No photographer had captured the face of the Empress of Austria for nearly thirty years, and that was entirely her own doing. A camera came near, and a fan went up. She walked behind a white leather parasol. Her hairdresser, who shared her height and her coloring, was sometimes dressed in the empress’s clothes and sent out in the empress’s 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, and 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. What they wrote down was 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 years old. One of them, a professor of forensic medicine named Louisé Méry, 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 sawed open 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 the Herzog-Max-Palais on the Ludwigstrasse in the center of Munich, in December of 1837. The family story ever after was that she came into the world with a tooth already showing in her gum. A Sunday child with a tooth: Bavarian folklore counted both as lucky.

Her parents named her Elisabeth Amalie Eugenie, and nobody used any of it. She was Sisi from the start, signing her name with a single s, though popular spellings later doubled it and the souvenir shops in Vienna followed them. Her father was Duke Maximilian Joseph in Bavaria, a junior branch of the royal house of Wittelsbach, close enough to the throne to be rich and far enough from it to have no job. Duke Max used that freedom about as fully as a man could.

He played the zither in beer halls and patronized Bavarian folk music. He wrote verse and published it under a pen name. He loved the circus so much that he built a riding arena into his own palace in the middle of the city 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 the family’s accounts, a mummy.

He rode off across the countryside for weeks to escape his wife and his obligations, and 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 Queen of Saxony, one 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.

She was a practical woman who spent much of her married life managing a household whose head was usually somewhere else. The children wintered in the Munich palace and spent their summers at Possenhofen, a squat, four-towered castle on the western shore of Lake Starnberg, with the Alps on the horizon on a clear day. Possenhofen had almost no protocol. The children ran through the woods, rode, fished, and skipped their lessons whenever they could get away with it.

Sisi in particular was a poor student and an excellent rider. Her tutors reported on her with the tone of people who had given up. 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 children called the place Posi. Sisi kept animals of her own there, and she and her brothers and sisters mixed with the village children and the farm people in a way that would have been unthinkable at any court. That was the Bavaria she would spend the rest of her life trying to get back to. The siblings would keep turning up, so it helps to have them roughly in view.

Ludwig was the eldest, born 1831, and would later marry an actress in a match the family considered a disgrace. Helene, called Néné, came in 1834, pious and serious, the one meant for greatness. Sisi was next. Carl Theodor, nicknamed Gackel, born 1839, became an eye doctor who ran clinics in Munich and Meran, operated on the poor for nothing, and was her favorite brother.

Marie Sophie came in 1841 and would end up Queen of Naples, standing on the ramparts at Gaeta during a siege while her husband’s kingdom fell apart underneath her. Mathilde, later Countess of Trani, followed in 1843. Sophie Charlotte in 1847. Max Emanuel in 1849, the baby of the family, who died before her in 1893.

One more child from those Starnberg summers: across the lake at Berg lived her cousin Ludwig, eight years younger, the boy who would become King Ludwig II of Bavaria. He and Sisi formed a bond that survived adulthood without ever quite growing up. They gave each other bird names: he was the eagle, she was the seagull. He would send her flowers and long letters, arrive at odd hours since he kept night hours, and sit and talk about poetry.

Both of them would spend their lives being described by other people as strange, and both of them would die beside a lake. In 1867, Ludwig became engaged to her sister Sophie Charlotte, a match people put down to the girl being Sisi’s sister and looking a little like her. He then spent months failing to set a date until Duke Max lost patience and told him to marry the girl or let her go. Ludwig let her go by letter, and the letter blamed her father.

Sisi, who had encouraged the match, wrote to her mother that she was angry with the king. The cousins made it up within a few years, and he went on visiting. The first heartbreak came early and is only half visible in the record. At fourteen or so, she fell for a young count who served in her father’s household.

Popular accounts give him the name Richard. The family found out, judged him unsuitable, and sent him away. He died not long afterwards, and she wrote poems about him that survive. 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 mother of the twenty-three-year-old Emperor Franz Joseph, was quite possibly the most formidable person in the Habsburg monarchy. People at court called her the only man in the Hofburg. She had steered her son onto the throne during the revolutions of 1848 by persuading her own husband to step aside, and she had run him ever since.

She had decided he would marry her niece Helene, and 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 their gala dresses went missing somewhere behind them, and they had just come from a family funeral. So 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, that she was so fresh, and that if he could not have her, he would not marry at all.

Sophie, to her credit, did not fight him. He asked his mother to ask her mother. At a ball on the evening of the seventeenth, he danced the cotillion with Sisi and gave her every one of the bouquets meant to be handed round the room, and everyone present understood. The eighteenth was his birthday.

The nineteenth was a Sunday, and the engagement was announced at mass with the girl in question standing in the church in front of the whole spa season. 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 that she had said she loved the emperor so much, if only he were not the emperor. The Archduchess marked the engagement by buying the villa at Ischl where it had happened and giving it to the couple as a wedding present.

She had wings added on either side so that the ground plan formed the letter E. The family would summer there for the next sixty years, and the family still owns it. Eight months of preparation followed, and they were not gentle. Tutors were brought in to pour history, French, Italian, and the family trees of half of Europe into a girl who had never sat still for a lesson in her life.

A trousseau was stitched at speed, and the inventory survives: dozens of dresses, hundreds of pairs of stockings and gloves, and a scale of underwear that ran to pages. Her teeth, which the Viennese court judged too yellow, were worked on by a dentist. Franz Joseph came to Munich twice in the interval and wrote of her tenderly. 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.

She was leaving a lake and a set of woods and a family that had let her run, and she was going to a palace where she would not be permitted to walk down a staircase without an escort. At Nußdorf, where the boat came in, the emperor jumped aboard before the gangway was down and kissed her in front of the crowd, and the crowd loved it. The next day she rode through Vienna in a glass coach drawn by eight white horses. As she climbed out at the Hofburg, her diamond tiara caught in the doorframe and had to be worked loose while the whole court watched.

Vienna was lit up for the wedding. The Ringstrasse did not exist yet. The old walls were still standing, and the crowds packed the streets inside them to see a sixteen-year-old in pink and silver drive past in a glass box. The accounts of the day describe her as pale and close to tears through most of it.

The wedding took place on the evening of the twenty-fourth of April in the Augustinerkirche, the court church inside the Hofburg complex, with more than a thousand guests. Cardinal Rauscher preached at such length that the Viennese nicknamed him Cardinal Plauscher, which roughly means Cardinal Chatterbox. Afterwards came the ceremony called the kissing of the hand, 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.

She fled the room in tears and had to be persuaded back, and the line resumed. Two of the women in it were her own Bavarian cousins, and when they reached her, she forgot herself and kissed them instead of holding out her glove. And the court noticed that, too. What happened that night is known in unusual detail, and the person who wrote it down was her mother-in-law.

Archduchess Sophie kept a diary, and in it she recorded walking the sixteen-year-old bride to her rooms with Ludovika, waiting in the small room next to the bedroom until the girl was in bed, and then going to fetch her son and bringing him in. She looked in once more to say good night. 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. A lady named Countess Sophie Esterházy had been assigned to the young empress by the Archduchess in effect as a supervisor, and several accounts name her as the source through which the details reached the family. Each morning the couple were expected at breakfast with the Archduchess, who asked her son questions. Whether the girl in the room understood every word of what was being discussed hardly matters.

She understood that it was being discussed. Something survives from her own pen from that first period: a verse in which she wakes in a dungeon with chains on her hands. Teenage writing, and also a fairly precise description of her situation. Another poem from the same weeks longs for the path she left and says she would give anything to have never left it.

The honeymoon was at Laxenburg, a palace south of the city, and Franz Joseph rode into Vienna every morning to work and left his bride alone with the household. He was a man who wrote work in his diary the way other people wrote prayers. He was at his desk by five most mornings for the next sixty years. She walked the grounds.

She wrote to her family. Within a few weeks she was coughing, anxious, and afraid of steep staircases. The court doctors called it nerves. 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. Costume changed several times a day, and each change involved a lady whose family had held the right to hand over that particular garment for generations. She could not eat what she liked, bathe when she liked, or speak to a servant without an intermediary. 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 older women chosen by the Archduchess, and they reported back. She had brought her dogs from Bavaria and her parrots, and both were objected to. The Archduchess held that a pregnant woman who spent her days staring at parrots risked a child that looked like one, and she said so, and the parrots were moved. Sisi rode when she could in the Prater and in the riding school, and the Archduchess thought that unseemly as well.

Ten months after the wedding, on the fifth of March 1855, she gave birth to a daughter. The Archduchess named the baby Sophie after herself without consulting the mother. She also made herself godmother and set up the nursery beside her own apartments on a different floor from the empress, so that to see her child Sisi had to climb stairs and walk through drafty corridors under observation. She was not allowed to breastfeed; a wet nurse handled that.

The grandmother’s view was that a seventeen-year-old was a silly young mother, and she said so. A second daughter, Gisela, arrived on the twelfth of July 1856 and went straight into the same arrangement. Somewhere in this stretch, Sisi found a pamphlet on her desk with certain lines underlined. The line said 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, partly to show the crown’s face in a country that had been in open revolt nine years before, and Sisi insisted on bringing both girls.

The Archduchess argued against it. Sisi had her way, which was rare enough to be remarked on. 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 with receptions at every stop and the empress in the middle of it in Hungarian dress, taking to the country in a way that surprised the people around her.

She was nineteen. Then the fevers started. In Buda, both children fell ill with high fever and diarrhea. Gisela, ten months old, got through it.

