March 29, 2022 • 58 mins
Elizabeth was Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary. She was a beauty icon with long, chestnut brown hair that came down, allegedly to her ankles. But she also lived a life of quiet, lonely depression. She was a ghost, even before her assassination.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of I Heart Radio
and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Minky. Listener discretion is advised.
On September, the streets of Geneva bustled with their normal
(00:27):
Sunday fare. Families strolled down the waterfront along the western
bank of Lake Geneva, ready to spend the afternoon lounging
on park benches that overlooked the snowy caps of the Alps.
In the distance. Among the crowd, two women were walking
down the Quadumant Blanc to board a steamship set for
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the nearby Swiss city of montrou from Afar. Nothing about
the pair was particularly remarkable. They were well dressed, one
in a light, modest dress, while the other was draped
dramatically in black fabric from head to toe, the soul
exception being the white parasol that she held low above
(01:11):
her head. But as the two women ascended the gangplank,
muffled whispers and subtle pointing fingers began pointing out the
cracks in their otherwise unremarkable facade. The taller of the
two women, the one in black, held her fan tight
enough for her knuckles to strain against the fabric. Her dress,
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while undoubtedly expensive, was speckled with dust only somewhat hastily
wiped away. Her companion in the light colored dress talked
to her in hushed tones, scanning her body with an
expression of deep concern. As the ship left the port,
the whispers continued to spread across the deck, like smoke
(01:56):
trapped under glass. Tendrils slowly expanded until they clouded everything
else in sight. Did you see what happened down there?
That man came out of nowhere? He pushed that woman
in the fancy black dress to the ground. Who would
do such a thing? But all of the whisper stopped
when the woman in black collapsed on the ship's deck.
(02:20):
A moment of deafening silence gave way to a flurry
of panicked bodies, searching desperately for aid, but the ship
had already cast off into the harbor, and there was
no doctor on board. With shaking hands, the woman's companion
in white quickly cut open the woman's corset to help
her breathe, only to pull back in horror when she
(02:41):
found a small brown stain spreading across the woman's chest.
For Going any last attempts at anonymity. The woman in white,
the Countess are, called for the captain and demanded that
he turned the ship back to port. When as for
a reason why, the prominent noble lady told the captain
(03:04):
with all the remaining poise she had, that Elizabeth, the
Empress of Austria, had been stabbed. Officially, the Empress was
not in Geneva at all. She had been traveling under
the pseudonym Countess von Hohenems during her excursions for the
sake of privacy as well as safety. There had been
(03:27):
increased reports of assassination attempts on European monarchs in recent years,
and since the Empress refused to travel with a guard,
a gnome de geer was necessary for her travels. However,
just the previous day, a newspaper in Geneva had caught
wind of the ruse and published the Empress's whereabouts in
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an article that found its way into the hands of
an Italian anarchist named Luigi Licheni. The following day, the
man sat stationed outside the Empress's hotel, a needle file
hidden in the right sleeve of his coat as he
waited for his moment to strike back aboard the ship.
(04:09):
The crew hastily scrambled to assemble a stretcher out of
spare oars and sails, while the captain slowly turned the
ship back to shore. On the deck floor, Elizabeth briefly
breached through the surface of consciousness and reached for her
lady in waiting. Are you in pain, the countess asked, no,
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The Empress replied weakly. The attack had been so sudden,
the assailant vanishing so quickly, that Elizabeth had been unaware
that she had been stabbed at all. The autopsy would
later reveal Lucheni's weapon had pierced clear through the Empress's heart,
and although her famously tight corset had staunched the bleeding
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long enough for the Empress to board the ship without
constant pressure on the wound, her heart began pumping blood
freely into her chest. From where she lay, Elizabeth stared
up at the sky, the same sky she used to
spend hours playing under as a child, the sky she's
so often wished she could run under instead of being
(05:14):
trapped behind palace walls, And as her heart beat its
way ever closer to death, she used her last moments
of consciousness to ask a simple question, a question she
had no doubt asked herself countless times throughout her life.
What has happened? I'm Dana Schwartz and this is noble Blood.
(05:42):
One quick warning just before we begin. This episode does
delve into a discussion about eating disorders, and so if
you're specifically sensitive to that sort of content, this might
not be the episode for you. Embrace Eliza Bith of Austria,
who was known to her friends and family as Ceci,
(06:04):
never wanted to make history. She was born Elizabeth Amlay
Eugenie on Christmas Eve eighteen thirty seven to her parents,
Princess Ludvika of Bavaria and Duke Maximilian Joseph. Princess Ludvika
was the sixth child of her father, the King of
Bavaria's second marriage, while Duke Maximilian was only a member
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of a junior branch of the royal House of Wittelsbach
and so Ceci was born as a child into a
family with no formal ties to daily court life. That
normally would have allowed her to live a life without
the pressures of court, but her father took that casualness
one step further. In history texts, the characterizations of Duke
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Maximilian range from childlike to eccentric, but to summarize him
in the simplest of terms, the Duke to play the
part of the cool dad. He had a love of
circuses and Bavarian folk music, and according to a self
published account of his time traveling in Egypt, he had
apparently ordered his servants to yodel while climbing the Great
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Pyramids as if they were traversing through the Swiss Alps.
When the Duke was home, he would often sneak his
children out of their lessons so they could play with
the local peasant children around Postenhoffen Castle, and so Ceci
and her siblings spent their summers riding horses, swimming and
hiking across the Bavarian countryside, like a troop of Von
(07:37):
Trapped children, minus the Nazis and leader hosen made of curtains. Unfortunately, though,
this is about the time I should remind you that
this is a podcast called Noble Blood, and from here
Cecy's life begins to take some dark turns. But to
fully appreciate cc story, we need to zoom out a
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little bit and understand the context for what Europe was
going through in the middle of the nineteenth century. Now,
it would be impossible for me to summarize the events
leading up to the mass political upheavals in eighteen forty eight,
all across Europe a series of collective and individual events
on a dozen different fronts. They are often lumped together
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in Encyclopedia entries under the Revolutions of eighteen forty eight,
but for the purposes of this episode, here's what you
need to know. In the wake of the Industrial Revolution,
most of the jobs of the peasant working classes became obsolete.
Artisans were replaced with machinery, and poverty, combined with urbanization,
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made tensions between the upper class, who wanted to preserve
their power and didn't want to be reminded that poor
people still existed, and the lower class, who wanted to
be given basic human rights and be represented by a
government who actually cared for their well being, rose to
a boiling point. All of this was occurring in a
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climate in which the old ideas of the divine rights
of the monarchy were beginning to seem a little obsolete.
The legal and symbolic power of kings across Europe was dwindling.
Naturally in response, to the demands of the working class.
The Austrian government restricted freedom of speech, gatherings of university fraternities,
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and then demanded absolute loyalty to the Austrian government. As
you can probably imagine, this didn't go well with the
working class, and after a series of appointments and resignations
following the resignation of the Foreign Minister Prince Metirik, Emperor
Ferdinand the First of Austria was forced to abdicate the throne.
(09:54):
The next in line for the throne was a man
named Archduke Franz Carl, who, at the urging of his wife,
would renounce his claim to the throne so that their son,
Friend Joseph, would become the new Emperor of Austria. Let
me say that one more time. Archduke Franz Carl gave
up the opportunity to be the Emperor of Austria because
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his wife, Archduchess Sophie told him that he should take
a step back and let their son ascend to the throne.
Convincing her husband to renounce his title maybe the easiest
way to characterize what type of person that the Archduchess was.
Sophie knew that her husband would be a poor ruler.
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But more than that, she knew that even though she
would technically be the Empress, she would be giving up
all of the power that she actually had over the
Empire in exchange for a symbolic crown. But if her
son were appointed, she would miss out on the title
of empress, But behind the scenes, her eighteen year old
emperor's son would be asking her counsel on all of
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the important government matters. Sophie would hold more power pulling
the strings than being the party throwing marionette, and so
the young Emperor and his mother ascended the Austrian throne.
By eighteen fifty three, five years later, the Hungarian uprisings
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had been long since quelled thanks to assistance from Russia,
but the approval of the young Emperor remained staggeringly low.
His indecision and ultimate refusal to offer aid to Russia
amidst the outbreak of the Crimean War left him in
murky territory internationally and on the home front, the working
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people of Hungary had not forgotten their grievances against the
emperor just because a few years had passed. All in all,
it was obvious that Emperor Franz Carl needed a pr makeover,
and even that the young emperor was twenty three years
old and still single, the easiest way to fix his
(12:06):
image would be turning to an answer that still bolsters
royal approval ratings today, they would have a royal wedding.
After careful consideration, the Archduchess Sophie decided that aligning Austria
with another connection to Bavaria was the right step forward
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for the Empire. That connection in question would take the
form of her sister Ludovica and Ludvika's eldest daughter Helene.
And this is how we find our way back to Cecy,
who in August eighteen fifty three found herself packed into
a carriage between her older sister and her mother and
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route to Austria's imperial summer residence in body Chel to
confirm the engagement between Helene and Emperor Franz Carl. With
her older sister in age to the man in charge,
the young Elizabeth, then fifteen years old, was being brought
along to be presented as a possible match for the
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Emperor's younger brother, Archduke Carl Ludwig. After all, why not
try to marry two of your daughters into royalty instead
of just the one, but that plan would quickly dissolve
into chaos the moment that Emperor Franz Joseph caught a
sight of young cc From here, historians have a few
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differing opinions as to what exactly happened next. Some historians
described the meeting of Franz Joseph and the young Duchess
Elizabeth as an almost disneyesque fairytale romance. The way this
version goes, the young Emperor spot a beautiful young woman
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running freely in a meadow, having stopped her carriage to
pick wild flowers. The Emperor sees this girl, her long,
dark blonde hair running in soft waves down past her shoulders,
and he falls instantly in love, only to then come
to realize later that the young woman was actually the
(14:13):
younger sister of his would be betrothed all along. In
another telling, Princess Ludovica suffered from a terrible migraine that
delayed their journey, a headache made worse by the fact
that when they did finally arrive in Friends Joseph's court,
albeit a bit tardy, their luggage had not, meaning that
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they had to meet the Emperor wearing what they had
traveled in. That would have been bad enough, but the
trio was dressed all in mourning for an aunt who
had recently passed away, And so the three women met
the Emperor while wearing black conservative dresses, certainly not the
gowns that were specifically made to impress royalty. And while
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the black maid, Helene, with her dark brown air, look
pale almost to the point of being sickly, Elizabeth's dark
blonde hair and youthful complexion was said to have glowed
in comparison. But regardless of which of the versions of
the first meeting between Franz Joseph and Cecy actually happened,
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the results were indisputable. Elizabeth, the younger sister, was the
Emperor's clear choice for a bride. Sophie, the Emperor's mother,
recounted an exchange with her son in her diary. She
had asked, don't you think that Helene is clever? That
she has a beautiful and slender figure. Obviously she was
(15:40):
desperately trying to salvage what was left of the planned engagement. Well, yes,
a little grave and quiet, certainly pleasant and nice, yes,
But cc the Emberor's tone brightened after just speaking her name. Cecy.
