Authors: Brigitte Hamann
B008AITH44 EBOK (72 page)
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
T
he marriage of her favorite daughter marked the beginning of a period for which Elisabeth had been preparing for a long time. “Once I no longer have any responsibilities to my Valerie, and once she is taken care of and is a happy wife with a great many children, which is what my
kedvesem
[Hungarian for “darling”] always wanted, then I am free and my ‘seagull flight’ can begin.” And again, “I shall travel the whole world over, Ahasuerus shall be a stay-at-home compared to me. I want to cross the seven seas on a ship, a female ‘Flying Dutchman,’ until I drown and am forgotten.”
1
Her only son was dead. Her only friend in the outside world, Andrássy, was dead. The Emperor was happy in his friendship with Katharina
Schratt, her daughter Valerie was happy in her home, enriched by an increasing number of children. Empress Elisabeth was in her fifties. Her beauty was a thing of the past. “As soon as I feel myself aging, I shall retire from the world altogether. There is nothing more ‘horrendous’ than
gradually
becoming mummified and unwilling to say farewell to youth. To go about as a rouged larva—dreadful! Perhaps later, I shall always wear a veil, and even those closest to me will no longer see my face.”
2
Elisabeth made good on her prediction. Never again did she allow herself to be portrayed—either by painters or photographers. Never again did she go out without fan or umbrella, behind which to hide her wrinkled, weather-beaten, emaciated face. The black fan and the white umbrella became, as Elisabeth’s Greek reader Christomanos wrote, “the loyal
companions
of her outward existence”; they could even be said to be “almost constituent parts of her physical appearance.” “In her hands, they are not what they mean to other women, but only emblems, weapons and shields in the service of her true self…. She wishes to use them only to ward off the external life of human beings, not to let it have any validity for herself, not to bow to the ‘herd laws of evolved animals’; she is eager to preserve her inner silence unprofaned; she is not willing to leave the locked gardens of grief she carries within herself.”
3
Elisabeth left Austria as often and for as long as she could, and her journeys became ever more purposeless. The Emperor had always dared to voice only the most circumspect objections to her long, repeated
absences:
“If you think that it is necessary for your health, I shall keep silent, although this year we have not spent more than a few days together since spring,” he wrote in October 1887.
4
During the 1890s the Empress spent at most a few weeks out of every year in Vienna, and even these she passed not in social activity or at public functions, but in total isolation in the Hermes Villa in Lainz.
It had been years since Elisabeth had tried to take a hand in political matters. Nor did she leave the slightest doubt that she no longer wished to be bothered with these affairs. Archduchess Valerie complained that Elisabeth’s “general way of life can be brought into harmony less and less with that of other people…. When will the time finally come when Mama will realize that she should live differently in order to give God an accounting of her talents?”
5
Franz Joseph’s servants gained the impression that Elisabeth was
deliberately
offending her husband. Eugen Ketterl, the valet de chambre, for example, recorded the situation as he saw it.
In Gödöllö, the Emperor was only rarely allowed to see his wife, even though they were living under the same roof. If Franz Joseph wished to visit her of a morning and went to her apartments without having made an appointment, the spirits on duty explained to His Majesty that the Empress was still
sleeping!
Sometimes the sovereign lady was already in the
mountains,
from where she returned in the evening with her unhappy lady-in-waiting, and now, exhausted, she certainly would not receive the Emperor. So 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.
6
By this time, many people viewed Franz Joseph’s relationship with Katharina Schratt with approval, gladly granting the old, ever more
resigned
gentleman the cozy hours spent with his friend.
On her travels, too, the Empress’s behavior became increasingly odd. Even Countess Marie Festetics expressed her complaints in a letter from Corfu to Ida Ferenczy, who had remained behind (and this was in
November
1888—that is, before the great emotional shock of the tragedy of Mayerling). “It bothers me, dear Ida, what I see and hear here. Her Majesty is always nice when we are together, and she speaks as she
always
did. But she is not the same—a shadow darkens her soul. I can use no other expression; in speaking of a person who suppresses or denies all handsome and noble feelings out of convenience or for amusement, one can only say that it is bitterness or cynicism! Believe me, my heart weeps bloody tears!” And then Marie Festetics cited a few examples of
Elisabeth’s
behavior.
And yet she does things that make not only your heart but also your understanding stop. Yesterday morning the weather was bad, nevertheless she went out in the sailboat. At nine it began to pour, and the terrible rainstorm, along with thunder, lasted until three in the afternoon. All this time she sailed around us, sat on the deck—held the umbrella over her head and was soaked to the skin. Then she went ashore somewhere, ordered her car to come for her, and decided to spend the night in some strange villa. You can imagine how far we have come—
fortunately,
the physician goes everywhere with her. But even more outrageous things happen.
7
This habit of simply going to strange houses—without saying a word or explaining what she had in mind—became a mania during the 1890s. Even the Emperor knew about this oddity of his wife’s; in 1894, after an incident in Nice, when an old woman chased away the stranger who seemed to want to enter her house, he wrote to Elisabeth, “I am glad that your Nice indigestion has passed so quickly and that you did not also get a beating from the old witch, but sooner or later that is exactly what will happen, for one does not simply push one’s way uninvited into people’s houses.”
