On the tenth of September 1898, a tall woman in black walked beside Lake Geneva with a single companion, heading for a steamer. A young man rushed at her and struck her chest. She fell, stood up, and wondered if he had wanted her watch. She walked on and boarded the boat.

Then she collapsed. Her companion opened her bodice and found one tiny brown spot. The boat turned back. By that afternoon she was dead.

She was Elizabeth, Empress of Austria, the face in the famous star portrait. Married at sixteen, she had spent almost forty years starving herself. And here is the strange part: the man who attacked her had not even come to Geneva for her. But how did the most admired woman in Europe end up on that lakeside path with a single lady-in-waiting?

And why did the doctors who examined her, a woman 1 m 72 tall, record how little fat lay under her skin? To understand that, it is necessary to go back to another lake entirely, because long before she was the empress in the painting with diamond stars pinned through her braids, she was a Bavarian teenager whom nobody had planned to make an empress at all. Elizabeth was born on Christmas Eve 1837 in Munich. Her father was Duke Max in Bavaria, from a junior branch of the Wittelsbach family, the dynasty that ruled Bavaria.

Decades later, in the worst moment of her life, Sisi would come to blame her Wittelsbach blood for a catastrophe. Her mother, Ludovika, was a Bavarian princess. The family’s real home was Possenhofen, a castle on Lake Starnberg south of Munich, and life there was informal in a way the stiff courts of Europe would barely have recognized. The family called her Sisi, with a double s—that spelling came much later from the films.

To the people who actually knew her, she was Sisi, and she grew up with far more freedom than a girl of her rank could normally expect. She was not drilled for a throne. She was not the daughter anyone was watching. That daughter was her older sister, Helene, who was considered the more beautiful and the better educated.

If either girl was being prepared for a brilliant marriage, it was her. Their mother had already tried to place her daughters well, and earlier inquiries at the court of Saxony had come to nothing. Helene, in other words, was the family’s best hope. That matters, because the freedom Sisi enjoyed at Possenhofen is exactly what would collide a few years later with the most rule-bound court in Europe.

The match itself was arranged between two sisters. Ludovika had a sister named Sophie, an archduchess in Vienna and, more importantly, the mother of the young emperor of Austria, Franz Joseph. That made Franz Joseph a first cousin to both Bavarian girls, which bothered nobody at the time. In the imperial family, Sophie was the one who organized, decided, and supervised her son’s marriage.

She was looking for a wife for him, and she was methodical about it. Her first hope, a Prussian princess named Anna, turned out to be already engaged. Her next idea, a princess from Saxony, was considered too sickly. So Sophie turned to her own family and to her sister’s daughters in Bavaria.

The plan, at least as the family later remembered it, was simple: Helene, the elder and the better prepared, would become empress. One historian who went through the surviving correspondence has pointed out that the letters never actually spell this out, but everyone involved seems to have behaved as if Helene was the intended bride, and that is how the story was told for generations afterward. The meeting was set for August 1853 in Bad Ischl, a fashionable spa town in the Austrian mountains where the imperial family spent its summers. Franz Joseph was twenty-three.

He would arrive just in time for his own birthday on the eighteenth. On the sixteenth of August, Ludovika arrived with her daughters. As far as anyone expected, Sisi had come along as her sister’s company. Almost immediately things went wrong.

Their luggage had gone missing on the journey, which meant the Bavarian ladies had nothing to change into except the black morning clothes they were already wearing. For Helene, who was supposed to make a dazzling first impression on the man she was meant to marry, this was a small disaster. Sophie invited them to tea anyway. And it was there, on that improvised afternoon, with everyone dressed in black, that the emperor met his cousin Sisi.

She was fifteen years old. What happened next is described in almost every account the same way: Franz Joseph was struck by her immediately. He had come to Bad Ischl to inspect one sister, and he could not stop looking at the other. Sisi was younger, less polished, and not dressed for the occasion.

None of that seemed to matter to him. For Sophie, who had planned the whole visit around Helene, the afternoon had just become a lot more complicated. Helene’s chance to recover came the next evening. There was to be a ball, and her mother had made sure she would wear a gown of white silk, which suited her far better than the gloomy black.

Helene, polished and correct, was finally going to look the part. It was a second chance at a first impression. For Sisi, the stakes looked small. For Helene, everything was riding on it.

The question was simple, and the whole family was waiting for the answer: at that ball on the seventeenth of August 1853, who would the emperor of Austria choose to dance with? He chose Sisi. Franz Joseph danced the cotillion with the fifteen-year-old, not with her sister. Then he handed her his nosegay, the small bouquet he had been carrying.

In a room full of courtiers who understood exactly how to read a gesture like that, nobody needed it explained. Helene, in her carefully chosen white silk, had been passed over in public. What Helene felt, the sources leave unclear. The next day was the emperor’s twenty-third birthday, and he spent part of it asking his mother for a favor.

Would she find out through Ludovika whether Sisi would have him? Notice how it was done. The most powerful young man in central Europe did not ask the girl himself. He asked his mother to ask her mother.

When Ludovika put the question to her daughter, Sisi burst into tears. Then she promised that she would try to make him happy. And she said something that, looking back, sounds less like a love story than a warning: “I love the emperor so much. If only he were not the emperor.

” That was the whole problem in one sentence. She was not marrying a man. She was marrying a court. Ludovika reported to her sister that Sisi had accepted.

On the nineteenth of August, the emperor was finally allowed some time alone with his future wife in the family’s hotel. Ludovika wrote that she left him alone with Sisi because he wanted to speak to her himself. Five days later, on the twenty-fourth of August 1853, the official engagement appeared in the Wiener Zeitung, the government newspaper in Vienna. The wedding was set for the following spring.

