Page:Charles von Hügel (1903 memoir).djvu/79

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CARL FREIHERR VON HÜGEL
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horseback, drove at walking pace through the turbulent crowd, which had no suspicion that the man, whose life was threatened, was in hiding within. It was the fate of Latour from which he was escaping at that moment; and he who had been omnipotent in the great Empire had for several days together to slink about in disguise. How the statesman who had grown grey and old in politics was at the time regarded even beyond the limits of Austria, appears in the circumstance that one of the most respected German publishers printed the fragment of a scurrilous lampoon which that untrustworthy scandal-monger Hormayer, who died a few months after Metternich's fall, had not lived to finish. Amid manifold dangers Carl von Hügel conveyed the Prince and Princess Metternich to England, and there for a time Hügel remained[1]. Meanwhile his country was brought to the verge of destruction by madness, incapacity, and infirmity of purpose; and the capital became the scene of anarchy and every crime.

On his return home Hügel with the rank of Major rejoined the army, which, under Prince Windischgrätz, had restored law and order in Vienna: and at the end of the winter, 1849, when the second Piedmontese war began, he was appointed to the head-quarters of the man to whom, when people in general had lost their heads, Grillparzer had addressed his: "In thy Camp is Austria." On the conclusion of the Conventions which had for their result the operations in revolutionary Central Italy on the part of the four Catholic powers, he was sent as representative of the Empire to Gaeta and Naples; he accompanied the Master of the Ordnance, Baron d'Aspre, in his advance on Tuscany; and after

  1. The Princess died, March 3, 1854, five years before her husband, who was thirty-two years her senior.