Sisi, page 12
Sisi listened in silence, the situation becoming clearer with each of Ludwig’s impassioned words.
“We would sit for hours at the piano, side by side, while she played and sang for me. She’s truly talented, your sister. And his music? His music puts me into such a state of divine intoxication. I think that was it. Sophie was playing it for me, and I became utterly intoxicated….I mistook the love aroused by him as love intended for her.”
Sisi nodded, crossing her arms before her breast. Eventually, she asked: “But why did you propose marriage, Ludwig?”
He turned away from her, leaning forward and pressing his brow into the glass of the window as he looked down at the cliff drop below. “Your mother saw the way I gravitated toward your sister. The way I visited and sought her out. And she saw how Sophie returned my affection. She pulled me aside one day and told me how Sophie felt. She guessed at my feelings, too, mistaking them for romantic love. She told me that it had gone on long enough. That Sophie could have any number of suitors and that it wasn’t fair for me to toy with her. That either we must get engaged, or I must cut all ties and allow her to find love elsewhere.”
Sisi’s head was spinning as she imagined her mother—her protective, practical, well-meaning mother—doing precisely what Ludwig now described.
“I realized then how far down that road I had allowed myself to travel, so enraptured was I by Sophie’s and my common passion. I felt genuine sympathy for Sophie, who I knew loved me. And I feared losing her. So…” Ludwig shrugged once, an irresolute gesture. “But…as with any intoxication…a feeling of disgust follows in the morning. Regret. And I do regret what I’ve done, what I must do, to poor Sophie-Charlotte.”
Sisi considered this, her mind racing to understand all the twists of this fruitless love story. She should have felt sadness, knowing the disappointment her sister would experience. As well as embarrassment for her family members, who would no doubt face a public scandal when King Ludwig jilted his bride. And yet, all that Sisi felt in that moment was an overwhelming sense of relief—both for Sophie-Charlotte and for Ludwig. Relief at knowing that they could avoid a loveless marriage that would have imprisoned them both, made them both so very unhappy.
Exhaling heavily, she said, “But it’s what’s best.” And it was; Sisi was sure of it. “My sister is a strong girl. She will recover from this.”
“You think so?” Ludwig asked, turning to Sisi with a pained look.
“Yes. This is what’s best for both of you.”
Ludwig nodded, his face slackening with relief. He sighed, lifting his hands and placing them over his heart. “And surely she must know, in her heart—well, I never pretended to care about her more than I care about him. She knows of the…friendship…I feel for him.”
“Does Wagner…Richard…share your feelings of…friendship?” Sisi asked.
“I think so,” Ludwig said, his voice suddenly faint. “At least, I certainly hope so. Sometimes it maddens me the way he avoids me. I build this place just for him; I take note of every detail, large and small, all with only one question in mind: will it please Richard? I have designed it to his exact desires, using his own words as my blueprint, hoping to draw him to me.”
Ludwig gestured jerkily now, waving his hands all around the room. When he spoke next, he sounded confused. “And yet, he always has some reason why he can’t come to me. He always reminds me of his wife…as if I don’t remember who she is!” Ludwig’s voice was sour with resentment now. He paused a moment, sighing as he turned back to the bust of the composer. He walked toward it, and Sisi followed.
Standing before Wagner’s likeness, Ludwig said, his voice quiet, “Sometimes I feel as if I only hear from him when he needs more money.”
This confession struck Sisi, and she put her hands on her cousin’s shoulder. “Then say no. If he ignores you, if he is ungrateful to you, don’t continue to spend your fortune on his writing and his productions.”
Ludwig shook his head, a sad smile of resignation spreading across his features.
“I mean it, Ludwig. Don’t hurry to fund a new opera or build him a new theater every time he asks you for one. It’s not fair of him to—”
But Ludwig held up a hand, pleading for her to be quiet. “It’s useless, Sisi. Don’t talk to me of that. I am powerless to say no to Richard.” He sighed again, crossing his arms, his tall frame drooping as he stared at the marble face. “I would give my palaces, my entire fortune, my very life, if it allowed him to keep creating such beauty. He tells me I am his guardian angel. I tell him that he is more than my guardian angel—he is my god.”
