B008AITH44 EBOK (57 page)

Then, Elisabeth continued, a conversation with Ludwig’s spirit took place, and he spoke of a woman who was burning: “I know that it is a woman who loved me, and until her destiny is fulfilled, I shall never be free. But afterward you will meet us, and the three of us will be happy together in Paradise.” It is not surprising that in her book, published in 1913, Marie Larisch interpreted these prophecies as referring to the death of Ludwig’s one-time fiancée, Sophie Alençon, in 1897 in a fire, and to the Empress’s death, which occurred a year later. Elisabeth to Marie Larisch: “But while I spoke, the apparition vanished; once again I heard the dripping of unseen water and the gurgle of the lake against the shore. I was seized with horror, for I felt the nearness of the shades from that other world who were holding out their ghostly arms, seeking the comfort of the living.”
⁴¹

Beginning in the mid-1880s, the Empress repeatedly spoke of suicide. The waters of Lake Starnberg, where Ludwig II had perished, held a particularly strong attraction for her.

Marie Valerie was one of the few people who clearly understood Elisabeth’s poor emotional state. Her diary records her concern at the vehemence and despair with which the forty-eight-year-old Empress reacted, for example, to an attack of sciatica. “Much worse than the ailment is Mama’s indescribable despair and hopelessness. She says that it is a torment to be alive, and she indicates that she wants to kill herself. ‘Then you will go to hell,’ Papa said. And Mama replied, ‘But we already have hell on earth!’” And the distressed seventeen-year-old reassured herself: “That Mama will never kill herself—of that I am confident; that she feels her life to be a burden and that to know this makes Papa just as unhappy as it makes me—about that I could weep for hours.”
⁴²

 

E
mperor Franz Joseph did his utmost to make life in Vienna as agreeable as possible for his wife and to fulfill her wishes. Since she was not comfortable either in the Hofburg or in
Schönbrunn,
Laxenburg, or Hetzendorf, in the mid-1880s he built her a summer residence of her own at the center of the deer park in Lainz, where she would be entirely free from court life. Designed by Karl Hasenauer, the architect of the Ringstrasse, the mansion turned into a little castle
altogether
to her taste. In front of the building stands a statue of Elisabeth’s favorite Greek god, Hermes (which also gave the house its name, Hermes Villa), on the balcony a bust of Heinrich Heine, in the entrance hall a statue of the dying Achilles. The walls and ceilings of Elisabeth’s bedroom were covered with frescoes depicting scenes from
A
Midsummer
Night’s
Dream 
(painted by the young, then still unknown, Gustav Klimt after drawings by Makart). The centerpiece, at Elisabeth’s bed of state, depicted Titania with the ass—a joke that can hardly have pleased the Emperor. The walls of the exercise room were covered with frescoes showing antique gladiatorial battles, just as much an expression of Elisabeth’s love of Greece as were the numerous small Greek sculptures.

What Elisabeth valued most of all about the mansion in Lainz—“Titania’s dream castle,” as she called it—was the solitude at the heart of an unspoiled forest, home to a great many deer. The Lainz deer park was surrounded by a wall. Guards kept watch on the gates. No outsider was allowed to glimpse the mansion when Elisabeth was in residence. She could go walking for hours, observing the deer (she always carried wooden rattles with her to protect her from wild boars, who were afraid of the noise) or composing poems.

At first, the Empress had misgivings about the modern sanitary
arrangements,
such as the built-in bathroom (the other imperial castles did not yet sport such modern fashions). For under these circumstances, “so and so many bathing women, whose job it was to set up and fill the tubs,” would “be deprived of their occupation.” Another innovation to which she was unaccustomed were the sinks in the corridors. Once the architect, Hasenauer, saw the Empress with evident pleasure turning the faucets on and off again and again, because she had never encountered such a thing before.
¹

When, in May 1887, the imperial family spent the night in Lainz for the first time, Marie Valerie moaned with homesickness for Bad Ischl. “Sadly I lay down on my white bed, which stands in a strange alcove and from which a most affected chubby-faced cherub stares down at me.” Nor did Valerie approve of the Empress’s state rooms. “Mama’s rooms have the best will in the world to be enormously friendly, but I detest their mannered rococo. Oh—if only we were home again!”
²

Valerie found the Hermes Villa “actually uninvitingly handsome and modern, and it is not at all like us and what we have been used to so far.”
³
For his part, Emperor Franz Joseph once again responded with helplessness, as he did when faced with so many ideas his wife got in her head: “I shall always be afraid that I will spoil everything.”

*

But now that she owned her own secluded castle, Elisabeth had no intention whatever of spending more time in Vienna. She stayed in her sinfully expensive villa for only a few days each year before setting out
on her travels once more. Though she no longer went hunting, she took long sight-seeing trips, preferably abroad.

At this time, Elisabeth was quite unmistakably in a serious crisis. She was nearly fifty. The splendor of her beauty had faded. She hid her wrinkles behind fans and umbrellas. The “Queen Riding to Hounds,” once so energetic and zestful, was suffering from sciatica and deep nervous disorders. In spite of her outstanding intellectual gifts, Elisabeth was
without
influence. One last time, she pulled herself together and tried to give some meaning to her life—though not, of course, within the framework of her imperial position or her family. Rather, she began to write poetry with a matchless intensity, and she wrested a bitter balance from her life.