Such loveliness, such exuberance like a little girl's, and yet
(16:00):
so sweet. Predictably, arch Duchess Sophie was livid. She had
arranged a perfectly suitable marriage with Helene, the obedient daughter
of her timid sister, who was almost guaranteed to do
anything the Archduchess asked of her. But Elizabeth. Elizabeth was young,
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only fifteen. She had not been given the proper schooling
to be an empress. She was a headstrong, freethinking young
woman who rode horses instead of attending lessons. She did
not fit into the carefully carved space Sophie had whittled
into her master plan for her son's reign in the
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years to come. Cc and the Archduchess would rarely agree
on anything, but in this decision they were both equally troubled.
Elizabeth could not imagine what the Emperor had seen in
her that would make him choose her over her sister,
But beyond that, she could see the writing on the wall, ironically,
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the same thing Archduchess Sophie herself had realized when she
convinced her husband to see the throne to their son.
Becoming an empress was in honor, to be sure, but
not the life that a smart woman would choose for
herself if her goal was happiness. To her aunt and
future mother in law, Sophie Cecy lamented quote, I love
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the Emperor so much if only you were not the Emperor.
The young Elizabeth knew that in accepting Franz Joseph's proposal,
she was accepting an entirely new way of life, one
without the anonymity or freedom that she had been allowed
during her childhood in Possenhofen. But ultimately there was no choice.
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In the words of her mother, who I imagine was
just relieved that one of her daughters had proved suitable,
one does not send the Emperor of Austria packing. If
there was a honeymoon phase for the happy couple, it
didn't last long. Almost immediately Elizabeth was put into lessons,
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each second of her day meticulously planned and accounted for
as she was quickly brought into the fold of Austrian aristocracy.
In the movie version, this would be the moment that
we get a quick montage sequence cutting between her awkwardly
balancing books on her head and earning a light slap
on her wrist for using the wrong spoon during a
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salad course. But unfortunately for Elizabeth, her life was not
a coming of age romantic comedy. Instead, her lessons consisted
of unlearning the parts of her childhood that she had
valued the most. She was no longer allowed to associate
with peasants or servants, no longer allowed to ride freely
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across the grounds. She was taught the latest dances in court, and,
after a not so subtle remark made by the Archduchess,
her new mother in law, a tutorial on how to
properly brush her teeth. Friends. Joseph, her new husband, remained
head over heels for his new bride, but he had
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an empire to run, and Elizabeth found herself increasingly alone
in a palace that felt more like a museum than
a home. The Archduchess hounded her every move, forbidding her
to confide in anyone about her homesickness or her growing depression.
After all, no one could know that the sovereign was unhappy.
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In a poem dated just weeks after their wedding, seventeen
year old Elizabeth wrote, quote, oh had I but never
left the path that would have led me to freedom,
I have awakened in a dungeon with chains on my hands.
She became resentful of her new family. She was treated
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more like a child old than a spouse. When it
came to diplomatic matters. She was otherwise ignored unless she
needed to be paraded around court. Cecy's depression only worsened
upon the realization of another complication. Barely a month after
the wedding, she was pregnant. The country was overjoyed, a
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new air, a new hope for Austria, But as Elizabeth's
stomach grew, the light inside her diminished. As difficult as
the early months of pregnancy typically are for any new mother,
Cecy had the compounded stress of representing a nation to
add to the morning sickness. The more she began to show,
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the more Archduchess Sophie forcibly paraded Elizabeth to the public.
Having seemingly lost the freedom even to control her own body,
Elizabeth grew exasperated with her mother in law, complaining to
a lady in way quote, she dragged me out into
the garden and declared that it was my duty to
show off my stomach so that people could see that
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I really was pregnant. It was awful. Instead, it seemed
to me a blessing to be alone and able to weep.
The commoners continued to love the humble young Empress, but
among the aristocracy, Austria Shining Star was losing her luster.
But they had once thought of as charming, devolved into
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ill mannered or even simple minded, as the court lost
patience with each of Elizabeth's social blunders. Producing an heir
to the throne may have given Elizabeth some political sway
over those in court, but in March eighteen fifty CC
gave birth to a daughter. The child had barely left
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her body before Elizabeth was cast aside. Again. Elizabeth was
even denied the right to name her own child. The
responsibility was instead taken up by arch Duchess Sophie, who,
after careful consideration, named the little baby Sophie. To absolutely
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no one's surprised the arch Duchess didn't end her control
there before little Sophie was even born. Elizabeth's mother in
law had arranged for the nursery to be placed directly
adjacent to her apartments, so that if the Empress wanted
to visit her own daughter, she would have to do
so through her mother in law. Just a little over
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a year later, Elizabeth gave birth to her second daughter, Gisella,
and for the second time the heads at court saw
a daughter and it turned away in disappointment. The desperation
for an heir to the Austrian throne was great, and
Elizabeth was feeling the burden tenfold. It's rumored that after
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the birth of Gisella, a pam flit mysteriously made it
onto CC's bedside table, outlining the importance of providing an
heir to the nation and the perilous position that she
would be in if she were unable to perform her duties.
It was never confirmed where the pamphlet came from, but
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all signs pointed to a certain mother in law, the
woman who held the key to see C's children's nursery.
Emperor Franz Joseph, being accustomed to his mother's specific breed
of tyranny, didn't see any issues in any of Elizabeth's grievances.
Cecy had been brought up in a world where status
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had remained an abstract concept. But to Franz Joseph, whose
mother had raised him to be ready to lead a
nation by the age of eighteen. Titles and power were
in all too reel part of his world. They were
his world, the very structure that held his reality a
oft Cecy's complaints were as abstract to him as wanting
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to spend childhood summers befriending local peasant children around posting
off in castle. So rather than offer any real solutions,
Emperor Franz Joseph reminded his wife of duties that she
could be fulfilling for the country. In one letter, he wrote, quote,
I beg you for the love you bear me. Pull
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yourself together, show yourself in the city, sometimes visit institutions.
You have no idea what a great help you can
be to me in this way. It will put heart
into the people in Vienna and keep up the good
spirit I require so urgently and so c. C. Did.
The Austrian public fell more in love with their empress
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as she used her free time to visit the hospitals
of wounded soldiers and donate to institutions for the mentally ill.
The court quietly disapproved of her new social ventures, as
they all but eliminated her distance from the peasant classes,
but their scrutiny did not burn as badly as it
had from within the palace walls. It was also during
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this period, though, that Elizabeth's obsession over her appearance would
begin to take a clear hold over her life. Cecy
had always been slender, accentuated further by her height five eight,
especially tall for a woman at the time, but after
the birth of her first child, Elizabeth began to regularly
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practice what she called quote starvation cures to bring her
weight down to what she considered a normal quote unquote
one hundred and ten pounds. In addition to her extreme
diet and exercise during the periods in between her pregnancies,
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Elizabeth also took up the practice of tight lacing, which,
as it sounds, can sit of tying the laces of
her corset so tightly that the Empress would be short
of breath. The term anorexia as we know it would
not be coined until eighteen seventy three, but Elizabeth's consistent
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fasting and almost compulsive need to exercise has often led
to posthumous diagnoses that would indirectly come to similar conclusions.
In one instance, her quote starvation diet exacerbated her already
declining health until she was diagnosed with quote green sickness
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otherwise known as anemia, which left her constantly exhausted. One
physician would note, quote in the otherwise healthy woman, I
found fairly pronounced swelling, especially in the ankles. He would
go on to describe her condition as something rare for
a woman of her position, as it had not become
(26:56):
quote regrettably notorious until the war. He called it a
deema of hunger. From such a young age, Cecy faced
scrutiny of her body on a global scale. After all,
at the age of fifteen, her life was forever changed
after the Emperor of Austria was moved more by her
(27:17):
beauty than that of her sister. As soon as she
moved into the Imperial Palace in Vienna, all of the
freedoms Cecy had grown up and joying were suddenly taken
away from her, and she was reinforced over and over
again by those around her with the idea that she
served the nation not with her thoughts or ideas, but
with her beauty, how she appeared to the people. And
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again not to provide a posthumous diagnosis or psychoanalysis, because
I find that largely unhelpful but personally, I can imagine
that the Empress found small comfort in her ability to
control one tiny piece of her existence when she was
so powerless everywhere else in her life. Elizabeth's obsession with quote,
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health and beauty would unfortunately only compound over time, But
after it became evident that she was pregnant with her
third child, she was forced to stop her excessive diets
and tight lacing, at least for the time being. To
her family, this pregnancy was welcome in more ways than one.
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In a letter from CC's mother to the Archduchess, Ludvika
confided that, in regards to CC's tight lacing quote, c
C has now become so reasonable and conscientious about lacing
and tight clothes, a matter that always worried and bothered me.
I myself believe that it can have an effect on
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one's mood. For an uncomfortable feeling like constant embarrassment may
truly put one out of sorts. In eighteen fifty eight,
Elizabeth finally gave the Empire and her mother in law
the air they had so long desired, Prince Rudolph of Austria,
and although the child was born healthy, the birth took
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a difficult toll on the Empress's body. Deprived of the
opportunity to breastfeed thanks to the Archduchess, who insisted that
it was only suitable for royalty to use wet nurses,
Elizabeth suffered from terrible fevers that caused chronic headaches and fatigue.
The recovery from the birth was so traumatic that the
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royal doctors discouraged Elizabeth from having any more children for
the sake of her own health. Following the death of
her first daughter, who succumbed to a fever at the
age of two, and the subsequent postpartum illness after the
birth of Prince Rudolph, Elizabeth's mental and physical health began
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to deteriorate rapidly. Her refusal to eat only exacerbated her
illness us, and after exhausting all of the other options,
Cecy was sent to Madeira as a last hail mary
attempt to alleviate her symptoms, though to almost everyone's shock,
upon landing on foreign soil, the Empress's condition actually began
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to improve. The fever stopped, her color returned, and Elizabeth's
general demeanor was brighter than it had been in years.