Sisi had no words with which to respond. After a long pause, Ludwig shifted on his feet and walked down the aisle between the marble heads. When he arrived before the statue of Marie Antoinette, he paused, lifting a finger to trace the outline of her elaborate hairline. “I’m building a replica of Versailles. Did you know that? At Linderhof.”
Sisi shook her head. She had heard that her cousin was millions in debt due to his lavish building projects and his patronage of Richard Wagner, but she had not heard that he was attempting to build a second Versailles. “Is it wise, Ludwig? Is it the right timing to undertake such a costly…”
“It will be a perfect imitation—only better,” Ludwig said, stroking Marie Antoinette’s stone cheek. “Isn’t she beautiful? Sometimes I think, if I could have had her, then perhaps I would have been happy to marry. Her…or you. But no one else will do. No other female could have enticed me to marry.”
Back at Possi, Sisi added her voice to the growing chorus of those who were urging Sophie-Charlotte to break off the engagement. Even the duchess came around to the inevitability of a severing of ties once she heard Sisi’s brief recounting of her visit to Neuschwanstein. Sisi didn’t elaborate too much, didn’t tell Sophie-Charlotte many of the specifics of her day spent with Ludwig. Perhaps she didn’t want to entirely admit to the others, or even to herself, how disturbing she’d found her time with her beloved cousin. Perhaps she felt some need to protect Ludwig, to allow him peace on his mountaintop, where he would not be a menace to anyone but himself. But she did remain resolute in her belief that Sophie-Charlotte should end the engagement.
“I can’t help but feel, Sophie-Charlotte, that it is for the best,” Sisi said that evening, safely ensconced back in her childhood home.
“But…surely you don’t mean—” the younger sister began, leaning forward to protest.
But Sisi continued: “I do mean it, my dear. Having visited Ludwig, and the place that you would call home, I now believe that you would find much more happiness elsewhere. Even that you have been saved, somehow, from a most undesirable fate.” Sisi repeated that phrase, and others like it, many times in the days following her visit to Neuschwanstein and her return to Possi.
And yet, her sister still clung to the hope that her fiancé would amend his ways. Sisi, Néné, and their mother took turns sitting beside the distraught girl, who had taken to her bed to weep for her absentee groom. Or perhaps it was the embarrassment more than the grief that drove Sophie-Charlotte to cling to the idea of Ludwig. But either way, the young bride seemed reluctant to give up on her dreams of happiness as Queen of Bavaria.
In the end, Sisi didn’t need to convince Sophie-Charlotte to end it, as Ludwig wrote a letter doing just that. The news arrived several days after Sisi’s visit to his castle. The letter was as overwrought and impassioned as Sisi would have expected, coming from him, but he had done the right thing.
Sisi remained at Possi for a few more days to comfort her sister; meanwhile, her heart flew to Budapest. She longed for the familiar and beloved countryside of Gödöllő. She longed for her horses and her freedom. But, even more, after the rigid months in Vienna and the draining days in Possenhofen and, especially, that bizarre and disheartening day she’d spent on Ludwig’s cliff top, Sisi longed for Andrássy. She longed for his strong presence and his steady words and the calm certainty and equilibrium that he always restored for her.
She told her mother that, rather than return straight to Vienna, she and Valerie would instead go on for a brief visit to Gödöllő. She hadn’t been there in far too long, and she wished to check on the stables and the household. Of course she longed for several weeks of strenuous riding, as well.
But Sisi’s plans were disrupted the next afternoon when she received word from Franz Joseph—an urgent request from the emperor that his wife return to court. The Archduchess Sophie was in poor health and getting worse. Rudolf and Gisela were beside themselves to see their matriarch suffering and so often confined to her bed. Franz couldn’t leave Vienna with his mother in this condition, but he missed his wife, and he begged the empress to return to her rightful place beside him and the children. Sisi’s heart seethed with a tangle of conflicting desires and emotions as she read Franz’s words. However, the postscript, as meaningless an afterthought as it must have been to Franz, flew off the page when Sisi read it.
