Sisi, page 43
Sisi laughed, thinking of it. Her rheumatism had made riding impossible so many years ago, even after the loss of Bay had made it a less desirable pastime. Nevertheless, to remember her former skill and agility, to compare her stories with those of Eugénie—it provided a momentary respite from her otherwise gloomy thoughts. Before long, Sisi came to look forward to her daily walks with the deposed empress, finding in her a most pleasant and agreeable companion.
But even these simple pleasures were not to last, for grief always haunted Sisi, following her across the globe with the relentlessness of a shadow. This time, heartache came to her in the form of a telegram from Paris. In it, Sisi read the news that her youngest sister, the beautiful Sophie-Charlotte, the girl who would have been Ludwig’s bride, had died in a calamitous fire in Paris.
The following summer found Sisi returning to Bad Ischl. It was to be a two-week stay for the imperial family, a reunion for Franz and Sisi before they were to return to the capital for the busy state celebrations of the upcoming golden jubilee. That autumn Franz would mark his fiftieth year on the throne. Fifty years of relative peace, prosperity, order, and progress—no small feat for a man whose fellow emperors had been toppled and replaced all around him.
Valerie arrived at Bad Ischl with Salvator and her brood of wild, lively children. Sisi delighted at being in her daughter’s company once more, and the two of them often set off together for long walks into the fields and mountains, exploring nature as they had during so many summers before. One afternoon, as they paused atop a summit to take a rest, Valerie turned to her mother. “Are you happy to be here, in Bad Ischl, Mamma?”
Sisi smiled at her girl, taking Valerie’s hand in her own. “Of course I am, my dear. I’m always happy to be wherever you are.”
But Valerie’s face remained serious, her features drawn tight in thought.
Sisi asked: “And you, my dear, are you happy to be here?”
Valerie remained quiet for a moment, weighing her words deliberately before she answered. “Of course I’m happy to see you and Papa. It’s simply that…”
“Yes? What is it?”
“I had forgotten…how unnatural it all is,” Valerie confessed. “How constrained everything must be. Life with Salvator is so sweet. And comfortable. Here, any chance for spontaneous pleasure is stamped out by our fossilized and suffocating protocol.”
Sisi turned from her daughter and looked out over the view, surprised at Valerie’s observation. If anything, Bad Ischl was where the imperial family was relaxed, where Franz allowed a slight reprieve from all of the protocol. And yet Valerie was finding this brief stay with her parents to be overwrought with procedures and rules? Sisi managed a faint, knowing smile. “Perhaps now you understand, Valerie, why I struggled as I did. Why I sought my chances to get away.”
Valerie nodded. After a pause she asked: “Was it Grandmamma Sophie who instituted all of this? Prevented Papa from ever knowing simple, unforced intimacies?”
Sisi crossed her arms, considering the question. Of course the answer was yes. Sophie had instilled these rigid procedures in the court—rules to which her son still hewed, ever the obedient and faithful child. And yet, Sophie hadn’t done it out of cruelty. She’d done it because it had been what she had thought best. What was proper and respectable. What was expected of the Habsburg family. Sisi sighed, simply saying, “I am glad that you are happy, Valerie. That’s all that matters now, that you married for love.”
“I am happy, Mamma.”
“Then I succeeded as a mother.” Her daughter was happy. And for those two weeks, she, Sisi, would force herself to feel happy as well.
This lasted until the following morning, when she awoke in her bed to a gnawing sensation crawling over her skin. Sisi peeled back the covers, looked down, and gasped in horror when she saw the terrible rash that streaked her body. She screamed and Irma came running into the bedchamber. “Your Majesty? What is it?”
“Fetch the doctor, Irma, at once!”
Dr. Widerhofer arrived and examined Sisi’s splotchy red skin. He was confused by the condition and by its sudden appearance, but he declared that the empress was too ill to travel to the capital and participate in Franz’s golden jubilee. Instead, she would need to travel to the western German spa town of Bad Nauheim for an intensive cure.
“But…I can’t go to Bad Nauheim,” Sisi protested. “I’m to go with the emperor back to Vienna.”
