In Vienna, court life afforded Sisi no privacy. Abruptly, she recognized that this new life would not be, as she had fancied, a grand extension of her Bavarian idyll. The crowds that gathered to see the empress-to-be on her engagement journey terrified and exhausted her. As such, she was completely unprepared for life in the glummest, most proper court in Europe, where appearance and convention were everything and intimacy and privacy impossible.

She was intelligent, high-strung, cared nothing for appearance, convention or grandee pride. Sisi was the opposite: spontaneous, warmhearted, sensitive, brooding and fantasizing, devoted to poetry and nature. He was a thoroughly decent, conventional, rigid stick of an imperial servant, prepared to sacrifice all to his position. Work was his life: He toiled throughout his honeymoon and on the day of his wife's assassination. Franz Joseph continued to adore his wife in his way, but he was ruled by his mother, and already, at 23, an old man, completely broken to the hopeless job of ruling an empire that was not merely crumbling but in open revolt. In the mothers' eyes, it may have been a good match, but it was not. One is sold as a fifteen-year-old and makes a vow one does not understand and then regrets for thirty years and which one can never undo.' If only he were not the emperor.' In that sad, little remark sounds the voice of a child who half feels herself trapped, and in later years she was to say bitterly, 'Marriage is an absurd arrangement. For Sisi, it was also a love match of a sort: How, at 15, could one not be swept away at being chosen by the handsome, charming emperor? But, dazzled as she was, she had doubts: 'I love the emperor. The two mothers, who were sisters, engineered the match, though the young emperor was deeply in love. In 1853, she was engaged to the young Emperor Franz Joseph. She was from a crown family, a fact that transformed her life. But ultimately upbringing mattered less than lineage.

Her father, though a royal duke, loved his artistic drinking friends, his circus horses, and his daily lunches with his two illegitimate daughters. It is a fascinating, poignant story of a beautiful woman who had no fantasies of fame and glory, who had fame and glory thrust upon her and never reconciled herself to the exigencies of her position.Įlisabeth, called Sisi, had a happy, unbridled, Bavarian childhood, partly royal, partly bourgeois she was the second daughter of a large, close-knit, rather raffish family. The Reluctant Empress by Brigitte Hamann, an Austrian biographer, is a life of Empress Elisabeth of Austria. to make herself a sandwich? It is not impossible, but it cannot be easy. Can the president sneak out to a restaurant for a quiet lunch with a friend? Can Queen Elizabeth slip down to the palace kitchen at 2 a.m. OUR CHILDHOOD fantasies of fame and glory - growing up to be president, becoming a princess - evaporate for most of us when we discover that the cost of fame and glory is the loss of privacy and simplicity. THE RELUCTANT EMPRESS By Brigitte Hamann Translated from the German By Ruth Hein Knopf.

Emperor franz and elisabeth