Postscript: “I’ve appointed Count Andrássy as foreign minister of the crown and have asked him to relocate, for a time, to Vienna. He will be on hand at the palace to welcome you and provide your official greeting if I am indisposed at Mother’s bedside.”
Suddenly, Vienna didn’t seem like such a terrible place to be after all.
IV
Where I am not, there lies happiness.
—HEINRICH HEINE, SISI’S FAVORITE POET
CHAPTER 4
Schönbrunn Summer Palace, Vienna
Autumn 1871
But it was not Andrássy, as expected, who stood in the courtyard to greet Sisi. It was Franz Joseph and the two older children.
The court remained at the summer palace just outside of the city for the last few pleasant days. Though Sisi preferred this palace, with its cheery, lemon-yellow walls and its sprawling, flower-strewn gardens, the mood she felt from her family members was far from warm. “Hello, Elisabeth,” Franz said, nodding to her before offering a perfunctory kiss on the cheek.
“Hello, Franz. How is your mother?”
“She is a strong woman,” was all he offered by way of reply, and Sisi sensed that he was choking back further emotion—perhaps even tears.
“Rudy, darling.” Sisi turned from her husband and leaned toward her son, taking in his serious face, his soft features crinkled in too-heavy worry for such a young boy.
“Mother.” Rudy glanced sideways at his sister as if for reassurance. Then, turning back to Sisi, he added: “Welcome back. I trust that your travels were smooth?”
Sisi leaned back, so caught off guard was she by the stiffness, the formality of Rudy’s reception. As if all the progress between them had gone cold during her time away. Perhaps he had not forgiven her for her sudden departure, her decision to take only Valerie with her. She straightened, turning now to Gisela. “Hello, my dear.”
“Mother.” Gisela’s response was even chillier. The girl fixed her eyes—the same pale blue eyes as her father’s, rimmed in red from tears over Sophie—on some distant point across the yard but offered no other greeting. Not entirely surprising, such brusqueness, but still, it saddened Sisi.
“Well, I am sorry that I’ve been away. I am eager to pay my respects to your mother,” Sisi said, turning back to Franz where he stood, stiff and upright in his military uniform.
“She sleeps now. I think today has seen enough stimulation for her, what with all of the physicians and nurses surrounding her. Perhaps tomorrow will be better.”
“As you wish,” Sisi agreed.
“Right, then,” Franz said, nodding. “I shall take the children back to her room now. We will tell her that you will visit her bedside tomorrow.” Franz made a small bow toward Sisi. “I’ve ordered a family dinner this evening in your honor. Mother won’t be able to join, of course, but she knows that you are expected home, and she will be glad to see us off to a family meal. I will see you then.”
And with that, the emperor turned, his children following devotedly behind him as he marched back toward the palace. Back toward the ailing woman whose loss they would all feel so much more deeply than her own. Sisi stood still in the courtyard, watching them recede, wondering why he had called her home.
Though word of the Archduchess Sophie’s miraculous improvement spread throughout court, lifting the nobles’ spirits and prompting prayers of thanksgiving, these celebrations were soon cut short. More troubling news followed shortly after, this time from beyond the palace walls, where the dark storm clouds of war had gathered to the west.
It was a damp, chilly evening in late autumn, several weeks after the court’s relocation to the Hofburg for the winter. Sisi sat at dinner, having been summoned to a gathering that there’d been no opportunity to decline. While the court musicians stood in the far corner of the room, filling the space with their lilting waltz melodies, and while the table setting was as lavish and splendid as ever, with piles of sweetmeats and glistening platters of gilded bronze, the mood of the assembly was noticeably dour.
She looked across the table, waiting, like everyone else, for the emperor to speak. Between every few bites of food, Franz would pause to wipe at his mouth, or take a quick, tight-lipped sip of wine, before cutting back into his dinner. Without his initiation, no one else might utter the anxious words or voice the uneasy questions that rippled through their minds.
