But, if that was their belief, then they were mistaken in it. In Princess Louisa’s case, as we have said, the hour of revolt had struck too late. Her spiritual revolution was, in some respects, rather like the great French Revolution, which continued to proceed from excess to excess, and from extravagance to extravagance, long after its ostensible purpose had been achieved. She might be able to “do sculpture”; but there were certain other things, more important than sculpture, which she found it impossible to do. Above all, she could not settle down and keep her allegiance fixed. She had no sooner settled down in one place than she wanted to move on and settle down somewhere else. Like Little Joe, she was “allus a-moving on”; and the meaningless migrations were a weariness of the flesh to her husband, and a hindrance to his professional prospects. “You are killing the artist in me,” he said to the woman who had once assured him that artists were, of all men, the noblest and the worthiest to be loved. [Illustration: _Photo_ _Dover Street Studios_ PRINCESS LOUISA OF TUSCANY (Ex-Crown Princess of Saxony). ] After that there was estrangement, culminating in separation, but mitigated by collaboration in a comic opera—the plot of it based upon Princess Louisa’s recollection of certain incidents in her career as Crown Princess of Saxony. The proof is clear that, in her case—if not also in his—the passion for publicity has survived the passion for romance; but the end is not yet, and is not likely to prove of a significance which would warrant the suspension of the publication of this work until it occurs. Princess Louisa’s story has been an excursus, albeit a necessary one, seeing that it illustrates, even to the point of absurdity, the Habsburg habit of doing melodramatic things melodramatically, as if they felt conscious that, whether they sat on thrones or slid off them, they owed at once an entertainment and an object lesson to the admiring curiosity of the world. And that, of course, is the reason why the Habsburgs have been at once so interesting and so troublesome to the Head of their House. When they have sinned, as he would account it—offended, at all events, against the ancient traditions of the House—they have not been contented to go out and sin quietly. They have, on the contrary, sinned, if not strongly, at least demonstratively, as if their business was everybody’s business, and it behoved both the Courts and the peoples to take note. And Francis Joseph, on his part, has not failed to take note, protesting, as it were, against Habsburg side-shows, and re-asserting those Habsburg principles which the rebels have rejected, with a vigour which sometimes reminds one of the last roar of a dying lion. We must return to him, though, in truth, there remains but little to be said. CHAPTER XXXII