Princess Stéphanie Clotilde Louise Herminie Marie Charlotte of Belgium (21 May 1864 – 23 August 1945) was a Belgian princess who became Crown Princess of Austria through marriage to Crown Prince Rudolf, heir-apparent to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Princess Stéphanie was the second daughter of King Leopold II of Belgium and Marie Henriette of Austria. She married in Vienna on 10 May 1881 Crown Prince Rudolf, son and heir of Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria. They had one child, Archduchess Elisabeth Marie. Stéphanie's marriage quickly became fragile. Rudolf, depressed and disappointed by politics, had multiple extramarital affairs, and contracted a venereal disease that he transmitted to his wife, rendering her unable to conceive again. In 1889, Rudolf and his mistress Mary Vetsera were found dead in an apparent murder-suicide pact at the imperial hunting lodge at Mayerling in the Vienna Woods.
In 1900, Stéphanie married again, to Count Elemér Lónyay de Nagy-Lónya et Vásáros-Namény, a Hungarian nobleman of lower rank; for this, she was excluded from the House of Habsburg. However, this second union was happy. After the death of her father in 1909, Stéphanie joined her older sister Louise to claim from the Belgian courts the share of the inheritance of which they both felt they had been stripped.
Until World War II, Count and Countess Lónyay (elevated to the princely rank in 1917) peacefully spent their lives at Rusovce Mansion in Slovakia. In 1935, Stéphanie published her memoirs, entitled Je devais être impératrice ("I Was Going To Be Empress"). In 1944, she disinherited her daughter, who had divorced to live with a socialist deputy and whom she had not seen since 1925. The arrival of the Red Army in April 1945, at the end of the war, forced Stéphanie and her husband to leave their residence and take refuge in the Pannonhalma Archabbey in Hungary. Stéphanie died of a stroke in the abbey later the same year.
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. In 1853, their marriage had been arranged for exclusively political reasons by both King Leopold I and the Habsburgs without consulting the groom and bride, whose interests were almost entirely opposed: the Duke of Brabant was little interested by family life and was passionate about political and economic issues in the kingdom which he was to reign over, while Marie Henriette was a young woman versed in religion with other interests limited to horseback riding, dogs and music.
Born at the Palace of Laeken on 21 May 1864, Stéphanie received an emergency baptism on the day of her birth. The official baptism took place one month later, on 25 June, in a ceremony which lasted an hour, in the chapel of the Palace of Laeken, where she received the names Stéphanie Clotilde Louise Herminie Marie Charlotte; her first two names were in honor of her godparents, her maternal uncle Archduke Stephen of Austria, titular Palatine of Hungary) and her aunt by marriage Princess Clotilde of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. After the ceremony, a gala lunch was given with 60 people in attendance.
Stéphanie had two older siblings: Louise (born 18 February 1858), and Leopold, Count of Hainaut (born 12 June 1859). On 10 December 1865, her paternal grandfather King Leopold I, founder of the Belgian dynasty, died after a reign of 34 years. His son, Stéphanie's father, ascended to the throne under the name of Leopold II, and her brother assumed the title of Duke of Brabant as the new heir of the throne.
In the spring of 1868, the almost 9-year-old Leopold, Duke of Brabant and heir to the throne, suffered from a chill following a fall in the pond in the Park of Laeken. His condition deteriorated rapidly: the doctor diagnosed acute pericarditis. In the summer, he seemed to recover, but his cough persisted. The doctor recommended the removal of the uvula and performed this surgery before his young patient went to Ostend to recover. 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. In August, Leopold, suffering from dropsy, was brought back to Laeken. The Queen thenceforth never left her son's bedside. After having received the last sacraments in September, the son seemed better, but his condition worsened again until he died on 22 January 1869.
In her memoirs, Stéphanie wrote: "The first event that was deeply engraved in my memory was the death of this beloved brother [...]. 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". Stéphanie's childhood was therefore marked by this mourning: "From that moment on, my memories have seen my parents' married life darken. Struck in the heart by the death of her son, my mother had changed a lot: this child had been the goal of her life, he had reconciled her with the fate that had fallen to her".
At the beginning of 1871, epidemics of typhus and smallpox raged in Brussels. The Queen, without worrying about potential contagion, assisted affected families. On 10 April, Stéphanie, who was not yet seven, contracted typhus, to the dismay of her parents, who feared that a second child of theirs would die. For many weeks, the girl was unconscious, feverish and in great pain. Her relatives prepared her for death. Her father often came to see her, and her mother and the faithful Toni Schariry, a nanny of German origin hired shortly after Stéphanie's birth, wept at her bedside. The princess was saved only by the care of an unknown Ardennes doctor, whom the royal couple had consulted, who recommended cold baths. The fever decreased and in October, Stéphanie was considered to have recovered. After the recovery of their daughter, Léopold II and Marie Henriette took her and her sister to make her convalescence in Biarritz, making a stopover in Paris.
Leopold nourished the hope of having a second son and therefore resumed sexual relations with the Queen; but, after a miscarriage in March 1871, another daughter was born on 30 July 1872: Clémentine, the last child of the royal couple. Stéphanie relates about her parents: "It is sad and discouraging to think that these two beings [...] could not live better together and create a home. But unfortunately, they did not understand each other. Their paths crossed for a single instant, only to move away immediately and forever. He chose that of indifference, infidelity, she had to accept that of resignation, loneliness and pain". 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. He also rejected his family for his mistresses – having so many scandalous liaisons that he was known to his subjects as Le Roi des Belges et des Belles (“The King of the Belgians and of the Beauties”).
From 1874, Stéphanie (who until then had a nanny, the Viennese Antoinette Polsterer) was placed under the direction of her sister Louise's governess, Mademoiselle Legrand. 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". Stéphanie benefitted from schooling by teachers who provided her with various courses: French, English, German, Dutch and Hungarian for languages, while mathematics lessons, horsemanship, history, history of art, religion, botany, and rhetoric were also taught. However, the level of education of the princesses was not very high: "The programs lacked scope. In the severe decor of the study room, it was usually too rudimentary that we applied ourselves to history, geography, literature, mathematics; a preponderant place being left to the decorative arts: painting, drawing, music, as well as needlework".