Category Archives: Geneva

Shelley & Byron Lore House on Lake Geneva for Sale

mary_shelley_plaque_nernierAn historic property on the shore of Lake Geneva associated with the lives of Percy and Mary Shelley and Lord Byron is offered for sale for €2.7 million. A plaque on the house declares that Mary Shelley wrote some pages of Frankenstein there in April of 1816. Short of the known facts that Mary did not start Frankenstein until after June of 1816, and did not arrive in Geneva from Paris until May of 1816, the house is surely connected to the travels of Percy Shelley and Lord Byron.

​The now custom designed four bedroom home with beautiful lake views of the Jura Mountains is located in Nernier, Haute Savoie France, on the southern shore of Lac Leman and dates back to 1739. In Percy Shelley’s journals, he reports that on his boating trip with Lord Byron as his companion to circumnavigate the lake while Mary remained with Claire in the house they had rented, one of their first stops was at Nernier. Percy had noted that Polidori was unable to join them on their trip, due to an ankle sprain. The trip continued to the Chateau Chillon on the Swiss side, which inspired Byron’s Prisoner of Chillon.

nernier_house_shelleyThe present house at the time in 1816 was an auberge guest inn for travelers around the lake. It has been reconstructed into a modern four bedroom single family home on upper and lower floors, which had been owned for many years by a French family, who have decided to sell, now that children have grown and moved away.

The property is situated on the harbor’s edge in the little medieval village of Nernier, about twelve miles from the Cologny neighborhood where the Villa Diodati is to be found, and across the lake from the Chateau Coppet, where Shelley and Byron visited Madame DeStael. The house can be reached by road from Geneva along the lake, or a ferry crosses the lake from Nyon on the Swiss northern shore to Yvoire on the French south shore. The winter ski resort of Portes du Soleil is an hour’s drive away.

nernier_house_interiorThe house is described by the real estate listing with Leggett Prestige as having an entrance hall on the ground floor with an open-plan kitchen, dining and living area and a balcony with idyllic views across the lake. The first floor has an office area and lounge with a fireplace and another balcony. The second floor has a landing with a built-in double closet and two bedrooms, one with its own balcony.

At the time of Shelley and Byron’s stay there he described it in rather a different frame:

“Leaving Hermance, we arrived at sunset at the village of Nerni. After looking at our lodgings, which were gloomy and dirty, we walked out by the side of the lake. It was beautiful to see the vast expanse of these purple and misty waters broken by the craggy islets near to its slant beached margin. There were many fish sporting in the lake, and multitudes were collected close to the rocks to catch the flies which inhabited them.

On returning to the village, we sat on a wall beside the lake, looking at some children who were playing at a game like ninepins. The children here appeared in an extraordinary way deformed and diseased. Most of them were crooked, and with enlarged throats; but one little boy had such exquisite grace in his mien and motions, as I never before saw equaled in a child. His countenance was beautiful for the expression with which it overflowed. There was a mixture of pride and gentleness in his eyes and lips, the indications of sensibility, which his education will probably pervert to misery or seduce to crime; but there was more of gentleness than of pride, and it seemed that the pride was tamed from its original wildness by the habitual exercise of milder feelings.

My companion (Byron) gave him a piece of money, which he took without speaking, with a sweet smile of easy thankfulness, and then with an unembarrassed air turned to his play. The imagination surely could not forbear to breathe into the most inanimate forms some likeness of its own visions, on such a serene and glowing evening, in this remote and romantic village, beside the calm lake that bore us hither.

On returning to our inn, we found that the servant had arranged our rooms, and deprived them of the greater portion of their former disconsolate appearance. They reminded my companion of Greece: it was five years, he said, since he had slept in such beds. The influence of the recollections excited by this circumstance on our conversation gradually faded, and I retired to rest with no unpleasant sensations, thinking of our journey tomorrow, and of the pleasure of recounting the little adventures of it when we return.”

I’m sure the beds have much improved, and if you’re got a couple a million handy and looking for a beautiful location to live in France with a literary history, this might be a golden opportunity.

