Violets and hunger cures

Kohlmarkt 14, the imperial court confectioner, holding that title since 1874 and still selling candied violets as the sweet the empress preferred.

Which tells you almost everything about her and food, because a violet was roughly the size of what she allowed herself.

Elisabeth was tall for her century, a metre seventy-three, and she spent forty years holding her weight near fifty kilos. She weighed herself daily, sometimes more often. Days went by on little more than beef juice, milk and eggs, and when the scale moved she stopped eating altogether for a while and called it a cure. Historians now read that as an eating disorder. The court read it as the empress being difficult.

And then the other side of it. In 1878, travelling incognito, she walked into an ordinary restaurant, ordered champagne, roast chicken and a salad, and finished with a considerable quantity of cake. Her companions were stunned.

She makes an odd patron saint for a pastry shop. Go in afterwards if you like. For now carry on up the Kohlmarkt towards Michaelerplatz, where the copper dome with the eagle on top is the front door of the palace she could not bear.