Oddlet: Empress Sissi (Elisabeth of Austria) · 1 min read
Jun 15, 2026
The Empress and the File
What does a 19th-century empress do in a room called the Toilette- und Turnzimmer?
Elisabeth of Austria was 5'8" and weighed 110 pounds, and she would have preferred you not mention either. She walked ten hours a day. She fenced in her fifties, sometimes twice in a day. At the Hofburg she had a room called the Toilette- und Turnzimmer fitted with wall bars, ropes, dumbbells, and gymnastic rings rigged in the doorway between her bedroom and the Large Salon.
The discipline was total, and it went where it pleased.
It went to the dinner table, where she lived for stretches on egg whites with salt, oranges, and raw milk, weighing herself three times a day. It went to her dressing room, where she had herself sewn into her gowns each morning so no seam would interrupt the line, the corseting taking an hour after the three hours of hair. By 1894, at fifty-six, she weighed 96 pounds and had been diagnosed with edema of hunger. What the doctors made of this is not recorded.
On 10 September 1898, on the quay at Geneva, an anarchist named Luigi Lucheni stabbed her in the heart with a sharpened needle file. The wound was very narrow. The corset was very tight.
She walked back onto the steamer and asked what had happened. Her waist had bought her half an hour.
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- Wikipedia - Empress Elisabeth of Austria — Comprehensive biographical entry with sourced specifics on her height (1.73 m), weight (around 50 kg, low of 43.5 kg in 1894), waist measurements (40 cm in 1859-60; 47-49.5 cm later), exercise apparatus, hairdresser Franziska Feifalik, diet, the death of Crown Prince Rudolf at Mayerling in 1889, and the assassination by Luigi Lucheni on 10 September 1898 with a sharpened file.
- Encyclopaedia Britannica - Elisabeth, empress consort of Austria — Confirms birth (24 December 1837, Munich), death (10 September 1898, Geneva), marriage to Franz Joseph on 24 April 1854, her impatience with Viennese court etiquette, her involvement with Hungary, and the assassination by Italian anarchist Luigi Lucheni.
- Royal Central - The Fitness Empress — Details the 'Toilette- und Turnzimmer' at the Hofburg, the wall bars, high bars, rings, ropes, dumbbells and iron bedstead, the second gymnasium built between the Amalienburg Wing and the Court Hospital, her 6 a.m. starts, fencing, swimming and 4-10 hour daily walks, and her weighing herself up to three times a day.
- Mimi Matthews - The Beauty Rituals of 19th Century Empress Elisabeth of Austria — Covers the raw veal sleeping mask, crushed strawberry treatments, olive-oil baths, the ankle-length hair, three-hour daily styling by Fanny Feifalik, washing with raw eggs and brandy, Feifalik's 2,000-gulden salary, and the 19.5-inch corseted waist; quotes biographer Brigitte Hamann/Merkle and Greek tutor Christomanos.
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