Literature and foreign languages
She had never been interested in the sort of shallow conversation which provided the focus of Court gossip or social functions, and she avoided it. Paradoxically her silence on such occasions gave her the reputation of not being very intelligent. In reality she was a very well-read and highly educated woman. ‘If the day were only once so long; I cannot learn and read as much as I would wish’. She was a great admirer of Heinrich Heine, she loved Shakespeare and was an avid reader of the works of writers and poets ranging from Homer to Goethe. She was highly versed in history, mythology and philosophy, she spoke fluent English, French and Hungarian, and in the late 1880s she began learning ancient and modern Greek. At Court nobody spoke of anything beyond theatre gossip and who had met whom in the Prater ( a park ) , and even Franz Joseph found what he saw as the abstract musings of his wife incomprehensible, even somewhat suspicious. She had always been a very caring person but as a result of her studies, her basic attitude became more profound. She developed into an individual with liberal democratic leanings and a keen sense of general awareness. She felt nothing but disdain for the arrogant and conceited aristocracy, feelings which she expressed in writing. She also wrote poetry, and with this she hoped to provide posterity with an insight into her world, her political and personal opinions as well as the problems she had to face. About then years before her death, she deposited her complete poems, which encompass about 600 printed pages, in Switzerland with the instructions to publish them sixty years later. They were made available to us, ‘the souls of the future’, in the fifties.
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