Nobody photographed the face of the Empress of Austria for nearly thirty years, and that was entirely her own doing. When a camera came near, a fan went up. She walked behind a white leather parasol. Her hairdresser, who shared her height and coloring, was sometimes dressed in the empress’s clothes and sent out in her carriage so 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 turned thirty-two. The woman under the veil in Geneva was sixty. The last people to look at that face for any length of time were two doctors with a notebook in a hotel bedroom on the lake on the afternoon she died. They recorded that the hair was dark brown, the eyes gray-blue, the teeth good, the skin loose and yellowish, and that the woman on the bed appeared to be about sixty.

One of them, a professor of forensic medicine, helped open her chest the next day and push a probe along the track a needle file had made through her heart. Twelve years after that, the same professor opened the skull of the man who had held the file, looking for something in the brain that would explain him, and found nothing unusual at all. She was born on a Sunday in December 1837 in Munich, the second daughter of Duke Max in Bavaria and his wife Ludovika. The family story held that she came into the world with a tooth already showing.

Bavarian folklore counted that as lucky. Her parents named her Elisabeth Amalie Eugenie, but nobody used any of it. She was Sisi from the start. Her father belonged to a junior branch of the royal house of Bavaria, close enough to the throne to be rich and far enough from it to have no duties.

Duke Max played the zither in beer halls, wrote verse under a pen name, built a circus ring into his own palace, and toured Egypt. Her mother, a daughter of the King of Bavaria, had expected a far grander husband. Her sisters had married better: one was Queen of Prussia, one Queen of Saxony, one Archduchess Sophie of Austria, the mother of the emperor. Ludovika got Max 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 Lake Starnberg with almost no protocol. They ran through the woods, rode, fished, and skipped lessons. Sisi in particular was a poor student and an excellent rider. The one thing she did with discipline was write sentimental verse in a locked notebook, and she would keep writing it for fifty years.

In August 1853, her mother took her to Bad Ischl, a spa town in the Austrian Alps. The trip was never meant to be about her. Archduchess Sophie, Ludovika’s sister and the mother of the twenty-three-year-old Emperor Franz Joseph, had decided that the emperor would marry her niece Helene, Sisi’s older sister. The Bavarian party arrived late, their gala dresses lost somewhere behind them, so the women walked into the emperor’s presence wearing black.

The black flattered fifteen-year-old Sisi, fair and still half a child, and did nothing for dark-haired Helene. Franz Joseph looked past the sister he was meant to want and could not stop looking at the one beside her. He told his mother that evening that if he could not have Sisi, he would not marry at all. 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, saying she loved the emperor so much—if only he were not the emperor. She was sixteen when she married him in Vienna in April 1854, in a wedding that left her pale and close to tears. Afterwards came a ceremony where a long line of aristocratic women approached the new empress one by one and bent to her glove. Somewhere in that line she broke down, fled the room in tears, and had to be persuaded back.

What happened that night is known in unusual detail because her mother-in-law wrote it down. Archduchess Sophie recorded walking the bride to her rooms, waiting while she got into 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 the Spanish ceremonial, a set of rules inherited centuries earlier and never updated. She could not eat what she liked, bathe when she liked, or speak to a servant without an intermediary. A girl who had grown up climbing trees found herself unable to cross a room without a lady walking behind her.

Her ladies were older women chosen by the Archduchess, and they reported back. Ten months after the wedding she gave birth to a daughter. The Archduchess named the baby Sophie after herself without consulting the mother, and set up the nursery on a different floor so that Sisi had to walk through drafty corridors under observation to see her own child. A second daughter, Gisela, arrived a year later and went straight into the same arrangement.

The first real death came in Hungary in the spring of 1857. The imperial couple went on a state tour, and Sisi insisted on bringing both girls. Little Sophie had already been sick before they left Vienna. In Buda, both children fell ill with high fever and diarrhea.

Gisela recovered. Sophie, two years old, died on the twenty-ninth of May, generally described as dying in her mother’s arms. Sisi took it on herself. She shut herself away, stopped eating for days at a time, and rode for hours alone.

It was the first appearance of a pattern that would run through the rest of her life: when something broke her, she starved. On the twenty-first of August 1858, she gave birth to a son. Vienna knew it was a son because the guns fired 101 times. Crown Prince Rudolf went into his grandmother’s nursery like his sisters before him.

