by Greg King
The engagement nearly evaporated when Queen Marie Henriette walked in on Rudolf in the arms of the actress Anna Pick, his latest mistress, whom he had brought to Brussels to keep him company while he wooed Stephanie.36 But dynastic ambition overcame any moral qualms, and the engagement was duly announced. With his father forcing his hand, Rudolf adopted an uncharacteristically optimistic tone: To Latour von Thurmberg he described Stephanie as “pretty, good, clever, very well bred,” someone who would “become a faithful daughter and subject of the Emperor and a good Austrian.”37 A few days later, declaring that he was “intoxicated with happiness and contentment,” he deemed his fiancée “a real angel, a good and faithful being who loves me, a very intelligent and tactful companion for life who will stand successfully and sympathetically by my side in all my difficult undertakings.”38
Franz Josef was relieved, but not so Empress Elisabeth. “Nothing good can come out of Belgium,” she complained, adding, “Hasn’t Charlotte been experience enough for us?”39 Arriving in Brussels to offer her halfhearted congratulations, Elisabeth did nothing to conceal her contempt for Leopold II and his consort. The empress also mocked her son’s fiancée and openly criticized her clothing as “the height of tastelessness”; the slights were so obvious that even Rudolf complained of his mother’s cold behavior.40 Rather than offer Rudolf comfort and guidance, Elisabeth, as one of her biographers noted, “failed him, as she had so often failed him in the crucial stages of his life.”41
Stephanie prepared for her future duties, but the wedding had to be postponed for a year when it was learned that the fifteen-year-old had not yet begun to menstruate.42 Leopold II further complicated matters by refusing to provide his daughter with any dowry larger than the 100,000 gulden (approximately $639,000 in 2017) his sister, Charlotte, had received more than twenty years earlier; an insulted Franz Josef gave Stephanie an additional sum and agreed to grant her an annual allowance from his own funds.43 “He’s nothing but a money-grubbing tradesman,” the emperor declared of the Belgian king, “and I can’t stand people like that.”44
Rudolf wed Stephanie at Vienna’s Augustinerkirche on May 10, 1881, exchanging rings that had belonged to their common ancestor Empress Maria Theresa, as artillery salvos rattled the windows. King Leopold and his wife, Stephanie recalled, “beamed with gratification,” while Empress Elisabeth—who denounced the bride as “a clumsy oaf”—openly sobbed.45 When they left for their honeymoon at Laxenburg, Rudolf was silent and Stephanie nervous, “alone with a man I hardly knew.” She found the rooms at Laxenburg cold and dark, with no flowers or any sign of celebration. Then came the wedding night, when Rudolf took possession of his bride: “What torments!” Stephanie recalled. “What horror! I had not the ghost of an idea what lay before me, but had been led to the altar as an ignorant child. My illusions, my youthful dreams, were shattered.”46
These initial disappointments faded with the passing weeks. Even Stephanie later admitted it was untrue that her marriage “had been unhappy from the outset. It did not fulfill my girlish ideals; there had been a lack of affectionate spiritual companionship; there had been nothing more than a sort of enforced association without cordiality. Still, though disappointed in many respects, I had done my best to understand the Crown Prince’s nature.”47 Rudolf’s sister Marie Valerie even thought that Stephanie’s “love for her husband comes close to adoration.”48 They soon took up residence in Prague when he was stationed with the army, though Stephanie complained that Rudolf’s duties consumed most of his time: When separated—at least in these first years—he sent his wife warm, effusive letters: Stephanie was his “Dearest Angel,” while he signed himself, “Coco.”49 To Latour von Thurmberg he wrote: “I am very much in love with her and she is the only one who could induce me to do many things.”50 But Stephanie was soon dismayed to find that Rudolf’s outward piety was all a show: “He had no true fear of God,” she wrote. “He lacked a sense of duty and responsibility, so that later when life came to make its claim on him he lacked the power of religious faith and moral restraint.”51
On September 2, 1883, Stephanie went into labor at Laxenburg. Everyone hoped for a son; indeed, Rudolf confidently filled his letters to Stephanie with talk of the boy they would name Václav.52 When she gave birth to a girl, Stephanie broke into tears; Rudolf reassured her, but all his talk of “Václav” left Stephanie convinced that he was disappointed.53 The baby, named after Saint Elisabeth of Hungary as well as her paternal grandmother, was known within the family as Erszi, a diminutive form of the Hungarian Erzsébet (Elisabeth). “Mother and child are very well,” Rudolf wrote to a friend. “Stephanie looks blooming as usual, as if nothing has happened. The little one is a stunner of seven pounds, perfectly well and strongly developed, with many hairs on her head, very much alive: she shouts terribly and drinks a great deal without the slightest difficulty.”54