She spent her free time reading and writing, learning to
play new instruments, and taking up more than one new language.
She also wrote frequently to her family, including to the
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ex fiance of her younger sister, that man King Ludwig
the Second you might remember from our episode The Swan King.
Even though the marriage had fallen through between Ludwig and
Elizabeth's sister, most likely because of Ludwig's interest exclusively in
the opposite sex. Ludwig and Elizabeth were main close friends
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throughout their lives, cousins who shared a love of beauty
and who felt comfortable with one another, commiserating in their
desires for a more romantic and artistic way of life,
and talking about the ways they felt trapped within the
walls of their palaces. Perhaps it had been the warm air,
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or the proximity to the ocean, or the distance from
a certain mother in law that had caused the turnaround
in Elizabeth's health when she was in Madeira. But as
soon as she returned to Vienna in eighteen sixty one,
she almost immediately fell ill again. The root cause of
her ailments was becoming harder to ignore. The years away
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in Madeira had changed her. She was no longer the
timid teenager who had silently watched her life slipped through
her grasps and into the hands of her mother in law.
When she returned to Vienna, Elizabeth knew that there was
a power that she had. Even the Archduchess could not
argue with that. Elizabeth had performed her duty and provided
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an air to the Austrian throne. Now the crown needed
Elizabeth as a symbol for the nation, one that was bright, youthful,
but most importantly beautiful. Elizabeth could not perform her duties
while quite literally withering away in Vienna. Her intense shyness
wanted anything but to be put on public display. But
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her image was also her one ticket out of the
walls of Viennese court, and so, with a passing regret
at the thought of leaving her children, the Empress turned
her back on Vienna, never to call it home again.
If Elizabeth's fixation on beauty had begun as a simple snowball,
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she had by this point escalated it to the point
of bringing down an avalanche. The Empress had an endless
list of exceedingly intricate beauty regimes that make today's capitalist
regimen of beauty bloggers look like child's play. The hours
of daily exercise never ceased, even at the behest of
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multiple doctors who examined her throughout her life. In each
of her residences, she had the staff builled gymnasiums so
she would be able to exercise without interruption. As the
Empress grew older, she would require new ladies in waiting,
ones that were younger, for the ones that grew older
with her could no longer keep up with her rigorous training.
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Her extreme dieting was equally grueling. To maintain her emaciated figure,
the Empress took to only eating dairy products and inspecting
each of the cows she received milk from, requiring them
to travel with her wherever she went. Elizabeth would use
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nightly face masks of raw veal and strawberries and take
bath this in warm olive oil to keep her skin
smooth and without wrinkles. Elizabeth's niece Marie Larish described the
process by saying, quote, once the oil was almost boiling
and she barely escaped the dreadful death of many a
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Christian martyr. Often she slept with damp clothes over her
hips to maintain her slenderness, and for the same reason,
she often drank a dreadful mixture of five or six
egg whites with salt. Caesi's hair, which had grown over
time from a dark blonde to a rich chestnut, was
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the crowning glory of the Empress's appearance. Pun intended. It
fell in thick waves, said to have reached all the
way down to her ankles. She took the idea of
a wash day and truly ran with it. She had
a full day scheduled every month solely dedicated to washing
her hair, not to mention the daily three hours brushing
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and stiling necessary just to maintain it. In between those days.
Elizabeth was so obsessive that she would have her hairdressers
show her the brush that they used after they completed
their task, and she would inspect how much hair she
lost each session. One hairdresser took to hiding a strip
of adhesive to the inside of her clothes so that
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she could hide any rogue hairs that fell out as
she went. One of Elizabeth's hired scholars once commented, quote,
your Majesty wears her hair like a crown instead of
the crown. To this, Elizabeth replied, except that any other
crown is more easily laid aside. Elizabeth's beauty routines took
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up substantial portions of every day, but she didn't simply
sit there and watch the time pass. Instead, she used
the time to educate herself, hiring scholars and readers to
teach her several new languages, including Hungarian, which proved especially
useful after Austria was defeated by Prussia in the Seven
(36:09):
Weeks War. The loss had reawakened Hungary's desire for independence,
and Emperor Franz Joseph saw that the unrest would not
be quite as easily quelled as it had been when
he had begun to rule. However, this time though, he
had one thing in his arsenal that was new cc.
(36:30):
If there was one thing that the Hungarian people felt
more passionately about than their disdain for the Emperor, it
was their love for the Empress, and the feeling was mutual.
In the early years of their marriage, the couple had
visited Hungary during peacetime, the Empress had fallen completely in
love with the Hungarian people and their way of life.
(36:52):
Unlike life in the conservative Viennese court, the Hungarian aristocracy
was bold, confident in their diamonds added couture in a
way that would have been shunned back in Austria. Elizabeth
was smitten. After that early trip, CC would ask for
a Hungarian lady in waiting to accompany her on her travels.
(37:12):
She would also make an effort to learn the language, culture,
and history of the Hungarian people, and in return, the
people of Hungary were more amenable to the compromises that
would eventually give birth to the Austro Hungarian Empire. In
eighteen sixty seven, it was decided that Hungary would no
(37:34):
longer be ruled by Austria. It would be an independent kingdom,
albeit a kingdom where the king and queen were Franz
Joseph and Elizabeth. After their coronations, Elizabeth allowed herself to
become pregnant for the final time to solidify the compromise
and establish their joint rules securely over both nations. In
(37:57):
eighteen sixty eight, CC gave birth to her fourth child,
Marie Valerie, on Hungarian soil. Now thirty years old, Elizabeth
was no longer beholden to her overbearing mother in law,
and she was finally allowed to raise the child herself,
far away from the Viennese court. Predictably, Elizabeth nearly smothered
(38:21):
the child with all of the love and affection that
she had never been able to give her three older children.
The two living elder children of the Empress grew resentful
of their younger sister, who was the obvious favorite of
their mother. Rudolph especially would start to show extreme jealousy
towards his sister, until the young Murrae Valerie became afraid
(38:44):
of her older brother. Altogether, Elizabeth predictably sided with her youngest,
making her elder son hate his little sister all the more.
Despite her lacking relationship with Gizella and Rudolph. In Budapest,
Elizabeth was finally getting everything she had always wanted with
Marie Valerie. Unfortunately, for her, the hardest was still yet
(39:09):
to come. If you're a frequent listener of this podcast,
the name Prince Rudolph might sound a little familiar. He
was the subject of an episode we did on the
Maryling Incident, a murder suicide between Prince Rudolph and his
seventeen year old mistress Mary Vitt Sarah. If you want
(39:30):
to learn more, I highly suggest going back to that
episode for a listen for Elizabeth, the tragedy would forever
alter the course of her life. The days following the tragedy,
the Empress held herself together as best she could. She
kept her emotions buried under careful lock and key, a
practice that had been fortified by years of royal trained repression.
(39:55):
But once the tears began to fall, there was no
stopping them. The Archduchess, her mother in law, had long
since died by this point, but her talents were still
visible in Elizabeth's spiraling depression. After watching her only son
be interred in the Imperial crypt, she remarked to her
(40:15):
favorite daughter, quote, after now all these people who from
the hour of my arrival here have said so many
bad things about me, will have the satisfaction after all
of seeing me pass on without leaving a mark on Austria. Unsurprisingly,
the Viennese court found reason to blame Elizabeth for the
(40:37):
tragic suicide of her son. Some, like Elizabeth herself, blamed
the madness of the Vittelsbach line, while others sought to
scapegoat Elizabeth's travels and her dissociation from court, for they
neglected Rudolph to suffer enough to drive him to suicide
In the end, the reason didn't matter to Elizabeth. As
(41:00):
soon as her youngest daughter was married, Elizabeth, free from
any more familial responsibility, boarded a ship and spent the
rest of her days attempting to sail herself away from
a life she no longer wanted to live. The Empress
would spend the next nine years traveling from port to port,
(41:21):
her worsening depression making her impulsive and borderline self destructive.
In her travels. There were multiple reported incidents of her
attempting to break into random people's homes, prompting the Emperor
to write to his wife after an especially hostile being
ean niece, where she was almost chased from the establishment
(41:43):
by the old woman who lived there. Quote, I am
glad that your niece indigestion has passed so quickly, and
that you did not also get a beating from the
old witch. But sooner or later, that is exactly what
will happen, for one does not simply push one's way
uninvited into people's houses. The Empress's behavior didn't end there.
(42:05):
When the weather would shift at sea, Elizabeth would demand
to be tied to a chair on the deck amidst
the harsh wind, rain and thunder. I do this like Odysseus,
she would say, because the waves tempt me. Her erratic
behavior pushed the limits of what even royalty could feasibly
(42:26):
get away with, but that had probably been her aim.
For so long. Elizabeth had been told how to dress,
how to behave, how to simply exist in a world
that she had never wanted to be a part of.
Now she had no son, no future for her in Austria.
She was a woman with nothing to gain, no one
to please, but more importantly, nothing to lose. Who would
(42:50):
stop her? The answer would come nine years later on
the Quas de mont Blanc in Geneva, Switzerland, as Luigi
Lucheni sat outside the Hotel beau Ravage with a heavy
weight in his right sleeve, waiting for his target to emerge.
(43:11):
At one pm on September, the Empress left the Hotel
beau Ravage, dressed in all black, as she had every
day since her son's death. She began walking with her
lady in waiting the Countess stare down towards the ducks
to board their ship to Montroux. Despite the desperate please
(43:34):
from the Swiss police, Elizabeth refused to travel with a guard.
Her persistent shyness made her wary of causing a commotion
with added security, but even so, some historians remark that
she simply felt she had nothing to lose. The former
Empress Eugenie of France perhaps best described CC's final years quote,
(43:59):
it was as if one were going driving with a ghost,
for her spirit seemed to dwell in another world. Spotting
the two women, lu Chennie pushed his way through the crowd.
Once within reach of the Empress, he wasted no time
pushing her parasol the way to confirm her identity. Then
(44:19):
he plunged his makeshift dagger directly into Elizabeth's heart. A
collective shock rippled through the crowd as the Empress fell
to the ground. Onlookers attempted to help the women. The
porter from their hotel even came out to check on them,
urging the women to return to their rooms so the
Empress could be examined by a doctor. But by this
(44:42):
time Cecy had already managed to get back to her feet.
