B008AITH44 EBOK (73 page)

Elisabeth’s position at court was thus given away in her lifetime. The court no longer counted on her—quite correctly, since she left no doubt that she despised such obligations.

Those familiar with life at the court could not fail to suspect that Rudolf’s death was not the true reason for Elisabeth’s absences from Vienna. It served merely as the pretext, a justification to the world.

Elisabeth’s aimless wanderings through Europe, in her own parlor car or on the imperial yachts
Greif
and
Miramar
, were a genuine martyrdom for her ladies-in-waiting, most especially Countess Festetics, whose health was no longer the best. Marie Festetics’s complaints were frequently voiced in letters. “Here I sit on the rolling ship in the alien world—alone. This too shall pass, but it is hard to watch with a cheerful countenance. I am homesick.”
¹⁷
Her letters make much mention of bad weather—“Thunder, storm, and rain as if it were Judgment Day”—and of endless inspection tours.

The Empress paid no attention at all to the weather. She loved the forces of nature and had no understanding for the sensitivities of her companions. There were almost grotesque scenes; once the traveling party had to go aboard the
Miramar
at Corfu during a “powerful northeaster.” “In their mortal terror,” as Alexander von Warsberg reported, two of the
chamber-women
fled into a corner. Elisabeth, unaffected by storm and rough seas, was intent on forcing the two of them, in this unsettling situation, “to admire the magnificent sunset, the colors on the mountains behind Patras,
until the poor creatures broke out in wretched cries, saying that they could see nothing at all but the terrible waves.”
¹⁸

Countess Festetics, who was always seasick, found it particularly
difficult
to walk up and down alongside her mistress on the ship, in any weather, because Elisabeth could not sit still. After one such ocean voyage in the Aegean in November, Marie Festetics stated, “To roam for two weeks on the open sea, at this time of year, is no pleasure.”
¹⁹

The same Elisabeth who, in Vienna, sighed at every cool breeze, proved, on her travels, to be totally indifferent to bad weather. Countess Festetics: “Her Majesty left Vienna because she cannot endure the cold, and we are spending the very worst six weeks in the coldest places, she goes out even in weather so bad that the wind twice turned her umbrella inside out and blew her hat off her head.”
²⁰

During stormy seas, she even had herself tied to a chair on deck. “I do this like Odysseus, because the waves tempt me,” she explained to Christomanos.
²¹

Sometimes Elisabeth spared her ladies-in-waiting when she went on her excursions in storm and rain and took along whoever happened to be her Greek reader at the time. Konstantin Christomanos—the short,
hunchbacked
philosophy student—once walked with her in the park at
Schönbrunn
in December during a wet snowstorm. They were forced to keep jumping over large puddles of water. “Like frogs, we go hunting in the pools,” said the Empress. “We are like two damned souls wandering through the underworld. For many people, this would be hell…. I like this sort of weather most of all. For it is not for other people. I am allowed to enjoy it all by myself. Actually, it exists only for me, like those plays poor King Ludwig had performed for himself alone. Except that out here, it is even more splendid. It could even be a wilder storm, then one feels so close to all things, as in conversation.”
²²

Elisabeth’s hectic restlessness also cast its shadows on the construction of the Achilleion on Corfu. Countess Festetics complained, “Her Majesty grows more willful and more self-indulgent by the day and is ever more demanding—she is trying to give herself heaven on earth…. Her Majesty tells herself that for money one can have even a garden like a castle’s, she is in despair because the trees are still not green. In her mind’s eye, she sees the garden of Miramar, which was truly magnificent this year, and that is the cause of her discontent.”
²³

But even her Greek property did not inspire Elisabeth to settle down. Hardly had the castle been completed than she set out again, not unlike the way she had behaved about the Hermes Villa, which she no longer
especially liked. Much as she longed for a home, serenity in it escaped her.

Abruptly she persuaded herself that she needed money for Valerie and that she therefore had to sell the Achilleion. “I shall even sell my private silver service engraved with my dolphin; perhaps some American will take it. I have an agent in America who advised me to do this,” she explained to the astonished Christomanos.
²⁴

The Emperor could not accept Elisabeth’s proposal to use the monies realized from a sale for Valerie.

A commensurate price, he added, could not be expected in any case, since the house already needed repairs, “and yet it will cause quite a scandal.” Elisabeth should really give the matter some more thought.

“For me,” Franz Joseph’s letter continued, “your plan also has its sad side. I had quietly hoped that, after you built Gasturi with so much joy, so much eagerness, that you would pass in your new creation at least the greater part of the time you unfortunately spend in the south. Now this, too, is to be stopped, and you will travel even more and roam the world.” He was looking forward to a reunion “with infinite impatience.”
²⁵

But in spite of these serious objections, once again, what Elisabeth wanted was what Elisabeth got; as soon as the Achilleion had been fully furnished, it was emptied out again. The expensive copies of antique furniture were shipped to Vienna and stored in the various castles and warehouses because the Empress was no longer interested in them. No buyer was found.

