B008AITH44 EBOK (25 page)

It was by no means true that after Sisi’s return, the imperial family lived together in cozy domesticity. The children were on vacation in Reichenau; Emperor Franz Joseph had no intention of giving up the hunts, which
often took him away for several days; Sisi traveled back and forth between Vienna, Reichenau, and Passau, where she met her mother and her sisters. Archduchess Sophie continued to stay in Bad Ischl, and Emperor Franz Joseph visited her there for more than two weeks, while Sisi stayed behind in Vienna and her sister Helene came to visit once more. The
ladies-in-waiting
were pleased whenever Helene was with the Empress: “She always has a calming effect, is herself so reasonable and decent and tells her the truth.”
⁶⁵

During the nearly two years of separation from her husband and the society of the Viennese court, the Empress had changed. She had become very self-confident and brisk and had learned to assert her interests
vigorously.
The Emperor, living in constant fear that at the first sign of discord she might run off again and do further damage to the prestige of the August House, treated her circumspectly, showing infinite patience.

He was considerate of Sisi’s sensibilities, personally protesting the
constant
surveillance by omnipresent police agents. He wrote firmly to his adjutant general

Hardly had the Empress regained her health than all hopes turned on a further offspring in the imperial family. Though a crown prince was assured, the Emperor wanted a second son to secure the succession. In this situation, Sisi found support and help in her old family physician, Privy
Councillor Dr. Fischer. He firmly declared that for the present, there could be no thought of “new expectations”; he advised that “repeated use of Kissingen” (with one stay at the spa a year, this meant a delay of several years at least) had to precede any such plans.
⁶⁷

In the meantime, Sisi returned to hiking and horseback riding. One of the ladies-in-waiting commented, “If one lacks inner peace altogether, one thinks that keeping on the move will make life easier, and she is by now only too used to this.”
⁶⁸

Elisabeth fled into solitude. The ladies-in-waiting made fun of her “eternal promenades in the evenings alone in the little garden.” As often as she could, she refused all company, getting her way, for example, in “being allowed to go alone through the gallery into the Oratorium,” which was contrary to court protocol.
⁶⁹
For an empress had to be an empress at all times, with appropriate entourage; she could not scurry alone through the long corridors of the Hofburg like a shy doe, as Sisi liked to do.

Nevertheless, she took part in the most important functions. She
appeared
at the court ball and at the Corpus Christi procession—and promptly became the center of a crowd.

The guests of the imperial family who met the young Empress during this time on public occasions were uniformly cool in their judgments. Typical is a letter from the Prussian Crown Princess Victoria, to her mother, Queen Victoria. Though she praised Sisi’s beauty and amiability, she did not hold back her criticism.

In the fall of 1863, the “Mexican affair” was settled. Archduke Max agreed to assume the crown of Mexico, moved by his ambitious wife, Carlotta, his dissatisfaction with Austria, and his increasingly deteriorating
relationship with his brother the Emperor. Archduchess Sophie—like the young Empress, who had always felt close to Max—was outraged at his willingness to undertake the adventure. Neither woman had any faith that it would turn out well. Even in the court party, hardly anyone took a rosy view of the plan, though some might have hoped that Max, who caused considerable discomfort by his liberal stance, might never return to Austria.

In his castle of Miramar near Trieste, Maximilian steeped himself in his fantasy of Mexico. Elisabeth called this residence “Max’s most beautiful poem, which shows so clearly what a poetic soul his was, filled with a dream of beauty, though unfortunately also with a longing for power and fame, for everywhere were affixed insignia and allegories of the new position, intended to tell of a powerful empire the Habsburg scion founded across the seas.”
⁷¹

In April 1864, the new Emperor of Mexico and his wife set out for an uncertain, eventually tragic, future. Sophie’s diary noted with gratitude that Sisi was showing deep compassion for her, the deeply stricken mother. Sophie had long ago abandoned her preference for Carlotta. By this time, she shared Elisabeth’s dislike of the ambitious wife of the once so merry Max. Sophie suspected that the parting was a final one, and she wrote as much in her diary. The last dinner with Max seemed to her like a “last meal (before execution).”
⁷²

In February 1864, Sisi had another opportunity to demonstrate her Samaritan services. At the Nordbahnhof, the wounded from the war in Schleswig-Holstein arrived. Austria was fighting on the side of Prussia against little Denmark. Franz Joseph to Sophie: “The alliance with Prussia is the only correct policy, but they make it hard with their lack of principle and their boorish recklessness.”
⁷³
Few in Vienna understood that
Schleswig-
Holstein was merely another milestone in Bismarck’s road to a war between Prussia and Austria.

During the Prussian-Austrian negotiations in Vienna, the Empress once again showed only too openly how much she hated public appearances. At one of the official dinners, which Bismarck attended, she even left the room on the pretext of being indisposed. The fact that she did not participate in the subsequent receptions and dinners fueled the gossip. Crenneville: “Everyone believes that she is expecting, others say she has stomach cramps because she takes cold baths after meals and laces herself too tightly, I do not know what is true in all this and only feel sorry for my good master.”
⁷⁴
Once again, Dr. Fischer was summoned from Munich. But Sisi’s illness can hardly have been serious, for Dr. Fischer used his stay in Vienna primarily to shoot stags in the Prater, with the Emperor’s permission.