“I’m afraid that is impossible, Madame,” the doctor replied, unwavering. “This rash will only grow worse the longer Your Majesty neglects it. And the only place I know of where the physicians might be up to the task of treating Your Majesty is that facility.”
“Will it…will it spread?” Sisi asked, shuddering.
“It will if Your Majesty does not treat it. And it may even spread to others, as well.”
Sisi despaired at this doubly disappointing diagnosis—both for the news of her serious illness and her inability to join Franz for his jubilee. Unlike all the times she had pleaded or exaggerated sickness to get out of her official duties, this time she truly longed to participate, to be with Franz. To celebrate her husband and his admirable life as a servant to his people. Instead, she would send him back to the capital alone. Franz took the news with his usual stoicism, insisting that Sisi should do whatever she must in order to heal, while Sisi wept.
Sisi lay motionless in bed that night, detecting a soft gurgling sound, like the trickle of water. Surely she was dreaming, because she was indoors, in her bedroom in Bad Ischl, where no brook could reach her. And yet, water seeped in through the crack under her bedroom door. The stream of water picked up until it was no longer a trickle but a flood, pouring in through the sides of her door and her windows. Did she dream? Sisi sat up, horrified, as she stared out the windows, glimpsing the moon shining in through the water. But this was no ordinary moon: it shone as bright as the midday sun, and the room was suddenly bathed in a cool, otherworldly glow.
“Irma!” Sisi called out, terrified. The flow of water had stopped, but the door opened slowly, creaking and groaning as it did, sloshing the water about on the parquet floor. Irma would have rushed in, would have come running at the sound of her mistress’s terror. But this wasn’t Irma who stood before her in the blinding moonlight. “Ludwig?” Sisi said the name with a mixture of shock and incredulity. “Ludwig? It can’t be you. Can it?”
Ludwig stood unresponsive, his entire figure soaking wet, his clothing and hair heavy with moisture.
“Ludwig! Why are you so wet?”
Now he spoke, his voice calm. “I’ve come from the lake.”
She felt her skin crawling with goosebumps. Surely she was dreaming—but how come she couldn’t force herself to wake, as she always did during her other nightmares? “The lake? But…you’re dead.”
Ludwig stared directly at her, his light eyes illuminated by the sunlike moon. “Dead, but not yet free.”
She dreamed—surely she dreamed. “Not free?” Sisi repeated. “Why not free?”
“Because…my fate is tied to two others. One was the woman who burned. I know that she loved me, and so I waited for her to join me.”
“The woman who burned.” Sisi felt how her heart raced, as if trying to hurl itself from her breast. “Sophie-Charlotte, my sister. Burned in the fire in Paris.”
Ludwig nodded.
“And…the other?”
“The other is you, Sisi.”
She shivered under the bedcovers, saying nothing.
“As soon as you join us,” Ludwig continued, still standing in the doorway, “the three of us shall be free, and we will be together.”
“Join you?”
“Yes.” He nodded, his damp hair matted to his handsome, youthful face.
“Join you…where?”
“In paradise.” With that, Ludwig turned, stepping back through the door. If he wasn’t real, if he wasn’t really here, why did his boots thump on the floor, disrupting the puddles of water? Before leaving, Ludwig paused, turning back to Sisi as he hovered at the threshold. “It won’t be much longer now.”
Franz appeared as if he might weep, but he clung to his seasoned and well-trained fortitude as he said goodbye to his wife on the Bad Ischl train platform. “Farewell, my darling Sisi. You be safe, and take care of yourself.”
Sisi clung to Franz, wanting to tell him about her dream of Ludwig. About Ludwig’s strange and terrifying prophecy. But Franz would never care to hear such a foolish ghost story. Franz, sensible, unflappable Franz, was the furthest a person could be from superstitious. He would laugh it off, telling her it was just her overactive imagination. He might even make her feel better for a brief moment, might convince her that Ludwig’s visit to her dreams did in fact mean nothing. But she didn’t want that assurance from Franz, because for some reason she couldn’t explain, Sisi felt more inclined to believe Ludwig’s midnight predictions than Franz’s reasonable daylight skepticism.
