Sophia tried to get Franz Joseph back on track, reminding him that the pious Nené was “such a good-looking girl with her slim, straight figure, and intelligent as well—a girl who would grow into a handsome woman.” That evening, to further convince her son that he was backing the wrong horse, she placed Sisi between herself and the old Prince of Hesse, with whom the girl could not possibly hold her own in conversation. Sophia was right, but it didn’t stop her son from staring at the girl all throughout the meal.
And at the ball that Sophia hosted on the eve of her son’s twenty-third birthday, which was meant to present Nené and her son to the Viennese aristocracy as their future rulers, Franz Joseph upset his mother’s plans by turning the event into the Sisi sideshow, giving each of his bouquets to her, while Nené—his intended fiancée, as least as far as Sophia was concerned—stood by and watched the emperor dance as often as possible with her little sister.
Franz Joseph ultimately convinced Sophia to approve of Sisi. And on Sunday morning, August 19, 1853, Ludovica accepted his marriage proposal on her daughter’s behalf, thrilled to be uniting Sisi to the biggest catch in Europe. Sisi, too, was over the moon, assuring her mother, “Of course I love him, how could I help but love him?” Then she burst into tears, sobbing, “If only he were not an emperor.”
Almost from the moment the royal betrothal was announced, Sisi demonstrated the qualities that would make her as unfit for her new role as Sophia had predicted. The throngs of delirious well-wishers in the streets crushing up against her carriage to catch a glimpse of their future empress utterly unnerved her and left her on the verge of tears. “It is a pity that Sisi is so delicate,” the archduchess commented, as if to say to her son, “I told you so.”
Nearly every convent in Bavaria was kept busy stitching Sisi’s trousseau, which included fifty dresses of varying weights and formality, dozens of undergarments and pairs of silk stockings, 113 pairs of shoes, and sixteen hats. Unfortunately, what was fashionable in the comparatively laid-back Bavaria was scoffed at by the sophisticated Viennese. A worried Franz Joseph wrote to his mother to say, “I have difficulty believing that it will be pretty.”
In April 1854, Sisi renounced her claim to the Bavarian throne and began her journey to Vienna. Just a few miles from the city, at the imperial palace of Schönbrunn, she got her first taste of what lay in store for her, and what had been a matter of course for the emperor all his life—the complete lack of privacy and a fanatical devotion to protocol. Her new Mistress of the Household, the pinch-faced Countess Esterházy-Liechtenstein, handed her a thick sheaf of papers, which she was expected to memorize verbatim, titled “Order for the Ceremonial of the Public Entry into Vienna of Her Royal Highness the Most August Princess Elisabeth.” It was the “script” for her role as a Hapsburg bride.
On April 23, the morning of her official entry into Vienna, Sisi broke down and wept in her mother’s arms. But by the time she climbed into the glass coach with its painted panels by Peter Paul Rubens, her eyes were dry and she wowed the crowd in her pink and silver gown embroidered with roses. Atop her abundant auburn tresses sat a diamond crown. “On show like a freak in a circus,” Sisi muttered to her mother.
The following day, April 24, 1854, illuminated by the glow of ten thousand candles, a thousand people packed the Church of the Augustinians within the parish of the Hofburg to witness the Cardinal Prince-Archbishop of Vienna’s joining of Franz Joseph and Sisi in holy matrimony. A papal dispensation had been necessary because Sisi and Franz Joseph, both Catholics, were first cousins. Significantly taller than her husband, Sisi looked every inch the empress in a wedding gown of white and silver strewn with myrtle blossoms, and a crown of opals and diamonds. She shyly glanced at her mother before murmuring her “I dos”—barely opening her mouth because the Archduchess Sophia had criticized her yellow teeth. In contrast to Sisi’s whisper, the enchanted bridegroom’s assent resounded to the farthest pew.
Sermon after tedious sermon followed the ceremony. The bridal party didn’t leave the church until evening, and made straight for the Hofburg, where the newlyweds spent another two hours sitting stiffly and accepting the formal congratulations—involving much curtsying and genuflecting—of countless dignitaries. Almost pathologically shy and fearful of meeting strangers, Sisi didn’t realize that no one could speak to her unless she addressed them first. She was utterly tongue-tied, with no gift for the inspired small talk in which most royals are raised from birth to excel.