Sophie, two years old, did not. She died on the twenty-ninth of May, the accounts putting the time at a quarter to nine in the evening after something like eleven hours of struggle. A small child with that sort of fever dehydrates fast: the skin goes slack, the eyes sink, the lips crack, and towards the end the body convulses. The likeliest causes are dehydration or fever convulsions, and typhus or typhoid are the words most often used, though nobody at the bedside could have said with certainty.

She is generally described as dying in her mother’s arms. Franz Joseph sent a telegram to his mother saying their little one was an angel in heaven and that they were devastated. A painting was made of the dead child laid out on her pillow in the palace at Buda, a jeweled crucifix set between her hands. The body was taken back to Vienna and laid in the Capuchin crypt in the smallest coffin in that row.

Writers who have gone through Archduchess Sophie’s letters generally say she did not stand over her daughter-in-law and blame her for dragging a sick child across a border, or at least did not put it in writing. Whether the reproach was spoken or only felt, Sisi took it on herself. That much the record agrees on. She 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. Her mother came to Vienna with three of the younger sisters and stayed for weeks. Slowly, the empress came out of her rooms.

On the twenty-first of August 1858 at Laxenburg, she gave birth to a son, and Vienna knew it was a son because the guns fired 101 times. Crown Prince Rudolf. 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 with the disasters at Magenta and Solferino and came home to a capital that blamed him personally. He had commanded at Solferino himself and watched forty thousand men fall in a day. Sisi, who had been through three pregnancies in three and a half years and was twenty-one, withdrew from him physically. She fought with the Archduchess over the children and lost, and she began lacing herself tighter than anyone had seen.

Her waist in this period came down to forty centimeters, a fraction under sixteen inches, on a woman who stood five foot eight. Court gossip in Vienna was also connecting the emperor with an actress; the name that comes down is Frau Roll. The details are thin and the gossip may have been nothing more than gossip, but it reached her a few weeks before she fell ill. In October of 1860, she fell ill.

She was pale, exhausted, coughing, and the doctors used an old word for anemia: green sickness. Then a lung specialist named Josef Škoda examined her and came away fearing consumption. In 1860, a diagnosis of consumption was an announcement about how a person was going to die. Škoda prescribed a winter somewhere warm and far away.

He said, Madeira. Queen Victoria lent her royal yacht for the voyage, the Victoria and Albert. And 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. She took a household and several dogs with her, and she was gone for six months.

From this point, the story splits, and it has never quite been put back together. Members of her own family who saw her before she left described her as not particularly ill. People at court doubted the lung diagnosis openly. A rumor began to travel in Vienna and then across the continent 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. No doctor wrote it down. What the doctors did write down was consumption. And then the patient went to a warm island and, by the accounts of the people around her, spent her time walking, playing with her dogs, playing cards with her ladies, and being bored.

Count Rechberg, the foreign minister, visited her there and reported home that she seemed better. She came back to Vienna in May of 1861. Within four days she had relapsed: fever, coughing, stopped eating, stopped sleeping. The doctors sent her away again, this time to Corfu.

And on Corfu, she improved almost as soon as the ship docked. That is twice that the symptoms retreated when she was out of reach of the Hofburg. Her sister Helene came out to Corfu that autumn to keep her company, the same Helene who had been dressed and drilled for the emperor at Ischl eight years before, and the two of them walked the island together for weeks. Franz Joseph came out to Corfu himself that October, sailing down the Adriatic to see his wife, and stayed a few days.

He found her improved, by his own account, and agreed that she should stay on. The following year, a Munich physician named Fischer examined her and found something different: severe anemia and dropsy, fluid gathering in the tissues. Her feet had swollen so badly she could only walk with someone holding her up. He sent her to Bad Kissingen for a cure, and she lingered afterwards in Bavaria with her own family for as long as she could stretch it.

When she finally traveled back to Vienna in August of 1862, she developed a migraine so violent that she vomited four times on the journey. So what was wrong with her in those two years? You can pick from the menu: lung disease as Škoda said, anemia and edema as Fischer found, a venereal infection as the gossip claimed, starvation doing what starvation does to a young body, which would account for the swelling without any of the rest, or a nervous collapse dressed up as physical illness by doctors who needed to give the emperor a diagnosis he could act on. Each of those has a paper trail of some kind.

None of them has a paper trail that shuts the others out. 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. The Archduchess and the emperor handed his education to a Count Leopold Gondrecourt, a major general with views on how to make a soldier out of a nervous child.

Gondrecourt’s methods survive in the accounts of the people who watched them. He woke the boy with pistol shots fired in his bedroom. He drilled him in the snow before breakfast. He doused him in cold water.

On one occasion, he took him into the animal enclosure at Lainz, locked the gate behind him, and shouted that a wild boar was coming. Rudolf screamed until someone let him out. The child grew sickly and frightened, and the people around him made sure the empress knew what was being done to him. Sisi did something she had not done in ten years of marriage.

She 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, she wrote, 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 and replaced by a liberal officer named Latour, whom Rudolf came to love. The Archduchess lost the children.

The mother who won them then spent the next twenty years mostly out of the country. The Archduchess herself died in May of 1872 at sixty-seven after a short final illness. Sisi sat at the bedside and, by the accounts of the court, stayed there for hours in a chair by the bed of the woman who had taken her children away longer than anyone had expected her to. She said very little about it, then or later, and within a few weeks she was traveling again.

From the early 1860s onward, her body became the project. Everything else in her life came and went. The Geneva autopsy measured her at one meter seventy-two, and English-language books round that to five foot eight. For a woman of that century, that was tall enough to look over most men’s shoulders.

Through fasting, exercise, and lacing, she kept her weight at about fifty kilograms, 110 pounds, for most of her adult life. She weighed herself up to three times a day. When the scale threatened to go past fifty, a hunger cure followed, and a hunger cure meant days of near-total fasting, sometimes with nothing but a few oranges and a glass of milk. Meat disgusted her, so the kitchen was ordered to press the juice out of half-raw beef steaks and serve it to her as a thin broth.

Some periods she lived on milk and eggs. She kept her own cows, first at Schönbrunn and later traveling with her, so that the milk would be right. Later accounts add violet-flavored ice cream. On the day of her death, she had eaten a glass of milk and some fruit.

The people around her got used to the sight of an empress at a state dinner with a full plate in front of her, moving nothing on it. Wall bars and gymnastic rings were installed in her dressing room in the Hofburg. They are still there, screwed into the wall of a room otherwise furnished for a queen, with the rings hanging from the door frame. She had the same equipment installed wherever she stayed for any length of time.

She fenced. She walked for hours at a pace that left her ladies-in-waiting limping behind her, six or seven hours over alpine paths without stopping. And she rode as though the horse had insulted her. Then the corsets.

Hers were rigid, solid-fronted, made in Paris, and by one account of leather. Lacing her into one could take an hour. She threw them away after a few weeks of use. For riding, she was frequently sewn into her habit, stitch by stitch, so that nothing would bulge and nothing would move, and unpicked again at the end of the day.

In 1862, one of her ladies wrote home with relief that the empress was eating properly, sleeping well, and had stopped tight-lacing. Her surviving dresses say otherwise: the waists of the gowns in the museums measure between forty-seven and forty-nine and a half centimeters, about eighteen and a half to nineteen and a half inches. The Prince of Hesse, meeting her, called her almost inhumanly slender. He meant it as a compliment.

It sounds now like a symptom. At night she took an olive oil bath in a tub installed in the Hofburg for her, the first bathroom the palace had ever had. In the morning, a cold shower. She took steam baths to sweat, and afterwards was rubbed down and wrapped in wet sheets.

She slept on a metal bedstead with no pillow because she believed a pillow ruined the posture. Over her face at night went a mask of leather lined with raw veal, or on other nights with crushed strawberries. Around her hips she wrapped cloths soaked in violet or cider vinegar and slept in them. Her skin cream was called Crème Céleste, and the recipe survives: white wax, spermaceti from the head of a sperm whale, sweet almond oil, rose water.

She developed a physical horror of fat women. When she took her youngest daughter, Marie Valerie, to meet Queen Victoria, the child came away frightened, and what had frightened her was her mother’s reaction to the queen’s figure. In 1894, at fifty-six, she reached her lowest recorded weight: forty-three and a half kilograms, ninety-five pounds and change, on a frame of five foot eight. The other half of that picture is the eating she did do, which came in bursts.

In 1878, she went incognito to a restaurant and, by the account of the person with her, put away a broiled chicken, an Italian salad, champagne, and what the report calls a considerable quantity of cake. In 1881, renting a country house in England for the hunting, she had a spiral staircase built from her sitting room straight down into the kitchen. On the last full day of her life, at lunch with a baroness outside Geneva, she ate with an appetite her lady-in-waiting noticed and wrote down. Two Belgian researchers, Walter Vander Eycken and Ron van Deth, went through the documents in the 1990s and published a piece in History Today under the title “The Anorectic Empress.

” Their conclusion was that the records describe a lasting fear of weight gain and the mental changes that go with anorexia nervosa. Other writers point out that women of her rank and era dieted and laced as a matter of course, and that a diagnosis across a century and a half is a diagnosis of a paper trail rather than a patient. You can weigh that yourself. What the paper trail contains is a woman weighing herself three times a day for forty years.

A Viennese pathologist named Roland Sedivy went back through the court pharmacy records for a paper in a medical journal and noted that fasting and exercise on that scale should have produced hunger edema, the swelling of starvation, and that this fits what Dr. Fischer found in her legs in 1862. He also found that at some point after Sigmund Freud’s enthusiasm for the drug in 1884, cocaine was reportedly given to the empress against melancholy. Whether it did her any good is not recorded.

