Franzi & Sisi

GOLDEN FLEECE: THE STORY OF FRANZ JOSEPH & ELISABETH OF AUSTRIA--Bertita Harding--Bobbs-Merrill ($3.50).

Franz Joseph, late Emperor of Austria, lived so long that, like his opposite number, Queen Victoria of England, he became an institution. Both these high-principled embodiments of monarchy were young once; both married for love, neither of them ever got 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 for.

A sad true story, it has its lighter moments, which Author Harding plays up for all they are worth; and because the story goes on so long, as stories in real life are apt to, its tired finale is as welcome as a happy ending.

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 but Helen's younger sister, 15-year-old Sisi. Sisi was a tomboy, but so pretty she made Helen appear a gawk. Franzi fell in love with her at sight, and for keeps. The scheming mothers put the best face on the matter they could, but Sophie could never forgive -her daughter-in-law-elect. To Son Franz Joseph she said: "Sisi is very nice, although the poor child doesn't know how to hold a goblet." And in truth Sisi was country-bred, had to learn painfully how to be regal. Franz thought her perfectly delightful but gave her little hints.

It was wonderful to be courted by a young and handsome Emperor. Sisi was enchanted. At 16 she was married, and the fairytale ended. There was no honeymoon trip. The morning after her horribly disillusioning wedding night (she had been well brought up), when she tried to hide in her room, Mother-in-law Sophie insisted on her facing the crowded breakfast table. From then on Sisi was on parade nearly every hour of the day. She hated it. More than anything else, she hated Sophie. And to Sophie, Sisi was never anything more than a bad bargain. When Sisi quickly became pregnant, Sophie scolded her for keeping parrots, said the sight of 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 servants to fill the seats. Sisi's charm and beauty made some impression on the scowling Italians; but it was not till she reached Hungary that she tasted triumph. There she was almost too successful: Hungary went so wild over her that Magyar-hating Austria began to mutter. While she was on this trip, her first child died. Vindictive Sophie said, "The heavens punish!"

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 occurred. Left to her own devices, she smoked (very fast for those days), rode horseback till patient Franzi grumbled: "If only you had never seen a saddle!", exercised and dieted herself into an alarming slimness. And one day she told Franz Joseph she simply had to go away. Hurt but anxious, he let her go. After that she hardly came home except for visits. On one of them she sat at old Sophie's deathbed. Her tormentor out of the way, Sisi never even attempted to take her place as the real Empress of Austria. By this time she was as unpopular with the Austrians as she was beloved in Hungary. At 36 Sisi was a grandmother. She celebrated by sneaking out to a masked ball, picking up a young man and beginning a clandestine but innocent correspondence. She developed new hobbies: a morbidly "humanitarian" interest in insanity; a kind of throne-room liberalism in which she prattled social equality, without realizing what a limb she was out on. She built a Greek palace in Corfu (cost to Franzi: 30,000,000 kronen), tried to sell it as soon as it was built. She traveled tirelessly. At 57 Sisi became a great-grandmother. She exercised, traveled, prattled harder than ever.

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 is no end to my need of you. My thoughts are near you and with pain do I think of our everlasting separation; especially do your vacant, dismantled rooms sadden me. . . ." He was writing to her again ("Farewell with God, beloved angel, I embrace you with my whole heart. . . .") when she lay dying in Geneva, stabbed by a political assassin. The news, Franz Joseph thought, filled his cup. And he was right. In 1916, before he could see the ruin of his empire, Death brought him his long-overdue holiday.

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