After the wedding supper finally ended, Sisi was led to her bedchamber by a dozen pages bearing gilded candelabra. Her mother and Countess Esterházy helped her undress and put her to bed. A half hour later, the eager bridegroom—still in full military uniform—knocked on her door, accompanied, according to Hapsburg tradition, by his mother, who had come to present him to his nubile new wife.
But Sisi behaved as though she heard nothing. Exhausted by the day’s ordeal, and terrified of sex, she buried her head in the pillow and pretended to be fast asleep.
Two days after the wedding the royal marriage was consummated. Sophia had the news by eight that morning. Having such deeply personal information shared with her mother-in-law as Sisi was still enjoying the afterglow was just one of the drawbacks of spending the honeymoon in the Hofburg. During the days immediately following their nuptials, Franz Joseph spent six to seven hours at his desk, reminding his bored new bride that “World politics will not wait on our honeymoon.”
Although he was one of the most famous workaholics of all time, Franz Joseph still had enough of a libido to take the necessary breaks. His sex drive had made Sisi his empress; and once his paperwork was shelved and night fell, he couldn’t get enough of her. A tender, ardent, and patient lover, he must have been shocked to discover that his sixteen-year-old bride was frigid. Carnality not only left Sisi cold, it disgusted her.
The empress’s revulsion was corroborated by her two confidantes—her cousin, Countess Marie Larisch, and her lady-in-waiting, Marie Festetics—who both claimed that Sisi was neither sexual nor passionate. Countess Larisch wrote, “the empress regarded the excitement of being adored as a tribute, which her beauty had a right to demand . . . the grossness of life repelled her just as much as its beauty attracted her.”
She had gotten her heart’s desire, but hated every minute of it. Almost literally from the moment she married, Sisi was profoundly unhappy. Craving freedom, she penned maudlin poetry, referring to her regimented new life as a “prison cell.”
She could go nowhere and do nothing alone, and was not even permitted to walk about solely in the company of her husband, as it was deemed undignified behavior. Not allowed to confide in anyone because it would have compromised her position as empress, “I felt so abandoned, so lonely,” Sisi told Marie Festetics. Her husband’s imperial duties kept him away for long hours at a stretch, and as he never confided in her about them, she felt even more excluded. “I was completely alone all day long and was afraid of the moment when Archduchess Sophia came. For she came every day, to spy on what I was doing at any hour. I was completely à la merci of this completely malicious woman. Everything I did was bad. . . .”
Sophia, with a lifetime of experience in the Hapsburg court, had the teenage girl’s best interests at heart, but Sisi was inclined to see her mother-in-law as a monster who attempted to control every aspect of her life. The ugly clash of wills between the “proper” way of doing things and Sisi’s desperate need for freedom lasted until Sophia’s death in 1872.
The emperor probably thought he was doing Sisi a favor by not troubling her with things she’d likely find tedious or wouldn’t comprehend. Yet the result was a self-fulfilling prophecy: deciding that Sisi was either too naïve or too uninterested in the complexities of governing an empire, his family and their advisers never bothered to school her in them.
Yet Sisi did have an indirect influence in her husband’s policies. To the delight of many, wedlock had turned Franz Joseph into a far more compassionate rul
er. Queen Victoria’s brother-in-law, Duke Ernest of Saxe-Coburg, noticed that “the young emperor’s marriage has changed him very much for the better. . . . In spite of the dark outlook and the political frost, one feels a sort of joyous excitement about him . . . and the more I see him the more convinced I am that he has a remarkable talent for governing and will give the old Hapsburg state a great position.”
A few weeks after their wedding, Sisi became pregnant. Naturally, Archduchess Sophia wanted to control the next nine months as well. She counseled her son to treat Sisi with particular patience, tenderness, and understanding. As for her daughter-in-law’s passion for certain pets, she cautioned Franz Joseph, “I do not think Sisi ought to spend so much time with her parrots, for if a woman is always looking at animals, specifically during the earlier months, the children may grow to resemble them. She had better look in her looking-glass or at you. That would have my complete approval.”
