B008AITH44 EBOK (59 page)

Elisabeth also shared the Master’s likes and dislikes. For example, she took an interest in the Hebrew poet Jehuda ben Halevy, whom Heine had praised in “Romanzero.” At that time, one of the foremost Halevy
scholars,
Professor Seligmann Heller, was living in Vienna. Unannounced and without having exchanged so much as a line with the scholar beforehand, Elisabeth appeared at Heller’s home one day. Heller was standing “at the window in his comfortable house jacket, looking out at the street, when he saw an equipage drive up to his house and stop. Since he was
shortsighted,
he could not make out that it was a court coach; he only joked to his son about an elegant carriage stopping before the old suburban house and whether he might be the intended recipient of the visit. A few moments later, there was a knock at the door, and the Empress stood before the surprised writer and scholar. In her own simple way, which
immediately
banished embarrassment, she explained the purpose of her visit. She spoke about Jehuda ben Halevy, whom she knew only from Heine’s verses, but whose own writings she was eager to learn with Heller’s help.”

Seligmann Heller delivered an improvised lecture on the life and work of the Hebrew poet, explaining also the difficulty of putting oneself into so entirely alien an intellectual world. The Empress, he suggested, would do well to stick to Heine’s “openly laudatory judgment.”
¹⁸

Elisabeth’s reputation as a Heine expert was so great that occasionally she was asked for advice, for example by one literary historian from Berlin. He turned to the Empress with three unpublished Heine poems and asked for her opinion as to whether the somewhat problematic verses should be published. Elisabeth replied in a long letter in her own hand, declaring one
of the poems to be spurious (and she was right, as subsequent examination proved) and advocating publication of the other two, “for Heine’s public are the peoples of the earth, and they have a right to know him completely, especially as the poet himself, unlike the majority of other poets, scorned all dissimulation and always liked to present himself as he was, with all his virtues and human failings.”
¹⁹

*

Elisabeth’s veneration for Heine did not rule out absorption in other poets. She continued enthusiastically to read Shakespeare’s plays, and she had committed most of
A
Midsummer
Night’s
Dream
to memory. With Marie Valerie she read
Faust
(unabridged, something considered unsuitable for a young girl of the period, because of the “immoral” tragedy of Gretchen). In the late 1880s, she began to study ancient Greek, so as to be able to read Homer in the original, but subsequently she concentrated on modern Greek. For practice, for example, she translated
Hamlet
from English into modern Greek. In 1892 she also tackled some passages by Schopenhauer but complained, “If only each day were twice as long; I cannot learn and read as much as I would like.”
²⁰
She gave a reason for spending hours a day studying Greek, not stopping until she mastered the language: “It is so beneficial to have to struggle with something difficult, so as to forget one’s own thoughts.”
²¹

As with Hungarian, Elisabeth also favored the demotic Greek the people spoke. She explained this preference to one of her readers very much in Heine’s manner. “The only reason for my preference for the popular language is that I wish to speak the language spoken by ninety percent of the population, and not that of the professors and politicians. If there is anything I abhor, it is pretence in thought, writing, or anything else.”
²²

On her walks, she was accompanied by a Greek student, who was made not only to speak Greek with her, but also to read to her as they walked. This was a difficult endeavor, given the Empress’s rapid pace, and elicited many astonished glances from passersby. When Elisabeth asked her brother Karl Theodor why he, too, did not make use of walks to have foreign languages read to him, he answered, “Because they would think I had gone mad.” To which Elisabeth replied, “Does that matter? Is it not enough that we ourselves know that we are not?” Marie von Redwitz, a Bavarian lady-in-waiting, who overheard this conversation, commented, “With this she explained so much in her own life. She did what gave her pleasure, and she left it to others to believe whatever they chose. With all her peculiarities, as a person she had remained simple and entirely natural.”
²³

The love of Greece was a Wittelsbach family tradition. Elisabeth’s
uncle, King Ludwig I, had also loved Greece, as did his son Otto, who was King of Greece from 1832 to 1862. During that time, many Bavarians made their way to Greece and gave personal and financial aid to develop the country impoverished by the long Turkish occupation. Elisabeth’s father, Duke Max, also knew Greece intimately, not only from his travels, but also through his preoccupation with Greek history and literature.

Elisabeth’s love for Greece was well grounded in knowledge of the country’s language, mythology, and history. One of her favorite poets was Lord Byron, probably the best-known foreign participant in the Greek wars of liberty. Elisabeth translated many of Byron’s poems into German, here, too, imitating Heine.

Probably the greatest German-speaking expert on Greece during the 1880s was the Austrian consul on Corfu, Alexander von Warsberg, who was known to the Empress through his books, especially his
Odysseische
Landschaften
(The Landscape of the Odyssey). In 1885, she asked him to be her scholarly guide on her travels in Greece. Before Warsberg’s first audience, Elisabeth’s chief chamberlain advised the writer a little fearfully “that I should keep my statements brief, concentrated; that the Empress could not tolerate much talking. So I was brought before her. She purred at me, curtly, not discourteously; I thought she looked ugly, old, thin as a rail, badly dressed, and I felt that I was looking, not at a foolish woman, but at a mad one, so that I grew truly sad.”

