AUSTRIAN ROYALTY.

Evening Post, Volume LXVIII, Issue 128, 26 November 1904, Page 13

AUSTRIAN ROYALTY.

«• A vulgar fight before the Austrian Law Courts now goes on between Clotilde, youngest morganatic daughter of the late Archduke Ernest of Austria, and Imperial aunts, uncles, and cousins, who want to keep the civil heritage she claims. They have failed to set aside the morganatic marriage of Ernest and Laura Stublitz, and have resorted to unworthy subterfuges to keep his private fortune. Four children came of the marriage of Ernest and Laura. The eldest was placed for some years in a school near Paris for children of "slow development." She there learned to feed herself and to button her own boots. The eldest son, named Ernest after his archducal father, also spent 6ome years in a French school to prepare him for the army, which he entered from the Theresa Military College. He ran deeply into debt, was cashiered, and fell from low to lower social grade until he had used up his influence, and became an omnibus driver. Steam trams driving him from this situation, he lived as he could by copying plays for theatres. Here progress pressed on him cruelly, in the shape of the typewriter. Bereft of employment, he fell ill from despair\and want, and, dyinj., left a number of children. His second brother studied law to qualify himself for a pott in the judicature, and might have d»iie well had not tuberculosis lain in wait for him. He avoided a lingering death by suicide. Clotilde, the fourth child of the morganatic marriage, is now at law with her Imperial aunts and uncles for her father's private property, and seems likely to win her suit. She is in poor health. The Empress Elizabeth used to show her kindness, and thought she had the pluck requisite for the calling she most admired — that of circus rider. Pluck, however, without a sound physique is as the sharp sword that soor wears out the scabbard. — London. Truth,