“I was more than ever enraptured when I saw her again. Elizabeth was sitting at breakfast, whilst her hair-dresser arranged her hair. She was too beautiful for words, at least I thought so, and indeed the Empress, then in the height of her beauty, was a lovely picture. A négligee of exquisite lace enveloped her slender figure, and her wonderful hair, which I saw for the first time unbound, flowed around her in heavy chestnut waves. Her inscrutable eyes were of a deep amber flecked with gold, and the searching daylight discovered no flaw in her. Elizabeth seemed a daughter of sun and fire as she sat there in the golden glow which intensified her loveliness and her strange ethereal look.”
— Sisi as described by Marie Larisch in her autobiography “My Past”.
An interior photograph of the Herzgruft, or Heart-crypt, at the HofburgAugustinerkirche in Vienna. The small crypt contains fifty-four urns, each holding the preserved heart of a member of House Hapsburg. The tradition of interring the heart of deceased Hapsburgs began with King Ferdinand IV on the 10th July 1654 as an act of piety and ended with that of Archduke Franz Karl of Austria on the 8th March 1878. In Urn 42, at the tenth position on the bottom row and mantled with a ribbon of the French Tricolore, is the heart of Prince Napoleon II of France, briefly, and by all intents and purposes in name only, Emperor of the French for fifteen days in 1815, a title only held in pretense after this period.
I can’t be a Habsburg historian because I can’t be objective about Franz Josef I no matter what shit he actually did in politics and in private he’s just a sweet old man, please treat him kindly
Franz Joseph surrounded by his suite (note the presence of Andrassy, 5th from the left, first row) in front of Dolmabahçe palace in Constantinople in 1869, during his oriental trip for the opening of the Suez Canal.
Photography of Archduchess Sophie of Bavaria with her youngest son Ludwig Viktor (second from right) and other unknown persons by Hermann Norden, 1865.
