09/01/2026
I was thirteen when a stranger showed me the knife hole.
The Met, 1979. Back when the Costume Institute still did costumes, historical things, not Vogue. My mother took me and my sisters into the city to see the dresses of the Habsburg empire.
I had wandered off from them. And was standing alone in front of a gown, thinking how impossibly small this woman must have been, when an old woman in her eighties slid up beside me and said, “Do you see the tear?”
I said no.
She said, right there, underneath the breast. And then I saw it. She said, that’s where the assassin’s knife went in. That was the dress she was wearing in Geneva.
Then she moved on and I never saw her again.
That was it for me. Who was she. Why would anyone kill her. Was she loved. Did she have children.
And then the detail that sealed it: she traveled constantly, restlessly, the way I already knew I wanted to.
Empress Elisabeth of Austria. Sissi.
It took me until 2017 to track down the catalogue from that exhibition, the one with her face on the cover. I bought it to find out whether I had imagined the whole thing. There is a photograph of the dress.
Last week I checked into the Rosewood Schloss Fuschl and found a building off the lobby holding her white lace robe, her face in marble, Franz Joseph across from her in uniform, and a velvet jewel box of small things. Fans. Parasols. Tiny beaded bags with her horses stitched into them.
Half that room belongs to Romy Schneider, not to Elisabeth. The films extended the myth and those particular film were filmed partly there, where I was. They were filmed there from 1955 to 57, and watching them is an holiday television ritual. They are now available on Apple TV.
Forty-seven years, and she is still ahead of me. I wasn’t finished. I’m going back.
Schloss Fuschl, Salzkammergut, Austria.
P.S. I never got the old woman’s name. She would be gone by now. I have been carrying that vivid memory around for most of my life.
