B008AITH44 EBOK (41 page)

Countess Festetics described Sophie’s hour of death. “The entire court was assembled, ministers of the imp. house, royal court, no! It was
horrible.
” When noon passed, a certain restlessness made itself felt among the waiting group, “it increased with each minute—waiting is disconcerting! Then everyone grew hungry, death would not cross the threshold. No! I shall never forget it; at court everything is different from the way it is with other people, I know that, but death is not a ceremony—death no court appointment.” Around seven o’clock in the evening the “redeeming word was spoken. Unheralded by the arrival of death, one voice said rather loudly: ‘Their Supreme Majesties will proceed to dinner.’ It sounded almost silly—and then all the others were excused and ran away.”

But Elisabeth remained. Like the others, she had not eaten in ten hours. She stayed at the bedside until Sophie died the following morning. Marie Festetics expressed her praise: “She has brought her heart along from her forests—that is why no one understands her here, where the germ cell of all feeling must smother in the customary formality.”
⁴⁹

On the morning of May 27, 1872, Archduchess Sophie—“this spiritually powerful woman,” as Crenneville wrote—died. The Emperor’s heavy grief was visible to all. The Swiss envoy reported to Bern, “For the Emperor, the loss of his mother is a heavy blow, since she alone still provided him with the amenities of family life, which he must lack in his immediate circle.” All commentators were agreed on Sophie’s political influence, especially in the important years from 1848 to 1859. Even the Swiss envoy, who had several objections to Sophie’s political line, stressed as much in his report. “Without doubt, Archduchess Sophie was the most significant political figure of all the women of the imperial house after Maria Theresia.”
⁵⁰
All these commentaries implicitly criticized Elisabeth’s inactivity as the negative contrast to Sophie’s fulfillment of her duties.

Count Hübner, clearly alluding to Elisabeth, remarked in his diary that Sophie’s death was “a great loss to the imperial family, to those who care about court tradition and understand its significance.”
⁵¹
And after the interment, Elisabeth’s devoted lady-in-waiting, Marie Festetics, overheard the cruel words, “We have buried our Empress”
⁵²
—an unmistakable indication that in almost twenty years, Elisabeth had not managed to be accepted.

Sophie left a letter of farewell (written in 1862) in which she
summarized
her principles one last time, stressing the paramount position of the Emperor even within the family: “Dear children, remain, all of you, united in unalterable love and loyalty and reverence of the younger for their Emperor and lord.” Nor did this document leave any doubt of her aversion to liberalism, appealing to her son: “my valued Franzi, since you are charged with a heavy responsibility for your Catholic empire, which you must
most
of
all
keep Catholic, though at the same time you will bestow paternal care on the several millions of different faiths.” She exhorted to strength and adherence to the old principles: “Only weakness, giving up on the part of the well-intentioned, … encourages the pioneers of the revolution.”
⁵³

These were the precepts of old, of the time of the divine right of kings and the time of the Concordat. In the meantime, events had passed beyond these principles. Since 1867, Austria-Hungary had a liberal constitution. The Concordat was abolished. There had been liberal school reform. Franz
Joseph was no longer an autocratic Emperor but a constitutional monarch who heeded the constitution’s commands. Sophie’s old enemies, the
Constitution
Party, the Liberals, were in power both in Austria and in Hungary. The one-time revolutionary and émigré Gyula Andrássy was the imperial and royal foreign minister. With the death of Archduchess Sophie, the era of the Catholic-conservative Habsburg state, which some mourned and others despised, had clearly come to an end. In Sophie, a symbol of the old days died.

The discord between Sophie and Elisabeth was public knowledge all over the monarchy. The extent to which these originally personal quarrels had affected politics was equally common knowledge. The death of the old Archduchess therefore meant a change in the political climate. Now, especially in Hungary, some were waiting for Elisabeth to seize her chance and become politically active. Her liberal ideas were known. Her
intelligence
could be relied on, as she had proven more than once, most overtly in 1867.

