The Empress Elizabeth of Austria

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Text originally published in 1930 under the same title.

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Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

THE EMPRESS ELIZABETH OF AUSTRIA

by

KARL TSCHUPPIK

Translated by

ERIC SUTTON

He held sacred only his own will; he lived only his own dreams; and his grief was dearer to him than his very life.

ELIZABETH ON ACHILLES

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

ILLUSTRATIONS 4

One — THE FAIRY PRINCESS 5

Two — IN A GOLDEN CAGE 18

Three — FLIGHT 43

Four — RETURN 50

Five — DR. CHRISTOMANOS 68

Six — LUDWIG’S DEATH 73

Seven — RUDOLF’S END 85

Eight — LAST YEARS 102

Nine — THE MURDER 113

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 124

ILLUSTRATIONS

EMPRESS ELIZABETH IN HUNGARIAN CORONATION COSTUME

DUKE MAX IN BAVARIA, ELIZABETH’S FATHER

EMPRESS ELIZABETH IN THE 1860’S

ARCH-DUCHESS SOPHIE, FRANZ JOSEPH’S MOTHER

FRANZ JOSEPH I WITH THE CROWN PRINCE RUDOLF AND ARCH-DUCHESS GISELA, 1861

LUDWIG II WITH HIS BRIDE, DUCHESS SOPHIE

COUNT JULIUS ANDRÁSSY

DR. CONSTANTIN CHRISTOMANOS IN 1895

CROWN PRINCE RUDOLF IN 1877

KATHERINA SCHRATT IN THE EARLY 1880’S

THE MURDERER, LUIGI LUCCHENI

THE FUNERAL PROCESSION IN GENEVA

One — THE FAIRY PRINCESS

THE Duchess Ludovika of Bavaria was travelling with her two daughters, and with a very ambitious purpose in her head. The daughter of a princely house on her way to visit a prospective bridegroom is always on the very best of good behaviour. Princess Helene was sitting beside her sister in the carriage, like a patient on her way to the doctor. Her mother had taken Sisi with them to keep Helene cheerful, and to avoid being alone with Helene and her own ambitions all the long way from Munich to Ischl. Sisi, who was sixteen years old, did not know that it was a mother’s right to play the part of Providence, and she could not tell what was the matter with her elder sister. She was as cheerful and unconstrained on the journey as she was when playing in the park at Possenhofen, or riding one of her father’s horses.

It was intended that Helene, the eldest of the five Princesses, should become the wife of the young Emperor of Austria. The plan had not been conceived in the Duchess Ludovika’s family circle: conscious as she always was of being a King’s daughter, she never forgot that she, the youngest of the six daughters of Maximilian I of Bavaria, had married beneath her station. Karoline, her eldest sister, was an Empress—the wife of the Emperor Franz; Elizabeth, wife of Friedrich Wilhelm IV, sat on the throne of Prussia; Amalia, wife of King Johann, and Maria, Friedrich August’s wife, were Queens of Saxony. The arch-Duchess Sophie, the most determined of the six Bavarian Princesses, had the reversion of the Imperial Crown of Austria; but she made a better choice—she secured it for her eldest son, Franz Joseph. Only Ludovika, the youngest, had to resign herself to a humbler position. Her husband, Duke Maximilian, belonged to the younger branch of the Bavarian Royal House, and, by a ceremonial distinction, his title in the kingdom was not Duke of Bavaria, but Duke in Bavaria.

