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Published anonymously in 1899, not long after the subject's assassination at the hands of an Italian radical, this book seems, in many ways, a standard biography of the Empress' life. Yet large portions of it describe the female author's first-person interactions with Her Majesty. These include time alone together in the Empress' private rooms in her various palaces, riding together across the plains of Hungary, an action-packed vacation in Brittany in which the Empress and the author resuscitate sailors shipwrecked in a storm, and many intimate and personal discussions. The latter include a moving scene following the wedding of Crown Prince Rudolf, when "Elizabeth, with a swift movement, came toward me, flung herself upon the floor, and, burying her proud head upon my knees, burst into an uncontrollable passion of tears" (p. 175).
Rudolf himself (according to these pages), tells the author she and he "have always been awful chums" (p. 195).
The problem is, there's no evidence any of these things actually happened.
The anonymous author, it's now known, was Marguerite Cunliffe-Owen, an American author who at the turn of the last century wrote a syndicated gossip column under the pseudonym, "Marquise de Fontenoy." Far from being an intimate friend of the Empress, Cunliffe-Owen's name appears in none of the more recent and reputable biographies of the Empress I've consulted, nor does this book appear in any of their bibliographies or indices. The highly dramatic (and, you would think, memorable) rescued-sailors scene also is no place to be found in any of the numerous printed or online biographies of the Empress that I've consulted.
If you already know something about the Empress's life and death, this book can be an entertaining (and/or infuriating) example of instant celebrity journalism at its worst. But if you're less familiar with the unfortunate "Sisi"'s story, steer away from this one.
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