Room 34 of the Hotel Beau-Rivage in Geneva had the curtains drawn against the afternoon sun. On the bed lay the Empress of Austria, sixty years old, her dark brown hair loose on the pillow, her gray-blue eyes closed. The two doctors who had been called, Professor August Reven and Dr. Louisie Mégevand, had just finished their examination.

Their notes were clinical: the skin loose and yellowish, the teeth good, the body that of a woman of about sixty. On the abdomen, the old pearly welts of four pregnancies. Above the left breast, a wound so small it could have been covered with a fingertip. What they did not yet know, and would only establish the next day when they cut the body open, was that a triangular file had passed through the wall of her heart, and that she had bled to death inside her own chest without a drop reaching the floor.

Nobody had photographed her face in nearly thirty years. That was her own doing. A camera came near and a fan went up, or she walked behind a white leather parasol. Her hairdresser, who had the same height and the same coloring, was on occasion dressed in her clothes and sent out in her carriage so that the crowds along the road would have something to wave at.

The famous pictures, the ones with the diamond stars in the braids, were all taken before she was thirty-two. The woman under the veil in Geneva was sixty, and she had decided long ago that nobody would be allowed to compare the two. The Empress of Austria was born on Christmas Eve, 1837, in the Herzog Max Palais on the Ludwigstrasse in Munich. She came into the world on a Sunday, and the family story ever after was that she arrived with a tooth already showing in her gum.

Bavarian folklore counted both a Sunday child and a tooth as lucky. Her parents named her Elisabeth Amalie Eugenie, and nobody used any of it. She was Sisi from the start, signing herself with one s against the later popular spelling. Her father, Duke Maximilian Joseph in Bavaria, belonged to a junior branch of the Wittelsbachs, close enough to the throne to be rich and far enough from it to have no job.

He used that freedom about as fully as a man could. He played the zither in beer halls, wrote verse under a pen name, and loved the circus so much that he built a riding arena into his own palace and put on shows in it with himself in the ring and his children on the ponies. He toured Egypt and came home with four Nubian boys as servants and, by family accounts, a mummy. He fathered children outside the marriage without much attempt at concealment.

Her mother, Ludovika, was a daughter of the King of Bavaria and had expected a far grander husband than the one she got. Her sisters had married better. One was Queen of Prussia. One was Queen of Saxony.

One was Archduchess Sophie of Austria, the mother of the emperor. Ludovika got Max and a palace with a circus ring in it and eight children to raise more or less alone. The children wintered in Munich and spent summers at Possenhofen, a squat four-towered castle on the western shore of Lake Starnberg with the Alps on the horizon. Possenhofen had almost no protocol.

The children ran through the woods, rode, fished, and skipped their lessons. Sisi in particular was a poor student and an excellent rider. The one thing she did with any discipline was write verse, sentimental stuff about forest paths and lost loves, in a locked notebook. She would keep writing it for fifty years.

The first heartbreak came early at fourteen or so, a young count who served in her father’s household. The family found out, judged him unsuitable, and sent him away. He died not long afterwards. She went into a slump that worried her mother enough to take her along on a trip that was never meant to be about her at all.

That trip went to Bad Ischl, a spa town in the Austrian Alps, in August of 1853. Archduchess Sophie, Ludovika’s sister and the mother of the twenty-three-year-old Emperor Franz Joseph, had decided that her son would marry her niece Helene. She had the confidence of a woman whose plans generally happened. The Bavarian party arrived late.

Ludovika had a migraine on the road, the coach carrying the gala dresses went missing, and the women walked into the emperor’s presence wearing black. Black did nothing for Helene, who was dark-haired and eighteen and had been dressed and drilled for this moment. On Sisi, fifteen, fair and still half a child, the black had the opposite effect. Franz Joseph looked past the sister he was meant to want and could not stop looking at the one standing beside her.

He told his mother that evening that Sisi was sweet, so fresh, and that if he could not have her, he would not marry at all. The engagement was announced at mass on the 19th of August. Nobody thought to ask Sisi in any form that would have permitted the word no. Her mother wrote to a relative that the child had cried and had said she loved the emperor so much, if only he were not the emperor.

Eight months of preparation followed. A trousseau was stitched at speed, dozens of dresses, hundreds of pairs of stockings and gloves. In April of 1854, she traveled down the Danube to Vienna on a steamer decorated with roses, and the accounts agree she cried for a good deal of the journey. At Nußdorf, where the boat came in, the emperor jumped aboard before the gangway was down and kissed her in front of the crowd.

