FIGHT WITH POVERTY

Evening Post, Volume CIX, Issue 13, 16 January 1930, Page 20

FIGHT WITH POVERTY

PRINCESS AS HOUSEMAID

Ida.' Sulkowski, an Austrian princess, and the descendant of one of the richest and proudest families of Imperial Austria, has been found working as., housemaid to a. Vienna family at a wage of five shillings a. week, sa;'~s the Vienna correspondent of the "Daily Express" (London). ■ The story of her tragic life and misfortunes has shocked society in Vienna, where her father, tho late Prince Josef Maria Sulkowski, who inherited a vast fortune, was one of the most lavish patrons of art and music. He founded the Sulkowski Theatre in Vienna, and married Fraulein Ida Jaeger, the beautiful opera singer, whose name was the toast of the town. Their only chifd, Ida, was brought

up in the magnificent Castle of Fclstritz, in tho Tyrol, but her early life was saddened by tho extravagance and eccentricities of her father, whose debts, when he died, sho nearly ruined herself to pay.

Princess Ida's . marriage ventures were equally disastrous. She divorced her first husband after the mysterious death of their only child. Her second husband was a German count who ruined her, while her third was a Polish knight, who treated her so cruelly that she left him.

Tho end of tho war found t'ho princess penniless, and forced to accept menial work or starve, as she was too proud to appeal to her rich relatives. Tho princess, while engaged as maid-of-all-work in Vienna theso days, bocame ill and was removed to hospital, where her real identity and sufferings were disclosed.