That gave a girl who had grown up in loose, informal Possenhofen roughly eight months to become an empress. It was not much time to learn the rules of the strictest court in Europe. On the eve of her departure from Munich, there was a farewell ball, and the crinoline gown she wore that night has survived as a replica. Embroidered on its skirt and stole are Arabic characters.

Translated, they read, “Oh my lord, what a beautiful dream. ”

The real wedding took place on the twenty-fourth of April 1854 at seven in the evening in the Augustinerkirche, the Augustinian church attached to the Imperial Palace in Vienna. The bride was sixteen years and four months old. The groom was her first cousin.

It was staged to overwhelm. More than 15,000 candles lit the church. Sisi wore a white and silver gown strewn with myrtle blossom and a crown of opals and diamonds. She was led up the aisle by two women: her mother and her new mother-in-law, Sophie.

The Archbishop of Vienna performed the ceremony with more than seventy bishops and prelates assisting. When the rings were exchanged, a salvo was fired from the church roof, and the city’s cannon answered. The archbishop then gave an address so long that Vienna nicknamed him Cardinal Plappermaul, roughly Cardinal Blabbermouth. It is a small detail, but a telling one.

Even on her wedding day, Sisi was standing still while older people talked at length about duty. The ceremony was only the beginning. The couple returned to the Hofburg, the Imperial Palace, for a formal reception that went on in stages. First came the ambassadors and envoys, then the diplomats’ wives in the Hall of Mirrors, then the members of the imperial household in the Hall of Ceremony.

Somewhere in that sequence, the sixteen-year-old reached her limit. She panicked and fled the Hall of Ceremony in tears. When she came back, she was too shy to make conversation, and the introductions only kept moving because a senior court lady, Countess Esterházy, got the other ladies to speak to her instead. Then came the moment that showed exactly what kind of trouble lay ahead.

Two of Sisi’s Bavarian cousins, Adelgunde and Hildegard, stepped forward to kiss her hand, as protocol required for an empress. Sisi refused. She hugged them instead. The onlookers were outraged.

Sisi defended herself with the obvious answer: “But they are cousins. ” To her, that settled it. To Sophie, it settled nothing. Sophie reminded her of her new position and insisted that protocol be followed.

On the very first day of the marriage, the battle lines were already drawn. The girl from Possenhofen thought family came first. The court thought rank came first, and her mother-in-law was the court. A gala banquet followed.

After that, the couple was taken to Sisi’s rooms. There is an unusually intimate source here, because Sophie wrote about the wedding night in her own diary. She recorded that she left the bride with her mother and later brought her son in to wish his wife good night. Sisi, she wrote, hid her pretty face in her pillow as a frightened bird hides in its nest.

Think about who was writing that. Not a gossip, not a servant, but the mother-in-law recording the bride’s fear on her wedding night in a household where the most private moments of the imperial couple were overseen by relatives. The marriage was reportedly consummated three days later. Everyone, it seems, knew the timetable.

Years afterward, Sisi gave her own verdict on how this had all begun. “Marriage is an absurd arrangement,” she said. She described being sold as a fifteen-year-old child. Strictly speaking, she was sixteen at the altar, but she was fifteen when the decision was made, and that is clearly the age she remembered.

The fairy-tale version of this story, the one later told in films, ends with the wedding. In reality, the wedding was where Sisi’s problem started. Her husband adored her, but he was the emperor with an empire to run and very little time to stand between his wife and his mother. The person who would actually shape her days, her household, her ladies, and soon her children was not the emperor at all.

It was his mother. Life at the Viennese court ran on protocol. Who could speak to whom, who walked first through a door, who kissed whose hand—all of it was fixed by rule. Sisi rejected this world almost from the start.

She criticized its structures openly and refused to accept that rigid etiquette had any real justification. The aristocracy of Vienna noticed and criticized her in return. Yet whenever she appeared in public doing her official duties as empress, crowds admired her. Shortly after the wedding, her health began to suffer, and she found the formality of the Hofburg suffocating.

Then Sisi became pregnant. On the fifth of March 1855, at Laxenburg, the Imperial Palace outside Vienna, she gave birth to a daughter. The baby was christened that same day and named Sophie, after her grandmother, who was also her godmother. Elizabeth was not consulted about the name.

Naming a child after a grandparent was perfectly normal. Not asking the mother was the part that stung. The nursery was placed near the grandmother’s rooms. Archduchess Sophie adored the little girl and filled her diary with details about her.

You may have heard the dramatic version of what happened next. Sisi herself told it years later. She said of her mother-in-law, “She took my children from me straight away. ” That line has shaped almost every retelling since.

But her own letters from the time tell a more complicated story. Three weeks after the birth, Sisi wrote that she had the baby with her all day except during walks. That August, she described little Sophie as always so cheerful. And in the summer of 1856, the nursery was moved to another room because Sisi insisted on it.

The baby was not simply snatched away at birth. What seems to be true is that Sisi lived surrounded by her mother-in-law’s control and later remembered it as total. Both of those things can be real at once. A second daughter, Gisela, was born on the twelfth of July 1856.

The following spring, the young couple planned a journey through Hungary, and Sisi insisted on bringing both little girls with her. Before they left, little Sophie had a fever and mild diarrhea. The doctors put it down to teething. The family set off anyway.

In Budapest, Gisela fell ill too. She recovered. Little Sophie did not. She got worse.

Franz Joseph wrote that the child was very nervous and kept crying constantly. The couple cut the tour short after five days at Debrecen to rush back to Buda. On the twenty-ninth of May 1857, little Sophie died in Buda in her mother’s arms after struggling for about eleven hours. She was two years old.

