Stealing Sisi's Star by Jennifer Bowers Bahney

Author:Jennifer Bowers Bahney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland
Published: 2015-07-02T04:00:00+00:00

The Vienna World’s Fair of 1873 featured Emperor Franz Joseph promoting the arts, technology, and industry. The emperor was a stickler for military discipline and duty, and never could relate to Sisi’s sensitive nature. Nonetheless, he stood in awe of his wife’s beauty, denied her nothing, and always referred to her as “my angel” (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, George Grantham Bain Collection).

Franz Joseph was exceedingly grateful to his normally flighty wife for her dedication to his mother at her deathbed. She proved that she could be supportive and dependable when she wanted to be. Thinking she was now more amenable to official duty, Franz Joseph asked Sisi to accompany him on a trip to Russia in February 1874 to discuss Austria-Hungary’s Balkan policies, but once again, Sisi declined to support her husband. She was apparently annoyed that the imperial family would be gone from Vienna for the pre–Lenten festivities, and it was then that she and her Hungarian reader, Ida Ferenczy, hatched a plan to attend Karneval in disguise.

Sisi had just become a grandmother at the age of thirty-six and perhaps felt the need for some youthful excitement. On the last day of carnival when the entire household was asleep, Sisi and Ida secretly arose and dressed for the masked ball. Sisi donned a loose, cloak-like domino fashioned from heavy yellow brocade along with an auburn wig and mask. Her name for the evening would be “Gabrielle.” Once at the ball, Sisi pointed out an elegant young man and requested that Ida escort him up to the gallery where the empress was observing the festivities. Assuming he had no idea who she was, Sisi began to cautiously flirt with the handsome stranger and ask his feelings on the emperor and empress and the politics of court life. Sisi learned his name, Fritz Pascher, and that he was a twenty-six-year-old civil servant. She also obtained his mailing address and wrote him coquettish letters for weeks following the ball (“Are you dreaming of me at this moment, or are your songs full of longing going forth into the stilly night?”),16 always signed “Gabrielle” with a return address of the General Post Office in London. Sisi’s sister Marie in England played along and collected Pascher’s return letters, posting them on to Vienna. Sisi naively believed that Pascher never knew her true identity, and like a perfect gentleman, he never exposed the empress’s secret in her lifetime. Pascher finally shared the letters with Sisi biographer Count Egon Corti shortly before his death in 1934.

The clandestine yellow domino affair ended as abruptly as it had started, and Sisi fondly tucked the romantic encounter away in her memory. She wandered from country to country for another five years until she decided to come through for the emperor once again. In 1879, the now forty-two-year-old empress returned to Vienna at her husband’s request for the imperial couple’s silver wedding anniversary celebrations. She would pull out all of the glamorous stops for the three-day event,

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