8
Uninvited and unannounced, she also turned up at various European courts, in order to fulfill her official obligations in a very strange and extremely uncourtlike manner. In 1891, for example, she drove directly from the railroad station to the royal palace in Athens and (in Greek) asked the first servant she encountered whether Their Majesties were at home. She was in traveling costume, and her only companion was her daughter. The servant, who did not recognize them, declared that if they wished an audience, they would have to call on the chamberlain. At that point Elisabeth revealed her identity. Valerie: “But it was true that they [King George I and his wife] really were not at home, and so we drove to the Crown Prince’s palace, in order to burst in on his family in the same way.” They were received by poor Crown Princess Sophie, who was unfamiliar with the local language and could not follow Elisabeth’s Greek
conversation
.
9
In order to teach her a lesson, Elisabeth did not switch to German but continued to speak in modern Greek.
Other crowned heads had to endure similar raids, among them the King of the Netherlands and Empress Friedrich. The latter, the mother of Wilhelm II, had retired to a castle near Bad Homburg. Elisabeth had a great liking for the very intelligent but embittered widow of the “
Ninety-nine
Day Emperor,” Friedrich III, and wished to honor her with a visit—on a hot summer’s day, naturally unannounced, and unaccompanied by a lady-in-waiting. The sentry, of course, stopped the strange woman who claimed to be the Empress of Austria. Empress Friedrich was roused with the alarming news that Empress Elisabeth was being held in the
guardroom.
The incident seemed to amuse Elisabeth, for she did not appear at all angry when the distraught chamberlain released her; she took the episode as an occasion for laughter.
10
On the other hand, she paid her respects very formally to a faded glory of yesteryear, the former Empress Eugénie of France. The widowed
Eugénie
lived in retirement at Cap Martin on the Riviera. Elisabeth ordered her companions to show the ex-Empress all the respect formerly due her.
Archduchess Valerie was impressed, praising Eugénie’s “charm, although there are hardly any traces left of her former beauty. Her demeanor extremely plain. One would hardly recognize her eventful past, she makes so little show of pain or toppled greatness.”
11
The two ladies shared drives and excursions in the countryside
surrounding
Cap Martin. Eugénie on Elisabeth: “It was as if one were going driving with a ghost, for her spirit seems to dwell in another world. She was rarely aware of what was happening around her, nor did she take notice when she was greeted by people who recognized her. When she did, she answered the greeting with a singular toss of the head instead of the customary bow.”
12
On her travels, the Empress gave ample demonstration of her utter contempt for any kind of etiquette. Marie Festetics to Ida Ferenczy from Genoa: “
Entre
nous
, yesterday Her Majesty received the simple
commandant
of the German training ship, although before this, she has turned away admirals, high dignitaries (military, civilian, and clerical) from Spain, France, and Italy. This disturbs me, since I am afraid of the newspapers.”
13
The Austrian diplomats were unsuccessful in their proposals that the Empress take part in official functions. “The Empress, however, was
gracious
enough to allow me to offer her an introduction to Arab snake charmers, conjurors, and soothsayers.” So wrote the Austrian chargé d’affaires in Cairo to the foreign minister in 1891. He added that Elisabeth’s “average march capacity per day is ca. 8 hours”
14
—and this in Egypt!
Her attempt, in 1891, to attend a ball one more time was a failure. Archduchess Valerie: “Many ladies are said to have sobbed, and in spite of diamonds and bright feathers, the whole resembled a funeral more than it did a carnival. Mama herself was in deepest mourning crepe.”
15
In 1893, Elisabeth made a final appearance at the “ball at court.” The geologist Eduard Suess described the party.
All the old imperial splendor. Every candelabrum seemed to want to tell its experiences. Close to the door to the inner salon, in his red hussar’s uniform, stands the master of
ceremonies,
Count Hunyady, with the long white staff, and … a Milky Way of youthful beauties streamed past him, the swarm of the whole new female generation of the nobility, who are eager to honor their Empress, know everything, and are without any adornment beyond their own charms. In the middle of the salon, however, two black figures, the
perpetually
mourning Empress and her chatelaine, and it was as if all
the glittering diamonds with which the mothers standing on the sidelines adorned themselves were extinguished by this deep, dull sorrow, and as if each of the bowing young
creatures
were told how much magnificence and how much grief can be combined in one life.
16
The presence of the Empress at court balls was crucial for social reasons. Before being introduced to society, the young girls of the aristocracy had to be introduced to the Empress. That was the tradition of the court of Vienna. By her refusal to participate in social occasions, the Empress brought a good deal of disorder into the strictly regulated structure of Viennese society.
The question of which archduchess was to represent the Empress on ceremonial occasions soon set quarrels and jealousies in motion. Rudolf’s widow, Stephanie, was very unpopular. Franz Joseph’s younger brother Karl Ludwig claimed that his wife, the beautiful Archduchess Maria Theresia, was the legitimate first (deputy) lady of the court.