All for Love

by Dan Jacobson (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2006

  $3.63

  She was a princess, daughter of perhaps the most hated king in Europe. He was just a lowly hussar. Their love affair in turn-of-the-century Vienna was to scandalize a continent. The story of Princess Louise of Belgium and Geza Mattachich, stepson of a minor Croatian count, began with no more than an exchanged glance in a park. Yet the princess and her soldier, divided by wealth and status, pursued their devotion to one another through scandal, ruin, madness and imprisonment. Dan Jacobson's brilliant imagining of this forgotten episode of the Hapsburg court brings to life one of the century's great love stories.

• Used

  Hardcover
  2005

  $3.39

  She was a princess, the daughter of King Leopold II of the Belgians, the wife of a prince, and a familiar figure in the court of the aged Emperor, Franz Joseph of Austria-Hungary. Her lover was second lieutenant Geza Mattachich. Ten years younger than the princess, a dashing figure in his fitted tunic and shiny boots, he was an unknown, undistinguished, unmoneyed subaltern: a man of dubious origin and extravagant ambition. Ahead of them both lay assignations, adultery, flight, the squandering of a fortune (not his; not hers either, as things worked out), a duel, imprisonment, bankruptcy, morphine, madness (or alleged madness). And, as well, a real-life heroine - in the form of canteen-worker Maria Stoger - who was no less ready than the princess and her soldier to risk all for love. Beautifully handled, romantic, sumptuous, full of wit and a real treat to read, the action of Dan Jacobson's All For Love moves from one end to the other of pre-First World War Europe. Constantly fusing historical fact with fiction, it elevates three extraordinary characters from the footnotes of history and puts them, along with their few friends and many enemies, at the centre of a drama that is both comic and painful, and as astonishing as it is convincing.