Each stone was perfectly cut, each given a name by Franz Josef himself. Four were named for the planets with a variety of corundum as their stone: the yellow sapphire was called the Star of Venus, the orange-yellow sapphire the Mercury Stone, the beautiful pigeon’s-blood ruby star-stone the Red Moon of Mars and the velvety cornflower Kashmir sapphire the Star of Jupiter. Individually the ruby and the cornflower-blue sapphire-each flawless, each cut into a perfect six-sided star-were the most valuable. But as a whole, the unique collection was worth a fortune.

In tribute to his wife’s unusually simple tastes, Franz Josef left the remarkable stones unmounted. He presented them to her in a ruby-red velvet bag embossed with the imperial seal. Elisabeth, it was said, took them with her everywhere. She was an incurable wanderer, and it was on one of these wanderings that she seemed to have “misplaced” the Jupiter Stones. Unlike her husband-and cousin-Franz Josef, Elisabeth, “Sisi” as she was known affectionately, wasn’t an orderly person. A lover of riding and endless walks, she was generous and careless with her possessions; she could have lost the unique gems or simply given them away-as she did so often with her things-on a whim. She never said. Whatever their fate, the fabled stones weren’t discovered among her countless jewels after her assassination in 1898, when, while boarding a steamer in Geneva, she was stabbed to death by an Italian anarchist who wanted to kill someone important enough that his name would get into the papers. He succeeded.

Almost sixty years later, Baroness Gisela Majlath claimed the unpredictable empress had given the stones to Gisela’s mother after she, as just a girl of eight or nine, had endangered her own life to help Elisabeth after a riding accident. Gisela had inherited the extraordinary bag of gems when her mother and most of her family were killed in the two World Wars that decimated Hungary. She herself had narrowly escaped death when fleeing Budapest after the Communist takeover in 1948. All she managed to take with her were the clothes on her back and, tucked into her bra, the Jupiter Stones.