She had assumed a madman had just shoved her to
the ground, and desperate to minimize the amount of people
who could recognize her, Elizabeth simply thanked the scattered by
standards and let the countess lead her back down towards
the docks. It wouldn't be until Elizabeth collapsed on the
(45:04):
deck of the steamship that the countess would realize the
severity of the Empress's injuries. By the time the crew
managed to assemble their makeshift stretcher and carry her back
to the hotel, it was already too late. When the
doctor slid her vein, there was no blood. Elizabeth, the
Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary, was dead. How
(45:30):
can you kill a woman who has never hurt anyone?
Those were the words Franz Joseph would repeat to himself
in the days following his wife's murder. The Emperor's first
reaction to Elizabeth's death had been grief. He sat stunned
as the news washed over him. Aids attempted to relay
the information. There was a telegram from her lady in
(45:53):
waiting details on the transport of the body in autopsy,
and that is when grief warped into confusion. That confusion
then morphed into bitter relief, for in the years since
their son's death, Franz Joseph was no stranger to Elizabeth's
despondent view on life, which is why he was so
(46:16):
surprised to learn that his wife had not taken her
own life, but rather that someone had taken it from her.
His Empress his Cecy had been assassinated. That brief relief
that his wife was free now from the pain and
torture that she felt, boiled off quickly. Anger was all
(46:36):
that was left. How can you kill a woman who
has never hurt anyone? Only forty eight hours prior, the
young anarchist Luceni had not planned to kill the Empress
at all. In fact, he had only traveled to Geneva
because he had planned on killing the Duke of Orleans,
only to find that the Duke had left before Luccenni
(46:57):
had even arrived. It was only after newspapers picked up
on the Empress's whereabouts in Geneva that he decided to
alter his plans. The man was caught quickly after fleeing
the scenes, showing no remorse for his actions. I am
an anarchist by conviction, he told the Swiss police. I
came to Geneva to kill a sovereign, with the abject
(47:20):
of giving an example to those who suffer, and those
who do nothing to improve their social position. It did
not matter to me who the sovereign was whom I
should kill. It was not a woman I struck, but
an empress. It was a crown that I had in view.
He had requested the death penalty at his sentencing, but Switzerland,
(47:41):
having outlawed capital punishment, sentenced Luceni instead to life in prison.
He would hang himself in his cell eleven years later.
He spared no thought for the woman behind the title,
nor had he seen the frail ghost drifting beneath the parasol.
But then again, neither had Austria. When the Empress's body
(48:04):
arrived in Vienna five days later, arguments immediately followed over
the inscription on the coffin The original text read Elizabeth
Empress of Austria, which caused an outcry from the citizens
of Hungary, until the plaque was changed to read Elizabeth,
Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary. Even in death,
(48:25):
her life was still measured in the ways it affected others.
Before her death, Elizabeth had told Murray Valerie quote, and
when it came time for me to die, lay me
down at the ocean's shore. Of course, this last wish
was never carried out. Her body was laid to rest
in the Imperial Crypt, just as her sons had been
(48:47):
nine years earlier. In December, Franz Joseph celebrated the fifty
year jubilee of his reign, though celebrate might be the
wrong word. The country was still mourning the loss of
their empress, but their grief was also reserved for what
(49:07):
her death meant for Austria itself. The death of Prince
Rudolph marked the beginning of the end of the Austria
Hungarian Empire. The country was left without an heir, and
after the assassination of Elizabeth, their unshakable emperor was left
with another crack in his already crumbling foundation. The end
(49:31):
of the empire was within their sights, and Elizabeth's death
was just another nail in its coffin. The actual woman
inside the crypt was of little import In the years
to come. Elizabeth's death would be used as fuel to
fire propaganda during World War One. In a piece published
(49:51):
under the headline Revenge for Elizabeth, the author rights to
the Austrian forces being sent to the Italian front. Austria's
warriors feel the strength within them to defeat and smash
with iron hand the raised hand of the murderer. It
is Lucenese spirit which leads the army of our enemy.
(50:13):
May Elizabeth Spirit lead our spirit? From more propaganda to
Hollywood blockbusters. Portrayals of Elizabeth typically fall in one of
two categories. The first is the Empress as a regal
sovereign unfairly taken before her time after giving nothing but
(50:34):
love and tolerance in her rule. This version of the
Empress found its way into war propaganda, but also into
government affairs, such as the Order of Elizabeth, which Franz
Joseph created following her death to award women for acts
of religious and charitable work. The second version of Empress
(50:54):
Elizabeth is the legacy of CC. It's more mythologized version
of her life then inaccurate historical account. People portraying her
as a victim of circumstance, the tragic byproduct of a
system that took a bright young woman and tried to
shape her into what the Crown wanted. In that way,
(51:15):
people often equate Elizabeth with Princess Diana, the people's princess
of the twentieth century. I think it's a fair comparison.
But I also think that maybe people don't realize that
those comparisons also hinge on the most easily consumable narrative
versions of who those people actually were. The simple fact
(51:38):
is that most portrayals of Empress Cecy emphasized just how
much the myth relies on portraying her as an innocent victim.
The name Cecy itself evokes this idea of a young
girl full of hopes and dreams, a girl who's surprised
when she wins the heart of an emperor who's meant
to marry her sister. The name Elizabeth just doesn't elicit
(52:01):
the same emotional response. But then again, Elizabeth did not
exist for the entertainment of others. Her life can't be
wrapped up in a neat, little beau because she wasn't
the perfect sovereign, nor was she the humble, compassionate woman
of the people that she's often painted as. The truth is,
(52:21):
Elizabeth was a complex woman. She married an emperor at
sixteen and had three kids. Before the age of twenty one.
She was alone in a strange and overbearing, restrictive formal court.
She lost two of her children, but she also had
a genuine love for nature, for the places she visited,
(52:42):
and for the languages and cultures she immersed herself in.
In the final years of her life, she existed more
than she lived. She was drifting from port to port,
chasing the open air as it found her. After her death,
her daughter Marie Valerie found a small comfort amidst the
cruel chaos, saying quote, now it has happened as she
(53:05):
always wished it to happen, quickly, painlessly, without medical treatment,
without long, fearful days of worry for her dear loved ones.
On the deck of the steamship on Lake Geneva, Elizabeth
spent her final conscious moments staring at the open expanse
of the bright blue sky above her. But even as
(53:27):
the sky began to fade, the sound of waves, which
she had long associated with home, lulled her to sleep.
That's the tragic story of Empress Elizabeth of Austria. But
keep listening after a brief sponsor break, to hear a
(53:47):
little bit more about how Cecy's legacy continues to persist today.
In the one hundred and twenty years since Elizabeth's death,
there have been countless adaptations of the Empress's story across
stage and screen, but perhaps none quite as peculiar as
(54:11):
the two thousand fourteen short film for Chanel by Carl Lagerfeld,
titled Reincarnation. Lagerfeld, who coincidentally was born on September nine,
thirty three, exactly thirty five years after Elizabeth's assassination, is,
of course the famous designer and fashion icon associated with Chanel,
(54:34):
Fendi and strangely detachable collars. The short film centers around
the most famous portrait of Empress Cecy, painted by Xavier
Winterhunter in eighteen sixty five. It's a painting where diamond
stars adorned the Empress's intricately plated brown hair and her
voluminous star adorned white ballgown. Lagerfeld uses this portrait of
(54:58):
CC and the matching venture Halter portrait of Franz Joseph
with his iconic imperial beard and in full military regalia
as vehicles to tell the origin story of one of
Coco Chanel's designs through the lens of a lowly bellhop
and bar maiden employed in an Austrian hotel in the
early nineteen fifties. The opening shots of the film have
(55:23):
the portraits hanging in the lobby of the hotel. Only
inside the frames the faces are actually Pharrell Williams and
karadel Avine, who are dressed and posed identically as their
historical counterparts. As the hotel bustles to life, we see
Kara Quote reincarnated as a mischievous nineteen fifties bar maiden,
(55:46):
and Farrell reincarnated as a much more subdued bellhop who
spends the majority of the first act of the movie
pressing an elevator button and not showing emotion. It's only
when the film Reach is its second act that we
see the characters inside the portraits come to life. As
the clock strikes midnight, the portraits themselves suddenly lose their
(56:09):
subjects to the hotel lobby. The film proceeds to waltz
around the room, Cecie's flowing white gown fanning out from
her frame with each twirl, as shots cut to Farrell
singing along to this song he wrote especially for the film,
titled ce ce the World Get It See See Coco Chanel.
(56:32):
The lyrics are a play on Chanel's iconic logo with
the interlocking CS. He sings, could she be the girl
to help me see See the world, while a blonde
child in the background chants slightly menacingly, in my opinion,
see cee over and over again, in rhythm with the music.
(56:53):
What's interesting about the film, in my opinion, is Lagerfeld's
use of C C in an almost manic pixie dream
girl away, reducing her down to a character that exists
solely to push for El's character toward the story. Even
when Kara gets turned to sing her verse, it's still
in the third person and she's singing the same lines.
(57:17):
Could she be the girl to help you see see
the world? Not could I? But could she? If you
want to find out how the rest of the film ends,
you can find it for free on YouTube. But I
think in the context of telling CC's story and the
continuation of her legacy, I'll leave you with this parting thought.
(57:39):
Even as the child chants see c in the background,
even as Kara del Avine's presence on screen physically dwarfs
for Els by the sheer size of her gown, in
the end, CC's name and image are once again being
used to fit someone else's narrative. It's enough to make
(57:59):
you wonder would they even notice if the real CC
wasn't there at all. Noble Blood is a production of
I Heart Radio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Minky.
The show was written and hosted by Dani Schwartz. Executive
(58:22):
producers include Aaron Manky, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick. The
show is produced by rema Ill Kali and Trevor Young.
Noble Blood is on social media at Noble Blood Tales,
and you can learn more about the show over at
Noble blood Tales dot com. For more podcasts from I
Heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
(58:43):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. M
Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of I Heart Radio
and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Minky. Listener discretion is advised.
On September, the streets of Geneva bustled with their normal
(00:27):
Sunday fare. Families strolled down the waterfront along the western
bank of Lake Geneva, ready to spend the afternoon lounging
on park benches that overlooked the snowy caps of the Alps.
