Princess Louise of Belgium

Star (Christchurch), Issue 17246, 12 January 1924, Page 17

Princess Louise of Belgium

Tragic Story of King Leopold’s Daughter.

Price She Paid for Defiance of Conventions.

“The wages of sin is death.” So says the Bible, and so it has proved in the case of innumerable sinners since the beginning of time (save the “ San Francisco Chronicle ”) But even many of those who think the “ manifold sins and wickedness ” of Princess Louise of Belgium make her richlv deserving of sever© punishment are inclined to fee] that the tragic wages she is paviurr are in many ways far worse than death. She has been forced to humble her pride and seek refuge with her sister. Princess Lonyay. at the latter’s estates in Hungary. She has had to desert the once young and handsome Austrian armv officer for whose sake, in the days when she was known as Europe’s madcap princess, she risked everything—honour, wealth, her father's love, social prestige, and life itself. Worst of all. perhaps, for a woman as high-spiritetd as Princess Louise, she at last has to bow her head to the conventions at which she so long SNAPPED HER PRETTY ‘FINGERS IN SCORNFUL DEFIANCE. And only the other dav Count Geze

von Mattacbich, who loved Princess Louise so much that he braved the wrath of Europe’s royalty in order t«, rescue her from an insane asylum, died in the greatest povertv *n an obscure Paris hotel. For months before his death he had been a miserable paralytic, who sat strapped all day iu a wheel-chair.

Princess i/ouise was one of three laughter born to King Leopold and Queen Henrietie of Belgium. One ot her sisters. Princess Lonyay, is quiffc happily married to a Hungarian noble man, and fortunatelv lias money enough left to keep Louise independent of royalty’s charity The otliei sister. Princess Stephanie. married Crown Prince Rudolph of Austria, whose death at Meyer ling some years ago remains to this dav one of the world’s greatest mysteries. With all his caoabiiitfies as an organiser and loader which made him so successful in the exploitation of the Congo "and other great money-making enterprises. Leopold was one of the most dissolute men that ever sat upon a throne. And his daughter Louise seems to have inherited from him much of the scorn of the conventions and public opinion that made his name a synonym for wickedness RELENTLESS FORCES OF HEREDITY. What the relentless forces of heredity had don© for her character was made all the worse bv the fact that the impressionable years of her childhood were passed in the courts of Belgium and Austria at the period of their most shocking decadence. Even a girl with no evil strain in her blood could hardly have escaped harm through living where virtue was laughed at and vice extolled as they were in Brussels and Vienna. The first of the tragedies that have made such a miserable wreck of Priniess Louise’s life cam© when she was married to Prince Philip of Saxe Co burg. She was then barely sixteen years old and ho was a man of thirty. The girl bride's disillusionment cam© quickly and she reacted to it as such a madcap princess \vould —by fleeing from her husband’s arms almost before the marriage bells had stopped ringing. “ I expected to find in marriage,” said Princess Louise in the amazingly frank memoirs she published later. “ the joys that a husband and child can give. I am not, I am sure, the first woman who. after her having lived

in (lie clouds during her engagement, has been as suddenly hurled to the ground on her marriage night and who, bruised and mangled iu her soul, has fled from humanity in tears! .... “ On the evening of my marriage at the Chateau of Laeken. while all Brus sels was dancing amid a blaze of light*. I fell from my heaven of love to what was for me a bed of rock and a mattress of thorns. . . . “The day was scarcely breaking when, taking advantage of a moment when I was alone in the nuptial rham ber, I fled aeross the park in my bare feet, a cloak wrapped about my night gown. . . . T found sanctuary amid the flowers and I whispered my grief, my despair and mv torture in the silent night.” . . . PRINCESS PLACED IN INSANE ASYLUM. In the years that folowed the Princess indulged in such wild extravagances and gave vent to such bitter protests at what she termed her hus band’s shameful treatment of her that even many of her friends thought she was out of her mind. At last she Mas

taken to an insane asylum near Dresden and virtually imprisoned there. In some way that has not yet been fully explained Geze von Mattachieh. then a lieutenant in the Austrian army, became deeply interested in th * fate of the lovely Princess and entered into a plot to free her from the asylum where lie believed she Mas unjustly am! cruelly held. He finally succeeded, but the effort cost him years in prison' and the sacrifice of what might have been a 'brilliant military. career. After weeks of plotting and the dis