This brief idyll ended in December 1883, when Franz Josef appointed Rudolf commanding officer of the 25th Infantry Division in Vienna and the couple reluctantly returned to the imperial capital. The move marked the beginning of Rudolf’s downward spiral. In Prague he had reigned unchallenged as the dynasty’s sole representative; in Vienna, where his father commanded all attention, Rudolf would be reminded daily of his subordinate position and lack of political influence .55
The emperor reinforced this sense of impotence by refusing to give Rudolf and Stephanie their own palace in Vienna, forcing them to live beneath his roof in a suite spread along the Hofburg’s Schweizerhof Wing. Stephanie found these rooms “gloomy and inhospitable,” decorated and furnished in “bad taste.” Much to her horror there was no indoor plumbing: She bathed standing in a portable rubber tub, rinsed with water from wooden buckets, and used chamber pots were carried through corridors “under the eyes and noses of any who might happen to be there.” Unwilling to endure these traditions, Stephanie had two bathrooms installed at her own expense. There was no electricity or even gas: Rooms were lighted with “horrible paraffin lamps, which stank all the time” and smoked until they inevitably broke. Kitchen odors constantly filled the rooms, and the food itself was unappetizing; when Stephanie dared hire a French chef to prepare meals, the imperial court deemed it an insult to Austrian cuisine.56
Stephanie lacked the ability to hide her disillusion; Empress Elisabeth, who had spent her first years in Vienna complaining about her mother-in-law, now repeated the pattern with Rudolf’s wife. “She did not make the slightest attempt to help or advise” her daughter-in-law, noted one historian, who added: “Whereas Archduchess Sophie interfered too much, Elisabeth erred on the side of interfering too little. Her cold, impersonal manner invited no confidences.” Treating Stephanie with disdain, she openly derided her as “narrow-minded, superficial, and a bigot.”57 The imperial court followed Elisabeth’s lead. Stephanie’s critics became legion: She was “devoid of all feminine qualities,” with “neither charm nor sex appeal,” a relative hyperbolically commented, “ugly, domineering, tactless and unintelligent,” with “the perfect instinct for doing the wrong thing.”58 People mocked her clothing and her appearance: She was awkward, in contrast to Vienna’s genial society; her eyes were too small, too closely set, and her smile was too condescending.59
The political impotence, the alienation, and the snobbish criticism—they all took a toll on Rudolf and Stephanie’s marriage. Perhaps they were too dissimilar in character and temperament to withstand the pressures bearing down on them. Rudolf toyed with philosophical and political discussions; Stephanie liked fashion and enjoyed her role as future empress. But disintegration took time: Even Stephanie admitted that they had shared happy moments and memories, despite what she termed “a lack of affectionate spiritual companionship.” She tried in her own way “to adapt myself to him, to interest myself in his plans, his activities, his tastes, that thereby I might make our life together more congenial.”60
Rudolf increasingly retreated to a world, Latour von Thurmberg recalled, dominated by “flattering p
arasites,” and “lost his moral balance” by hurling himself into “an unceasing round of pleasure.”61 By 1885 he was spending two-thirds of the year hunting with his faithful horde of retrievers and setters and a coterie of trusted confidants like his brother-in-law Prince Philipp of Coburg.62 Knowing that Rudolf liked nothing better than whiling away the night at some tavern, surrounded by workers singing the sentimental tunes that appealed to him, Stephanie once decided to join him. She was appalled at the places of “dubious reputation” where her husband seemed to be a regular fixture. Stephanie found sitting in the smoke-filled room, breathing in the persistent odor of garlic, watching as men played with greasy cards while girls danced on tables to zither music until dawn, scarcely proper behavior for the next emperor and his consort: The entire experience repelled her. “I simply could not understand what pleasure the Crown Prince could find in these places,” she later wrote.63
Fidelity in royal unions is often rare, and Rudolf soon strayed with great regularity. Not content with his usual conquests, Rudolf’s insatiable nature carried him—and Prince Philipp—to the establishment of Frau Johanna Wolf, Vienna’s most successful and notorious madam, who kept a contingent of beautiful young girls scattered across Europe’s capitals.64 Rudolf could always count on Frau Wolf to provide amorous company to share his bed.65 In 1885 she introduced Rudolf to her latest addition, twenty-one-year-old Mitzi Caspar. Pretty though not beautiful, with a dark complexion and uncomplicated charm, Mitzi soon became Rudolf’s favorite mistress. Although she remained “one of the city’s best known and expensive prostitutes,” Rudolf spent 60,000 gulden ($383,400 in 2017) buying her a house at 10 Heumülgasse and showered her with money and jewels.66
