The most frequent point of contention in the imperial household seemed to be the upbringing of their children. Their health was always delicate, yet no one seems to have credited their physical, as well as mental, instability with the fact that they were the inbred offspring of a pair of first cousins. Gisela was turning into a plodding creature with none of her mother’s beauty or imagination. Crown Prince Rudolf was precociously bright, but possessed a cruel and willful streak and a fascination with pistols—thanks to his brutal tutor, who was always trying to frighten him by shooting them off in his bedroom.
In 1865, the twenty-eight-year-old Sisi presented Franz Joseph with a written ultimatum: “It is my wish that full and unlimited powers should be reserved to me in all things concerning the children . . . I alone must decide everything up to their majority.” She added that from then on, “I further desire that everything concerning my own personal affairs, my place of residence (all changes in domestic arrangements) should be left for me alone to decide.”
One of those places Sisi chose to reside was Castle Gödollo in Hungary. She had fallen in love with the country—its people, its music, and its picturesque aspect. She actively championed the rights of the strong, proud Magyars, often to the chagrin of her husband, who had brutally subdued their rebellion in 1848-49. In 1867, after many months of negotiations, a political compromise was reached between Austria and Hungary, restoring the latter’s 1848 constitution and creating a dual monarchy, the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And on June 8, 1867, with tremendous pageantry, the Emperor and Empress of Austria were crowned King and Queen of Hungary. Sisi’s coronation gown, created by Worth of Paris, was a couture version of the traditional Hungarian national costume: an embroidered and bejeweled skirt and train of silver and white brocade, and a black velvet bodice laced entirely with pearls.
It was her beloved Hungary where the thirty-year-old Sisi insisted on bearing her fourth child. But even that decision sowed the seeds of a potential political crisis. If she gave birth to a boy on Hungarian soil, it would mean that he (rather than his older, Austrian-born brother) would be the eventual King of Hungary. It would also mean that upon this hypothetical son’s eventual succession, the Hungarian crown lands would be separated from Austria.
Much to the relief of the Austrians, who were coming to despise their empress, on April 22, 1868, Sisi gave birth to a daughter, the Archduchess Marie-Valerie. As neglectful as she had been of her first three children, Sisi would dote so much on “Valerie” throughout the girl’s life that she nearly smothered her.
By the 1860s Sisi’s renowned beauty had made her an international celebrity, yet it brought her no joy. Hungarian countess Marie Festetics, the lady-in-waiting who became Sisi’s closest confidante for years, wrote in her diary, “The Empress is sweet and good, but she makes everything a burden for herself, and what to others is a source of happiness becomes for her a source of discontent. She seems to me like a child in a fairytale. The good fairies came, and each of them laid a special gift in her cradle, beauty, sweetness, grace . . . dignity, intelligence, and wit. But then came the bad fairy and said ‘I see that everything has been given you, but I will turn these qualities against you and they shall bring you no happiness. I will deprive you of something which a man bears within him unconsciously—moderation in your actions, occupations, thoughts and sensibilities. Nothing will bring you happiness, everything will turn against you . . . and you will never find peace.’ ”
Sisi’s favorite daughter, Marie-Valerie, turned a critical eye on her mother’s manias. “How often I ask myself whether the relationship between my parents might not, after all, have turned out differently if in her youth Mama had had a serious, courageous will for it—I mean, a woman can accomplish anything—And yet she may be right that, given the circumstances, it was impossible to become more intimately one.”
It was no secret to anyone at the Austrian court that the emperor was a slave to Sisi’s manipulative moods and to her numerous physical indispositions, which she invoked whenever she didn’t want to do something that invariably involved professional appearances and the discharging of the formal duties expected of an empress. However, she was always perfectly healthy when it came time to indulge in her brisk exercise regimens, to spend the entire day riding one of her horses at breakneck speed, or to travel for hundreds of miles.