In the distance. Among the crowd, two women were walking
down the Quadumant Blanc to board a steamship set for
(00:48):
the nearby Swiss city of montrou from Afar. Nothing about
the pair was particularly remarkable. They were well dressed, one
in a light, modest dress, while the other was draped
dramatically in black fabric from head to toe, the soul
exception being the white parasol that she held low above
(01:11):
her head. But as the two women ascended the gangplank,
muffled whispers and subtle pointing fingers began pointing out the
cracks in their otherwise unremarkable facade. The taller of the
two women, the one in black, held her fan tight
enough for her knuckles to strain against the fabric. Her dress,
(01:33):
while undoubtedly expensive, was speckled with dust only somewhat hastily
wiped away. Her companion in the light colored dress talked
to her in hushed tones, scanning her body with an
expression of deep concern. As the ship left the port,
the whispers continued to spread across the deck, like smoke
(01:56):
trapped under glass. Tendrils slowly expanded until they clouded everything
else in sight. Did you see what happened down there?
That man came out of nowhere? He pushed that woman
in the fancy black dress to the ground. Who would
do such a thing? But all of the whisper stopped
when the woman in black collapsed on the ship's deck.
(02:20):
A moment of deafening silence gave way to a flurry
of panicked bodies, searching desperately for aid, but the ship
had already cast off into the harbor, and there was
no doctor on board. With shaking hands, the woman's companion
in white quickly cut open the woman's corset to help
her breathe, only to pull back in horror when she
(02:41):
found a small brown stain spreading across the woman's chest.
For Going any last attempts at anonymity. The woman in white,
the Countess are, called for the captain and demanded that
he turned the ship back to port. When as for
a reason why, the prominent noble lady told the captain
(03:04):
with all the remaining poise she had, that Elizabeth, the
Empress of Austria, had been stabbed. Officially, the Empress was
not in Geneva at all. She had been traveling under
the pseudonym Countess von Hohenems during her excursions for the
sake of privacy as well as safety. There had been
(03:27):
increased reports of assassination attempts on European monarchs in recent years,
and since the Empress refused to travel with a guard,
a gnome de geer was necessary for her travels. However,
just the previous day, a newspaper in Geneva had caught
wind of the ruse and published the Empress's whereabouts in
(03:48):
an article that found its way into the hands of
an Italian anarchist named Luigi Licheni. The following day, the
man sat stationed outside the Empress's hotel, a needle file
hidden in the right sleeve of his coat as he
waited for his moment to strike back aboard the ship.
(04:09):
The crew hastily scrambled to assemble a stretcher out of
spare oars and sails, while the captain slowly turned the
ship back to shore. On the deck floor, Elizabeth briefly
breached through the surface of consciousness and reached for her
lady in waiting. Are you in pain, the countess asked, no,
(04:30):
The Empress replied weakly. The attack had been so sudden,
the assailant vanishing so quickly, that Elizabeth had been unaware
that she had been stabbed at all. The autopsy would
later reveal Lucheni's weapon had pierced clear through the Empress's heart,
and although her famously tight corset had staunched the bleeding
(04:52):
long enough for the Empress to board the ship without
constant pressure on the wound, her heart began pumping blood
freely into her chest. From where she lay, Elizabeth stared
up at the sky, the same sky she used to
spend hours playing under as a child, the sky she's
so often wished she could run under instead of being
(05:14):
trapped behind palace walls, And as her heart beat its
way ever closer to death, she used her last moments
of consciousness to ask a simple question, a question she
had no doubt asked herself countless times throughout her life.
What has happened? I'm Dana Schwartz and this is noble Blood.
(05:42):
One quick warning just before we begin. This episode does
delve into a discussion about eating disorders, and so if
you're specifically sensitive to that sort of content, this might
not be the episode for you. Embrace Eliza Bith of Austria,
who was known to her friends and family as Ceci,
(06:04):
never wanted to make history. She was born Elizabeth Amlay
Eugenie on Christmas Eve eighteen thirty seven to her parents,
Princess Ludvika of Bavaria and Duke Maximilian Joseph. Princess Ludvika
was the sixth child of her father, the King of
Bavaria's second marriage, while Duke Maximilian was only a member
(06:29):
of a junior branch of the royal House of Wittelsbach
and so Ceci was born as a child into a
family with no formal ties to daily court life. That
normally would have allowed her to live a life without
the pressures of court, but her father took that casualness
one step further. In history texts, the characterizations of Duke
(06:52):
Maximilian range from childlike to eccentric, but to summarize him
in the simplest of terms, the Duke to play the
part of the cool dad. He had a love of
circuses and Bavarian folk music, and according to a self
published account of his time traveling in Egypt, he had
apparently ordered his servants to yodel while climbing the Great
(07:15):
Pyramids as if they were traversing through the Swiss Alps.
When the Duke was home, he would often sneak his
children out of their lessons so they could play with
the local peasant children around Postenhoffen Castle, and so Ceci
and her siblings spent their summers riding horses, swimming and
hiking across the Bavarian countryside, like a troop of Von
(07:37):
Trapped children, minus the Nazis and leader hosen made of curtains. Unfortunately, though,
this is about the time I should remind you that
this is a podcast called Noble Blood, and from here
Cecy's life begins to take some dark turns. But to
fully appreciate cc story, we need to zoom out a
(07:59):
little bit and understand the context for what Europe was
going through in the middle of the nineteenth century. Now,
it would be impossible for me to summarize the events
leading up to the mass political upheavals in eighteen forty eight,
all across Europe a series of collective and individual events
on a dozen different fronts. They are often lumped together
(08:21):
in Encyclopedia entries under the Revolutions of eighteen forty eight,
but for the purposes of this episode, here's what you
need to know. In the wake of the Industrial Revolution,
most of the jobs of the peasant working classes became obsolete.
Artisans were replaced with machinery, and poverty, combined with urbanization,
(08:45):
made tensions between the upper class, who wanted to preserve
their power and didn't want to be reminded that poor
people still existed, and the lower class, who wanted to
be given basic human rights and be represented by a
government who actually cared for their well being, rose to
a boiling point. All of this was occurring in a
(09:07):
climate in which the old ideas of the divine rights
of the monarchy were beginning to seem a little obsolete.
The legal and symbolic power of kings across Europe was dwindling.
Naturally in response, to the demands of the working class.
The Austrian government restricted freedom of speech, gatherings of university fraternities,
(09:31):
and then demanded absolute loyalty to the Austrian government. As
you can probably imagine, this didn't go well with the
working class, and after a series of appointments and resignations
following the resignation of the Foreign Minister Prince Metirik, Emperor
Ferdinand the First of Austria was forced to abdicate the throne.
(09:54):
The next in line for the throne was a man
named Archduke Franz Carl, who, at the urging of his wife,
would renounce his claim to the throne so that their son,
Friend Joseph, would become the new Emperor of Austria. Let
me say that one more time. Archduke Franz Carl gave
up the opportunity to be the Emperor of Austria because
(10:18):
his wife, Archduchess Sophie told him that he should take
a step back and let their son ascend to the throne.
Convincing her husband to renounce his title maybe the easiest
way to characterize what type of person that the Archduchess was.
Sophie knew that her husband would be a poor ruler.
(10:38):
But more than that, she knew that even though she
would technically be the Empress, she would be giving up
all of the power that she actually had over the
Empire in exchange for a symbolic crown. But if her
son were appointed, she would miss out on the title
of empress, But behind the scenes, her eighteen year old
emperor's son would be asking her counsel on all of
(11:01):
the important government matters. Sophie would hold more power pulling
the strings than being the party throwing marionette, and so
the young Emperor and his mother ascended the Austrian throne.
By eighteen fifty three, five years later, the Hungarian uprisings
(11:24):
had been long since quelled thanks to assistance from Russia,
but the approval of the young Emperor remained staggeringly low.
His indecision and ultimate refusal to offer aid to Russia
amidst the outbreak of the Crimean War left him in
murky territory internationally and on the home front, the working
(11:45):
people of Hungary had not forgotten their grievances against the
emperor just because a few years had passed. All in all,
it was obvious that Emperor Franz Carl needed a pr makeover,
and even that the young emperor was twenty three years
old and still single, the easiest way to fix his
(12:06):
image would be turning to an answer that still bolsters
royal approval ratings today, they would have a royal wedding.
After careful consideration, the Archduchess Sophie decided that aligning Austria
with another connection to Bavaria was the right step forward
(12:26):
for the Empire. That connection in question would take the
form of her sister Ludovica and Ludvika's eldest daughter Helene.
And this is how we find our way back to Cecy,
who in August eighteen fifty three found herself packed into
a carriage between her older sister and her mother and
(12:48):
route to Austria's imperial summer residence in body Chel to
confirm the engagement between Helene and Emperor Franz Carl. With
her older sister in age to the man in charge,
the young Elizabeth, then fifteen years old, was being brought
along to be presented as a possible match for the
(13:09):
Emperor's younger brother, Archduke Carl Ludwig. After all, why not
try to marry two of your daughters into royalty instead
of just the one, but that plan would quickly dissolve
into chaos the moment that Emperor Franz Joseph caught a
sight of young cc From here, historians have a few
(13:32):
differing opinions as to what exactly happened next. Some historians
described the meeting of Franz Joseph and the young Duchess
Elizabeth as an almost disneyesque fairytale romance. The way this
version goes, the young Emperor spot a beautiful young woman
(13:52):
running freely in a meadow, having stopped her carriage to
pick wild flowers. The Emperor sees this girl, her long,
dark blonde hair running in soft waves down past her shoulders,
and he falls instantly in love, only to then come
to realize later that the young woman was actually the
(14:13):
younger sister of his would be betrothed all along. In
another telling, Princess Ludovica suffered from a terrible migraine that
delayed their journey, a headache made worse by the fact
that when they did finally arrive in Friends Joseph's court,
albeit a bit tardy, their luggage had not, meaning that
(14:34):
they had to meet the Emperor wearing what they had
traveled in. That would have been bad enough, but the
trio was dressed all in mourning for an aunt who
had recently passed away, And so the three women met
the Emperor while wearing black conservative dresses, certainly not the
gowns that were specifically made to impress royalty. And while
(14:57):
the black maid, Helene, with her dark brown air, look
pale almost to the point of being sickly, Elizabeth's dark
blonde hair and youthful complexion was said to have glowed
in comparison. But regardless of which of the versions of
the first meeting between Franz Joseph and Cecy actually happened,
(15:17):
the results were indisputable. Elizabeth, the younger sister, was the
Emperor's clear choice for a bride. Sophie, the Emperor's mother,
recounted an exchange with her son in her diary. She
had asked, don't you think that Helene is clever? That
she has a beautiful and slender figure. Obviously she was
(15:40):
desperately trying to salvage what was left of the planned engagement. Well, yes,
a little grave and quiet, certainly pleasant and nice, yes,
But cc the Emberor's tone brightened after just speaking her name. Cecy.
