B008AITH44 EBOK (29 page)

There follows a long-winded description of the actual hairdressing.

“I am aware of my hair,” Elisabeth told Christomanos. “It is like a foreign body on my head.”

Christomanos: “Your Majesty wears her hair like a crown instead of the crown.”

To which Elisabeth replied, “Except that any other crown is more easily laid aside.”
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The weight of these masses was so great that sometimes it caused Elisabeth to have a headache. On such mornings, she remained in her apartments for hours, her hair held up high with ribbons. This method decreased the weight on her head, and allowed air to circulate.

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The older Elisabeth grew, the more strenuous became her struggle to hold on to her looks. The methods and the time spent on care became ever more lavish. By constant diets, Elisabeth managed to remain willowy and slender; hours of daily exercise kept her supple and graceful. Her skin care was a highly complicated process. Since there was no cosmetic industry such as exists today, the ladies who took pride in their appearance had to depend on beauty products they mixed themselves according to more or less secret recipes. All this required enormous expenditures of time and money.

The constant occupation with these “outward appearances,” so essential to Elisabeth’s sense of self, degenerated into a virtual obsession with beauty. In later years, Elisabeth’s niece Marie Larisch characterized this maliciously as “an all-consuming passionate love”: “She worshiped her beauty like a heathen his idols and was on her knees to it. The sight of the perfection of her body gave her aesthetic pleasure; everything that marred this beauty was displeasing and repulsive to her…. She saw it as her life’s work to remain young, and all her thoughts turned on the best method for
preserving
her beauty.”
²⁵

Marie Larisch recorded the means with which the Empress attempted to keep up her beauty: nightly face masks with raw veal, during strawberry season a strawberry mask, warm olive-oil baths to maintain the smoothness of her skin. “But once the oil was almost boiling, and she barely escaped the dreadful death of many a Christian martyr. Often she slept with damp cloths over her hips to maintain her slenderness, and for the same reason, she drank a dreadful mixture of five or six egg whites with salt.”
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Sisi needed as much as three hours a day for dressing (occasionally several times in one day). The famous lacing alone frequently took an hour, until the desired wasp waist was slight enough. To do justice to her reputation of a proverbially narrow waist, Sisi made use of unusual
methods
, shocking for her time; beginning in the 1870s, for example, she gave up petticoats, wearing only thin “pantalettes” made of the finest doeskin. She had herself sewn into her dresses—each time she changed clothes.

The fact that these outrageously time-consuming preparations for public appearances became increasingly burdensome and arduous for her may explain in no small part why more and more she avoided being “harnessed” to function as the premier showpiece of the empire. Other empresses before her had not been under an obligation to uphold a reputation of fabulous looks. They could afford to appear in public simply attired, or with hair less carefully dressed without incurring criticism. Such behavior became all the more impossible for Elisabeth the more brightly shone her reputation for beauty.

The course of Sisi’s day during the 1870s and 1880s was unusual for an empress. In summer, she rose around five, in winter, around six o’clock, and she began her day with a cold bath and massage. This was followed by gymnastics and exercise and a meager breakfast, sometimes taken with her younger daughter, Valerie. Then, while her hair was being dressed, she used the time for reading and for writing letters and for studying
Hungarian
. Then came dressing (either in her fencing costume, if she intended to fence, or her riding habit, if she was going to the riding school to practice). All these activities amply filled the morning. At dinner, however, the Empress made up for lost time; her meal, often consisting of no more than a thin gravy, was consumed in a few minutes. After the meal, she went for a walk lasting several hours—more accurately, a forced march at great speed over huge distances—on which she was accompanied by a lady-
in-waiting
. Around five in the afternoon, after another change of clothing and hair combing, Marie Valerie came to play. Then, if there was no way to avoid it, Elisabeth appeared at the family dinner table around seven o’clock—and there, usually for the only time during the day, she saw her husband. But this meeting did not last long; for Elisabeth retired at the earliest opportunity, to indulge in her daily chat with her friend Ida Ferenczy, who also prepared the Empress for bed and loosened her hair.

Every official obligation, no matter how insignificant, was considered a disruption of the schedule. The Empress lived entirely for her beauty and health. There was no room in her day for court and family duties (except for concern with Valerie).

When the first signs of aging appeared—wrinkles and weather-beaten skin caused by her diets and the time spent out of doors, and aching joints—Sisi was determined to hold on to her widely praised beauty by force. She tortured her slight body with hours of physical exercise—at the barre, at the rings, with dumbbells and weights of every description.

Wherever she lived, Elisabeth installed exercise rooms, which she used daily for long periods at a time. The first news of this innovation, in the 1860s, caused a sensation—and incredible astonishment. No one could readily conjure up an image of an empress of Austria as she lived and breathed, in an exercise outfit at the parallel bars or the barre. And so the newspapers printed grotesquely false reports, such as the following: “It must surely be of great interest to learn that the Great Hall in the Hofburg has been turned into an exercise ground. Every form of gymnastic
equipment
can be found in it: swings, parallel bars, barres, monkey bars, etc. Almost daily for 2 hours, His Majesty the Emperor and the exalted archdukes, along with gentlemen from the royal court including even the aged Baron Hess, all of them in gymnastic costume, disport themselves….”
²⁷
The fact that it was not the male members of the August House, but the Empress who spent several hours a day exercising seemed unthinkable even to the journalists of 1864.

