Sisi, page 34
Ludwig nodded, running a hand through his unkempt, graying hair, once a chestnut hue as vibrant as her own. Could he tell that she was lying? “As you wish, Sisi.”
They stood in the front hall, and it was there that Sisi was struck anew by the sheer size of the place—and just how much bigger it must have felt for Ludwig, alone in it each night. Ludwig offered Sisi and Valerie refreshments, and then Sisi suggested a walk. As they trod the gardens that encircled the castle, Ludwig answered Sisi’s questions about the premiere of the Ring Cycle. He explained how Richard had been a smashing success in Bayreuth. How Ludwig had insisted that Richard hold special, private performances just for him so that he might watch and enjoy the operas in peace, shielded from the prying eyes of the crowds that otherwise gawked at him and made him feel as if he were the “spectacle, rather than spectator.”
Sisi told Ludwig about Rudolf’s bouts of ill health; about the new baby, Elisabeth; about her stay in Zandvoort. “I think you’d love it there, Ludwig. I really do. It’s so rugged and untamed.”
Ludwig looked ahead of them, then back toward the walls of his castle, then toward Sisi, his eyes listless. As if he were waiting for company to appear from any direction at any moment. The longer they walked, the more restless he seemed to grow beside Sisi.
“Do you think you’d ever want to take a visit there? To Zandvoort? Or perhaps to come and visit me in Hungary?” Sisi asked, trying to settle his spirits.
Ludwig shook his head. “I have no desire to leave my palace.”
“I can’t entirely blame you for that,” Sisi conceded. “It is indescribably lovely here, after all.”
“It’s even more that I fear the rest of the world. The nasty, brutish, terrifying world out there.”
Sisi let the comment go unanswered.
After several moments, Ludwig asked: “What did you do there? In Zandvoort.”
Sisi looked out over Ludwig’s view, glancing down the surrounding cliffs to a vista of fields and the lake and distant white-tipped summits. “Well, it’s a landscape entirely unlike this one. We were on the North Sea. I’d walk along the beach every single day. I’d see the doctor. I’d get seawater massages. I’d read; I’d write. In fact”—she riffled through her pocket, retrieving a paper now—“I wrote this for you.”
Ludwig took it, and sliding a pair of spectacles onto his nose, he read aloud:
“To the eagle of the mountains, dwelling amidst eternal snows,
Sends the sea gull fervent greetings from the watery waste below.”
Ludwig read it twice before letting out a peal of giddy laughter, his mood somehow shifting to entirely buoyant in a matter of seconds. “I love it!” He laughed once more, a tight, high-pitched cackle sputtering out, echoing off the mountains that hemmed them in. “The eagle—that’s me! From the sea gull! You!”
Sisi continued to walk beside him, edging her body just the slightest bit away. She didn’t know what unnerved her more—the glimpses of his deep gloominess or his sudden, unexpected bouts of hysterical laughter. She continued in a measured tone: “I’d watch the sea gulls for hours. I’d never seen so many birds. I found myself, at times, envying them. Such freedom, that each gull might take wing and pursue her next adventure across the sea with nothing—no one—to hold her back.”
She hoped he’d understand, from her telling him this, that he wasn’t the only one who suffered from loneliness. The only one to wrestle against waves of despair, what Heine called Weltschmerz, “world-weariness.” That she, too, understood melancholy. But Ludwig didn’t seem to gather her meaning, because when he looked at her now, his eyes were restless and giddy, and he clapped his hands. “Speaking of the sea…” Ludwig paused his steps, looking out over the cliff at the lake below them, its basin carved by the ancient glaciers into the edge of his mountain. “How about a boat ride before you go?”
Sisi glanced over her shoulder to where Valerie trailed just a few steps behind with Marie Festetics and Ida and Baron Nopcsa. She turned back to her cousin. “If you think we can all fit?”
They descended the hill in Ludwig’s coach and stepped into his private boat. It was a calm, windless late-summer day, and the waters were eerily placid, like a sheet of glass nestled in between the stark, pine-dotted Alpine cliffs. The boat cut across the still surface of the lake as Ludwig rowed them toward the distant side.