The exact cause is still uncertain. Typhus or typhoid has often been suggested, but it has never been proven. Modern writers lean toward dehydration or convulsions brought on by high fever. There is one more detail, and it is a hard one.

According to later accounts, Archduchess Sophie blamed Elizabeth for the death. It was Sisi, after all, who had insisted on taking the children. It is worth saying plainly, though, that doctors had seen the fever before the journey and called it teething. That judgment was not hers alone.

Whatever Sisi heard from others, the record of what she did is clear enough. She was inconsolable. She withdrew from everyone, including her surviving daughter, Gisela. Her mother was summoned to Vienna with three of Sisi’s younger sisters to help.

Little Sophie was buried in the Imperial Crypt, the vault beneath the Capuchin church where the Habsburgs are laid to rest. All that summer, Sisi had herself driven from Laxenburg into the city with the carriage blinds drawn, to pray there. Six months after the funeral, Franz Joseph wrote that his wife was still crying a great deal. A year later, the pressure that had hung over the marriage since the wedding was finally lifted.

On the twenty-first of August 1858, at Laxenburg, Sisi gave birth to a son. The Habsburg dynasty had its heir at last. Rudolf was the son the empire wanted, and he was treated that way from his first day. He was given the Order of the Golden Fleece, the dynasty’s highest honor, and made a colonel in the army while still a newborn.

His mother was not able to breastfeed him, and she was ill for weeks after the birth. In practice, it was Archduchess Sophie who largely looked after the boy. Once again, the grandmother was in the nursery, and the mother was somewhere else. And around this time, something else began to change.

It was quieter than a death or a birth, and at first it barely looked like a crisis at all. By around 1859 and 1860, Sisi was dramatically reducing the size of her waist. She was eating less, and then much less. In 1860, a court official, Count Rechberg, wrote that the empress had developed a deep aversion to any kind of nourishment.

This is the first clear trace of the thing that would follow her for the rest of her life. She was twenty-two years old. She had already been married for six years, buried a child, and given the empire its heir, and now she was refusing food. Nobody at court had a name for what they were watching.

In 1859, Vienna began hearing that the empress was suffering from a mysterious illness. She spent long stretches at health spas. Some historians suspect the illness was, at least in part, a way out—away from the Hofburg, away from the nursery, and away from Archduchess Sophie. By October 1860, the illness had turned into a real emergency, or at least an official one.

Doctors reported green sickness, an old name for a kind of anemia seen in young women, along with physical exhaustion. Her coughing grew worse. The respected lung specialist Dr. Josef Škoda examined her, feared tuberculosis, and spoke of a pulmonary disease.

His prescription was dramatic: she needed a warm climate, and she needed it immediately. He recommended Madeira, the Portuguese island far out in the Atlantic. There was an obvious connection that nobody at the time quite named. Her refusal to eat had left her anemic and exhausted.

A young woman who barely eats will tire and weaken whatever her lungs are doing. And the life-threatening diagnosis was met at court with a great deal of skepticism. Vienna, as Vienna does, filled the silence with rumor. One story whispered that the emperor had passed a venereal disease to his wife.

There is no evidence for that at all. And according to her own family’s reports, she hardly seemed ill. Very few people seem to have believed the official lung story either. Whatever the reality, the empress was leaving.

No suitable ship could be found in time, so Queen Victoria offered her own royal yacht, the Victoria and Albert. Sisi boarded it at Antwerp. Her luggage and servants followed on a second vessel. When she sailed, Gisela was four years old and Rudolf was just two.

Back in Vienna, nobody missed the meaning. Archduchess Sophie wrote a little pointedly that her daughter-in-law would be separated from her husband for five months. Another member of the family, Archduchess Therese, was blunter: “In Vienna, no one has any compassion for the empress. ”

Then something unexpected happened.

On Madeira, the dying empress came alive. She lived quietly in a rented villa by the sea. She surrounded herself with animals: ponies, parrots, and dogs. She played cards.

At one point, a photograph circulated showing her playing the mandolin with her sister and her ladies, all of them dressed in sailor blouses and sailor hats. In Vienna, that photograph caused outrage. An empress was not supposed to look like she was enjoying a holiday, least of all one prescribed for a fatal disease. Franz Joseph sent couriers to the island with letters and orders to report back on her health.

One of them described her quiet existence, calling it a very calm, sensible life. Her lungs, it turned out, were healing, and she was learning something new: how to stand up for herself at a distance. She also wrote revealing letters to Count Grünne, a senior figure at her husband’s court. She admitted that if it were not for the children, the thought of going back to the life she had led until then was almost too much to face, and of her mother-in-law she wrote that she could think of her only with a shudder.

That is simply not the voice of a woman longing to go home. She stretched the stay as long as she could. She postponed her return until May 1861, when the weather would be milder, and then added a Mediterranean cruise on top, extending her absence by about a month. Franz Joseph finally urged her to come back.

They met at Trieste in May. Four days after she arrived in Vienna, the coughing attacks returned. So she left again, this time for Corfu, the Greek island she would one day describe to her husband as her ideal abode. She stayed about four months.

Franz Joseph pressed her to return, mainly for the children’s sake, and when she still would not come back, Gisela and Rudolf were brought to Venice to be reunited with their mother. Here is the detail that changes how the whole episode reads. While Sisi was on Corfu, her mother reported home that she was eating a lot of meat and drinking a lot of beer. Away from Vienna, the woman who refused food at court was apparently eating heartily.

Vienna drew its own conclusion. The empress, people said, was ill with her nerves, not her chest. When Sisi finally returned to Vienna for good, people noticed she was different. The shy bride who had fled the receiving line in tears was gone.

In her place was a self-confident young woman who knew what she wanted. One of the first things she wanted was her own bedroom. She arranged separate sleeping quarters from her husband, which was highly unusual at the Viennese court, and Franz Joseph, if anything, loved her more. She seems to have understood exactly how much he idolized her, and she began to use it.

