Princesses Behaving Badly (34 page)

Elizabeth’s eccentricities affected several aspects of her personal life, but one of the most salient was the deterioration of her marriage. The emperor was infatuated with his young wife but was mystified by her, too. He was practical; she was romantic and prone to jealousy. He clung to etiquette; she was used to being with people like her mother, who kept her dogs on her lap during dinner, killing their fleas and depositing the dead insects on her plate. Ultimately, Franz Josef never understood his wife, and that deeply frustrated her. He also refused to acknowledge that the girl he’d married had blossomed into a clever young woman with a quick mind and sympathetic understanding of international politics. He frequently rebuffed her efforts to offer advice, disregarding what was often sound counsel.

As time went on, sex became a problem, too. Disgusted as she was by her body during pregnancy, Elisabeth was terrified of having more children. After Rudolf was born, she ended all intimate contact with her husband; abstinence also flattered her self-image as an unsullied goddess, desired but unattainable. By withholding sexual favors, though, she had to face the very real fear that Franz Josef would find another woman. And in 1860, her worst fears were realized: after being diagnosed with a venereal disease (likely gonorrhea), 23-year-old Elisabeth realized that her husband had been unfaithful. She took off traveling, the first of what would be a lifetime of trips to escape the Austrian court and Franz Josef, who bankrolled her peripatetic lifestyle without complaint.

The couple made up enough in 1867 for Elisabeth to become pregnant again, this time with Valerie, the only daughter she raised as she wished. She then spent the rest of her life keeping the emperor at arm’s length. When Franz Josef began a long affair with an actress in 1885, Elisabeth not only promoted the match, she also seems to have orchestrated it by engineering frequent meetings. Her jealousy had clearly transmuted into something else.

Elisabeth’s obsession with her beauty was coupled with a deep persecution complex; as young as 22, she regularly complained of being surrounded by enemies. She wept often and would shut herself up in her room for days. She had a tendency toward hypochondria, which unfortunately was encouraged by her depression, unhealthy diet, and doctors.

Elisabeth’s fragile state wasn’t entirely unexpected—several of her close relatives also suffered from varying degrees of mental illness. King Ludwig II of Bavaria, one of her favorite cousins, lived a life of romantic isolation before allegedly turning dangerously paranoid and violent. She was aware that mental illness ran in the family and dwelled on the idea that she, too, would one day go insane. Even if she hadn’t had a genetic propensity to madness, there was plenty in her life to drive a sane person batty. Along with constant political turmoil and increasing isolation, Elisabeth suffered personal tragedy. Her siblings and relatives were dying in increasingly awful ways (fire, firing squad, shipwreck), and in 1889 her estranged son killed himself and his 17-year-old mistress in a suicide pact. It’s no wonder, then, that for her birthday one year, she asked for a Bengal tiger and, barring that, a fully operational lunatic asylum.

Elizabeth’s response to the pressures of her life was flight, which exacerbated her problematic self-imposed isolation. One courtier remarked, “She has a mind diseased, and she leads such an isolated life that she only makes herself worse.” But constant travel helped bring Elisabeth back to the person she thought she was. She could be brilliantly happy, especially when foxhunting in Ireland or swimming in the Greek islands. When away from court, she was charming, kind, solicitous, and loving to her
children and husband. Perhaps that’s why she pursued travel with almost as much fervor as she policed her own body.

Elisabeth’s mother once wrote to her, “You don’t know how to live or to make allowances for the exigencies of modern life. You belong to another age, the time of saints and martyrs. Don’t give yourself too much the airs of the saint or break your heart imagining yourself to be a martyr.” These words proved strangely prophetic. Elisabeth did become a martyr of sorts, emblematic of the dying European empires. While out on a walk in Geneva on September 10, 1898, she was stabbed through the heart by an Italian anarchist named Luigi Lucheni. She was 60 years old. Her murderer later said he had been looking for a crowned head to murder that day, and Elisabeth just happened to fit the bill. Adding insult to injury, Lucheni said, “She wasn’t very beautiful. Quite old already.”

