B008AITH44 EBOK (27 page)

 

E
lisabeth derived her growing self-confidence from the
circumstance
of her increasingly more striking and more unusual beauty. It turned her into a worldwide celebrity in the 1860s.

The legendary beauty of Empress Elisabeth grew very slowly. She had been a sturdy, boyish little girl with a round peasant face. At that time, her sister Helene was considered the great beauty in the family.

When little Sisi reached marriageable age—somewhere between fourteen and fifteen—she caused her mother great worry. In Bad Ischl, when the young Emperor asked for her hand rather than for Helene’s, no one was more surprised than Sisi herself and her Bavarian family. She was pleasant, lively, and limber, but still barely matured and a little
melancholy
. It may have been this last—such a contrast to the merry Viennese
countesses to whose company the young Emperor was accustomed—that gave her a unique charm.

Comments on the young Empress’s beauty from the early years of the marriage are still rather reserved. We should not forget that Sisi was, after all, ailing (whatever the disease may have been) from the moment she came to Vienna. She went on starvation diets, she was often exhausted, severely anemic, and extremely unsure of herself in the court surroundings. All these circumstances would not enhance her appearance.

Thus, her increasing charms went unrecognized for a long time. Her figure became more rounded, especially as a result of three children born in the first four years of marriage. A great deal of physical activity and constant diets, however, kept her extremely slender and graceful. During this time, she also grew taller, until, at the considerable height of 172 centimeters (5 feet, 7.5 inches), she topped her husband by several
centimeters
. (Portraits of the couple do not show this difference, for painters always made adjustments rendering the Emperor taller than his wife.) All her life, Elisabeth’s weight remained fairly constant at roughly 50 kilos (110 pounds)—she was thus considerably underweight. Even her waist
measurement
changed hardly at all in her lifetime; it was an astonishing and almost incredible 50 centimeters (19.5 inches). Elisabeth emphasized her famous tiny waist by lacing so tightly that she frequently suffered from shortness of breath, as her mother-in-law complained repeatedly. The reported hip measurement, however (62 to 65 centimeters; 24 to 25 inches) is open to doubt.
¹
Apparently at the time the measurement was taken higher up on the body.

It was the common people who first recognized the young Empress’s beauty. When she went riding in the Prater, crowds gathered to see her. Archduchess Sophie’s diary noted with some astonishment after one such turbulent visit to the Prater, “It is the Empress who attracts them all. For she is their joy, their idol.”
²
As soon as Sisi showed herself in the city, crowds gathered. Curious onlookers blocked the streets before her carriage. On one occasion, when she wanted to walk to St. Stephen’s Cathedral, so many people thronged around her that she became afraid and could think of no other way out than to flee, weeping, into the vestry. Sophie: “It was almost a scandal.”
³

Foreign diplomats were also quick to remark on the Empress’s
extraordinary
looks. As early as two years after the wedding, for example, Minister of Police Kempen confided to his diary “that the beauty of Empress Elisabeth draws many people to the court who would otherwise stay away.”
⁴

Sisi had a more difficult time with court society. The many elegant countesses were hardly prepared to accept the former Bavarian country girl as a beauty; the aristocratic ladies continued to find fault with this or that detail of Sisi’s outward appearance. With a positively insulting eagerness, in 1857, they elected Archduke Max’s bride, Carlotta, as the “beauty” of the court—putting the final touch on the already strained relationship between the sisters-in-law. To assert herself in this group of people who bore her no good will was extremely difficult for the young Empress.

The crisis in her marriage and her flights from Vienna to Madeira and Corfu marked a turning point. In her solitude far from the Viennese court, Sisi’s self-confidence began to blossom. Here the shy, insecure girl from Bavaria turned into a mature young woman exceedingly conscious of her beauty. This new self-assurance intensified with time into a sense of being one of the elect, based on the recognition of her extraordinary physical looks.

In Madeira, Sisi also had an ardent admirer in Count Hunyady, whom she could use to test the power of her radiance and whom she treated as she did all his successors. She was the unapproachable, cold beauty who allowed herself to be worshiped to the point of the man’s surrender, but who never permitted even the smallest liberty. With all the loveliness of her appearance, she became increasingly and emphatically dignified, even majestic—to men.

*

To women, on the other hand, Sisi could be very cordial, affectionate, even sisterly. But here, too, she applied one overriding criterion: She liked only beautiful women. In the early 1860s (again, beginning with her stay on Madeira) she had an intimate friendship with her lady-in-waiting who was of the same age, the beautiful Countess Lily Hunyady, Imre’s sister. She made no secret of this attachment, in that she preferred Lily’s company to any other, neglecting the other ladies (which gave rise to endless petty jealousies in the small royal household cut off from the rest of the world). When he visited on Corfu, Adjutant General Count Crenneville even noticed a “magnetic rapport” between the Empress and Lily Hunyady, but immediately added that this tie, “cleverly employed, could be useful”
⁵
—which presumably meant that he believed the Empress could be influenced through her lady-in-waiting. Unfortunately, there are not enough sources to allow us to do justice to this intimate friendship, which lasted for years.