couraging failure of several attempts to rescue the princess, she was final!abducted one night, hurried across the border and taken to Paris. There a number of famous alienists who were engaged to submit her to a searching examination pronounced her absolutely sane. LOVER I MPRISONED. But even the verdict of the alienists and the love and devotion which her heroic saviour gave her could not bring the unfortunate Princess any lasting

family and friends of the husband she had deserted moved heaven and earth to separate her from the dashing young lieutenant who had rescued her from the madhouse. In the end they accomplished their purpose for a time by trumping up charges of forgery against Von Mattachich and having him arrested and sentenced to four years in prison. From the time of her dramatic es--cape from tWo asylum the life oS Princess Louise Mas as crowded with unhappiness as her father’s was "with almost every kind of wickedness. Many of her troubles were due to the extravagant tastes which she seemed entirely unable to curb, and her financial situation became still more desperate when old Leopold practically disowned her and cut off the large income he had settled on herCuriously enough, although King Leopold was continually sharing his capacious heart and his immense fortune with dancers, barmaids and servant girls, he made a great show of virtuous indignation over Louise’s love affair with Von Mattachieh and declared he wanted nothing more to do with her unless she would leave her

peace or happiness. Members of her lover. He also became estranged from his other two daughters when they sided v ith tnelr ill-fated sister. Soon after King Leopold's long and notorious affair with Cleo' de Merode, the French dancer, 1 1 is amorous fancy was taken by a pretty little former barmaid named Claire Delacroix. FIGHT FOR LEOPOLD’S MILLIONS. The King made the former barmaid the Baroness Vaughan, and a few days before his death he shocked Europe b\ marrying her. An angry mob of disgusted Belgians drove the

Baroness from Brussels; but she could well afford to laugh at tlieir rage, for she carried with her 20,000,000 dollars of the dead King’s fortune. Princess Louise and her sisters at once began suit to recover this money under the Belgian law which forbids the King to bequeath such a tremendous sum to anybody outside his immediate family. But after years of costiv litigation thev found that their shrewd old father had outwitted them. He had found a way to evade the law

bv organising liis estate into a stock | company and giving the controlling intereti in this to tin former barmaid, 1 whom he loved whether 6he kissed or Out. of the huge fortune King Leopold had the. 'laughters whom he had learned, to hate shared only 3,000,000 dollars, and Louise’s part of this was not enough to begin to pay her pressing debts. CLOSING SCENE OF THE LOVE TRAGEDY. She and VOll Mattachieh bravely tried to live down the ostracism of fashionable society in Vienna and the other European capitals, but they never succeeded. The war swept away the last remnant of their slender means and then ill-health made their ruin still more complete by sending Von Mattachieh to a hospital charity, ward and forcing Princess Loins© to depeim on the bounty of her more prosperous sister. The recent miserable death of Geze von Mattachieh in a, shabby room in a Paris hotel has the closing scene in the Princess’s’ love tragedy. After weeks of misery in the charity ward, where he spent, his last days, he Mas removed to the cheap hotel, and there Princess Louise closed his eyes and made the arrangements for his funeral, with the aid of a sympathetic friend. This u-as the death of former Captain roil Mattachieh, once dashing young Huzzar captain. Mho dared to elope with beautiful Princess Louise in spite of Pope Leo XII. ’s thunders and former Kaiser Franz Joseph’s threats of perpetual imprisonment. While the Princess sat at Mattachich’s bedside during his last hours in the dingy room where death’s curtain fell across the last scene of her tragedy, a Hungarian friend who was servant to the assassinated Crown Prince Rudolph of Austria, her brother-in-law, entered quietly and arranged for the burial for which he kneM r she could not pay. PRINCESS PROUD AND UNREPENTANT. Does this sad reaping in sorrow of the seeds she sowed in lier headstrong girlhood mark the last of the M-ages of sin Princess Louise must pay or are there still more terrible penalties to be imposed upon her before the reckoning can be called complete and her account closed ? The unbroken spirit of the madcap princess throughout, all her troubles has always amazed her friends. While they are making arrangements for tiding her over her present troubles, the still charming and penniless Princess holds her head up proudly and remains apparently unrepentant-. •' What can I say.’’ she exclaimed in answer to all queries, “only that I have lost him nno was the whole world to me!” Thus she has faced for a score of years the criticism of emperors, kings and social traditions witii a calm, composed and queenly bearing, and those who have watched her paying her wages of sin are w ondering how much more the pride and courage of Princess Louise can bear.