Louise was quickly preceded by a reputation for scandal to which she gave credit by engaging in several successive affairs before falling in love with Geza Mattachich, an officer and member of the Croatian nobility, whose mother Anna Kuchtich de Oskocz (b.

[1][2][3] Europe was scandalized when her husband had Louise declared insane and convinced the Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria to intern her in a psychiatric hospital, while Mattachich was accused of forgery and imprisoned.

World War I and the German defeat further impoverished Louise, who decided to publish her memoirs under the title Autour des trônes que j'ai vu tomber (Around the thrones that I saw fall) which also constitute a testimony of the life of the European courts.

[7] A brother, Leopold, was born on 12 June 1859 and titled Count of Hainaut as the eldest son of the Duke of Brabant, and whose birth seemed to ensure the sustainability of the recently established Belgian royal house.

Louise and her brother, until now under the direction of a governess, Miss Legrand, were now endowed with a governor: Count Ignace van der Straten-Ponthoz, major of artillery, assisted in his functions by Albert Donny, a young artilleryman.

[10] From the time she was 6 years old, Louise had benefited from home schooling from teachers who provided her with various courses: French, English, German and Italian languages, and lessons in mathematics, horse riding, history, religion and music.

King Leopold II nourished the hope of having a second son and therefore resumed an intimate life with the Queen; but, after a miscarriage in March 1871,[18] a third daughter was born on 30 July 1872: Clémentine, the last child of the royal couple.

[22] Philipp presented his request for Louise's hand in 1872 and repeated it in the summer of 1873 when, after having toured the world, he went to Ostend accompanied by his mother, Princess Clémentine of Orléans, to make a formal visit to the Belgian sovereigns.

Residing in Vienna and called to inherit the paternal fortune in the form of a sumptuous Majorat in Hungary, the prince, who was already enjoying the favor of Queen Marie Henriette (nostalgic about her birthplace), ended up also establishing himself as a privileged candidate in the eyes of King Leopold II, who did not want a rapprochement with Prussia so soon after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.

Their two sons were brilliantly married: the eldest, Gaston, Count of Eu, with Isabel, Princess Imperial of Brazil, and the second, Ferdinand, Duke of Alençon, with Duchess Sophie Charlotte in Bavaria, sister of Empress Elisabeth of Austria, "Sissi", thus becoming a brother-in-law of Emperor Franz Joseph I.

Finally, Philip's paternal uncle, Prince Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, became King consort of Portugal and the Algarves by his marriage to Queen Maria II da Gloria.

As for Philip's sister, Princess Clotilde of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, she was happily married with the brother of Queen Marie-Henriette, Archduke Joseph Karl of Austria, titular Palatine of Hungary.

However, once informed of her imminent engagement, she remembered favorably her future husband, fourteen years her senior, glimpsed during his visits to Brussels and that if they had said insignificant things to each other, she had the impression of "knowing him well, and always have".

[28] Louise describes her setbacks in her memoirs: "I am not the first who, victim of an excessive reserve based, perhaps, on the hope that the delicacy of the husband and the maternal nature will agree to arrange everything, learns nothing of a mother, of what to hear when the hour of the shepherd strikes.

Still, having come at the end of the wedding evening at the Château de Laeken, and while all of Brussels danced to the interior and exterior lights of national joys, I fell from the sky on a bed of rocks lined with thorns.

[29] Before returning to their main residence, the Palais Coburg in Vienna, where Louise would have liked to take one of her faithful chambermaids, which was not allowed,[30] the bride and groom paid a few visits to the courts of Gotha and Dresden.

[...] In the middle of this paradise, an immense display case full of the prince's travel memories: stuffed birds with long beaks, weapons, bronzes, ivories, Buddhas, pagodas.

Philipp wanted to transform his wife, who he saw as his property, and tried to introduce the young woman to a sexuality that she disapproved of by giving her daring books to read or by making her discover his erotic collection brought back from Japan.

Relations between Louise and her mother remained unstable, but the Queen was delighted to see her two daughters and her sons-in-law again during the festivities given in Brussels in honor of the fiftieth year of King Leopold II's reign in April 1885.

The following year, Mattachich, recently promoted to First Lieutenant in the Imperial and Royal Uhlan Regiment,[49] traveled to Opatija in the Austrian Riviera where he heard about Louise's presence and presented himself to her at a ball.

On 17 June 1899, Louise therefore was transferred to another medical institution, this time located in Saxony, the Lindenhof Sanatorium in Coswig, where she enjoyed a villa in the park at her service and where she resided with her lady-in-waiting Anna von Gebauer and a maid, Olga Börner.

[67] Geza Mattachich published in January 1904, first in Leipzig, his memoirs entitled "Mad by Reason of State" (Folle par raison d'État), a real plea in favor of Louise's release.

[70] After a long journey, Louise, Geza, and Maria Stöger (who had just told the princess the true nature of her relationship with Mattachich)[71] arrived in France, where they stayed at the Westminster hotel in the Rue de la Paix, Paris.

The reactions of the Belgian royal family were lively: the Countess of Flanders (Louise's aunt), wrote to her daughter Henriette that this kidnapping was an incredible thing and that her niece was unaware of her fate.

[77] While she had just signed an acknowledgment of debts amounting to 250,000 marks in Berlin, Louise learned, by November 1907, that her share of the jewelry of late Queen Marie Henriette (who died in 1902), seized by her creditors, had been put on public sale.

[79] Louise and her sisters discovered that their father had left his chief mistress, the French prostitute Caroline Lacroix as the main beneficiary of his will and a portion of his legacy to the Royal Trust,[80] but also deliberately concealed property included in his estate in shell companies in Germany and France.

[86] In April 1916, her son Leopold Clement, who had openly sided with his father and refused all contact with his mother, died in tragic circumstances following a fight with his mistress who, before committing suicide, had thrown him acid in the face and then shot him four times.

[91] While trying to return to Belgium since 1920, Louise, who had become undesirable in her native country because of her situation as an "enemy subject", was forced to stay outside Belgian borders, so as not to offend public opinion still battered by the war.

[96] In her memoirs published in 1921 under the title Autour des trônes que j'ai vu tomber, Louise immediately affirms her Belgian patriotism (always hoping for a return to her native country) then recounts her eventful existence and draws up interesting portraits, obviously subjective, of members of her family and of the European sovereigns she has met during her lifetime.

As for her daughter Princess Dorothea of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, born in 1881, married on 2 August 1898 (during the internment of her mother) with Ernst Gunther, Duke of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg, brother of the German Empress Augusta Victoria.