sissiofaustria

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Portrait of a young Kaiserin Elisabeth of Austria aka “Sissi”. She s holding a miniature of her (then) fiance, Franz Josef I

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The Wittelsbachs of the branch of dukes in Bavaria, of an independent and wild character, were too contemptuous of the conventions of the century. Among them, respect for their own freedom had the force of law and even bordered on insolence. My father [Albert I of the Belgians] often told me of his atonishment at seeing, during one of his stays in Possenhofen, the duke Karl-Theodor left for a horseback ride at the very moment his sister the empress Elisabeth of Austria, wife of Franz-Joseph, without even greeting her even though they hadn’t seen each other for months.

My mother [Queen Elisabeth, née Duchess in Bavaria] admired the empress, her aunt and godmother. A certain quality of emotion and aesthetic sensibility unite them. But when the empress said “When I move among people, I only use for them the part of myself that I have in common with them. They are surprised at our resemblance, but it is an old piece of clothing that from time to time I take out of the wardrobe to wear for a few hours”, my mother, for her part, could not have taken this attitude, because all her life, she shared the best of herself with others, and this with generosity and a total absence of condescension.

The pagan that was the empress, imbued with the beauties of ancient Greece, had passed on to her niece a certain number of hygienic advices: pluge no matter when into glacial water, walk indefinitely in all weathers, as well as number of other precepts that she cultivated until the end of her days. Let us add to this some principles of geriatrics kept jealously secret.

What my mother deplored about her aunt was her insubordination to the rigid etiquette of the Court of Vienna, insubordination which alienated the Austrian aristocracy. Besides, her prolonged absences from the capital and her costly wanderings earned her the reputation of being at least whimsical.

“…In our positions, we must avoid being given a label that we will never get rid of,” assured my mother. How many characters from history have had sad reputations, often undeserved, for this sole reason.

My father granted more indulgence to “this beautiful creature”, as he called her. Besides her beauty, he admired her deep intuitive sense of events and things. According to him, the Empress foresaw the imminent collapse of the heterogeneous amalgam that the Austro-Hungarian Empire had become. We have preserved some verses from her quite academic but very prophetic, written in 1893:

“How right you are, Habsburg, to cover [your head “How right you are to wring your hands “Think then of your departed race “Never again will your children reign over your lands!”

Powerless, Elisabeth of Austria fled from her cruel destiny without seeking to dominate it. She was freed by the knife of a fanatic on the banks of peaceful Lake Geneva. “I would like to escape from my body, like a little bird from its cage,” she frequently said to her relatives. Let's listen to Barres who summarizes in a few lines the wandering existence of this nihilistic sovereign, thirsty for the absolute: "… Her movements did not have the beautiful and reasonable regularity of the migrations of a traveling bird, it was rather the whirling of a a lost spirit which beats the air, which no longer finds shelter and which no discipline regulates.” In similar circumstances, my mother would certainly have overcome the adversities of life because, in her, confidence and energy dominated events through an instinctive sense of the mysterious laws of life and through a concrete vision of the responsibilities to be assumed.

Marie-José of Belgium (1971). Albert et Elisabeth de Belgique, Mes Parents

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The Sissi Trilogy (1955-1957) costume appreciation: 7/∞

costume design by Leo Bei, Gerdago and Franz Szivats

Period dramas | costume appreciation: 9/∞

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Evening dress of Empress Elisabeth of Austria, 1860-65.

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Archduchess Gisèle of Austria (in a black dress) with her younger sister Archduchess Marie-Valérie of Austria (in a white dress), both daughters of Empress Elisabeth and Emperor Franz-Joseph of Austria-Hungary.

(photograph taken around 1890)

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Sissi {1955}

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Some photographs of Elisabeth’s imperial train compartment.

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Vienna, Austria (by Angel de los Rios)

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Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria, by Giuseppe Sogni.

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Sissi's only son

🩵✨... Rodolphe, petit garçon aux yeux tristes, intelligent et sensible, incompris jusque dans sa mort... 🩵✨

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･ﾟ✧*:･ Romy Schneider as Empress Elisabeth of Austria in Sissi (1955)

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3 funerals cards representing Elisabeth’s appearance through her life.

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Sissi's children

Rodolphe and Gisele photographed at Venice in the 1860s.

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Empress Elizabeth of Austria, Queen of Hungary

"Don't Make me sad, dont make cry, sometimes love is not enough and the road gets tough, I don't know why.." born to die

Happy birthday Sissy💓💫💋

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Elisabeth’s mourning dress for the funeral of her cousin Louis ll of Bavaria. (probably 1886)