*
Though the Empress had paid little enough attention to either of her two older children, when the time came to find a suitable candidate to marry fifteen-year-old Gisela, she sprang into action. Elisabeth always bemoaned her own fate, having been married so young, and yet she gave her daughter no chance to take time with her marriage, let alone to go her own way. (It was not until she came to her youngest, Marie Valerie, that Elisabeth was generous, declaring that Valerie would be allowed to marry even a chimney sweep if she really had her heart set on it.) As Duchess Ludovika had done at one time, now Elisabeth also brought family relations into play.
Gisela was not very pretty. The royal Catholic houses of Europe, moreover, had no suitable princes to offer during the 1870s. Once more, therefore, Bavaria was considered, the candidate being Prince Leopold, the second son of Prince Luitpold. He was ten years older than Gisela.
Leopold was not free. Negotiations concerning a marriage with Princess Amalie of Coburg had been going on for a long time. This same Amalie of Coburg was adored by Sisi’s youngest brother, Max Emanuel (“Map-perl”); but probably no one at the Viennese court except the Empress was aware of this. Now there was great astonishment at Elisabeth’s unusual action; she invited the quasi-groom of Princess Amalie to Budapest and Gödöllö in the spring of 1872. The official occasion was a snipe hunt. Elisabeth to Leopold: “In this way, it will, it is to be hoped, raise no questions.”40
Leopold dragged out the negotiations with the House of Coburg because, as he said, they were unable to agree on a dowry (a matter of 50,000 guldens was at stake). Princess Amalie suspected nothing. Furthermore, as luck would have it, she happened to be in Budapest at the same time as Leopold, giving rise to many awkward situations.
Leopold’s engagement to Gisela was settled after only a few days. Countess Festetics about the bride: “She is happy, as a child will be—a beautiful couple they are not.”41 The Emperor wrote to his mother, “The whole thing was simple, cordial, patriarchal, although Sisi and I simply are not patriarchs yet.”42 Sophie’s comment: “The domestic happiness of the little one and the good Leopold seems assured to me, but the marriage cannot count as a great match.”43
In spite of everything, the groom had a bad conscience; writing from Hungary, he expressed his concern to one of his aunts. “If only it does not harm A[malie]. Actually I am very concerned…. When I left, I met A on the stairs; she looked very cheerful. The poor thing….” Leopold, however, quickly found comfort. “Fate determined it that way, and it could not be otherwise. Gisela is so nice, has her father’s kind eyes.”44 For Leopold, the connection with the daughter of the Emperor of Austria was worth all the trouble. From her grandfather Archduke Franz Karl and her grandmother Sophie alone Gisela received 500,000 guldens on the occasion of her marriage.45
With the utmost cleverness, Elisabeth allowed a considerable length of time to pass, so that the scorned Princess Amalie might recover from her shock. Then—in May 1875—she personally, with the help of Countess Marie Festetics, negotiated the marriage of her brother to Amalie of Coburg.46 Even on this occasion, however, Elisabeth did not suppress her poor opinion of marriage, declaring it a “strange fancy, when one is so young to give up one’s freedom. But one never knows the value of what one has until one has lost it.”47 The marriage arranged by Elisabeth was a very happy one.
Whether Elisabeth made any efforts to prepare her daughter for marriage is not known. That she did not deal with such prosaic matters as the trousseau, leaving its acquisition entirely to her staff, was a matter of course. Remembering the devotion and personal commitment with which at one time Duchess Ludovika looked after young Elisabeth, how even mother-in-law Sophie spent months preparing everything for the new Empress with the greatest care—from bed linens through the knickknacks to the rugs—one can understand why the entourage railed “at the heartlessness of the Empress,” as Festetics’s diary records.48
It was true that Gisela was colorless in every respect and not a daughter one could easily show off. She had nothing of her mother’s and brother’s flights of fancy. In her modesty she resembled her father, and modest as she was, she did not rebel against her mother. In the end, she became a good, calm, somewhat plump wife and mother of four. Not a single word of Elisabeth’s is preserved that might indicate a loving affection for her older daughter.
