BEAUTY QUEEN - SISI OF AUSTRIA

When Empress Elisabeth of Austria’s children were snatched away by a domineering mother-in-law and tragedy at home shattered her family, she turned to the mirror for comfort.

As the Bard of Avon almost wrote, some are born great and some have greatness thrust upon them. For Empress Elisabeth of Austria, known by her nickname ‘Sisi’, greatness was achieved not just by a very shrewd marriage, but also a 16-inch waist, lustrous hair that cascaded well past said waist and a beauty regimen that took hours of dedicated mirror-gazing. One of the most fashionable women on the continent, she was never far from a well-equipped gym and was followed by an entourage that included a hairdresser clad in pristine white gloves and a team of attendants who stitched their mistress into corsets so restrictive they almost fended off an assassin’s blade.

From her birth in Bavaria on 24 December 1837, Sisi seemed destined to live a charmed life. The daughter of Duke Maximilian Joseph and Princess Ludovika, Elisabeth was born to a father who did not care for the restrictive court world. Instead, the family spent their days in the Bavarian countryside, revelling in the wide-open spaces and carefree days of childhood. Sisi’s early years were far from the restrained upbringing of some royal daughters, and her father’s eccentricity offered his children the chance to enjoy a laid-back youth, one in which education might take a backseat to recreation.

It was in these early years that the girl who would one day become famous for her tightly laced style and perfect poise discovered her aptitude for and love of horse riding, whiling away long hours roaming the countryside on horseback, Sisi would become a fine horsewoman and her love of the freedom riding offered soon took precedence over education, etiquette and oficialdom.

When Sisi was just 15, all of that changed forever and the freedom to roam the countryside without a care for birthright and protocol became a distant, mourned-for memory. Like so many young royal ladies, Sisi’s sister, Helene, was destined for a dynastic marriage. Her intended groom was the cousin she had never met, Franz Joseph I of Austria, and when Helene and her mother set off to meet the emperor and receive his official proposal, young Sisi went along for the ride.

From the start, the trip was a disaster. The elaborate gowns intended for the girls went astray and they were forced to attend the first meeting wearing the plain black mourning clothes that they had donned out of respect for a recently deceased relative. Helene took one look at her intended and was distinctly unimpressed, while Franz Joseph took one look at her little sister and was happy to propose a change to the planned nuptials, replacing 19-year-old Helene with Sisi in the blink of an eye.

The couple was married on 24 April 1854, and at the tender age of just 16, the newly crowned Empress Elisabeth of Austria was plunged into a world that would change her forever. Far from the carefree days she had enjoyed roaming the Bavarian countryside, Sisi found herself at the heart of the rigidly disciplined Habsburg court, the leading lady on a stage she had received no training for. Here, protocol, ceremony and etiquette were everything, and she was scrutinised by her new mother-in-law, the fearsome Princess Sophie of Bavaria. The true power behind her son’s throne, Sisi’s aunt wielded an influence at court that was second to none and was determined that no one would usurp her place, especially some slip of a Bavarian girl.

Almost immediately upon her arrival at her new home in the Hofburg, Sisi began to experience the first symptoms of her swiftly multiplying health problems. As well as physical cold symptoms she became anxious and nervous under the scrutiny of her mother-in-law and the court, finding life in this word of protocol and rules too much to bear despite the adoration of her husband. All of this was compounded when she fell pregnant soon after her marriage. Her anxiety deepened as the pregnancy progressed, and when Sisi gave birth to a daughter, one might be forgiven for thinking that Princess Sophie herself was the mother, rather than a doting grandma. She took the newborn and named her Sophie, installing an army of carers and wet-nurses to look after the infant in place of her young mother. Although the child would live for just two years, history repeated itself when Sisi gave birth to a second daughter, Gisela, in 1856.

Of course, as far as the court was concerned, there was one very obvious problem with these two children. Two daughters might be cause for some celebration in most families, but Sisi’s duty was to produce a male heir and, if fate smiled, a spare too. Malicious anonymous writings later attributed to Sisi’s mother-in-law accused the empress of being a viper in the Habsburg nest, implicitly suggesting that this lack of an heir somehow made her a natural enemy of her new homeland. She was power hungry, the writings claim, a stranger, a foreigner with designs on the empire, and Sisi, finding herself increasingly marginalised and lonely, fell into depression that only deepened when little Sophie died of typhus.

Mourning her first daughter and kept from caring for her second, the empress refused to eat, beginning a pattern of fasting that she would repeat throughout life at times of stress. Sisi became fixated on keeping her weight below 50 kilograms, and when she did eat, it was often a thin broth or the simplest food available, far from fine elaborate court banquets. Sisi's family and husband did al they could to rally her but she sank deeper into unhappiness. With apparently little hope on the horizon, it was to the delight of all that Sisi finally gave birth to that longed-for son, Rudolf, in 1858.