But in a world where her role was so prescribed, where protocol was king and ceremony queen, Sisi’s behavior—including her fanatical dieting and exercising—was her way of gaining a measure of control. If all that was hers was her own body, she could at least control that—by withholding it from her husband, from their subjects, and by taming it into an enviable, if eventually wraithlike, physique.
After twenty-one years of marriage, Sisi began to spend the better part of her time abroad. She expressed the wish that Franz Joseph could join her, yet at the same time reveled in the opportunity to get away from him. When he explained that his responsibilities kept him from leaving his empire at a moment’s whim, she accused him of having the soul of a petty bureaucrat. Tragically, both Franz Joseph and Sisi were desperately lonely—within the marriage as well as when geographical and emotional distance separated them—yet neither could fill the other’s needs as spouses and as lovers.
Meanwhile, the imperial brood was growing older and slipping dangerously away from their parents’ control—which was weak to begin with. Apart from her obsession with her youngest child, Marie-Valerie, Sisi was absent—emotionally, literally, or both—from their children’s lives.
Sisi spent more time worrying about herself than about anyone else. At the age of forty-six, desperate to stave off old age, she took up fencing and mastered it. She continued her gymnastics exercise regimen, as skilled on the trapeze as many circus performers. Terrified of wrinkles, she slathered herself with facial masks made from raw veal or crushed strawberries, frequently invoking her credo, “Life will be worthless to me when I am no longer desirable.”
And yet her husband’s desire for her went unappreciated. It was only a matter of time before Franz Joseph would seek to replace the emotional void that Sisi had left by her prolonged absences. In 1884 he developed an interest in the theater, and in particular in an actress twenty-three years his junior named Katharina Schratt, also known as Frau von Kiss. Ironically, it was Sisi who had been to see her on the stage and became convinced that the young woman had all the requisite qualities to make the emperor happy.
The May-December relationship between Katharina Schratt and Franz Joseph may not have been a sexual one, although the emperor did fall in love with her. Madame Schratt was tender and solicitous, and a good listener; their liaison would last more than thirty years. Often she would travel with the imperial couple, and Sisi would make a point of being seen walking alone with her in public gardens to stave off any speculation that Franz Joseph was having an affair. For years, Franz Joseph and Sisi would refer to Madame Schratt as their “good friend.”
But Archduchess Marie-Valerie was appalled and embarrassed by her father’s extramarital relationship. She wrote in her diary, “Oh! Why did Mama bring about this acquaintance, and how can she say to boot that it is a reassurance to her! . . . How can it be that two such noble natures as my parents can be so mistaken and can so often make each other unhappy.”
By 1888, Sisi was off on her travels again, returning to Corfu, where she decided to build a villa. She had become obsessed with Homer and the ancient Greeks, when she should have been minding her son’s behavior instead. Rudolf had married the homely sixteen-year-old Princess Stephanie of the Belgians in May of 1881, but had hardly been faithful to her, in addition to becoming an alcoholic and a morphine addict—the latter as a result of the pain he incurred when he took a bad fall from a horse. Rudolf had become obsessed with the notion of suicide, and when Stephanie told the emperor that he had asked her to make a suicide pact with him, Franz Joseph stiffly informed his daughter-in-law that she was merely giving way to fantasies.
> On the morning of Wednesday, January 30, 1889, Sisi received the awful news that the crown prince had been found dead at Mayerling, his hunting lodge. Beside him was the corpse of his latest fling, seventeen-year-old Mary Vetsera—nude but for the single stemmed rose clasped between her fingers, the victim of a single shot to the head. The imperial couple spun the event, claiming that Mary had poisoned their son and then herself, but no one could ignore the bullet hole in each of their brains. It was later revealed (and most historians still believe) that Rudolf had killed Mary; and, coward that he was, he spent the next six to eight hours sitting on the bed beside her corpse, guzzling brandy until he had the gumption to fulfill their bargain and shoot himself.
