ke in the presence
and to the delight of the considerably older Crown Prince. Ready as I
am to believe that the Crown Prince Rudolf enjoyed the jokes--and
little do I doubt that there were men there who would act in such
fashion so as to curry favour with the Crown Prince--I still think
that these unpleasant incidents in his youth weighed less in the
balance with Franz Ferdinand than the already-mentioned occurrences
during his illness.

Apart from his personal antipathies, which he transferred from a few
Hungarians to the entire nation, there were also various far-reaching
and well-founded political reasons which strengthened the Archduke in
his antagonistic relations with Hungary. Franz Ferdinand possessed an
exceptionally fine political _flair_, and this enabled him to see that
Hungarian policy was a vital danger to the existence of the whole
Habsburg Empire. His desire to overthrow the predominance of the
Magyars and to help the nationalities to obtain their rights was
always in his thoughts, and influenced his judgment on all political
questions. He was the steady representative of the Roumanians, the
Slovaks, and other nationalities living in Hungary, and went so far in
that respect that he would have treated every question at once from an
anti-Magyar point of view without inquiring into it in an objective
and expert manner. These tendencies of his were no secret in Hungary,
and the result was a strong reaction among the Magyar magnates, which
he again took as purely personal antagonism to himself, and as the
years went on existing differences increased automatically, until
finally, under the Tisza regime, they led to direct hostility.

The Archduke's antipathy to party leaders in Hungary was even stronger
than that he felt for Tisza, and he showed it particularly to one of
the most prominent figures of that time. I do not know for certain
what took place between them; I only know that several years before
the catastrophe the gentleman in question was received in audience at
the Belvedere, and that the interview came to a very unsatisfactory
end. The Archduke told me that his visitor arrived bringing a whole
library with him in order to put forward legal proofs that the
Magyar's standpoint was the right one. He, the Archduke, snapped his
fingers at their laws, and said so. It came to a violent scene, and
the gentleman, pale as death, tottered from the room.

Certain it is that Ministers and other officials rare