Sisi, page 7
Sisi allowed herself to forget the woman’s former strength and stared at her now through fresh eyes, and she saw that Sophie’s body indeed appeared shrunken and weak, her face pale. Her mother-in-law, her aunt, had become an old woman. The change caught Sisi completely unaware; it was as if Father Time, having granted the formidable woman a reprieve for so many years, had now come to collect his payment, and greedily so.
Sisi looked up once more at the portrait of herself where it hung over her husband’s desk, and she grasped in that moment something she had never before believed possible: she was stronger than Sophie. True, it was only because of the deficit of youth and energy and bodily strength that existed between herself and the older woman, but regardless of the reason, she, Sisi, had the advantage. She would outlast this woman. She knew it, and Sophie knew it. Her husband had to know it, too.
Franz made to break the silence, but Sisi raised her hand, beating him to it. “Franz dear, I am back. I am here for my son. And I will stay. I will be his mother, and I will be your wife.” Sisi said it with a firm authority, and she noted the sudden attentiveness in her husband’s face as he turned from his mother to listen to his wife. Before Sophie could interject, Sisi pressed her advantage: “But I can’t stay if that man is allowed to continue on. I cannot stand by and watch that. You have a choice: Gondrecourt goes, or I go.”
And surely, all in the room knew that what Sisi might as well have said was: It’s your mother’s way or mine.
Vienna’s leaves burst from green into a riot of color—flame red, mustard yellow, warm gold, and honeyed ochre—before falling from the branches and carpeting the imperial boulevards with their used remnants. That autumn and winter, as the days grew short and chilly, Sisi settled in to a regular, if not contented, routine in Vienna. As always, she found that her days passed more quickly when she kept busy, and so she filled her hours with the concerns and cares of her household and her children.
Her first task was to follow through on the dismissal of Count Gondrecourt. Though bits of the insulted military man’s gossip reached her ears (All I ever did was faithfully enact the orders of the emperor and his mother. But then, the empress never did know her place.), Sisi ignored the controversy that Gondrecourt tried to foment, never even acknowledging his slander.
In Gondrecourt’s place Sisi installed Colonel Joseph Latour, a soft-spoken man with a kind smile and liberal ideals for educating children. Latour, like Gondrecourt, was a military man by training, but Sisi gave him the strictest orders not to behave like one with her son. “Latour, you are to find the best teachers possible, regardless of pedigree or social standing at court,” Sisi said to the man when he visited her in her study to discuss the crown prince’s new schedule.
“But, Empress…” Latour hesitated. “I beg to humbly remind Your Majesty that the Habsburg hiring rules, in place for centuries, mandate that only military officers, members of the aristocracy, and clergymen might be permitted to interact with and teach a crown prince.”
“You are to ignore those ancient rules,” Sisi answered, offering a decisive flick of her wrist. In response to the tutor’s visible disbelief—or was it discomfort?—she added: “These are your new orders. I will deal with any opposition you might encounter. I care only about the character and the scholarly training of the crown prince’s teachers. In fact,” Sisi whispered, “members of the bourgeoisie and common classes would be perfectly acceptable, even preferred, as I hope to gain for my son a liberal education. That’s how I was educated, and that’s the program I have advocated since his birth.”
Under the watchful eye of his mother, his kindly tutor, and the new court physician, a mild-mannered gentleman named Dr. Widerhofer, Rudy was slowly and cautiously introduced to a new way of life. He began to eat and gain some weight. He shed his habit of trembling upon entering a new room, as if anticipating some horrific shock. It became not uncommon to hear the little boy laugh. Nobody was to ever speak the name Gondrecourt in his presence, and soon enough the only symptoms from his former torment that persisted were occasional night terrors and difficulty sleeping. From time to time, Sisi might catch him staring quietly off into nothingness, his face pinched in some unspoken agony, as if recalling a past torment or fearing some future event. When this happened, Sisi’s heart would break anew, and she would recall why she had left the peace and freedom of Gödöllő to be here with her child.
