolutionary soldier.