Romy Schneider popularized it in the cinema but Sissi, Empress of Austria did exist and it is a free woman, pioneer of fitness that we discover today.
In Wait a minute !, Sidonie Bonnec traces the real story behind the film Sissi Empress, before the eternal reruns of the Christmas holidays. Her guest is the writer specializing in the great destinies of women and author of the book “Sissi’s novel“, Elisabeth reynaud. She tells us about the passions and wounds of Austria’s most famous empress.
Sissi, fitness pioneer
Elisabeth de Wittelsbach day Sissi always took care of her. She was exhausting her attendants by playing sports like jogging or walking, “up to thirty kilometers per day“indicates Elisabeth reynaud.
Sissi is also arranging “sports rooms” in its various castles. She does pommel horse, rings or rope there and does not hesitate to receive ambassadors from around the world perched on her apparatus.
The Empress takes care of her all her life. Besides, she strives to keep a waist circumference of 51 cm and adopt for this a particular diet, preferring to consume beef blood and rejecting the meat so as not to have to ingest the fat and fiber of the animal.
The cabinet of beauties
Elisabeth de Wittelsbach loves beauty above all, to the point of collecting. In her beauty cabinet, she brings together images of portraits of beautiful women of the time. There are representations of empresses and bakers, actresses and shepherdesses alike.
All “beautiful women” had the right to appear in his cabinet of beauties.
A free but restrained woman
Sissi is married to the young emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria when she was just 15 years old. She is very uncomfortable with the ardor and manners of her new husband. She said a few years later that:
marriage is an absurd institution. A 15-year-old child, I was sold …
She gives birth to her first child after a few months of married life, but the Empress is deprived of her daughter by her stepmother Archduchess, a woman director who will consider that Sissi is far too young to assume her maternal responsibilities.
Since then, Sissi can see her daughter only when the Archduchess does not allow her to do so. The suffering of this separation is added to the unhappiness of the young empress who does not live with the weight of Viennese protocol and etiquette. Poorly treated, her daughter died of an illness at 26 months.
Elisabeth de Wittelsbach will refuse moreover all his life to sacrifice his private life and his desires to his duties of empress.
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