Imperial Manners, Memoirs, More

Runaway Austrian Archduchess dishes the dirt in scathing memoirs. – Her Imperial Highness, her mother, she says, had a terrible habit of punishing her children by cutting their faces with diamonds, the royal children were beaten worse than dogs, and given to the care of “low minded and dangerous persons, without manners or education.” 

Archduchess in Memoir Scores Saxon Court – Calls King George “Brawler and Braggart”

Calls Crown Prince Husband a Boor –

Ridicules Royal Suitors –Paints Terrible Picture of Life in Imperial Household of Austria

NEW YORK, Nov. 26.—Mrs. Louise Toselli, who was an Austrian Archduchess and would be Queen of Saxony today, had she not eloped with her children’s tutor, Giron, has entered the “memoir list’’ with her husband. Toselli’s memoirs have been running in a magazine. Henry W. Fisher of New York is the publisher of Mrs. Toselli's diary, lost at the time of her elopement from Dresden with Giron. In the books the former Archduchess touches with characteristic levity upon life at the Court of Saxony. "When my first baby came I wanted to nurse it, of course,” she writes. “You should have seen Frederick Augustus’ (the Crown Prince) face. If I had proposed to become a wet nurse to some ‘Socialist brat’ he couldn’t have been more astonished.” Louise describes her father-in-law, King George, as a brawler and a braggart, her husband as a boor. King George’s kiss, she writes, “felt like a piece of gritty ice rubbing against my forehead.” 

Louise paints a terrible picture of childhood in Austria. Her Imperial Highness, her mother, she says, had a terrible habit of punishing her children by cutting their faces with diamonds, the royal children were beaten worse than dogs, and given to the care of “low minded and dangerous persons, without manners or education.” At 18 she was taken to Vienna to look over the field for possible suitors. She “reviewed” Prince Ferdinand of Coburg, who was a “Cohen, not a Coburg,” and Prince Danilo of Montenegro, a small, thin person, “looking like a counter jumper in holiday dress.” Under entry of May 1, 1893, Louise tells of an experience with a young Baron who attempted to explain to her what real love is. The Baron told her an anecdote about an alleged amour of Catherine the Great of Russia with a handsome soldier.– New York Times, 1912

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