[1] While staying with Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, Duke Siegfried August in Bavaria met his host’s unmarried half-sister, Archduchess Maria Annunziata, he fell in love with her, and their engagement was to be announced in due course.

They would have made a comely couple, for the Princess had inherited much of the brilliance as well as good looks of her mother, the beloved Archduchess Maria Theresa, while Duke Siegfried was probably the best looking Prince of his house, a dashing cavalier, and one of the few scions of old world royalty and who had achieved distinction as a steeplechase rider.

Two months later, in August 1902, the engagement was broken off by the Archduchess, owing to her sudden discovery of the stormy antecedents of her fiancé, which she had been ignorant of at the time when she had promised to become his wife.

The breaking off of the engagement was a matter which was arranged between the young people themselves, and that they had been deeply in love with each other was shown by the appeal immediately afterward by the Archduchess to the Emperor for permission to enter Holy Orders and to take the vows of a Benedictine nun, while the Duke became prey to melancholia, which in due course developed into insanity, rendering it necessary his confinement.

Each of the members of the order bears the honorary title of “Canoness,’ and the Queen Mother of Spain held the office of Abbess until her marriage to King Alfonso, drawing a stipend as such of $30,000 a year.