*
Shortly after Gisela’s engagment, the substitute mother of the two older children, Archduchess Sophie, who had been ill for some time, died. Thus the only person who might have paid attention to the bride, not yet sixteen years old, was removed. Sophie’s death was a difficult one and took a long time. Her will to live had been broken by the death of her second son, Max. Bravely she had endured, fulfilling her duties to her husband, her children and grandchildren, and the Habsburg family. But during the last few years, she had neither taken part in political affairs, the direction of which she found deeply distasteful, nor dared to advise Elisabeth.
Sophie’s ties to the Emperor continued deep and close. Everyone at the court could witness the Emperor’s grief at his mother’s decline. Unflaggingly solicitous, he watched at her bedside for many hours. He had straw strewn along the Burgplatz to lessen the rumble of the heavy carriages. At this time, Elisabeth was in Merano, but she interrupted her cure at the news of Sophie’s imminent death and returned to Vienna.
For ten days and nights the imperial family was at Sophie’s deathbed. She experienced several cerebral hemorrhages and from time to time lost the power of speech.
Countess Festetics described Sophie’s hour of death. “The entire court was assembled, ministers of the imp. house, royal court, no! It was horrible.” When noon passed, a certain restlessness made itself felt among the waiting group, “it increased with each minute—waiting is disconcerting! Then everyone grew hungry, death would not cross the threshold. No! I shall never forget it; at court everything is different from the way it is with other people, I know that, but death is not a ceremony—death no court appointment.” Around seven o’clock in the evening the “redeeming word was spoken. Unheralded by the arrival of death, one voice said rather loudly: ‘Their Supreme Majesties will proceed to dinner.’ It sounded almost silly—and then all the others were excused and ran away.”
But Elisabeth remained. Like the others, she had not eaten in ten hours. She stayed at the bedside until Sophie died the following morning. Marie Festetics expressed her praise: “She has brought her heart along from her forests—that is why no one understands her here, where the germ cell of all feeling must smother in the customary formality.”49
On the morning of May 27, 1872, Archduchess Sophie—“this spiritually powerful woman,” as Crenneville wrote—died. The Emperor’s heavy grief was visible to all. The Swiss envoy reported to Bern, “For the Emperor, the loss of his mother is a heavy blow, since she alone still provided him with the amenities of family life, which he must lack in his immediate circle.” All commentators were agreed on Sophie’s political influence, especially in the important years from 1848 to 1859. Even the Swiss envoy, who had several objections to Sophie’s political line, stressed as much in his report. “Without doubt, Archduchess Sophie was the most significant political figure of all the women of the imperial house after Maria Theresia.”50 All these commentaries implicitly criticized Elisabeth’s inactivity as the negative contrast to Sophie’s fulfillment of her duties.
Count Hübner, clearly alluding to Elisabeth, remarked in his diary that Sophie’s death was “a great loss to the imperial family, to those who care about court tradition and understand its significance.”51 And after the interment, Elisabeth’s devoted lady-in-waiting, Marie Festetics, overheard the cruel words, “We have buried our Empress”52—an unmistakable indication that in almost twenty years, Elisabeth had not managed to be accepted.
Sophie left a letter of farewell (written in 1862) in which she summarized her principles one last time, stressing the paramount position of the Emperor even within t
he family: “Dear children, remain, all of you, united in unalterable love and loyalty and reverence of the younger for their Emperor and lord.” Nor did this document leave any doubt of her aversion to liberalism, appealing to her son: “my valued Franzi, since you are charged with a heavy responsibility for your Catholic empire, which you must most of all keep Catholic, though at the same time you will bestow paternal care on the several millions of different faiths.” She exhorted to strength and adherence to the old principles: “Only weakness, giving up on the part of the well-intentioned, … encourages the pioneers of the revolution.”53
These were the precepts of old, of the time of the divine right of kings and the time of the Concordat. In the meantime, events had passed beyond these principles. Since 1867, Austria-Hungary had a liberal constitution. The Concordat was abolished. There had been liberal school reform. Franz Joseph was no longer an autocratic Emperor but a constitutional monarch who heeded the constitution’s commands. Sophie’s old enemies, the Constitution Party, the Liberals, were in power both in Austria and in Hungary. The one-time revolutionary and émigré Gyula Andrássy was the imperial and royal foreign minister. With the death of Archduchess Sophie, the era of the Catholic-conservative Habsburg state, which some mourned and others despised, had clearly come to an end. In Sophie, a symbol of the old days died.
