My Own Affairs

This 1921 memoir offers an unapologetically raw account of royal life from its most uncomfortable inside perspective. Princess Louise, eldest daughter of King Leopold II of Belgium, writes from the evening of her days with the bitter clarity of someone who idealized life too much and was cruelly disappointed. She recounts her gilded cage: a childhood marked by isolation at court, marriage at a young age to a man she grew to despise, and a lifetime of watching European thrones crumble around her. The memoir gains historical weight through her proximity to power. She moved among the Austrian Emperor, the German Kaiser, the Tsar of Bulgaria, and witnessed the violent unraveling of their worlds. Her own exile during the Great War, flight to Munich and Budapest, brief imprisonment by Hungarian Bolshevists, become both personal harrowing and emblematic of a continent's collapse. Yet what elevates this beyond period relic is Louise's savage honesty about what royalty costs: the betrayal, the ingratitude, the way thrones devour their own. Her love for Belgium burns through every bitter page, but it is the love of a daughter who feels her father was denied his due honor.