By 1860, everything went wrong at once. Franz Joseph lost a war in Italy, and a diagnosis of consumption sent Sisi away for a winter in Madeira. She sailed out of her marriage and away from her children, and was gone six months. She relapsed within days of returning to Vienna, was sent away again to Corfu, and improved almost as soon as the ship docked.

Twice the symptoms retreated when she was out of reach of the Hofburg. She came back from those two years with a decision made. She was going to live mostly elsewhere, and she was going to fight for the children she had left behind. The fight came over Rudolf in 1864.

His education had been handed to a major general with brutal methods: he woke the boy with pistol shots fired in his bedroom, drilled him in the snow before breakfast, and once locked him in an animal enclosure shouting that a wild boar was coming. Sisi did something she had not done in ten years of marriage. She issued an ultimatum in writing. She demanded absolute authority over everything concerning the children and full freedom over where she lived and traveled.

Franz Joseph gave in. The general was dismissed within days. From the early 1860s onward, her body became the project. Through fasting, exercise, and tight lacing, she kept her weight at about fifty kilograms for most of her adult life.

She weighed herself up to three times a day. When the scale threatened to go past fifty, she fasted for days on nothing but oranges and milk. At a state dinner she would sit with a full plate and move nothing on it. She installed gymnastic rings in her dressing room in the Hofburg; they are still there.

She walked for six or seven hours at a pace that left her ladies limping behind her, and she rode as though the horse had insulted her. Her hair reached her ankles, took two to three hours to dress daily, and was washed every two weeks with raw egg and cognac. By her early thirties she had stopped letting herself be photographed. In public she moved behind a fan, a veil, or a white leather parasol.

Hungary gave her the one thing Vienna never had: a place where she was wanted. On that first tour in 1857, the trip that killed her daughter, she had met Hungarian magnates who spoke to her plainly. Her mother-in-law loathed Hungarians, which was reason enough for Sisi to take them up. She learned the language well enough to write letters and make jokes in it.

The man at the center of the Hungarian business was Count Gyula Andrássy, condemned to death in absentia in 1849 and hanged in effigy, who had come home under amnesty to get for Hungary through negotiation what it had failed to get through war. Sisi became his ally inside the palace, and she pushed her husband relentlessly: if he would trust Andrássy entirely, she told him, they might still be saved. The Compromise of 1867 turned the empire into the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary, and Andrássy became Hungary’s first prime minister. On the eighth of June 1867, Franz Joseph and Elisabeth were crowned king and queen of Hungary in the Matthias Church in Buda.

To the Hungarians she was Erzsébet királyné from that day, Queen Elizabeth. She was thirty. Those were, people who knew her said, her happiest years. In the months after the coronation she became pregnant again, and the gossips whispered that the child was Andrássy’s.

The baby born in Buda in April 1868 was a girl, Marie Valerie, and the Viennese called her the Hungarian child. Sisi raised this one child herself with an intensity she had never shown the others. When Andrássy died in 1890, she said her last and only friend was dead. Rudolf’s marriage was worse, and she had a hand in it.

By January 1889 he was thirty, drinking, taking morphine, and talking about death constantly. On the thirtieth, at his hunting lodge at Mayerling, he shot his seventeen-year-old mistress Mary Vetsera in the head, sat with her body through the rest of the night, then put a revolver to his temple and killed himself. The official story put out that morning said he had died of a stroke, and the church allowed a Catholic funeral only after doctors signed a statement that he had been mentally unbalanced. He left a letter to his mother.

She kept it and destroyed it after her death; what it said is gone. Sisi gave away her light-colored gowns and wore black for the rest of her life. She told Marie Valerie that Rudolf’s bullet had killed her faith. She tried séances and kept trying them for years.

The deaths kept arriving. Her father died in 1888, her sister Helene in 1890, her mother in 1892, her brother in 1893. In May 1897 her youngest sister Sophie Charlotte burned to death in the Bazar de la Charité fire in Paris, identified only by her gold fillings. Sisi was fifty-nine.

Her own body by then had started to fail. Sciatica stopped the riding for good. Then came neuralgia in her face, then swelling in her feet. In the summer of 1898 the doctors at Bad Nauheim found her heart enlarged and her blood thin, and she wrote to her daughter that she did not expect the cure to work.