When she was not following Rudy’s progress and approving lesson proposals from Colonel Latour, Sisi spent the rest of her time doting on Valerie, ensuring that the baby made a smooth transition from Gödöllő to the Hofburg. Sisi guarded her daughter like the fiercest of she-wolves, not allowing Valerie out of her apartments unless accompanied by the empress herself. Though Sophie issued invitations for both Sisi and Valerie to join her for tea in her suite or a stroll through the imperial gardens, Sisi never accepted, nor did she ever return the invitation to her mother-in-law.
Valerie was a healthy girl who experienced the usual ailments of any baby: pain from her new teeth, the occasional upset stomach, small fevers or tumbles as she experimented with her unsteady legs. Each small incident, however minor Governess Throckmorton labeled it, sent Sisi into a terror, so solicitous was she for her child’s well-being.
The only child who didn’t seem to need—or want—Sisi’s presence was Gisela. She had, after all, grown to adolescence without her mother playing a significant role in her life; she seemed perfectly content to continue without her now, carrying on her busy days within the relative autonomy of her own little household, overseen by her solicitous grandmamma. From the limited interactions Sisi had with Gisela during their occasional family dinners or official gatherings, Sisi saw that Gisela seemed perfectly comfortable in her own place at court. She was nothing like her mother physically, already round in her figure before having reached ripe maturity. Nor was she like Sisi in temperament, having inherited—or adopted—her father’s reserved formality, where Sisi had been free-spirited and sensitive in her youth. And Gisela was on the cusp of young womanhood, only a couple of years younger than Sisi herself had been upon meeting Franz Joseph. Gisela would marry soon and leave the court entirely, Sisi realized. Sensing her daughter’s emotional distance, and yet seeing the closeness that existed between Gisela and her grandmother, Sisi couldn’t fight back a feeling of bitterness, so she willingly ceded the girl’s affections, pouring out what might have gone to Gisela onto little Valerie instead.
As the year drew to a close, Sisi marked her thirty-first birthday with a small family dinner in her apartments and looked glumly ahead to the remainder of the Viennese winter. While the rest of the court eagerly anticipated Fasching, the merrymaking period before Lent that saw a flurry of carnivalesque masquerades and nightlong parties, Sisi longed for Budapest and its freedom. She longed for Andrássy, who visited her now only in his letters, sent to Ida to avoid censors or snoops. She began to think that perhaps Rudy was strong enough that she might slip away for a quick trip to Budapest with Valerie and her ladies. But then, some troubling news would come to her from the crown prince’s tutor—news of some relapse: an attack of anxiety, a night terror waking the prince, or a refusal to eat—and she would be reminded that she was needed in Vienna.
And so the best Sisi could do was carve out her own small sanctuary in what she viewed as an otherwise hostile environment. She kept to her own private rooms, avoiding her mother-in-law and all but the most official obligations. She would plead a headache or cold as a reason to skip most state dinners, balls, and ceremonies. She saw her husband for regularly scheduled visits in his staterooms and at dinner once a week in her private rooms, but otherwise she allowed into her confidence only Ida Ferenczy and Marie Festetics. To help her with the administrative work that inevitably piled up in Vienna, Sisi invited a Hungarian nobleman, a discreet, bespectacled man by the name of Baron Ferenc Nopcsa, to manage her household. Hungarian, not German, was spoken in her apartments at all times. And so, with Valerie in her lap and Shadow and Brave at her feet, Sisi cultivated as safe and cozy a cocoon as she could.
Franz Joseph, accustomed as he was to his wife’s prolonged absences from court, seemed content to have even the scraps of odd hours with her a few times a week. When she did join him for an official appearance, he seemed positively delighted. He knew that she would never return to his bed, nor would she invite him back into hers—that had been established years earlier. What he most longed for was an end to the rumors and an occasional visit. Sisi’s return had satisfied both desires and thus appeared to satisfy him.
But not everyone shared the emperor’s happiness at the empress’s return. Surely the emperor knew that his new adjutant general, a conservative Austrian officer by the name of Count Bellegarde, disliked Her Majesty the Empress. Everyone in the palace knew what Bellegarde whispered about her, excoriating “the Bavarian” for her liberal policies, her meddling in Rudolf’s education, and her flagrant preference for Hungarians over Austrians. He railed against her “offensive submission to Andrássy’s compromise.” He noted every state function from which the empress was absent, lamenting the “heavy cross our emperor is forced to bear.”