There was one more sign of the new Sisi, and it is a strange one. In 1862, writing from Venice, she announced that she was building a photo album, and she wanted photographs only of women—beautiful women. Soon the request went out through the foreign minister himself to Austrian ambassadors in Constantinople, St. Petersburg, Paris, London, and Berlin.

Diplomats of a great power were now collecting pictures of beautiful women for the empress. Curators who have studied the albums point out that she took her ideas for presenting herself less from other royals than from international stage stars. She was learning how an image is made. Within a few years, she would also decide exactly who was allowed to capture hers.

What Sisi built over the following years was not a beauty routine. It was a system, and it ran every single day. It started with the rooms. In every residence she used, an exercise room was installed, fitted with bars, rings, ropes, weights, and dumbbells.

At the most formal court in Europe, this was scandalous. Empresses did not do gymnastics. This one did, daily. One of her readers, a companion who read aloud to her, described watching her hang from ropes and pull herself up on hand rings while wearing a black silk dress, as if it were the most normal thing in the world.

Then came the numbers. Her weight was checked as often as three times a day, and the results were written down in a list. Her waist was measured. So were her thighs and her calves.

Her scale has survived; it is now displayed in a Vienna museum, a plain little object for something so central to her life. At 1 m 72, she was tall for a woman of her time. Yet for most of her adult life, she seldom went above roughly 50 kg, about 110 lb. By modern standards, that is underweight for her height.

Her waist was kept at around 50 cm, under 20 inches. To hold those numbers, she ate in a way that worried almost everyone around her. Her diet cut out most solid food. She fasted often.

There were days when she lived on oranges or on milk alone, and because she wanted that milk fresh, goats, and later even cows, traveled with her. She drank raw egg whites mixed with salt. She took meat broth, including juice pressed out of veal. Occasionally there was violet ice cream.

And here is a detail that complicates the simple picture: these starvation periods did not run in a straight line. They alternated with times when she ate cakes and ice cream. Her dressing was part of the same discipline. She wore tight leather corsets and laced them so firmly that she often had trouble breathing.

The lacing alone could take up to an hour. Getting fully dressed could take three hours, and sometimes she changed several times a day. On some occasions she had herself sewn into her dresses so that nothing would spoil the line. From 1870 she gave up petticoats altogether.

Even her nights were regulated. She slept on a metal bed without a pillow, took cold showers, bathed in warm olive oil, and had her limbs wrapped in compresses meant to tighten the skin. But the most demanding part of her regimen was her hair. It was a rich chestnut brown, and it eventually grew all the way down to her heels.

The sheer weight of it gave her headaches, and on bad days it had to be lifted up with ribbons to relieve the strain. Its care required a specialist. Sisi had admired the hairstyle of an actress at the Burgtheater, Vienna’s Court Theater, so she hired the woman responsible, a hairdresser named Fanny, who joined the empress’s household for a salary of 2,000 florins a year. Fanny’s work took two to three hours every day.

Sisi refused to waste that time. She used it to study languages, especially Greek. Every couple of weeks, the hair was washed with a mixture of egg and cognac. Afterward, Sisi walked up and down in a long waterproof silk wrapper until it dried.

Then came the inspection. The hairs that came out in the comb were collected and presented to the empress in a silver bowl. A relative, Archduchess Louise, later recalled the maid counting every single hair and searching the carpet and her dress for any that had fallen. If Sisi decided too many had come out, she was very displeased.

So Fanny developed a quiet solution: she hid the combed-out hairs on a piece of tape, so the bowl always looked reassuring. She became one of the empress’s most trusted servants. Her bearing was so faultless that she was sometimes even used as the empress’s double. Sisi was entirely aware of what this had become.

“I am a slave to my hair,” she said. And on another occasion, “It is like a foreign body on my head. ”

All of this—the fasting, the gym, the corsets, the hours of hair—came together in one image, the one that made her famous around the world. In September 1864, the German portrait painter Franz Xaver Winterhalter arrived in Vienna to paint the imperial couple.

The portrait of Sisi he finished in 1865 is the painting this story is named after. She stands almost full length, holding a fan, glancing back over her left shoulder. Her gown, believed to be by the Paris couturier Charles Frederick Worth, is white satin and tulle scattered with stars. Her long braids are coiled on top of her head, and pinned through them are diamond stars with pearls at their centers, ordered from the Viennese court jewelers.

That year, at her brother’s wedding, her brother-in-law Ludwig Viktor described her as stunningly beautiful. The stars in her hair started a fashion across Europe’s courts. Sisi herself called that hairstyle her trademark. She was in her late twenties, and she had made herself into a work of art.

Winterhalter also painted her more privately, with her hair loose and falling free. Franz Joseph reportedly preferred those intimate portraits. They were kept away from the public. Today, historians and doctors look at this regime and reach for a name.

The painting shows the result. It does not show the cost. And in the same year Winterhalter finished it, Sisi went to war with the court over her son. Rudolf had been made a colonel on the day he was born, and the court intended to raise him as a soldier.

Shortly after his sixth birthday in 1864, he was separated from his sister Gisela, the person he was closest to, and placed in an all-male household. His new tutor and governor was a general, Count Leopold Gondrecourt. Gondrecourt’s methods would be called abuse today, and many historians call them that now. The little boy was put through water cures.

He was woken by pistol shots. He was left out at night in the Imperial game park. He was drilled with military exercises for hours, to the point of exhaustion. The general’s stated philosophy was that the child’s intellectual development must be sensibly subdued so that his body could keep up with it.

