Sightseeing in Vienna for the first time, Britain’s Edward of Wales last week inevitably went to see yellow-stuccoed Schönbrunn Castle and took snapshots like any other tripper. Afterward, not satisfied with the Schönbrunn guide books, he sent out an aide to get research material on that House of Habsburg that was once accustomed to occupy Schönbrunn in the summertime and on its last great Emperor, long-legged, Dundreary-whiskered Franz Josef I.
For data on that high bourgeois royalty, Edward of Wales might better have walked through Schönbrunn Park and called on Franz Josef’s best friend in a villa hard by. Katharina Schratt was a popular Viennese actress in her middle twenties and Kaiser Franz was nearly 30 years older when they met. Their relationship was as respectable as the staid, fussy Emperor could make it. In full uniform he used to go to her villa at 4:30 a.m. three times a week, have a stiff formal breakfast with her. The Empress was as good a friend of Käthi Schratt as he was. One by one Franz Josef’s family died, his heir Rudolf supposedly by his own hand, his wife by a shoemaker’s awl in the hand of an assassin. The War finally killed the old Emperor. The pension he had given Frau Schratt the Austrian Republic promptly canceled. But she still had plenty of assets: the neat villa, jewels, antiques. Her greatest asset was what she remembered of the scandal-riddled House of Habsburg but on that asset, despite the incessant wheedlings of publishers’ agents, she has never drawn. Instead she mortgaged her villa. Last week at 78 she was still living in it, selling one by one her jewels and antiques to keep inviolate her royal recollections.
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