Princesses Behaving Badly (35 page)

Charlotte refused to leave the pope’s presence, spending hours ranting about the situation in Mexico. By midday, the storm seemed to have passed. At lunch she behaved almost normally, save her demand to eat off
the same plate as her lady-in-waiting, and by the afternoon she was persuaded to return to her hotel. But upon noticing that her room keys were missing—they’d been taken with the intention of locking her in that night—she became hysterical and demanded to be returned to the safety of the Vatican. So at ten that night they all trooped back, where the patient pope ordered that the library be turned into a bedchamber. “Nothing is spared me in this life,” he remarked wryly, “now a woman has to go mad in the Vatican.” The next morning, after Charlotte passed a quiet night under the influence of serious sedatives, she refused to eat or drink anything that hadn’t been prepared for His Holiness.

A regular madwoman was one thing, but a crazy empress was a much bigger diplomatic problem. Tongues were wagging, and it became clear that someone had to figure out how to extract Charlotte from her papal safe haven. One of the cardinals hit upon asking the mother superior of a local convent to invite Charlotte to visit the orphans in their care. A flattered Charlotte agreed, at first playing the role of the kind, charitable empress. But then she was shown the kitchens, where she commented on the delicious smell wafting out of the cooking pots. The nun showing her around offered her some of the ragout, using a knife that had a speck of dirt on it. Charlotte began screaming, “It’s poison! Only God has saved me!” But she was still starving—she hadn’t eaten since early that morning, and in her deranged state she thought that meat snatched directly from the boiling pot would be safe. The burns to her hand were so bad that she fainted while having them dressed.

The doctors could see that Charlotte was suffering from a “severe congestion of the brain,” as they wrote to her husband, but what to do about it beyond a steady diet of “bromides” (sedatives) was unclear. The week between September 30, when Charlotte burst in on the pope, and October 6, when she was committed to the care of an imperial physician, was a long one. Her hotel was emptied of guests to minimize the risk that Charlotte would fly into another violent rage over “assassins” coming to kill her. In the mornings, she would direct a carriage to drive her to one of Rome’s many fountains, where she’d fill a crystal jug and drink from a glass she’d taken from the papal rooms. She refused to eat anything that hadn’t been prepared in front of her; her servants bought live chickens to
be killed and trussed before her eyes and kept them tied to the legs of a gilded table in her royal suite. Her letters to Max careened from loving missives by a woman convinced she was dying to an embittered paranoiac convinced that her husband had been trying to murder her.

Back in Mexico, Max was waking up to the fact that his empire was a hopeless cause. His wife was insane, French troops were leaving, and a bloody civil war was well under way. But rather than abdicate his throne, abandon his followers, and return to Europe in shame, he decided to stay. It would be an act of suicide.

The French left Mexico on February 5, 1867. With just 8,000 loyal soldiers against Juarez’s roughly 40,000, Max waited out a siege at Santiago de Querétaro. The city fell on May 15, and Max and his generals were caught trying to escape. They were tried for treason and sentenced to death by firing squad. On June 19, 1867, Emperor Maximilian I of Mexico was executed by the new government of the country he’d tried to adopt.

Charlotte was never told about her husband’s death; for the rest of her life, she was kept in Belgium by her family. Afraid of everyone and everything, she lived in a castle surrounded by a moat, physically and mentally cut off from the outside world. Although she did have lucid moments, Charlotte lived mostly in her own twilight world, never realizing that Max was dead. She waited for him to return, sometimes asking her servants why he was late for dinner. And every spring, she would walk down to the moat, step into a little boat anchored there, and proclaim, “Today we leave for Mexico.”

Charlotte of Belgium may have gotten an audience with the pope, but one princess claims her reach extends above even him. Princess Märtha Louise (b. 1971), the only daughter of King Harald and Queen Sonja of Norway and fourth in line to the throne, said she knew as a child that she could read people’s feelings, that she was clairvoyant. It wasn’t until her experiences with horses that she realized she could communicate with angels as well as the dead.

In 2007, she and Elizabeth Nordeng (a fellow spiritualist whom she met at a clairvoyance course) opened Astarte Education, an English-language school in Norway that aims to help individuals find their own “spiritual passwords,” create miracles, and “get in touch with angels.” Since then, the princess and Nordeng have written several books—best sellers in Norway—about their spiritual journey. They write, “There are an infinite number of angels all around us who want to help us in all circumstances and at all times.… They are there for us. They are real. They exist.” The year it opened, the school offered a three-year course in angel spirituality at an annual cost of $4,150; it now offers workshops in angelic communication, too.

Märtha Louise’s claims to contact extra-earthly beings didn’t endear her to Norway’s religious community—her father, after all, is nominally the head of the state church. In 2010, Norwegian bishop Laila Rikaasen Dahl told the local news, “We don’t know enough about the status of the dead, but they belong to God and should be allowed to rest. We should remember the dead, not try to get in touch with them.” Others warned the princess that trying to contact the dead was “unhealthy.” The palace, however, is staying mum about the princess’s hotline to heaven.

Franziska

D
ECEMBER
16, 1896–F
EBRUARY
12, 1984
T
HE
R
USSIAN
E
MPIRE
;
MULTIPLE MENTAL HOSPITALS
; C
HARLOTTESVILLE
, V
A
.;
AND THE WORLD
’
S IMAGINATION

O
n the night of February 17, 1920, a Polish factory worker named Franziska Schanzkowska slipped off a bridge in Berlin and plunged into the icy waters of the Landwehr Canal. She was, she admitted later, trying to kill herself. And in a way she succeeded.

When Schanzkowska was fished out of the frigid waters by police, she refused to speak. She had no identification and no money, only the clothes on her back. For lack of better options, the authorities brought
her to a hospital.