Rudolf was bright, precocious, and very sensitive to pressure. He often reacted to stress by becoming physically ill. After about a year of this regime, he fell seriously ill. Sisi had not been paying close attention to his education.

That changed when one of Gondrecourt’s own subordinates, an officer named Josef Latour, came to her and described what the training was doing to her son. What happened next is one of the few moments where Sisi used her position to fight directly for one of her children. She later wrote that she had reached for the utmost and that something would have to happen. In 1865, she put her demands to Franz Joseph in writing.

She wanted full authority over how the children were raised, and over her own household and her own affairs. The message underneath was simple: either Gondrecourt went, or she did. Franz Joseph gave way. Gondrecourt was removed.

Latour, whom Sisi trusted, became Rudolf’s new tutor. A new physician, Dr. Widerhofer, gave the boy a thorough examination, and from then on his academic education took priority over military drill. Rudolf would grow up with a far more liberal education than anyone at court had planned.

Some historians believe those early years with Gondrecourt left damage that lasted the rest of his life. Rudolf never forgot that his mother had rescued him. He idolized her. A lady-in-waiting later described him as very like his mother, with her charm as well as her brown eyes.

But here is the uncomfortable part. Having saved him, Sisi largely went back to being absent. She wrote to her children often and signed off with the words, “Think of your mama often. ” It is a sweet line.

It is also the line of a mother who expects to be thought of from a distance. Because by then, Sisi’s attention had found a new cause: Hungary. Her interest started through a Hungarian lady-in-waiting, and in 1864 she took on a Hungarian woman, Ida Ferenczy, as her companion. Ida stayed for thirty-four years, until Sisi’s death, and became her closest friend and adviser.

She was also a quiet channel to Hungarian politicians, including the man who would matter most in this part of the story, Count Gyula Andrássy. Hungary had long resented being ruled from Vienna, and its leaders wanted their old rights restored. Sisi learned Hungarian, adored the country, and openly took its side, which earned her sharp criticism from the court and from leading politicians in Vienna. There, people called her unapproachable and invisible.

She met Andrássy in January 1866. She was twenty-eight. He was forty-two. Inevitably, Vienna whispered that they were lovers.

There is no verifiable evidence that they were. What the record does show is political. That summer, Austria was defeated by Prussia at Königgrätz, a disaster that shook the whole empire. Sisi went to Budapest and became, in effect, Andrássy’s voice inside the imperial family, sending her husband long letters pressing his demands.

In one, she warned Franz Joseph that if he refused, he would be acting irresponsibly. In another, she wrote, “I did all in my power. Your misfortune does not weigh on my conscience. ” That is not a decorative empress.

That is a political player putting pressure on an emperor. The Hungarians noticed. When she addressed their parliament in Hungarian, the deputies were moved, and Franz Joseph wrote to his mother praising his wife’s Hungarian and her tact. The pressure worked, alongside much else.

In 1867, the Compromise created the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary, and Andrássy became Hungary’s first prime minister under the new arrangement. Exactly how much Sisi’s letters decided is still debated. That she pushed hard is not. On the eighth of June 1867, in Budapest, Franz Joseph and Elizabeth were crowned king and queen of Hungary in the Matthias Church.

The procession left the castle at seven in the morning. Andrássy carried the Holy Crown of Hungary, and it was Andrássy who placed it on Franz Joseph’s head. Sisi was anointed, and then, by old custom, Andrássy held the crown over her right shoulder. She wore a gown by Worth, designed after traditional Hungarian dress: silver brocade, lace, and a midnight blue velvet bodice laced with pearls.

As a coronation gift, Hungary gave the couple the palace of Gödöllő outside Budapest. Sisi would spend a great deal of time there. Ten months later, she gave Hungary something too. She moved to Buda about three months before the birth, and on the twenty-second of April 1868, she delivered her fourth child, a daughter, Marie Valerie.

Valerie grew up speaking Hungarian as her first language. People called her the Hungarian child. In Vienna, the gossip went a step further and claimed that Andrássy, not Franz Joseph, was the father. There is no evidence for that whatsoever.

What is documented is how Sisi felt about this daughter. Of her earlier children, she had seen too little. Of Valerie, she said that she had finally had the courage to love her and to keep her with her. That love would become the most intense relationship of her life.

It would not always be easy on the child. Valerie grew up adored and closely watched. As an adult, she wrote in her diary about her mother’s “unbridled love and exaggerated, groundless concern,” which she said put her in an embarrassing and false position. Valerie also loved her father deeply, and she often found herself caught between her parents.

Archduchess Sophie had once hovered over Sisi’s children. Now Sisi hovered over this one in her own way. Around the time Valerie was born, Sisi made another decision that still shapes how we see her. At about thirty years old, she stopped allowing herself to be photographed.

One museum that studied her photo albums adds that she refused even a medical x-ray. From then on, in public, she shielded her face with a fan or a parasol. The last likeness for which she personally sat was a sculpted bust by Victor Tilgner in 1879. Think about what that means.

The woman who had once asked ambassadors to send her photographs of beautiful women would not let the world see her own face age. So the world kept the face from her twenties—the face in the Winterhalter portrait. That is still the face that most people picture when they hear her name. She was hiding her face, but she was not hiding from life.

In the 1870s, Sisi threw herself into riding, and not gentle riding. She spent hours in the saddle, practiced dressage, and took up the most dangerous sport available to a woman of her rank: fox hunting. In 1876, she hunted in England and visited Lord Spencer at Althorp. There, Captain George Middleton, known to everyone as Bay, was asked to pilot her.

A pilot rode ahead of a guest in the field and showed the safest line over the fences. Middleton was one of the best horsemen in England, and he became her regular companion in the hunting field. Then came Ireland, in 1879 and again in 1880. Sisi rented Summerhill House in County Meath, traveling as the Countess of Hohenems.