“Where did we fail?” the imperial couple asked themselves. Sisi was tortured by her son’s death, not so much because she had neglected him for years but because she was convinced that she had passed him “tainted blood” through the Wittelsbach line. Rudolf was related both to Sisi’s cousin “Mad King Ludwig” of Hesse-Darmstadt and to Ferdinand and Isabella’s daughter “Joanna the Mad.”
Rudolf’s death and the manner in which it transpired haunted Franz Joseph as well as Sisi, but he dealt with it differently. Their daughter Marie-Valerie wrote to her fiancé, Franz Salvator, Archduke of Austria-Tuscany, “My mother causes me great anxiety. Now that agitation has given way to everyday life, and Papa at least appears outwardly the same, and works as he always did, life seems to her oppressive and cheerless. Besides, she is afraid that her ever-increasing grief may become a burden to Papa and lead to misunderstandings between them.”
In 1890, after Marie-Valerie’s wedding, Sisi resumed her wanderings once more, returning to Vienna only to quell rumors of her husband’s affair with Katharina Schratt. The imperial couple was otherwise estranged and had been so for years. According to the emperor’s valet de chambre, Eugene Ketterl, “At Gödollo, the Emperor was only rarely allowed to see his wife, even though they were living under the same roof. . . . It could happen that the Emperor might try to see her in vain for ten days running. How embarrassing that was in front of the staff, anyone can imagine; I often felt endless pity for my sovereign lord.”
After Rudolf’s suicide, Sisi became a black-clad, wraithlike figure who inspired more pity than awe. Sciatica and neuritis plagued her fifty-something body, which she still strove to keep youthful with seaweed wraps and massages. And yet she longed for death, wishing it to “take me unawares,” and to do so far from her family.
The empress got her wish in September 1898. During a visit to Switzerland, Sisi had been walking in the woods at Caux with her financial adviser and her attendants when they were accosted by an unemployed twenty-five-year-old Italian workman asking for alms. He was curtly rebuffed by Sisi’s controller, who kept the purse shut tightly.
The beggar, Luigi Luccheni, was a wannabe anarchist looking to make a name for himself by assassinating a monarch. His weapon was a sharp-edged file with a rough-hewn firewood handle that he’d purchased in the market at Lausanne. For the next few days, he stalked the sixty-year-old empress.
On the afternoon of September 10, as Sisi and Countess Irma Sztáray strode along the quay, about to board the steamship for Montreaux, Luccheni suddenly collided with them, raising his fist and striking at Sisi. She fell to the ground and hit her head. At first it wasn’t quite clear what had happened. The empress was carried to the deck of the steamship, where the captain tried to revive her with water and sugar soaked in alcohol.
“What is it?” she murmured.
The countess noticed a bloodstain on her chemise and a puncture in the fabric. Over the roar of the engines, she cried, “The Empress of Austria has been murdered!”
The captain ordered the boat turned for Geneva, but by then Sisi’s breath had become a death rattle. The piercing of Luccheni’s file was so small that she very gradually bled to death internally, with only a single drop of blood staining her stays and batiste camisole. She had been Empress of Austria—however reluctantly—for forty-four years.
Franz Joseph had been in the process of writing his estranged wife a letter when he received a telegram from Geneva with the tragic news. “Is nothing to be spared me on this earth?” he wept. Broken and distraught, he gazed at the portrait of Sisi hanging opposite his desk. “No one will ever know how much I loved her,” he murmured to himself.
Luccheni pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison. On October 19, 1910, he hanged himself in his cell.
Four years later, on June 28, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife were assassinated in Sarajevo as they traveled in an open car, sparking the First World War. The archduke was Franz Joseph’s nephew, and (thanks to Crown Prince Rudolf’s suicide) the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Eighteen years after Sisi’s death, on November 21, 1916, at the age of eighty-six, Franz Joseph died, allegedly singing “God Save the Emperor.” He had enjoyed one of the longest reigns in history—sixty-eight years—surpassing even Queen Victoria’s. But the Age of Empire was over. The Austro-Hungarian imperial monarchy was dissolved after the end of the First World War.