As he rowed, Ludwig hummed to himself. A doleful, romantic melody—something from Wagner, Sisi presumed. Valerie chattered with Marie Festetics and Ida as the ladies pointed out the different marvels in the breathtaking scenery. Staring at her cousin, Sisi felt her discomfort thickening in her belly; she simply longed for this boating excursion to be over so that she might bid farewell to Ludwig and be gone from this place.
Ludwig looked at her now, holding Sisi in his amber-eyed gaze, his features seeming to pulse with intensity as he continued to hum the song. Sisi shifted on the wooden seat. “What is that you hum, Ludwig?”
“It’s Richard’s.”
Sisi nodded.
“Richard…” Ludwig continued, still staring squarely at Sisi, “he’s not well.”
Neither are you, Ludwig.
“We don’t have much time,” Ludwig said.
Sisi swallowed, crossing and then uncrossing her hands in her lap. When she spoke, she forced herself to keep her tone measured. “Time for what?”
Still rowing, Ludwig smiled at Sisi. A feverish, trembling smile. “Why, for our divine work, of course.”
“Your music?”
Ludwig nodded.
“There’s more?”
Again, Ludwig nodded. “It’s Richard. Of course there is more; there is always more. It never ends. And the world needs it.”
“But, Ludwig…I thought that…I heard that your coffers had run dry. You’ve been a most generous patron, but perhaps you ought to take a brief respite from funding these works so that your ministers—”
Ludwig raised a large, long-fingered hand, cutting her short. “No, Sisi.” He shook his head, a fitful, jumpy gesture that set his graying locks aflutter. “Come now, don’t tell me that you’ve joined their side?”
“I’m on no one’s side who would be against you, Ludwig. You know that. I only wish for you to be…”
“Don’t join them, don’t join them. You must understand. You know the divine, Sisi; you know what I must accomplish. I have important work to do, and I can’t be forever waiting on them.”
Them meant his ministers, the men who ran the government in Munich, Sisi deduced. The men who collected taxes and paid for the kingdom, the men who had cut their King Ludwig off from the Bavarian treasury, putting an end to his boundless spending until his government could become solvent once more.
When Ludwig spoke next, his voice had an eerie calm to it, a wiry softness that had the effect of rendering Sisi even more uncomfortable than his loud, effervescent manner of a moment earlier. “Richard and I are running out of time.”
Sisi heard these words, offering no reply. She looked from her cousin up toward Neuschwanstein, where the castle soared atop the cliff like a stone swan poised to take flight. It really was breathtaking. Ludwig had achieved perfection. The Ring Cycle was being heralded as the most perfect operatic masterpiece ever written. His castles were the most impressive dwellings any ruler had ever built. Ludwig’s works would inspire imaginations and stir hearts for centuries to come, Sisi was sure of it. And yet, he wanted to continue to build and spend and create, even though he was bankrupt, even though his ambitions were driving him to the brink of madness. But was there any way to speak reason to a mind and heart such as his? A mind that imagined and a heart that dreamed the way his did? Sisi turned back to her cousin, laboring to keep her tone even. “What more do you feel you must accomplish, Ludwig?”
“What more?” He repeated the question as he would an accusation, his eyes ablaze. “Why, everything.”
“But you have paid for the finest castles and operas of your time. And now you are out of money, my dear cousin.”
“I only need ten million more.”
“Ten million?” Sisi gasped, finally unable to hide her shock. She knew, from Baron Nopcsa’s briefings and Franz’s audible disapproval, that her cousin was already at least ten million marks in debt. And yet he wanted ten million more?
Ludwig continued, undaunted: “But they tell me I can’t have it. How am I to sit idle and listen to them? If I had listened to them, I’d never have built this.” He gestured toward the castle on the hill. “I’d never have given Richard the freedom to…” He choked on these last words, dropping the oars into the water, disrupting the placid calm of the surface. Sisi turned to Valerie, trying to assure her with a comforting look. Marie Festetics reached over the side of the rowboat and retrieved the oars as Sisi let Ludwig weep. Eventually, when he looked back up, his eyes glazed with moisture, he said, “I won’t let anyone get in our way. I can’t. Not now. I’ll just have to dismiss them.”
