The RIBS there, Bohemian all, up to the shoulder, are ours: but the shoulder-blade and left arm, whose are they! Austria Proper and Hungary, these may be taken as sitting-part and lower limbs, ample and fleshy; but see, just above the pelvis, on the south side, how Bavaria and its Tyrol sticks itself in upon Austria, who fancied she also had a Tyrol, and far the more important one. Our Tyrol, our Styria, Carniola, Carinthia,--Bavaria blocks these in. Then the Swabian Austria,--Breisach, and those Upper-Rhine Countries, from which we invade France,--we cannot reach them except through Bavarian ground. Swabian Austria should be our right arm, fingers of it reaching into Switzerland; Ober-Pfalz our left:--and as to the broad breast between these two; left arm and broad breast are Bavaria's, not ours. Of the Netherlands, which might be called geographically the head of Austria, alas, the long neck, Lorraine, was once ours; but whose is it? Irrecoverable for the present,--perhaps may not always be so!"These are Kaunitz's ideas; and the young Kaiser has eagerly adopted them as the loadstar of his life. "Make the Reich a reality again,"thinks the Kaiser (good, if only possible, think we too);"make Austria great; Austria is the Reich, how else can the Reich be real?"In practical politics these are rather wild ideas; but they are really Kaunitz's and his Kaiser's; and were persisted in long after this Bavarian matter got its check: and as a whole, they got repeated checks; being impossible all, and far from the meaning of a Time big with French Revolution, and with quite other things than world-greatness to Austria, and rejuvenescence on such or on any terms to the poor old Holy Roman Reich, which had been a wiggery so long. Nobody could guess of what it was that France or the world might be with child: nobody, till the birth in 1789, and even for a generation afterwards. France is weakly and unwieldy, has strange enough longings for chalky, inky, visionary, foolish substances, and may be in the family-way for aught we know.
To Kaunitz it is pretty clear that France will not stand in his path in this fine little Bavarian business; which is all he cares for at present. England in war with its Colonies; Russia attentive to its Turk; foreign Nations, what can they do but talk;remonstrate more or less, as they did in the case of Poland;and permit the thing with protest? Only from one Sovereign Person, and from him I should guess not much, does Kaunitz expect serious opposition: from Friedrich of Prussia; to whom no enlargement of Austria can be matter of indifference. "But cannot we perhaps make it worth his while?" thinks Kaunitz: "Tush, he is old and broken;thought to be dying; has an absolute horror of war. He too will sit quiet; or we must make it worth his while." In this calculation Kaunitz deceived himself; we are now shortly to see how.
Kaunitz's Case, when he brings it before the Reich, and general Public of mankind and its Gazetteers, will by no means prove to be a strong one. His Law "TITLE" is this:--"Archduke Albert V., of Austria, subsequently Kaiser Albert II., had married Elizabeth, only Daughter of Kaiser Sigismund SUPER-GRAMMATICAM: Albert is he who got three crowns in one year, Hungary, Bohemia, Romish Reich; and 'we hope a fourth,' say the Old Historians, 'which was a heavenly and eternal one,'--died, in short (1439, age forty). From him come the now Kaisers.
"In 1426, thirteen years before this event of the Crowns, Sigismund GRAMMATICAM had infeoffed him in a thing still of shadowy nature,--the Expectancy of a Straubingen Princedom; pleasant extensive District, only not yet fallen, or like falling vacant: 'You shall inherit, you and yours (who are also my own), so soon as this present line of Wittelsbachers die!' said Kaiser Sigismund, solemnly, in two solemn sheepskins. 'Not a whit of it,' would the Wittelsbachers have answered, had they known of the affair.
'When we die out, there is another Line of Wittelsbachers, plenty of other lines; and House-treaties many and old, settling all that, without help of you and Albert of the Three Crowns!'
And accordingly there had never come the least fruit, or attempt at fruit, from these two Sigismund Sheepskins; which were still lying in the Vienna Archives, where they had lain since the creation of them, known to an Antiquary or two, but not even by them thought worthy of mention in this busy world. This was literally all the claim that Austria had; and every by-stander admitted it to be, in itself, not worth a rush.""In itself perhaps not," thought Kaunitz; "but the free consent of Karl Theodor the Heir, will not that be a Title in full? One would hope so; in the present state of Europe: France, England, Russia, every Nation weltering overhead in its own troubles and affairs, little at leisure for ours!" And it is with Karl Theodor, to make out a full Title for himself there, that Kaunitz has been secretly busy this long time back, especially in the late critical days of poor Kurfurst Max.
Karl Theodor of the Pfalz, now fallen Heir to Baiern, is a poor idle creature, of purely egoistic, ornamental, dilettante nature;sunk in theatricals, bastard children and the like; much praised by Voltaire, who sometimes used to visit him; and by Collini, to whom he is a kind master. Karl Theodor cares little for the integrity of Baiern, much for that of his own skin. Very long ago, in 1742, in poor Kaiser Karl's Coronation time, we saw him wedded, him and another, to two fair Sister Sulzbach Princesses, [Supra, viii.