The wedding took place on the evening of the 24th of April in the Augustinerkirche, the court church inside the Hofburg complex, with more than a thousand guests. Sisi was described as pale and close to tears through most of it. What happened that night is known in unusual detail because her mother-in-law wrote it down. Archduchess Sophie kept a diary and recorded walking the sixteen-year-old bride to her rooms, waiting until the girl was in bed, then fetching her son and bringing him in.

Her own description of what she saw is the line everyone quotes: Sisi had hidden her face in the pillow under the mass of her hair as a frightened bird hides in its nest. The marriage was not consummated that night nor the next. It happened on the third night, and the reason we know the count is that the court was counting. Life in the Hofburg ran on what was called the Spanish ceremonial, a set of rules inherited from the Habsburgs’ Spanish cousins centuries earlier and never updated.

A pair of shoes was worn once and then given away. A sixteen-year-old who had grown up climbing trees found herself unable to cross a room without a lady walking behind her. Her ladies in waiting were chosen by the Archduchess and reported back. The parrots she had brought from Bavaria were moved out because Sophie held that a pregnant woman who stared at parrots risked a child that looked like one.

Ten months after the wedding, on the 5th of March 1855, she gave birth to a daughter. The Archduchess named the baby Sophie after herself without consulting the mother, set up the nursery beside her own apartments on a different floor, and would not allow the mother to breastfeed. A second daughter, Gisela, arrived in July of 1856 and went straight into the same arrangement. Somewhere in this stretch, Sisi found a pamphlet on her desk with certain lines underlined, saying that the natural destiny of a queen was to give an heir to the throne and that a queen who bore no sons was merely a foreigner in the state, and a very dangerous foreigner at that.

Who left it there has never been established. The general suspicion has always pointed at the mother-in-law. The first real death came in Hungary in the spring of 1857. The imperial couple went on a state tour of the Hungarian lands, and Sisi insisted on bringing both girls.

Little Sophie had already had diarrhea and a fever before they left Vienna, and the doctors put it down to teething. The tour went down the Danube to Buda. Both children fell ill with high fever. Gisela, ten months old, got through it.

Sophie, two years old, died on the 29th of May, generally described as dying in her mother’s arms. Franz Joseph telegraphed his mother that their little one was an angel in heaven and that they were devastated. Sisi shut herself away from everyone, including Gisela, and stopped eating for days at a time. She rode for hours alone.

This is the first appearance of a pattern that would run through the rest of her life: when something broke her, she starved. On the 21st of August 1858, she gave birth to a son, Crown Prince Rudolf, and Vienna knew it was a son because the guns fired 101 times. He went into his grandmother’s nursery like his sisters before him, and the Archduchess picked his nurses, his tutors, and eventually the man who would nearly destroy him. By the end of that decade, everything went wrong at once.

In 1859, Franz Joseph lost a war in Italy and came home to a capital that blamed him personally. Sisi, twenty-one and worn out by three pregnancies in three and a half years, withdrew from him physically and began lacing herself tighter than anyone had seen. Her waist came down to 40 centimeters, a fraction under sixteen inches, on a woman who stood five foot eight. In October of 1860, she fell ill, pale, exhausted, coughing.

A lung specialist named Josef Škoda examined her and came away fearing consumption, a diagnosis in 1860 that was an announcement about how a person was going to die. He prescribed a winter somewhere warm and far away. Madeira. In November, the Empress of Austria sailed out of her marriage and away from her children to a rented villa above the harbor at Funchal, gone for six months.

From this point, the story splits, and it has never quite been put back together. Members of her own family described her as not particularly ill. A rumor began to travel that the real illness was venereal, something the emperor had brought home from his other women and passed to his wife. No document confirms it.

What the doctors did write down was consumption, and then the patient went to a warm island and spent her time walking, playing with her dogs, and being bored. She came back to Vienna in May of 1861. Within four days she had relapsed. The doctors sent her away again, this time to Corfu, and on Corfu she improved almost as soon as the ship docked.

What is plain is that she came back from those two years with a decision made. She was going to live from now on mostly elsewhere, and she was going to fight for the children she had left behind. The fight came over Rudolf in 1864 when the boy was six. His education had been handed to a Count Leopold Gondrecourt, a major general with views on how to make a soldier out of a nervous child.