According to Countess Larisch, Sisi “loathed the whole business of childbearing.” Obsessed with her own beauty, she was so concerned that pregnancy was ruining her figure and making her ugly that she refused to be seen in public. Plagued with morning sickness and depression, she no longer wished to share her husband’s bed. On March 5, 1855, the seventeen-year-old Sisi gave birth to a daughter. According to Archduchess Sophia, as the labor pains increased, the emperor had remained by his wife’s bedside, holding her hand and comforting her; and that after the birth Sisi lovingly held her newborn, exclaiming, “Oh, now everything is all right, now I don’t mind how much I suffered!” as she and the emperor erupted in joyous tears. Three weeks after her daughter was born, Sisi wrote to a Bavarian relative that “at first it seemed strange to me to have a baby of my own; it is like an entirely new joy. . . .”
Yet years later, Sisi described the event quite differently, claiming that before she awoke after giving birth, her infant was taken from her by her mother-in-law, who named her Sophie. The empress added that although Franz Joseph was utterly delighted with his baby girl, she had been utterly despondent. Little Sophie’s birth meant that she “would have to go through the whole dreary business again” in order to try for a son and Hapsburg heir.
Archduchess Sophia immediately assumed all responsibility for her grandchild’s care, choosing every attendant and demanding that the royal nursery be placed on the same floor as her own suite of rooms at the Hofburg, while Sisi was compelled to head upstairs within the vast palace to visit her own daughter.
Sisi gave birth to another girl, Gisela, in the summer of 1856. By this time, the empress and her mother-in-law were at war with each other over the upbringing of the imperial children.
Meanwhile, behind the scenes at the Hofburg, there were rumblings about Sisi’s failure to produce an heir. One day, a yellowed pamphlet dated 1784 (originally an anti-Marie Antoinette screed) was anonymously left on her desk, ominously opened to a particular section, where certain passages were heavily marked.
The destiny of a queen is to give an heir to the throne . . . if the queen is so fortunate as to provide the state with a crown prince this should be the end of her ambition. . . . If a queen has no sons she is merely a foreigner in the state and a dangerous foreigner at that—for fearing to be sent back from whence she came will always be seeking to win back the king by other than natural means. She will struggle for power and position by intrigue and the sowing of discord to the mischief of the king, the nation, and the empire.
On the one hand, Sisi was not terribly maternal; on the other, she wanted to wrest control of her children from her mother-in-law. So, in spite of Sophia’s protests that little Sophie was a sickly child who couldn’t tolerate too much activity or excitement, Sisi insisted on bringing her daughters on a state visit to Hungary.
Both Sophie and Gisela came down with the measles during the imperial couple’s tour. But Sophie’s symptoms proved fatal. Dashing back to Budapest, Sisi spent over eleven hours at the little girl’s bedside, helplessly watching her slip away. On May 29, 1857, the two-year-old archduchess died.
The death of their firstborn child widened the rift between Sisi and Franz Joseph. The emperor erected a protective wall of paperwork around himself. Having softened under Sisi’s caresses, he now became a chilly bureaucrat who never seemed to have a moment to spare for his grieving wife. But Sisi, too, seemed not to want to see her spouse, shutting herself in her rooms and weeping inconsolably. She took out her anger on tiny Gisela; for the rest of her life she blamed the girl for giving her older sister the measles and would have as little to do with her as possible.
Sisi was also pregnant again. When her condition was confirmed, she tried any number of quack remedies “guaranteed” to produce a boy. On the afternoon of August 21, 1858, the twenty-one-year-old empress went into labor. By midnight, Franz Joseph was weeping tears of joy as a 101-gun salute announced to the people of Vienna that the Hapsburgs had an heir, the Crown Prince Rudolf.
But the bloom was long gone from the marriage. Sisi was no longer the child-bride to be constantly wooed and cosseted; now she was just the neurotic mother of the crown prince. Franz Joseph no longer dismissed their attendants so they could enjoy a romantic horseback ride together. Although he assured Sisi that he loved her even more than he did when they wed, he preferred going hunting to her company.
The emperor also had more on his mind than his needy wife; he had a thorny political crisis to contend with—France’s open support of Italy’s bid for unification. In 1859, Franz Joseph made good on his threat to wage war against the Italian states of Piedmont-Sardinia if they refused to toe the Austrian line. Ironically, although they had little to say to each other when Franz Joseph was home, while he was off making war and losing at Magenta and Solferino, Sisi and the emperor enjoyed a loving correspondence—absence evidently making the heart grow fonder, while proximity increased and exacerbated their individual quirks and made it impossible for them to communicate with each other.