Ludovika found this very galling; and her main preoccupation was to increase her family’s importance, and to secure a better establishment in life for her now marriageable eldest daughter than her own parents had thought it necessary to do for her. Still, it was only in her imagination that she had ventured to cast an envious glance at her Imperial nephew in Vienna. The young Emperor of Austria was Europe’s most eligible parti. Twenty-three years old; master of the now restored Habsburg power; in the eyes of the counter-revolutionary world the saviour and hero for whom they were waiting; a Prince Fortunatus, as charming as he was powerful and rich. Royal Princesses could find no better match. Franz Joseph would have been beyond the reach of the Ducal House of Possenhofen. The great scheme which was shortly to emerge from Ludovika’s travelling carriage had been conceived by the Arch-Duchess Sophie, the young Emperor’s mother. This energetic and far-seeing woman wanted to complete her work. She had a right to regard herself as the saviour of Austria and the preserver of the Habsburg dynasty. Five years before, in 1848, in those days of perplexity, hesitation, weakness and surrender, among all the Arch-Dukes, Princes, Ministers, diplomats and Generals, there had been only one man at the Imperial Palace in Vienna—the Arch-Duchess Sophie. Her determination extinguished the revolution in Central Europe. She overcame the scepticism and easy-going tolerance of the Court, put Freiherr von Kübeck’s famous system into practice, and placed the sabre of counter-revolution in the strong hands of Radetzky, Jellacic and Windischgratz. She gave an Emperor to Austria—her own son. And now she, the effective regent of the Empire, wished to choose a wife for the Emperor.

It was natural that her thoughts should turn to her own family. Reason and calculation are the best match-makers; and she was a faithful daughter of the Catholic Church. Arch-Duchess Sophie was a pious woman, enthusiastic in her faith. As she once had spent days and nights reflecting how to save the tottering throne for her son, so now she devoted all her care and thought to finding him a suitable wife. The peremptory precept of the Church narrowed the sphere of choice, and indeed it ultimately reduced itself to Munich. In this decision there were two advantages: she would do her duty by the Church in selecting a wife from a strict Catholic house, and she would also advance the fortunes of her family. The Arch-Duchess Sophie found no difficulty in opening her mind to her youngest sister Ludovika. It was marvellous glad tidings for Possenhofen. And the young Emperor? The young man’s autocratic spirit, born of the battlefields of Hungary and the overthrow of rebellious Vienna, more uncompromising and indefeasible than the absolutism of prerevolutionary days—this consciousness of power vanished outside his mother’s door. The young Emperor was the most devoted son. His mother had re-established the throne once more; and the new sovereign became, in her presence, an obedient child. Whatever she did was wise and good. The philosopher of the new Absolutism, Staatsrat von Kübeck, had no need to appeal to God: To Franz Joseph, his mother’s will was Divine Providence. And the mother had good reasons for wishing to see her son soon married.

Franz Joseph’s mother was one of those not uncommon Austrian women who are religious without being prudish. The most notable example of them was Maria Theresia. The affairs of sex were treated quite frankly—an attitude, one feels instinctively, in harmony with the age-long aristocratic tradition of the Catholic Church. Just as Maria Theresia, in her capacity of an experienced mother, gives the most intimate advice in her letters to Marie Antoinette, so the Arch-Duchess Sophie was not in the least shy of her son’s bedroom secrets. She thought it merely a matter of practical good sense to guide her son’s first footsteps into that mysterious domain, a proceeding which had long been customary in the Imperial House. The phrase hygienic ladies was not invented at the Court, but by the cynical and occasionally witty aristocratic entourage; it was, however, a neat description of an institution regarded as necessary and reasonable. So long as the young Emperor took the arrangement for granted, without his emotions being seriously touched, his mother had time and leisure to consider the question of marriage. But in the last two years the Arch-Duchess Sophie had noticed with concern that her son was showing perilous signs of falling seriously in love with a lady who was, of course, quite an impossible match. It was time, then, to put an end to such a romance and look for a wife for Franz Joseph. After a period of anxious reflection, all details were agreed in an exchange of letters between the sisters, Sophie and Ludovika. Franz Joseph knew his cousin Helene, he had made her acquaintance in Munich and Ischl, and their relations seemed to indicate more than a little liking for each other. That was enough for the Emperor’s mother; but night and morning for weeks Ludovika had prayed that God would grant her child this great happiness.