Photos Courtesy Leggett Prestige BNPS

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Paris to Geneva in Three Hours On TGV-Lyria

TGV Lyria200 years ago during that famous summer of 1816 when Mary and Percy Shelley left England for the second time to travel to Switzerland, where they would meet up with Lord Byron on the shores of Lake Geneva for the oft-told ghost story competition and the beginning of Frankenstein, it required about four days to travel from Paris to Geneva, by hired coach, with room for Clare and a few servants to carry all the luggage. Today, traveling from Paris to Geneva with a small group of friends or family takes 3 hours by train, on the High-Speed TGV-Lyria, the “bullet train’ of the SCNF French Railway.

And from now up through Christmas of 2018 and a little beyond, if you’ve a hankering to follow the trail of the Shelley’s with a family or small group of friends for an anniversary year exploration of the sights that inspired Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, to visit the Bodmer Library where some of the Shelley documents reside or to see the Villa Diodati and walk through the garden, or just for a romantic adventure, Rail-Europe is offering TGV-LYRIA ticketing as a special discount for small groups.

From 1 September through 27 December the TGV-Lyria High Speed train which rockets through the Burgundy countryside to from France to Switzerland is offered at – for 3, 4, or 5 passengers traveling together. Rail Europe TGV-Lyria

*This is an affiliate link for FD gets a small commission from the supplier, but adds no cost.

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Goethe and Frankenstein: Or, The Devil and the Dream

Goethe and FrankensteinHere’s an exchange from The Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley when Mary, Percy and Claire are unexpectedly entertained in Switzerland from a local academic who has read Percy Shelley’s St. Irvyne, addressing him under the mistaken name from his pseudonymous “A Gentleman from Oxford” author identity.

“Monsieur Oxford, in your book—an outcast from society wanders in the Alps Mountains hoping for death. This is Wolfstein,” he began, giving the abstract and the main character’s name to the author as if he might have forgotten it. “He encounters an alchemist, the Rosicrucian, who promises him the elixir of life if his magic can raise the corpse of his dead lover, Magalena, from her tomb. But to do this, he must denounce his faith and deny his creator. They are struck by lightning and they are destroyed.”

The familiar story of the creation of the Frankenstein novel is a fireside reading of a book of Gothic tales and a nightmare dream on the lakeside of Geneva one summer. But the formation of the ideas of Mary Godwin’s book arose from her exposure to many influences, of Shelley, a collection of literary minds in the circle of her father’s acquaintances, and her readings, assembling the themes and events of her story from as many parts as her fictional creature.

But what role did Johann Goethe play in the writing of Frankenstein? And his friend, Friedrich Schiller?

When Victor Frankenstein encounters his creature who has been wandering and hiding in the Alps above Geneva, his unwanted creation tells of his education, how he read “The Sorrows of Werter”, “Plutarchs Lives” and “Paradise Lost”, books he found in a dropped leather satchel. It is from Werter, he learns the human need for love and connection, which so angers him with Victor for denying him, it drives him to murder and revenge.

Sorrows of Young Werther Johann Goethe

Today, Goethe is more familiarly known for his play of “Faust”, the doctor who trades his soul for a deal with the devil, but Johann Goethe’s early masterwork “The Sorrows of Young Werther”, the semi-autobiographical tale of a young student so obsessed with a love he cannot have that he commits suicide, was the “Catcher in the Rye” or “Hunger Games” of its day in the late 18th Century, a popular story that reached out to the young, so melancholy that it was blamed for a wave of suicides. The creature in Frankenstein expresses the profound effect the story had on him, which is the author’s expression of the effect it had on her, so much that in it can be found her own inspirations.

“I thought Werter himself a more divine being than I had ever beheld or imagined; his character contained no pretension, but it sank deep. The disquisitions upon death and suicide were calculated to fill me with wonder…”

But the reading of his book was not Mary Godwin’s only connection to Goethe. At the time of her formations of ideas that would permeate her novel, the German classicism was infusing the English literature world, inspiring the romantics of her world. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a regular of the literary society of her father, William Godwin, and a familiar acquaintance of Mary and Shelley, had been one of the founding sources of this.

Coleridge had learned German on a trip to Germany in his younger days, along with his friend William Wordsworth. Coleridge had encamped for a few months at Gottingen University, where he learned the language and listened to lectures and made side trips. He utilized this on his return to England to launch his literary career by translating to English his version of Friedrich Schiller’s “Wallenstein”.

