In 1875, Princess Louise of Belgium married Prince Philip of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha in what she hoped would be a grand royal future. She was 17, he was 31, and within months their marriage had become a source of personal misery that would ultimately lead to her being locked away in a mental institution. Louise Marie Amélie was born on February 18, 1858, in Brussels, the eldest daughter of the future King Leopold II of Belgium. Belgium itself was a young nation, having only secured independence in 1830 after centuries of foreign rule.
Her father would ascend to the throne in 1865, and Louise grew up in the royal palaces of Brussels, raised mostly by her mother, Queen Marie Henriette of Austria, while Leopold remained a distant and silent figure. The royal household was fractured. Leopold and Marie Henriette’s marriage had been arranged for duty rather than love, and the couple shared little affection. In 1869, tragedy compounded their troubles when their only son, nine-year-old Leopold, died from complications of pneumonia following a fall into a pond.
The loss left Louise grief-stricken and removed any hope of a direct male heir to the Belgian throne. As the eldest daughter of the Belgian king, Louise was expected to make a marriage that would strengthen her small nation’s diplomatic ties. In an era when European powers fought over territory, Belgium needed strong alliances. After lengthy negotiations, the choice fell on Prince Philip of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, a grandson of King Louis Philippe I of France and a member of a powerful German aristocratic dynasty.
The two were also closely related by blood. They married at the Royal Palace of Brussels on February 4, 1875. Louise had met Philip before the wedding and initially liked him, but the marriage quickly soured. In her later memoir, she described her wedding night as so distressing that she fled the palace in her nightgown the next morning to hide in a greenhouse.
She described an unsettling routine in which Philip had her pour wine for him while he read from erotic books before bed. The couple settled in Vienna at the Palais Coburg, where Louise found the residence dark, strangely furnished, and terrifying in its size. She also clashed with her domineering mother-in-law. Despite these problems, the couple had two children: a son, Leopold Clement, born in 1878, and a daughter, Dorothea, born in 1881.
By then, the marriage had become tense. Conflicts with Philip were frequent, and Louise dealt with her unhappiness by becoming an extravagant socialite in Vienna. After suffering two miscarriages, she increasingly left the care of her children to governesses and sought escape from the Palais Coburg. Her absences soon had a scandalous explanation.
In 1883, she began an affair with her husband’s own military attaché. After his death in 1888, she transferred her affections to his successor, Baron Nicolas Dory, a liaison that lasted until his marriage in 1893. Word of Louise’s behavior spread rapidly through the Habsburg court and across Europe, greatly displeasing her father, who was by then immensely wealthy from his personal rule over the Congo in Africa. In 1895, Louise began a fiery affair with Count Géza Mattachich, a young Croatian officer nine years her junior.
The Habsburg court erupted in scandal. On February 18, 1898, Prince Philip, desperate to salvage his honor, challenged Géza to a duel but was swiftly defeated. Louise fled to France, and when she returned, the consequences were brutal. Her children were taken from her, and her marriage was effectively finished.
Weeks after the duel, Philip 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 choice: return to the Palais Coburg or live out her years in a mental institution. She chose the latter and was sent to an institution in Döbling, Vienna.
Géza was also targeted, arrested, and thrown into prison on charges of forging documents. News of Louise’s confinement leaked, and the Austrian press erupted with sympathy for the fallen princess. Alarmed by the growing scandal, Philip had her quietly removed from the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1899 and transferred to an institution in Saxony, where she vanished from public view. For years, she saw no family at all, except for a single heartbreaking visit from her daughter Dorothea in February 1903.
Meanwhile, Géza, imprisoned near Vienna, began a romance with Maria Stöger, a 23-year-old married woman who took a job at the prison solely to meet him. She became his mistress and threw herself into winning his release, hiring lawyers and stirring the press. Her persistence paid off, and Géza was pardoned in August 1902. Once free, Géza tried to rally support for Louise, but nothing changed until the summer of 1904, when Louise was sent to Bad Elster in Saxony for a health cure under noticeably lax surveillance.
Géza seized the moment, orchestrated her escape, and with Maria’s help, the three fled across the border into France. After more than six years of confinement, Louise was free. The following year, Louise was officially declared sane. In 1906, her long-delayed divorce was settled, with Prince Philip granting her a monthly pension.
But Louise, long accustomed to extravagant luxury, was soon in debt. She and Géza stayed together for the rest of their lives, though they never married. Louise’s father, King Leopold II, died on December 17, 1909. Her mother had passed away in 1902 while Louise was institutionalized.
Leopold had changed the provisions of his will, and this created an inheritance dispute that would shape the rest of Louise’s life. Although Leopold was enormously rich from his exploitation of the Congo, he left only about six million dollars’ worth of estate to be divided among Louise and her two sisters. The rest of his wealth went to his longtime mistress, Caroline Lacroix, whom he had married just five days before his death. News of the inheritance dispensation scandalized Europe.
A legal battle commenced as Louise and her sisters contested their father’s will. In 1914, after years of bitter litigation, the courts granted them just over five million francs each. But Leopold had hidden much of his money in holding companies outside Belgium, specifically designed to make it difficult to challenge his financial arrangements. Compared to Lacroix, the sisters were effectively cut out of the inheritance.
Louise and Géza moved around for years after the dispute, eventually settling back in Vienna before World War I. When the war broke out, they were asked to leave, as Austria-Hungary did not want the daughter of the former Belgian king within its borders while Germany invaded neutral Belgium. They moved to Munich. While living there, Louise learned that her son, Leopold Clement, had been shot several times by his mistress on October 17, 1915, after an argument.
She also broke a jar of sulfuric acid over his head before turning the gun on herself. He survived, but suffered acid burns, the loss of an eye, shattered ribs, and a ruptured spleen. After six months of agony, he died in April 1916. To compound her plight, Géza was arrested the following August and sent to a prisoner of war camp in Budapest.
Louise returned to the Austro-Hungarian Empire to plead his case, but by then she was increasingly poverty-stricken. With Belgium under occupation, the funds she once relied on were cut off. By early 1917, her debts had exploded to an astonishing 30 million marks. Declared insolvent, she could only watch as her remaining possessions were sold at auction.
Géza was released at the end of the war. With no money, Louise wrote her memoirs, published in French in 1921 as “Around the Thrones and Fall. ” Neither she nor Géza lived to enjoy any major royalties. He died from uremia and heart problems in the autumn of 1923 while they were living in Paris.
Louise relocated to Germany, but died in poverty on March 1, 1924, at 66 years of age. Her sole surviving child, Dorothea, married and had no biological children, though the couple adopted several. Louise’s biological line died out when Dorothea passed away decades later in 1967.
