Archduchess Marianne’s long denouement is drawing to a close. After so many maelstroms, the last years of Prince and Princess Schwarzenberg unfold in relative peace — spent hunting, managing their estates, and raising their long-desired heir. Apart from the Prince’s accidental death in 1732, no further calamity seems to have darkened their life. The widowed Princess, though ailing, dutifully fulfilled her parental and managerial responsibilities until her death in 1741.
Karolina — Madame Reventlow — by contrast, ends her story as enigmatically as she lived it. She outlived her husband by only a few years and probably spent her final days in Holstein, though a return to Austria or elsewhere cannot be entirely ruled out. She died in 1734 at the age of fifty. I have not been able to discover her final resting place.
The remnants of the once splendid Baroque gardens of Palace Goldburg at Murstetten, Karolina’s ancestral home, may well be taken as symbolic of a tale of lives long gone.
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