What is recorded is the sciatica, the neuralgia in her face, the insomnia, and the migraines, all chronic by her fifties. If you have seen one picture of her, it is the one where the hair is braided into a crown on top of her head with diamond stars pinned through it, twenty-seven of them made by the court jeweler Köchert. That hair reached her ankles. It was 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 was Franziska Feifalik, born Fanny Angerer, poached from the Burgtheater and paid a salary said to match her university professors. Feifalik went almost everywhere with her for thirty years. She was forbidden to wear rings while she worked.

She wore white gloves. At the end of every session, she was required to present the hairs that had fallen out during the process, laid out in a silver bowl for the empress to inspect. Feifalik is said to have survived the job by hiding stray hairs under her apron. When the hairdresser was ill, the empress refused to appear in public, since nobody else was permitted to touch it.

And when Feifalik went out in the carriage in the empress’s place, the Viennese lining the streets were waving at the hairdresser. Every two weeks or so, the hair was washed with a mixture of raw egg and cognac, and the whole day was cleared for it. The weight of it gave her headaches. On bad days, she had the tresses tied with ribbons and hung from hooks so that the scalp got a rest.

Her Greek tutor, a young man named Constantine Christomanos, wrote afterwards about seeing her at a white-covered table wrapped in a white lace dressing gown with the hair unfastened and pooling on the floor around her chair. She told him hairdressing took almost two hours, and that while her hair was busy, her mind stayed idle. She was afraid, she said, that her mind escaped through the hair and into the fingers of the hairdresser, and that was why she had a headache afterwards. She used the two hours to learn Hungarian and later Greek, and the hours added up.

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. The last authorized pictures show a woman of roughly thirty to thirty-two, and after that the famous portraits are copies of copies retouched from the old plates. Photographers who tried to catch her in the street got the fan raised at exactly the right moment, and a few of those pictures survive: a tall woman in black with a fan where the face should be.

In public she moved behind the fan or a veil or a white leather parasol. The later portraits, dated to the 1880s and nineties, were worked up from the old photographs and from earlier paintings since she would not sit, and they show a woman of thirty in the clothes of a woman of fifty. A snapshot from the Swiss lakeside in that final summer is the last photograph of her alive: two figures in black on a path, the empress with a parasol and Staray beside her, and there is no face in it either. 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, so that people who met her came away saying she murmured.

Her skin by the nineties was weathered from years of walking in the sun and the sea wind, and she knew it. The woman in the diamond stars was a memory she was carrying around under a veil, and she had decided nobody would be allowed to compare the two. She once said that children were the curse of a woman, because when they came they drove away beauty, and beauty was the best gift of the gods. She had four of them.

The last one she kept. Hungary came next, since Hungary gave her the one thing Vienna never had: a place where she was wanted. On that first tour in 1857, the same trip that killed her daughter, she had met Hungarian magnates who spoke to her plainly and made fun of Viennese court manners to her face. Her mother-in-law loathed Hungarians.

The Hungarians had risen against the Habsburgs in 1848 and been crushed by the young Franz Joseph with Russian help, and thirteen of their generals had been hanged and shot at Arad afterwards on his authority. That alone would have been reason enough for Sisi to take them up. She learned the language, no easy thing since Hungarian is related to almost nothing else in Europe, and learned it 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.

When there was a letter Sisi did not want the emperor to see, Ida carried it. Ida also handled the reading aloud in Hungarian while the hair was being done, from newspapers and books, so that the empress of Austria kept up with the mood in Pest in a way that unsettled the Viennese ladies of the household who were not invited in for it. 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 for his part in the rising, and since he was safely abroad, they hanged him in effigy instead.

Paris society took him up as le beau pendu, the handsome hanged man. He came home under amnesty in the 1850s and set about getting for Hungary through negotiation what it had failed to get through war. He was tall and dark and careless in his dress, and the salons had a great deal to say about him. Sisi became his ally inside the palace.

Her letters to Franz Joseph in the mid-sixties 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—and she begged him in Rudolf’s name not to lose the chance at the last moment. When he stalled, she withheld her company. When he moved, she came to Vienna.

He listened in the end, though it took losing another war, to Prussia in 1866, to make him listen. The Compromise of 1867 turned the empire into the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary, with Hungary running its own affairs under a shared crown, 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, with Andrássy standing in for the Palatine and holding the Crown of St. Stephen.

Afterwards, the king rode up a mound of earth gathered from every county in the kingdom and struck out with the sword towards the four points of the compass, the old oath to defend the country. To the Hungarians she was Erzsébet királyné from that day, Queen Elisabeth, and the empress title was left in Vienna. Liszt had written the mass. The queen’s gown came from Worth in Paris, white and silver with a bodice of black velvet laced with pearls.

By the old custom, the queen consort was not crowned on the head; the crown was lifted and touched to her right shoulder. People in the church wrote afterwards that the Hungarians wept and that the queen looked as though she belonged to them. In the days after, the king granted a general amnesty to the men of 1848 still in prison or in exile, and a good many Hungarians took that as her doing, too. Whether it was or not, she did nothing to correct them.

For the rest of her life, Hungarian crowds behaved with her the way Viennese crowds never did. 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. People who knew her said those were her happiest years.

She was thirty. The nation also voted the couple a coronation gift in gold, and the king and queen handed it straight back to be spent on the widows and orphans of the Hungarian soldiers who had died fighting the Habsburgs in 1848. Vienna talked, of course. Vienna had noticed that the empress had come alive in the company of a handsome Hungarian rebel, and she became pregnant in the months after the coronation.

The gossips predicted a son named Stephen after Hungary’s patron king. The baby born in Buda on the twenty-second 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.

The timing puts conception close to the coronation celebrations; Andrássy’s devotion to the empress was public and his own letters do not hide it; and she chose to give birth in Buda rather than Vienna, which had never been done. On the other side, Franz Joseph never showed a flicker of doubt, no letter, note, 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. What can be said is that Sisi raised this one child herself, with an intensity she had never shown Gisela or Rudolf, and that Valerie grew up frightened of it.

The girl was made to speak Hungarian as her first language and wrote in her diary that she hated being called the Hungarian child, that she loved Austria, and that she could not say so. Her mother’s love came with a demand that she return it in exactly the same measure. When Andrássy died on the eighteenth of February 1890 at sixty-six of bladder cancer, in agony, Sisi said that her last and only friend was dead. Valerie wrote that her mother had clung to him with a true and steady friendship that she gave perhaps to no other person.

He had been foreign minister of the whole monarchy for most of the 1870s. After he resigned in 1879 she saw him less and wrote to him more. They met for the last time at Gödöllő when he was already ill, and by the account of a lady who watched, they walked in the park for an hour and did not talk about anything that mattered. Gödöllő deserves a minute of its own, since it is the one place where you can see what she was like when nobody was making her do anything.

The palace had a riding hall, and she had a circus ring marked out in it and hired Elise Renz, daughter of the most famous circus family in Europe, to ride with her. She learned high-school riding and circus tricks in that ring. She kept a menagerie. The Hungarian gentry came to hunt and found the queen jumping fences in front of them and setting the pace, and the stories went home with them.

Marie Festetics, the countess Andrássy picked out for her household in 1871, wrote in her diary about the empress’s charm and about her moods and about how much of each day was spent walking. Vienna did get some of her in between. During the war against Prussia in the summer of 1866, with the army broken at Königgrätz and the Prussians a few days’ march from the capital, she went into the military hospitals. The accounts have her in the wards in Vienna, walking the rows of cots, sitting with the wounded, and coming back the next day.

She was twenty-eight, and it is the one stretch of her life where the Viennese, who never warmed to her, wrote about her with something like affection. Then she took the children to Hungary, out of reach of the Prussians, and did not come back for months, and the affection cooled. In 1873 the city hosted a world exhibition, and she was required to be present. The diaries of that summer are a catalog of things she found unbearable.

The Shah of Persia came, brought his own sheep to slaughter in the gardens of the palace at Laxenburg where he was lodged, kept the emperor waiting at a review while he finished his lunch, and examined the empress through a lorgnette at a length the court found hard to forgive. Balls were held, and she stood through them behind a fan. Receptions were held, and she developed migraines. The Vienna stock market crashed in the middle of the exhibition, and cholera broke out in the city, and she left for Hungary as soon as she decently could.

In April of 1879, the couple marked their silver wedding, and the painter Hans Makart organized a procession through the Ringstrasse with thousands of citizens dressed as figures from the Renaissance, guilds and floats and horses, and the emperor and empress sat in a pavilion and watched it go by for hours. She was forty-one and had spent the previous winter in Ireland jumping ditches. Two years later, in December of 1881, the Ringtheater caught fire during a performance of Offenbach with the house full, and somewhere near four hundred people died in the stairwells and the galleries. By February she was back in England.

Vienna learned the pattern: she would appear for a disaster or a ceremony, do what was asked with a face like a closed door, and be gone before the flowers wilted. The Viennese called her the absent empress, and worse. Her own view, which she put in verse, was that the city had never wanted her and that she owed it nothing beyond what the emperor asked. The marriage, meanwhile, had settled into something that looked from the outside like an arrangement between two people who wrote to each other fondly and rarely shared a roof.

Franz Joseph stayed in love with her. His letters are full of it: hundreds of them, written almost daily whenever they were apart, in a careful hand, addressing her as his angel and reporting on the weather and the hunting and the children as though she might be persuaded home by the details. He paid for her travels, indulged her absences, and kept trying in his stiff way to coax her back. He asks whether she is sleeping.

He reports on the weather and on a review he has held and on who came to dinner. And then at the end, in the same careful hand, he asks when she is coming and says he is lonely and signs himself her little one. He was the emperor of Austria, and he signed himself her little one. He also had other women, and the two who matter both left traces.

