Princess Stéphanie of Belgium (d. 1945)
Princess Stéphanie of Belgium (French: Stéphanie Clotilde Louise Herminie Marie Charlotte; 21 May 1864 – 23 August 1945), was by birth a Princess of Belgium and member of the House of Wettin in the branch of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (as such she was also styled Princess of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha and Duchess in Saxony). In 1881, she became Crown Princess of Austria, Hungary and Bohemia by virtue of her marriage with Crown Prince Rudolf, only son of Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria.
The second daughter of King Leopold II of Belgium and Queen Marie Henriette (born Archduchess of Austria), she married in Vienna on 10 May 1881 Archduke Rudolf of Austria, heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The union produced only one daughter, in 1883: Elisabeth Marie. Stéphanie's marriage quickly became fragile. Rudolf, depressed and disappointed by politics, had multiple extramarital affairs and contracted a venereal disease that he transmitted to his wife, rendering her unable to conceive again. She was infamously 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.
In 1900, Stéphanie married again, to Count Elemér Lónyay de Nagy-Lónya et Vásáros-Namény, a Hungarian nobleman of lower rank; for this, she was excluded from the imperial and royal House of Austria-Hungary. However, this second union was happy. After the death of her father in 1909, Stéphanie joined her older sister Louise to claim from the Belgian courts the share of the inheritance of which they both felt they had been stripped.
Until World War II, Count and Countess Lónyay (elevated to the princely rank in 1917) peacefully spent their lives at Rusovce Mansion in Slovakia. In 1935, Stéphanie published her memoirs, entitled Je devais être impératrice ("I Had to Be Empress"). In 1944, she disinherited her daughter, who had divorced to live with a socialist deputy and whom she had not seen since 1925. The arrival of the Soviet army, in April 1945, at the end of the war, forced the couple to leave their residence and take refuge in the Pannonhalma Archabbey, in Hungary, where on 23 August 1945 Stéphanie died of a stroke, aged 81.