An Ex-Duke Who Sold Sausages

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 1016, 5 July 1930, Page 29

An Ex-Duke Who Sold Sausages

Cast Off His Roy:i l Po mp LIVED IN THE WOODS “So far as I know, T am the only man, born of Royal parents, in any part of the world, who has had the distinction of earning a living as a i small grocer/’ These are the words of Leopold ! Wolfling (ex-Arehduke Leopold of ; Tuscany), and they indicate the romantic attraction of his “Life Story: ; Front Archduke to Grocer,” published ! recently. | The ex-Arehduke tells in finely , suave English, but with quite startI ling frankness, a personal story which j in ups and downs of fortune is surely j exceptional. “Fearsome Old Bogey” The author was the eldest son of Ferdinand IV., Grand Duke of Tuscany, whose cousin was no other than the Emperor Francis Joseph of Austria. “So that fearsome old bogey. Family Tradition,” comments the exArchduke, “stalked my cradle from the start.” Francis Joseph, in fact, along with his nephew the Archduke Francis Ferdinand, who was murdered at. Serajevo, appear as the two evil influences in the life of the | author. j Francis Joseph, lie writes, success* i fully broke my heart by robbing me fof the only real love of my life. Like- ; wise . . . bis nephew and heir presumptive Francis Ferdinand almost as j successfully broke my career by the j pursuit of a cruel and senseless perj sonal vendetta against me. But : although both these men sought by j merciless persecution to lay me in jI he dust, they did not succeed. Little ; more than a lad. though 1 was, 1 | fought them inch by inch, and on re- • nouncing my Royal rank eventually brat, them fair and square. - The most astonishing episode of the sorry Hapsburg family feud narnfted : by the author is that in which he was : locked up in a lunatic asylum by , order of the Francis Joseph. Never shall J forget (he writes) my •: sensation as I passed within the prej cincts of that long, low building, with ; its heavily-barred windows and bolted : doors, on that bleak November day. i Here 1 stood at long last, a man brought low by his enemies; the capj tive slave of Francis Joseph, no i doubt imprisoned for life. As it happened, the author had to j endure only three months' captivity. ! He threatened, he says, to appeal to i King Edward, and the result of that | threat was that “the doctor declared I me to be perfectly sane, and free to leave Rheinau.” After that the way was' clear for i the final and complete rift. It came, ; says the author, because he insisted ! on championing his favourite sister, I Luisa. Crown Princess of Saxony, in 1 her dramatic decision to run away I from her husband with a French i tutor named Giron. . j The ex-duke also came to a dramatic decision on his own account. •Tust as the sending for Giron would spell social ostracism for Luisa, ho writes, so I knew that, if I sent for my girl, Johanna, Francis Joseph would banish me from Austria, and my royal rank would disappear. The joint plan hatched out with success, and from a royal personage the author descended—or rather, by his own way of it, ascended—to the status of a commoner. Thereafter he entered on rather a weird and unconvential life as a wild backwoodsman: The general public all over the I world, lie admits, has never been able i t(> forget that once —although against my better judgment, and only for a i short spell —l lived an eccentric back- | to-nature life, together with a lot of ! other wild men and women in a remote back wood village, all of them j going about stark naked, and subsisti in £ entirely on raw vegetables and ; fruit, up in the trees. Freak Jobs Apparently, however, the et-Arch-duke calmed down a good deal, and after a series of menial freak-jobs, including selling sausages on the streets of Berlin—“only think of it —a Hapsburg a sausage-hawker I ” wrote a royal relative—he took up the grocery business in Vienna. He now lives in humble circumstances with his adopted daughter in the hamlet of Mauer, about eight miles south of Vienna. “How humbly we live.” he writes, “is shown in that, besides doing all the housework, my adopted daughter washes all the clothes, and on washing days, to relieve her, 1 do the cooking.” And he confesses that he is happier as a working man than he was at any period of his life as a Royal personage. Truly a remarkable life story.

POINTS FOR DAIRYMEN

ADVICE BY DIRECTOR OF DAIRY DIVISION The following points form an excellent summary of the lengthy adUress given by Mr. W. M. Singleton, director of the Dairy Division at the annual meeting of the N.D.A. at Hamilton. 1. There should be a general and sustained effort throughout the cheese manufacturing districts of the Dominion toward making better qualitv of both whole milk and standardised cheese. 2. As indicated at various meetings this season there should be differential payments to cheese manufacturing dairy companies, based on grade points for preference, as in Denmark. 3. The differentials in payment should be passed on to suppliers through the grading of the milk deBye red, to cheese factories. The grading should be considerably developed on a voluntary basis, and should be placed on a compulsory basis when the time is opportune. 4. Farm dairy instruction should be general throughout the dairying districts of the Dominion as the complement of cream and milk grading. 5. The cheese-curing rooms should be heated during the spring months and the temperature maintained at about 65 degrees Fahi-enheit. 6. The dairy scientists should makeiheir best endeavours to find the cause of openness in cheese. Their conclusions should be based on results o£ carefully-conducted manufacturing experiments, before being published.