QI The Book of the Dead

than human beings, and less malicious’. It was said that she ‘looked like an angel but rode like a devil’ and she hunted all over Europe, often transporting her own mounts byship and by rail. Fortunately, she had a personal allowance of £5,000 a month to indulge her hobby (worth around £300,000 today). On Corfu she built a holiday villa where she said that she wanted to live ‘like a student’. This was about as realistic as Marie-Antoinette’s attempts to live like a shepherdess at Versailles: Elizabeth’s student digs had 128 rooms and stables for fifty horses.
    The empress seemed oblivious of the dangers of riding. She once narrowly escaped death when her horse caught its foot in the planks of a bridge over a steep gorge in the Alps. Later, attempting to vault a wall in Normandy, she was thrown and knocked unconscious, but nothing would slow her down. Riding helped her keep her slim figure – and that tiny waist. Local tailors would be summoned to sew her into her riding costume and, of course, she always watched what she ate. Staying at Combermere Abbey in Shropshire, Elizabeth required the cook to keep a supply of live turtles to make fresh soup and tubs of seawater were shipped to the house from the Welsh coast so that the Empress could have a proper bath.
    Elizabeth continued riding until she was in her late forties, after which she channelled her energies into long-distance walks, swimming and gymnastics as well as almost ceaseless travelling, especially after the death of her son. Her fitness regime included daily visits to the gym, so she naturally had gyms built into all of her residences. One visitor described her using the rings to pull herself off the ground dressed in a black floor-length gown trimmed with ostrich feathers. At the edge of the exercise area a rope was stretched across the room, which, she said, was there ‘to make sure I don’t forget how to jump’.
    At state banquets, Elizabeth insisted on having only a cup ofconsommé, two slices of wheaten bread and some fruit. She also irritated the emperor by skipping dinner entirely sometimes, instead retiring to her room with a glass of milk and a biscuit. When her doctors told her that she was anaemic, she was persuaded to eat red meat for a time, though she soon reduced it to the juice of a rare steak and almost nothing else. One aristocrat described her as ‘inhumanly slender’. Her beauty treatments included vigorous massages and being wrapped in wet towels filled with seaweed. She immersed herself in baths of olive oil to smooth her skin and her magnificent hair was washed every three weeks with beer and honey. On her travels she was occasionally seen eating generous portions of cake and drinking hot chocolate, suggesting that she probably suffered from bulimia.
    After the death of her son, Elizabeth stayed out of the public eye as much as possible, usually travelling with just one lady-in-waiting. In her diary she wrote: ‘I wish for nothing from mankind except to be left in peace.’ The crown prince’s death brought Elizabeth and Franz Joseph together in grief, and, even though they were apart for months at a time, they corresponded daily. In one of his last letters to her, Franz Joseph poignantly wrote:
    Happiness is hardly the right word for us, we should be satisfied with a little peace, a good understanding between us and fewer misfortunes …
     
    He did not get his wish. In September 1898 Elizabeth was stabbed in the heart by an Italian anarchist as she boarded a ferry on Lake Geneva. Luigi Lucheni had travelled to Geneva to assassinate the duke of Orleans but couldn’t find him. Hearing that empress was in the vicinity he took his chance, saying afterwards: ‘I wanted to kill a royal, it didn’t matter which one.’As Elizabeth lay dying, a doctor forced a sugar lump soaked in brandy between her lips, an ironic final touch for a woman who today would have been diagnosed as suffering from an eating disorder. Always destined to play the tragic heroine, a few days earlier she had confided to her companion, Countess Sztaray, that she felt ‘a vast longing to lie in a good large coffin and simply find rest, nothing but rest’.

     
    Dr John Harvey Kellogg (1852–1943) had a simple slogan: ‘Eat what the monkey eats, simple food and not too much of it’. His advice went against the grain for large numbers of his fellow Americans who were then, as now, fond of red meat and white bread. Concerned with the