And though he did not translate Schiller’s play of “Wilhelm Tell” he translated a poem “Tell’s Birthplace”. Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Godwin had been so influenced by the story of Wilhelm Tell it had inspired their elopement trip to Switzerland in 1814, to the beauty of the Lake Uri locations of Schiller’s story, where they had hoped to live away from the clucking tongues of English society, until they ran out of money. Shelley had even expected his wife and son might come and live with them in an egalitarian communal paradise.

Schiller was not Coleridge’s only influence on Mary and Percy. About the time of their elopement escape, Coleridge had been approached by publisher John Murray II to produce a translation of Goethe’s Faust. Coleridge was struggling with his own particular demons at the time, his long addiction to Laudanum, and his doubts about his own work with a tendency to begin brilliant works and never quite finish them, like Kubla Kahn, even going so far as to add: Or, a Vision in a Dream, A Fragment to the title, after Byron and friends convinced him publish it.

Coleridge would surely have been well acquainted with the literary circle of Darmstadt, the German Romantic movement “Circle of the Senses”, much like the literary circles of the English publishing world of John Murray, and of Madame DeStael at her Chateau Coppet in Geneva, visited by Bryon and Shelley in their travels around the lake.

The Darmstadt Circle was organized around the literary lights of Johann Merck, Gottfried Herder, and Christoph Wieland. The German authors had been translating works of Shakespeare and Cervantes into their language, as Coleridge had been the German works to English. Goethe, born in Frankfurt had served briefly as a magazine editor in nearby Darmstadt with Merck, before trying to revitalize his legal career in Wetzler, where he was inspired by the suicide of a friend and his own passionate attraction to an unattainable girl to write Young Werther.

Had Coleridge heard of the story of the strange activities of the one-time inhabitant of the Frankenstein Castle at Darmstadt, the college lecturer-alchemist and occult dabbler, Johann Conrad Dippel, from his travels in Germany? Coleridge may have readily been introduced to Dippel’s Oil, a malodorous concoction made from distilled animal parts, claimed as a universal medicine (meant to be rubbed on and not swallowed.) But by Coleridge’s time in Gottingen, the medicinal qualities of the Dippel’s Animal Oil had been largely dismissed and perhaps turned into somewhat of a joke after his chemical formulas had found a use in cloth dies. Mostly now only known for his tangential relation to the Frankenstein Castle, Dippel had written almost seventy works about his chemistry in German by the time of Coleridge’s studies at Gottingen.

Coleridge never published his English version of Faust in his lifetime and only later has what is believed may be his unfinished work been discovered. Mary Godwin also began a book before Frankenstein that she never finished, she called Hate, and what secrets of her sixteen year old heart it held may never be known. But why would she chose a German name for her French speaking Genevan characters of: Frankenstein: Or, The Modern Prometheus? Not only were they French Swiss, but Victor Frankenstein’s father was Italian. Confusing?

Wallenstein, Wolfstein, Frankenstein, and some smelly creepy medicine for a pregnant young woman author, expressing her exposure to the lofty thoughts and influences of the circle of contemplative minds surrounding her. Constantly pressed for an explanation of where she got the idea for her story, if a vision in a dream worked for Coleridge to explain Kubla Khan, why not for Frankenstein?

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Frankenstein Fraud! Victor Frankenstein College Dropout

“So, Mr. Frankenstein, you say you’re a doctor and that you have created life from dead tissue, by some mysterious means which you don’t support in any substantive way. Might we see your curriculum vitae?”

frankenstein_illustration2018 marks 200 years since the publishing of “Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus” by Mary Shelley, and countless versions and adaptations ever since. In many of these, or references to the story, the monster is often called Frankenstein and the main character, Victor Frankenstein, is often referred to as “Dr. Frankenstein”. But after creating his creature, which in the novel he never named, Victor Frankenstein left his studies at Ingolstadt University and returned home to Geneva on the tragic news of his younger brother’s death.

His field of study at Ingolstadt was at first, Natural Philosophy, an Enlightenment precursor to today’s natural sciences, but combining mathematics and chemistry with his own interests in the ancient alchemist notions of Cornelius Agrippa and Paracelsus, all of which he abandoned on the horror of his creation, missing his examinations to hurry home.