In the hothouse atmosphere of imperial Vienna, word of Rudolf’s escapades inevitably reached Stephanie; her sister Louise was only one of many ladies at court who eagerly repeated the crown prince’s latest indiscretions into his wife’s ear.67 The gossip was so prevalent that it spread across Europe. Rudolf, Queen Victoria confided to a granddaughter, “led a very bad life,” which left “poor Stephanie … not happy” and made it impossible for her to have “any respect or love” for her husband.”68 One night, returning to the Hofburg from the opera, Stephanie spotted her husband’s carriage waiting outside the house of a certain countess whose favors Rudolf was then enjoying. The crown princess had her own carriage stopped, climbed into her husband’s, and ordered his driver to return her to the palace, leaving her abandoned vehicle in the street as a silent but visible rebuke. It did not take long for the incident to pass from tongue to tongue; Franz Josef was furious, not with his son, but with his daughter-in-law, and he summoned Stephanie to an angry meeting where he denounced her for causing a public spectacle.69
The imperial court heaped scorn on Stephanie. The neglected wife was denounced as unable to hold her husband’s attention and affection. “It is impossible to warm to her,” Archduchess Marie Valerie wrote in her diary, adding, “How can Rudolf love this cold and arrogant woman?”70 Rather than cast a critical eye on her son’s behavior, Empress Elisabeth derided her hated daughter-in-law as a “bumpkin,” mocking her “long, fake tresses,” denouncing her as “jealous” and “impossible,” and adding that she was someone “I never want to set eyes on.”71 For Stephanie it was an embarrassing repetition of her father’s flaunted infidelities: Just as Leopold II had humiliated her mother with his endless succession of mistresses, so too was her own husband now victimizing and insulting her, making her the object of ridicule in Vienna.
Finding no sympathy at court, Stephanie went to a Jesuit cleric. If only he would intervene and speak to Rudolf of his duties, she was sure that her husband would abandon his frivolous way of life; in what must have been a particularly embarrassing admission, she even asked the priest if he could persuade Rudolf to sleep with her again, so that she could provide him a son. The poor man duly met the crown prince and laid out Stephanie’s plea, but Rudolf was furious at this unwelcome interference.72 Accusing Stephanie of spying on him, Rudolf left their shared rooms and retreated to his old bachelor apartments in the Hofburg, spending his days in an exotic Turkish salon he created, complete with tigerskins, a tented ceiling, and hookahs set on ornately carved tables.73 Stephanie was forbidden entrance: When she once dared disobey, Rudolf shouted and screamed until she fled in humiliation.74 He read all of Stephanie’s private letters before allowing them to be mailed, and ordered that when he was away she was to see no one other than her ladies-in-waiting.75 Increasingly the time Rudolf and Stephanie did spend together was marked by loud arguments, accompanied, it has been said, with hurled china and vases that servants discreetly swept up afterward.76
Then, at the beginning of February 1886, Rudolf suddenly fell ill. The emperor later had his son’s medical files destroyed, and multiple pages in the imperial Apothekarie’s prescription books were removed or doctored.77 Still, enough concrete clues remain to decipher what happened. The public was told that Rudolf was suffering from severe rheumatism and a bladder infection.78 In fact, on February 16 the imperial physician Dr. Franz Auchenthaler, diagnosed venereal disease.79
It was later claimed that Rudolf was suffering from syphilis.80 His autopsy report is lost, but an excerpt leaked to the press hinted at some unnamed abnormality in Rudolf’s brain.81 In 1921, Baron Albert von Margutti, who served as Franz Josef’s adjutant, reported that one of the post-mortem physicians had discovered “advanced paralysis” of the brain, resulting from syphilitic infection. Margutti claimed confirmation from the court physician Dr. Josef Kerzl, who in turn said that he learned it from the imperial physician Dr. Hermann Widerhofer, who helped conduct the autopsy.82 In addition Rudolf received occasional prescriptions for mercury chloride after 1886, which was then the only treatment for syphilis.83 Yet the time line makes this diagnosis questionable: “Advanced paralysis” was then common medical shorthand for the effects of the final, tertiary stage of syphilis, which, if the disease was left untreated, took a number of years from initial infection to destruction in the brain.
