by Greg King
These two ambitious, morally bankrupt women, Helene and Marie, formed a dangerous and ultimately deadly alliance. Although Helene Vetsera later declared that the countess had “abused her trust” and acted “under false pretexts” by facilitating a liaison between Rudolf and Mary, the baroness knew what Larisch was doing.11 Having apparently succeeded in bedding the crown prince a decade earlier, Helene Vetsera now seems to have pushed her youngest daughter to follow in her footsteps. One thing, as Larisch wrote, seems clear: Helene Vetsera was “fully aware” of Mary’s infatuation and treated it “as a great joke.”12 Count Anton Monts, counselor at the German Embassy in Vienna, which regularly opened its doors to the Vetseras, also agreed that Helene Vetsera was well informed about the affair from its inception.13
Larisch, for her part, insisted that Mary had sought out Rudolf on her own and that she was surprised to learn of their relationship.14 This is nonsense. Marie Larisch was more than willing to promote an affair—in exchange for money. Helene Vetsera showered her with bribes and expensive gowns from the leading Paris couturier, Charles Worth: When even these rewards proved insufficient for the avaricious Larisch, she blackmailed Mary, once demanding that the young girl give her 25,000 gulden (approximately $159,750 in 2017) if she ever wanted to see Rudolf again. As soon as she received the money, though, the countess demanded another 10,000 gulden ($63,900) to further the liaison—all while she continued to bleed Rudolf of considerable sums as well.15
The only true innocent in this sordid affair, if any innocence indeed existed, was Mary herself. Victimized and used by her mother and Marie Larisch, she became an unwitting—if naively willing—pawn in their dangerous misadventure. And, despite what both Helene Vetsera and Marie Larisch claimed, that misadventure began in the spring of 1888.16 For a time Mary was completely reliant on Larisch to facilitate meetings with Rudolf. The countess usually collected Mary from her mother’s palace every few days, either in the late morning to go shopping or in the afternoons to join her in the Prater, but inevitably these excursions took her to see the crown prince.17 “Marie Larisch has departed,” she confided to Hermine Tobias, “and so I could not see him. I am dying of longing and cannot wait until she returns.… I count the hours, because since meeting and talking to him my love has only deepened. I’ve been thinking day and night how I could see him.”18
Every encounter only fueled Mary’s imagination. “I cannot live without having seen or spoken to him,” she confessed to Tobias. There were “accidental” encounters while driving in the Prater. Rudolf, Mary insisted, came only to see her.19 The blossoming affair was scarcely a secret: Once Stephanie discreetly followed her husband to the Prater and saw him with Larisch and Mary.20 “Rudolf is meeting this girl here in Vienna!” she complained to Katharina Schratt. Mary, the crown princess declared, “ought to be packed off to school or somewhere where she’d be taught to respect the holy commandments!”21
In June 1888 Helene Vetsera took her two daughters off to England. Mary was reluctant to go, and Rudolf was never far from her mind. To Gabriel Dubray she confessed: “I am still in a dream state after having left Vienna, and now being so far away, so far away. I left with a heavy heart, and hope to return soon to the homeland. It is funny, when you are away, to see things how they are.”22
English society had always proved less difficult to crack than the archaic and ossified aristocracy of Vienna. Helene’s sister Elizabeth had married Albert, 3rd Baron Nugent, and Baltazzi connections to the racing crowd opened doors to the fashionable circle dominated by the Prince of Wales. One Austrian diplomat met the Vetseras at Claridge’s Hotel in London and arranged for them to attend several balls being given by the Prince and Princess of Wales at Marlborough House; Mary, “a striking looking girl, with beautiful eyes and a charming manner,” the prince recalled, “enjoyed herself immensely.”23 When the heir to the British throne left for a holiday at Bad Homburg in Germany in August, the Vetseras followed, Helene renting the elegant Villa Imperiale to ensure social prominence. Maureen Alleen, a visiting American, briefly befriended Mary at the resort. The young baroness, she thought, was “highly approved of by society, but was very serious. Although unselfish in her manner, people gave her credit for not taking love lightly but rather quite seriously.”24 Just how seriously Mary took her romantic quest that summer remains a mystery, but she certainly made an impression on the Prince of Wales. Mary, he wrote, was “a charming young lady, and certainly one of the prettiest.”25