The first visit ran from late February to late March. The second, through most of the following February. Twelve hunters were brought over from England for her, and Middleton killed three of them while schooling them over the Irish ditches. It was Lord Spencer, a former Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, who had invited her.

Her house parties drew guests such as Lord and Lady Randolph Churchill. On the twenty-fourth of February 1879, the Ward Union hunt chased a stag straight into the grounds of St. Patrick’s College at Maynooth, the great Catholic seminary. The Empress of Austria was leading the field.

The college’s acting president greeted her. The next Sunday, she came back for mass and gave him a gold ring. The following year, she sent the college a statue of St. George and a set of vestments.

Crowds followed her everywhere, and local tailors, hairdressers, and barbers did a brisk trade. At one point, up to 500 horsemen turned out. She led one hunt at full gallop for forty minutes. She was thrown from her horse once and climbed straight back on.

In 1880, she insisted on jumping every fence on the Fairyhouse racecourse. Irish nationalist newspapers welcomed her warmly, which is exactly what worried the British authorities. The Lord Lieutenant reported his concern about the enthusiasm she was generating. She intended to return in 1881, but the British government made it clear she would not be welcome.

Ireland was in turmoil over bad harvests, evictions, and the Land League, and officials feared her presence would inflame it. So in 1881 and 1882, she rented Combermere Abbey and hunted in Cheshire instead, with Bay Middleton. People talked, of course. He was engaged, and later married, and his wife was reportedly jealous of the empress.

But there is no evidence of any improper relationship between them. After his death, his widow destroyed the letters she had received from him, so whatever those letters said is gone. Their last known meeting was at Gödöllő in March 1888. Four years later, Middleton was killed in a fall during a steeplechase.

Even the hunting was not enough exercise for Sisi. She took up fencing, at one point taking two lessons a day. A servant recorded her so-called sweat cures. On some evenings, she would walk up the mountain several times, deliberately dressed very warmly.

The purpose, the servant said, was to prevent her from getting fat. She was around forty, among the most famous women in Europe, and she was still exercising like someone running from something. Her marriage, meanwhile, had settled into a strange shape. Valerie’s birth had brought her parents closer, but only for a short time.

Franz Joseph still loved her. In one letter, he wrote, “Even though you were very cruel and vexing, I love you so boundlessly that I cannot be without you. ” But she spent as much time away from Vienna as she could, and their quarrels often sent her away again. She complained that he lacked sensitivity.

He, for his part, rarely made demands on her. Then Sisi did something few empresses would ever do. She actively encouraged her husband’s close friendship with an actress, Katharina Schratt. The aim, as most historians understand it, was to ease his loneliness during her long absences.

Schratt could keep him company in a way his wife no longer would. Not everything in the family was in order, though. In 1881, Rudolf married Princess Stephanie of Belgium. Sisi would later say flatly that Stephanie had been the wrong wife for him.

And in 1886, there was a death close to home: Sisi’s cousin, King Ludwig II of Bavaria, drowned in Lake Starnberg, the same lake where she had grown up at Possenhofen. Nothing had prepared her for what came next, though. Three years later, the blow that would split her life in two arrived from a hunting lodge outside Vienna. On the twenty-ninth of January 1889, Crown Prince Rudolf excused himself from a family dinner in Vienna.

His wife Stephanie told the family he had a cold. Nobody thought much more about it. And so when the news came, the family had no warning. He was not ill.

He was at Mayerling, his hunting lodge in the woods outside Vienna. And he was not alone. With him was Baroness Mary Vetsera. She was seventeen years old.

In the early hours of the thirtieth of January, both of them died there, in what appears to have been a murder and suicide that they had agreed on together. Rudolf was thirty. He was the only son of the emperor and empress, and the heir to the throne. The news did not go first to his father.

It went to his mother. Count Josef Hoyos, Rudolf’s hunting companion, had been at Mayerling. He rushed to the Hofburg and told the empress. The version he gave her was that Mary had poisoned Rudolf and then taken poison herself.

What Sisi did next tells you a great deal about her. She did not collapse. She went to tell Franz Joseph herself, and she was composed when she did it, and she brought Katharina Schratt with her because she believed she would be able to comfort him. The woman who had encouraged her husband’s friendship with an actress was now, in the worst hour of his life, bringing that actress to his side.

Then the story began to change, the way stories do when a dynasty is trying to manage a catastrophe. The accounts of those first hours still conflict with one another, and even the people closest to events told different versions. But the poison story did not hold. The later medical findings showed that both Rudolf and Mary had been shot in the head.

That created a terrible problem for the court. Under the church’s rules, a suicide could not normally receive a Christian burial. So the official finding was that Rudolf had acted in a state of mental unbalance. That finding allowed him to be laid in the Imperial Crypt with his ancestors, the same vault where his little sister Sophie had been buried more than thirty years earlier.

Mary Vetsera received no such ceremony. Her body was buried in secret in the village cemetery at Heiligenkreuz. The Habsburgs wanted her gone from the story. Sisi’s composure did not last.

The night Rudolf lay in state in the Hofburg, she sobbed at dinner. The German ambassador reported back to Berlin that she was brooding incessantly and reproaching herself. And this is where an idea from the very beginning of her story returns. Remember the Wittelsbach family—her father’s dynasty in Bavaria.

Her cousin, King Ludwig, had drowned three years earlier after being declared unfit to rule. Now, according to the ambassador’s report, Sisi blamed her own Wittelsbach blood for her son’s mental confusion. In her mind, the inheritance she had carried from Possenhofen had passed into Rudolf. That was her interpretation, not a medical finding.