During her husband’s absences, Sisi focused all her energy on herself. Obsessed with her appearance, if she weighed more than 110 pounds (at a height of somewhere between five feet six and five feet seven and a half), she would starve herself with a liquid diet of orange juice and milk, or orange juice and fresh-squeezed veal juice. Sisi’s personal cult of beauty included vigorous daily exercise, particularly extensive horseback riding, and gymnastics. Tending to her hair was also a near mystical ritual, and it was observed that she spent far more hours on her coiffure than with her children.
It was during this period that Sisi was neither sleeping nor eating, and sending desperate letters to her husband at the front. “What shall I do without you? Have you forgotten me in all these events? Do you love me still? If you did not, then I would not care what happens to me.”
And yet when Franz Joseph would write that he was coming home, Sisi wanted him to say that it was because he could not wait to embrace her, not because imperial duty called. If he had to stay in Italy, she convinced herself that he was having an affair. Regardless of her paranoia, when her husband actually did return to her, she usually froze him out, emotionally and physically.
The emperor particularly needed her support when he came back to Vienna a disillusioned man, having been compelled to sign a treaty with France that divided several of the northern Italian states between the two powers. To his surprise and delight, this time Sisi welcomed him with open arms, and at first the imperial couple enjoyed a renewed tenderness. But something happened over the following fifteen months to trigger Sisi’s complete distaste for her husband, her callous disregard for his feelings, and the wanderlust that would characterize the rest of her days. Some thought her behavior showed signs of the Wittelsbach dynasty’s hereditary madness.
Mental illness, or a chemical imbalance that could not be diagnosed by nineteenth-century medicine, may have played a part in Sisi’s behavior, but something far more pedestrian might have been responsible for pushing her so far away from her husband that she had to leav
e the country and place half of Europe between them. She’d heard through the grapevine that Franz Joseph had enjoyed a rendezvous with a Polish beauty, a countess he had known before his marriage. It was rumored that the mystery woman was one of his mother’s ladies-in-waiting, or part of her household in some way—yet another reason for Sisi to despise Sophia, whom she now regarded as a procuress.
In the autumn of 1860, Sisi suffered a total physical and mental breakdown. Although no written records survive, rumors have persisted for the past hundred and fifty years that Sisi had received from her adoring husband the gift that keeps on giving—an utterly devastating blow—not merely proof of his infidelity, but a strange disease that left her with swollen wrists and knees. The court physicians refused to give her a diagnosis; so, heavily veiled and incognita, she visited a private doctor in Vienna, who gave her the awful truth. If his diagnosis of venereal disease was accurate, it was likely the catalyst that sent her fleeing from a place she already detested and a marriage that she considered “hell on earth”—a phrase that brought tears to Franz Joseph’s eyes whenever she said it to his face.
The “mysterious illness” was publicly billed as tuberculosis, which provided enough of an explanation as to why she was wasting away. Touted to her subjects as a “rest cure,” she toured Madeira and Corfu, places where she would be unlikely to meet any Austrians, who gleefully equated the empress’s flight with her inability to win the love of the people. There, she took Hungarian lessons, devoured Shakespeare, and received lovesick letters from Franz Joseph. Certainly if he knew by then he had given her a venereal disease (were that indeed the case), his guilt would have been overwhelming.
No sooner did Franz Joseph persuade Sisi to come home than her emotional symptoms returned, manifesting themselves in melancholia (what is now called depression, in addition to what we might diagnose as anorexia). She developed a mania for visiting local lunatic asylums and began to champion better treatment for madness. Edgy and restless, she insisted on resuming her foreign travels, returning to the welcoming throngs of Viennese in August of 1862. Baron Hübner, an eyewitness to the imperial couple’s interactions at the time, observed that they were as loving as ever; but Sisi’s ladies-in-waiting described her as frequently in tears, spending hours alone in her bedroom sobbing. She was sometimes so irritable that she could not bear to have them around, nor could she tolerate being alone with her husband. This time her mystery ailment was diagnosed as anemia, which had also led to dropsy. As a result, Sisi’s feet were painfully swollen with fluid.
Notorious Royal Marriages: A Juicy Journey through Nine Centuries of Dynasty, Destiny, and Desire Page 42