During this time, Sisi repeatedly showed her attachments to beautiful young women, including complete strangers she happened to meet. In 1867, for example, she wrote to her son, then nine years old, from
Switzerland
,
“We have made the acquaintance of a twelve-year-old very pretty Belgian girl, who has splendid long hair. We talk with her often, and once I even kissed her! So you can imagine how sweet she must be.”
⁶

The Empress took special pleasure in appearing at the side of another, hardly less beautiful woman—Lily Hunyady as well as her younger sister, ex-Queen Marie of Naples. These relationships involved a deep
attachment
, demonstrated publicly; thus, in 1868 in Budapest, the two beautiful sisters, Elisabeth and Marie, appeared side by side dressed exactly alike—dark silk dresses, plaid “bedouins” (a coatlike wrap, extremely fashionable at the time), and small pearl-gray silk hats—and reveled in their obvious success.
⁷

Ex-Queen Marie of Naples was also the star in the album of beauties Sisi compiled for herself in Venice in 1862. Of the more than one hundred photographed beauties in the album, there were more portraits of the “heroine of Gaeta,” as she was known all over the world, than of anyone else. Without a trace of envy, Elisabeth was the foremost admirer of the delicate, still very melancholy beauty of her younger sister.

At the time, there were several famous galleries of beauties, although all the others were made up of paintings. The best-known collection was the gallery of beauties that Sisi’s uncle King Ludwig I of Bavaria assembled in Nymphenburg. The chief attraction of this gallery is (to this day) the portrait of the royal mistress Lola Montez, for whose sake Ludwig I abdicated in 1848. Besides Lola, however, several other favorite beauties of the art-connoisseur King are represented—primarily from the middle classes. Ludwig included only a few of the Wittelsbach family—of the nine sisters, however, none other than Sisi’s mother-in-law, Archduchess Sophie, who had been a beautiful woman in her youth, and one of the most implacable opponents of Lola Montez. The notorious Montez also found a place in Sisi’s photo collection—to be sure, heavily aged—and thus established a direct link to the Nymphenburg collection.

Like her Uncle Ludwig, Sisi had no high opinion of impeccable
aristocratic
pedigrees when it came to beauty. Like Ludwig, she accepted women of all classes into her album, even total strangers. For example, she sent a request to her brother-in-law, Archduke Ludwig Viktor, “I happen to be assembling an album of beauties and am now collecting photographs for it, only of women. Please send me whatever pretty faces you run across at Angerer’s and other photographers.”
⁸

Austrian diplomats were also instructed to send to the foreign minister photographs of beautiful women for the Empress. This request aroused immediate skepticism and astonishment; no one was ready to believe that
it really was the Empress who wanted the pictures. And many a respectable ministry official came under suspicion of wanting them for himself.

From London, Berlin, and St. Petersburg, the ambassadors sent portraits of beautiful women from the very best society: photographs taken in the foremost studios, artfully arranged, with mirrors, draperies, or scenery framing a lady, dressed in the latest fashion and striking a pose.

The task set the envoy in Constantinople was much harder to fulfill than that of his colleagues. His instructions from Vienna read, “H. M. the Empress desires to receive for her private collection photographic portraits of beautiful women from the preeminent capitals of Europe. Her Supreme Majesty would place special value on possessing, along with such portraits of Oriental beauties, photographs of beautiful women from the world of the Turkish harems. I shall not fail to inform you of this her desire, insofar as local conditions allow, to fulfill it by prompt posting of such portraits executed in the usual form of calling cards.”
⁹

The ambassador’s reply to the foreign minister expressed considerable perplexity concerning the desired ladies of the harem. “The matter is more difficult than it may seem, namely in regard to Turkish women, who, with very few exceptions, do not allow themselves to be photographed and can least be persuaded to do so by their husbands.”
¹⁰
But finally several likenesses traveled from Constantinoppe to Vienna, of exceedingly strange ladies of questionable beauty (by Viennese standards), whose antecedents (whether from the harem or not) were simply left open.

The pictures that arrived from Paris were quite unexpectedly ordinary. They did not depict ladies from the circles of the famously beautiful Empress Eugénie, nor did they show off the latest Parisian fashions. Instead, many dozens of wallet-sized photographs arrived displaying the likenesses of acrobats, actresses, dancers, circus equestriennes in extremely scanty clothes and remarkably unrestrained, even scandalous poses. The Empress’s instructions had not been entirely clear, and the definition of
beauty
was flexible. One can hardly accuse this Parisian consignment of malicious intentions—although a certain mockery could not be ignored by initiates: Still another way had been found to allude to Sisi’s inadequately noble origins and the circus predilections of her Bavarian family.

*

Quite independent of the fashion of the season, the legend of Empress Elisabeth’s extraordinary beauty grew. It originated among the public, the observers outside the court, the foreign diplomats. Each of Sisi’s rare public appearances during the 1860s turned into a sensation, cause for endless talk. No matter how much the Viennese aristocracy objected that Sisi’s dresses
were not always at the zenith of whatever the fashion trend was, it became impossible to deny or dispute her unusual beauty. By the mid-1860s, there was not a single lady in Viennese society who could consider herself a match for Elisabeth.

Sisi’s success was overwhelming. In 1864, for example, she went to Dresden for her brother Karl Theodor’s wedding. After the court ball, Archduke Ludwig Viktor reported to Vienna that Sisi was “stunningly beautiful, also the people here acted insane. I have never seen anyone having such an effect before.” Sisi wore a white dress embroidered with stars, her famous large diamond stars in her hair, on her breast a corsage of camellias. Her sister “Helene, a very pale copy of the Empress, in a star dress also,” wrote Ludwig Viktor. At the wedding, the main attraction was not the bride, but Elisabeth. This time she appeared in a lilac dress
embroidered
with silver clover leaves, with a cape of silver lace, a diamond tiara on her intricately dressed hair. Ludwig Viktor: “the people here are so flabbergasted at our lady sovereign!!! they’re right.”
¹¹