From Nauheim she went to Switzerland, to Lake Geneva, which she called her favorite place because she was quite lost there among the cosmopolitans. She stayed at a hotel under the name Countess of Hohenems, and it fooled nobody who mattered. The police put men outside her hotel; she complained, and they withdrew at her request. The man who would kill her had come to Geneva to kill somebody and had not much cared who.

Luigi Lucheni was born in 1873 in a hospice for the poor to an unmarried servant girl who abandoned him. He drifted through Europe as a laborer, enlisted in an Italian cavalry regiment, served in Africa, and became an anarchist. His first idea had been King Umberto of Italy, but he could not afford the journey to Rome. Then a newspaper told him the Empress of Austria was staying at the Beau-Rivage.

He wanted a stiletto, but a stiletto cost twelve francs and he did not have twelve francs. What he had was a needle file, a triangular file about ten centimeters long, ground to a point and set into a wooden handle. It cost him nothing. On the tenth of September 1898, the empress came out of the hotel on foot with her lady-in-waiting, Countess Irma Sztáray, and turned along the lakeside toward the steamer.

She wore black and carried a parasol in one hand and a fan in the other. Lucheni ran toward her, bent down and looked under the parasol because both women were in black and he did not want to get the wrong one. He pushed the file into her chest with all his strength. She fell over backwards onto the pavement, then stood up, brushed the dust off her dress, thanked the men who helped her, and refused to go back to the hotel.

The ship was leaving. She walked about a hundred yards up onto the deck, upright, refusing her lady’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 she was aboard, she went gray in the face and dropped.

Her lady began undoing her clothing and cut through the corset laces. The empress opened her eyes, asked whether she was in pain, and said no. Then she said her last words: What has happened to me? She was unconscious by the time they saw the wound, a brown stain the size of a coin on the chemise, with in the middle a hole so small you could have covered it with a fingertip.

The steamer turned round, and she was carried back to the hotel. She was dead in room 34 within the hour. The file had gone through her left lung and the wall of her heart, and she had bled to death inside her own chest without a drop reaching the floor. The immediate cause was cardiac tamponade: blood leaking into the sac around the heart until the pressure stopped it from filling.

The doctors could not agree why she had walked so far with that wound. The old explanation was that the corset held everything in place until the laces were cut, and then the seeping became a flood. Lucheni ran, threw the file into a doorway, and was chased down by two cab drivers and a sailor. He told the police he was an anarchist, that he had come to Geneva to kill a sovereign, and that it had not mattered to him which sovereign.

He demanded to be tried where he could be beheaded, but Geneva had abolished the death penalty. His trial took a single day in November. The jury took very little time: life imprisonment for a man of twenty-five. He spent years in prison writing his memoirs in five notebooks, which disappeared from his cell in 1909.

On the nineteenth of October 1910, he was found hanged in an underground isolation cell with his own belt. He was thirty-seven. The professor who had opened the empress’s chest got the body. He 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 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 on the condition that it never be put on display. Crowds turned up on the anniversary of the assassination asking to see it, and in February 2000 the museum quietly buried the head in the anatomical graves at Vienna’s Central Cemetery. It now lies about eight kilometers from the Imperial Crypt, roughly the distance the two of them have kept ever since.

The empress’s body was carried by funeral train across Austria with crowds along the line. Her husband met it at the station. She had wanted to be buried by the sea or on Corfu. Instead she lies in the Imperial Crypt between Franz Joseph, who followed her in 1916, and Rudolf.

The coffin plate originally said Elizabeth, Empress of Austria. The Hungarians were furious, and the words and Queen of Hungary were added in a hurry. That is still the sarcophagus the tourists photograph, and the one with fresh flowers on it, most of them left by visitors from Hungary. Franz Joseph outlived her by eighteen years.

After Mayerling, the empire’s heir was his nephew Franz Ferdinand, shot in Sarajevo in June 1914, and the old emperor went to war over it, and the war ate the empire. He died in 1916 and went into the crypt beside her. Two years later, the monarchy she had written mocking verses about was gone. She had predicted that in verse in the 1880s.

The rest, she had decided long before, was not for anyone alive to see.