Sisi followed his logic, incredulous. “Dismiss your ministers? Your entire government?”
Ludwig waved a hand, shrugging, as if to say it could be easily done. “I have men here who can serve better than they can. Why, my stable boys and hairdressers would be better equipped. They understand my sacred mission.”
Sisi leaned forward and pressed her hands onto his. “Oh, Ludwig, my dear one.” She loved his romance; she admired his dreaming, his longing to create beauty. And yet, those same passions that drove him to conceive of such splendor would now be his undoing, rendering him entirely unable to function in this world. She feared for him.
But her disquiet ran even deeper than that, and she could not delude herself about that fact. In her cousin, Sisi caught a terrifying glimpse of what she herself could potentially become, if time dealt with her as cruelly as it had so many other members of her family. Hadn’t she always been the one most able to understand Ludwig? Hadn’t her own papa, Duke Max, similar to his favorite daughter in so many ways, fought against this same shiftless mania in his life? Sisi knew that the seeds of this madness lurked latent in her own core, too, threatening to sprout like a petrifying, strangling weed.
And with that thought, she offered up a silent prayer to God that she’d never find herself as lost as her cousin. She looked to her daughter—at reasonable, steady Valerie—and couldn’t help but smile. Thank God her daughter was so much like the father she resembled, Sisi thought, for the first time in her life. And now she, like her daughter, suddenly longed to return home to Franz Joseph.
XIII
At first I was almost for giving in;
I thought I never could bear it. Yet, in spite of all, I’ve borne it—
Only ask me not how.
—HEINRICH HEINE QUOTATION, KEPT ON SISI’S DESK
CHAPTER 13
Moravia, Austria-Hungary
Summer 1885
“Let’s see now. You’ve charmed the emperor of Austria-Hungary, clearly. We know he’s the most doting husband in Europe. And you’re well on the way to warming my cold Russian blood. But how shall Germany’s impenetrable Chancellor Bismarck hold up against your famous charms, Empress Elisabeth?” With that, Tsar Alexander erupted in deep-bellied laughter at his own joke, his gaze swinging from Sisi to Franz before he helped himself to another long, hearty glug of wine.
Sisi and Franz sat opposite Russia’s tsar and tsarina in the garden at Kremiser’s summer palace, in their northern region of Moravia. It was a sultry evening in late summer, and the fountains gurgled as all around them birds filled the garden with song, hopping between the trees and flower beds. The small royal dinner party sat in the soft indigo twilight; once dark descended, a pair of actresses would arrive from Vienna for an outdoor performance. It might not have been an entirely unpleasant evening, Sisi thought, if not for the awkward and tiresome company.
Joining the Russian and Austro-Hungarian rulers was the third prong of the new alliance, Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, representing Germany’s interests in the place of his ailing kaiser. Sisi had to marvel at this group, as unlikely as it was uncomfortable. An alliance that, years earlier, she would never have imagined possible. But with Andrássy and his liberal administration gone from Vienna, Franz’s new ministers had pressed on him the necessity of Austria-Hungary realigning itself with its onetime friend Russia, while also maintaining its close ties with Germany. With a powerful ally on both its eastern and western borders, Austria-Hungary could be assured of its safety—no one would dream of starting a war with a member of such a trio. Franz had agreed. And so, now, the three leaders sat together, toasting the so-called Kaiserbund, the League of the Three Emperors, gathered on this summer evening to solidify the bonds between them and set their foreign policy agendas together.
As the men chatted about England and France and the far-flung nation of America, Sisi studied her companions, eager for night to fall so that the show might begin and the tsar might cease his bawdy winking in her direction. Russia’s ruler had grown impossibly jowly, his face swollen under a thinning patch of strawberry-colored hair. A full beard of the same shade colored his bulbous cheeks, its whiskers moist where it had dipped into his wine cup, already refilled too many times this evening. Beside him sat the Tsarina Maria, who appeared her husband’s opposite in nearly every way. Maria had a long face, a shock of black hair pulled tight atop her head, and matching black eyes. She, like Bismarck, didn’t smile, nor did she speak.