The first was Anna Nahowski, a young married woman he met walking in the park at Schönbrunn. By the account of a modern study of their affair, it ran for about fourteen years, from 1875 to 1888, and ended with a settlement. She lived in a house on the Maxingstrasse by the wall of the Schönbrunn Park. He visited early in the morning before his day began, and he paid her.

Anna kept a diary which her family published in 1976, and in it the emperor of Austria is a punctual man who paid. Her daughter Helene, who grew up to marry the composer Alban Berg, was rumored for the rest of her life to be the emperor’s child. Nobody has proved it, and nobody has been able to bury it. The second was Katharina Schratt, an actress at the Burgtheater.

And this one is stranger: Sisi arranged it, from around 1885. She drew Schratt into the family circle. She commissioned a portrait of the actress from the painter Heinrich von Angeli and gave it to her husband. She took walks with Schratt.

She wrote to her and called her the friend and asked her to look after the emperor. The usual interpretation is that the empress, who had no intention of coming home, found her husband a companion so that he would not be alone, and did it openly enough that nobody could call it a scandal. Whether the friendship between Franz Joseph and Schratt was ever physical is one of those questions the two of them took to their graves. What is on record is that he built her a villa at Bad Ischl, that they had breakfast together for thirty years, that he wrote her hundreds of letters, and that after both the emperor and the empress were dead, Katharina Schratt went down into the Capuchin crypt to visit their coffins every day.

What also sits on record is the picture he kept in his private study in the Hofburg, the room where he worked from before dawn: the portrait Franz Xaver Winterhalter had painted of his wife in 1864, her hair down to her waist and her shoulders bare, a picture never meant for the public. It stayed on that wall for the rest of his life. Sisi’s own attachments are harder to see, and the one that gets discussed most involves a horse. In the 1870s she discovered English fox hunting and became, by the accounts of people who had hunted all their lives, one of the finest and most reckless riders in the field.

She had already had one bad fall in Normandy in September of 1875, where a horse went down with her and she lay unconscious in a field while her retinue ran to her. She was up and riding within days against the doctors. From 1876 she was assigned a pilot, a rider whose job was to go ahead and pick the line over the fences. His name was Captain William George Middleton, called Bay after a Derby winner, equerry to Earl Spencer, and generally reckoned the best man across country in England.

He had not wanted the job; by one account he said before he met her that he had no wish to ride nursemaid to a foreign empress. For six seasons after that, he rode at her shoulder. She hunted in Northamptonshire with the Pytchley and the Bicester. In February of 1879 she took Summerhill House in County Meath from Lord Langford and spent six weeks in Ireland hunting almost every day with the Ward Union, the Meath, and a pack the locals called the Killing Kildares.

Middleton went with her. He killed three of her twelve hunters that season, schooling them over Irish ditches, which gives you some idea of the ditches. One day, chasing a stag, she jumped clean over a wall into the grounds of the seminary at Maynooth and very nearly landed on the college’s vice president, a priest named William Walsh, who later became Archbishop of Dublin. She sent the college a statue of St.

George killing the dragon by way of apology, and it is still there. She wrote home that the great charm of Ireland was that there were no royal highnesses in it. The master of the Meath, a Captain Fowler, grumbled that he was not going to have any damned empress buying his daughter’s horse. She gave him a riding crop anyway.

It sold at auction in Dublin in 2010 for €28,000. When her horse Domino died, she had its hooves mounted in silver. She came back to Ireland in 1880 when the country was in the middle of a land war, and Queen Victoria was not amused to hear that the Irish were cheering an Austrian. In 1881 and ’82 she rented Combermere Abbey in Cheshire with a retinue of eighty, twenty-five of them grooms.

Then in February of 1882, she left England for good and never hunted there again, though she kept the horses for a while and sold them off slowly. One explanation she gave was that she had grown too old for it. She was forty-four. Summerhill House was burned out in 1921 during the Irish War of Independence and later pulled down, so the one Irish address she ever had is a field.

Middleton married a woman named Charlotte Baird, who was by every account jealous of the empress. He was killed in 1892 in a fall at a steeplechase at Kenilworth in Warwickshire when the horse came down at a fence and he did not get up, and after his death his widow burned every letter he had kept. The English papers had hinted for years. Nothing verifiable has ever come out of the ashes.

What you have is six seasons of a married man and a married woman riding side by side through some of the most dangerous country in the British Isles, a jealous wife, and a fire. Make of it what you like. After England, she took to the sea. The imperial yacht was called the Miramar, and on it she went round and round the Mediterranean for the rest of the 1880s and nineties: Corfu, Cap Martin, San Remo, Algiers, Morocco, Malta, Turkey, Egypt, Madeira again, every summer the Swiss lakes.

She had herself lashed to a chair on deck in storms so that she could watch the waves while the crew were sick. She said once that if she arrived somewhere and knew she could never leave it again, the whole stay would become hell, even if the place were paradise. Her household had to be packed and ready at a few hours’ notice. Ladies-in-waiting broke down under it.

Marie Festetics wrote about the exhaustion of following a woman who could not stay anywhere, and about the loneliness of it, since the empress wanted company on her walks and silence during them. Franz Joseph made one serious attempt to build her something she would stay in. Between 1882 and 1886 he had a villa put up for her in the Lainzer Tiergarten, the old imperial hunting ground on the edge of Vienna, called it the Hermes Villa, and the papers called it the Palace of Dreams. Her bedroom was painted with scenes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Titania and her fairies, after designs by Hans Makart, with a young Gustav Klimt among the painters who did the work.

A gymnasium was fitted out. She came, admired it, and used it for a few weeks a year. The emperor went on paying for it. It is a museum now, and the Titania bedroom is the room people go to see.

In 1888, at fifty, she had an anchor tattooed on her shoulder while she was in Greece. Marie Valerie mentions it in her diary on her mother’s back. The doctors who examined the body in Geneva ten years later did not note it, an oddity nobody has explained. Somewhere on those voyages she began to write seriously.

Her model was Heinrich Heine, the German poet she called her master, and in the more feverish passages spoke of as though he visited her. She told Valerie that Heine’s spirit had appeared to her. She cast herself as Titania, the fairy queen from Shakespeare, and as a gull that belonged to no country. One of the poems in the original opens with the line “Ach, murre bin ich von keinem Land,” a seagull am I of no land, and goes on to say that she calls no shore her home and flies from wave to wave.

Another has her circling over whoever is listening like a seabird, finding no corner of the earth to build a nest. The verses also went after the Habsburgs directly. She mocked the family, mocked the court, mocked her husband’s politicians, and in several places predicted the end of the monarchy with a certain relish. She decided those poems should outlive her, and she made unusual arrangements.

In 1890, she ordered that the manuscripts be kept sealed for sixty years and then handed to the president of the Swiss Confederation, of all people, with any money they earned to go to the dependents of political prisoners. Her brother Carl Theodor kept the locked box at his estate at Possenhofen. On the third of July 1951, the box was delivered to Federal President Eduard von Steiger in Bern, and the officials who opened it, some of whom had quietly hoped for a last letter from Crown Prince Rudolf, found volumes of poetry. The head of the Swiss Federal Archives gave his professional opinion in French: roughly translated, he did not think the poems had much literary value and did not think they added anything to the empress’s glory.

Publication was approved in 1980, and Das poetische Tagebuch, the poetic diary, came out in 1984 with part of the proceeds going to the United Nations refugee agency, about as close as the twentieth century could get to political prisoners’ dependents. She wrote a covering letter to go in the box, addressed to the people who would open it, whom she called the future souls, and told them the poems were written for them since nobody alive would understand them, and that by the time they were opened, the world would be a different place. Sixty years turned out to be the right guess: the monarchy she wrote about had been gone for more than thirty years by the time the box was opened. Her interest in madness was open and lifelong.

She visited asylums the way other royal women visited orphanages: Bedlam in London in 1874, the institutions in Munich and Vienna, and asked questions the directors were not used to answering. In 1871, asked what she wanted for her name day, she said a young tiger, a medallion, and, if it were possible, a fully equipped lunatic asylum. She was probably joking. After her cousin’s death, by Valerie’s diary, she talked about the blood in the family and whether it was in her.

Her cousin Ludwig supplied the dark version of the same theme. By 1886, the King of Bavaria had bankrupted himself building castles, and his ministers had him declared insane by a panel of doctors who never examined him. On the twelfth of June, he was taken to Berg Castle on Lake Starnberg and locked up with the door handles removed from the inside and spy holes cut in the doors. Sisi was on the other side of the lake, staying at the Hotel Strauch in Feldafing, close enough to see the far shore.

On the evening of the thirteenth, Ludwig went for a walk with his psychiatrist, Dr. Bernhard von Gudden, and neither man came back. Searchers with lanterns found both bodies late that night in the water near the shore, in a depth where a tall man could have stood. Gudden’s face was scratched and bruised.

Ludwig’s watch had stopped a few minutes before seven. The Bavarian government called it suicide. Nobody has ever settled it. The museum at Starnberg records her view: that Ludwig had not been a fool, only an eccentric living in worlds of ideas, and that the government had killed him by locking him up.

Another remark attributed to her has him as not mad enough to be shut away, but too abnormal to get on in the world with reasonable people. She sent jasmine, his favorite flower, to be laid on his chest in the coffin, and wrote a poem about tying a bouquet of white jasmine and having it carried across the water and placed on his heart. Her 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, a match Sisi approved of mainly for taking the girl back to Munich.

She wrote from the wedding that she felt strange playing the mother-in-law at thirty-five. And then the letters about Gisela thin out to almost nothing. Gisela had children early and often and grew stout, and her mother, by the diaries of the household, could hardly bear to be in a room with her. No record of cruelty survives.

