B008AITH44 EBOK (21 page)

 

T
he political crisis of the winter of 1859–860 went hand in hand with a serious private crisis in the life of the Emperor and Empress. In the political sphere, one piece of bad news followed on the last. Grünne’s successor as adjutant general, Count Crenneville, complained, “terrible prospects—state bankruptcy—revolution—
misfortune
—war. Poor Emperor, indefatigably striving for the best.”
¹

Emperor Franz Joseph had no intention of letting his young wife share in his worries. He continued to discuss politics only with his mother, never with Elisabeth, who was developing opposing opinions. Annoyed, the Empress had to accept a situation in which she was pushed aside like a child and her suggestions were not even acknowledged. The tug of war between Sophie and Sisi was fiercer than ever.

It can hardly seem surprising that the Emperor tried to keep out of the way of the endless quarreling of the two women in this already
overcharged
atmosphere and that he sought comfort elsewhere. Widespread rumors about Franz Joseph’s affairs began to circulate for the first time in his marriage, which was almost six years old. However, this was a turn of events the Empress was not ready to confront. Lack of experience, excessive sensibility, jealousy of her mother-in-law, the most severe strain on her nerves caused by her husband’s long absence—all contributed to her loss of self-control.

She began to provoke those around her. In the winter of 1859–1860—at the very time when the Austrian Empire was trapped in the greatest political calamities and the Emperor’s unpopularity had reached
unprecedented
heights—the young Empress, normally so reserved, became a
blatant
pleasure-seeker. She, who until then had strictly refused to develop any social activities at court outside the official functions, now, in the spring of 1860, organized no fewer than six balls in her apartments. She never invited more than twenty-five couples—all of them, of course, young people of the first rank with impeccable genealogies, as was required at court. The peculiarity of these balls, however, was that only the young couples were invited, not the mothers of the young women, as was customary. This meant that Archduchess Sophie, too, was excluded.

Landgravine Therese Fürstenberg, who did attend the balls, wrote that these “orphan balls” at the Empress’s were very amusing, but nevertheless did irritate court society not a little: “at first one was startled at such an enormity [not inviting the mothers], nothing could be done against the Supreme will.” Landgravine Therese wrote that at these balls, the Empress “danced with passion,”
²
a partiality never remarked in her before or after.

Furthermore, Sisi, who normally shunned all social events as best she could, also attended the large private balls. After a ball given by the Margrave Pallavicini, for example, she did not return to the Hofburg until six thirty in the morning, by which time the Emperor had already set out for the hunt, so that she no longer found him at home (as Archduchess Sophie noted in her diary). Political cares did not deter the Emperor, either, from going hunting as often as possible.

While court society showed no tolerance for Sisi’s defiant behavior, it had all the more sympathy for a husband’s romantic adventures. In the circles of the high nobility and the court, marriages of convenience and dynastic marriages were the rule. They were necessary to maintain an immaculate pedigree. Love affairs alongside these marriages of rank were common. The wives understood as much. Though for the most part they
could not retaliate with affairs of their own (for similar open-mindedness was not granted to a woman), on the whole they accepted their husbands’ affairs without complaint. For they were repaid by the high social position they occupied by virtue of their marriages, which, for all practical
purposes,
could never be dissolved.

But Elisabeth had not married Franz Joseph out of any social ambition. Purely emotional reasons (whether or not they can be called love in a fifteen-year-old) united her to the Emperor. Now she had to admit that the young Emperor was not adequate to her emotional demands (which surely seemed excessive to him, given his life), that he was betraying her. Franz Joseph was the only one, besides the children, who tied Elisabeth to the Viennese court. This one link in an otherwise alien and hostile world was now threatening to break.

Elisabeth had witnessed the unhappiness of her parents’ marriage;
Duchess
Ludovika with her horde of children lived apart from her husband, Duke Max. As the whole family knew, he had affairs and a whole string of illegitimate children, whom he provided for generously. This marriage was characterized by decades of humiliation and total isolation of the wife and mother. The fear of such a lamentable fate as Duchess Ludovika’s may have played a large part in Sisi’s vehement reaction.

Disturbing news from Naples now aggravated the difficult situation. In May 1860, Garibaldi’s troops conquered the island of Sicily, and a short time later, Naples, the capital of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was threatened. Cries for help from young Queen Marie reached Elisabeth. In June, her brothers Karl Theodor and Ludwig arrived in Vienna to discuss possible measures to aid the Bourbon kingdom. But no matter how much solidarity Emperor Franz Joseph felt for the royal house, related to him by marriage, and no matter how much he and Archduchess Sophie
deplored
the predicament in which this monarchy found itself—given Austria’s own unfortunate situation, there could be no thought of military or financial aid. The young King and his Queen were abandoned to their fate. Elisabeth’s worries about her beloved young sister, who had tried in vain to obtain Austrian help, not only further strained her already
overtaxed
nerves, but also placed an additional burden on the imperial
marriage.
In July 1860, the differences between the Emperor and Empress were so acute that Elisabeth left Vienna, taking little Gisela with her, and went to Possenhofen—for the first time in five years. This sudden trip was in the nature of flight. Sisi used the new railway line from Vienna to Munich (Kaiserin-Elisabeth-Westbahn) before its official opening, thus introducing no little chaos into the solemn celebrations.

