In spite of her sense of being one of the elect and of her sovereign position, Elisabeth nevertheless never lost her desire to know the life of the common people. Life outside court protocol held a powerful attraction. There she sought simplicity, straightforwardness, and truth. This pleasure in playing Harun al-Rashid and finding out everything that did not reach the select circles of the imperial court also played a part in the biggest adventure the Empress allowed herself: Once, masked and disguised, she secretly attended a costume ball, the Rudolfma Ball held in the Musikvereinsaal on Mardi Gras of 1874. Only a few were privy to the adventure—Ida Ferenczy, who accompanied the Empress; Fanny Feifalik, the hairdresser; and Schmidl, the lady’s maid, who got the Empress ready for the big event.
Many documents have allowed this story to survive. Elisabeth, for one, considered the outing so important that she composed several long poems on the subject. Her beau of the evening, Friedrich Pacher von Theinburg, preserved the ensuing correspondence (with letters written by Elisabeth herself in a disguised handwriting); he also gave a detailed report to Elisabeth’s biographer, Corti. Marie Larisch and Marie Valerie also recorded the adventure, which they heard about from the Empress herself.
The significance the Empress gave to this outing surely justifies the conclusion that it was the only one of its kind and that it made perhaps too strong an impression on her. It happened the winter after the Vienna World Exhibition, before she traveled to England to hunt, when she was thirty-six years old and had just become a grandmother for the first time.
Fritz Pacher, at the time a twenty-six-year-old government employee and a bachelor, related that at the ball, he had been drawn into conversation by an unknown woman in a red mask. (It concealed Ida Ferenczy. Elisabeth was much too shy to take the initiative.) Elisabeth and Ida had already spent some time on the gallery, watching the comings and goings of the ball below, but they had not yet met anyone. Finally, around eleven o’clock, when they grew tired of watching, Ida proposed that Elisabeth select a young man, and then she, Ida, would act as go-between: “At a ball, one must speak to people and plot.” The man Elisabeth chose was Fritz Pacher.16
Ida first made sure that the young man was not a member of the aristocracy nor was personally acquainted with the leaders of society. Then she talked a little more without coming to the point, until finally she mentioned her friend “who is sitting up there in the gallery, all alone, and is bored to death.” She led the way upstairs to a box. There sat a lady in “unusually elegant dress” of the heaviest yellow brocade equipped with a “train that was most impractical for such purposes.” Her mask was so large that Pacher could not see either her features or her hair. “My mysterious lady was disguised to the point of unrecognizability and must have suffered a great deal from the heat.”
The woman in red disappeared discreetly, and (according to Pacher) a “pretty dull” conversation began. They stepped to the railing and watched the carnival bustle.
Pacher: “And while, during these totally indifferent conversations, I was tortured by the thought: Who can this be? she suddenly came out with the unexpected question: ‘I am a stranger here in Vienna, tell me, do you know the Empress, how do they like her, and what do they say, what do they think about her?’”
Elisabeth could not have introduced the subject more awkwardly. The question made Pacher leery. Cautiously he replied, “The Empress, well, of course I know her only by sight, when she drives to the Prater in order to go riding there. What they think of her? Actually, they do not talk about her much, because she does not like to be conspicuous in public, does not like to show herself, and busies herself primarily with her horses and dogs. I would not know anything more to say, perhaps they are not being fair to her. In any case, she is a beautiful woman.”
The woman in yellow then asked her cavalier how old he thought she was. But when Pacher guessed Elisabeth’s true age—thirty-six—she became surly, and shortly afterward she said abruptly, “All right, you can leave now.” She addressed him in the familiar form. But the sort of treatment any courtier had to accept from an empress, Fritz Pacher refused to accept from a strange masked woman. Irritated, he countered, “How gracious you are. First you send for me to join you here, pump me for information, and then send me packing.” (In speaking to her, he, too, used the familiar form of address.) Elisabeth, who was not used to such an attitude—even the Emperor responded humbly when she expressed her wishes!—relented. Pacher thought he noticed some astonishment. In any case, she said, “All right, you can stay. Sit down, and later take me down to the dance floor.”
