That this physical peculiarity was, in the case of the Habsburgs, the outward sign of mental and moral divergences from the healthy norm was evidently as little suspected by Napoleon as by Brantôme. It is the discovery of the students of a comparatively new science; and it is a discovery of which the biographer must be careful to make neither too little nor too much. Eugenics is not yet an exact science; and the laws of heredity remain obscure. They are laws, it would seem, which, though generally true, cannot be relied upon to operate in any particular way in any particular case. The life of a family almost invariably confirms them, whereas the life of an individual may often appear to confute them; and we may often see genius flowering on the same plant as insanity. The history of the Habsburgs in general—and the life of Francis Joseph in particular—supports that view of the matter. The Archduke Charles, who was so nearly a match for Napoleon, and actually beat him at Aspern, was not a very distant relative of the Archduke Otto who used to dance in a Vienna café, attired only in a képi, a pair of gloves, and a sword-belt. The Archduchess Christina, who proved such an admirable mother to the little King of Spain—though she has transmitted a double portion of the Habsburg jaw to him—was no less a Habsburg than the Princess who so signally and so publicly failed to find happiness in the love of Signor Toselli. And so on, and so forth; for the contrasts of the kind to which one could point are endless. One is left with the impression that the family, taken as a family, is mad, but that certain isolated members of it have been as sane as the rest of us, and abler than the majority; and one needs the impression before one can justly appreciate the drama of Francis Joseph’s life. He has stood before Europe, for more than sixty years, as the picked champion of the Habsburgs: picked not only for his ability, but also for his strength of character and conciliatory tact—for all those qualities, in short, which one looks for from a sane man in an exalted station. He started, as we have seen, under the burden of a singularly bad heredity; and he has carried that burden through life with patient endurance—and with an air of dignity—as if personally unconscious of the taint, while the lives of those nearest and dearest to him were furnishing undeniable proofs of it at every turn. He has shown himself, to conclude, the true head of the house, by nature as well as by pragmatic sanction. So much made clear, we may proceed to chronicle the bald facts of his birth and childhood. CHAPTER IV