Elisabeth was in no hurry whatever to return to Vienna. She passed the time primarily in horseback riding, and it was the Viennese stables she missed most. For her brother’s horses no longer met her high expectations. They “are terribly overridden and out of hand,” she wrote to Grünne, to whom she was openly affectionate. “I hope that you miss me a little and feel the absence of all my complaining, which you always tolerate so patiently.”
³

To avoid creating a stir, however, Sisi had to return to Vienna before Franz Joseph’s birthday on August 18. The Emperor drove to Salzburg to meet his wife. Sisi asked two of her siblings to come with her—Karl Theodor and Mathilde—a sign that she needed support against the imperial family and still did not feel confident enough to be alone with Sophie and Franz Joseph.

In the meantime, the situation in Naples had worsened. Garibaldi had invaded the capital. Queen Marie and her sickly, weak husband retired to the fortress of Gaeta. In spite of great bravery on the part of the
twenty-year-old
Queen (“the heroine of Gaeta”), the fall of the fortress and the ultimate victory of the Italian unification movement was only a matter of time.

*

Austria’s domestic policies ushered in hardly less radical changes than did her foreign policy. The call for a constitution could no longer be ignored. Characteristic of the mood is an anonymous letter delivered to the
Emperor
in August 1860.

The Emperor remained helpless in the face of all political demands; outraged, he complained to his mother, “But such vileness on the one hand and cowardice on the other as rule the world now have surely never been seen before; one wonders sometimes whether everything that happens can really be happening.”

He begged for “forgiveness for the fact that the banditry of Garibaldi, the thievery of Victor Emmanuel, the unprecedented sharp practices of the arch-villain in Paris, who surpasses even himself—the Reichsrat, now happily and truly buried beyond all expectation, the Hungarian nuisance, and the inexhaustible wants and needs of all the provinces, etc. claim me to such an extent and fill my poor head so much that I had hardly a moment for myself.”
⁵

The first concession to the Austrians thirsting for freedom was the October Diploma of 1860, the beginning of a constitution. Franz Joseph wrote to reassure his mother, who was worried about the fact that “popular opinion” was prevailing, “Though we will get a little parliamentarianism, all the power remains in my hands, and the overall situation will suit Austrian conditions very well.”
⁶
But the Emperor, who had ruled
absolutely,
felt even this modest concession to be a personal humiliation. Sophie went so far as to regard this first loosening of absolute rule as the “ruin of the realm, which we are rapidly approaching.”
⁷

The family peace had now been broken for a year. No improvement was in sight—quite the contrary: Elisabeth’s health, affected by nervous breakdowns and unrelieved starvation diets, became so fragile by the end of October 1860 that Dr. Josef Skoda, a lung specialist, determined that she would have to seek out a warmer climate at once; he felt her condition to be acutely life-threatening. She could no longer, he advised, endure the Viennese winter. During the preliminary consultations, the physician recommended Madeira as a suitable wintering place.

It is not clear why he chose Madeira; it may be that the Empress herself suggested this destination. A short time earlier, Archduke Max, Sisi’s favorite brother-in-law, had returned from a trip to Brazil and a lengthy stay on Madeira and had told the imperial family many stories of the scenically beautiful island in the Atlantic. These recitals may well have inspired the Empress’s eccentric wish. For in fact the Austrian monarchy contained enough resorts situated in mild climates (to mention only
Merano), where consumptives could go to be cured. Madeira, on the other hand, was not exactly famous as boasting a climate conducive to recovery from life-threatening pulmonary disease. It looked to all the world as if by choosing a distant destination, Elisabeth wanted to prevent frequent visits from the Emperor.

The form of disease was completely obscure—and remains so to this day. To the same degree that Elisabeth was healthy as a child, she began ailing from her wedding day on. Three pregnancies within four years had exhausted her body, especially the difficult birth of the Crown Prince in 1858. For years, she suffered from severe coughing attacks, which increased ominously in the winter of 1860 and probably led to the diagnosis of pulmonary disease. Her stubborn refusal to eat not only caused her to suffer from “greensickness”—anemia—but kept her physically exhausted. Her nerves could take no more. Repeatedly, she fell into crying jags that would not stop. To calm her strained nerves, she had acquired the habit of taking a great deal of exercise: daily rides over often considerable distances (for example, from Laxenburg to Vöslau, which the Emperor called “sheer foolishness”
⁸
), obstacle jumping to the point of complete exhaustion, hikes extending for hours, gymnastics.

The diagnosis of life-threatening “affected lungs” was received with much skepticism. Especially the Viennese relatives and the court society were not willing to believe that the Empress was really so very ill. Archduchess Therese, for example, wrote to her father, Archduke Albrecht, “One cannot get to the bottom of whether there is much or little wrong with her, since so many versions of Dr. Skoda’s pronouncements are told.”