By early September, with Mary back in Vienna, her mother thought that the fire smoldering in her heart for the crown prince had “fanned into a bright flame.”26 “Do not think that I have forgotten him,” Mary wrote to Hermine Tobias. “I love him even more intimately.”27
Returning from Pardubice early that autumn of 1888, Marie Larisch found that the affair had flourished in her absence. Mary admitted that she’d written to Rudolf confessing her love, and that one September midnight a meeting had quickly been arranged. To evade nosy servants, she’d taken her maid, Agnes—whose father was the porter at the Vetsera Palace—into her confidence. Mary had slipped out and gone to Rudolf wearing only a fur coat over her filmy nightgown. Mary claimed it was innocent, but Larisch wasn’t convinced.28 The fur coat over the nightgown was a salacious detail that, with a stunning lack of gentlemanly tact, the crown prince freely shared with his brother-in-law, Prince Philipp of Coburg, and his cousin Archduke Otto.29 It all must have seemed quite amusing to his rather dissolute confidants, but also suggests that Rudolf had little regard for Mary’s reputation.30
According to Larisch the entire Vetsera household was in an uproar over the relationship. Helene Vetsera complained that Mary “is really not well,” while Hanna called her sister “a stupid child” to believe “she is in love with the Crown Prince. You can’t imagine anything so silly, and she has no idea how ridiculous it is.” If their mother had any sense, Hanna announced, she “would thrash Mary.”31 Mary positively bubbled with excitement over the relationship: “I know it is only a happy dream from which I shall have to awaken one day,” she confessed. Larisch was furious. Losing control over the situation lessened her importance as an agent for the liaison and her ability to extort money. All this “happily ever after” talk was too absurd. She was even more irate that Mary had taken Agnes into her confidence. Larisch had heard rumors that Agnes was openly sleeping with several of Mary’s Baltazzi uncles—perhaps even the countess’s own lover, Heinrich.32
Helene tried to conceal her daughter’s liaison behind Mary’s rumored romance with Duke Miguel of Braganza, a handsome, thirty-five-year-old Portuguese widower and a Habsburg relative then serving in the Austrian army.33 His ties to the Habsburgs were strong: One sister, Maria Josépha, had married Empress Elisabeth’s brother Karl Theodor, while another, Maria Theresa, became the third wife of Franz Josef’s brother Karl Ludwig. In 1877 Miguel had married the empress’s niece Princess Elisabeth of Thurn und Taxis, a first cousin to both Rudolf and Larisch. Elisabeth bore him two sons but died in 1881 shortly after giving birth to their daughter. In the 1880s Miguel’s dragoon regiment was stationed at Schwarzau, and he began spending holidays with Helene and her children at their villa there.34 By 1888 he seems to have turned his amorous attentions to Mary, who, true to her reputation, is said to have shared the lonely duke’s bed.35
It was all temporarily diverting; Mary even once derided the duke as “stupid” and insisted to Larisch that he “knows all about my affair with the Crown Prince.”36 Yet Helene seems to have had other ideas. Knowing that the liaison with Rudolf would inevitably end, she cynically used the duke of Braganza to divert attention from her daughter’s affair with the crown prince while at the same time hoping that the widowed Miguel might think Mary a suitable wife. This was unlikely. Although he’d assured the succession with two sons, Miguel was titular head of the House of Braganza. “I am sure my grandfather,” says his grandson Dom Duarte de Bragança, “never intended to marry Miss Vetsera, since his family, the Por