At last, Franz glanced out over the small group, his eyes noncommittal as he scanned two columns of concerned faces. “But for the grace of God…” Though he did not finish his sentence, Sisi and everyone else at the table knew precisely what he meant.
But for the grace of God, it would have been them suffering, in Vienna, as opposed to the Parisians. It could have been the Habsburgs besieged and dethroned by Otto von Bismarck’s Prussians as opposed to Napoleon III and Eugénie. It could have been the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire as opposed to the fall of the French Empire.
It had been them only five years earlier, embarrassed and defeated by Prussian military might and Bismarck’s cunning. And yet it was staggering now to read the headlines and hear the reports. To see how, in only a handful of years, Bismarck’s forces had grown even stronger, making easy work of the legendary French army—believed just months earlier to be the strongest fighters in Europe and the world. And yet, now all the world could read how Prussian men and field guns had mowed down entire French divisions, capturing Emperor Napoleon in battle and swiping huge swaths of French land for themselves.
But it was the news that traveled to Vienna from Paris—more so than the news from the battlefields—that made Sisi shudder: tales of daytime murder and looting of the shops, accounts of Empress Eugénie being chased through the streets of the capital by the blood-lusting Prussians. How the French citizenry, surrounded and defenseless, had suffered during the long siege, forced to fend off the freezing weather by burning their furniture and combat starvation by eating rats and dogs in their city that prided itself on its unrivaled culinary tradition.
“This spells a very dark future,” Franz said aloud to no one in particular, before wiping at his gnarled beard with his napkin.
A very dark future, perhaps, and a grim present. Sisi looked around the table now at the muted and stunned faces gathered for their decadent Austrian dinner. No one in any of Europe’s ruling classes, the Habsburgs very much included, quite understood what had just happened. How Bismarck had so quickly and decisively handed the French defeat and, in doing so, established the new and formidable German Empire. How he had so swiftly wiped out the French Empire, knocked Austria from its place as the leading German entity, and upset the entire balance of power—not only in Europe, but in the world.
Franz Joseph stabbed absentmindedly at his dinner plate, his hands finding their way every few minutes to his graying whiskers. Unless he spoke, no one else could, so a tense silence hovered around them.
Rudolf shifted in the chair next to his father, uncomfortable with his new status at the adults’ table, his eyes darting between his father, his grandmother, and his elder sister for cues as to how to cut his fish or wipe his still-unwhiskered mouth. Gisela sat quietly and dutifully, eyes angling downward, though Sisi suspected the girl’s thoughts were elsewhere, with her suitor. Prince Leopold, a distant relative in Bavaria, had recently made his intentions for marriage clear to the very distracted Franz Joseph.
Farther down the table, Andrássy sat grim faced and silent, his dark eyes ragged with fatigue. He most likely longed for Hungary, Sisi guessed. How could he not regret his decision to come to this capital? How could he not miss the freedom of Budapest compared to the solemn, worry-stricken Viennese Court? International politics and the demands of Franz’s role for him had consumed Andrássy since his move here. And yet, Sisi was relieved beyond explanation to have him at the Hofburg, even if they had barely had a moment together or a meaningful word spoken between them.
But Sophie, the archduchess, was the one who took news of the new German Empire the hardest. Sophie, who had rallied to come to this dinner with her son and the family, looked as if she now yearned for her bed. For Sophie, the triumph of the hated Prussians—first over her own son five years earlier and now over France—was perhaps the harshest blow in a string of devastating losses. All around her, her enemies and rivals seemed to be ascending. Sophie had been stunned when her son had been so quickly defeated by Bismarck, in a war that she herself had advocated. Then she had publicly decried the Austro-Hungarian Compromise and establishment of the dual monarchy, a move she considered far too liberal and weak, and that was engineered, no less, by her daughter-in-law and the former revolutionary Count Julius Andrássy. Then she had watched, overridden, as Franz had granted Sisi the reins of Rudy’s education.