But it shows what she believed, and it was a crushing thing to believe. She looked for other explanations too. She blamed Stephanie. Rudolf, she said, had sought distraction elsewhere because he had the wrong wife.

Others, though, looked straight at her. A woman of the court, Countess Jöchinger, wrote that “this time the first lady of the land bears the principal blame. ” It is a hostile judgment, and it should be read as one. But it reflected what many in Vienna thought.

The empress who was always away, who had rescued her son from Gondrecourt and then largely left him, now had to face the question of what her absence had cost. The gossip did not stop there. People whispered that she had gone down into the crypt and tried to contact Rudolf’s spirit. Whatever happened down there, she came out of that period with a sentence that sums up the whole year.

“Rudolf’s bullet,” she later said, “killed my faith. ” Her daughter Gisela was so frightened by her mother’s state that she feared Sisi might take her own life as well. Then Sisi did something concrete. She gave the colors away.

Her light-colored gowns went to her daughters, Gisela and Valerie. Her jewels went too, to her daughters and to her granddaughter, Rudolf’s only child, little Elisabeth Marie. Among them were the diamond stars, the ones Winterhalter had painted in her hair. When Elisabeth Marie married in 1902, she wore them.

It seems to have been the last time the full set was ever together. In place of the jewels came mourning jewelry made of black glass and jet. In place of the bright gowns came black: black veils, black fans, black coats. For the rest of her life she appeared almost only in mourning.

One light blue and cream dress from these years does survive, so it may not have been absolutely every day, but to the world, the woman in the white star gown had become the woman in black. There is a cruel symmetry here, and it is a factual one. The stars that had made her the most famous beauty in Europe were now on someone else. The face she had protected from cameras was now hidden behind a veil and a fan.

She was fifty-one years old. She had been married for nearly thirty-five years. She had now lost two of her four children, and the son she had once saved from the general’s drill had died in a hunting lodge with a seventeen-year-old girl. Sisi pulled back from court duties almost entirely.

She had always traveled. Now she seemed unable to stop. But a woman who could not stop moving was also a woman whose body was being pushed harder than ever, and in the years that followed, the cost of decades of fasting was about to show up when nobody could hide it. The losses did not stop with Rudolf.

Her father had died the year before Mayerling. In 1890, her sister Helene died—the sister who had once been meant to marry the emperor. That same year, Andrássy died too. Sisi’s answer was motion.

After 1889, she traveled more restlessly than ever, and long sea voyages on the imperial yachts came to dominate her life. On the yacht Miramar, she had a glass pavilion built on deck so she could watch the sea in any weather. She sailed the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the coasts of Greece. Cows and goats still came along, so there would always be fresh milk.

Her favorite refuge was Corfu, the island where she had once eaten meat and drunk beer while Vienna whispered about her lungs. In a letter to her husband, she called it her ideal abode. In 1890, she began building a villa there in an ancient Pompeian style, named the Achilleion after Achilles, her favorite hero from Greek mythology. Everything bought for it was marked with a crowned dolphin.

She was studying both ancient and modern Greek by now, with a Greek reader to keep her company. And then, once it was finished, she lost interest. In 1897, she quietly put it up for sale through an estate agency. The dream house became one more place to leave.

After her death, it passed to Gisela, who sold it to the German Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1907. Meanwhile, the regime went on, and in her fifties it was taking a visible toll. A servant described her taking steam baths, followed by full baths at about 7°C, roughly 45°F, after which her ears were ringing. On Corfu, her feet sometimes swelled badly.

Then a doctor examined her and did not soften his words. In the 1890s, he found pronounced swelling, especially around her ankles, in a woman who otherwise seemed healthy. His verdict was simple: edema of hunger. Edema means swelling caused by fluid collecting in the body’s tissues.

It can be a sign of severe undernourishment when the body has been starved of what it needs for too long. One biographical account records her lowest weight as about 43. 5 kg in 1894. That is under 96 pounds, on a woman 1 m 72 tall.

Franz Joseph could see it. In a letter to Katharina Schratt, he asked her not to alarm his wife about her quite bad appearance, and warned against any new cures. “You can imagine how worried I am,” he wrote. There were other complaints too.

Her medical records mention rheumatism, sciatica, and what the period called melancholy. A 2024 medical study of her death also notes cocaine injections, at a time when doctors were still recommending cocaine as a treatment. Records from the court pharmacy list ointment after ointment, and drink after drink, made up for her. Her travel medicine chest is on display in Vienna today.

So here is the question this story has been building toward. What was wrong with her? Today many people answer with one word: anorexia. Anorexia nervosa is an eating disorder in which a person severely restricts food, driven by an intense fear of gaining weight.

The psychologist Walter Vandereycken, together with Ron van Deth, has argued for that retrospective diagnosis. Their strongest evidence is that documents from her own life repeatedly describe exactly that fear. Add the daily weighing, the fasting, the compulsive exercise, and the hunger edema, and the case looks strong. But it is a theory, and it should be told as one.

Nobody diagnosed her in her lifetime. The starvation periods alternated with cakes and ice cream, and on Corfu she ate heartily. Some reports about her eating may be exaggerated. Her grief and depression are well documented and could account for some of what she did.

And she lived in a culture that worshiped the tiny corseted waist. One scholar has called her Vienna’s most fashionable neurasthenic, using the period’s own word for nervous exhaustion. The behavior is documented. The label remains a proposal.

What she thought about it herself, she mostly put into verse. Sisi admired the German poet Heinrich Heine and collected his letters. She filled volumes with poetry in his style, often calling herself Titania, the fairy queen from Shakespeare. The poems were a kind of secret diary.

In them, she attacked the court and the monarchy itself, which she considered outdated. Her views were liberal and anti-clerical, and she knew they would not be welcome in Vienna. So she made an extraordinary arrangement. In 1890, she directed that her poetry diaries be locked away for sixty years, and then handed over to the president of Switzerland.

