She barely felt it. A man stepped from the crowd on the lakeshore promenade, a thin file in his hand, and struck her in the chest. Elisabeth thought someone had jostled her. She got to her feet, thanked the people who hurried to help, and walked on.

The steamer pulled away from the dock, and she continued chatting with her lady-in-waiting, Irma Sztáray. Then her legs gave out. She collapsed, and the woman beside her heard the empress speak for the last time: “But what has happened to me? ” Minutes later, she was dead.

Elizabeth of Austria, called Sisi by the world, was sixty years old. The world knew her as beautiful, free, and withdrawn. But the years had worn her down. Her heart longed for peace, and her spirit fled the borders of the court.

She traveled and she wrote, she lost everyone she loved, and in the end an assassin made her immortal. The surface of her life was splendor. Beneath it lay an ocean of pain. Even in her youth, the first tragedy struck: her infant daughter, little Sophie, died, and Sisi carried that grief inside her forever.

Years later came the execution of Maximilian of Mexico, her husband’s brother, a man she had greatly admired. He had believed in his dreams and was shot on foreign soil, a shock to all Europe and a deep wound in her heart. Then died her favorite cousin, King Ludwig II of Bavaria. He was the kindred spirit she understood, a dreamer, a romantic, a free soul like her own.

“Only in art do I find freedom,” he had said. With him she felt understood—a king without a kingdom, a man who lived in dreams. But Ludwig was declared insane, deposed, and shortly afterward found dead in Lake Starnberg. The mystery of his death never left her.

The hardest blow came in 1889. Her only son, Crown Prince Rudolf, took his own life. From that day, Sisi wore only black. Her gaze grew more distant, her spirit more exhausted.

The political world crushed her as well. The Austrian monarchy passed through a profound crisis throughout her lifetime: conflicts, wars, lost territories, uprisings in the provinces. Nationalism spread across the empire, and the peoples demanded freedom and a republic. For a state of many nations like Austria, this was a severe problem.

The peoples increasingly demanded self-determination and questioned monarchy itself as a form of government. The era plunged Elisabeth into deep inner conflict. As empress she was bound to defend the old values, but as a person she understood the new ideas. To escape these contradictions, she searched for outlets, something that could free her from court etiquette, from pain, from restraint.

She found it in poetry. As a young girl she had written verses; later writing became her refuge. Her great model was Heinrich Heine—not only one of the greatest poets of the German language but a true revolutionary who questioned monarchy and mercilessly mocked it as a form of government in his poems. Sisi wrote poetry in Heine’s style, and like the master she openly criticized the politics of her age.

She even denounced her own family and ridiculed the court. Sometimes she produced brilliant verses that ruthlessly mocked her countless admirers. Such texts could never be published—too dangerous, too honest—so she hid her work. After her son Rudolf’s death, she threw down her pen.

She placed all her poems in a chest and directed that it not be opened until after 1950, and not by the imperial family but by the Swiss Republic. She called those who would one day understand her “souls of the future. ” She was right: in her thinking, her feelings, her longing for freedom, Elisabeth was ahead of her time. Travel was her second escape.

Even as a child she dreamed of boarding any ship and sailing to Africa or Brazil. Her passion for travel was her constant companion. But in her youth it was impossible. Travel meant endless wagon journeys—slow, exhausting, dangerous—and as a young empress she was not allowed to make any decision on her own.

Others dictated her life every single day. So she looked for a way out, again and again fleeing through illness. Her doctors called it a nervous complaint, but in truth it was a pretext, a reason to leave Vienna, to breathe freely and enjoy a better climate. Over the years everything changed.

By then, an expansive rail network stretched across Europe—fast, safe, comfortable—and Sisi made full use of it. She fought for the right to decide for herself where and when to go, and she was financially independent. Now she could finally live as she pleased. She traveled from country to country, from sea to sea, rarely staying in Vienna anymore.

Her place at court stood empty, and an archduchess was appointed to carry out her representative duties beside the emperor. But Sisi wanted her freedom and found it in movement—always moving, always fleeing imprisonment, duty, herself. In her youth, Hungary had captivated her. In the last chapter of her life she fell in love with Greece.

The myths, the gods, the philosophers fascinated her. She read Homer, revered the poets of antiquity, and wanted to understand their works in the original, so she began to learn Greek, one of the hardest languages in the world. She mastered it in astonishingly little time and soon traveled through the land she loved, walking through its barren mountains accompanied by scholars and archaeologists who told her its history. At last she bought a plot of land on Corfu overlooking the Ionian Sea, and there she built a palace in the Pompeian style.

