B008AITH44 EBOK (53 page)

When Elisabeth’s niece, Marie Wallersee-Larisch, published her book
Meine
Vergengenheit
(My Past) in 1913 and included the story of the Empress’s masked adventure, Fritz Pacher had proof of what the yellow mask had concealed. But in no uncertain terms he contradicted Marie’s account, which made a richly amorous affair of this episode. “If the Empress’s other adventures were as innocent as the Carnival jest she played
with me à la Harun al-Rashid, she truly has nothing to reproach herself with.”

When Elisabeth was a girl, in Munich, even Duchess Ludovika had looked forward to secretly visiting such balls. And in Paris, Empress Eugénie and Pauline Metternich attended such functions, concealed behind masks. The problem was the motives and consequences of such leisure diversions: the Empress of Austria was so unfulfilled that in her case, this kind of amusement not only was a diverting pastime (as it was for Empress Eugénie), but grew into dreams that papered over raw reality.

*

Court society could not keep up with the Empress’s fantasies. Gossip occupied itself with something that was not unusual for beautiful, idle, and unhappy rich women—affairs. It was said, for instance, that “it was an open secret in the Hofburg that Her Majesty was having an affair with Niky Esterházy, and that everyone knew that, disguised as a man of the cloth, he came up through the garden and that the meetings took place in Countess Festetics’s apartments.”
²¹

Countess Festetics was excessively puritanical and herself above all suspicion. When she learned of this gossip, her anger took on absolutely frightening proportions.

The gossip about Bay Middleton (
see here
) ran along very similar lines. Here, too, examination of the sources yields no concrete proof. Even Marie Larisch merely describes a rendezvous the Empress and Middleton had in London—the highlight of the amorous adventure, as it were. Under the pretext of visiting a beauty salon, she wrote, Elisabeth had gone to London using the strictest incognito. She was accompanied by Count Heinrich Larisch, her niece Marie, and two servants. “My aunt gave the impression of a boarding-school pupil who for once had gone on vacation all on her own.”
²²

Arrived in London, the Empress decided to pass up the beauty salon in favor of the Crystal Palace. Two carriages were hired, and suddenly Bay Middleton seemed to be one of the party. Elisabeth lowered her veil over her face and, at Bay’s side, disappeared into the crowd. For a short time, she was (what shocking behavior for an empress!) alone with a man who was not of the aristocracy, in the midst of the booths with trained monkeys, fortune tellers, shooting galleries, in a world of jugglers and magicians, which she had loved as a child but which, because she was an empress, had been forbidden to her ever since. It is hard to find anything in this episode in the adventure at the masked ball—that could be criticized.

Having had this taste of disappearing into the life outside the court, the Empress dared one more sidestep: She allowed herself to visit a small restaurant. Marie Larisch: “I could hardly believe it, Aunt Sissi with her fanatical diets and timetables wanted to go to a restaurant!” Heinrich Larisch calmed the excited young lady, explaining “that surely one should not begrudge the Empress the innocent pleasure of enjoying her freedom for once.” To Marie Larisch’s astonishment, Elisabeth ate “at this late hour, not only roast chicken, but also Italian salad, drank champagne, and devoured a considerable amount of delicate pastry, things she usually despised.” Never in Vienna had the Empress eaten so much at table.

During the return trip—without Bay—the Empress was “extremely cheerful, and said that it really was wonderfully amusing for a change to pass a day without trailing a comet’s tail.” Marie Larisch was nevertheless astonished when Middleton, who had taken the evening train to Brighton, stood ready to welcome the Empress, wearing an innocent expression, bowing respectfully, and saying, “I hope your Majesty had a good time.”

One can hardly deny that Elisabeth showed a sense of humor during her escapades. She amused herself, for example, by leading the ever daring Prince of Wales (later, King Edward VII) up the garden path. A poem (probably exaggerated with her usual flights of fancy) records the scene. 

