Stunning beauty and exceptional, often tragic fate meant that Elizabeth of Bavaria - known more as the Empress Sisi - permanently entered popular culture. What secrets was this special woman hiding?
Soon rumors emerged about the strange way of eating the young empress. That she ate like a bird or didn't eat at all. After her first pregnancy, she quickly returned to her maiden figure. After two and three it was said that you were starving. Then everyone was spreading with shock that slimming had become her obsession, although the then ideal of female beauty did not require such draconian sacrifices.
The article is an excerpt from the book At the table with the king. As feasted at the royal court Znak Horyzont publishing house
So maybe she was a precursor of conscious body shaping to fit a specific pattern, in this case an ethereal nymph sung in the romantic poetry she adored.
Stress in the corner of the appetite
Currently, the opinion that it was a disease is being raised more and more often - Sisi may have suffered from anorexia. The disease attacked as a result of stress. As a young girl, Sisi had no problems with eating. One could even say that she seduced Franz Józef with her healthy appetite. During a dinner in Ischl on August 17, 1843, she sat next to him and ate until her ears trembled. Archduchess Zofia in a letter to her twin sister Maria, the Saxon queen, described it as follows:
During the family dinner, the emperor was proud that Sisi, who was sitting next to him, was eating with appetite!
Yes, it was a reason to be happy, because the empress should have the strength to give birth to a group of equally robust children. The eating problems only began when the shy 17-year-old, raised in the bucolic Possenhofen, faced overnight fame, and worse - the rigid Spanish etiquette of the Viennese court.
Young Elizabeth, 1854
Everyone here not only admired Sisi's beauty, but also expected - especially her mother-in-law - that as empress she would also be perfect in every other respect . Some of the shortcomings in education could be made up during the eight-month engagement, but it was impossible to change the sensitive personality and reluctance to follow conventions at home.
Difficult life outside
Sisi was still in conflict with the court ladies trying to lecture her, and above all with the despotic mother-in-law. She struggled to bear the necessity to eat breakfast every day, along with the entire eternally stiff husband's family. At dinner, she could not drink the beer she liked, because it was too coarse for the empress. She had to completely forget about Bavarian sausages.
Lonely wandering in the woods and devoting herself to meditation among the branches of trees, now she was deprived of all privacy - she could not even take a step without the accompanying entourage. In addition, once she was pregnant, she was expected to expose her growing belly to everyone, while she would rather hide it. Court gossip and intrigue suffocated her. They were constantly watching someone's eyes. It was overwhelming by the need to utter formulas provided for in the given circumstances and unchanging for generations. In addition, she was forbidden to talk to anyone outside the designated list of 229 ladies and 23 aristocratic gentlemen, and even tried to force her to wear gloves at meals. Only the latter did she manage to oppose.
Sisi as Queen of Hungary
At the first official dinner in the Hofburg, she simply took them off, and at the attention of the lady of the court that it was against etiquette, she stated that from that moment this point of etiquette ceased to apply. All in all, the result of her skirmishes with etiquette was that she began to be considered eccentric, immature and… disregarded.
It was Sisi who was most affected when she picked up her children. Though it shouldn't even occur to her, she figured she would breastfeed them. The mother-in-law was categorically against such educational experiments, maybe a good one in a peasant cottage, but not in an imperial house. She decided that the daughter-in-law was too young and irresponsible to care for the offspring on her own, and took care of them herself. Sisi was allowed to see the children only briefly, and only after obtaining permission to do so. In addition, deeper opposites of characters and differences in preferences between her and Franz Józef were revealed more and more clearly. The husband loved Sisi with all his heart, but he was brought up in the shackles of court etiquette and treated her as his natural environment, he was unable to understand the oversensitive wife and could not help her. No wonder she became depressed. The eating disorder she probably suffered from may have been a derivative of her.
A battle for a narrow waist
In the face of constant criticism and the feeling of losing control over her life, Sisi, saving herself, chose those values that were appreciated in her. She tried desperately to display her beauty and impeccably slender figure. Impeccable appearance was the only thing that depended on her and over what she could control , and this awareness gave her apparent self-confidence. Perhaps in her battle for the image of a sylphid, the fact that at 172 centimeters tall, she was taller than her husband (which was not shown in the portraits) and did not want the excess body to emphasize this difference additionally.