He woke the boy with pistol shots fired in his bedroom, drilled him in the snow before breakfast, dowsed him in cold water, and on one occasion locked him in the animal enclosure at Lainz and shouted that a wild boar was coming. The child grew sickly and frightened. Sisi issued an ultimatum. In August of 1865 at Ischl, she put it in writing and handed it to her husband.

She wished to have reserved to her absolute authority in everything concerning the children, the choice of the people around them, the place they lived, and the entire direction of their upbringing. She added that in her own personal affairs, including where she lived and where she traveled, she would decide for herself. It was signed and dated like a treaty. Franz Joseph gave in.

Gondrecourt was dismissed within days. From the early 1860s onward, her body became the project. Through fasting, exercise, and lacing, she kept her weight at about 50 kilograms for most of her adult life. She weighed herself up to three times a day.

When the scale threatened to go past 50, a hunger cure followed, sometimes nothing but a few oranges and a glass of milk. The kitchen was ordered to press the juice out of half-raw beef steaks and serve it to her as a thin broth. On the day of her death, she had eaten a glass of milk and some fruit. Wall bars and gymnastic rings were installed in her dressing room in the Hofburg, and they are still there, screwed into the wall.

She walked for hours at a pace that left her ladies limping behind her, six or seven hours over alpine paths. Then the corsets, rigid, solid-fronted, made in Paris. Lacing her into one could take an hour. For riding, she was frequently sewn into her habit, stitch by stitch, and unpicked again at the end of the day.

The hair reached her ankles, chestnut by adulthood, though she had been fair as a child. Dressing it took two to three hours every day. The woman who did it, Francisca Feifalik, was forbidden to wear rings while she worked and at the end of every session was required to present the hairs that had fallen out during the process, laid out in a silver bowl for the empress to inspect. Every loose hair was a small defeat.

Feifalik is said to have survived the job by hiding stray hairs under her apron. She used the two hours to learn Hungarian and later Greek. By her fifties, she had Hungarian well enough to write in it, French and English from girlhood, and modern Greek well enough to translate into it. By her early thirties, she had stopped letting herself be photographed.

Photographers who tried to catch her in the street got the fan raised at exactly the right moment. A tall woman in black with a fan where the face should be. In her forties her teeth went bad, and she began to speak with her lips almost closed and her hand or fan in front of her mouth. The woman in the diamond stars was a memory she was carrying around under a veil.

Hungary gave her the one thing Vienna never had: a place where she was wanted. Her mother-in-law loathed Hungarians. The Hungarians had risen against the Habsburgs in 1848, and thirteen of their generals had been hanged or shot at Arad afterwards. Sisi learned the language, well enough to write letters and make jokes in it.

In 1864 she brought a young Hungarian woman named Ida Ferenczy into her household as a companion and confidante, and Ida stayed until the end. The man at the center of the Hungarian business was Count Gyula Andrássy. In 1849, an Austrian court had condemned him to death in his absence, and since he was safely abroad, they hanged him in effigy instead. Paris society took him up as the handsome hanged man.

He came home under amnesty and set about getting for Hungary through negotiation what it had failed to get through war. Sisi became his ally inside the palace. Her letters to Franz Joseph in the mid-1860s are not the letters of a decorative wife. She told him that if he would trust Andrássy and trust him entirely, they might still be saved, not only Hungary but the monarchy itself.

The Compromise of 1867 turned the empire into the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary, and Andrássy became Hungary’s first prime minister. On the 8th of June 1867, Franz Joseph and Elisabeth were crowned king and queen of Hungary in the Matthias Church in Buda, with Andrássy standing in for the Palatine and holding the crown of St. Stephen. To the Hungarians she was Erzsébet királyné from that day, Queen Elizabeth, and the empress title was left in Vienna.

People who knew her said those were her happiest years. She was thirty. The Hungarian nation presented the couple with the palace of Gödöllő, twenty miles east of Budapest, with a park and a riding hall and stables she filled with horses within the year. She lived there whenever she could in a household that spoke Hungarian.

The gossips in Vienna noticed that the empress had come alive in the company of a handsome Hungarian rebel. The baby born in Buda on the 22nd of April 1868 was a girl, Marie Valerie, and the Viennese called her the Hungarian child. Some of them meant it as more than geography. The whisper was that Andrássy was the father.