The record of absence runs for pages. 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 in her letters and did not hide it from the girl.

When Stephanie’s first and only child was born in 1883 and turned out to be a daughter, the empress’s reaction, recorded by the household, was relief that she would not have to be interested. She and Rudolf had by then drifted so far apart that they communicated mostly through Valerie. He was a liberal who wrote anonymous articles attacking his father’s ministers, and she was a woman who wrote poems attacking the same ministers and never showed them to him. They had almost everything in common and could not talk to each other.

Valerie was the one she held on to, and holding on took the form of not letting go. When the girl fell in love with Archduke Franz Salvator, a cousin from the Tuscan branch of the family, her mother approved and then began to grieve months before any wedding. She wrote that she would be alone. Rudolf, who disliked Franz Salvator and thought Valerie could have done better, made his opinion known, and the family Christmas of 1888 was spent with the crown prince and his sister barely speaking, and their mother in the middle, holding on to one and turning her back on the other.

The engagement was formally announced on Christmas Eve, her fifty-first birthday. Rudolf congratulated his sister and then, according to Valerie’s diary, told her privately that he would not be at the wedding. He was right about that, though not in the way he meant. A month after that Christmas came Mayerling.

Crown Prince Rudolf, her only son, was thirty in January of 1889, and by the accounts of the people closest to him, he was coming apart. He drank. He took morphine. He had, by most reckonings, picked up gonorrhea years earlier and passed it to his wife, which left her unable to have more children and left the marriage in ruins.

Stephanie came back from a trip in October of 1888 and wrote afterwards that his decay had advanced so far as to be conspicuous, that he was frightfully changed, that his skin was flaccid and his eyes restless. He kept a revolver on his desk and a skull beside it. He talked about death constantly. He asked more than one woman to die with him, including a Viennese demi-mondaine named Mizzi Caspar, who laughed at him and went to the police.

In the last weeks, he found one who said yes. 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 in honor of Kaiser Wilhelm’s birthday on the twenty-seventh. 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. After it was over, she told Valerie that she had never understood him, and Valerie wrote it down, and it is the closest thing to a confession in the whole record. Mary Vetsera was seventeen, the daughter of a baroness on the make, and had been in love with the crown prince in the way of a seventeen-year-old for about a year, arranging to be seen by him at the Prater and the opera until he noticed.

In the last days of January 1889, Rudolf had her brought to Mayerling, a hunting lodge in the Vienna Woods about fifteen miles from the city, by a cab driver named Bratfisch, who sang and whistled for the guests in the evenings and would whistle for these two on their last night. Sometime in the early hours of the thirtieth of January, in the bedroom of the 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, so he stayed in a locked room with a dead girl, the blood drying in her hair and the body cooling beside him through the rest of the night.

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 medical statement the court printed in the official newspaper said that the bullet had gone in at one temple and out the other, that the vault of the skull was shattered, and that part of the brain lay outside it. The doctors who wrote that were trying to establish that death had been instant and that the mind that did it had not been sound.

They managed both. His valet Loschek knocked at the usual hour and got no answer. He kept knocking. Eventually the door was broken open with an axe.

Count Joseph Hoyos, who had been at the lodge as a hunting guest, went in and saw Mary on the bed, already stiff, rigor mortis set, and Rudolf slumped beside her with blood down his face and pooling on the floor. Hoyos saw the blood at the prince’s mouth and assumed poison. Strychnine, he thought, and that the girl had given it. He took a special train to Vienna with that story in his head.

The next few hours inside the Hofburg are oddly specific, since everyone involved wrote about it afterwards. Court protocol forbade anyone waking the emperor with news of that sort. The adjutant general, Count Paar, insisted that the only person who could tell the emperor was the empress. Baron Nopcsa, who ran Sisi’s household, sent for Ida Ferenczy.

Ida went into the room where the empress was in the middle of her Greek lesson with Christomanos and interrupted it, white to the lips by his description. Sisi sent the tutor out. The first version Ida gave her was Hoyos’s version, that Mary Vetsera had poisoned Rudolf and then herself. The story going round the palace in those first hours was that one, and Sisi clung to it.

Ida came back into the room a little later and found her weeping uncontrollably. Then the empress got up, composed her face, and went to tell her husband in private. Nobody knows what was said. Katharina Schratt was sent for to be nearby for the emperor afterwards.

When Marie Valerie was told, her mother said to her, “No, no, I will not believe that. It is so likely, so certain that the girl poisoned him. ” Stephanie, summoned, found the emperor seated in the center of the room and the empress in dark clothes beside him, her face white and rigid. Only the next day did a court physician tell the parents what the doctors had found at Mayerling: both had been shot in the head.

Mary had been laid out with a rose between her hands. The revolver was on the floor. Sisi’s reaction, as recorded, was a line that sounds like scripture and is not quite: “Great Jehovah is terrible as he marches onward, sowing destruction like the storm. ”

Mary Vetsera’s body was treated like contraband at the lodge in the first panic.

It had been shoved into a storeroom and covered with a cloth. Her two uncles, Alexander Baltazzi and Count Gábor Stockau, were summoned to Mayerling the next evening and told to get her out without anybody seeing a corpse leave the building. They dressed her in the clothes she had arrived in, with her hat and her fur boa. Rigor mortis had come and gone by then, so to hold her upright they pushed a walking stick down the back of her clothes along the spine and buttoned the coat over it.

Then they sat her between them in a closed carriage and drove through the night with a dead seventeen-year-old propped up between them, her head lolling at every rut in the road, to the Cistercian abbey at Heiligenkreuz about three miles away. She was buried by torchlight in the abbey cemetery in foul weather without her mother present. The official story put out in the first days was that she had died on the way to Venice. Her mother was kept from the grave for more than two months.

Her mother, Helene Vetsera, had gone to the Hofburg on the day itself before anyone had told her anything, to demand that the empress help her find her missing daughter. She had heard rumors the girl had run off with the crown prince. Sisi received her, which was against all protocol, and told her that Mary was dead. Then, by Helene’s own account, she told her that Rudolf was dead too, and that the girl had killed him.

The baroness collapsed. The first official announcement that morning had said the crown prince died of a stroke, and the empress, according to that account, told the baroness to remember that and left the room. Within the week Helene Vetsera was told by the police to leave Vienna. Rudolf lay in state in the Hofburg with his skull bandaged to hide where the bullet had gone in and where it had come out.

The embalmers had done what they could, and the hair was combed forward over the bandage. A committee of doctors signed a statement that he had been mentally unbalanced, which was the only way the church would allow a suicide a Catholic funeral. And on that basis he was buried in the imperial crypt with full honors. He had left letters.

The longest was to his mother. Sisi kept it and, by her instruction, destroyed it after her death, so what it said is gone. Fragments of the others survive. He wrote that he was not worthy of writing to his father.

He called Mary a pure angel who was going with him into the hereafter. He asked to be buried next to her at Heiligenkreuz. That request was ignored. His letter to Valerie survived.

In it, he told his sister that when their father closed his eyes, she should leave Austria, since nothing good would be left in it. Stephanie, who got a letter of her own, published her side of the story nearly fifty years later under the title I Was to Be Empress. The empress did not attend the funeral. Habsburg women did not walk behind coffins by the custom of the house, and she stayed in her rooms while the procession went past below and Franz Joseph walked alone behind his son.

Helene Vetsera, for her part, had a pamphlet printed later that year setting out her own account of what had happened to her daughter, and the police seized it. Franz Joseph had the hunting lodge turned into a convent for Carmelite nuns, with the altar of the chapel placed on the spot where the bed had stood, so that mass would be said every day over the place his son died. Mary Vetsera’s grave has been disturbed more than once since. Russian soldiers broke into it after the Second World War looking for valuables.

It was opened again in the 1950s. And in 1991, a furniture dealer from Linz dug her up in the night on his own initiative and kept the bones for two years before anyone found out. They were examined by forensic doctors before being put back, and the doctors could not agree on whether the skull showed a bullet wound at all. And a finding like that keeps a theory alive.

The theories that Rudolf and the girl were murdered by outsiders have never died. They have their believers. The official account then and now is murder and suicide. Sisi never got over it.

At dinner that night, she broke down sobbing in front of the household. Within days she was blaming her daughter-in-law, saying that if one came to know Stephanie properly, one would have to excuse Rudolf for looking elsewhere for distraction and narcotics. The German ambassador reported home that the empress had given herself over to brooding, that she reproached herself constantly, and that she blamed the inherited Wittelsbach blood for her son’s confusion of mind. One aristocratic lady wrote that if the empress had thought less of herself and more of her obligations, the catastrophe would not have occurred.

That letter circulated. A few days after the funeral, she went down alone into the Capuchin crypt at night with a single lantern and stood by her son’s coffin trying to reach his spirit. She called his name. When nothing answered, she tried séances and kept trying them for years afterwards.

She told Marie Valerie that Rudolf’s bullet had killed her faith. Valerie wrote in her diary that her mother would probably never again be as she once was, that she envied Rudolf his death, and that day and night she longed for her own. She gave away her light-colored gowns and wore black for the rest of her life. Lines are attributed to her from those years about having sooner or later to go the way her son went.

The exact source is hard to pin down. The mood is not. The deaths kept arriving. Her father, Duke Max, had died in 1888 at seventy-nine.

Helene, the sister who had been meant for the emperor, died in 1890 of stomach cancer at fifty-six, with Sisi at the bedside. Andrássy in February of that same year. Her mother Ludovika in 1892 at eighty-three, in the Munich palace with the circus ring. Her youngest brother Max Emanuel in 1893 at forty-three.

