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The theme that recurred from then on was that of the caged bird or the butterfly far from home, finding only unhappiness and the absence of freedom. This despairing cry for freedom is threaded through all of the young Empress’s verses. Two weeks after the wedding, on May 8, 1854, she wrote:

But the young Empress shed tears, not only over her home and her freedom, but also over her first love. That she did so even during the honeymoon weeks with Franz Joseph indicates that there were additional problems, about which we can only speculate.

Reluctantly and sadly, Sisi began to obey the rules of the court, even if she never acknowledged the propriety of such rigid etiquette. Later, she told her lady-in-waiting “how afraid she had been in the world of
strangers,
of exalted personages—how everything had seemed so different!—how she missed her home and her sisters and brothers!—the whole carefree, innocent existence of Possenhofen!—The natural, the simple was to
disappear
under the unnatural pressure of exaggerated etiquette—in a word—how everything dealt only with ‘seeming’ and not with ‘being’—and how difficult everything had often been.”
²⁶

In Vienna, Sisi’s health became very precarious. For months she suffered from severe coughing fits and from anxiety attacks whenever she had to go down steep stairs.
²⁷
It is quite probable that her constant ailments had psychological origins.

A mere two weeks after the wedding, Sisi’s longing for her sisters and brothers was so great that she requested the Emperor almost beseechingly to invite her favorite brother, Karl Theodor, to spend a few days in Vienna. When the Emperor agreed, she wept for joy.

She felt trapped in a gilded cage. The jewelry, the beautiful dresses—they were merely a burden to her. For they meant fittings, making choices, constant dressing and changing. There were battles over little things. Elisabeth refused to give away her shoes after wearing them once. The chambermaids sneered: The new Empress was unfamiliar with the simplest time-honored customs practiced at the court of Vienna. She did not like to have the waiting women dress her. She had been raised to be
independent,
and she was very shy; the lady’s maids were still strangers to her. On this point, too, she was unable to get her way.

Conflicts with the secret Empress, Archduchess Sophie, usually turned, in Sisi’s opinion, on trivialities, and they hurt her all the more for being
so trivial. Thus, the young couple liked to wander alone through the halls and twisting corridors of the Hofburg to the old Burgtheater, which was part of the castle. This innocent pleasure, however, was immediately forbidden by Archduchess Sophie. For the Emperor and Empress were entitled to be escorted to the theater by carefully specified court officials.
²⁸
Sophie was always concerned with upholding imperial dignity. The fact that in this matter the Emperor did not dare to object additionally offended the already high-strung Sisi.

Sophie was accustomed to making all the decisions in family and
political
matters. And she was accustomed to commanding obedience. Her husband depended on her mind. From their earliest childhood on, her four sons—Franz Joseph, Ferdinand Maximilian, Karl Ludwig, and
Ludwig
Viktor—acknowledged Sophie’s authority as supreme and never dared to resist her. It was Sophie to whom Franz Joseph owed his
position.
She had persuaded her husband, the rightful heir to the throne, to renounce it. She had made her son what he was—a fully trained, dutiful, and extremely industrious young man of personal integrity, who
espoused
her political principles: the divine right of kings, absolute rule by the monarch, suppression of any manifestations of the popular will,
rejection
of parliamentarianism, close ties between church and state. Now she felt it to be her duty to turn her sixteen-year-old niece into an empress who would fulfill
her
conception in the service of the empire and the dynasty.

In later years, Elisabeth understood that Sophie was not motivated by malice, and she declared to a lady-in-waiting, “that the Archduchess surely meant so well in everything—but that the paths were arduous and the manner harsh—that the Emperor suffered from it as well and that she always wanted to control … and how from the first day she was an obstacle to her contentment and happiness and interfered in everything and how she made it harder for them to be—undisturbed—together!”
²⁹

All her life, Archduchess Sophie had longed for a position such as her sixteen-year-old niece now assumed. She could not help being offended, even outraged, at the way in which the young Empress looked on her high standing as only a burden and something that robbed her of her personal liberty. Sophie paid no attention whatever to Sisi’s very obvious
depressions;
she did not even take them seriously. She saw only the expression, radiant with joy, of her enamored “Franzi.”