On one side, the timing puts conception close to the coronation celebrations. On the other, Franz Joseph never showed a flicker of doubt, no letter or confession from anybody has ever surfaced, and people who saw the girl grow up generally said she had her father’s face. Historians tend to shrug and move on. Sisi raised this one child herself with an intensity she had never shown Gisela or Rudolf.

Valerie’s diary is one of the main windows into her mother’s mind, and it is not always a comfortable view. When Andrássy died on the 18th of February 1890, at sixty-six of bladder cancer in agony, Sisi said that her last and only friend was dead. The children, in the meantime, had been growing up with a mother who arrived by train and left the same way. Gisela was married off in 1873 at sixteen to Prince Leopold of Bavaria, and then the letters about her thin out to almost nothing.

Gisela had children early and often and grew stout, and her mother could hardly bear to be in a room with her. Rudolf’s marriage was worse, and she had a hand in it. In 1881, he married Princess Stephanie of Belgium, who was sixteen and, by every account including her own, plain, stiff, and completely unprepared. Sisi called her the clumsy ox.

When Stephanie’s first and only child was born in 1883 and turned out to be a daughter, the Empress’s reaction was relief that she would not have to be interested. Mother and son were in a room together for the last time at the end of January 1889 at a reception at the German embassy. Rudolf looked ill. He kissed his mother’s hand.

She noted afterwards that he had seemed strange, and that was all. Two days later, he went out to Mayerling. Sometime in the early hours of the 30th of January, in the bedroom of the hunting lodge, Rudolf shot Mary Vetsera in the head. Then he sat with her body.

The doctors who examined the two of them later put a gap of several hours between the two deaths. He arranged her on the bed with a rose in her hands. At some point towards morning, he put the revolver to his temple and pulled the trigger, and the bullet took the top of his skull with it on the way out. The fight over the children, the absent years, the body as a project, the two deaths that were still to come, all of it had led here, to the deck of the steamer Genève on the warm afternoon of Saturday the 10th of September 1898.

The man who killed her had come to Geneva to kill somebody and had not much cared who. Luigi Lucheni was born in Paris in 1873 in a hospice for the poor to an unmarried Italian servant girl. She left him there and went to America. He was farmed out to one family after another, worked on a railway, drifted through half of Europe, enlisted in an Italian cavalry regiment, and served in Africa.

Somewhere along that road he became an anarchist, and somewhere along it he told a man he shared a room with that he would like to kill someone, but that it would have to be someone famous so that it would be all over the papers. His first idea had been King Umberto of Italy, but he could not afford the journey to Rome. His second was the Duke of Orléans, who left before Lucheni could find him. Then the newspaper told him who was staying at the Beau-Rivage.

He wanted a stiletto. A stiletto cost 12 francs, and he did not have 12 francs. What he had was a needle file, a triangular file about ten centimeters long, of the sort used in factories to sharpen the eyes of industrial needles. He ground it to a point and set it into a wooden handle.

A dull gray file would not catch the light the way a blade would. It cost him nothing. At about 1:35 in the afternoon, the empress and Countess Irma Sztáray came out of the Beau-Rivage on foot and turned along the Quai du Mont-Blanc towards the landing stage where the paddle steamer Genève was due to leave for Montreux. She wore black, carried a parasol in one hand and a fan in the other, and had eaten a glass of milk and some fruit.

Lucheni had spent the morning with the newspaper, had seen the paper that named the hotel, and had gone and waited across from it. He had the file inside his coat. As the two of them stepped out onto the street, he ran towards her and blocked her way. He bent down and looked under the parasol because both women were in black and he did not want to get the wrong one.

When he gave her the push, he said he knew she was going to die. He pushed with all his strength and felt the weapon go deep into her chest. She fell over as if struck by lightning. The file went in from above and to the right, angling down and to the left into her left breast.

He pulled it out and ran. She went over backwards onto the pavement. A coachman helped her up. She brushed the dust off her dress, thanked the men, and refused to go back to the hotel.

She walked about a hundred yards to the gangway and then up onto the deck upright, refusing Sztáray’s arm. Nobody on the quay who saw her would have known that a metal spike had just passed through the wall of her heart. The moment they were aboard and Sztáray let go of her, she went gray in the face and dropped. Three men carried her up to the upper deck and laid her on a bench.

The empress opened her eyes. Sztáray asked whether she was in pain, and she said no. Then she looked around her at the strangers, at the deck, at the lake, and said the last words anyone recorded: Was ist mit mir geschehen? What has happened to me now?