Having inherited his throne following his father’s assassination, Alexander was known for his paranoia, and he had traveled to Moravia with an abundance of imperial Russian guards. Those stern-faced men now filled the garden, interspersed throughout the lush space, standing alert beside the plump marble figures of the grounds’ baroque statues. Their watchful eyes seemed to indicate that Russia’s imperial guards feared a new attempt at an assassination at any moment. That, too, was why the Kaiserbund had chosen such a remote and unvisited corner of the Austro-Hungarian Empire for this meeting; Vienna, Berlin, or St. Petersburg would pose far too many security risks.
Like his guards, Alexander wore the Russian military uniform, a heavy jacket of dark blue and gold, his massive barrel of a chest bedecked with ribbons and medals. Hereditary awards, Sisi presumed, earned at birth in St. Petersburg’s imperial nursery, rather than in battle.
Beside the tsar sat Chancellor Bismarck. This formidable minister, once Franz Joseph’s sworn enemy, now sat quietly. His stern eyes darted back and forth between Franz and Alexander, as if to size them up even though they were now, allegedly, his friends. Though the hair had receded from around his forehead and temples, a plentiful mustache overhung Bismarck’s unsmiling lips. He wore the Prussian military uniform—the gray blue of his jacket drawing out the pale color of his hard, observant gaze. But where he seemed stingy with his words, his Russian friend proved the opposite. “You know what the German kaiser once confided in me, Empress Elisabeth?” Tsar Alexander continued, his voice growing louder and merrier with each cup of wine.
“If it was said in confidence, Your Majesty, perhaps it would be better off not repeated,” Sisi answered, trying to conceal her ennui.
Alexander waved a hand, its fleshy bulk more like that of a bear’s paw. “He told me that he couldn’t look at you for too long, Empress Elisabeth. He said…it inflames his soul too much.” With that, Alexander roared out a fresh volley of laughter. Bismarck lowered his eyes, his lips tightening beneath his mustache.
Sisi could sense Franz’s disapproval, could practically feel his frame going more rigid beside her with each passing moment. He was all for being a gracious host, but the tsar’s flirtatiousness was taxing even Franz’s limitless patience. Sisi leaned forward, her voice quiet as she answered Alexander: “What need have I, Your Imperial Majesty, for Russian or German admiration, when I have the one heart that sets my own to waltzing?” With that, she threw a tender glance toward Franz, who nodded his reply. She hoped that this might finally be enough to put Alexander off.
It was all a charade, but only Franz and Sisi knew it. In truth, they had grown tired of each other’s company this summer, almost as tired as Sisi now felt of this dreadful summit with these foreign leaders. Franz, as much as he professed to long for his wife during her absences, quickly grew irritated and confounded by Sisi after any prolonged amount of time in her presence. He didn’t understand her restlessness, her need to take off into nature for hours-long walks. Her desire to spend her evenings alone, reading Heine’s depressing poetry or speaking with Marie Festetics and Ida rather than attending state dinners with him.
While he found her overly emotional and perplexing, she found life with him dull and painfully hard-edged. He accused her of daydreaming and evading reality; she didn’t understand how he lived with so little curiosity or imagination. How he could stand it when all he ever did was pore over his papers, discuss government business with his ministers, and attend formal, tedious state dinners in which he never actually spoke to anyone on any topics of interest or substance.
They’d spent the recent weeks of late summer unhappily together in Bad Ischl. Sisi had longed to take off for Hungary or on some other enriching pilgrimage, but Valerie, inexplicably, had taken her father’s side. She really had grown quite stubborn, Sisi noted, as the girl had refused to travel with Sisi, suggesting instead that the family should pass a summer as one for the first time in years.
Much good that had done. Now, at the end of the summer, Sisi sat at this meeting, bored to tears and sensing Franz’s relief that the season was nearly over. That he would soon be allowed to return to Vienna. Back at the Hofburg, they both knew, he could throw himself even more fully into his papers and meetings and his imperial duties, and the two of them might easily go days without seeing each other and arguing.