On the day after Sophie’s funeral, Countess Festetics wrote in her diary, “without a doubt, a serious break in time! The firm bond between ‘today’ and the past is dissolved! Will the Empress want what she is capable of? Will she show herself now, or has she given up in the eternal struggle?—Has she become too listless, or has she lost all pleasure in the work?”
⁵⁴

The hopes (and the corresponding fears of the Court Party) were not fulfilled. Elisabeth continued to flee the court. Even Countess Festetics, who was always ready to excuse the Empress, noted with concern how much Elisabeth retired into “physical and spiritual isolation.” She wrote, “All this is also nourishment to her bent to idleness. What is painful today will be comfortable in a while, and she will do less and less and people will go into battle more and more and she?—she will grow poorer and poorer for all her riches, and no one will remember that she was driven into isolation.”
⁵⁵

Furthermore, Elisabeth’s shyness was already—in the early 1870s—taking on grave proportions, making political as well as social activities more and more unlikely. By now Elisabeth was afraid, not only of large crowds—curious onlookers as well as hangers-on—but also of court
officials.
Marie Festetics: “What astonishes me every time is the fear of meeting people from the court—an aide-de-camp (let alone an adjutant general) in view is enough to unsheathe all her weapons; out come the blue veil, the large parasol, the fan, and the next path that turns off the road is taken.” Before such an imminent meeting with a courtier, Elisabeth, obviously frightened, said, “My God! Let us run, I can almost hear them addressing
us”—or: “Oh, dear! Bellegarde! He hates me so much that I break out in perspiration when he looks at me!” and similar remarks.
⁵⁶

The more Elisabeth fell to brooding and philosophizing, the less
occupied
and the more bored she grew, the more the chasm between her and the tirelessly active, dutiful Emperor widened. Marie Festetics: “He offends her … in spite of his adoration, and he calls whatever is enthusiasm in her, eccentricity [literally: sky-scraping].”
⁵⁷

There are dozens of witnesses to the absolutely desolate boredom of dinner with the supreme family. It truly was not easy: No one was allowed to address the Emperor, to ask him a question or simply to tell him something. But he himself maintained an icy silence, since he was not in any way a gifted conversationalist. At table, he did only what he was there to do: He ate, and as quickly and sparingly as possible. When he finished, the meal was over. No attention was paid to whether the other diners had reached even the main course or not. (The Hôtel Sacher, it was known, experienced an enormous increase in business because the archdukes, starved after a family dinner, would rush there so as finally to get some food in their stomachs.) Nor was it any better when the Empress was at table. For she ate even less than the Emperor and finished even sooner.

Elisabeth had long since given up any attempts to keep conversation going at meals. The fact is that when she had tried, she had picked the wrong subjects, attempting to engage the Emperor in talk of
Schopenhauer’s
philosophy and Heine’s poetry. She seldom took part in shared meals (since she was constantly dieting) and so escaped being with her husband—and the attendants. By now, the couple rarely met except on special occasions, such as birthday celebrations and religious holidays, when they were surrounded by ladies-in-waiting and adjutants, in an atmosphere even little Valerie complained of—as when the imperial family gathered, once a year, under the Christmas tree and felt so embarrassed and knew each other so little that they were unable to manage any conversation.

The Emperor’s youngest daughter did not get to know what genuine family life was like until she herself was married and living far away from her imperial parents. Only then did Valerie realize how joyless her years at the Viennese court had been. Her diary records her enthusiasm about her first Christmas after her marriage: “The happy togetherness with the household staff made Christmas Eve such a happy occasion as I had never yet known. What a contrast with the Christmas trees in the castle, where everything was so stiff
and awkward.”
⁵⁸

