Charming and interesting. Haslip portrays the long sad but endearing story of the romantic friendship between Emperor Franz Josef and Katharina Schratt, a leading actress in the most prestigious theatre company in Vienna.

There were several aspects of this somewhat familiar story that were "new" to me. I had not been aware that the beautiful (and doomed) Empress Elizabeth was tremendously supportive of her husband's infatuation for Miss Schratt - and that the two women formed a friendship based upon their relationship with the Austro-Hungarian Emperor. It's as if the Empress appreciated Katharina for providing some feminine quality of suppleness and passivity to the Emperor that the she - Sisi - did not possess.

I also had not been aware that Katharine Schratt was a correspondent and close friend of the Bulgarian ruler "Foxy Ferdinand," to the point where Franz Joseph was occasionally jealous of Katharina's flirtatious behavior with the Balkan King. Ferdinand seems to have been genuinenly fond of the theatrical diva, and was also willing and able to use her as a conduit to influence Austro-Hungarian policy in southeastern Europe. (Stephen Constant's biography of Ferdinand does not include any mention of Schratt, so I'm not sure how well-known Schratt's role is to Balkan historians.) ( )

Storia dell'amore che legò Francesco Giuseppe a Katarina Shratt ( )