Princess Catherine Radziwill, a disgraced member of Eastern European royalty (read about her on
this page
), sometimes earned a living writing celebrity tell-alls about the aristrocrats of Europe, including a book titled
The Black Dwarf of Vienna and Other Weird Stories
. In this collection, the titular dwarf was a dreaded specter who appeared before every disaster that befell the Austrian royal family.

The dwarf was rumored to be a court fool in the employ of an Austrian emperor, but the emperor, for reasons unknown, executed the jolly man, condemning him to haunt the palace ever after. He was first seen “laughing sardonically” while wandering the halls of the Hofburg in Vienna in 1683, just before the city was besieged by the Turks. Only when the city was rescued by the Polish army did the dwarf disappear. He was practically a court fixture during the reign of the unhappy Maria Theresa, an empress who “hardly knew a quiet moment during the long years that she occupied her throne,” according to Radziwill. He appeared the day the French queen and former Austrian princess Marie Antoinette mounted the scaffold to lose her head. On that occasion, he at least had the good grace to look “immeasurably sad.”

The only time the Black Dwarf was ever seen outside the Hofburg halls was when he appeared to the ill-fated Empress Elisabeth and her lady-in-waiting at a hotel in Geneva. According to Radziwill: “He flitted before Elizabeth as she proceeded along the passage, but as she was to enter her apartments, he vanished, but not without having made her a sign of farewell, which was but too well understood a few hours later, when the dagger of Luchenni sent the Empress into eternity.”

Charlotte of Belgium

J
UNE
7, 1840–J
ANUARY
19, 1927
M
EXICO BOTH REAL AND IMAGINED

A
polite princess—a polite anyone, really—knows not to stick her finger in the pope’s hot chocolate. But when Princess Charlotte of Belgium burst in on His Holiness’s breakfast at the Vatican, she was starving—she hadn’t eaten more than a few bites in days, convinced that her enemies were trying to poison her. The pope’s morning cocoa had to be safe, right? Surely no one would try to poison the pope…

Charlotte wasn’t always a crazed chocoholic. Life for the pretty, dark-haired princess began promisingly enough. She was born in 1840, the daughter of Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, King of the Belgians, and his second wife. Despite being named after Leopold’s first (dead) wife (see “Death and the Victorian Age,”
this page
), nothing in her early years hinted at the tragedy to come. Serious and smart, little Charlotte started reading Plutarch at age 11 and was her father’s favorite. At 16, she fell in love with Ferdinand Maximilian, the 24-year-old Hapsburg archduke and brother of Austrian emperor Franz Josef. Handsome (sort of) and passionate, he talked philosophy and religion with the fervor of a true believer. Against her father’s wishes—he planned a match for her with the king of Portugal—she married Maximilian on July 27, 1857.

Unfortunately, Max’s passions weren’t limited to philosophy and religion. Charlotte tried to keep up the pretense of a happy marriage, but by 1859 she was no longer intimate with her unfaithful husband. Rumors began circulating that he’d given her a venereal disease, although later biographers suggest that Max, who preferred novelty and new experiences, was simply “unable to perform” with her.

In 1863, Napoleon III offered Maximilian the crown of Mexico, a country that had just spent decades embroiled in conflict and civil war. The republic was restored in 1860, but the reformist government under liberal Benito Juarez was broke and burdened with foreign debts. In 1861, on the pretense of trying to reclaim their lost money, France, Spain, and England invaded Mexico. After the latter two countries pulled out in April 1862, Napoleon III—craving the kind of empire his uncle had won—kept his troops in the capital. Maximilian was part of the French emperor’s plan to solidify his claim in Latin America and form an alliance with Austria.