Her brother-in-law Maximilian, the emperor’s younger brother, had been shot by a Mexican firing squad at Cerro in June of 1867, eleven days after her coronation in Buda, and his body had come home to Vienna in a coffin with the eyes replaced by glass ones taken, as the story goes, from a statue of a saint, since the embalmers in Mexico had nothing better. His widow Charlotte had gone mad and been shut away in a Belgian castle, where she would live until 1927, sixty years a widow, asking after a husband who had been dead for decades. Then her youngest sister. On the fourth of May 1897, Sophie Charlotte, by now the Duchess of Alençon, was running a stall at the Bazar de la Charité in Paris, an annual charity sale where the aristocracy of France sold trinkets for the poor inside a temporary hall built of wood and canvas and painted to look like a medieval street.

One of the attractions that year was a cinematograph, the new moving pictures, shown in a screened-off booth with a projector lit by an ether lamp. Around four in the afternoon, the projectionist’s assistant struck a match near the lamp to refill it. The vapor caught. Within minutes the canvas ceiling was on fire, and burning fabric was dropping onto the crowd.

Somewhere between fifteen hundred and eighteen hundred people, most of them women in long skirts with hair piled up and pinned, with the exits few and narrow. The whole thing was over in about a quarter of an hour. Witnesses outside described women running into the street with their hair on fire and men climbing over women to get to the doors. The historian Jerry Walton puts the dead at 126 and the injured at about 150.

Most of the dead were women of the aristocracy. A Dominican nun who got out saw the duchess drop to her knees and pray as the roof came down. Other accounts have her refusing to leave until the girls working under her at the stall were out. Either way, she did not come out.

One version repeated in the French papers gives her a line to the effect that the girls should go first and she would follow last. Whether she said it or a newspaper said it for her, it fits what the nun saw. Her body was so badly burned that her own maid could not identify it. The corpses had been laid out in rows in a nearby building on the floor of the Palais de l’Industrie, blackened and shrunk and fused to scraps of clothing, and the families went along them lifting the cloths.

After two hours of examining charred bodies, her dentist, an American named Davenport, identified her by her gold fillings. It was one of the first times dental records had been used that way, and forensic dentistry counts the Bazar fire as a founding case. Another victim that day was identified only by the metal of an orthopedic corset that had survived where the woman wearing it had not. What was left of the Duchess of Alençon went into a sealed metal coffin and was taken to the family vault at Dreux.

A chapel was built on the site of the hall on the Rue Jean Goujon, paid for by the families of the dead, still there with the names inside. Sophie Charlotte was fifty. She had written her will seven months before the fire. Sisi received the news at Lainz outside Vienna.

She was fifty-nine. Sisi’s own body by the nineties had started to send the bill. Sciatica first, so bad in the mid-eighties that she could not sit a horse and had to be carried to the carriage, and the riding stopped for good. She went to Amsterdam to a masseur named Metzger, a blunt Dutchman who was the fashionable specialist of the day, and he told her, by her own account, that she would have to eat or she would die, and that her diet was the whole of her trouble.

She called him rude and did what he said for a few months. Then the fasting resumed. After the sciatica came neuralgia in the face, so that she wound a veil over the lower half of it in the wind, and after that the swelling in the feet and ankles that Dr. Fischer had found thirty years earlier, back for good.

In the summer of 1898, the doctors at Bad Nauheim, who specialized in hearts, found hers enlarged and her blood thin, and prescribed the baths, and she took them and wrote to her daughter that she did not expect them to work. The walking at least went on until the end. On Corfu, she would go out at dawn with a lady and a Greek reader and walk until the lady dropped, six hours over stony hills in a heat that made the reader faint, and then come back and have her hair done. The readers were a series of young Greek scholars hired to walk beside her and talk to her in Greek about Homer.

Christomanos, the one who wrote it all down, described her at the Achilleion at night standing on the terrace over the sea and talking about death as though it were a country she had booked passage to. She told him, in a line he wrote down, that the thought of death purified. She spoke, by his account and her daughter’s, of wanting to be buried by the sea, and Corfu was the place she had in mind. The emperor did not allow it.

She worked at the language seriously. With her readers, she translated Shakespeare into modern Greek, Hamlet and The Tempest among them, line by line, and the manuscripts survive. Her devotion to Heine ran the same way. In 1885 she went to Hamburg to visit the poet’s elderly sister, Charlotte, and talk about him, and she collected his manuscripts and letters where she could get them.

And when the city of Düsseldorf turned down a monument to its own poet after a public row in which his being a Jew and a radical was held against him, she put one up at her palace instead. Franz Joseph, for his part, kept coming to wherever she was. He went to Cap Martin on the Riviera in 1894 and again two years later to spend a few weeks with her in a hotel. By the accounts of the people around them, the two of them walked in the mornings and sat in the evenings and were, for the length of the visit, a married couple.

He brought Schratt’s regards. She sent regards back. Then he went home to the desk. The last summer found her low.

In July of 1898, from the cure at Bad Nauheim in Germany, she wrote to Marie Valerie that she was in bad humor and sad, that the family could be glad to be away from her, and that she had a sense she would not rally again. Before Nauheim, she had spent a few weeks with the emperor at Ischl, walking with him in the mornings with Katharina Schratt in her villa down the road as usual. On the sixteenth of July, he saw her onto the train. Neither of them said anything memorable.

He went back to his desk and she went to her cure, and he wrote to her at Nauheim within the week as he always did. That was the last time they saw each other. Nauheim was a misery for other reasons too. The town was full of visitors who had heard the Empress of Austria was taking the waters, and they waited outside her villa and followed her on her walks, and she complained of it in her letters.

The baths themselves she found tedious. She went on with them anyway for the sake of the heart the doctors had told her about, and left as soon as the course was finished. From Nauheim she went to Switzerland, to Lake Geneva, which she called her favorite place to stay because she was quite lost there among the cosmopolitans. She was staying at Territet near Montreux under the name Countess of Hohenems, one of the family’s minor titles, and it fooled nobody who mattered.

The Swiss authorities knew who she was and knew that Switzerland was full of anarchists, since Switzerland took in political exiles from every country in Europe, and had been warned by Vienna more than once. The police of the canton of Vaud put men outside her hotel. She noticed them, complained, and the police chief, a man named Virieux, withdrew them at her request. On the ninth of September, she and her Hungarian lady-in-waiting, Countess Irma Sztáray, who had been with her four years and was the only lady she had brought to Switzerland, crossed the lake by steamer to Pregny to have lunch with Baroness Julie Rothschild.

The lunch had more courses than the empress usually saw in a week, and she ate them. Sztáray wrote it down. Afterwards they toured the baroness’s orchid houses, and then they went on to Geneva to spend the night at the Hôtel Beau-Rivage on the Quai du Mont-Blanc, in rooms on the first floor with a view of the lake. That evening she walked to a pastry shop she liked and bought toys for her grandchildren.

Someone at the hotel talked. The next morning’s newspaper announced to the city that the Empress of Austria was staying at the Beau-Rivage. The man who would kill her had come to Geneva to kill somebody, and had not much cared who. Luigi Lucheni was born in Paris on the twenty-second of April 1873, in a hospice for the poor, to an unmarried Italian servant girl whom the records call Luigia Laini or Lucini or Lacheni depending on which clerk wrote it down.

She was very young and had crossed the Alps to hide the pregnancy. She left him there and went to America. At about sixteen months, he was sent to a foundling hospital in Parma in northern Italy, and from there he was farmed out. A cobbler and a washerwoman named Moni took him first, back to the foundling home at eight.

Then a peasant family named Nicarassi in a village called Verano, who took him for the money the state paid and whom he later described as treating him worse than a slave, though other sources say they were kind. From about twelve, he worked for a parish priest. At his trial, he said his mother had denied him and abandoned him the moment he was born, that the people who raised him had not had enough to feed their own child, and that he could not have been to school more than two or three times in his life. He laid track on the Parma–La Spezia railway.

He drifted through Genoa, Turin, Vienna, Budapest, Fiume, and Trieste as a laborer. In 1894 he enlisted in an Italian cavalry regiment, the 13th Monferrato, and served at Caserta and Naples. He was sent to Africa in 1896, arriving just after the Italian army had been slaughtered by the Ethiopians at Adwa, and came home with a commendation. Discharged in 1897, he briefly went into service with his former commanding officer, a prince, as a valet, and asked the prince for help getting a job as a prison warder.

The prince said no. Lucheni quit or was dismissed and went to Switzerland, to dig at Chiasso and to work at Wittikon on the Lake of Zurich, at Martigny and Sion in the valley, in Lausanne, and finally in Geneva. 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, a French royal pretender who was supposed to be in Geneva that September. The Duke left for the Valais before Lucheni could find him. Then the newspaper told him who was at the Beau-Rivage.

He wanted a stiletto. 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, four inches, of the sort used in factories to sharpen the eyes of industrial needles. He ground it to a point.

He set it into a wooden handle, which older accounts say he cut from a piece of firewood, and Sedivy’s paper says a friend named Martinelli mounted for him. A dull gray file would not catch the light the way a blade would. That was the weapon. It cost him nothing.

Saturday the tenth of September 1898 was warm. The empress spent the morning in Geneva in the shops and at a music dealer’s. She listened to an automatic organ play and, by the accounts, ordered one for Valerie’s children. At about 1:35 in the afternoon, she and Countess 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 at 1:40.

Her servants and luggage had gone ahead. She refused, as always, to travel in a procession. 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. The quay had trees on one side and the lake on the other, and a handful of people were about.

Lucheni had spent the same morning with the newspaper. He had seen the paper that named the hotel, and had gone and waited across from it. He had the file inside his coat. He had been carrying it for days already, waiting for the Duke, and had told the man he lodged with that he was going to do something that would be in every newspaper in Europe.