Now, as the travelling carriage was speeding on its way to Ischl, the Duchess Ludovika’s mind was bent upon all the details of stage management which she knew, as an experienced and clever woman, played so important a part in the preliminaries to a betrothal. The matter itself was settled, and Heaven had confirmed it. The Duchess was not at all sorry that she had brought her second daughter with her. The other three of the Ducal pair’s five daughters, Marie, Mathilde and Sophie, were still children. Elizabeth, known as Sisi, was her father’s favourite, the gayest of the family, boyish—rather too boyish for her mother’s taste—but her lively interest in the landscape, fresh faces, and all the diversions of a journey, made her delightful and amusing company. She took after her father rather than her mother; and her mother was continually being reminded of this since Sisi had grown out of childhood.

Her father! The Duchess had now been married for five and twenty years, and the September of that very year, 1853, would see the anniversary of the quarter-century of her wedding. Had the marriage been a happy one? Her eight children—five girls and three boys—would seem to prove it. But it was not, and not only because Ludovika’s attitude was one of painful resignation. Duke Max was not an easy husband to train, and Ludovika’s intelligence and diplomacy were not equal to the task. He remained the aristocratic Bohemian that he had been from his earliest youth. Many off-shoots of the Zweibrücken-Birkenfeld line of the ancient and noble house of the Wittelsbachs were endowed with natural inclinations quite fatal to the Princely calling. Duke Max, Sophie’s husband, resembled in many respects his father-in-law, by the grace of Napoleon first King of Bavaria, the friend of the French, an easy-going monarch much given to making debts. He was better educated than King Maximilian I, and, although a cavalry General, his tastes were much more literary than martial. So far as a passion for horses can be combined with literature, he would have been an agreeable writer, or an excellent editor of a newspaper supplement. His sojourn at the University of Munich had been no mere aristocratic formality, and on his travels in Greece, Turkey, Arabia and Egypt, he showed himself an observant and intelligent man, as is, indeed, obvious from his book, Wanderings in the East. A dramatic effort and a few short stories are evidence that Duke Max made a serious attempt to work up his literary leanings into a definite talent. He wrote under an assumed name, and only a few persons knew who Phantast was. But marriage, and a growing family of daughters, forced the Duke to live a more orderly and regular life.

The Ducal family lived in a style suited to their rank: autumn and winter in their palace at Munich, spring and summer in Schloss Possenhofen, a roomy but unpretentious building on the Lake of Starnberg. The family could not do without the Duke’s pay as a General, but he much preferred the Bavarian jacket and leather breeches to the uniform of his cavalry regiment. Even as a General, however, the Duke was always attended and accompanied by his Court musician, that strange son of a Vienna tavern-keeper, Johann Petzmacher, whose acquaintance he had made in Bamberg, and from whom he had, since then, never been parted. Petzmacher, an agreeable oddity, had taught the Duke to play on the zither and had been his travelling companion; indeed, the Duke liked to relate how they had both performed on their native zithers at the top of the Pyramid of Cheops. Even after twenty-five years of marriage Duke Max had not learnt to give up his independent ways. The Duchess had to acquiesce in his occupying apartments of his own. He lived on the ground floor of the Possenhofen Schloss, and his time and freedom were not confirmed by the hours observed on the first floor. He went off for days on end with Petzmacher, and spent them in the company of foresters and woodcutters in the mountains. He was forty-four years old at this time, with the slim figure of a young man, tanned by the sun like his peasant companions on his hunting expeditions, a tireless mountaineer, a first-rate shot, and an admirable horseman. He hated every sort of ceremony, and liked the company of rough, plain-spoken men. Sisi loved this father of hers with the enthusiasm of a profound affinity. He was her ideal. The gifts that were naturally his were what she dreamed of as the fulfilment of her own existence. She was always happy in his company, and to be allowed to ride out with him heightened the almost heroic fascination that horses always had for her. It was her pride to keep pace with her father. She walked like he did, she climbed mountains, rode, and swam, because she had first seen her father do so. Helene was formed upon another plan. She took after her mother, and not her father. She was silent, given to piety, and had not her younger sister’s unaffectedness. She was also physically quite different from Sisi. She had none of Sisi’s boyish characteristics, neither her slim lithe figure, nor her beautiful eyes, nor her shining dark hair. She was her mother’s daughter, and would make, both mothers were convinced, the best of wives for Franz Joseph and a suitable Empress for the throne of Habsburg.