Another prescription Rudolf received presumably solves the mystery. At first Auchenthaler treated Rudolf with zinc sulfate and morphine for the pain; then, on February 16, the doctor added oil of Copaiba balsam. This had no effect on syphilis, but it was the most common treatment for a particularly virulent strain of gonorrhea.84 Typical symptoms included painful urination, bladder infections, unsightly discharges, and lesions on the penis and scrotum. Joint pain and inflammation of the eyes were also frequent symptoms—and Rudolf began to suffer from these complaints.85
Given the multitude of Rudolf’s sexual encounters with a variety of dubious women, including Frau Wolf’s prostitutes, it would not have been surprising that he contracted gonorrhea. It was common among the Austrian military: One source estimated that somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of the emperor’s soldiers were infected with venereal disease.86 Revelation of the disease fell on an already fragile mind. Gonorrhea was treatable but permanent: Painful symptoms would recur at varying intervals and without warning. Diagnosis was not only shameful but also often unintentionally fatal, as many suffering from venereal disease chose to kill themselves rather than suffer moral opprobrium and the unknown terrors of the future.87
Even worse, Rudolf infected his wife.88 Stephanie was on the Adriatic island of Lacroma when she suddenly fell ill with “intolerable pains.”89 “I myself did not suspect the cause of my complaint,” she later said, thinking at first it was a bad case of peritonitis. “Everything was hushed up upon orders from above, and the doctors were sworn to secrecy.” Two gynecologists came to examine her: She thus learned that “the Crown Prince was responsible for my complaint.”90 The gonorrhea caused pelvic inflammation and destroyed her Fallopian tubes—and any chance that Stephanie would again give birth.91
Horror at being infected by her husband with a painful and incurable disease that prevented any additional children shattered whatever sentimental feelings still bound Stephanie to Rudolf. Sh
e had endured her husband’s flaunted affairs, but now his careless action had destroyed Stephanie’s raison d’être at court: to provide a male heir to the Habsburg throne. The diagnosis of gonorrhea left her powerless, undermining her position and condemning her to a shadowy existence.92
Starting in 1886 Rudolf relieved the painful symptoms of gonorrhea with an ever-increasing and dangerous mixture of drugs, including morphine, opium, and cocaine—all prescribed by imperial physicians.93 Even today this causes unease in Austria, and a few authors have claimed that the prescriptions recorded in the admittedly doctored court pharmacy books were too infrequent to have sustained addiction.94 But Rudolf had no difficulty persuading physicians to prescribe medicines to assuage his pain, nor, with his questionable circle of friends, would he have had any trouble obtaining such drugs on his own. On top of this ever-expanding pharmacopoeia, Rudolf added copious amounts of Cognac and Champagne, which increasingly left him in a mental haze.95
It didn’t take long for the effects of this regimen to take their toll. By the summer of 1886 Rudolf was lethargic and apathetic, with dark circles rimming his eyes. “He suffered more and more from nervous unrest and from violent temper, culminating in what was tantamount to complete mental decay,” Stephanie wrote; he stayed out all night, and when he returned home he was inevitably “in a most disagreeable frame of mind.”96 That July, Duke Karl Theodor in Bavaria, Rudolf’s uncle, wrote that the crown prince now seemed a “sinister person.”97
Rudolf was oblivious to the devastation he had wrought through his careless actions; although he could not deny that his marriage was strained, he continued to humor Stephanie with intimate, even sensual letters suggesting that he longed for a reconciliation and asking about her menstrual periods.98 “I think we could sleep together this one night,” he wrote to her of an upcoming reunion, adding, “It would be very nice to cuddle up in bed again.”99 But Stephanie’s trust had been destroyed: “It was plain to me,” she recalled, “that the Crown Prince had completely withdrawn from me, and moved into a different world.” Married life, Stephanie declared, “had become impossible,” and she retaliated by taking her own lover.100 She first met Count Artur Potocki, a handsome, thirty-eight-year-old widower, in the summer of 1887, and soon began an affair with him. Unlike her husband, though, Stephanie was discreet: She used her sister Louise as a go-between to arrange meetings with “Hamlet,” as she referred to Potocki.101 Rudolf was apparently too self-absorbed to notice his wife’s infidelity, while Stephanie now considered her marriage a union that existed in name only.