He had watched the two women the day before and knew what he was looking for. His own account to the police, given within the hour, is the plainest description we have. 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.

She was not particularly pretty, he said, quite old already. Sztáray’s account, from the memoir she published in 1909, has the ship’s bell ringing at that moment and a man who seemed to stumble towards them and threw out his hand as if to catch his balance. Lucheni’s version has no stumble. 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, about eleven centimeters below the collarbone and eleven from the center line of her body. He pulled it out and ran.

She went over backwards onto the pavement. Several accounts say the heavy coil of hair on the back of her head cushioned the fall, so that the only visible damage was the dust on her dress. A coachman who had been waiting nearby helped her up. The hotel’s concierge, an Austrian named Planner, came running.

She brushed the dust off her dress, thanked the men, and refused to go back to the hotel. What she said to Sztáray, by the countess’s memory, was to ask what the man could have wanted from her—her watch, perhaps. The Swiss version of the same moment has her saying it was nothing, that he had only knocked into her, and that he must have been after her watch. The ship was leaving.

She wanted to be on it. Sztáray thought she looked pale and asked, and the empress said it was nothing. 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. The Genève was already backing away from the landing stage. Sztáray shouted for a doctor. The only person who came forward was a woman who had once been a nurse.

The captain, a man named Roux, had no idea who the lady was and put it down to the heat. Three men carried her up to the upper deck and laid her on a bench, and Sztáray began undoing her clothing to help her breathe. The bodice came open. Underneath it was the corset, laced as tight as they were always laced, and Sztáray took a knife or scissors and cut through the laces.

Somebody brought water, and somebody brought a little ether. 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.

Sztáray gives them in German: “Was ist geschehen mit mir jetzt? ” What has happened to me now? Other tellings drop the “now,” and the English versions vary between what has happened and what happened to me. She said something like that once, and then she was unconscious.

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. Nothing else showed. Sztáray understood what it meant, went to the captain, told him who was dying on his bench, and 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. They carried her back along the quay she had walked ten minutes earlier, past the spot where she had fallen, with the face covered, and up to room 34 on the first floor of the Beau-Rivage. Sedivy’s reconstruction puts the time at about a quarter to two. The hotel director’s wife, Fanny Mayer, and a nurse who happened to be staying in the hotel got her out of her clothes and took off her shoes.

Fanny said afterwards that she heard the empress take two breaths, loud ones, as she was brought into the room, and that she believed those were the last. A Dr. Golay arrived first, then a Dr. Maire, and a priest who was too late to give absolution to a woman who could hear him and gave it conditionally anyway.

Maire opened an artery in her arm to see whether the blood would flow. Nothing came. The police record adds that he tapped around the nipple with a reflex hammer, testing for any response, and got none. Sztáray closed the empress’s eyes and folded her hands on her chest, and everybody in the room knelt.

The time of death is written down as 2:10 in the memoir published in London the following year and in Sedivy’s paper. Several Swiss and Austrian accounts citing the death certificate say 2:40. Take your pick. Either way, 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.

Sztáray then had to send a telegram. The wire went to Count Paar in Vienna. The emperor was at Schönbrunn at his desk, and Paar took the paper in himself. The first wire said the empress had been seriously injured.

The second, an hour later, said she was dead. Franz Joseph, by Paar’s account, went white, sat down heavily, and said the words everyone quotes: that nothing at all was to be spared him in this world. Then he asked how it had happened. And when Paar could not tell him, his first thought, which he spoke aloud, was that she had done it herself.

The word assassination came later. At five that afternoon, two doctors, Louisé Méry and Professor August Reverdin, examined the body in room 34 under a sheet. Their notes are clinical, and they are also in their way the last portrait of her. A woman of about sixty, they wrote: skin loose, no rigor mortis yet, a yellowish pallor, dark brown hair, gray-blue eyes, good teeth, the layer of fat under the skin poorly developed, height one meter seventy-two.

On the abdomen, old pearly welts, the stretch marks of four pregnancies. The wound itself was a small V-shape four centimeters above the nipple, its edges dried to a brownish color with a thin blue rim. The Geneva authorities had arrived within the hour and sealed the corridor, and a death mask was taken that evening. The full autopsy took place the next day, Sunday the eleventh, at two in the afternoon, with Sztáray in the room along with the Austrian consul, Count Kuefstein, a General Bézervitzki sent on behalf of the emperor, and the Geneva prosecutor.

The three doctors—Golay, Reverdin, and Méry—cut a flap from the left side of her chest, forty-three centimeters across, and folded it back. What they found underneath was this. A triangular wound about eight millimeters wide had gone in through the third intercostal space, the gap between the third and fourth ribs. On its way through, it had 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 what the report calls a herniated, voluminous blood clot filling it. Past the pericardium, the file had gone through the wall of the left ventricle.

They passed a probe along the track to measure it. Fifty-five millimeters of that track ran through the heart itself, in the front wall and out the back. The whole channel from skin to the far side of the heart measured eighty-five millimeters, three and a third inches. The file had been four inches long.

They sewed the heart shut with button sutures. They tied off the lung. They closed the ribs with eight deep stitches and the skin flap with fifty. Then they wrote the cause of death: 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, in the modern term. The heart sits in a sack with almost no room to spare, and when blood leaks into that sack, the heart is squeezed from outside until it can no longer fill. She had bled to death inside her own chest without a drop reaching the floor. Franz Joseph had been asked by telegram whether an autopsy might be done.

His reply was that the laws of the country should be followed. The Swiss wanted it on record. An empress killed on their soil was a diplomatic catastrophe, and the last thing Geneva needed was a rumor that she had died of something else. How she walked a hundred yards and climbed a gangway with that hole in her heart is a question doctors have argued over for a century and a quarter, and it is the reason her death gets taught in cardiology lectures.

The old explanation, from the memoir of 1899, is that the corset did it: the wound was so narrow and the corset so tight that the blood could only seep drop by drop, and the pressure on her chest held everything in place until the laces were cut and the seeping became a flood. In that telling, if Lucheni had left the file in her, it would have plugged the hole and she might have lived. Sedivy went through the anatomy in his paper and rejected the corset theory outright. His argument is that a narrow slit through the muscular wall of the heart behaves like a valve, letting out only a few spurts with each beat, and that the slow filling of the pericardium is what kept her upright until the pressure finally collapsed her circulation.

Her dizziness on the quay, in his account, was the first stage of tamponade, and her collapse on deck was the second. Three American cardiologists argued in 2008 that a needle into the pericardium to drain it, a procedure known for half a century by then, might have saved her. Sedivy doubts anyone in Geneva in 1898 would have tried it in time or would have known what they were looking at. You can decide for yourself whether a woman who wanted to die quickly and far from home was failed by medicine or granted a wish.

Dr. Golay had photographed the wound. The Swiss procurator general destroyed the photograph and the instruments, according to the London memoir, on the emperor’s orders. Two pages of the autopsy report survive in the Austrian state archives, and Sedivy reproduced them.

The file itself is kept today at the Josephinum, the medical museum in Vienna, by his account, though other sources put it in the Hofburg. It is small and dull with a rough wooden handle, and it looks like nothing. Lucheni ran up the Rue de la Fontaine away from the lake and threw the file into the entrance of number three. A concierge found it there, took it for a workman’s tool somebody had dropped, and only handed it in later when the police came asking.

The tip had broken off. It carried no blood. The weapon had come out of her clean. He did not get far.

Two cab drivers and a sailor chased him down and held him for a gendarme, believing they had caught a man who had punched an unknown lady in the street. A Swiss diplomat telegraphing the federal president that afternoon reported that the murderer had been seen in the company of two other men, and for weeks half of Europe went looking for the network behind him, with several governments convinced there had to be one. None was found. Lucheni went along with the gendarmes smiling.

He said he had got her good and that she must be dead. When they told him she was, he was delighted. Asked why, he gave them a speech he had clearly prepared: because he was an anarchist, because he was poor, because he loved the workers and wanted to see the death of the rich. He had come to Geneva to kill a sovereign, he said, and it had not mattered to him which sovereign.

He told them he had struck at a crown, and that the woman wearing it had not come into it at all. Then he discovered that Geneva had abolished the death penalty, and this seems to have been the one thing that upset him. He wrote to the authorities demanding to be tried under the laws of the canton of Lucerne, where he could be beheaded, and signed the letter as Luigi Lucheni, anarchist and one of the most dangerous. The federal council refused him on the sixteenth of September.

He received fan mail in prison from people who called his victim a criminal by her mere birth. He kept it. He also had his photograph taken in custody, smiling with the mustache turned up, and that is the picture of him that survives. He wrote letters from the cell to newspapers and to the Swiss authorities, signing them with his full name and the word anarchist, explaining himself in a French that improved with practice.

His trial took a single day, the tenth of November 1898. Sixty accredited reporters were in the room. The prosecutor produced a report from Cesare Lombroso, the Italian criminologist who believed criminals were born and could be spotted by the shape of their ears, and Lombroso blamed heredity from a choleric drunkard of a father Lucheni had never met. The jury of twelve 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. Sztáray was in the courtroom to give evidence, in black, and described the man stumbling and the hand and the fall in the same terms she would later put in her book. Two weeks later, delegates from twenty-one countries met in Rome for the first international conference against anarchism and agreed, among other things, that killing a head of state should carry the death penalty everywhere.

The empress had joked for years that she wanted no part of politics. She got a conference. Lucheni spent his first two years in solitary confinement in the Évêché prison in Geneva, making slippers. An attempt to kill himself with a key sharpened from a sardine tin in February of 1900 turns up in some accounts and cannot be confirmed in the better ones.