Only then did Sztáray see it. On the fine batiste of the chemise above the left breast was a brown stain about the size of a coin, and in the middle of the stain a hole so small you could have covered it with a fingertip. The Genève turned round. Six sailors carried her off the boat on a stretcher put together from a sail, some cushions, two oars, and the velvet from the deck chairs, and carried her back along the quay she had walked ten minutes earlier, up to room 34 on the first floor of the Beau-Rivage.

Her sisters came into the room and knelt. From the file going in on the pavement to the last breath in room 34 was somewhere between forty minutes and an hour, and for the first ten minutes of it, she had been walking. The wire went to Count Paar in Vienna. The emperor was at Schönbrunn at his desk.

The first wire said the empress had been seriously injured. The second, an hour later, said she was dead. Franz Joseph went white, sat down heavily, and said the words that everyone quotes, that nothing at all was to be spared him in this world. The full autopsy took place the next day at two in the afternoon.

The three doctors cut a flap from the left side of her chest and folded it back. A triangular wound had gone in through the third intercostal space and split the fourth rib across its entire thickness. Past the rib, it had punctured the upper lobe of the left lung. Past the lung, it had torn an oval hole in the pericardium, the sack that holds the heart, and inside that sack was a herniated voluminous blood clot filling it.

The file had gone through the wall of the left ventricle. They passed a probe along the track to measure it: 55 millimeters of that track ran through the heart itself, in the front wall and out the back. The whole channel measured 85 millimeters. The file had been four inches long.

The cause of death was that blood had flowed slowly and steadily out of the heart into the sack around it until the pressure of that blood compressed the heart from outside and stopped it. Cardiac tamponade. She had bled to death inside her own chest without a drop reaching the floor. Lucheni did not get far.

Two cab drivers and a sailor chased him down. He told them he was an anarchist, that he was poor, that he loved the workers and wanted to see the death of the rich. He had come to Geneva to kill a sovereign, and it had not mattered to him which sovereign. Then he discovered that Geneva had abolished the death penalty, and this seems to have been the one thing that upset him.

His trial took a single day, the 10th of November 1898. The jury took very little time. Life imprisonment for a man of twenty-five. He was led out shouting for anarchy and death to the aristocrats in a voice that several of the reporters described as frightened.

His body went to Professor Mégevand. The professor removed the head, opened the skull, found a brain like anyone else’s, sewed it back up, and set the head in formaldehyde at the Institute of Forensic Medicine. The rest was buried in the prison yard. The head stayed on its shelf in Geneva for the better part of a century.

In 1985, at Austria’s request, the jar was sent to Vienna to the Federal Pathological-Anatomical Museum on the condition that it never be put on display. In February of 2000, the museum quietly buried the head in the anatomical graves at Vienna’s Central Cemetery, about eight kilometers from the Imperial Crypt, roughly the distance the two of them have kept ever since. Her body was placed in a triple coffin, two inner ones of metal and an outer one of bronze on lion’s claw feet with glass panels so that the face could be seen. France Joseph met the funeral train at the station.

The coffin lay in the Hofburg chapel for two days. On the morning of the 17th of September 1898, eighty-two crowned heads and their representatives followed her coffin through streets hung with black to the imperial crypt beneath the Capuchin church. The coffin plate said Elizabeth, Empress of Austria. The Hungarians saw it and were furious, and the words and Queen of Hungary were added in a hurry.

She lies there now between Franz Joseph, who followed her in 1916, and Rudolf. Franz Joseph outlived her by eighteen years, and they were not kind ones. His nephew Franz Ferdinand was shot at Sarajevo in June of 1914, the old man went to war over it, and the war ate the empire. He died at Schönbrunn in November of 1916 at eighty-six, at his desk almost to the last day.

Two years later, the monarchy she had written mocking verses about was gone, and the crypt became a place you buy a ticket for. She had wanted to be buried by the sea, or on Corfu. The emperor did not allow it. Budapest built the Elisabeth Bridge across the Danube and kept her name on it even after the German army blew it into the river in 1945.

A bronze statue went up in the Volksgarten in Vienna in 1907, a seated figure in a sunken garden with a pool in front of it. Katarina Schratt, the actress the empress had chosen for her husband, kept going down into the Capuchin crypt and visited the coffins every day for years. First his, and then because they lay side by side, hers as well.

That’s where the records run out.