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this was a revolutionary shift.
    The Bauers’ ambitions for Adele were the product of an era when “in order to protect young girls, they were not left alone for a single moment,” noted Zweig, and “a female person could have no physical desires as long as they had not been awakened by man” in the sanctity of marriage. This cloistered social world believed “one could distinguish at a distance a young girl from a woman who had already known a man, simply by the way she walked,” Zweig wrote. “In Vienna in particular, the air was full of dangerous erotic infection.” A young woman had to be kept “in a completely sterilized atmosphere . . . until the day when she left the altar on her husband’s arm.” A wealthy girl was like a jewel, to be locked away until her family found a worthy setting.
    This was changing. Adele could see it happening, in the lives of the royal family, and even among her own circle. A childhood friend of hers, Alma Schindler, wanted to be a composer. Alma was the daughter of the late Austrian painterJakob Emil Schindler and the stepdaughter of the artistCarl Moll, a friend of Gustav Klimt. Alma’s family took her artistic ambitions seriously. Unmarried Alma would be allowed to enjoy the thrilling kisses of her music teacher, au courant bachelor Alexander von Zemlinsky,whose sister Mathilde had married a promising young composer named Arnold Schoenberg. Alma would be left unchaperoned for heated assignations on the sofa of the family parlor with the brilliant conductor Gustav Mahler.

    The empress Elisabeth, beloved in Austria
as “Sisi.” The empress was an excellent
horsewoman who detested the Vienna court
and found life a challenging search for meaning. ( Illustration Credit 5.2 )
    For sheltered Adele to gain this kind of autonomy, she would have to marry.
    Arranged marriage was an institution in upscale Vienna. Men sought love or passionate sex with mistresses. Such extramarital liaisons carried shame and stigma for lonely wives. Yet even this was changing, and the gender shift was being led by Empress Elisabeth, the unhappy defector from the best-known arranged marriage in the empire. Everyone in Vienna knew the story of how Elisabeth had traipsed happily through the woods with her brothers, and grown into an excellent horsewoman who loved art, literature, and Gypsy music. How her ambitious mother presented her older sister to Emperor Franz Joseph in the Austrian resort town of Ischl, but he couldn’t take his eyes off sixteen-year-old Elisabeth. The teenager marriedthe emperor with the muttonchop whiskers, and enchanted Vienna with the little diamond stars she wore in her long, dark hair.

    Gustav Klimt, “The King,” in tunic, sittling on a throne, and his fellow artists, spoof the Vienna Establishment with a satire of the solemn photographs of important men,
1902
. ( Illustration Credit 5.3 )
    She was pronounced the most beautiful woman in Europe.
    Elisabeth was also one of the most unhappy. Locked in the gloomy Hofburg Castle with a mother-in-law who controlled access even to her children, Elisabeth spent her empty hours working out on custom-made wooden gym equipment, developing a notorious aversion to the spiteful Viennese court. She wrote wistful poetry, yearning for a life unfettered, “and when it is time for me to die, lay me down at the ocean’s shore.”
    Finally she fled the palace to wander Europe, leaving the Vienna aristocracy to speculate and gossip about her amorous adventures. Instead of being buried in scorn and scandal, this desperate royal housewife inspired popular sympathy. Ordinary Viennese adopted her as their own people’s princess, affectionately referring to her by her nickname, Sisi.
    Adele had just turned seventeen in September 1898, when the empress Elisabeth left a gathering atMathilde Rothschild’s manor at Lake Geneva. Elisabeth was boarding a steamship