Stéphanie was the third child of the Duke (future King Leopold II) and Duchess of Brabant (born Archduchess Marie Henriette of Austria), an unhappy and mismatched couple.

Queen Marie Henriette isolated herself in Spa to rest, while King Leopold II, held back by affairs of state, and his two daughters remained in Laeken.

Although I was only four and a half years old, I still vividly remember this deliciously beautiful and tender child, his resignation during his short illness, and the poignant pain of my mother, when he exhaled in her arms".

[7] Leopold nourished the hope of having a second son and therefore resumed sexual relations with the Queen; but, after a miscarriage in March 1871,[8] another daughter was born on 30 July 1872: Clémentine, the last child of the royal couple.

[10] Leopold II thereafter lost interest in his family; he turned his attentions to the notorious creation of the Congo Free State, which was his personal fiefdom and not a Belgian colonial territory, and as such its ruthless exploitation amassed him a vast private fortune.

Stephanie writes: "My education began at the age of ten; I immediately understood that from that moment books and notebooks would take the place of my toys, that a more orderly life would begin".

After reading the story of William Tell, the teacher decided to teach her pupil about the power and grandeur of the House of Habsburg and illustrated her words by showing her an engraving published in a magazine depicting the Crown Prince in hunting costume.

Countess Marie Larisch von Moennich, niece of Empress Elisabeth, had declared about Rudolph's future fiancée: "In advance, we had pity on the poor princess who would have the honor of being chosen".

[36] After the wedding night, which Stéphanie in her private letters revealed to her sister to have been a violent event by Rudolf, already mentally unstable, the couple honeymooned at Laxenburg outside the capital.

[40] As in any dynastic marriage where the political interest of the two sovereign houses takes precedence, the existence of romantic feelings within the couple has never been proven, but the relationship of the young spouses was based, at the beginning, on respect and a mutual attachment.

Both Stéphanie and Rudolf were sure it would be a boy; they even spoke of the future child by calling him "Wenceslaus" (Wacław), a Czech first name reflecting the sympathies of the Crown Prince for the Slavic populations of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

When the sex of the child was announced to Rudolf, he did not hide his disappointment at not having been given an heir to Austria-Hungary Empire, but he got used to his role of father and gave, in his correspondence, many details about the newborn girl.

For his part, Rudolf, who disapproved of his father's policies, developed friendships among opponents of the monarchy and anonymously published his political opinions in the Neues Wiener Tagblatt, edited by his friend Moritz Szeps.

Rudolf began to lose control of himself: suffering from deep fits of melancholy and mania he spoke in front of whoever wanted to hear him the presentiment of his imminent death.

During the summer of 1888, Stéphanie noticed a disturbing change in the general condition of the Crown Prince: his increasingly angry character led him to continued public outbursts of extreme violence.

I began by telling him that Rudolf was very ill and that his pathetic appearance and his dissipated behavior caused me serious concern; I begged him to make his son take a long journey so as to distract him from his grueling existence.

[63] For her part, Stéphanie planned to marry an aristocrat: Count Elemér Lónyay de Nagy-Lónya et Vásáros-Namény, a Hungarian nobleman of lower rank, of Protestant faith, and one year older than her.

The King forbade his youngest daughter Clémentine to correspond with Stéphanie and threatened to abolish the annual annuity of 50,000 francs which she received, although Franz Joseph I advised him against it.

The Emperor reluctantly gave his authorization, but Stéphanie lost her rank and her imperial titles by remarrying, while her daughter Elisabeth Marie remained in Vienna in her grandfather's guardianship.

However, King Leopold II was still so furious with his daughter's unequal marriage that he forbade Stéphanie to attend the funeral service,[69] and she was finally forced a few days later to return to London.

The neoclassical-style building is located in an area of over 2,400 hectares, consisting of an English-style park, planted with purple beeches, silver fir trees and multiple decorative species, which extends over both banks of the Danube.

They received many guests there, including Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his morganatic wife, still ostracized by the court of Vienna, and writers, such as the pacifist Bertha von Suttner.

With Hungary not yet undergoing many hardships, Stéphanie set up a makeshift dispensary in the Rusovce house, while Elemér accepted a management position in the Austrian Red Cross which took him to Romania and Serbia.

In the choir of St. Stephen's Cathedral, the new Emperor and his wife Empress Zita took a prominent place alongside the foreign rulers, and behind them stood their close family relatives.

In the years following the end of the World War I, Elisabeth Marie (who resided with her family in Schönau an der Triesting, Lower Austria) and her mother still had strong feelings for each other.

[81] According to her granddaughter-in-law, author Ghislaine of Windisch-Graetz (née d'Arschot Schoonhoven), Stéphanie "was confused in devotion and even bigoted; she was convinced that her daughter was possessed by the demon and she could not tolerate the immorality of her love life.

The publishing contract was drawn up on 24 April 1934, but Stéphanie's procrastination postponed the publication and distribution of her memoirs to October 1935, under the original title of Ich sollte Kaiserin werden (I Was To Be Empress) in German bookstores,[83] because the book was censored in Austria,[84] where the police visited every bookshop in Vienna in order to seize the copies already on sale.

She disinherited her daughter, who had divorced Prince Otto of Windisch-Graetz to live with Leopold Petznek, a Social Democratic deputy from Lower Austria, and bequeathed all of her real estate to the order of the Benedictines.

[89] The year 1944 brought new worries to Stéphanie and her husband because the German Army wanted to transform their residence into a military hospital for war wounded, a project which was rejected at the last minute.

[90] Stéphanie's only daughter, Archduchess Elisabeth Marie, finally obtained a divorce from her husband, Prince Otto Weriand of Windisch-Graetz in early 1948 and on 4 May of that year, she married her longtime partner Petznek in a registry office in Vienna.