“No one bad is happy,” or “No bad man is lucky,” or “No peace for the wicked.”
In a NY Times article (here) about Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s great-granddaughter, ‘Her Serene Highness Princess Sophie Hohenberg,’ and her quest to reclaim her lineage’s castle in Konopiste, it is noted that “the walls of the castle’s public halls are mounted with some of the roughly 300,000 animals that Franz Ferdinand shot during his lifetime. It is a phantasmagoric display of bison heads and dear antlers and boar tusks and wood grouse tail feathers, each mounted on a wooden plaque inscribed with the date and place where they were shot.”
Talk about aristocratic excesses. 300,000 animals. Legend has it that one of the more 5,000 deer killed by Ferdinand was a rare albino buck. White stags appear in numerous anglo-saxon myths and legends (here), and it is believed that killing them brings bad luck (unless you’re the president of the Saxony Hunting Federation, and you use yer huntin’ science to conclude “the white deer is a mutation. It does not belong in the wild; it should be shot” – here).
While we can never know if World War I was caused by bad luck wrought when an avid hunter threw superstition to the wind, the sheer amount of violent death associated with Ferdinand’s existence haunts me: 300,000 animals felled, him and his wife hunted themselves in Sarajevo, and the resulting monstrous folly of treaty that left 40 million people dead or wounded.
Some of us live our lives as if touring a castle, tip-toeing in awe, taking care not to touch anything. Others, well, they inherit the castle and decorate it as they see fit.