Any money from publishing them was to go to political prisoners and their families in need. Her brother Carl Theodor kept the strongbox in Bavaria. Nobody would read her real thoughts until long after everyone she wrote about was dead. Then, in the spring of 1897, another blow.

Her younger sister Sophie Charlotte had once been engaged to their cousin Ludwig before he broke it off. She later married a French prince, the Duke of Alençon. On the fourth of May 1897, she was helping at a charity bazaar in Paris, the Bazar de la Charité, when it caught fire. She refused to be rescued until the young girls, visitors, and nuns had been brought out first.

A nun who escaped saw her kneeling in prayer. Her body was so badly burned that even her maid could not recognize it. After about two hours, her dentist identified her from her gold fillings, one of the first identifications of its kind. By the following spring, Sisi’s own condition had become impossible to ignore.

In May 1898, Valerie wrote in her diary, “Mama looks terribly ill. ” That summer, the empress went to Lake Geneva on a health cure. In late summer 1898, Sisi stayed for several weeks at the Grand Hôtel high above Montreux. She traveled incognito, as she so often did, despite warnings about possible assassination attempts.

She went about anyway. On the ninth of September, she crossed to Geneva to visit Baroness Julie Rothschild. That night, she stayed at the Hôtel Beau-Rivage with her lady-in-waiting, Countess Sztáray, registered as the Countess of Hohenems. The hotelier recognized her.

The next morning, the Journal de Genève reported that the empress of Austria was in town. One of the people who read that newspaper was Luigi Lucheni. Lucheni was a twenty-five-year-old Italian anarchist, and he had not come to Geneva for her. His target was a French royal, Prince Henri of Orléans, who had been expected in the city but never arrived.

Lucheni could not afford a revolver or even a dagger. So he had taken an ordinary file, ground it to a sharp triangular point, and fitted it with a wooden handle. When his prince failed to appear, he read about the empress. A royal was a royal.

Killing her would make the papers too. On Saturday, the tenth of September, Sisi and Countess Sztáray left the hotel and walked along the lake toward the landing stage. They meant to catch the steamer at three minutes past two. Sisi was carrying a parasol.

Lucheni was waiting along the path. He stepped up, looked under the parasol to make sure it was her, and struck. She fell. Then she got up, brushed off her clothes, and thanked the people who rushed to help.

She seemed fine. She asked the countess whether perhaps the man had wanted to take her watch. Then she walked on about a hundred yards and boarded the steamer, the Genève. Shortly after it pulled away, she collapsed on the upper deck.

When her bodice was opened, they found a small hole in her thin batiste camisole and one tiny brown spot. Only then did Countess Sztáray understand that the empress had been stabbed. According to one account, Sisi briefly came round and asked what had actually happened to her. The captain turned the boat back.

The crew made a stretcher out of oars and velvet chairs and carried her to the hotel. A doctor and a priest came. At 2:10 that afternoon, she was pronounced dead. She was sixty years old.

The autopsy explained the mystery from the opening of this story: how a woman with a pierced heart could walk to a boat. The file had entered below her left collarbone, broken a rib, gone through her left lung, and pierced the heart straight through. The wound channel was 85 mm long. Because the wound was so narrow, blood seeped only slowly into the sack around her heart, gradually squeezing it until it stopped.

A modern medical review of the autopsy concluded that a looser corset would not have saved her. The same report recorded the body of a woman 1 m 72 tall, with very little fat beneath the skin. Lucheni had run off down a side street, but two cab drivers who had seen the attack caught him almost immediately. He did not resist.

At the police station, he boasted that he had done it and that she must be dead. He said he was an anarchist, that he was poor, that he loved the workers, and that he wanted the rich to die. Before the magistrate, he explained, “It was not a woman I struck, but an empress. It was a crown that I had in view.

”

He wanted to be executed as a martyr. Geneva had no death penalty, and the Swiss government refused his request to be tried in Lucerne, which still had one. On the tenth of November 1898, he was sentenced to life imprisonment. On the nineteenth of October 1910, he hanged himself with his belt in his cell.

Even then, he did not entirely leave her story. A professor named Louis Megevand, who believed in phrenology—the discredited idea that the shape of the skull reveals character—had the head removed and the skull opened. He found nothing unusual. The head was preserved in Geneva for decades, then transferred to Vienna.

In February 2000, it was finally buried in Vienna’s Central Cemetery, about 8 km from the crypt where the empress lies. When the news reached Franz Joseph, he was devastated. According to Valerie’s diary, he wept, then kept his composure, as he had after Rudolf’s death. But he said one thing to his daughter that she wrote down: “You do not know how much I loved this woman.

”

Her body reached Vienna on the fifteenth of September and lay in state in the chapel of the Hofburg. Sisi had wished to be buried by the sea. Instead, on the seventeenth of September, with eighty-two sovereigns and royals in attendance, she was laid in the Imperial Crypt in Vienna, near the son she had lost at Mayerling and the little daughter she had lost in Buda. There was one last message from her, and it took more than half a century to arrive.

On the third of July 1951, the locked box was handed to the Swiss president in Bern. Officials hoped for something sensational, perhaps a farewell letter from Rudolf. Instead, they found her poems. The head of the Swiss archives judged them of little literary value and feared they could shock readers and damage her reputation, and the government at first wanted to keep them unpublished.

The historian Brigitte Hamann published them in 1984. In the spirit of the empress’s wish to help political prisoners, part of the proceeds still goes to help refugees. The woman who refused cameras after thirty is still remembered by a portrait painted in her late twenties.

And the last person to measure her body, after four decades of scales and tape measures, was the doctor at her autopsy.