The Archduke did not forgive himself for his weakness in continuing the benefits attached to his title and rank when his tastes for abstract theories and the bitterness of his blighted destiny had led him to embrace the worst convictions of anarchistic socialism. With all that, prodigiously learned, a great reader, and a great conversationalist, he seemed to take revenge upon his own inconsistencies in conduct and in action by the acuteness of his criticism. Never did his lips express admiration without some disparaging and cruel reservation. Only scientific research, with its impregnable certitudes, appeared to communicate to this disordered intelligence a little repose, and, as it were, a steadier equilibrium. Since the time when his disagreements with his wife had resulted in that species of moral divorce imposed by higher authority, his researches had absorbed him more than ever. Retired at Cannes, where he was kept by the beginning of an attack of asthma, he had worked so hard that he had transformed himself from an amateur into a professional, and a series of important discoveries in electricity had given him a semi-reputation among specialists. His enemies had spread abroad the report, which Corancez had echoed, that he had simply published under his own name the work of Marcel Verdier, a graduate of the École Normale, attached for some years to his laboratory. In justice to the Archduke, it must be said that this calumny had not lessened the enthusiasm and jealous affection which the strange man felt for his assistant. For the final trait of this being, so wavering, uncertain, and, in consequence, profoundly, passionately unjust, was that his only attachments were infatuations. The story of his relations with his wife was the same as with all the relations formed in a life made up of alternations between passionate sympathy and inordinate antipathy for the same persons, and for no other cause than that incapacity of self-control, an incapacity which had made him, with all his gifts, tyrannical, unamiable, and profoundly unhappy, and, to borrow a vulgar but too justifiable epigram from Corancez, the great Failure of the Almanach de Gotha. Madame de Carlsberg had had too long an experience with her husband's character not to understand it admirably, and she had suffered too much from it to avoid being, on her side, exceedingly unjust toward him. A bad temper is of all faults the one that women are least willing to pardon in a man, perhaps because it is the most opposed to the most virile of virtues, steadfastness. She was too keen not to discern in that tormented face the approaching storm, as sailors read the face of the sky and the sea.