page_title: Princess Stéphanie of Belgium
section_title: Later life
hierarchical_section_title: Princess Stéphanie of Belgium / Later life
context_page_description: Princess Stéphanie of Belgium, a Belgian princess by birth, became Crown Princess of Austria through her marriage to the heir-apparent of the Habsburg dynasty, Archduke Rudolf. She was famously widowed in 1889 when Rudolf and his mistress, Mary Vetsera, were found dead in an apparent murder-suicide pact at the Imperial hunting lodge at Mayerling in the Vienna Woods.
  Her grandfather Leopold I of Belgium was the country's first king. Her aunt, Charlotte of Belgium, the future ill-fated Empress of Mexico, was married to Maximilian, the brother of her future father-in law, the Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph.
context_section_description: Stéphanie married again on 22 March 1900 at Miramare. The groom was Prince Lónyay de Nagy-Lónya et Vásárosnamény (Bodrogolaszi, 24 August 1863 - Budapest, 20 July 1946), a Hungarian nobleman of unequal rank who, in 1917, was elevated by the Emperor of Austria to the rank of Fürst. Her father was so furious at the marriage that he forbade Stéphanie to see her dying mother. 
  She settled with her new husband in his castle Oroszvár - Rusovce in western Hungary, modern-day Slovakia, until the advancing Red Army forced them to flee their estate. They found sanctuary in Pannonhalma Archabbey, near Györszentmárton, Hungary.
  In 1935 she wanted to publish her memoir to set the record straight, but this caused a scandal and a court forbade their distribution. Police visited every bookshop in Vienna in order to seize the copies already on sale. In it she published Rudolf's last letter to her, and proclaimed that (in her view) he and the Baronness had made a suicide pact. Her memoir was eventually published outside of Austria in 1937 as Ich sollte Kaiserin werden (I Was To Be Empress).
  Stéphanie died at Pannonhalma on 23 August 1945. Her only child, Archduchess Elisabeth Marie of Austria, had four children:
  Prince Franz Joseph of Windisch-Graetz
  Prince Ernst of Windisch-Graetz
  Prince Rudolph of Windisch-Graetz
  Princess Stephanie of Windisch-Graetz
caption: Elemér Lónyay, Stéphanie's second husband
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