Word: franzi
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...over it. But Victoria was lucky, Franz Joseph was not. Many of his misfortunes were due to foreign levies, but malice domestic caused his greatest sorrows. To those numerous U. S. readers who like to peek through the hedge at royalty, Bertita Harding's intimate narrative of Franzi and his wife Sisi will be as good a show as they could wish...
...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...
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...