Pacher:
From that moment on, the invisible barriers between us seemed torn down. My yellow domino, until then stiff and formal, seemed transformed, and our conversation, which touched on the most diverse topics, never came to a halt again. She took my arm, gently linking hers in mine, and, chatting steadily, we strolled through the crowded ballroom and the adjacent rooms, it must have been at least two hours. I anxiously avoided paying more insistent court to her, avoided every suggestive word, just as her conversation also bore the stamp of a “lady.”
The couple did not dance. Pacher noticed how ill at ease the woman in yellow felt in the crowd. “She trembled all over her body if people did not step out of her way. Clearly, she was not used to these conditions.” Her slender, tall, and extraordinarily elegant appearance caused a sensation and “visible interest among the aristocrats.” Pacher: “In particular it was the well-known sportsman Niki Esterházy, the constant companion and leader of the fox hunts, in which at the time the Empress participated enthusiastically, who did not take his eyes off her and seemed to pierce her with his looks whenever we passed him. Even at the time, I felt that he suspected or perhaps even knew who was hidden behind this mask.”
The conversation between the woman in yellow and Fritz Pacher turned to personal matters—Pacher’s life, their shared love of dogs, finally Heinrich Heine, a topic Elisabeth found inexhaustible. Elisabeth was open about her partisanship without giving herself away by so much as a word. She paid Pacher compliments and complained, “Oh, yes, people! Whoever has come to know them as I have can only despise them, the flatterers.” She put him off when he wanted to see at least her hand without a glove, fobbing him off with the possibility of a tryst at some later time in Stuttgart or Munich: “For you must know that I have no home and am constantly traveling.”
Pacher’s suspicion that the Empress was hidden behind the yellow mask grew stronger. He also felt that his companion was “an intelligent, cultured, and interesting woman, with a touch of originality, to whom everything ordinary was completely foreign.”
Long after midnight, the woman in red (Ida Ferenczy) came back; according to Pacher, she had “been hovering around us somewhat anxiously.” The three descended the large staircase to the principal approach, where they had to wait a few minutes for a carriage. When they said good-bye, Pacher boldly tried to unmask at least his companion’s chin. The disguise was so tight-fitting that he was foiled, but his attempt caused the woman in red to utter “a bone-chilling scream in her ultimate alarm, which to me spoke volumes.”
The adventure was not yet at an end. A few days later, the woman in yellow, who called herself Gabriele, sent a letter to her cavalier, postmarked Munich. It was Elisabeth’s own handwriting, though it was disguised. She continued to toy with him and was not very modest as regarded her supposed effect. “You have talked with thousands of women and girls, you have even thought yourself amused, but your spirit never encountered a kindred soul. Finally, in a lively dream, you found what for years you had searched for, perhaps to lose it again forever.”
Gabriele’s next letter arrived a month later from London. She apologized for the long delay.
My spirit was weary unto death, my thoughts did not take wing. Many a day I sat at the window for hours staring at the desolate fog, then again I was wild with joy and rushed from one diversion to the next…. You want to know about my doings and my life. It
is not interesting. A couple of old aunts, a vicious pug, many complaints about my extravagance, for recreation a drive each afternoon in Hyde Park. In the evenings, a party after the theater, and there you have my life, with all its desolation and vapidity and boredom to the point of despair.”
This was just as unmistakably Elisabeth’s style as were the sarcastic sentences, “Are you dreaming of me at this moment, or are you launching yearning songs on the still night air? For the sake of those who live near you, I hope for the former.”
A third and final letter followed, this one also from London, containing the familiar teasing allusions, the deceptions. Between them flashed a glimpse of truth. “So you want to know what I read. I read a great deal, quite unsystematically, just as my whole life is unsystematic—from one day to the next.”
After this letter, the only messages were from a masked woman named Henriette, who (unsuccessfully) demanded the return of Gabriele’s letters—two years later.
