Lithograph of Empress Sissi by Franz Ruß
While I was at Vienna it was learned one morning that one of the Empress’s maids had died during the night, and very severe comments were made about the fact that the Empress had been seen riding in the Prater on the very same afternoon. It was not told, however, that the Kaiserin had spent the whole of the previous night, as well as several others which had preceded it, at the dying woman’s bedside, nursing her with her own hands up to the moment when she breathed her last, and that it was only when death had stilled her sufferings that Elizabeth, who was in sore need of some fresh air and of some change of scene, had gone in search of both in the less frequented parts of the Prater.
Painting of Empress Elisabeth of Austria out riding by Domenico Quaglio
Marguerite Cunliffe-Owen, The Martyrdom of an Empress (New York: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, 1902), p. 127.
Short Stories on Honor, Chivalry, and the World of Nobility—no. 214