She named it Achilleion, after her favorite hero, Achilles. In the gardens she placed statues of Greek philosophers and a monument to her beloved poet, Heinrich Heine. It was a palace of longing, a temple for the freedom of her mind. But no sooner was it finished than she lost interest.

Such was her restless, contradictory nature. In her final years she grew increasingly eccentric. It reached the point that it became hard to find ladies-in-waiting for her. She wandered for hours in storms, in rain, at night.

She bought a yacht and sailed the world’s oceans, tying herself to the deck during gales, just like Odysseus defying the Sirens. Sometimes she anchored off a foreign shore, went ashore simply, and if she liked a house, asked whether she might spend the night. Hotels dreaded her, for she usually arrived without warning with a huge, demanding retinue and countless special requests that were nearly impossible to fulfill. She even embarrassed princes.

She hated protocol. Instead of courtly planning she simply appeared and introduced herself: “I am the Empress of Austria, and I wish to visit your lords and ladies! ”—and entered the palace. Once, in Bad Homburg, the guard on duty arrested her when she wanted to visit the Dowager Empress.

The sentry did not believe her and took her for a madwoman. Only the frantic Lord Chamberlain of the Dowager Empress freed her from the predicament. And Sisi? She found the whole affair highly amusing, laughed heartily at the incident, and continued her journey—forever.

Emperor Franz Joseph grew used to his wife’s long absences. In 1885, Elisabeth introduced him to the actress Katharina Schratt, a remedy for his loneliness. The friendship between the emperor and Schratt lasted a lifetime, but only as long as Elisabeth lived. Despite the distance, a deep affection bound the couple.

They exchanged countless letters, full of worry, tenderness, and longing. He never visited her on Corfu—the sea did not attract him—yet they met on the French Riviera, in peace and intimacy, almost as before. When the emperor left, Elisabeth returned to her restless life: long journeys, solitary trips, days aboard her yacht, the Miramar. In 1888 she had a tattoo placed on her shoulder, a mark of her freedom—a sign of her love for the sea and her longing for distant lands.

She never wanted to be tied down again, only to drift onward, toward the light. From childhood, Sisi had leaned toward melancholy, a trait inherited from her family, and with every stroke of fortune that gloom deepened. After Rudolf’s death, it broke open. She sought comfort in spirituality, believing she could speak with the dead—with Rudolf, with Ludwig of Bavaria, with the revered Heinrich Heine.

Some said she almost envied her son his death. Perhaps it was true, for when she died in Geneva in 1898 during one of her travels, it seemed more like a release than a blow of fate. Summer 1898. Elisabeth was at Bad Nauheim for a spa treatment.

Her heart was diseased, her body exhausted and weakened. But she left the town abruptly, without luggage, without her retinue, as if she were fleeing. A short stop at Homburg vor der Höhe, then she traveled unrecognized to Lake Geneva. From August 30 to September 9 she stayed at a hotel high above the lake, surrounded by light and silence.

But the newspapers soon found her out. On September 9 she visited Baroness Julie Rothschild with Irma Sztáray. A quiet evening. She laughed, she ate, she seemed remarkably cheerful.

Looking at some orchids, she whispered: “I wish my soul could fly to heaven through a tiny opening in my heart. ” Words that sounded like a premonition. On September 10, shortly before noon, she left the hotel to board the steamer. She walked along the promenade.

Irma Sztáray walked beside her. Then a man stepped out of the crowd. Luigi Lucheni, an Italian anarchist, stabbed her in the heart with a sharpened file. Elisabeth barely felt it.

Thinking someone had pushed her, she rose, thanked the bystanders, and continued on board. Shortly after the ship cast off, she collapsed. Her last words were: “But what has happened to me? ” Within minutes she was dead.

Lucheni had originally intended to assassinate another nobleman, Philippe, Duke of Orléans, the heir to the French throne. When the duke canceled his journey, Lucheni chose a new target: the Empress of Austria. The tragedy: he meant to strike at the monarchy, but instead he struck a woman who, in her inmost heart, had long been a supporter of the republic. Her body was carried to Vienna in a train packed with ice.

Officials lined the route, lowered their flags, and paid their respects. Her wish to be buried on the shore of Corfu was never fulfilled. On September 17, 1898, she was laid to rest in the Imperial Crypt in Vienna. So ended the life of a woman who never fit her age.

An empress who sought freedom and found peace only in longing. Loved and misunderstood, admired and mocking. To this day she remains an enigma, a legend, a myth.

Elizabeth of Austria—the empress who possessed everything, and yet wanted only life and liberty.