A man as well informed as Count Charles Bombelles, chamberlain to Crown Prince Rudolf, declared all the sensationalist gossip around the Empress to be untrue—and he was anything but a supporter of Elisabeth. In 1876, he mentioned “the extravagances of the Empress, but very
innocent
ones,” as Hübner noted in his diary. He, too, attributed a major part of Sisi’s behavior to the effects of her early very unhappy life in Vienna and the excessive severity of Archduchess Sophie. “One has placed one chain after another around this bottle of champagne, and finally the cork blew. It is a lucky thing that this explosion had no consequences other than the ones we see: unfettered preference for horses, hunting, and sports, as well as a secluded life, which is not easy to reconcile with the obligations of an empress.”
²⁴

The older Elisabeth grew and the more her shyness increased, the more she became trapped in her fantasies and her dream world. It was specifically in this area that her inhibited relations with men became evident.

Among the myths and legends that particularly caught the Empress’s fancy was the story of a legendary Egyptian queen who never grew old and who lived, veiled, in a mysterious place. Her name had long ago been forgotten. “She” retained her power not to age, but only so long as she did not give herself in love to a man.
²⁵
Elisabeth, too, was unapproachable, with the deep fear that love might rob her of her power and aura.

In her poems, she saw herself most often as Titania, Queen of the Fairies. The unsuccessful suitors were represented as donkeys. Every castle where the Empress lived boasted a painting of Titania with the donkey. Elisabeth to Christomanos: “That is the ass’s head of our illusions, which we caress ceaselessly…. I never get tired of looking at it.”
²⁶

In almost all her poems, Franz Joseph is depicted as Oberon, King of the Fairies, standing by Titania’s side. Occasionally, however, Elisabeth
included even her husband in the ranks of her admirers, which was
probably
a realistic view of the attitude he demonstrated toward her for the world to see.

In all these poems, the influence of Heinrich Heine is all too plain: His laments about false love, about lies and disappointments also appear in Elisabeth’s verses. After she had stopped riding so abruptly, she lived in total seclusion, remained far away from Vienna, sought solitude and
nature,
and did not miss the company of men.

Her poems also dealt with the dead and with heroes of legend, such as Heine and her favorite Achilles. It is hard to distinguish where, in her feelings, infatuation stops and the yearning for death begins. Both are quite certainly evident in Elisabeth’s dabbling with spiritualism. She no longer found anyone among the living who understood her. She was too sensitive, too vulnerable for a real, “normal” relationship with a man. She therefore took refuge in fantasy relations with dead heroes, who could not hurt her.

No matter how florid some of these poems and fantasies might be, reality was much more ordinary. Many of Elisabeth’s statements and poems give indications of an extreme tension when it comes to sexuality. Only in her poems did Titania lower herself to the ass. In reality, she loathed love. 

There are more examples of this sort. As has been seen, Elisabeth may be retrospectively diagnosed as a victim of anorexia nervosa. Psychologists now believe that this disorder is caused by a deep revulsion against
everything
that is physical and voluptuous, but most especially against sexuality.

Even when her favorite daughter, Marie Valerie, married and became pregnant, Elisabeth could not conceal her distaste. She knew nothing to say to the extremely young wife and prospective mother except that she “sighed for ‘the good old times, when I was still an innocent virgin’ … yes sometimes, joking in her peculiar way, she said that looking at my changed figure made her altogether impatient and that she was ‘ashamed of me.’”
²⁸

At times, Elisabeth’s tried-and-true game—unapproachable goddess and infatuated ass—turned into a real jest. In the late 1880s—the Empress was at least fifty years old—a young man from Saxony named Alfred Gurniak Lord Schreibendorf began to dog her footsteps. He followed her as far as Romania, pursuing her with endlessly long, florid love letters and urgent pleas for proof of her favor. Elisabeth remained aloof. But she saved Alfred’s letters and made them the basis of a cynical poem, “Titania and Alfred,” which she never completed.

There is no doubt that for the Empress, this overwrought young man was merely a figure of ridicule. Nevertheless, her thoughts dealt so
intensely
with the matter that she composed many pages of poetry about it. Surely she also kept the “enchanted stag” Alfred in thrall by offering now and again tiny proofs of her favor (such as flowers deliberately left behind on a park bench). She saw the episode not only as a cause for merriment, but also as a welcome distraction in her empty life.

Among the many lines about her admirer Alfred, however, we also find the revealing lines: