In 1875, 17-year-old Princess Louise of Belgium married 31-year-old Prince Philip of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha in a union that quickly turned bitter and abusive. After years of suffering, she fled her husband, an act that ignited scandal and family outrage. Louise was eventually detained and sent to a mental institution, where she was expected to live out the rest of her days. But her story did not end there.
Louise Marie Amélie of Belgium was born on February 18, 1858, at the Royal Palace in Brussels. She was born into a relatively young nation, as Belgium had only gained its independence after the 1830 revolution following centuries of rule by the Burgundians, the Spanish, the Austrians, the French, and the Dutch. Her father was Prince Leopold, heir to the throne, who became King Leopold II of the Belgians in 1865. At the time of her birth, her grandfather, Leopold I, was the reigning monarch.
Her mother was Marie Henriette of Austria, a member of the Austrian Habsburgs. Louise was the first child of Leopold and Marie Henriette’s marriage. As an infant, her father described her as “very wise and pale,” joking that she had “dark eyes and a large nose, worthy of mine in every way. ” Sadly, this would prove to be the high point of their relationship.
Three other children followed: a boy named Leopold in 1859, and two more daughters, Stéphanie and Clémentine, in 1864 and 1872. But tragedy struck the royal household in 1869 when young Leopold, just nine years old, died from complications of pneumonia, the lingering result of a fall into a pond the previous year. The death devastated the Belgian royal family, and ten-year-old Louise was left grief-stricken. The loss left Leopold II without a male heir, deepening the cracks in his already troubled marriage and leaving his children to grow up in a tense, fractured household.
As the eldest daughter of the Belgian king, Louise was expected to marry into a prominent royal or aristocratic family to strengthen the small kingdom’s diplomatic ties. Belgium was a minor power at a time when Europe’s great powers were locked in struggles where might often made right. The suitor eventually decided upon was Ferdinand Philippe, Prince of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, from one of Germany’s premier aristocratic lines. Philippe had been born in Paris and was a grandson of King Louis Philippe I of France.
The two were closely related, being both paternal second cousins and maternal first cousins once removed. After lengthy negotiations, the couple married at the Royal Palace of Brussels on February 4, 1875. Louise was just 17 while Philippe was 31. She had high hopes for the marriage, having met Philippe on several occasions and initially liking him.
It became a disastrous union. Philippe was 14 years older than her, and the differences in their personalities soon became obvious. Louise later reflected in her memoir that she had no idea what to expect on her wedding night, calling the experience so distressing that she fled the palace in her nightgown the next morning to hide in a greenhouse. In the weeks that followed, she described an unsettling routine in which Philippe had her pour him wine while he read from erotic books before bed.
The marriage also separated Louise from her family, and after a brief tour of Europe’s capitals, she and Philippe settled at the Habsburg court in Vienna. They took up residence in the Palais Coburg. Though grand, Louise later painted a far dimmer picture, claiming it was strangely furnished, dark, and that her large room terrified her. Worse still, the couple lived there with Philippe’s parents, and Louise found her mother-in-law domineering and overly controlling.
Despite these problems, the couple welcomed two children: Leopold Clement in 1878 and a daughter, Dorothée Marie Henriette, in 1881. By then, her marriage had become tense. Conflicts with her husband were frequent, and Louise dealt with it by spending lavishly, becoming an extravagant socialite in Vienna. By the late 1880s, much of the day-to-day care of her children had passed to governesses, and she increasingly sought to stay away from the Palais Coburg.
Louise’s frequent absences soon had a far more scandalous explanation. In 1883, she plunged into a passionate affair with her husband’s own military attaché. When he died in 1888, she swiftly transferred her affections to his successor, Baron Nicholas Dory, an affair that blazed on until Dory’s marriage in October 1893 abruptly ended it. Whispers of Louise’s behavior spread through the Habsburg court and soon across Europe, causing such embarrassment that her parents attempted unsuccessfully to halt the scandal from Belgium.
News of his daughter’s infidelity displeased Leopold II enormously and contributed to his growing animosity toward her. This was significant because Leopold had become immensely wealthy through his personal rule of the Congo in Africa, and Louise was banking on receiving a massive inheritance. As it turned out, this was not to be. In 1895, Louise began a fiery affair with a young Croatian officer, Count Géza Mattachich.
From the moment they met, she was entranced. He was handsome, daring, and nine years her junior, only 27 to her 37. When whispers of their liaison spread, the Habsburg court erupted in scandal. Matters exploded on February 18, 1898, when Prince Philippe, desperate to salvage his honor, challenged Géza to a duel but was swiftly defeated.
In the aftermath, Louise fled to France, and when she returned, the consequences were brutal. Her children were taken and her marriage was effectively finished. Just weeks after the duel, Philippe struck back in a far more devastating way. He had Louise declared insane and persuaded Emperor Franz Joseph I to confine her to an asylum.
She was given a cruel choice: return to the Palais Coburg or live out her years in a mental institution. Louise chose the latter and was sent to an institution in Döbling, Vienna. Soon afterward, Géza himself was targeted, accused of forging documents. He was arrested and thrown into prison.
News of Louise’s confinement quickly leaked, and the Austrian press erupted with sympathy for the fallen princess. Alarmed by the growing scandal, Philippe had her quietly removed from the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1899 and transferred her to an institution in Saxony. There, she vanished from public view. For years, she saw no family at all except for a single heartbreaking visit from her daughter Dorothée in February 1903.
Meanwhile, Géza, imprisoned near Vienna, began an unlikely romance with Maria Stöger, a 23-year-old married woman who took a job in the prison solely to meet him. She gained his trust, became his mistress, and threw herself into winning his release, hiring lawyers and stirring the press. Her persistence eventually paid off, and Géza was pardoned in August 1902. Once free, Géza tried to rally support for Louise through articles and a memoir, but nothing changed until fate handed him an opening.
In the summer of 1904, Louise was sent to Bad Elster in Saxony for a health cure where surveillance was noticeably lax. Seizing the moment, Géza orchestrated her escape, and with Maria’s help, they stole Louise away and fled across the border into France. After more than six years of confinement, Louise was finally free. The following year, she was officially declared sane, and in 1906 her long-delayed divorce was finally settled.
Prince Philippe granted her a respectable monthly pension, but Louise, long accustomed to extravagant luxury, was soon in debt. By then, Maria Stöger was out of the picture, and Louise and Géza would remain together for the rest of their lives, though they never married. Louise’s father died on December 17, 1909, at 74 years of age. Her mother had passed away in 1902 while Louise was institutionalized.
Although there had been rumors that Leopold had married his long-term mistress Caroline Lacroix years earlier, in reality he only married her five days before his death. He had also changed the provisions of his will, creating an inheritance dispute that shaped the rest of Louise’s life. Leopold’s nephew Albert succeeded him smoothly as King Albert in line with Belgian law prohibiting female succession to the throne. However, the issue of his estate was much more complicated.
Leopold had two daughters with Lacroix in addition to Louise and her sisters. Although Leopold was enormously rich from his rule over the Congo, he left only about $6 million worth of an estate to be divided between Louise, Stéphanie, and Clémentine. The rest of his wealth went to Lacroix. News of the inheritance dispensation scandalized Europe.
Soon a legal battle commenced as Louise and her sisters contested their father’s will. In the end, the courts could only offer a small victory. In 1914, after years of bitter legal battles, Louise and her sisters were granted just over 5 million francs each from her father’s estate. King Leopold II had apparently suspected this would occur, as much of the money had been hidden in holding companies outside Belgium, created especially to make it difficult for his daughters to challenge the financial arrangements he had made.
Compared to Lacroix, the sisters were effectively left out in the cold. Louise and Géza moved around for many years after the inheritance dispute. They settled back in Vienna before the outbreak of the First World War, despite their troubles there in years past. When war broke out, they were asked to leave.
The Austro-Hungarian Empire had allied with Germany, and Germany’s first action had been to invade neutral Belgium. The Austrians did not want the daughter of the former Belgian king in Vienna. Unable to return to Belgium as it was under German occupation, the couple went to Munich in southern Germany. While living there, Louise learned that her son, Leopold Clement, had been involved in an incident on October 17, 1915, in which he had argued with his mistress, who then shot him several times and broke a jar of sulfuric acid over his head before turning the gun on herself.
He survived but suffered grievous injuries: acid burns, the loss of one eye, shattered ribs, and a ruptured spleen. After six months of agony battling infections and complications from his wounds, he died in April 1916. To compound her plight, Géza was arrested in August 1916 and sent to a prisoner of war camp in Budapest. Louise eventually returned to Austria-Hungary to plead his case, but by then she was increasingly poverty-stricken.
With Belgium under occupation, the funds she once relied on were abruptly cut off. By early 1917, her debts had exploded to an astonishing 30 million marks. Declared insolvent, she watched her remaining possessions hauled off and sold at auction. She only managed to survive thanks to occasional financial help from her daughter Dorothée and her sister Stéphanie.
Relief came at the end of the First World War with the defeat of Germany and Austria-Hungary. Géza was eventually released, and they left for France as the old Habsburg Empire collapsed into multiple countries and several years of internal warfare. With no money to speak of, Louise set about writing her memoirs in France, publishing them as “Around the Thrones at Fall” in 1921. Although the book provided engaging insight into the scandals of Europe’s courts in the twilight of the imperial era, neither she nor Géza lived long enough to enjoy major royalties.
Géza died from uremia and heart problems in the autumn of 1923 while they were living in Paris. Louise relocated once again to Germany after this, but she did not live long either. She died at Bad Nauheim in poverty on March 1, 1924, at 66 years of age. Her sole surviving child, Dorothée, married Ernst Günther, Duke of Schleswig-Holstein.
They did not have biological children, though they adopted several. Louise’s biological line died out when Dorothée passed away decades later in 1967.