Though Sophie’s age was advancing and her robust health waning, it appeared that Bellegarde was all too happy to take up the archduchess’s banner. The general slandered Sisi so loudly that even she, almost entirely removed from the court gossip circles, couldn’t help but hear his criticisms. She saw in the papers how she was referred to as “the resident guest at the Hofburg,” that there were bets being placed on when she would next abandon her family and flee from her role. She heard how the courtiers scoffed at her, mocking her “rustic Hungarian hunting lodge.” Even the diplomatic Baron Nopcsa, whose quiet and inoffensive manner often lulled people into disclosing perhaps too much in his presence, had to acknowledge to Sisi that she seemed to have a number of detractors at court.
Egypt was so rarely at the center of news. The civilized world followed the updates out of Vienna, where Master Strauss, the court composer and unrivaled “Waltz King,” was hard at work on a new masterpiece for his imperial patrons. Or out of Paris, where new hoopskirt designs and tight corsets had inspired a flurry of female excitement and fainting across Europe. Or London, where Queen Victoria had workers tunneling beneath the city streets to create a vast network of trains that ran under the ground. But Egypt? The glory of that Nile kingdom belonged to antiquity and Rudy’s schoolbooks.
And yet, the opening of the Suez Canal promised to be a party worthy of the world’s elite, a massive project that made even the construction of Vienna’s Ringstrasse or Queen Victoria’s underground trains seem like unambitious odd jobs in comparison. The project, undertaken with France’s leadership, had carved a water passage through Egypt, linking the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, promising a new and lucrative era of easy trade between East and West. The project had taken ten years, cost one hundred million dollars, and had claimed the lives of thousands of workers. A project such as that, naturally, necessitated a party as lavish and splendid as the canal’s building had been costly and destructive. And no one would want to miss a party given by Napoleon III and his Empress Eugénie.
Franz Joseph and Sisi were expected to join the crush of crowned heads who prepared to travel to the northern shores of Africa in the autumn of 1869 to mark the long-awaited opening. In the weeks leading up to the journey, Marie and Ida had begun to buzz with questions: “When shall we begin packing, Empress?” “What shall Your Majesty need for Egypt?” “Will it please Your Grace to have us begin your trunks?”
“I cannot go.” Sisi broke the news to Franz Joseph several weeks before their planned departure. The emperor looked up from his letters, pen poised midsentence, his shock immediately apparent on his face. “I shall explain why,” Sisi said, sitting down opposite her husband at his desk. It was one of their scheduled weekly meetings in his study, often the only hour in a week they shared alone as man and wife.
Franz seemed to think he hadn’t heard Sisi correctly. “Cannot go? But you must—surely you don’t wish to miss the opening of the Suez Canal.”
Sisi was careful to keep her tone soft, plaintive, as she ventured, “Valerie has been fighting a cold for over a week now. And Rudy? Why, he makes gains, to be sure, but just yesterday his tutor informed me that the boy awoke in the middle of the night gripped by a terror and cold sweat. I am reluctant to leave the children behind. I feel that it is my…” And then, emphasizing the one word to which she knew her husband would surely yield, Sisi said, “It is my duty.” She nodded, letting the word ring in his ears in the otherwise quiet study.
Franz lowered his pen onto the paper in front of him, folding his hands before himself on the desk as he mulled this over. As was his habit, his eyes drifted toward the massive portrait of his wife where it hung over his desk, as if he found its presence to be a soothing balm when he became overburdened by cares. It reminded Sisi of how her baby, Valerie, seemed to cling to one particular blanket of hers when she was upset.
Sisi had offered only a portion of her reasoning for not wanting to go to Egypt, leaving out the other and perhaps more significant piece. But Franz—unimaginative, unquestioning, practical Franz—would never have guessed at his wife’s deeper thoughts, would never have surmised that a more complicated emotion lurked behind her straightforward words.
“Are you certain, Elisabeth?” Franz looked back to his wife now. “Eugénie will be there. She’s going to accompany the French emperor.”
