Maria Theresa's Depression
Poem★★★★Maria Theresa (1717-17 80), Empress of Austria and once the most powerful woman in the world, was crippled by depression following the deaths of her son Karl, her sister Johanna, and her husband, Emperor Francis. In To the Scaffold, historian Carolly Erickson tells of Maria Theresa’s grief at the death of her husband: The grieving widow had her rooms painted black, the windows draped with black velvet and her person veiled and swathed in somber widow’s weeds. By nature energetic and affirmative, though plagued by periods of depression, the Empress now seemed to lose heart completely, sitting alone in her darkened apartments, her hair shorn, her thoughts increasingly morbid . ... [She] ordered her own coffin prepared and placed beside her husband’s in the burial vault of the Capucin church.
The Empress spent a large part of each afternoon in the vault, sitting beside Francis’s coffin and the empty one waitingfor her, praying and weeping . ... “Emperor Francis I, my husband,” she wrote in her prayer book, “died on the evening of the eighteenth of August at half past nine o’clock.
He lived 680 months, 2,958 weeks, 20,778 1 William Manchester, The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Visions of Glory, 1874- 1932 (Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 1983), 23-24.
The point
Maria Theresa, once the most powerful woman in the world, was crippled by depression following the deaths of her son, sister, and husband; she sat in darkened chambers, ordered her coffin, and spent afternoons at her husband's tomb.