From 1907, he started writing the story of his childhood into five blue prison notebooks, in a French he had taught himself. And the story stops before the murder. So the notebooks are a biography of a boy nobody wanted, written by the man he became. In March of 1909, the notebooks disappeared from his cell.

He tore the cell apart. The governor, as a punishment, had a picture taken down from the wall of the cell, and the picture was of the Empress Elizabeth. He had been keeping her. On the sixteenth of October 1910, he quarreled with a foreman in the prison workshop and was locked in an underground isolation cell.

On the nineteenth, he was found hanged there with his own belt. Some accounts give the sixteenth as the date of death. An official Habsburg history site asks in its own text whether he was found hung or hanged, with the second word carrying the implication. Nobody investigated.

He was thirty-seven. Professor Méry 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 rest was buried in the prison yard.

A description written in 1920 says the fluid had gone cloudy and had deformed the head somewhat, giving it a gruesome look: the eyes half open, the mouth slightly contorted and open far enough to show the teeth, which were still in excellent condition. 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 in the old round asylum tower called the Narrenturm, on the condition that it never be put on display. The Swiss National Museum dates the transfer to 1985, and the New York Times reported the relic’s arrival in Vienna at the end of August 1986.

Crowds turned up at the tower on the anniversary of the assassination anyway, asking to see it. In February of 2000, the museum quietly buried the head in the anatomical graves at Vienna’s Central Cemetery. Michael van Orsouw of the Swiss National Museum has pointed out that this puts it about eight kilometers from the Imperial Crypt, roughly the distance the two of them have kept ever since. The five notebooks turned up again in the 1990s: the father of a man named Santo Cappon had bought them from the daughter of a head guard at the prison, and Cappon published them in 1998 under the title Mémoires de l’assassin d’Élisabeth, and in German as Ich bereue nichts, I regret nothing.

Back in September of 1898, Europe had done what Europe did. The Neue Freie Presse reported Vienna as horrified, stunned, and indignant, with one Viennese lady quoted as wanting the assassin cut into little pieces. In Budapest, men and women wept in the streets. In Paris, the newspaper vendors were mobbed.

The American papers had it on their front pages the next morning. Mark Twain, who was living in Austria that year, wrote that even the assassination of Caesar could not have electrified the world the way this had. Italian shops in Vienna had their windows broken. Geneva flew its flags at half mast and opened a book of condolence in the lobby of the Beau-Rivage.

The Paris papers ran full-page color pictures of the moment on the quay, the man lunging, the parasol going up, the countess with her hands out, drawn by artists who had not been there, and those pictures sold in enormous numbers and are still the image most people carry of it. Lucheni’s face with the mustache was on front pages across Europe within a week. He had wanted that, and he got it. Switzerland had its own reckoning.

The federal council expelled a few dozen foreign anarchists in the weeks after, tightened the rules on who could stay, and took a good deal of abuse from Vienna and Rome for having let the man walk around in the first place. The Vaud police chief who had pulled his men off the empress at her own request had to explain himself, and his explanation was that she had asked. The Beau-Rivage kept room 34 shut for a time, then rented it again, and today it is a suite with her name on it and a plaque by the door. The spot on the quay has a bronze of her walking, put up on the centenary, and a lot of pigeons.

The steamer Genève, the boat she collapsed on, is still afloat. It was built two years before the assassination, worked the lake for decades, and is moored in Geneva today as a boat that serves meals to people down on their luck, roughly what the man who killed her would have wanted done with it. 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 behind sliding doors so that the face could be seen. A funeral train carried the coffin across Switzerland and Austria with crowds at the stations along the line, and it reached the Hofburg on the fifteenth of September.

Franz Joseph met it at the station. Marie Valerie had come from Wallsee the moment the telegram reached her, and she sat beside his desk that first day while he went through the reports from Geneva, and he said to her that she did not know how much he had loved that woman. To a Liechtenstein prince he said it was incomprehensible to him that a man could be found to attack such a woman, whose whole life had been spent doing good and who had never injured anyone. He had been married to her for forty-four years and seen her, in some of those years, for a few weeks.

The coffin lay in the Hofburg chapel for two days, and the family filed past, and the emperor was seen kneeling at it for a long time on the first evening. Her friend the Queen of Romania, who wrote poetry under the name Carmen Sylva, said the end had been beautiful and calm and painless, in sight of the nature she loved, and that only to the world had it seemed horrific. She had wanted to be buried by the sea, or on Corfu, and had said so. On the morning of the seventeenth of September 1898, eighty-two crowned heads and their representatives followed her coffin through streets hung with black from the Hofburg chapel to the imperial crypt beneath the Capuchin church.

The coffin plate said “Elisabeth, 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, and the three sarcophagi are the ones the tourists photograph. The emperor issued a manifesto to his peoples that week, thanking them for their sympathy in language that was stiffer than anything he said to Valerie, and it was printed and posted across the monarchy.

Her sarcophagus is a plain one, plainer than his. It is also, on most days, the one in the crypt with fresh flowers on it, and visitors from Hungary leave a good many of them. The old Habsburg custom of burying the heart in a silver urn at the Augustinian church and the entrails in the crypt under St. Stephen’s had stopped by her day.

The last heart and viscera placed in those crypts were those of the emperor’s father, Archduke Franz Karl, in 1878. Modern embalming had made the old butchery unnecessary. She went into the ground whole, or as whole as Méry and his colleagues had left her. Her will sold her jewels for charity, gave two-fifths of the estate to each daughter, and left the remainder to Rudolf’s daughter, Erzsébet.

Franz Joseph founded an order in her name for women within the month. Budapest built the Elisabeth Bridge across the Danube and opened it in 1903, and named two districts after her. The retreating German army blew the bridge into the river in 1945, and the city put up a plain white suspension bridge in its place in the sixties and kept her name on it. Ida Ferenczy founded a memorial museum in Budapest in 1899 and gave it the black silk jacket the empress had been wearing on the Quai du Mont-Blanc, with the tiny hole in it.

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. A monument went up at Territet in 1902, and a bronze by the sculptor Philip Jackson on the Geneva lakefront in 1998, a few steps from where she fell. The Sisi Museum in the Hofburg, which opened in 2004 in her old apartments, has her death mask taken in Geneva and a mourning ribbon from her sister Maria, the Queen of Naples, inscribed “Addio, Regina, tuo Mari. ” In 1998, during the centenary exhibition at Schönbrunn, a Canadian thief named Gerald Blanchard walked out with the diamond-and-pearl star from her hair, and the police did not get it back until 2007.

Gödöllő itself was used as a barracks by the Soviet army after the war and left to rot, with the riding hall full of vehicles and the rooms stripped, and it was only restored from the 1990s onward. Possenhofen is flats now, and the museum devoted to her sits in the old railway station down the road. Marie outlived her by twenty-seven years. The sister who had stood on the walls of Gaeta under bombardment at nineteen lived in Paris and Munich on a pension, kept dogs, and was one of the last of the eight to go, in 1925, in a Munich that had already lost its king and was about to lose a great deal else.

She was the sister who sent the ribbon. Hungary mourned her longer and louder than Vienna did. Budapest voted a statue within weeks of her death and then spent more than thirty years arguing over the design, through competition after competition. The bronze that finally went up in 1932, by the sculptor György Zala, shows her seated and tired, with her hands in her lap, a long way from the diamond stars.

Hungarian families went on naming daughters Erzsébet after her for a generation. The Viennese who had called her the absent empress while she lived put her in the Volksgarten and left her there, and the city’s affection for her is mostly a thing of the last few decades. Franz Joseph outlived her by eighteen years, and they were not kind ones. His nephew Franz Ferdinand, who had become heir after Mayerling, was shot in a car in Sarajevo in June of 1914 with his wife beside him, and 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, and went into the Capuchin crypt beside her. 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 predicted that in verse in the 1880s. The last Habsburg emperor left the country by train.

Her ladies did what ladies did. Ida Ferenczy lived on in Vienna, burned what she had been told to burn, and died in 1928. Sztáray published her memoir in 1909 under a title that means “From the Last Years of the Empress Elisabeth” and spent the rest of her long life being asked about one afternoon. Marie Valerie kept the diary she had begun as a girl, thousands of pages of it, kept it locked, and died in 1924.

The diary stayed locked until the 1990s, when two historians, Martha and Horst Schad, were finally allowed to publish it. Christomanos published his book, a slim volume of diary pages, while the emperor was alive and was told never to set foot in Austria again. One building outlasts all of it. After Rudolf died, she had a palace built above the village of Gastouri on Corfu, about six miles south of the town, by an Italian architect named Raffaele Caritto, on an island she had loved since her exile there in 1861.

She dedicated it to Achilles, whom she admired for his strength and, one suspects, for dying young and famous. She called it the Achilleion. It was finished in 1891, with a gymnasium built into it. In the garden stood a marble figure of the dying Achilles pulling the arrow out of his heel, and a seated statue of her master Heine was placed among the trees after the poet’s own city of Düsseldorf had refused to put up a monument to him.

Franz Joseph hoped she would settle there. She lost interest within a couple of years and talked about selling it. After her death it stood empty for nine years, until Gisela sold it in 1907 to Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, who had Heine removed, shoved the dying hero to one side, and put up a colossal bronze of Achilles standing in triumph with a spear. Wilhelm spent his springs there until the war came, and the palace became a military hospital in both world wars and is now a museum.

The dying Achilles is still there in the garden, off to the side where Wilhelm left him. Back in Vienna, Katharina Schratt kept going down into the Capuchin crypt. The actress the empress had chosen for her husband visited the coffins every day for years. First his, and then, because they lay side by side, hers as well.

That is where the records run out.