The discord between Sophie and Elisabeth was public knowledge all over the monarchy. The extent to which these originally personal quarrels had affected politics was equally common knowledge. The death of the old Archduchess therefore meant a change in the political climate. Now, especially in Hungary, some were waiting for Elisabeth to seize her chance and become politically active. Her liberal ideas were known. Her intelligence could be relied on, as she had proven more than once, most overtly in 1867.
On the day after Sophie’s funeral, Countess Festetics wrote in her diary, “without a doubt, a serious break in time! The firm bond between ‘today’ and the past is dissolved! Will the Empress want what she is capable of? Will she show herself now, or has she given up in the eternal struggle?—Has she become too listless, or has she lost all pleasure in the work?”54
The hopes (and the corresponding fears of the Court Party) were not fulfilled. Elisabeth continued to flee the court. Even Countess Festetics, who was always ready to excuse the Empress, noted with concern how much Elisabeth retired into “physical and spiritual isolation.” She wrote, “All this is also nourishment to her bent to idleness. What is painful today will be comfortable in a while, and she will do less and less and people will go into battle more and more and she?—she will grow poorer and poorer for all her riches, and no one will remember that she was driven into isolation.”55
Furthermore, Elisabeth’s shyness was already—in the early 1870s—taking on grave proportions, making political as well as social activities more and more unlikely. By now Elisabeth was afraid, not only of large crowds—curious onlookers as well as hangers-on—but also of court officials. Marie Festetics: “What astonishes me every time is the fear of meeting people from the court—an aide-de-camp (let alone an adjutant general) in view is enough to unsheathe all her weapons; out come the blue veil, the large parasol, the fan, and the next path that turns off the road is taken.” Before such an imminent meeting with a courtier, Elisabeth, obviously frightened, said, “My God! Let us run, I can almost hear them addressing us”—or: “Oh, dear! Bellegarde! He hates me so much that I break out in perspiration when he looks at me!” and similar remarks.56
The more Elisabeth fell to brooding and philosophizing, the less occupied and the more bored she grew, the more the chasm between her and the tirelessly active, dutiful Emperor widened. Marie Festetics: “He offends her … in spite of his adoration, and he calls whatever is enthusiasm in her, eccentricity [literally: sky-scraping].”57
There are dozens of witnesses to the absolutely desolate boredom of dinner with the supreme family. It truly was not easy: No one was allowed to address the Emperor, to ask him a question or simply to tell him something. But he himself maintained an icy silence, since he was not in any way a gifted conversationalist. At table, he did only what he was there to do: He ate, and as quickly and sparingly as possible. When he finished, the meal was over. No attention was paid to whether the other diners had reached even the main course or not. (The Hôtel Sacher, it was known, experienced an enormous increase in business because the archdukes, starved after a family dinner, would rush there so as finally to get some food in their stomachs.) Nor was it any better when the Empress was at table. For she ate even less than the Emperor and finished even sooner.
Elisabeth had long since given up any attempts to keep conversation going at meals. The fact is that when she had tried, she had picked the wrong subjects, attempting to engage the Emperor in talk of Schopenhauer’s philosophy and Heine’s poetry. She seldom took part in shared meals (since she was constantly dieting) and so escaped being with her husband—and the attendants. By now, the couple rarely met except on special occasions, such as birthday celebrations and religious holidays, when they were surrounded by ladies-in-waiting and adjutants, in an atmosphere even little Valerie complained of—as when the imperial family gathered, once a year, under the Christmas tree and felt so embarrassed and knew each other so little that they were unable to manage any conversation.
