Tall, slim, beautiful, she prided herself on her waist (16½ inches), strapping herself into tightly laced corsets. She craved freedom, fame and love like a modern woman, riding and hunting manically, making herself Europe’s fastest equestrienne. Growing ever more self-absorbed and self-indulgent, she had little time for Franz Josef and not much for her children: ‘Children are the curse of a woman, for when they come, they drive away Beauty.’ She adored Heinrich Heine’s verses and wrote poems herself, often mocking her enemies; she hated royal life – ‘this drudgery, this torture’, she called
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