Nor was it through any overt act of his that incompatibilities irreconcilable with that dream had come to light. The handsome young man, united to a beautiful young woman, had only by degrees discovered that his case was also that of a simple man of soldierly directness, united to a woman who was a mysterious enigma, living an inner life into which it was impossible for him to penetrate. He had done his best, and hoped against hope that the dream which he had dreamed would come true. There is no reason to suppose that he abandoned the hope because he found himself taking a keen pleasure in the society of Frau Schratt; and there is every reason to believe that he liked to recall the dream, and live in it again, and deceive himself. But his marriage had, nevertheless, been a proof of the failure of the Habsburg matrimonial system; and further proofs of its failure, together with many instances of revolt against it, were to be pressed upon his notice in the years immediately in front of him. His future trouble with the Archdukes and the Archduchesses was to be trouble mainly of that kind. CHAPTER XXVI “Austria’s idiot Archdukes”—A _catalogue raisonné_—The Emperor’s brothers—The Archduke Rainer—The Archduke Henry and the actress—The Archduke Louis Salvator, the Hermit of the Balearic Islands—The Archduke Charles Salvator—The Archduke Joseph—The Archduke Eugéne and his vow to be “as chaste as possible”—The Archduke William and his courtship in the _café_—The Archduke Leopold—The awful Archduke Otto and his manifold vagaries. “Austria’s idiot Archdukes”—that is the scornful phrase in which Bismarck summed up the pillars of the House of Habsburg; but we must neither adopt it as a definition nor discard it as an insult. Archdukes, it is true, have been bred to deviate from the normal human type; but they have not all deviated from it in the same direction. Brilliance, as well as beauty, may go with decadence. Genius and madness are allied, and eccentricity is the cousin of both of them; the diseased fruit of a diseased stock may sometimes seem to make up in splendour for what it lacks in strength. We shall see how the various cases of the Archdukes and Archduchesses confirm that truth—Francis Joseph alone among them combining a fair endowment of ability with a plausible resemblance to the average man.