A shocking loss.
You can't replace Ferdinand by any twopenny-halfpenny idiot.
Only he ought to have been still fatter.'
'What do you mean?' Bretschneider livened up.
'What do I mean?' Svejk answered happily.
'Just this.
If he'd been fatter then of course he'd certainly have had a stroke long ago, when he was chasing those old women at Konopiste when they were collecting firewood and picking mushrooms on his estate, and he wouldn't have had to die such a shameful death.
Just imagine, an uncle of His Imperial Majesty and shot!
Why, it's a scandal! The newspapers are full of it.
Years ago in our Budejovice a cattle-dealer called Bfetislav Ludvik was stabbed in the market place in a petty squabble.
He had a son called Bohuslav, and wherever that lad came to sell his pigs, no one wanted to buy anything from him and everyone said:
"That's the son of that chap who was stabbed. l-Ie's probably a first-class bastard too!"
There was nothing for him to do but to jump into the Vltava from that bridge at Krumlov, and they had to drag him out, resurrect him, pump water out of him, and of course he had to die in the arms of the doctor just when he was giving him an injection.'
'You do make strange comparisons, I must say,' said Bretschneider significantly.
'First you talk about Ferdinand and then about a cattledealer.'
'Oh, no, I don't,' Svejk defended himself.
'God forbid my wanting to compare anyone to anybody else.
Mr Palivec knows me very well.
I've never compared anyone to anybody else, have I?
But I wouldn't for the life of me want to be in the skin of that Archduke's widow.
What's she going to do now?
The children are orphans and the family estate at Konopiste has no master.
Marry a new Archduke?
What would she get out of that?
She'd only go with him to Sarajevo again and be widowed a second time. You know years ago there was a gamekeeper in Zliv near Hluboka.1 He had a very ugly name- Pind'our.z Some poachers shot him, and he left a widow and two little babes.
Within a year she married another gamekeeper, Pepfk Savel from Mydlovary. And they shot him too.
And then she married a third time, again a gamekeeper, and said:
"Third time lucky.
If it doesn't succeed this time, then I don't know what I shall do."
Well, of course, they shot him too, and with all these gamekeepers she had six children altogether.
She even went to the office of His Highness the Prince at Hluboka and complained that she'd had trouble with those gamekeepers.
And so they recommended her a fellow called Jares3 who was a water bailiff in the watch tower at Razice.
And, can you imagine it? He was drowned when they were fishing the lake out.
And she had two children by him.
And then she took a pig-gelder from Vodiiany and one night he hit her over the head with his axe and went and gave himself up voluntarily.
And when they hanged him afterwards at the district court at Pisek he bit the priest's nose and said he didn't regret anything. And he also said something extremely nasty about His Imperial Majesty.'
'And you don't happen to know what he said?' Bretschneider asked hopefully.
'I can't tell you, because no one dared repeat it.
But I'm told that it was something so dreadful and horrible that one of the magistrates went mad, and they keep him to this very day in solitary confinement, so that it shan't get out.
It wasn't the usual sort of insulting remark which people make about His Imperial Majesty when they're tight.'
'And what sort of insulting remark do people make about His Imperial Majesty when they're tight?' asked Bretschneider.
'Now come, gentlemen, please change the subject,' said Palivec.
'You know, I don't like it.
Somebody might talk out of turn and we'd be sorry for it.'
'What sort of insulting remarks do people make about His Imperial Majesty when they're tight?' Svejk repeated.
'All kinds.
Get drunk, have the Austrian national anthem played and you'll see what you start saying!
You'll think up such a lot about His Imperial Majesty, that if only half of it were true it would be enough to disgrace him all his life.
But the old gentleman really doesn't deserve it.
Just think! His son Rudolf' - lost in tender years, in full flower of his manhood. His wife Elizabeth - stabbed with a file. And then Jan Orth - also lost. His brother, the Emperor of Mexico2-put up against a wall and shot in a fortress somewhere.