Victor Frankenstein was essentially a college dropout, so to call himself a doctor would have been fraudulent. He certainly never practiced medicine following the events at Ingolstadt. But he was perhaps distracted by other events. He came from a moneyed upper middle-class family, so presumably had no need to practice a trade. He did not establish any practice, nor teach at any institution. If he were to apply for a doctorate, I’m not sure how his interview might go…

“So, Mr. Frankenstein, you say you have discovered the secrets to life and death where others have failed, but you claim your notes were stolen by a monster, which you had sewn together from dead bodies, and kept in your university dormitory apartment bedroom for two years? Perhaps it is a means of refrigeration you have discovered?”

Frankenstein might suggest at this point that he’s working on it. He’s, of course, been thinking of other possible uses for electricity beyond bringing the dead back to life, but hasn’t had the time to develop his thoughts as he’s been preoccupied with some murders in his family.

The interview takes an incredulous turn at this point. “From your dissertation, you say this “demon” being you animated learned to read Plutarch and Goethe, in French, and discuss complex human cultural philosophy solely by observing a mountain farm family though the window of a barn, sustaining himself by eating nuts and berries he gathered in the woods? And no-one but you spoke to this eight foot tall individual of horrific visage, except one old blind man. And you didn’t finish your studies because this unseen horror murdered your little brother…and framed the crime on the housemaid?”

Frankenstein might apologetically have responded that he felt some personal responsibility in not stepping forward at the time, and telling the authorities they should be looking for an eight foot tall man who could run like a gazelle, with well-proportioned arms and sallow, watery, yellow eyes. He might further explain that this man he had once thought beautiful, and meticulously cared for and groomed for two years, turned on him from jealousy when he was rejected, blaming Victor for not loving him, and demanding he make a girlfriend for him who would understand him and love him for who he was, in spite of his flaws, and not the perfect being Victor had unrealistically envisioned when they started together.

Some of Victor Frankenstein’s life was most certainly based on Percy Shelley’s, if not intentionally, by familiarity. Shelley was a college dropout. He went to Oxford, but was asked to leave after anonymously publishing a scandalous tract on atheism authored together with his friend, Thomas Jefferson Hogg. Shelley and Mary lived on Percy Shelley’s family fortune estate income, though Shelley was in conflict with his father over his share and they struggled through thin years. Mary herself never attended a formal school, though women’s education was a major theme of her mother’s writing. She was tutored at home as the daughter of a noted author and publisher, William Godwin, and she was a voracious reader for her education.

The reference to “Doctor Frankenstein” seems to come from the stage or film dramatizations of the story, where in dialogue, just calling him Frankenstein would get repetitive and “Mister Frankenstein” doesn’t seem to carry the weight of gravitas authority for such an important character. And even though his family had money and prominent position, he had no landed title, so Lord or Sir Frankenstein doesn’t work. Many of the later adaptations refer to him as Von Frankenstein, but in the novel he is not a noble and Frankenstein is not a land, just a family name.  He was the son of a local bourgeois government official in French speaking Switzerland, where it would have been “de  Frankenstein” if he was landed.

If the story of Victor Frankenstein’s miraculous creation of life from dead tissue had been verified and not have turned out so tragically, with his desperately following his murderous creation across a frozen north wasteland, he might have been given an honorarium title of doctor, or perhaps even have been knighted. But instead, perhaps the interview might conclude…

“Mr. Frankenstein, while we find your tale intriguing and colorfully inventive, we might suggest you take a long sea voyage and spend some time alone in the artic to gather your thoughts and perhaps submit a revised application, with more footnotes. And some references. Oh, your references have been murdered, too? Well…Hm.”

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Assassination of Empress Sisi in Geneva

An Account of the Assassination of Empress Elizabeth of Austria and Queen of Hungary in Geneva by the Italian anarchist Lucheni.

Empress Elizabeth Sisi of AustriaThe most famous assassination of a Habsburg was the shooting of the Archduke Ferdinand by Yugoslav separatist Gavrilo Princip, while riding in a car in Sarajevo in 1914, which is deemed to be the catalyst which led to the beginning of the First World War. This was not the first murder of an Austro-Hungarian royal while traveling. Mary Shelley set the tragic events of her novel Frankenstein on the shores of Lake Geneva with the murder of Victor Frankenstein’s son on the Plainpalais by the creature he had created. This was the terrible retribution for his hubris of creating a living being and then abandoning him. A similar case might be made for the turning of the anarchists on the imperials in class warfare. The French Revolution, of which Mary’s mother Mary Wollstonecraft had been a witness and had written about, and the resulting end of the Emperor Napoleon, had been one of the draws which had brought Mary and Percy to Paris on their elopement tour in 1814 as told in the Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley: The Frankenstein Diaries.

