B008AITH44 EBOK (52 page)

Fritz Pacher, at the time a twenty-six-year-old government employee and a bachelor, related that at the ball, he had been drawn into conversation by an unknown woman in a red mask. (It concealed Ida Ferenczy. Elisabeth was much too shy to take the initiative.) Elisabeth and Ida had already spent some time on the gallery, watching the comings and goings of the ball below, but they had not yet met anyone. Finally, around eleven o’clock, when they grew tired of watching, Ida proposed that Elisabeth select a young man, and then she, Ida, would act as go-between: “At a ball, one must speak to people and plot.” The man Elisabeth chose was Fritz Pacher.
¹⁶

Ida first made sure that the young man was not a member of the aristocracy nor was personally acquainted with the leaders of society. Then she talked a little more without coming to the point, until finally she mentioned her friend “who is sitting up there in the gallery, all alone, and is bored to death.” She led the way upstairs to a box. There sat a lady in “unusually elegant dress” of the heaviest yellow brocade equipped with a “train that was most impractical for such purposes.” Her mask was so large that Pacher could not see either her features or her hair. “My mysterious lady was disguised to the point of unrecognizability and must have suffered a great deal from the heat.”

The woman in red disappeared discreetly, and (according to Pacher) a “pretty dull” conversation began. They stepped to the railing and watched the carnival bustle.

Pacher: “And while, during these totally indifferent conversations, I was tortured by the thought: Who can this be? she suddenly came out with the unexpected question: ‘I am a stranger here in Vienna, tell me, do you know the Empress, how do they like her, and what do they say, what do they think about her?’”

Elisabeth could not have introduced the subject more awkwardly. The question made Pacher leery. Cautiously he replied, “The Empress, well, of course I know her only by sight, when she drives to the Prater in order
to go riding there. What they think of her? Actually, they do not talk about her much, because she does not like to be conspicuous in public, does not like to show herself, and busies herself primarily with her horses and dogs. I would not know anything more to say, perhaps they are not being fair to her. In any case, she is a beautiful woman.”

The woman in yellow then asked her cavalier how old he thought she was. But when Pacher guessed Elisabeth’s true age—thirty-six—she
became
surly, and shortly afterward she said abruptly, “All right, you can leave now.” She addressed him in the familiar form. But the sort of treatment any courtier had to accept from an empress, Fritz Pacher refused to accept from a strange masked woman. Irritated, he countered, “How gracious you are. First you send for me to join you here, pump me for information, and then send me packing.” (In speaking to her, he, too, used the familiar form of address.) Elisabeth, who was not used to such an attitude—even the Emperor responded humbly when she expressed her wishes!—relented. Pacher thought he noticed some astonishment. In any case, she said, “All right, you can stay. Sit down, and later take me down to the dance floor.”

Pacher:

The couple did not dance. Pacher noticed how ill at ease the woman in yellow felt in the crowd. “She trembled all over her body if people did not step out of her way. Clearly, she was not used to these conditions.” Her slender, tall, and extraordinarily elegant appearance caused a sensation and “visible interest among the aristocrats.” Pacher: “In particular it was the well-known sportsman Niki Esterházy, the constant companion and leader of the fox hunts, in which at the time the Empress participated enthusiastically, who did not take his eyes off her and seemed to pierce her with his looks whenever we passed him. Even at the time, I felt that he suspected or perhaps even knew who was hidden behind this mask.”

The conversation between the woman in yellow and Fritz Pacher turned to personal matters—Pacher’s life, their shared love of dogs, finally
Heinrich
Heine, a topic Elisabeth found inexhaustible. Elisabeth was open about her partisanship without giving herself away by so much as a word. She paid Pacher compliments and complained, “Oh, yes, people! Whoever has come to know them as I have can only despise them, the flatterers.” She put him off when he wanted to see at least her hand without a glove, fobbing him off with the possibility of a tryst at some later time in Stuttgart or Munich: “For you must know that I have no home and am constantly traveling.”

Pacher’s suspicion that the Empress was hidden behind the yellow mask grew stronger. He also felt that his companion was “an intelligent,
cultured,
and interesting woman, with a touch of originality, to whom everything ordinary was completely foreign.”

Long after midnight, the woman in red (Ida Ferenczy) came back; according to Pacher, she had “been hovering around us somewhat
anxiously.”
The three descended the large staircase to the principal approach, where they had to wait a few minutes for a carriage. When they said good-bye, Pacher boldly tried to unmask at least his companion’s chin. The disguise was so tight-fitting that he was foiled, but his attempt caused the woman in red to utter “a bone-chilling scream in her ultimate alarm, which to me spoke volumes.”

The adventure was not yet at an end. A few days later, the woman in yellow, who called herself Gabriele, sent a letter to her cavalier,
postmarked
Munich. It was Elisabeth’s own handwriting, though it was
disguised.
She continued to toy with him and was not very modest as regarded her supposed effect. “You have talked with thousands of women and girls, you have even thought yourself amused, but your spirit never encountered a kindred soul. Finally, in a lively dream, you found what for years you had searched for, perhaps to lose it again forever.”

Gabriele’s next letter arrived a month later from London. She
apologized
for the long delay.

This was just as unmistakably Elisabeth’s style as were the sarcastic sentences, “Are you dreaming of me at this moment, or are you launching yearning songs on the still night air? For the sake of those who live near you, I hope for the former.”

A third and final letter followed, this one also from London, containing the familiar teasing allusions, the deceptions. Between them flashed a glimpse of truth. “So you want to know what I read. I read a great deal, quite unsystematically, just as my whole life is unsystematic—from one day to the next.”

After this letter, the only messages were from a masked woman named Henriette, who (unsuccessfully) demanded the return of Gabriele’s letters—two years later.

In his tales, Pacher mentioned that he saw the Empress once, years later, in the Prater. He was on horseback and she in her carriage. He was certain that she recognized him. This impression was confirmed in Elisabeth’s verses. 

Fritz Pacher’s report in no way indicates, however, that he had felt any “bitter lament.” He was chiefly curious whether, as he suspected, it really had been the Empress who was concealed behind the yellow mask. Not a hint that he was pining away because of a great lost love, as Elisabeth’s poem claimed.

Pacher’s surprise was great when, in 1885—that is, eleven years after the event—he received another letter from the lady in yellow with the request that he send his address and a photograph of himself to a post-office box. Pacher replied, “… I have become a bald, respectable, but
happily
married man, I have a wife who resembles you in height and stature, and an adorable little girl.” He did not enclose a photograph. Four months later, a second request arrived for a photograph of the “paternal bald head.” Pacher grew annoyed and replied with some irritation. “I am truly sorry that after eleven years you still find it necessary to play hide-and-seek with me. Unmasking after so long a time would have been a pleasant lark and a fine ending to Mardi Gras of 1874, an anonymous correspondence loses its charm after so long a time.”
¹⁸

Elisabeth had expected quite a different outcome. Now she was so angry that the lines she wrote about Pacher held little imperial dignity. She railed at him. 

Of course, Pacher did not know that the lines existed. Two years later, as a coda to the Carnival adventure, he received a letter from Brazil. Lacking a return address or signature, it contained a printed poem.