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attitude he demonstrated toward her for the world to see.
    In all these poems, the influence of Heinrich Heine is all too plain: His laments about false love, about lies and disappointments also appear in Elisabeth’s verses. After she had stopped riding so abruptly, she lived in total seclusion, remained far away from Vienna, sought solitude and nature, and did not miss the company of men.
    Her poems also dealt with the dead and with heroes of legend, such as Heine and her favorite Achilles. It is hard to distinguish where, in her feelings, infatuation stops and the yearning for death begins. Both are quite certainly evident in Elisabeth’s dabbling with spiritualism. She no longer found anyone among the living who understood her. She was too sensitive, too vulnerable for a real, “normal” relationship with a man. She therefore took refuge in fantasy relations with dead heroes, who could not hurt her.
    No matter how florid some of these poems and fantasies might be, reality was much more ordinary. Many of Elisabeth’s statements and poems give indications of an extreme tension when it comes to sexuality. Only in her poems did Titania lower herself to the ass. In reality, she loathed love. 
    Für mich keine Liebe,
Für mich keinen Wein;
Die eine macht übel,
Der andere macht spei’n! 
     
    Die Liebe wird sauer,
Die Liebe wird herb;
Der Wein wird gefälschet
Zu schnödem Erwerb.
     
    Doch falscher als Weine
Ist oft noch die Lieb’;
Man küsst sich zum Scheine
Und fühlt sich ein Dieb!
     
    Für mich keine Liebe,
Für mich keinen Wein;
Die eine macht übel,
Der andre macht spei’n! 27
     

    [For me no love, / For me no wine; / The one makes you ache, / The other makes you ill! / / Love grows sour, / Love grows bitter; / The wine is doctored / For base gain. / / But more false than wine / Often is love; / We pretend to be kissing / And feel like thieves! / / For me no love, / For me no wine; / The one makes you ache, / The other makes you ill!]
     
    There are more examples of this sort. As has been seen, Elisabeth may be retrospectively diagnosed as a victim of anorexia nervosa. Psychologists now believe that this disorder is caused by a deep revulsion against everything that is physical and voluptuous, but most especially against sexuality.
    Even when her favorite daughter, Marie Valerie, married and became pregnant, Elisabeth could not conceal her distaste. She knew nothing to say to the extremely young wife and prospective mother except that she “sighed for ‘the good old times, when I was still an innocent virgin’ … yes sometimes, joking in her peculiar way, she said that looking at my changed figure made her altogether impatient and that she was ‘ashamed of me.’” 28
    At times, Elisabeth’s tried-and-true game—unapproachable goddess and infatuated ass—turned into a real jest. In the late 1880s—the Empress was at least fifty years old—a young man from Saxony named Alfred Gurniak Lord Schreibendorf began to dog her footsteps. He followed her as far as Romania, pursuing her with endlessly long, florid love letters and urgent pleas for proof of her favor. Elisabeth remained aloof. But she saved Alfred’s letters and made them the basis of a cynical poem, “Titania and Alfred,” which she never completed.
    There is no doubt that for the Empress, this overwrought young man was merely a figure of ridicule. Nevertheless, her thoughts dealt so intensely with the matter that she composed many pages of poetry about it. Surely she also kept the “enchanted stag” Alfred in thrall by offering now and again tiny proofs of her favor (such as flowers deliberately left behind on a park bench). She saw the episode not only as a cause for merriment, but also as a welcome distraction in her empty life.
    Among the many lines about her admirer Alfred, however, we also find the revealing lines: 
    Besitzest du den kecken Mut,
Mich jemals zu erreichen?
Doch tödted meine kalte Glut,
Ich tanze gem auf