Empress Elisabeth (Sissi), accompanied by doctors, visiting the sick in the General Hospital in Vienna. Wood engraving after Rudolf Hausleithner, 1880.
She dried the tears of countless wretches, and brought comfort and consolation with her to many and many a stricken home. During the typhus epidemic which raged in the Hernalser-Mädchen Institute she insisted upon visiting the stricken girls, and upon personally encouraging and consoling them, quite regardless of the danger which she ran; and when cholera and smallpox made their appearance at Budapest, she accompanied the Emperor, who was obliged to go there for the opening of the delegations, saying that the moment of danger was just the moment when she should be by the side of her husband.
Marguerite Cunliffe-Owen, The Martyrdom of an Empress (New York: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, 1902), pp. 127-128.
Short Stories on Honor, Chivalry, and the World of Nobility—no. 231