But it was not long before the critical Warsberg changed his mind. For while sightseeing,

Nor did it take long for Alexander von Warsberg to exhibit all the usual signs of infatuation. “She is enchantingly cordial. Cannot resist the woman. … I care only about her, the woman,” his diary records in 1888.
²⁵

Wherever Elisabeth appeared in those parts that had not yet seen
tourists,
she caused a sensation: a tall, excessively thin, foreign woman dressed in dark colors, striding manfully along even the worst paths, behind her the always ailing scholar Warsberg and the panting, stout Countess
Festetics.
According to Warsberg, people called her “the railroad train”
²⁶
—and it was meant absolutely as an expression of profound respect, for this new nineteenth-century invention was just being introduced to Greece and was admired for its unbelievable speeds.

Time and again, Elisabeth’s companions caused problems, as when the party climbed Sappho’s Cliff. Warsberg had planned everything so
beautifully.
Twenty years earlier, he had climbed the rock and visited a hermit who lived at the top in a ramshackle hut. Since Warsberg’s visit, the hermit had not seen another stranger. “And now the second visitor was—the Empress of Austria!” Warsberg wrote proudly. “I invited the monk, whose hair had turned snow-white and who had grown a long beard, once again, as on a previous occasion, to lead the way to the site of the temple of Apollo and the spot where Sappho had made her leap. At the time, I thought it the most beautiful sight in the world, I never had a happier day.” Because the rock is also interesting from the point of view of navigation, the Empress allowed several naval cadets from the yacht
Miramar
to come along. Warsberg: “Now this pack of young people chattered so much, and about matters so unsuitable to the location, that any kind of poetic
atmosphere
was destroyed. While we stood on Sappho’s Cliff, the Empress whispered to me that she felt as if she were in a railroad-station restaurant.” Warsberg “had long ago grown quite melancholy and silent, because I saw that I would be robbed of the pleasure of being able to lead the Empress around in a mood of sacred solemnity.”
²⁷

Nor is there much mention of a mood in Countess Festetics’s report. “By the time we got to the top after three hours, it had turned very cloudy, and then it poured, the path was slippery and hard, we therefore inspected only the spot from which she [Sappho] jumped. On the climb up, we saw nothing, since we were running as if we were in Gödöllö, and we had to watch out so as not to break our arms and legs.”
²⁸
There are dozens of such letters.

Elisabeth tirelessly followed the traces of her Greek heroes. From Ithaca, she sent her daughter Valerie cyclamens with a note to say that in the morning she had been at the spot “where Odysseus landed, and there I picked the two cyclamens for you. Just as on Corfu, here too there are flowers everywhere. I read Warsberg’s Ithaca on the way, I converse a great deal with him, it is a real grand tour.”
²⁹

Emperor Franz Joseph nevertheless could not “imagine what you find to do for so many days in Ithaca,” and, “I am glad that you like Ithaca so infinitely much. That it is nerve-calming and quiet I can well believe, but that it is supposed to be more beautiful than Hallstatt seems impossible to me, especially given the sparse southern vegetation.”

Almost gleefully, Franz Joseph returned to the subject of Hallstatt in his next letter. He could reconcile himself neither to Ithaca nor to Odysseus. “I was right after all that Ithaca cannot compare to Hallstatt, for the Hereditary Prince of Meiningen, who has traveled all through Greece and has admired Greece for a long time, assures me that the island is completely bare and is anything but beautiful.”
³⁰

In 1888, the Empress announced to her husband that she “was
considering
” Greece “a home for the future.” She made long sea voyages in the Aegean, even had an anchor tattooed on her shoulder—an act the Emperor called “a dreadful surprise.”
³¹
Elisabeth intended the gesture to prove her undying love for the sea.

*

We do not know what the Empress thought of modern literature. We only know about her close ties to such contemporary Hungarian writers as Moriz Jókai and Josef Eötvös. Nothing is known of an equal interest in contemporary German-speaking writers—with one exception: Carmen Sylva. This poet’s outpourings, however, are literature only in the most qualified sense.

Carmen Sylva (as previously mentioned) was the pen name of Queen Elisabeth of Romania, the wife of Carol I, born Princess zu Wied, six years younger than Elisabeth. During the 1880s, she had a great success with her plays in French, her poems in German, and her fairy tales, novels, and lay sermons in Romanian. All shared a sentimental, feverish style. Carmen Sylva became Elisabeth’s ideal. With her “poet friend,” Elisabeth, usually so shy, thawed and left no doubt that she preferred her above all other royalty. Sixteen-year-old Marie Valerie shared Sisi’s admiration. Writing about Carmen Sylva’s visit to Vienna in 1884, she noted, “And they call
her
a bluestocking, I thought to myself as I looked at the laughing large green eyes, the cheeks still colored with youthful freshness, the
snow-white,
conspicuously handsome teeth. O Carmen Sylva, if you can see into human hearts, you must know that ours were yours from that hour on—wholeheartedly yours.”

Valerie described Carmen Sylva’s appearance. “Her way of dressing was a little peculiar. Under the voluminous fur coat, the Queen wore a loose, almost dressing-gownlike garment of very dark red velvet adorned with
colorful embroidery and fastened around the waist with a ropelike silk cord. She wore a closed hat … and had a veil, on top of which she had placed her pince-nez.”
³²
The Romanian Queen was a figure of fun in Viennese society—an additional reason for Elisabeth to rally to her.

Many poems give evidence of Elisabeth’s veneration for Carmen Sylva, her “sister,” her “friend.” Because the Romanian Queen was often homesick for the Rhine, when Elisabeth visited Heidelberg in 1884, she wrote “Rheinlied” (Song of the Rhine) expressly for Carmen Sylva. (The same year, Sylva’s collection of poems,
Mein
Rhein
[My Rhine] was published.)

Several times, Elisabeth undertook the long journey to Romania to visit Carmen Sylva.