The Wittelsbachs

Duke Karl Theodor, the brother of Empress Elisabeth, and the father of Queen Elisabeth, for example, was a gifted, deeply generous humanitarian. He dedicated his life to relieving the sufferings of others through medicine, becoming an internationally acclaimed ophthalmologist and caring for many for free. He raised his children with the same altruistic ideals; young Elisabeth, Belgium's future Reine-Infirmière, trained in nursing in her father's own clinic. He also cultivated a love of beauty and art; he was a wonderful pianist, and his daughter, Elisabeth, who inherited his passion for music, used to listen to the Duke play for hours, entranced. Again, the family's artistic sensibility is often associated with morbid emotionalism, with self-indulgence, with neurosis. Yet, as Count Sforza indicates in his memoirs, Makers of Modern Europe, Karl Theodor, on the contrary, actually seemed to derive the spiritual strength needed for his medical work from his music. Furthermore, the household of the Duke and his wife, the prayerful, loving, if rather autocratic Maria Josepha of Portugal, appears to have been a warm and united one, quite different from the unhappy ménage of Franz Josef and Sisi.