Empress Sisi and Contes SztataryAs Geneva celebrates the 200th anniversary of the origination of Frankenstein, for history buff sight-seeking visitors to Geneva who might be drawn by the story of Frankenstein, and looking for more to explore, here is an account of the curious murder of one of the most sympathetic of the Imperial family of Habsburgs who ruled and dominated the life of Central Europe.

There had been warnings of possible assassination movements when the popular Empress Elisabeth, more commonly called “Sisi” (or Sissi), now sixty years old and essentially estranged from her husband, the Emperor Franz Joseph, visited Geneva in 1898. She was traveling incognito, but such an illustrious personage is hard to keep quiet and an employee of the Hotel Beau Rivage, where she was staying, had bragged that the Empress of Austria was a guest.

Assassination of Embress ElizabethOn Saturday, the 10th of September, at 1:35 in the afternoon, Sisi and her lady-in-waiting and traveling companion, the Countess Irma Sztáray, 35, left the hotel to walk the short distance to the harbor dock to catch the steamship Genève for a scenic cruise journey to Montreux where she was residing. The empress like many others had followed the “Grand Tour” which began with the writings of Byron and the other romantics. The Empress Sisi didn’t like “processions,” and she had ordered that her servants take the train ahead to  Territet on the lake shore at Montreux where they would meet the boat after she had taking the scenic Lake Geneva cruise boat on the waters. Percy Shelly and George Lord Bryon had made this trip by row boat, now it was a tourist trip by paddle steamer.

Hotel Beau Rivage Geneva TodayThe two women were strolling on the promenade when a 25-year-old Italian man approached them. In an account by Countess Sztáray, the young man tried to peek under her mistress’s parasol, then, just as the ship’s bell rang to signal the departure, the man stumbled against her and made a movement with his hand as if he was trying to catch his balance. She was unaware at the moment it happened that he was actually holding a small weapon made of a sharpened four inch long needle file embedded into a wooden handle. The attacker was an Italian anarchist named Luigi Lucheni. The tool was used to file the eyes of industrial needles, intended by the assassin as a symbol of the rise of the industrial worker against the oppressor, and he later pronounced this as part of the anarchist creed, the “propaganda of the deed”, promoting the change of society by a violent action. His original plan was to assassinate the Duke of Orleans, a pretender to the throne of France, but the duke had departed on a tour of the Swiss Valais before he could make his move. Then, a Geneva newspaper had reported from the hotel source that a guest staying under the name of the “Countess of Hohenembs” was in fact the Empress Sisi of Austria, and he changed his target.

Lucheni declared at his trail. “I am an anarchist by conviction…I came to Geneva to kill a sovereign” as an example for those impoverished who take no action to improve their social position, “it did not matter to me who the sovereign was whom I should kill. It was not a woman I struck, but an Empress; it was a crown that I had in view.”

Paddle Steamer GenevaAfter Lucheni had made his sly attack and moved swiftly on, neither woman realized the seriousness of what had happened, that she had been stabbed. The empress weakened on her feet and a nearby coach driver rushed to assist her. He signaled to the concierge of the Beau Rivage, an Austrian named Planner, who was watching. Rather than return to the hotel, the coachman helped the two women to the boat dock, about a 100 yards, and up the gangway to board the Genève steamer. Countess Sztáray relaxed her hold on the empress’s arm and at that moment she collapsed unconscious on the boat deck. The companion called urgently for a doctor, but there was none on board and only a fellow passenger, a former nurse, came to aid. The captain of the Genève, a Captain Roux, was unaware of the true identity of the ill passenger and since it was a very hot day, advised that her companion should take her back to the hotel. This was impossible as the boat was already departing from the dock, and sailing out of harbor onto the lake. Three men carried the empress to the top deck and laid her on a bench. Countess Sztáray then opened her gown and cut the laces of her corset so she could take air. The empress came around briefly and her lady-in-waiting asked if she was in pain. “No”, Elizabeth answered, and then asked, “What has happened?” They were her last words as she lost consciousness.