However, keeping the circumference of the waist in the range of 47-50 centimeters throughout her life cost her a lot of sacrifices and even more backbreaking work. The corset tightened almost out of breath was one thing, exhausting exercise was another, and the rigorous diets she underwent was a third. The hairdresser measured the empress's waist every morning and if the result was more than 19.5 inches, or about 49.5 centimeters, the day was a draconian fast.
Distrusting the measurements, Sisi weighed herself several times a day. The tilt of the pointer even a quarter of a kilogram meant more sacrifices and effort. In the first months at the court, Sisi just ate little, it was believed that it was because of her nervousness with the new situation. The old healthy appetite vanished like a dream. The following months and traumatic events undermined her fragile psyche even more.
The years 1857–1860 were extremely bad for her. First, her older daughter died at the age of two. A year later - to the great joy of everyone - Sisi gave birth to a son, but again his mother-in-law took him under her wing. The year 1859 was marked by her anxiety for her husband's life - Franz Joseph went to Italy to fight Emperor Napoleon III. Her attitude towards food was close to anorexia, she was nervous, she argued with her mother-in-law every day.
The Empress traveled a lot…
She relieved the tension by galloping for hours on horseback or covering several kilometers long paths so fast that only dogs could keep pace with her, because the accompanying ladies of the court were far behind. "The empress's despair is beyond all comprehension," noted the caretaker of her children, Leopoldina Nischer, "since yesterday morning [...] she has not stopped crying, she eats nothing, she does not want to see anyone - at most with the children." Upon his return, the emperor found his wife emaciated and very nervous. Whether the rumors about the jump to the side by Francis reached Sisi, or did she find out about it later - it is not known, but this scratch in the marriage additionally had a negative effect on her. She was weak, irritable or apathetic. She had headaches. She coughed. In the end, doctors, unable to quite diagnose what was wrong with her, recommended climate change and a trip to the south.
Blood or oranges
A few months in Madeira and Corfu was a respite for Sisi from the Hofburg nightmare. She was accompanied by a mansion of over 30 people, which she chose, consisting mainly of young people, so time passed in a quite pleasant atmosphere.
She had her ships shipped loads of chocolate, red meat and beer. She alternated between eating and dieting, but eventually felt much better. She returned to Vienna via Possenhofen, relaxed and in good shape.
From then on, however, to her husband's distress, she traveled incessantly. She spent about two months a year in Vienna, but quickly moved on under the guise of saving her health. Apart from the Hofburg or the summer residence in Schönbrunn, that is, away from Vienna, her well-being was improving, but she did not give up her bizarre and dangerous to health diets. For example, six glasses of milk a day could be her only food for up to several weeks. In order to always be able to reach for them, even on her farthest journeys, she carried a goat and two jersey cows, whose milk - in her opinion - was the tastiest.
The article is an excerpt from the book At the table with the king. As feasted at the royal court Znak Horyzont publishing house
Sometimes, instead of milk, she drank only fruit juices for a long time, while other days she had to be satisfied with a stock of four types of meat - veal, chicken, deer and partridges - and two glasses of wine.Once Franz Josef, as we know thanks to the writings of his butler Eugen Ketterl, discovered a bottle with some dark liquid in his wife's room. When he asked what it was, it was explained to him that it was the broth cooked from 6 kg of beef meat and that it would be the Empress's only food that day, as her body weight had increased by 3 decagrams. "It's terrible," the emperor would sigh, shaking his head. Another time the meat broth was replaced by beef blood or a mixture of raw eggs and salt , or a cooked Roman roast at best.
For several days, she could only eat grapes, violet sorbet, ice cream or oranges. She didn't put vegetables in her mouth. Sometimes she fainted with hunger, reportedly even had so-called hunger puffiness. Under pressure from doctors, she drank nutritious broths and ate light meals, but sensitive to every twitch of weight, she quickly returned to her dietary habits.
The article is an excerpt from the book At the table with the king. How was a feast at the royal court of the Znak Horyzont publishing house