One other time the Empress had a plan to build herself a house—this time in San Remo—but she quickly abandoned it. From this time on, she preferred hotels. But here, too, her excessive demands created perpetual problems. All too often she would arrive unannounced at the height of the
season, bringing a sizable entourage, demanding a great many rooms—at times the entire hotel—with a private entrance and hundreds of
complicated
security precautions to protect herself from curiosity seekers. Soon, therefore, her arrival became a matter of dread. “Her Majesty grows more demanding by the year, and with the best will in the world, it is not possible to satisfy her; the people are so astonished at us that I blush,” Marie Festetics wrote from Interlaken to Ida Ferenczy in Hungary in 1892.
²⁶

Ida Ferenczy went along on none of the trips because of her precarious health. By the early 1890s, Countess Festetics had also become ill and tired. “Where we shall be in 2–3 days, we do not know. I understand that man seeks warmth, but that one spends three months on board ship in the winter probably requires a special gusto. Where we are headed, not even Her Majesty really knows.”
²⁷
After more than twenty years of hard work as a lady-in-waiting to the Empress, Marie Festetics was finally replaced by the much younger and more athletic Countess Irma Sztaray, also a
Hungarian.
Accompanied by Irma, the Empress spent her final years wandering through Europe and around the Mediterranean. In 1890, for example, she traveled to Bad Ischl, Feldafing, Paris, Lisbon, Algiers, Florence, and Corfu. Often she changed her destination on short notice, causing
considerable
confusion. Her mail was sent to her in care of general delivery wherever her ship was scheduled to dock (according to information in Vienna, which was frequently incorrect). The name to which letters were directed was almost always a pseudonym. For example, in October 1890, the imperial adjutant general, Count Eduard Paar, sent Emperor Franz Joseph’s letters to a “Mrs. Elizabetha Nicholson—
Chazalie
” (
Chazalie
being the name of the ship Elisabeth was using on this trip) to general delivery in “Arcachon, La Coruña, Oporto, Oran, Algiers, Toulon,
Gibraltar,
San Remo, Marseilles, Monaco, Cannes, Mentone, and Livorno … and finally a small chest … to Gibraltar.” Elisabeth’s chief chamberlain, Baron Nopcsa, was required to find out from the consulates in question “whether mail had been left at one of these places and to send it back.”
²⁸

The Empress’s retinue came to see a great deal of the world in this way. Thus, one of the Greek readers, M. C. Marinaky, was in Elisabeth’s service for ten months in 1895–1896; this time was spent in the Hermes Villa outside Vienna (May and June), the Hungarian spa of Bartfeld (July), Bad Ischl (August), Aix-les-Bains and Territet on Lake Geneva (September), Gödöllö (October), Vienna (November), Cap Martin (December to
February),
and Cannes, Naples, Sorrento, and Corfu (March).

The itineraries for other years were not very different. Some of her destinations were chosen on a sudden whim and were irreconcilable with
Austrian politics. For example, the German ambassador, reporting on Elisabeth’s trip to Florence, wrote that “Emperor Franz Joseph did not wish his wife to set foot anywhere on Italian soil. Nor was this place part of her itinerary, but the sovereign lady’s decisions are not always known ahead of time.”
²⁹

Two years later, after an audience with Emperor Franz Joseph, the German ambassador informed Berlin, “But it is clear from all his statements how little he himself knows about the plans of Her Majesty his wife, and he has little influence on her travel decisions…. I am not stating anything new if I most humbly remark that these long absences from home on the part of the Empress are not gratifying to the Emperor, and that they are seen with displeasure in the country and unfortunately are judged harshly.”
³⁰

And time and again, Elisabeth traveled to Munich, the site of her childhood. Countess Sztaray reported, “Walking slowly, we traversed the city; we did not wish to see anything new, anything surprising; this visit was entirely dedicated to the past, to memories. Now we stopped before an old-fashioned palace, then again before an old building, at a stand of trees whose branches had spread wide since then, at a bed of flowers that had been blooming even then. The Empress … had something to tell about each one, something lovely from the good old days.” She never left Munich without a visit to the Hofbräuhaus—incognito of course, and behaving “like the best of the bourgeois,” as she said. Each time she ordered a small pitcher of beer for herself and her lady-in-waiting.
³¹

On all these travels, Elisabeth refused police protection. But in view of the growing danger of anarchists, some governments insisted on having her followed by police agents—even against her express wishes. One of these tormented agents, Anton Hammer from Karlsbad, recounted, “Empress Elisabeth made a tremendous lot of work for us. No one was allowed to look at her. In one hand she held an umbrella, in the other her fan. To this were added her sudden walks, once at three o’clock at night, then again in the mornings she would go to the woods. One had to be on the alert at all times. And with all this, I had been given strict orders to watch the Empress’s every step in such a way that she would not notice.” Often enough, when Elisabeth became aware of one of these agents, she fled across fences or along untrodden paths to shake off her watchers. These escapades were the cause of great unpleasantness for the agents, because they had failed to comply with their orders to accompany the Empress. Hammer: “We had to stalk after the Empress for five hours. Always at a distance of about two hundred meters, using trees or rocks to hide behind.”
³²
The
curiosity to catch a glimpse of what had been the most beautiful woman in the world was great everywhere. Many observers noted the great disparity between legend and reality. One of these was Prince Alfons Clary-Aldringen, who saw the Empress in Territet when he was a small boy in 1896–1897. He and his sister were in the hills behind the hotel where both the Clary family and the Empress were staying. When they saw the black, slender figure of the Empress, the children blocked her path, “and lo and behold, because no adult was nearby, this time the Empress did not open her fan! My sister curtseyed, and I made my best bow; she smiled at us in a friendly way—but I was stunned, for I saw a face full of wrinkles, looking as old as the hills.”

When the children spoke to their grandmother of the encounter, she solemnly told them, “Children, do not forget this day, when you saw the most beautiful woman in the world!” Alfons Clary: “In response to my smart-aleck answer, ‘But, Grandmama, her face is all wrinkled!’ I received a hefty slap.”
³³