Word: franz
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Franzi and Sisi's affair began like a fairy tale. Franz Joseph had been Austria's Emperor since he was 18. Now he was 23, and his managing mother Sophie thought it high time for him to marry. Sophie and her sister Ludovika, an ambitious German duchess, put their heads together, agreed that young Franz could do much worse than wed Ludovika's eldest daughter, Helen. In the ensuing royal houseparty to bring the nervous pair together, this well-laid plan went sadly agley. Helen was mightily pleased with Franzi, but Franzi had no eyes for anyone...
...them might affect the child's looks. When Sisi's baby daughter was born, Sophie immediately snatched her away, kept her. "Give her the child?" said Sophie. "When she cannot even discipline herself? Never!" The same thing happened with the second baby, also a girl. Finally Franz Joseph took a hand, attempted to rescue Sisi's children for her. Sophie chalked up another score to settle...
...Meantime Franz Joseph had been finding plenty to do at the office. His hodge-podge empire, he discovered, was a seething mass of anachronisms, misgovernment, discontent. To get a better idea of how the land lay, see which fences needed mending most, he began making the rounds of his property. On some of these trips he took Sisi with him. In the Italian provinces, where Austrian misrule was worst, even the paid hands would not clap the royal owners. At the Scala in Milan, the audience had to be commanded to attend, under penalty of fines: the aristocrats sent their...
Sisi gave Franz Joseph two more children, a boy and a girl. At Rudolf's birth Franzi was so overjoyed that he decorated the infant with the ancient order of the Golden Fleece. For once Sophie could find nothing wrong with Sisi's conduct but when her fourth grandchild was unpatriotically born in Hungary, Sophie was ostentatiously uninterested, even sniffed doubts of its legitimacy. What with Sophie's suspicious enmity and Franz Joseph's fond indulgence, it would have been a miracle if Sisi had turned out to be a model wife and mother. No miracle...
While his restless wife was looking for the bluebird, Franz Joseph stayed at home, lived simply, worked hard. Without at all meaning to, he got involved in two disastrous wars, with France and Italy and with Prussia. He found out what it felt like to be a beaten general. When his only son Rudolf shot himself and his mistress rather than give her up, Franz Joseph knew what it felt like to be a failure as a father. But his love for his flighty wife never wavered. After she had left him for the last time he wrote her: "There...