Despite her dip in the canal, nothing appeared physically or mentally wrong with the young woman. They called her Fraulein Unbekannt, or “Miss Unknown”; she refused to say who she was and would speak only rarely. She was eventually transferred to Dalldorf, a state-run hospital for the mentally ill. There Miss Unknown kept to her bed, covered her face with blankets, and resisted having her photograph taken. She read constantly, especially newspapers and magazines. Such was Franziska’s life for a year and a half—until the day she read about the Romanovs.

Eighteen months before Franziska jumped into the canal, Anastasia Romanov, just a month past her seventeenth birthday, was executed in the basement of a Siberian mansion. She was the youngest daughter of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, who had abdicated a year before in the face of the implacable Bolshevik army, communists demanding the destruction of the monarchy. Nicholas, his wife, and their children were placed under house arrest and later transferred to a residence in Ekaterinburg, Siberia. As the White Army—the anticommunists who supported the monarchy—inched closer to Ekaterinberg, the Bolsheviks started to panic.

On the night of July 17, 1918, the Romanov family, three of their servants, and their doctor were herded down to the building’s basement, where they were shot, by order of communist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin. Empress Alexandra was killed before she could finish crossing herself, and those who survived the initial hail of bullets were stabbed to death with bayonets and beaten with rifle butts. Swiftly, brutally, and bloodily, a 304-year-old Russian dynasty was extinguished.

Two of the children’s bodies were burned, and the remaining corpses of the tsar’s family were sealed in a pit. The execution itself was hushed up—the Bolsheviks confirmed they’d executed the tsar on the pretext that he was going to try to escape but neglected to mention that they’d murdered the rest of the family as well. The information vacuum that followed allowed rumors to flourish that some of the Romanovs had survived. Within months of the execution, multiple imposters came forward
claiming to be various members of the family. Most such impostors were dismissed out of hand, but other claims were not so easy to reject.

In 1921, the stories of Franziska Schanzkowska and Princess Anastasia collided.

During Franziska’s nineteen months in the hospital, newspapers and magazines were her primary link to the outside world. One day, a chatty nurse showed her the October 23, 1921, issue of
Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung
, which featured a picture of three of the Russian princesses, accompanied by the dramatic speculation that Anastasia had survived the execution. The article announced, “To this day, it has not been possible to definitively establish if, during the course of the massacre, one of the Grand Duchesses, Anastasia, was not merely severely wounded and if she remained alive.” Shortly after, Franziska declared that she was, in fact, Anastasia.

After dropping her bombshell, Franziska swore the staff and patients to secrecy. But her claim to be the lost Romanov princess couldn’t be kept under wraps, and word soon got around (helped out the door by a fellow inmate). Before long, a continuous parade of curiosity seekers, Russian émigrés, former imperial officers, monarchists, and displaced minor nobility was lining up to see the supposed Romanov offspring. Most didn’t believe her, but six months after making her claim, Franziska was adopted by two Russian émigrés, a baron and his wife. They’d never met the real Anastasia, but they were convinced that this woman was telling the truth.

And for good reason, or at least so it seemed. Franziska was about the same height as the murdered princess, had the same arresting blue-grey eyes, and even suffered from the same foot condition,
hallux valgus
(bunions). And when she was pulled from her watery would-be grave, reports noted that she was covered with lacerations and scars, including from a stab wound to her right foot that matched the triangular shape of the bayonets used by the Bolsheviks.

Other evidence soon surfaced. Franziska refused to speak Russian but could understand it and, according to a doctor, spoke it perfectly in
her sleep. Under the influence of anesthesia, she raved in perfect English, the language of Anastasia’s mother, and spoke French with a “perfect” accent. (Anastasia, like other princesses, had learned French from a young age.) Franziska could also recall intimate details of the Romanovs’ family life, including nicknames Anastasia supposedly bestowed on obscure courtiers and military officials. Her imperial etiquette was impeccable. She convinced handwriting experts that she was the real deal (apparently having practiced copying Anastasia’s signature from a signed photograph found in a book) and broke into genuine tears upon hearing an obscure waltz that had been played for the princess once upon a time. How could she have known all these things if she wasn’t a true Romanov?

In 1922 Franziska, still living with the baron, didn’t seem eager to press her claim to princesshood just yet, though she didn’t disabuse anyone of the notion, either. When her hosts asked what they should call her, she told them to dispense with etiquette and just call her Fraulein Annie. Which was nice for them and handy for her, relieving her of the pressure to continually act like a princess. It also gave Franziska time to figure out exactly how best to become Anastasia.

At first, a string of happy coincidences, such as the foot deformity, tied Franziska to the deceased princess. But as time went on, three factors consipired to force her into perpetuating her claims: memory “lapses,” a growing fear of being found out (Franziska was an unhinged woman with nothing to lose and a lot to gain), and the willingness of those who wanted so much to believe to her.

As Anastasia, Franziska declared that the trauma of her family’s execution, her beating at the hands of the Bolshevik soldiers, and her subsequent escape had resulted in huge memory gaps. She claimed to have been rescued by a man whom she variously described as a soldier she’d just met or a young guard who’d been friendly to her for weeks; he was either a peasant who’d raped her or a member of a fallen Polish noble family whom she’d married and whose child she’d borne (and then misplaced). She also maintained that her rescuer used some sort of device to alter the shape of her nose and mouth, thus explaining the differences in appearance between her and Anastasia. Most of her details were just as hazy, contradictory, and half formed. For example, she stated that she
couldn’t read German, tell time, or recognize numbers (despite being a devotee of solitaire). All such inconsistencies were assumed by her supporters to be evidence of the severe abuse she had suffered at the hands of the revolutionaries.