1. The heir to the throne is the son of the family scapegrace, who used to dance in cafés _in puris naturalibus_. 2. This heir is married to a lady who comes of the decadent Bourbon Parma stock. 3. This young man, and his wife, and his family are taking precedence of his own wife, whom he loves, and the healthy[7] children whom she has borne him. [Footnote 7: Apparently healthy, though there is, unhappily, a strain of insanity in the Chotek family also. Nothing was known or suspected of it at the time of the marriage; but the Duchess of Hohenberg’s father had to be placed under restraint before his death. One may hope that the weakness was developed too late in life to be transmitted.] The superstition of caste would, indeed, be strong in Francis Ferdinand if he regarded that as a right and proper state of things; and the mere fact that he married as he did, in the face of the opposition which he encountered, shows clearly that, whatever superstitions may still retain a hold on him, that particular superstition has relaxed its grip. Is he likely—human nature being what we know it to be—to accept an affront inflicted in the name of a superstition which he has abandoned? Can we expect his wife and his children to press him to do so? Obviously we cannot. The thing might have happened in bygone ages—or even in comparatively recent ages—when universal opinion drew a religious as well as a social distinction between hereditary sovereigns and their subjects, and the personal dignity of the individual counted for nothing in comparison with that great impersonal principle. It cannot happen now that all impersonal principles are in the melting-pot and so many postulates which men used to grant as they now grant the law of gravitation are being brought to the bar of opinion to be cross-examined. The postulate which bids the progeny of an Emperor who married for love take a lower seat than the son and grandsons of the family scapegrace will assuredly be questioned by the next Emperor of Austria; and it will be found that it has nothing to say for itself. It may die fighting; but it will die; and the whole of the Habsburg superstition will die with it. What will happen then lies in the lap of the Gods. It is, however, precisely because of its gradual approach to such problems as these that one finds the reign of Francis Joseph such an intensely interesting period of history. It is interesting from the personal point of view as the story of Nemesis overtaking the oppressor; the story which we have presented symbolically as the story of the fulfilment of Countess Karolyi’s curse. Philosophically it is interesting as the age of transition from mediæval to modern ideas: the age in which both nationalities and individuals have stormily asserted their right to live their own lives in their own way. In both these matters we see, in Austria more clearly than anywhere else, the hungry generations treading down the past.