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when a twenty-five-year-old Italian anarchist stabbed her in the chest. “How can you kill a woman who has never hurt anyone,” the emperor kept repeating. “You do not know how much I loved this woman,” he told their daughter.
    Even Elisabeth’s messy death failed to turn her into the predictablewarning for wayward women. Instead she was enshrined as a symbol of a lonely woman trapped in a loveless marriage.
    Elisabeth could have been a cautionary tale for Adele, who still had not committed herself to Ferdinand when he attended Moritz and Jeanette’s anniversary celebration in October.
    The occasion required another syrupy poem. “Hand-in-hand to the altar, you stepped through life’s spring,” Adele read, with comic ceremoniousness. “Now you dwell amidst beloved children in a space full of bliss, like a sweet dream.” Ferdinand was charmed. He didn’t mind that bad poetry was a cornerstone of the cozy Bauer
Gemütlichkeit
. Ferdinand was living an honorable but dull existence. The Bauers lived in the moment, and Ferdinand yearned to marry Adele and live there with them.

TheSecession
    In November 1898, Gustav Klimt prepared to step into the spotlight.
    Klimt and his fellow maverick artists were unveiling their palace dedicated toArt Nouveau on the Ringstrasse. It was a monastic white building crowned by a dome of golden laurels, designed by architectJoseph Maria Olbrich. All of Vienna paused to stare at this temple for those who believed art had the power to change the world. Here, Klimt and eighteen of Vienna’s most talented artists would break away from the Establishment and fight for their “art of the soul.”
    Vienna artists were frustrated. Aesthetic tastes were dictated by a handful of upper-class patrons who had the money to buy and commission art. They preferred historic art, exemplified byHans Makart’s neo-Renaissance painting of Romeo and Juliet, that endlessly repeated medieval or ancient Greek themes, mirroring the neoclassical architecture on the Ringstrasse. Vienna artists who had defected from the official Kunstlerhaus were electrified byVincent van Gogh and the French Impressionists. They wanted the freedom ofPablo Picasso andHenri Matisse. In Paris and Munich, the work of new artists hung alongside the old. But the staid Vienna establishment refused to display experimental work in major museums. In Klimt’s view, state sponsors created a “dictatorship of exhibitions” that showedonly “weak” and “false” art, and grasped “every opportunity for attacking genuine art and genuine artists.”
    Even worse, the incestuous relationship between art dealers and some artists fostered a stale culture of art-for-hire that stifled innovation and had people buying “paintings that go with the furniture,” as the critic Hermann Bahr complained.
    The fight was on.
    â€œBusiness or art, that is the question of our Secession,” Bahr said. “Shall the Viennese painters be damned to remain petty businessmen, or should they attempt to become artists?” Those artists “who are of the opinion that paintings are goods, like trousers or stockings, to be manufactured according to the client’s wishes,” should stay in the state-sponsored Kunstlerhaus, he said. “Those who want to reveal—in painting or drawing—the secrets of their soul, are already in the society.”
    At the opening, the patrons walked under a credo, byLudwig Hevesi, painted over the door: to every age its art; to art its freedom. Throughout the building, the Secessionists repeated their vow to create art that reflected their moment in history. “Let the artist show his world, the beauty that was born with him, that never was before and never will be again,” Bahr urged in a script wall text inside.
    As the notoriety grew, Emperor Franz Joseph himself strode in with his entourage for an official