Such loveliness, such exuberance like a little girl's, and yet
(16:00):
so sweet. Predictably, arch Duchess Sophie was livid. She had
arranged a perfectly suitable marriage with Helene, the obedient daughter
of her timid sister, who was almost guaranteed to do
anything the Archduchess asked of her. But Elizabeth. Elizabeth was young,
(16:21):
only fifteen. She had not been given the proper schooling
to be an empress. She was a headstrong, freethinking young
woman who rode horses instead of attending lessons. She did
not fit into the carefully carved space Sophie had whittled
into her master plan for her son's reign in the
(16:43):
years to come. Cc and the Archduchess would rarely agree
on anything, but in this decision they were both equally troubled.
Elizabeth could not imagine what the Emperor had seen in
her that would make him choose her over her sister,
But beyond that, she could see the writing on the wall, ironically,
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the same thing Archduchess Sophie herself had realized when she
convinced her husband to see the throne to their son.
Becoming an empress was in honor, to be sure, but
not the life that a smart woman would choose for
herself if her goal was happiness. To her aunt and
future mother in law, Sophie Cecy lamented quote, I love
(17:28):
the Emperor so much if only you were not the Emperor.
The young Elizabeth knew that in accepting Franz Joseph's proposal,
she was accepting an entirely new way of life, one
without the anonymity or freedom that she had been allowed
during her childhood in Possenhofen. But ultimately there was no choice.
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In the words of her mother, who I imagine was
just relieved that one of her daughters had proved suitable,
one does not send the Emperor of Austria packing. If
there was a honeymoon phase for the happy couple, it
didn't last long. Almost immediately Elizabeth was put into lessons,
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each second of her day meticulously planned and accounted for
as she was quickly brought into the fold of Austrian aristocracy.
In the movie version, this would be the moment that
we get a quick montage sequence cutting between her awkwardly
balancing books on her head and earning a light slap
on her wrist for using the wrong spoon during a
(18:33):
salad course. But unfortunately for Elizabeth, her life was not
a coming of age romantic comedy. Instead, her lessons consisted
of unlearning the parts of her childhood that she had
valued the most. She was no longer allowed to associate
with peasants or servants, no longer allowed to ride freely
(18:54):
across the grounds. She was taught the latest dances in court, and,
after a not so subtle remark made by the Archduchess,
her new mother in law, a tutorial on how to
properly brush her teeth. Friends. Joseph, her new husband, remained
head over heels for his new bride, but he had
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an empire to run, and Elizabeth found herself increasingly alone
in a palace that felt more like a museum than
a home. The Archduchess hounded her every move, forbidding her
to confide in anyone about her homesickness or her growing depression.
After all, no one could know that the sovereign was unhappy.
(19:37):
In a poem dated just weeks after their wedding, seventeen
year old Elizabeth wrote, quote, oh had I but never
left the path that would have led me to freedom,
I have awakened in a dungeon with chains on my hands.
She became resentful of her new family. She was treated
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more like a child old than a spouse. When it
came to diplomatic matters. She was otherwise ignored unless she
needed to be paraded around court. Cecy's depression only worsened
upon the realization of another complication. Barely a month after
the wedding, she was pregnant. The country was overjoyed, a
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new air, a new hope for Austria, But as Elizabeth's
stomach grew, the light inside her diminished. As difficult as
the early months of pregnancy typically are for any new mother,
Cecy had the compounded stress of representing a nation to
add to the morning sickness. The more she began to show,
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the more Archduchess Sophie forcibly paraded Elizabeth to the public.
Having seemingly lost the freedom even to control her own body,
Elizabeth grew exasperated with her mother in law, complaining to
a lady in way quote, she dragged me out into
the garden and declared that it was my duty to
show off my stomach so that people could see that
(21:07):
I really was pregnant. It was awful. Instead, it seemed
to me a blessing to be alone and able to weep.
The commoners continued to love the humble young Empress, but
among the aristocracy, Austria Shining Star was losing her luster.
But they had once thought of as charming, devolved into
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ill mannered or even simple minded, as the court lost
patience with each of Elizabeth's social blunders. Producing an heir
to the throne may have given Elizabeth some political sway
over those in court, but in March eighteen fifty CC
gave birth to a daughter. The child had barely left
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her body before Elizabeth was cast aside. Again. Elizabeth was
even denied the right to name her own child. The
responsibility was instead taken up by arch Duchess Sophie, who,
after careful consideration, named the little baby Sophie. To absolutely
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no one's surprised the arch Duchess didn't end her control
there before little Sophie was even born. Elizabeth's mother in
law had arranged for the nursery to be placed directly
adjacent to her apartments, so that if the Empress wanted
to visit her own daughter, she would have to do
so through her mother in law. Just a little over
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a year later, Elizabeth gave birth to her second daughter, Gisella,
and for the second time the heads at court saw
a daughter and it turned away in disappointment. The desperation
for an heir to the Austrian throne was great, and
Elizabeth was feeling the burden tenfold. It's rumored that after
(22:57):
the birth of Gisella, a pam flit mysteriously made it
onto CC's bedside table, outlining the importance of providing an
heir to the nation and the perilous position that she
would be in if she were unable to perform her duties.
It was never confirmed where the pamphlet came from, but
(23:19):
all signs pointed to a certain mother in law, the
woman who held the key to see C's children's nursery.
Emperor Franz Joseph, being accustomed to his mother's specific breed
of tyranny, didn't see any issues in any of Elizabeth's grievances.
Cecy had been brought up in a world where status
(23:41):
had remained an abstract concept. But to Franz Joseph, whose
mother had raised him to be ready to lead a
nation by the age of eighteen. Titles and power were
in all too reel part of his world. They were
his world, the very structure that held his reality a
oft Cecy's complaints were as abstract to him as wanting
(24:05):
to spend childhood summers befriending local peasant children around posting
off in castle. So rather than offer any real solutions,
Emperor Franz Joseph reminded his wife of duties that she
could be fulfilling for the country. In one letter, he wrote, quote,
I beg you for the love you bear me. Pull
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yourself together, show yourself in the city, sometimes visit institutions.
You have no idea what a great help you can
be to me in this way. It will put heart
into the people in Vienna and keep up the good
spirit I require so urgently and so c. C. Did.
The Austrian public fell more in love with their empress
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as she used her free time to visit the hospitals
of wounded soldiers and donate to institutions for the mentally ill.
The court quietly disapproved of her new social ventures, as
they all but eliminated her distance from the peasant classes,
but their scrutiny did not burn as badly as it
had from within the palace walls. It was also during
(25:11):
this period, though, that Elizabeth's obsession over her appearance would
begin to take a clear hold over her life. Cecy
had always been slender, accentuated further by her height five eight,
especially tall for a woman at the time, but after
the birth of her first child, Elizabeth began to regularly
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practice what she called quote starvation cures to bring her
weight down to what she considered a normal quote unquote
one hundred and ten pounds. In addition to her extreme
diet and exercise during the periods in between her pregnancies,
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Elizabeth also took up the practice of tight lacing, which,
as it sounds, can sit of tying the laces of
her corset so tightly that the Empress would be short
of breath. The term anorexia as we know it would
not be coined until eighteen seventy three, but Elizabeth's consistent
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fasting and almost compulsive need to exercise has often led
to posthumous diagnoses that would indirectly come to similar conclusions.
In one instance, her quote starvation diet exacerbated her already
declining health until she was diagnosed with quote green sickness
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otherwise known as anemia, which left her constantly exhausted. One
physician would note, quote in the otherwise healthy woman, I
found fairly pronounced swelling, especially in the ankles. He would
go on to describe her condition as something rare for
a woman of her position, as it had not become
(26:56):
quote regrettably notorious until the war. He called it a
deema of hunger. From such a young age, Cecy faced
scrutiny of her body on a global scale. After all,
at the age of fifteen, her life was forever changed
after the Emperor of Austria was moved more by her
(27:17):
beauty than that of her sister. As soon as she
moved into the Imperial Palace in Vienna, all of the
freedoms Cecy had grown up and joying were suddenly taken
away from her, and she was reinforced over and over
again by those around her with the idea that she
served the nation not with her thoughts or ideas, but
with her beauty, how she appeared to the people. And
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again not to provide a posthumous diagnosis or psychoanalysis, because
I find that largely unhelpful but personally, I can imagine
that the Empress found small comfort in her ability to
control one tiny piece of her existence when she was
so powerless everywhere else in her life. Elizabeth's obsession with quote,
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health and beauty would unfortunately only compound over time, But
after it became evident that she was pregnant with her
third child, she was forced to stop her excessive diets
and tight lacing, at least for the time being. To
her family, this pregnancy was welcome in more ways than one.
(28:27):
In a letter from CC's mother to the Archduchess, Ludvika
confided that, in regards to CC's tight lacing quote, c
C has now become so reasonable and conscientious about lacing
and tight clothes, a matter that always worried and bothered me.
I myself believe that it can have an effect on
(28:47):
one's mood. For an uncomfortable feeling like constant embarrassment may
truly put one out of sorts. In eighteen fifty eight,
Elizabeth finally gave the Empire and her mother in law
the air they had so long desired, Prince Rudolph of Austria,
and although the child was born healthy, the birth took
(29:10):
a difficult toll on the Empress's body. Deprived of the
opportunity to breastfeed thanks to the Archduchess, who insisted that
it was only suitable for royalty to use wet nurses,
Elizabeth suffered from terrible fevers that caused chronic headaches and fatigue.