“Telegram when you arrive safely, to let me know you’re settled, will you?” Franz said.
Sisi nodded. “Yes, I will.”
“And please, do whatever is asked of you by the doctors. Yes?”
She smiled, sensing the depth of his concern in these gentle but urgent requests. “I am terribly sorry that I won’t be with you in Vienna for the jubilee.”
He shrugged. “It matters little, in comparison to your health.”
She stared him squarely in the eyes. “Franz, you are a good emperor.”
He fidgeted, as if uncomfortable with the compliment. “Why, thank you. And you are a good empress.”
She shook her head. “No, not as good as I should have been. Not like you. You are a good emperor, and a good man, and a good father, and a good and patient husband. I…I thank you.”
He bowed his head a moment, overcome. All around them, the porters hustled about, loading her trunks and nodding at Irma’s orders for readying the train carriage. The conductor blew a whistle as the train’s engines rumbled in anticipation of the coming journey.
But amid all of that, the two of them stood motionless, indifferent to the activity around them, their eyes locked on each other before their imminent separation. Eventually, after a long silence, Franz lifted his hand and pressed it tenderly to her forehead, as if he were giving a blessing. And then, his voice soft, he said, “May God keep you, my darling Sisi.”
The city came into sharper view as the steamer glided across the calm, crystalline waters of Lake Geneva. All around them, the Swiss countryside was in the throes of glorious autumn—the hills laced with gold and amber and copper, a dusting of snow covering the jagged peaks of the nearby Alps.
Sisi couldn’t help but marvel at the view surrounding her, at the raw and untamed beauty of this lakeside city. She couldn’t believe that her husband and the others had written to her with such terrible things to say about Geneva: That it was a nest swarming with criminal and anarchist activity. That she was mad to travel there without her full household, refusing her attendants and an escort of police. As she looked at the view now—at the stony church steeples; at the famous and newly built Jet d’Eau, a fountain that spewed water impossibly high; at the orderly buildings tucked in between the lake and the mountains—Geneva appeared an idyllic location. Sisi was all the more glad now that she had disregarded their alarms and warnings and had kept her plans to visit; she and Irma would be perfectly safe here.
Irma had booked their rooms at the lakeside Hôtel Beau Rivage, under the alias of Countess Hohenembs. Sisi was traveling incognita and light, having brought with her only one lady-in-waiting and a few trunks. Much to Franz’s dismay and his ministers’ disapproval, she had refused even to alert the Swiss police of her visit to their city. If she did, they would insist on trailing her, and her alias would be compromised, the whole town alerted to her presence. She’d have no peace or privacy, which was exactly what she needed on this few days’ respite from her tedious health cure.
As the steamer brought them closer to the landing berth, Sisi looked out over the deck, blinking against the soft September sunlight. Nearby, a little boy bounced a ball, unaware of his imperial company and that he might have disrupted her with his noisy laughter and play. But Sisi didn’t mind his commotion, didn’t find that the racket he created caused one of her familiar headaches. She felt good today—cheerful and optimistic. She even smiled at the boy, thinking he must be about the same age as Valerie’s little Hubert.
She turned back to the letter in her hand, finishing off the last of Franz’s words. She found, as she read, that she missed her husband. She longed for him in a way that she hadn’t in…she couldn’t recall how long. Franz missed her, too, as was evident in his writing. He told her about how, recently, while outside the palace, he had looked up at the window to her bedroom and had felt a great stab of sadness, longing as he did for his wife’s return. He closed the letter now with a line of particular tenderness: I commend you to God, my beloved angel.
Sisi’s eyes stung as she read and reread her husband’s closing line. A tear slid down her cheek, landing on her smiling lips. She looked up from the letter, glancing out over the mountains, allowing the gentle autumn breeze to dry her tear. She turned to her lady-in-waiting, who sat beside her on the deck. “Irma?”
“Yes, Empress Elis—er, Countess Hohenembs?”
“I miss Franz.”
