Love on the run
Digby Durrant
ALL FOR LOVE by Dan Jacobson
Hamish Hamilton, £16.99, pp. 260, ISBN 0241142733
✆ £14.99 (plus £2.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848 The ravishingly romantic cover of this book is very unlike the tragic and unromantic story inside until, that is, you get to its last pages when a rare and strange kind of new love emerges. Many of the extraordinary things that happen seem to be the fruit of the writer’s excitable imagination, but Dan Jacobson, an academic as well as an award-winning novelist, relies on indisputable historical fact as he demonstrates with easily digestible and fascinating footnotes. But however firm the facts, Jacobson is telling a bizarre story and the characters’ conversations, moods and motives are his invention as is the rich demotic style of a thoroughly modern novel which he favours.
Leopold II of the Belgians, the brute who made millions out of mining and murdering the Congo in the last years of the 19th century, had a repellent appearance. Louise, his daughter, compared his skinny legs to a carpenter’s measuring rod and said he had a nose that could chop logs or take out a man’s eyes. Conspicuously overweight herself, prey to various stomach complaints and giving off an aura of tainted food, Louise is on the grotesque side herself. She is married to Prince Phillipp, known as Fatso, a cousin who ruled over the duchy of Saxe-CoburgGotha, who she comes to hate as much as her father. After 20 years and various infidelities of her own she notices that a young officer is deliberately showing off his horsemanship on her daily drives through the Prater in Vienna in a flirtatious way. Then one day comes an unmistakable look, ‘an electric shock’, passes between them and from then on they are doomed.
Géza Mattachich is the son of an obscure Croatian count whose accent marks him out as a counter-jumper too obviously on the make to move in the elevated circles to which Louise is accustomed. Nevertheless he’s brave enough to dare to have an affair with a Saxe-CoburgGotha princess knowing it’s on the cards he will be murdered for his impudence. The Emperor Franz-Joseph exiles them from Vienna and their scandalous, nomadic life of exhibitionist extravagance begins in Paris and on the Riviera as credit at exorbitant interest is readily extended to a royal princess with such wealthy connections.
But Mattachich has gone too far. Several clumsy forgeries of his come to light. As Jacobson in his racy way puts it, Mattachich feels it’s like having ‘a packed intestine with the forged promissory notes as the final bung up his arse’. Things move fast. Mattachich is sentenced to prison with enough extra torments thrown in to make his survival unlikely. Louise is examined by Krafft-Ebing, diagnosed as mad and packed off to an asylum.
What happens next is described by the historian Holler as ‘the sheer impossible’. A peasant girl, Maria Stöger, who has adored Mattachich from afar, manages to get a job in his prison as a canteen worker, conceives a child with him and finally persuades the press to intervene so effectively that he is pardoned. The pair then spring Louise from her asylum and off all three go to make whoopee in Paris again. Maria and Louise become more important to each other than Mattachich, who dies worn out at 56 with Louise following six months later. On the face of it neither Louise or Mattachich had seemed capable of sustained loyalty particularly when to have stopped their affair would have spared them much misery. But in their memoirs they have no regrets and nothing but good to say of each other. In the end their love has moved on to a higher plane — a devotion of quasi-mystical dimensions on her side and on his, a creed hammered out in a foul cell where he renewed his vow to make Louise his lifelong duty whatever the consequences. All For Love puts us right in the centre of a forgotten historical episode that was a public scandal during the last years of the corrupt and ramshackle Habsburg empire in an astonishingly vivid way.
Previous page
