All for Love by Dan Jacobson

Author:Dan Jacobson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2005-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

That mood did not last long. When they got back to Baroness Fugger, whom they had left behind in Paris, they found her holding a letter from Ozegovich. It warned them on no account to return to Nice. Though they had tried to leave the resort as unobtrusively as possible, word of their departure had got around instantly. As a result yet more creditors were besieging the villa, many of them armed with distraining orders which magistrates up and down the Riviera and further afield were distributing to all comers. One of the claimants was also insisting that he carried a warrant for the arrest of Mattachich, on the grounds that he had taken with him items of jewellery which had been in Louise’s possession ‘on approval’ merely. Journalists from French, German, Austrian and Hungarian newspapers were infesting the place – badgering neighbours, creditors, servants, even street-sweepers for whatever bits of gossip could be sucked out of them. They would ‘run amok’, Ozegovich wrote, if the two of them reappeared.

Mattachich telegraphed his friend to close the house down completely, discharge any servants who still remained and set out as soon as he could for the Ozegovich home in Breznica, Croatia.* Not forgetting to take with him whatever valuables, clothes and items of furniture he could save from the wreck. The princess would join him there. Of his own movements Mattachich said nothing. Yet when the train carrying the princess arrived at Breznica, he was with her. So was Marie Fugger.

In his Memoiren written six years later Mattachich offers a lofty reason for his decision, which he took at the last moment, to accompany Louise on her journey to his native country. ‘Now I had just one aim in mind: to get back to Austria in order to give not the slightest hint of plausibility to the idea that I or the princess wished to evade our responsibilities.’† Even in retrospect it was impossible for him to confess to the banal truth: that they had no money and hadn’t been able to find anyone to shelter them in any other European country. (The last beseeching letters sent by Louise before their flight from Nice had been addressed to Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany and to the much hated Schleswig-Holsteins. Both parties had failed to reply.) Still less could Mattachich confess that something more compelling, perhaps more shaming, than the lack of an alternative was drawing him back to Croatia. Initially he had intended Louise to be ‘stored’ anonymously in backwoods Breznica until he found a place of refuge for them somewhere in Western Europe. But when the time came for Louise to leave, the thought of being left behind, on his own, was more than he could face. Equally, the thought of her alone in Croatia had no appeal. Croatia was his place, not hers. It was his home. At this moment of crisis it was where he wanted to be. In almost childlike fashion he found himself thinking he would be safer there.

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