Only many years later did the Empress indicate the true cause of her supposed indisposition: She was annoyed at Bismarck. In 1893, she told Konstantin Christomanos, her Greek reader, “It seems to me that Bismarck was also a follower of Schopenhauer; he could not stand women, with the possible exception of his own wife. Mainly, I believe, he despises queens. When I saw him for the first time, he was exceptionally stiff. What he really wanted was to say: The ladies may keep to their rooms.”
⁷⁵

The Empress’s few official appearances in public aroused enormous notice and steeped the function in question in great solemnity—the
inauguration,
for example, of the Ringstrasse on May 1, 1865. Seven years had passed since demolition was begun. For seven years, the “capitol and residence” had been one large building site. The old ramparts were torn down and the broad avenue took their place. The munificent new
boulevard
gave to Vienna an entirely new feeling of spaciousness, breadth, a link with the modern world.

For the reception of the imperial couple, a fairground with tents, platforms, flags, and flowers had been set up outside the Burgtor. The coach carrying the Emperor and Empress drove across Burgring, Schottenring, and Quai and over the Ferdinandsbrücke into the Prater. Hundreds of flower-trimmed coaches followed in a long procession past hundreds of thousands of enthusiastic spectators, who were eager especially to catch a glimpse of the young Empress.

We have no indications that Elisabeth took an interest of any kind in the restructuring of the city of Vienna. The construction of the Ringstrasse brought work and (meager) earnings to many of those who had been unemployed; but it was, of course, entirely a concern of the highest society. The demolition of the old city walls and ramparts did create a great deal of space for new housing. But except for public buildings, only splendid mansions for the richest families were put up. The notorious Viennese housing shortage was not relieved—on the contrary: The slums connected to the old ramparts (which, though they placed the poor in indescribable living conditions, nevertheless put a roof over their heads) were torn down and not replaced. The housing shortage was further aggravated by the influx of many thousands of workers employed in the construction of the Ringstrasse.

In all probability, the Empress was not well informed about social conditions in the capitol and residence (not to mention the provincial cities and the countryside). She was isolated within the court. Her freedom of movement was so restricted by protocol that it would have required great effort to stand outside so as to form a true picture. But after a few failed
attempts during the early years of her marriage, Elisabeth became incapable of such efforts. Her energy flagged in proportion as she began to enjoy and exploit the advantages of her position.

*

The two children, Gisela and Rudolf, had now outgrown the nursery. While Gisela had a robust constitution and was of average abilities, the Crown Prince became a remarkable figure at an early age. He proved to be unusually intelligent and intellectually precocious. Even as a
five-year-old
, he could make himself understood, as Archduchess Sophie proudly noted, in four languages: German, Hungarian, Czech, and French. The little boy had a lively imagination and an exuberant temperament, but he also had a delicate constitution and was frequently ill. He was delicate and extremely thin, as well as anxious and in great need of love.

Franz Joseph had wished for a bold, physically strong son, who would grow into a good soldier. Little Rudolf absolutely did not fulfill these hopes. His intellectual precocity was a cause for worry rather than joy for his august father.

On the Crown Prince’s sixth birthday, the two children, who had grown extremely close, were separated. Following the Habsburg custom, Rudolf was given his own all-male household, with a tutor who also undertook the Prince’s military training. The separation from the
nursemaid
and the shared “Aja,” Baroness von Welden, and particularly the separation of the two children from each other were occasions for
heart-rending
scenes.

Rudolf had quite obviously inherited his mother’s sensibility. Since living under the strict, even sadistic control of his new tutor, Count Leopold Gondrecourt, he was almost a permanent invalid, suffering from fevers, angina, stomach colds, and similar ailments. Gondrecourt had strict orders from the Emperor to “work extremely hard” with the delicate, overly sensitive boy to make a good soldier out of him: “His Imperial Highness is physically and mentally more advanced than other children of his age, but rather vivacious and nervously irritable, therefore his
intellectual
development must be sensibly subdued, so that that of the body can keep pace.”
⁷⁶

Gondrecourt carried out the Emperor’s instructions in his own way: He drilled the anxious, sickly child to the point of exhaustion with military exercises and rigorous physical and psychological “toughening.”

At this time (1864), the Empress did not yet have enough influence over her husband to be able to prevent this sort of upbringing. Later, she
repeatedly complained about the children “who were no longer allowed to be with me—about whose education I was not allowed to have a say—until, with their [that is, the Crown Prince’s household] rough handling and Count Gondrecourt’s educational methods, they almost turned him into an idiot;—to try to turn a child of 6 into a hero through hydropathic treatments and fear is madness.”
⁷⁷

The martyrdom of the little Crown Prince was nothing extraordinary for the time; rather, it was part of the normal training of a cadet. The only thing that made it worse for Rudolf was that in his case this military toughening started at an unusually early age and that—at the express wish of the Emperor—it was carried out with unusual rigor.