It was then that the Countess Sztáray noticed a small brown stain above her mistress’s left breast, but still didn’t know what it was. Frightened that she had passed out a second time, the lady finally revealed who her companion was. The captain, recognizing the seriousness, immediately turned the boat to return to the Geneva harbor, where the empress was carried by sailors on an improvised stretcher made from two oars and a sail with seat cushions, back to the Hotel Beau Rivage.

assassination_weapon1The wife of the hotel chief was a nurse and when she and Sztáray began to undress the empress’s layers, they finally noticed the small stain of blood and the tiny puncture wound. The empress was still. She had breathed her last breaths as they had carried her into the room, but when they lifted her to a bed, she was certainly dead. Two doctors arrived and a priest. Dr. Mayer made a small incision in her arm, but there was no blood flow, and the Empress Elizabeth was pronounced dead at 2:20 pm and that Saturday afternoon. An autopsy was performed by Dr. Golay, who determined that the thin tool, just three and third inches, had pierced the lung and penetrated the heart. The pressure from the tight corsets the empress wore to control her slim figure, had kept the blood flow from the surface and had kept the empress from being aware of the wound. When the corseting was removed, the blood hemorrhage had filled the pericardial sac, stopping the heart.

Empress Elizabeth Funeral in ViennaShe had been placed in placed in a triple coffin, with two inner lead linings and a bronze exterior case with lion claw feet. On Tuesday, before the coffins were sealed, Franz Joseph’s official representatives arrived to identify the body. The coffin had two glass panels with doors which could be slid back to view her face. Eighty-three sovereigns and the nobility of the Austro-Hungarian Empire followed the funeral cortege of the hearse to her burial in the Habsburg crypt at the Church of the Capuchins in Vienna. The tomb inscription first denoted “Elisabeth, Empress of Austria”, but the words “and Queen of Hungary” were added after the protests of Hungarians.

empress_sisi_coffin

On Wednesday morning, Elisabeth’s body was carried back to Vienna aboard a funeral train. The inscription on her coffin read, “Elisabeth, Empress of Austria”. The Hungarians were outraged and the words, “and Queen of Hungary” were hastily added. The entire Austro-Hungarian Empire was in deep mourning; 82 sovereigns and high-ranking nobles followed her funeral cortege on the morning of 17 September to the Habsburg tomb in the Church of the Capuchins.

Rue Mont Blanc and Rue Des Alpes at Hotel De La Paix GenevaThe assassin had made his escape from the harbor down the Rue des Alpes and tossed the weapon into the doorway of No. 3 Rue des Alpes, which is now a storefront abutting the Hotel de La Paix. After an alarm was raised he was cornered by two sailors and a cab coachman until a gendarme could be called. The file was found by the building concierge who didn’t at first realize what it was as the sharp tip had broken off.

luigi_lucheni_arrestLuigi Lucheni was actually born Paris and left as an orphan and spent most of his life in Switzerland, so he was only really Italian by the parentage of his mother. But the news that the assassin of the adored Sisi was “Italian” caused a wave of anti-Italian reprisals through Switzerland. There was concern that a wave of political attacks was coming from cells of anarchists, but Lucheni claimed he was acting alone. But a few months later, the International Conference for the Social Defense Against Anarchists was held in Rome, but it failed to curb the movement, until another anarchist would fire the shot which sent the world into war and ended empires.

Lucheni wanted his trial moved to Lucerne when he learned that the Canton of Geneva had abolished the death penalty, as he wanted to be famous as a martyr. He was sentenced to life. He first unsuccessfully tried to kill himself with a sardine can key in 1900, but it was another ten years before he was found hanging by his belt in his cell in an apparent suicide.

In a bit of gruesome science theater worthy of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Lucheni’s head was removed during autopsy and kept in a jar of formaldehyde for 100 years, first at the Institute of Forensic Science of the University of Geneva until 1985, then given to the Federal Museum of Pathology and Anatomy in Vienna, until finally buried at the Central Cemetery (Zentralfriedhof) in Vienna in the year 2000. The murder weapon can still be seen in the Sisi Museum at the Hofburg Palace in Vienna and Sisi’s hearse at Imperial Carriage Museum of the Schonbrunn Palace. You can still take the Lake Geneva cruise that Sisi never completed, or stay incognito at the Beau Rivage.

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