For all Sisi’s self-centeredness and emotional remoteness, and Franz Joseph’s rigid workaholism, they’re a pair of royals we can oddly relate to even though they may not be particularly likeable as individuals. The more eccentric Sisi grew, the more pedantic her husband became; and where the empress gave free rein to her hypersensitivity, he clung to stubborn obstinacy. Their marriage was fraught with tribulations, some of which seem strikingly “modern”—the sort of things you’d expect from an HBO hit series: miscommunication, eating disorders, manic depression, infant death, a problem child who got mixed up with bad company and substance abuse, suicide, frigidity, extramarital dalliances, and ultimately, estrangement. Yet never once did either Franz Joseph or Sisi seem to have contemplated divorce—possibly because they were devout Catholics—and to the last, at least from Franz Joseph, what remained bobbing just beneath the current, amid all the ugly emotional flotsam, was Love.
TSAR NICHOLAS II 1868-1918
RULED RUSSIA: 1894-1917
and
ALEXANDRA FEODOROVNA
1872-1918
married 1894-1918
“At last, united, bound for life, and when this life is ended, we meet again in the other world and remain together for eternity. Yours, yours.”
—Alexandra’s entry in Nicholas’s diary on their wedding night, November 26, 1894
QUEEN VICTORIA HAD A PREMONITION. ON DECEMBER 29, 1890, four years before Nicholas and Alexandra were wed, when their love was little more than a long-distance crush, the Queen of England wrote to her eldest daughter expressing her misgivings about the potential union: . . . there must be no more visits of Alicky to Russia—and . . . you and Ernie [Alexandra’s brother] must insist on a stop being put to the whole affair. . . . The state of Russia is so bad, so rotten that at any moment something dreadful might happen . . . the wife of the Thronfolger [heir to the throne] is in a most difficult and precarious position. . . . It would have the very worst effect here and in Germany (where Russia is not liked) and would produce a great separation between our families.
When Victoria finally met Nicholas, she claimed to have “never met a more amiable, simple young man, affectionate, sensible, and liberal-minded.” Having married for love herself, Her Majesty also recognized that her granddaughter’s relationship with Nicky was a passionate and devoted love match. Her rationale for dissuading Alexandra from making a huge marital mistake was wholly political.
Alicky, as Alexandra was known among the family, was only six years old in 1878 when her mother, Alice of Hesse-Darmstadt, died of diphtheria. Nicholas’s youth had also been colored by the death of a close relative; at the tender age of twelve he saw his grandfather, Tsar Alexander II, blown apart by an assassin’s bomb.
Nicholas’s father was Tsar Alexander III, an imposing, six-foot-six-inch bear of a man who could bend metal bars with his bare hands
. His mother was the Empress Marie Feodorovna, known as Minnie, a former Danish princess and the sister of the Princess of Wales. Minnie was as adamantly against a marriage between Alicky and Nicky as was Queen Victoria, but for different reasons: in her view, a daughter of tiny and undistinguished Hesse-Darmstadt was unworthy of becoming the next tsarina of Russia. Minnie was also convinced that Alicky was not enough of a people person for the job. She was too nervous; a shy, badly dressed parvenue with a clumsy, schoolgirl manner. But no amount of family pressure from either side could induce either Nicholas or Alexandra to consider wedding anyone else.
Alexandra and Nicholas first met in 1884 when Alicky, only twelve, had journeyed to St. Petersburg for the wedding of her older sister Ella to Nicholas’s uncle, the Grand Duke Serge. All week, she exchanged furtive glances with the sixteen-year-old Nicholas. And when he gave her a brooch, she felt so uncomfortable about accepting it that she returned it, wounding his feelings. But they kept in touch over the years, their mutual attraction increasing with each reunion.
Notorious Royal Marriages: A Juicy Journey through Nine Centuries of Dynasty, Destiny, and Desire Page 43