Criticism of Viennese court life was voiced particularly by the
Hungarians,
who had always been suspicious of Vienna. Thus, Marie Festetics
recorded, “the 10th is the court ball. What a lot of trivial matters of great importance there are—what silly little things are talked about, what
striving
is endemic to human nature, and how pitifully ‘appearances’ wreak their mischief and what value is placed in ‘pinchbeck’?? one can see most hatefully at court.”
⁵⁹
And on another occasion, “All around, almost
everyone
is an egotist. Every archduke is an enclosed little court of his own with his aspirations and his little world! All of them feel the great imperial court to be something to which they, too, must bow, so it is like a pressure, and because of ‘convention,’ a meeting of minds, and I mean an intimate one, is out of the question, and so the good traits of each are of use to no one or to only a very few.”
⁶⁰

The strict etiquette of the court can certainly be cited as a reason for this coldness and emptiness. But the same etiquette prevailed in other times as well. And other empresses—even the much busier Maria Theresia—thoroughly understood how to safeguard an area of freedom for themselves and their families. (One need think only of Queen Victoria’s family life!) And this traditional task of the female members of the House of Habsburg, to cultivate an almost bourgeois family circle in the midst of court
protocol,
was one Elisabeth did not fulfill—in contrast to her mother-in-law. For Archduchess Sophie had managed to create some kind of family life even under these extremely unfavorable circumstances; she had done it by shared breakfasts and suppers in the more intimate circle, by long talks with the children, children-in-law, and grandchildren, by showing concern for their sorrows, by praise and criticism. Her death in 1872 therefore created a perceptible void; it is fair to say that, for all practical purposes, her passing put an end to family life in the imperial household.

Nor was it as if the Empress had rejected every form of etiquette. When it came to her own person, she was fully insistent that the rules governing behavior to an imperial majesty be observed. Countess Festetics realized as much when she wrote in her diary, “It cannot be denied that protocol is a very clever invention. Without it, Olympus would have toppled long ago. As soon as the gods show human frailties, they stop standing on their altars, and people stop bending their knees to them. The same is true for the world. But it does not have a happy effect on the images of the deities, and once idolatry no longer serves them, everything goes awry. For they will want to have both.”
⁶¹

*

The wedding of the Emperor’s older daughter, Gisela, in April 1873 meant little more to Elisabeth than a dreaded public appearance. The bride was sixteen, the mother of the bride thirty-five years old. As usual, little
notice was taken of the daughter. Elisabeth’s appearance outshone the festivities. Marie Festetics: “how beautiful she was in her silver-
embroidered
dress; her cascading, truly shimmering hair with the glittering tiara is beyond words. But the most beautiful is not her physical being—no it is what floats above it—It is something like an atmosphere—a breath of loveliness—nobility—grace—girlishness—modesty and yet again a
grandeur
over ‘Her’ that is deeply touching.”
⁶²

At the railroad station, there followed a great family scene to speed the newlyweds on their way.
Neues
Wiener
Tagblatt:
“the most touching sight was offered by Crown Prince Rudolf; he wept unceasingly and was unable either to stem the flow of tears or to suppress his sobs, even though he visibly struggled to control himself.” The two older children had grown up in such isolation from the rest of the family that they had become unusually close. The separation was extremely hard on both—
sixteen-year-
old Gisela as well as fourteen-year-old Rudolf. Gisela, too, sobbed as she said her good-byes. The Emperor had tears in his eyes. “Nevertheless, the Princess, accompanied by her mother, walked with firm steps, greeting the deeply bowing spectators in a friendly way, toward the train
compartment,
which she entered.”
⁶³
By far the most composed was the mother of the bride. Her only show of emotion, while all the others sobbed and wept, was to press “her handkerchief to her tear-filled eyes.”

The Empress exhibited a similar composure when, nine months later, she became a grandmother for the first time. She wrote to Ida Ferenczy about the christening of little Elisabeth (later, Countess Seefried), “Thank God, another day is past. It is bitter for me to remain here, quite alone, and unable to speak with anyone. I miss you unspeakably. Today was the christening, mother and child are so healthy that they will live to be 100. This to reassure you that the state of their health will not keep me here.”
⁶⁴