The Emperor’s youngest daughter did not get to know what genuine family life was like until she herself was married and living far away from her imperial parents. Only then did Valerie realize how joyless her years at the Viennese court had been. Her diary records her enthusiasm about her first Christmas after her marriage: “The happy togetherness with the household staff made Christmas Eve such a happy occasion as I had never yet known. What a contrast with the Christmas trees in the castle, where everything was so stiff and awkward.”58
Criticism of Viennese court life was voiced particularly by the Hungarians, who had always been suspicious of Vienna. Thus, Marie Festetics recorded, “the 10th is the court ball. What a lot of trivial matters of great importance there are—what silly little things are talked about, what striving is endemic to human nature, and how pitifully ‘appearances’ wreak their mischief and what value is placed in ‘pinchbeck’?? one can see most hatefully at court.”59 And on another occasion, “All around, almost everyone is an egotist. Every archduke is an enclosed little court of his own with his aspirations and his little world! All of them feel the great imperial court to be something to which they, too, must bow, so it is like a pressure, and because of ‘convention,’ a meeting of minds, and I mean an intimate one, is out of the question, and so the good traits of each are of use to no one or to only a very few.”60
The strict etiquette of the court can certainly be cited as a reason for this coldness and emptiness. But the same etiquette prevailed in other times as well. And other empresses—even the much busier Maria Theresia—thoroughly understood how to safeguard an area of freedom for themselves and their families. (One need think only of Queen Victoria’s family life!) And this traditional task of the female members of the House of Habsburg, to cultivate an almost bourgeois family circle in the midst of court protocol, was one Elisabeth did not fulfill—in contrast to her mother-in-law. For Archduchess Sophie had managed to create some kind of family life even under these extremely unfavorable circumstances; she had done it by shared breakfasts and suppers in the more intimate circle, by long talks with the children, children-in-law, and grandchildren, by showing concern for their sorrows, by praise and criticism. Her death in 1872 therefore created a perceptible void; it is fair to say that, for all practical purposes, her passing put an end to family life in the imperial household.
Nor was it as if the Empress had rejected every form of etiquette. When it came to her own person, she was fully insistent that the rules governing behavior to an imperial majesty be observed. Countess Festetics realized as much when she wrote in her diary, “It cannot be denied that protocol is a very clever invention. Without it, Olympus
would have toppled long ago. As soon as the gods show human frailties, they stop standing on their altars, and people stop bending their knees to them. The same is true for the world. But it does not have a happy effect on the images of the deities, and once idolatry no longer serves them, everything goes awry. For they will want to have both.”61
*
The wedding of the Emperor’s older daughter, Gisela, in April 1873 meant little more to Elisabeth than a dreaded public appearance. The bride was sixteen, the mother of the bride thirty-five years old. As usual, little notice was taken of the daughter. Elisabeth’s appearance outshone the festivities. Marie Festetics: “how beautiful she was in her silver-embroidered dress; her cascading, truly shimmering hair with the glittering tiara is beyond words. But the most beautiful is not her physical being—no it is what floats above it—It is something like an atmosphere—a breath of loveliness—nobility—grace—girlishness—modesty and yet again a grandeur over ‘Her’ that is deeply touching.”62
At the railroad station, there followed a great family scene to speed the newlyweds on their way. Neues Wiener Tagblatt: “the most touching sight was offered by Crown Prince Rudolf; he wept unceasingly and was unable either to stem the flow of tears or to suppress his sobs, even though he visibly struggled to control himself.” The two older children had grown up in such isolation from the rest of the family that they had become unusually close. The separation was extremely hard on both—sixteen-year-old Gisela as well as fourteen-year-old Rudolf. Gisela, too, sobbed as she said her good-byes. The Emperor had tears in his eyes. “Nevertheless, the Princess, accompanied by her mother, walked with firm steps, greeting the deeply bowing spectators in a friendly way, toward the train compartment, which she entered.”63 By far the most composed was the mother of the bride. Her only show of emotion, while all the others sobbed and wept, was to press “her handkerchief to her tear-filled eyes.”
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