Irma nodded, perhaps unsure of how best to respond to such a declaration. Marie Festetics and Ida would have burst into unadulterated smiles, perhaps even clapping their hands—so long had they hoped to hear those words from Sisi. Marie would have turned the boat around right then and there to chart a direct course back to Vienna. But Sisi and Irma didn’t have that well-worn intimacy yet, that mutual understanding that came out of years of companionship and required only looks but not words.
“I must get well,” Sisi said, sighing. “I must get well, and quickly. I must return to Franz.”
Now Irma’s features creased into a gentle smile. “And you shall, Emp—Countess. You are stronger every day. You shall be home to the emperor in no time.”
Sisi nodded, standing from her seat as the ship touched softly against the landing dock. “Home.” Where was home? She didn’t know. All she knew was that, suddenly, she longed for her husband. “Yes, I shall be well in no time.”
—
That afternoon, once settled into their suite at the hotel, Sisi and Irma joined the Baroness Rothschild at her family’s château just outside of the city for luncheon. The beautiful autumn weather continued, and so did Sisi’s buoyant mood. The baroness was an old friend, and Sisi felt happy not only in her company but also in the picturesque surroundings.
The baroness served a delicious meal of chicken in a soft pastry shell with champagne. As dessert was served, a Hungarian ice cream, the hostess offered a toast to Sisi. “Empress Elisabeth, I see that Switzerland suits you.”
Sisi nodded her thanks, taking a small sip of the cold champagne.
The baroness frowned thoughtfully now, her aged, aristocratic features crumpling as she said, “But traveling incognita, eschewing your escort of guards and attendants, need not mean that you forfeit all comfort and luxury as well.” The old woman leaned close, as if she were a coconspirator. “I would gladly offer you our yacht to take you on to your next destination.”
“You are kind, Baroness Rothschild,” Sisi said, shaking her head. “But I am happy to take the public steamer.”
“Where do you go from here?” the woman asked, picking delicately at the scoop of ice cream before her.
“To Montreux,” Sisi answered.
“Then please, allow me to lend you our yacht. It’s not far, just up the lake to the east.”
“As you yourself say, it’s not far. I am already booked on the steamer tomorrow. I am quite taken care of, Baroness.”
The baroness cocked an incredulous eyebrow, not convinced. “But people might bother you.”
Sisi smiled now. “That’s precisely why I travel incognita—I look like any other old woman.”
The hostess placed her spoon down and folded her hands demurely on the table before her. “I don’t like the idea of anyone simply being permitted to approach you, Empress. Especially not here, not lately, when we’ve had quite an unpleasant spike in criminal mischief.”
“You sound like my husband, the emperor. He begged me to avoid Geneva unless I agreed to a police escort.”
“And yet you declined?” The baroness’s mouth fell open now, displaying her shock that Sisi had disregarded the emperor’s request.
“I’m tired of all sorts of escorts. I wish only to be left alone.”
—
Sisi returned to the city following the luncheon. She passed the afternoon walking around the Vieille Ville, the oldest quarter of the city, where she bought chocolates and sweets for her grandchildren. It wasn’t until past dark that she returned to the hotel, where she ordered a light supper to her room and prepared for bed. “Leave those open, Irma,” Sisi said, as she slipped out of her heavy dressing robe to climb into bed.
“The curtains?”
“Yes, leave them open. It’s a full moon. I love sleeping in moonlight.”
“But…Empress…” Irma turned back to the window. Beneath them, the city bustled with life in the warm evening. Fishermen and captains laughed and hollered on the lakeside quay, while traffic clamored noisily over the nearby Pont du Mont-Blanc, carrying couples to dinner, and students to bistros and bars, and international businessmen to their townhouses and hotels.
Irma, still looking out over the scene, seemed reluctant to walk away from the window. “But the city knows you are here, Empress. I think you ought to close the curtains.”
“How could they know I’m here?” Sisi asked, yawning.
Irma sighed as, from beneath them on the street, loud laughter traveled in through Sisi’s opened window. “Your alias lasted all but a few hours, Empress. It’s in all the papers. Someone always whispers.”