But from the moment Max marched into Mexico City in June 1864, it was clear the whole “Mexican empire” was an illusion. Most Mexicans did not want a foreign ruler; few cheered when the new emperor paraded through the city. They had good reason to be angry. On every corner of the squalid capital, people left maimed and poor by the last war were begging for food. No one working for the imperial government had
been paid, and debts were mounting.

At first, Charlotte was keen to get to work. “This country is a vast field in need of cultivation,” she wrote to her first cousin, Queen Victoria of Britain, adding that there was nothing else to do “but to till that field.” But the hand at the plough was shaky—Maximilian was as bad a leader as he was a husband. He enacted several pieces of good legislation, but his policies lurched from overly liberal to overly conservative, and too often he listened to bad advice. Meanwhile, Benito Juarez was running a rebel government in Chihuahua, which the American government, among others, recognized as official in 1865. Napoleon III, facing increasing international and domestic pressure as well as the continued resistance of the Mexican rebels, was threatening to take his troops and go.

As the situation deteriorated, so, too, did Charlotte’s mental stability. She’d tried to take an active interest in her imperial duties, touring the Yucatan and hosting charity events, but by 1865–66, she was wilting. She hated Mexico City and began to find it overwhelmingly dirty and dangerous. She suffered terrible headaches. A deep melancholia that she’d fallen into after her father died never truly dissipated. With the end of sexual relations with her husband, she no longer hoped to have a child; the Mexican public taunted her for being a “barren woman.” At the same time, word reached her that the gardener’s wife at her husband’s Cuernavaca retreat was carrying his child. Just 26 years old, Charlotte sent increasingly incoherent letters to Maximilian that revealed a woman on the verge of a breakdown: “I think you should send [Queen] Victoria a decoration so you can get the Garter. God have mercy on our souls in Purgatory. I think it is going to snow.”

But when Napoleon III gave the order to cut off all martial and financial support and reason demanded that Max abdicate, Charlotte sprang into action to defend her throne. In August 1866, she traveled alone to Europe to appeal directly to the French leader.

The empress’s mental state was questionable even before she left for Europe, but the strain of her critical mission proved overwhelming. According
to accounts, she was thin and haggard and seemed far from the serious but youthful princess who’d left Europe less than three years before.

The meeting with Napoleon III took place behind closed doors; later, Charlotte accused her hosts of trying to poison her. A second meeting went even worse, ending with Empress Eugenie pretending to faint to stop Charlotte’s raving about the wrongs done to Mexico and the promises made by France. Then Charlotte went completely mad, seemingly undone by her failure to convince the French monarch to continue propping up the Mexican empire. She decided that duplicitous Napoleon was the Devil himself, out to destroy her and her husband. She became obsessed with the idea that the emperor’s assassins were trying to poison her food and drink.

Throughout her European visit, Charlotte raved that her father, mother, and Prince Albert had all been poisoned; even now, she claimed, prisoners were trying to kill her, too. Some evenings she would eat only oranges and nuts, examining the peels and shells to make sure they were intact. She saw spies everywhere—while traveling in Italy, she was convinced that a peasant in a field had come to kill her on Napoleon’s orders; an organ-grinder in the streets of Bozen was another of his murderers. Her entourage, who’d come with her from Mexico, became the objects of grave suspicion, and her periods of lucidity were fewer and farther between.

Just when it seemed as if Charlotte couldn’t go any crazier, she did. On September 30, while in Rome, she ordered a carriage to drive her to the famous Trevi Fountain. Once there, she jumped down and gulped desperate handfuls of water, muttering, “Here, at least, it will not be poisoned. I was so thirsty.” Then she ordered the carriage to take her to the Vatican, where she demanded an audience with Pius IX. Flushed and shaking, Charlotte begged him to protect her from Napoleon’s assassins. Seeing a cup of hot chocolate on the table, she pounced on it, dipping her fingers in and licking them, wailing, “I’m starving! Everything they give me is poisoned!”