In his tales, Pacher mentioned that he saw the Empress once, years later, in the Prater. He was on horseback and she in her carriage. He was certain that she recognized him. This impression was confirmed in Elisabeth’s verses.
Ich seh’ dich reiten, ernst und traurig,
In Winternacht im tiefen Schnee;
Es bläst der Wind so eisig schaurig,
Mir ist so schwer zumut, so weh!
Im dunkeln Osten, fahl verschwommen,
Da dämmert jetzt ein blasser Tag,
Mit Centnerlast das Herz beklommen,
Trägst heimwärts du die bitt’re Klag’.17
[I see you riding, sad and serious, / In the winter night, in deepest snow; / The wind is blowing so icily eerie, / I feel so heavy, so aching! / / In the dark east, pallid-lurid and blurred, / A pale day is now dawning, / Your heart weighed down by tons, / You carry homeward the bitter lament.]
Fritz Pacher’s report in no way indicates, however, that he had felt any “bitter lament.” He was chiefly curious whether, as he suspected, it really had been the Empress who was concealed behind the yellow mask. Not a hint that he was pining away because of a great lost love, as Elisabeth’s poem claimed.
Pacher’s surprise was great when, in 1885—that is, eleven years after the event—he received another letter from the lady in yellow with the request that he send his address and a photograph of himself to a post-office box. Pacher replied, “… I have become a bald, respectable, but happily married man, I have a wife who resembles you in height and stature, and an adorable little girl.” He did not enclose a photograph. Four months later, a second request arrived for a photograph of the “paternal bald head.” Pacher grew annoyed and replied with some irritation. “I am truly sorry that after eleven years you still find it necessary to play hide-and-seek with me. Unmasking after so long a time would have been a pleasant lark and a fine ending to Mardi Gras of 1874, an anonymous correspondence loses its charm after so long a time.”18
Elisabeth had expected quite a different outcome. Now she was so angry that the lines she wrote about Pacher held little imperial dignity. She railed at him.
Ein ganz gemeines Beast;
Kahl war er auch, dazu noch schiech,
Gehört nur auf den Mist.19
[An altogether common beast; / And bald he was, and ugly to boot, / Belonging only on the dungheap.]
Of course, Pacher did not know that the lines existed. Two years later, as a coda to the Carnival adventure, he received a letter from Brazil. Lacking a return address or signature, it contained a printed poem.
Das Lied des gelben Domino
Long, long ago
Denkst du der Nacht noch im leuchtenden Saal?
Lang, lang ist’s her, lang ist’s her,
Wo sich zwei Seelen getroffen einmal,
Lang, lang ist’s her, lang ist’s her.*
Wo unsre seltsame Freundschaft begann.
Denkst du, mein Freund, wohl noch manchmal dcran?
Denkst du der Worte, so innig vertraut,
Die wir getauscht bei der Tanzweisen Laut?
Ein Druck der Hand noch, und ich musste fliehn,
Mein Antlitz enthüllen durft’ ich dir nicht,
Dock dafür gab ich der Seele Licht.
Freund, das war mehr, das war mehr!
Jahre vergingen und zogen vorbei,
Doch sie vereinten nie wieder uns zwei.
Forschend bei Nacht fragt die Sterne mein Blick,
Auskunft noch Antwort gibt keiner zurück.
Bald wähnt’ ich nahe dich, bald wieder fern.
Weilst du vielleicht schon auf anderem Stern?
Lebst du, so gib mir ein Zeichen bei Tag,
Das ich kaum hoffen, erwarten vermag.
So lang ist’s her, so lang ist’s her!
Lass mich warten nicht mehr,
Warten nicht mehr!20
[Do you remember the night in the glittering ballroom? / Long, long ago, long ago, / Where once two souls met, / Long long ago, long ago. / / Where our strange friendship began, / Do you, my friend, think of it at times? / Think you of the words, so deeply intimate, / That we exchanged as the dance music played? / Once more we pressed hands, and I had to fly, / Nor was I allowed to disclose my features to you, / But instead I lighted up my soul, / Friend, that was more, that was more! / Years passed and disappeared, / But never again did they unite us two. / Searching at night, my gaze questions the stars, / No answer or news comes back from any of them. / Sometimes I think you near, and then again far. / Dwell you perhaps on another star? / If you live, give me a sign by day / That I can hardly hope for or expect. / Long, long ago, long ago! / Keep me waiting no more, / waiting no more!]
When Elisabeth’s niece, Marie Wallersee-Larisch, published her book Meine Vergengenheit (My Past) in 1913 and included the story of the Empress’s masked adventure, Fritz Pacher had proof of what the yellow mask had concealed. But in no uncertain terms he contradicted Marie’s account, which made a richly amorous affair of this episode. “If the Empress’s other adventures were as innocent as the Carnival jest she played with me à la Harun al-Rashid, she truly has nothing to reproach herself with.”
When Elisabeth was a girl, in Munich, even Duchess Ludovika had looked forward to secretly visiting such balls. And in Paris, Empress Eugénie and Pauline Metternich attended such functions, concealed behind masks. The problem was the motives and consequences of such leisure diversions: the Empress of Austria was so unfulfilled that in her case, this kind of amusement not only was a diverting pastime (as it was for Empress Eugénie), but grew into dreams that papered over raw reality.
*
Court society could not keep up with the Empress’s fantasies. Gossip occupied itself with something that was not unusual for beautiful, idle, and unhappy rich women—affairs. It was said, for instance, that “it was an open secret in the Hofburg that Her Majesty was having an affair with Niky Esterházy, and that everyone knew that, disguised as a man of the cloth, he came up through the garden and that the meetings took place in Countess Festetics’s apartments.”21
Countess Festetics was excessively puritanical and herself above all suspicion. When she learned of this gossip, her anger took on absolutely frightening proportions.
The gossip about Bay Middleton (see here) ran along very similar lines. Here, too, examination of the sources yields no concrete proof. Even Marie Larisch merely describes a rendezvous the Empress and Middleton had in London—the highlight of the amorous adventure, as it were. Under the pretext of visiting a beauty salon, she wrote, Elisabeth had gone to London using the strictest incognito. She was accompanied by Count Heinrich Larisch, her niece Marie, and two servants. “My aunt gave the impression of a boarding-school pupil who for once had gone on vacation all on her own.”22
Arrived in London, the Empress decided to pass up the beauty salon in favor of the Crystal Palace. Two carriages were hired, and suddenly Bay Middleton seemed to be one of the party. Elisabeth lowered her veil over her face and, at Bay’s side, disappeared int
o the crowd. For a short time, she was (what shocking behavior for an empress!) alone with a man who was not of the aristocracy, in the midst of the booths with trained monkeys, fortune tellers, shooting galleries, in a world of jugglers and magicians, which she had loved as a child but which, because she was an empress, had been forbidden to her ever since. It is hard to find anything in this episode in the adventure at the masked ball—that could be criticized.
Having had this taste of disappearing into the life outside the court, the Empress dared one more sidestep: She allowed herself to visit a small restaurant. Marie Larisch: “I could hardly believe it, Aunt Sissi with her fanatical diets and timetables wanted to go to a restaurant!” Heinrich Larisch calmed the excited young lady, explaining “that surely one should not begrudge the Empress the innocent pleasure of enjoying her freedom for once.” To Marie Larisch’s astonishment, Elisabeth ate “at this late hour, not only roast chicken, but also Italian salad, drank champagne, and devoured a considerable amount of delicate pastry, things she usually despised.” Never in Vienna had the Empress eaten so much at table.
During the return trip—without Bay—the Empress was “extremely cheerful, and said that it really was wonderfully amusing for a change to pass a day without trailing a comet’s tail.” Marie Larisch was nevertheless astonished when Middleton, who had taken the evening train to Brighton, stood ready to welcome the Empress, wearing an innocent expression, bowing respectfully, and saying, “I hope your Majesty had a good time.”
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