The travelling carriage had passed Chienistein; a night was spent at Traunstein and another at Salzburg. At every halt and every change of horses Sisi had to endure expostulations from her mother. Sisi’s familiarity with coachmen, grooms, and horses displeased the Duchess; Sisi was reminded that she had only been allowed to accompany them on one condition—that she would promise to be obedient. Once, in Rosenheim, her mother threatened to send Sisi home. She had helped to water the horses, and came back with wet shoes and arms. After that she was hardly allowed out of sight, and the maid who was travelling with them helped the Duchess to keep Sisi in check. But it was not merely because of this that Sisi became more silent on the last section of the journey from Salzburg to the Lakes of the Salzkammergut. The Duchess addressed herself only to Helene, and her mother’s conversation and her elder sister’s manner made Sisi suspect that a surprise was waiting for her in Ischl.

They arrived punctually at their destination, according to plan. The Arch-Duchess Sophie, notwithstanding the dignity that never deserted her even in her simple summer clothes, could unbend upon occasion. Her husband, the Arch-Duke Franz Karl, showed his friendliness in his eyes and smile rather than in his words, which fell but sparingly from his heavy lips. He resembled his eldest brother, the abdicated Emperor Ferdinand, who was living on a pension in the castle at Prague. Helene and Sisi kissed Aunt Sophie’s hand, with a deep curtsey that expressed the polite cordiality proper between near relations with a touch of the respect due to the more powerful House. In its outward aspects the encounter in no way differed from the last visit to Ischl, and yet all was changed: the young Emperor’s brothers were present, the pomp of Sophie’s Court was greatly enhanced, there were new faces and more uniforms. All these people moved and behaved as though continuously under orders. But where was he, the centre-point of all these dignitaries and officials—the young Emperor himself? He had twice postponed his journey to Ischl, but his arrival was now fixed for August 16th. August 18th, 1853, was his twenty-fourth birthday. He was still detained in Vienna. These first seven months of the year had been difficult and eventful: the disturbances in Milan, the persistent agitation in Piedmont, the conspiracies of the Hungarian émigrés, Mazzini’s manifestoes—the defeated revolution still smouldered like a fire under its covering of ashes. On February 18th it flickered up and almost destroyed the young Emperor himself. Was it not a miracle that the dagger of the young blacksmith’s apprentice, Janos Libényi, glanced off the clasp of the Emperor’s cravat? Cardinal Rauscher’s observation, We have a good conscience! had been a constant encouragement to the new régime. The shades of those hanged and shot were not likely to haunt the young Emperor.

Early on August 16th Sisi was handed over to the governess’s charge. The Emperor had arrived. Sisi contemplated the events around her rather in the manner of a child shut up in a neighbouring room while company is being entertained. Her mother and Helene hardly had time to look at her. There was a reception in the castle; before it took place Aunt Sophie came to see her sister. Helene was dressed, servants appeared with flowers, the Cardinal called upon the Duchess twice, and an adjutant of the Emperor presented a letter. Sisi was alone with her governess, but she, too, was infected by the general feeling of unrest. Next day the Emperor paid his visit, according to his mother’s wish and arrangement. Never in his life had Franz Joseph questioned his mother’s wishes or advice. This harmony had hitherto been the more undisturbed by any feeling of constraint as the Emperor’s reconstituted and now absolute power gave him the sensation of unlimited freedom. It was the first time that Franz Joseph felt his mother’s wish as an alien and compelling force. Whenever she had touched upon the subject of the choice of a wife and made