The empress became obsessed with her own body, literally the only thing over which she could exert any control, and she was determined to flaunt it. Those tight highly structured gowns were a useful tool with which to aggravate her mother-in-law too; after all, Sophie was lobbying for more pregnancies, desperate for the spare to back up the heir. However, with her daughter-in-law's wasp-waist on show for all to admire, there could be no doubt that there was no baby on the way. Sisi tried not only to preserve the figure of her youth, but the pastimes she had enjoyed too, and she once again began to spend long hours on horseback, gaining recognition not only for her looks but for her skill and confidence in the saddle. Under her direction, the private chambers of her palces were lined with mirrors, and gymnasiums were established within her residences so that she could undertake her punishing exercise regime, spending long hours every day keeping her body as thin as she could.

With Sisi standing 1.75 metres tall, her tiny waist could not fail to get her noticed and, with her exercises performed to military precision, she turned to beauty.

When it came to cosmetics, one might expect that Sisi would have been a follower of the more is more school of thought, yet surprisingly, she preferred to use as little make-up as she could. However, she did have her own personal pharmacists who prepared potions and lotions that were intended to keep her skin and hair perfect, the team dedicated to preserving her beauty as the years passed by. She slept on a hard bed to keep her back straight, her face hidden by a leather mask beneath which raw meat or a face pack of fruit moisturised her skin as she slumbered.

One cannot hold back the clock forever, of course, and as Sisi entered her 30s, she withdrew from the public gaze, forbidding photographs and portraits so that her eternal image would be one of youthful beauty. With the birth of her last child, Marie Valerie, in 1868, the newly crowned queen of Hungary finally broke away from her mother-in-law and the children that had been taken from her, and ventured forth to see something of the world.

Sisi became a famed celebrity as she travelled the continent, with the public hungry for news of her exploits and rumoured intrigues. She was one of the most fashionable ladies in Europe, setting trends and raising eyebrows with her unforgiving diet and hard-hitting regime of exercise and beauty procedures. Free from Princess Sophie and with the daughter she doted on by her side, it almost seems as if Sisi was going to get some kind of happy ending. Fate, sadly, had other plans.

In 1889, when Sisi was 51, her only son, Rudolf, was found dead beside the body of his lover, Baroness Mary Vetsera. They died together at Rudolf’s secluded Austrian hunting lodge at Mayerling and from the moment that his body was discovered, confusion and gossip began to swirl. Trapped in a loveless dynastic marriage, the Crown Prince was initially believed to have been poisoned by his lover, who then killed herself, though the official word was that a heart attack had caused his death. In fact, Rudolf had shot Mary and then himself, but was this some sort of scandalous murder-suicide? Recently unearthed evidence proved that Mary was not a victim of her lover, but the pair had in fact planned to commit suicide together rather than be parted. At the time, however, rumours spread that the emperor had demanded Rudolf end the affair and that the crown prince had been driven to desperate measures.

The mysterious deaths of Mary and Rudolf became known as the Mayerling Incident. Immortalised in film and literature, the gossip, scandal and sadness of the affair drove a final wedge through the strained marriage of Sisi and Franz Joseph. What threads of affection might have remained were severed and the empress was once again plunged into depression, having lost not only her son but her parents, sister and best friend, and rumoured lover, Count Gyula Andrássy, in the space of just four short years. From now on she dressed only in mourning black, becoming a slender, mysterious silhouette glimpsed on her wanderings as she criss-crossed the continent back and forth, searching for some measure of contentment and focusing her efforts on philanthropy.

Sisi’s wanderings ended on 10 September 1898, during a fateful trip to Geneva where she was attacked by an anarchist named Luigi Lucheni. Lucheni had come to Geneva to kill the Duke of Orléans, but found his prey had already left. Determined not to leave without shedding some blood, he selected Sisi as his target instead. Although Lucheni stabbed Sisi with a ten-centimetre-long needle, it seemed at first that she was not badly injured. However, those tight-laced corsets she so adored had merely stemmed the flow of blood from the wound and, once they were removed, the injury proved fatal. The blow had pierced Sisi’s heart; she died later that same day.

At first, Franz Joseph feared that his wife had fallen victim to her own demons and taken her own life. So concerned was he that, when he learned she had been assassinated, he was actually relieved. Sisi was laid to rest in Vienna in a triple coffin. It contained a glass panel through which her face could be seen, the beauty of Empress Sisi of Austria feted right to the very end.

Written by Catherine Curzon in "History of Royals" UK, issue 4, July 2016, excerpts pp. 68-72. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.