The recovery from the birth was so traumatic that the
(29:32):
royal doctors discouraged Elizabeth from having any more children for
the sake of her own health. Following the death of
her first daughter, who succumbed to a fever at the
age of two, and the subsequent postpartum illness after the
birth of Prince Rudolph, Elizabeth's mental and physical health began
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to deteriorate rapidly. Her refusal to eat only exacerbated her
illness us, and after exhausting all of the other options,
Cecy was sent to Madeira as a last hail mary
attempt to alleviate her symptoms, though to almost everyone's shock,
upon landing on foreign soil, the Empress's condition actually began
(30:17):
to improve. The fever stopped, her color returned, and Elizabeth's
general demeanor was brighter than it had been in years.
She spent her free time reading and writing, learning to
play new instruments, and taking up more than one new language.
She also wrote frequently to her family, including to the
(30:38):
ex fiance of her younger sister, that man King Ludwig
the Second you might remember from our episode The Swan King.
Even though the marriage had fallen through between Ludwig and
Elizabeth's sister, most likely because of Ludwig's interest exclusively in
the opposite sex. Ludwig and Elizabeth were main close friends
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throughout their lives, cousins who shared a love of beauty
and who felt comfortable with one another, commiserating in their
desires for a more romantic and artistic way of life,
and talking about the ways they felt trapped within the
walls of their palaces. Perhaps it had been the warm air,
(31:21):
or the proximity to the ocean, or the distance from
a certain mother in law that had caused the turnaround
in Elizabeth's health when she was in Madeira. But as
soon as she returned to Vienna in eighteen sixty one,
she almost immediately fell ill again. The root cause of
her ailments was becoming harder to ignore. The years away
(31:45):
in Madeira had changed her. She was no longer the
timid teenager who had silently watched her life slipped through
her grasps and into the hands of her mother in law.
When she returned to Vienna, Elizabeth knew that there was
a power that she had. Even the Archduchess could not
argue with that. Elizabeth had performed her duty and provided
(32:06):
an air to the Austrian throne. Now the crown needed
Elizabeth as a symbol for the nation, one that was bright, youthful,
but most importantly beautiful. Elizabeth could not perform her duties
while quite literally withering away in Vienna. Her intense shyness
wanted anything but to be put on public display. But
(32:28):
her image was also her one ticket out of the
walls of Viennese court, and so, with a passing regret
at the thought of leaving her children, the Empress turned
her back on Vienna, never to call it home again.
If Elizabeth's fixation on beauty had begun as a simple snowball,
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she had by this point escalated it to the point
of bringing down an avalanche. The Empress had an endless
list of exceedingly intricate beauty regimes that make today's capitalist
regimen of beauty bloggers look like child's play. The hours
of daily exercise never ceased, even at the behest of
(33:11):
multiple doctors who examined her throughout her life. In each
of her residences, she had the staff builled gymnasiums so
she would be able to exercise without interruption. As the
Empress grew older, she would require new ladies in waiting,
ones that were younger, for the ones that grew older
with her could no longer keep up with her rigorous training.
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Her extreme dieting was equally grueling. To maintain her emaciated figure,
the Empress took to only eating dairy products and inspecting
each of the cows she received milk from, requiring them
to travel with her wherever she went. Elizabeth would use
(33:54):
nightly face masks of raw veal and strawberries and take
bath this in warm olive oil to keep her skin
smooth and without wrinkles. Elizabeth's niece Marie Larish described the
process by saying, quote, once the oil was almost boiling
and she barely escaped the dreadful death of many a
(34:16):
Christian martyr. Often she slept with damp clothes over her
hips to maintain her slenderness, and for the same reason,
she often drank a dreadful mixture of five or six
egg whites with salt. Caesi's hair, which had grown over
time from a dark blonde to a rich chestnut, was
(34:36):
the crowning glory of the Empress's appearance. Pun intended. It
fell in thick waves, said to have reached all the
way down to her ankles. She took the idea of
a wash day and truly ran with it. She had
a full day scheduled every month solely dedicated to washing
her hair, not to mention the daily three hours brushing
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and stiling necessary just to maintain it. In between those days.
Elizabeth was so obsessive that she would have her hairdressers
show her the brush that they used after they completed
their task, and she would inspect how much hair she
lost each session. One hairdresser took to hiding a strip
of adhesive to the inside of her clothes so that
(35:23):
she could hide any rogue hairs that fell out as
she went. One of Elizabeth's hired scholars once commented, quote,
your Majesty wears her hair like a crown instead of
the crown. To this, Elizabeth replied, except that any other
crown is more easily laid aside. Elizabeth's beauty routines took
(35:47):
up substantial portions of every day, but she didn't simply
sit there and watch the time pass. Instead, she used
the time to educate herself, hiring scholars and readers to
teach her several new languages, including Hungarian, which proved especially
useful after Austria was defeated by Prussia in the Seven
(36:09):
Weeks War. The loss had reawakened Hungary's desire for independence,
and Emperor Franz Joseph saw that the unrest would not
be quite as easily quelled as it had been when
he had begun to rule. However, this time though, he
had one thing in his arsenal that was new cc.
(36:30):
If there was one thing that the Hungarian people felt
more passionately about than their disdain for the Emperor, it
was their love for the Empress, and the feeling was mutual.
In the early years of their marriage, the couple had
visited Hungary during peacetime, the Empress had fallen completely in
love with the Hungarian people and their way of life.
(36:52):
Unlike life in the conservative Viennese court, the Hungarian aristocracy
was bold, confident in their diamonds added couture in a
way that would have been shunned back in Austria. Elizabeth
was smitten. After that early trip, CC would ask for
a Hungarian lady in waiting to accompany her on her travels.
(37:12):
She would also make an effort to learn the language, culture,
and history of the Hungarian people, and in return, the
people of Hungary were more amenable to the compromises that
would eventually give birth to the Austro Hungarian Empire. In
eighteen sixty seven, it was decided that Hungary would no
(37:34):
longer be ruled by Austria. It would be an independent kingdom,
albeit a kingdom where the king and queen were Franz
Joseph and Elizabeth. After their coronations, Elizabeth allowed herself to
become pregnant for the final time to solidify the compromise
and establish their joint rules securely over both nations. In
(37:57):
eighteen sixty eight, CC gave birth to her fourth child,
Marie Valerie, on Hungarian soil. Now thirty years old, Elizabeth
was no longer beholden to her overbearing mother in law,
and she was finally allowed to raise the child herself,
far away from the Viennese court. Predictably, Elizabeth nearly smothered
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the child with all of the love and affection that
she had never been able to give her three older children.
The two living elder children of the Empress grew resentful
of their younger sister, who was the obvious favorite of
their mother. Rudolph especially would start to show extreme jealousy
towards his sister, until the young Murrae Valerie became afraid
(38:44):
of her older brother. Altogether, Elizabeth predictably sided with her youngest,
making her elder son hate his little sister all the more.
Despite her lacking relationship with Gizella and Rudolph. In Budapest,
Elizabeth was finally getting everything she had always wanted with
Marie Valerie. Unfortunately, for her, the hardest was still yet
(39:09):
to come. If you're a frequent listener of this podcast,
the name Prince Rudolph might sound a little familiar. He
was the subject of an episode we did on the
Maryling Incident, a murder suicide between Prince Rudolph and his
seventeen year old mistress Mary Vitt Sarah. If you want
(39:30):
to learn more, I highly suggest going back to that
episode for a listen for Elizabeth, the tragedy would forever
alter the course of her life. The days following the tragedy,
the Empress held herself together as best she could. She
kept her emotions buried under careful lock and key, a
practice that had been fortified by years of royal trained repression.
(39:55):
But once the tears began to fall, there was no
stopping them. The Archduchess, her mother in law, had long
since died by this point, but her talents were still
visible in Elizabeth's spiraling depression. After watching her only son
be interred in the Imperial crypt, she remarked to her
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favorite daughter, quote, after now all these people who from
the hour of my arrival here have said so many
bad things about me, will have the satisfaction after all
of seeing me pass on without leaving a mark on Austria. Unsurprisingly,
the Viennese court found reason to blame Elizabeth for the
(40:37):
tragic suicide of her son. Some, like Elizabeth herself, blamed
the madness of the Vittelsbach line, while others sought to
scapegoat Elizabeth's travels and her dissociation from court, for they
neglected Rudolph to suffer enough to drive him to suicide
In the end, the reason didn't matter to Elizabeth. As
(41:00):
soon as her youngest daughter was married, Elizabeth, free from
any more familial responsibility, boarded a ship and spent the
rest of her days attempting to sail herself away from
a life she no longer wanted to live. The Empress
would spend the next nine years traveling from port to port,
(41:21):
her worsening depression making her impulsive and borderline self destructive.
In her travels. There were multiple reported incidents of her
attempting to break into random people's homes, prompting the Emperor
to write to his wife after an especially hostile being
ean niece, where she was almost chased from the establishment
(41:43):
by the old woman who lived there. Quote, I am
glad that your niece indigestion has passed so quickly, and
that you did not also get a beating from the
old witch. But sooner or later, that is exactly what
will happen, for one does not simply push one's way
uninvited into people's houses. The Empress's behavior didn't end there.
(42:05):
When the weather would shift at sea, Elizabeth would demand
to be tied to a chair on the deck amidst
the harsh wind, rain and thunder. I do this like Odysseus,
she would say, because the waves tempt me. Her erratic
behavior pushed the limits of what even royalty could feasibly
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get away with, but that had probably been her aim.
For so long. Elizabeth had been told how to dress,
how to behave, how to simply exist in a world
that she had never wanted to be a part of.
Now she had no son, no future for her in Austria.
She was a woman with nothing to gain, no one
to please, but more importantly, nothing to lose. Who would
(42:50):
stop her? The answer would come nine years later on
the Quas de mont Blanc in Geneva, Switzerland, as Luigi
Lucheni sat outside the Hotel beau Ravage with a heavy
weight in his right sleeve, waiting for his target to emerge.
(43:11):
At one pm on September, the Empress left the Hotel
beau Ravage, dressed in all black, as she had every
day since her son's death. She began walking with her
lady in waiting the Countess stare down towards the ducks
to board their ship to Montroux. Despite the desperate please
(43:34):
from the Swiss police, Elizabeth refused to travel with a guard.
Her persistent shyness made her wary of causing a commotion
with added security, but even so, some historians remark that
she simply felt she had nothing to lose. The former
Empress Eugenie of France perhaps best described CC's final years quote,
(43:59):
it was as if one were going driving with a ghost,
for her spirit seemed to dwell in another world. Spotting
the two women, lu Chennie pushed his way through the crowd.
