Few Habsburgs have attracted as many rumours as Empress Elisabeth. One of the most persistent: Sisi lived on meat broth and regularly injected herself with cocaine. How much of it is true?
The syringe in the travel pharmacy
Elisabeth’s travel pharmacy, a case with 63 pieces, really does contain a small box labelled “Cocainspritze”, a cocaine syringe. In the late 19th century cocaine was considered a modern medicine and was given, among other things, for women’s complaints and low spirits. The pharmacy still travelled with the empress to Geneva in 1898, on her last journey. How often the syringe was used, nobody knows. So the claim that Sisi “regularly” injected herself is not documented. What is documented is that she used the medicine of her day, and that medicine was more adventurous than we would like today.
Weighed every day
Elisabeth’s struggle with her figure is well recorded. At 172 centimetres she weighed between 45 and 47 kilos, with a waist of 51 centimetres. She stepped on the scales every day, and her diets grew stricter with age. The famous meat juice, pressed from veal or beef, was seasoned and boiled, not drunk raw. Her milk came from her own cows at the Schönbrunn dairy. In the Hofburg she had wall bars, a horizontal bar and rings installed; she exercised daily and rode hard and long.
Confectioners’ bills also show that the empress loved sweets and ice cream, a side of her that tends to get lost in the legends.
Sisi up close
If you would like to get closer to the woman behind the myth, the Sisi Museum in the Hofburg shows her fans, gloves and that very travel pharmacy. On our tour of the Hofburg and the Sisi Museum we tell you what lies behind the legends, and on our special tour of Schönbrunn we show you where the empress spent her summers.
