NEWS OF THE WEEK
AGREAT blow has fallen upon the House of Hapsburg. Upon the morning of the 30th ult., the Crown Prince Rudolph, who was staying at his hunting-seat near Baden (Austria), was found by his valet dead in his bed. It was officially announced in Vienna, before any autopsy had been made, that he had died of apoplexy ; but this was discredited, as he was of slight habit, unusually active, and had appeared only the day before in his usual health. Suspicion, sharpened by some reported utterances of the Prince, pointed to suicide; and on Friday the official Vienna Gazette admitted that the Prince had shot himself. No reason is suggested, but the Prince comes on one side from a family with a proclivity to brain-disease. The Prince was thirty-one years of age, and had been married for nearly eight years to Princess Stephanie of Belgium ; but he leaves only a daughter, and the Austrian inheritance, under the grand Imperial Decree, commonly called the Pragmatic Sanction, of 1724, which confines the Throne, after the decease of Maria Theresa, to the "male descendants of Charles VI. in the order of primogeniture," passes to the Emperor's brother, Charles Louis, and his heirs, of whom the eldest is the Archduke Francis, born in 1863. There is a rumour that the Emperor may try to modify the family law ; but it is a mere guess, and, for reasons given elsewhere, a most improbable one.