Queen Marie of Saxony confirmed this attitude. “The news from Vienna sounds indescribably happy and makes me happy…. Both happy
mothers have written me veritable
books
about it.”
³⁰
Sophie also wrote to Bavaria about “our dear young couple,” who, in the “rural seclusion” of Laxenburg “spent the happiest honeymoon. The truly Christian domestic happiness of my children is a heartwarming sight.”
³¹

Nevertheless, there is no trace of domestic happiness in the Empress’s statements made in later years. Whenever she visited Laxenburg, Sisi never forgot to refer to her sad honeymoon. For example, Marie Valerie, her younger daughter, noted in her diary, “Mama showed us the desk at which she wrote so much to Possi [Possenhofen] and cried so much, so much, because she was homesick.”
³²

Similarly, Marie Festetics wrote in her diary in Laxenburg,

Elisabeth’s complaints continued in the same vein. Surely as far as Sophie’s malice went, they were exaggerated. For that the Archduchess meant well, even though she employed the wrong means, is made
sufficiently
clear by Sophie’s diary. On the other hand, Elisabeth’s stories show very obviously the paramount position Sophie occupied in the imperial family during the 1850s. Archduchess Sophie “scolded” not only the young Empress, “but also the Emperor, like schoolchildren,” the astonished Countess Festetics learned from Elisabeth.

Even here in Laxenburg, during the so-called honeymoon, the young couple was hardly ever alone for their only shared meal of the day. For example, one of the imperial aides-de-camp, Hugo von Weckbecker, had the job of sitting next to the Empress and was supposed to “endeavor to engage her in conversation, since she was still too timid and was now to be educated in the social graces.”
³⁴
Countess Esterházy, acting on Sophie’s orders, also never left Sisi’s side, so as to be able to correct every misstep immediately.

*

The Emperor and Empress took their first trip early in June, traveling to Moravia and Bohemia. It was an act of gratitude and recognition for proffered aid and loyalty. In 1848, the imperial family had fled riot-torn Vienna and gone to Olmütz in Moravia. There, an important event in Austrian history had taken place: Emperor Ferdinand’s renunciation of the throne (“I was glad to do it”) and the accession of Franz Joseph, eighteen years old at the time.

The privileged position of the Bohemian lands during this time can also be seen in the fact that the first new language Sisi was expected to learn was Bohemian. Archduchess Sophie once noted in her diary that Sisi could already “count in Bohemian,” though later there was very little mention of Sisi’s progress in the language.

Sisi had no choice but to grow used to the extensive retinue that always accompanied the imperial couple on all travels. There were aides-de-camp, military officers, household troops, clergy, the personal physician Dr. Johann Seeburger, Adjutant General Grünne. Then there was Sisi’s personal entourage: chief steward and chatelaine, two ladies-in-waiting, a secretary. All these people brought along their own servants—valets, hairdressers, bathing attendants, footmen.

A rail line—the Nordbahn (Northern Railway)—had already been built along the stretch from Vienna through Brno to Prague, which was of great economic importance. The flower-bedecked locomotive
Proserpina
brought the imperial couple to Brno, the capital of Moravia, in a mere
four hours. They were greeted with arches of triumph, girls dressed all in white, waving flags, speeches by dignitaries and the Emperor in German and in Czech, festive illumination, gala performances at the theater, a public festival in Brno’s Augarten with sack races and ropedancers, a torchlight parade. A parade in Moravian costume featured a colorful float bearing a bride and groom and the entire rustic wedding party. They presented the Emperor and Empress with gifts—including a bottle of local wine, vintage 1746.

Here in Moravia, young Elisabeth made her debut in the role of sovereign. She visited orphanages, schools, and a charity hospital.
Wherever
she went, she made “a highly favorable impression by her gracious condescension and kindness,” as the
Wiener
Zeitung
reported the following day. The simple and natural manner in which the young Empress was able to speak with people from the lower classes was noticed, and it nourished the hope that some day this woman would espouse social problems.