Yes, Sisi knew that the French emperor and his wife would be there. She knew that she shouldn’t allow her rival—the only woman who was ever held up as a contender to Sisi’s fashion sense or skill atop a horse—to go alone and seize the international headlines and glory.
But Empress Eugénie wasn’t the person whose planned presence in Egypt unnerved Sisi. Just a day prior, Franz had shared with his wife the news that he had invited Andrássy to join the Austrian delegation on the trip. It would be a show of unity, Franz declared, proof of the stability and harmony that reigned in his empire since the establishment of the dual monarchy.
Sisi had received the news with quiet agony. She longed to see Andrássy more than anything, to be near him and with him. But that longing was precisely why she didn’t trust herself to go. She knew that Bellegarde, also selected to be a part of the imperial delegation, would be watching each step she took, would notice every look that passed over her face.
The adjutant general had been so vicious in his attacks on the empress of late, so critical of Sisi anytime she declined to attend a formal state occasion with the emperor, and Sisi knew that he would be poised to catch any error she might make on the trip, happily reporting back to Archduchess Sophie’s camp, as well as the Viennese press, ensuring that news of Sisi’s failings and shame could be served up like scrumptious pastry to the entire empire.
Andrássy, the model of self-discipline, would behave flawlessly throughout the trip. He knew of Bellegarde’s vitriol, and he would never dream of putting Sisi at risk. But being so near to Andrássy and yet being forced to act like an aloof acquaintance, to conceal the way she truly felt about him, would be more agonizing for Sisi than being apart. She had never acquired that essential palace skill of repressing her true feelings or masking her troubled thoughts. Andrássy always teased her about this, told her that she wore her thoughts and emotions so plainly on her face that she barely needed a mouth to speak them.
No, she couldn’t go on this trip. For she knew that, while she stood holding her husband’s arm, her eyes would travel to the Hungarian count beside her, and it would be plainly obvious to all that the man she loved and the man to whom she was married were not one and the same.
But here, in Franz’s study, Sisi didn’t divulge any of this, and she knew that as long as she stuck to the lines she had prepared she would most likely be granted a reprieve. “Besides,” Sisi said, smiling at her husband where he sat at his desk, hemmed in by his papers, “I know how fond you are of la belle Eugénie. Without me there, you’ll be free to flirt and declare your admiration for France’s beauty without fear of your wife growing jealous.”
Franz looked down, the skin under his thick beard flushing the same scarlet hue as his trousers. It was indeed common knowledge that Franz Joseph admired Eugénie greatly, having extolled to his ministers the exotic and full-figured charms of Napoleon III’s empress. But oh, how ironic that this line of logic would now work to Sisi’s advantage!
“I understand,” Franz said eventually, unknotting his hands and pressing them down onto his desk, like a judge passing a verdict. “You feel that your place is here with your children. While I regret that I won’t have you beside me, I commend you for your maternal devotion. And your willingness to put your sacred duty and the concerns of our children ahead of your own joy. You may stay.”
And so, while the palace buzzed around her and the two most important men in her life prepared to leave for the lush and alluring land on the Nile, Sisi looked ahead to yet more time in Vienna.
—
As soon as the Viennese newspapers learned of Sisi’s plans to forgo the trip, the criticisms began to swirl anew. The most widely accepted theory was that Sisi, jealous of the preeminent role that Eugénie and the French would play in hosting the opening ceremonies, had declined out of vanity and bruised pride. Other papers printed that Sisi was fearful of a “beauty contest” with her shapely, coquettish rival. Others wrote that she, “the houseguest,” would never miss an opportunity to be unsupportive of her husband, the long-suffering Emperor Franz Joseph, whose wife only stayed in the capital when His Majesty had to be out of it. Sisi would read the reports and editorials each morning over breakfast, feeling her appetite flee. Surely stories such as these sold papers—otherwise they wouldn’t be printed with such frequency. And surely if they sold, it was because this was what the people wanted to read and discuss. She’d toss the papers aside, but it was always too late; the words had already crawled into her mind and body and gripped her with an overwhelming feeling of self-rebuke, a bitter loathing for the vicious, unrelenting gossips in this city.