Franz Joseph’s rage at such articles is completely understandable—quite aside from the fact that the site where the exercises were said to take place was one of the most impressive rooms in the Hofburg, the very one where, for a time, Emperor Franz Joseph delivered his official addresses. “Whether the matter is not too silly to be retracted as a lie, I leave to you to decide,” the Emperor wrote to Crenneville. In any case, one must “find some method to make the editors of the
Fremdenblatt
feel the impropriety of their actions through selective harassment.”
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Elisabeth rose above the gossip and held rigorously to her daily hours of exercising. For a woman of her day, this was really scandalous behavior. At times, she took pleasure in shocking unsuspecting people with her gymnastic exercises; on New Year’s Day of 1892 (when Elisabeth was fifty-four years old), for example, Christomanos wrote in his diary, “This morning before her drive she had me called back to the salon. At the open door between the salon and her boudoir, ropes, bars, and rings were installed. When I saw her, she was just raising herself on the handrings. She wore a black silk dress with a long train, hemmed with magnificent black ostrich feathers. I had never before seen her so imposing. Hanging on the ropes, she made a fantastic impression, like a creature somewhere between snake and bird.” In order to let herself back down, she had to jump
over a rope stretched above the ground. “‘This rope,’ she said, ‘is there to make sure that I don’t forget how to leap. My father was a mighty hunter before the Lord, and he wanted us to learn to leap like the mountain goats.’” Then she begged the astonished student to continue his reading of the
Odyssey
and explained to him that she was so formally dressed because she was about to receive some archduchesses. “If the archduchesses knew that I did my exercises in this dress, they would turn to stone.”

Proudly, Elisabeth always spoke of her father’s teachings (though she did not get along at all well with the man himself). He had taught his daughters the right way to walk, she told Christomanos. “We were to keep only one model in mind: the butterflies. My sisters Alençon and the Queen of Naples are famous in Paris for the way they walk. But we do not walk as queens are supposed to walk. The Bourbons, who hardly ever went out on foot, acquired an odd way of walking—like proud geese. They walk like true kings.”
²⁹
Here, as in all things, naturalness was Elisabeth’s ideal. And she used even this occasion to polemicize against the unnaturalness of the “true kings.”

The success both of rigorous dieting and of exercising could not, however, be ignored. To the nineteenth century, which stamped even thirty-year-old women as matrons, especially when they had borne several children, Empress Elisabeth was an extraordinary phenomenon. For roughly thirty years—an unheard-of length of time—the reputation of her beauty persisted.

Even the appearances of the forty-year-old Empress at the major balls were of almost fabulous splendor: Diamond stars in her hair, her tall, slender figure clothed in the most splendid gowns that European
dressmakers
could contrive, she stood at the center of the court bustle and brilliance, “not as if she were in a ballroom among all the people, but as if she were standing alone on a rock at the ocean, so lost is her glance into the distance”—so unapproachable and so unreal. To the admiring remark of her niece Marie Larisch that she was like Titania, Queen of the Fairies, Elisabeth, however, replied with her usual irony, “Not Titania but a seagull that has been caught and cowers in its cage.”
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Wherever Elisabeth appeared, she stole the show from the other women. When the Italian King and Queen visited Vienna in 1881, Alexander Hübner, writing about the meeting of the two queens, noted, “poor Queen Margherita seemed a soubrette next to a demigoddess.”
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And Elisabeth’s youngest daughter, Marie Valerie, often could hardly contain her pride in her beautiful mother; for example, in 1882, she wrote in her diary, “Dinner. Mama black pearl bodice, black feather in her hair
and a gold chain around her throat. Oh! she was so beautiful. Nor did Mama look much older than me.”
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(This last was surely an exaggeration—since at the time Elisabeth was not quite forty-five years old, while Valerie was fourteen.)

That always and everywhere Sisi’s beauty expressed sovereignty was mentioned by many contemporaries, including the German Emperor
Wilhelm
II: “she did not sit down, she lowered her body; she did not stand up, she rose….”
³³

Sisi’s confidante, Marie Festetics, was another admirer.

But Festetics noticed something else about the Empress, who was only thirty-four at the time. “What I miss in her is joy in life. A serenity overlies her that is quite striking in a young person!”
³⁴

Sisi’s esoteric, overly sensitive nature was coupled with a considerable arrogance. She showed this aspect of her personality in a hurtful way whenever and wherever it suited her, especially to her critics at court.

In the course of time, her ill humor increasingly turned into contempt for any public appearances. During the 1880s, Sisi spoke with her close friend and fellow poet Queen Elisabeth of Romania (Carmen Sylva) about the value of her position. She described it as exceedingly low; she held appearing in public to be no more than playacting. Queen Elisabeth remarked, astonished, “Your great beauty does not help you and does not relieve you of any of your shyness!”

To which Sisi replied, “I am not shy, it merely bores me! So they hang beautiful clothes on me and much jewelry, and then I step outside and say a few words to the people, and then I rush to my room, tear it all off, and write.”
³⁵

The clever Countess Festetics, who knew and loved her Empress more than most, wrote in her diary in the late 1860s that Elisabeth had all the virtues but that a wicked fairy had transformed each one into its opposite: “Beauty!—Loveliness!—Grace!—Elegance!—Simplicity!—Goodness!—Magnanimity!—Spirit!—Wit!—Humor!—Astuteness!—Cleverness!” And now the curse: “for everything turns against you—even your beauty will bring you nothing but sorrow, and your high spirit will penetrate so deep—so deep that it will lead you astray.”
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