Once within reach of the Empress, he wasted no time
pushing her parasol the way to confirm her identity. Then
(44:19):
he plunged his makeshift dagger directly into Elizabeth's heart. A
collective shock rippled through the crowd as the Empress fell
to the ground. Onlookers attempted to help the women. The
porter from their hotel even came out to check on them,
urging the women to return to their rooms so the
Empress could be examined by a doctor. But by this
(44:42):
time Cecy had already managed to get back to her feet.
She had assumed a madman had just shoved her to
the ground, and desperate to minimize the amount of people
who could recognize her, Elizabeth simply thanked the scattered by
standards and let the countess lead her back down towards
the docks. It wouldn't be until Elizabeth collapsed on the
(45:04):
deck of the steamship that the countess would realize the
severity of the Empress's injuries. By the time the crew
managed to assemble their makeshift stretcher and carry her back
to the hotel, it was already too late. When the
doctor slid her vein, there was no blood. Elizabeth, the
Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary, was dead. How
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can you kill a woman who has never hurt anyone?
Those were the words Franz Joseph would repeat to himself
in the days following his wife's murder. The Emperor's first
reaction to Elizabeth's death had been grief. He sat stunned
as the news washed over him. Aids attempted to relay
the information. There was a telegram from her lady in
(45:53):
waiting details on the transport of the body in autopsy,
and that is when grief warped into confusion. That confusion
then morphed into bitter relief, for in the years since
their son's death, Franz Joseph was no stranger to Elizabeth's
despondent view on life, which is why he was so
(46:16):
surprised to learn that his wife had not taken her
own life, but rather that someone had taken it from her.
His Empress his Cecy had been assassinated. That brief relief
that his wife was free now from the pain and
torture that she felt, boiled off quickly. Anger was all
(46:36):
that was left. How can you kill a woman who
has never hurt anyone? Only forty eight hours prior, the
young anarchist Luceni had not planned to kill the Empress
at all. In fact, he had only traveled to Geneva
because he had planned on killing the Duke of Orleans,
only to find that the Duke had left before Luccenni
(46:57):
had even arrived. It was only after newspapers picked up
on the Empress's whereabouts in Geneva that he decided to
alter his plans. The man was caught quickly after fleeing
the scenes, showing no remorse for his actions. I am
an anarchist by conviction, he told the Swiss police. I
came to Geneva to kill a sovereign, with the abject
(47:20):
of giving an example to those who suffer, and those
who do nothing to improve their social position. It did
not matter to me who the sovereign was whom I
should kill. It was not a woman I struck, but
an empress. It was a crown that I had in view.
He had requested the death penalty at his sentencing, but Switzerland,
(47:41):
having outlawed capital punishment, sentenced Luceni instead to life in prison.
He would hang himself in his cell eleven years later.
He spared no thought for the woman behind the title,
nor had he seen the frail ghost drifting beneath the parasol.
But then again, neither had Austria. When the Empress's body
(48:04):
arrived in Vienna five days later, arguments immediately followed over
the inscription on the coffin The original text read Elizabeth
Empress of Austria, which caused an outcry from the citizens
of Hungary, until the plaque was changed to read Elizabeth,
Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary. Even in death,
(48:25):
her life was still measured in the ways it affected others.
Before her death, Elizabeth had told Murray Valerie quote, and
when it came time for me to die, lay me
down at the ocean's shore. Of course, this last wish
was never carried out. Her body was laid to rest
in the Imperial Crypt, just as her sons had been
(48:47):
nine years earlier. In December, Franz Joseph celebrated the fifty
year jubilee of his reign, though celebrate might be the
wrong word. The country was still mourning the loss of
their empress, but their grief was also reserved for what
(49:07):
her death meant for Austria itself. The death of Prince
Rudolph marked the beginning of the end of the Austria
Hungarian Empire. The country was left without an heir, and
after the assassination of Elizabeth, their unshakable emperor was left
with another crack in his already crumbling foundation. The end
(49:31):
of the empire was within their sights, and Elizabeth's death
was just another nail in its coffin. The actual woman
inside the crypt was of little import In the years
to come. Elizabeth's death would be used as fuel to
fire propaganda during World War One. In a piece published
(49:51):
under the headline Revenge for Elizabeth, the author rights to
the Austrian forces being sent to the Italian front. Austria's
warriors feel the strength within them to defeat and smash
with iron hand the raised hand of the murderer. It
is Lucenese spirit which leads the army of our enemy.
(50:13):
May Elizabeth Spirit lead our spirit? From more propaganda to
Hollywood blockbusters. Portrayals of Elizabeth typically fall in one of
two categories. The first is the Empress as a regal
sovereign unfairly taken before her time after giving nothing but
(50:34):
love and tolerance in her rule. This version of the
Empress found its way into war propaganda, but also into
government affairs, such as the Order of Elizabeth, which Franz
Joseph created following her death to award women for acts
of religious and charitable work. The second version of Empress
(50:54):
Elizabeth is the legacy of CC. It's more mythologized version
of her life then inaccurate historical account. People portraying her
as a victim of circumstance, the tragic byproduct of a
system that took a bright young woman and tried to
shape her into what the Crown wanted. In that way,
(51:15):
people often equate Elizabeth with Princess Diana, the people's princess
of the twentieth century. I think it's a fair comparison.
But I also think that maybe people don't realize that
those comparisons also hinge on the most easily consumable narrative
versions of who those people actually were. The simple fact
(51:38):
is that most portrayals of Empress Cecy emphasized just how
much the myth relies on portraying her as an innocent victim.
The name Cecy itself evokes this idea of a young
girl full of hopes and dreams, a girl who's surprised
when she wins the heart of an emperor who's meant
to marry her sister. The name Elizabeth just doesn't elicit
(52:01):
the same emotional response. But then again, Elizabeth did not
exist for the entertainment of others. Her life can't be
wrapped up in a neat, little beau because she wasn't
the perfect sovereign, nor was she the humble, compassionate woman
of the people that she's often painted as. The truth is,
(52:21):
Elizabeth was a complex woman. She married an emperor at
sixteen and had three kids. Before the age of twenty one.
She was alone in a strange and overbearing, restrictive formal court.
She lost two of her children, but she also had
a genuine love for nature, for the places she visited,
(52:42):
and for the languages and cultures she immersed herself in.
In the final years of her life, she existed more
than she lived. She was drifting from port to port,
chasing the open air as it found her. After her death,
her daughter Marie Valerie found a small comfort amidst the
cruel chaos, saying quote, now it has happened as she
(53:05):
always wished it to happen, quickly, painlessly, without medical treatment,
without long, fearful days of worry for her dear loved ones.
On the deck of the steamship on Lake Geneva, Elizabeth
spent her final conscious moments staring at the open expanse
of the bright blue sky above her. But even as
(53:27):
the sky began to fade, the sound of waves, which
she had long associated with home, lulled her to sleep.
That's the tragic story of Empress Elizabeth of Austria. But
keep listening after a brief sponsor break, to hear a
(53:47):
little bit more about how Cecy's legacy continues to persist today.
In the one hundred and twenty years since Elizabeth's death,
there have been countless adaptations of the Empress's story across
stage and screen, but perhaps none quite as peculiar as
(54:11):
the two thousand fourteen short film for Chanel by Carl Lagerfeld,
titled Reincarnation. Lagerfeld, who coincidentally was born on September nine,
thirty three, exactly thirty five years after Elizabeth's assassination, is,
of course the famous designer and fashion icon associated with Chanel,
(54:34):
Fendi and strangely detachable collars. The short film centers around
the most famous portrait of Empress Cecy, painted by Xavier
Winterhunter in eighteen sixty five. It's a painting where diamond
stars adorned the Empress's intricately plated brown hair and her
voluminous star adorned white ballgown. Lagerfeld uses this portrait of
(54:58):
CC and the matching venture Halter portrait of Franz Joseph
with his iconic imperial beard and in full military regalia
as vehicles to tell the origin story of one of
Coco Chanel's designs through the lens of a lowly bellhop
and bar maiden employed in an Austrian hotel in the
early nineteen fifties. The opening shots of the film have
(55:23):
the portraits hanging in the lobby of the hotel. Only
inside the frames the faces are actually Pharrell Williams and
karadel Avine, who are dressed and posed identically as their
historical counterparts. As the hotel bustles to life, we see
Kara Quote reincarnated as a mischievous nineteen fifties bar maiden,
(55:46):
and Farrell reincarnated as a much more subdued bellhop who
spends the majority of the first act of the movie
pressing an elevator button and not showing emotion. It's only
when the film Reach is its second act that we
see the characters inside the portraits come to life. As
the clock strikes midnight, the portraits themselves suddenly lose their
(56:09):
subjects to the hotel lobby. The film proceeds to waltz
around the room, Cecie's flowing white gown fanning out from
her frame with each twirl, as shots cut to Farrell
singing along to this song he wrote especially for the film,
titled ce ce the World Get It See See Coco Chanel.
(56:32):
The lyrics are a play on Chanel's iconic logo with
the interlocking CS. He sings, could she be the girl
to help me see See the world, while a blonde
child in the background chants slightly menacingly, in my opinion,
see cee over and over again, in rhythm with the music.
(56:53):
What's interesting about the film, in my opinion, is Lagerfeld's
use of C C in an almost manic pixie dream
girl away, reducing her down to a character that exists
solely to push for El's character toward the story. Even
when Kara gets turned to sing her verse, it's still
in the third person and she's singing the same lines.
(57:17):
Could she be the girl to help you see see
the world? Not could I? But could she? If you
want to find out how the rest of the film ends,
you can find it for free on YouTube. But I
think in the context of telling CC's story and the
continuation of her legacy, I'll leave you with this parting thought.
(57:39):
Even as the child chants see c in the background,
even as Kara del Avine's presence on screen physically dwarfs
for Els by the sheer size of her gown, in
the end, CC's name and image are once again being
used to fit someone else's narrative. It's enough to make
(57:59):
you wonder would they even notice if the real CC
wasn't there at all. Noble Blood is a production of
I Heart Radio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Minky.
The show was written and hosted by Dani Schwartz. Executive
(58:22):
producers include Aaron Manky, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick. The
show is produced by rema Ill Kali and Trevor Young.
Noble Blood is on social media at Noble Blood Tales,
and you can learn more about the show over at
Noble blood Tales dot com. For more podcasts from I
Heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
(58:43):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. M
Host
Dana Schwartz
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