tuguese royalists, and his Austrian friends would not have accepted it.”37
Spurred by her ambitious mother and fed by a taste for steamy French novels, Mary began to see herself as the heroine in an epic royal romance. Although she may not have read such classics as Alexandre Dumas’s La Dame aux Camélias or Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, their themes of suffering, melodramatic love, and atonement by death had infused even the most excessive of Gallic novels and likely influenced Mary’s overwrought romanticism. For her it didn’t matter that Rudolf was fast losing his youthful vigor and pleasing appearance: He was still the heir to the throne, wealthy, and at the top of the social ladder. Girlish fantasies began to fill Mary’s head: Rudolf would annul his marriage to Stephanie and ask her to share his throne. “That stupid Crown Princess knows I am her rival!” Mary smugly told Larisch.38 She delighted in mocking Stephanie and her sister, Louise: “Did you ever see anything so ugly as those two Belgians?” she demanded of the countess. “They’ve no figures; they are just like bundles of hay tied in the middle.”39 Mary’s eyes “looked positively evil” whenever she mentioned Stephanie’s name.40
A lot of ink has been spilled to explain Rudolf’s apparently enduring interest. With more than a hint of misplaced misogyny, those who loathed Stephanie contended that Mary offered a potent counterbalance to Rudolf’s cold, imperious, and unsympathetic wife, who “nagged and pushed” him into more convivial arms.41 Rudolf’s increasingly troubled state, insists another argument, left him unable to “resist the spell” of Mary’s “charm and passion.”42 Mary, Frederic Morton speculated, “kindled in the Crown Prince a necessity unknown to him until then. He had begun to need a woman who could offer him more than surrender. He needed to be embraced by a mystery.”43
But what mystery could a willing, immature seventeen-year-old girl possibly hold for the worldly crown prince? Rudolf didn’t need a sympathetic feminine confidante and lover: He already had one in Mitzi Caspar, whom he continued to see regularly throughout his affair with Mary. Rudolf certainly found Mary attractive and entertaining. She offered her companionship and her body—and Rudolf took both. But Mary wasn’t an intellectual who could share Rudolf’s dilettantish political ideas, discuss philosophy, or argue about the future of the monarchy. In truth Rudolf treated this new liaison in much the same way as those that had come before it, taking whatever Mary gave in an effort to find temporary escape. His youth was behind him: He had no meaningful role to play and increasingly viewed his life as a failure. Mary’s credulous fawning not only offered assurance that he mattered but also appealed to Rudolf’s vanity. Even so he admitted to Marie Larisch that Mary’s breathless romanticism was often more of an annoyance than a reward, adding that it was difficult not “to despise this poor little girl’s affection.” Mary, Rudolf explained forthrightly, was “just a woman who loves me. I’ve known many far more beautiful, but I have never met with one more faithful.”44
The lovers met throughout the autumn of 1888, “much more frequently” than they admitted, Larisch recalled in annoyance.45 Rudolf and Mary would “accidentally” encounter each other while the latter was with Larisch in the Prater; as soon as she spotted Rudolf’s carriage, Mary fled her chaperone and climbed into the privacy of his fiacre as Bratfisch drove through the park.46 The countess offered use of her suite at the Grand Hotel, but, suspicious of his cousin’s motives, Rudolf wanted something with more privacy. One day he cornered his friend Eduard Palmer, a Viennese banker who kept an apartment on the Ringstrasse across from the Grand Hotel. “Please give me the key to your rooms,” the crown prince asked Palmer. “I have a discreet rendezvous and should like to use your rooms. But take care that nobody is there.”47 Palmer loyally complied, and soon Rudolf and Mary were regularly meeting at the banker’s apartment.48
That autumn of 1888 the Prince of Wales paid an extended visit to Vienna. Attending a race at Freudenau with Rudolf, the British heir spotted Mary Vetsera strolling about the tea pavilion. Having previously met and admired her in Homburg, the prince pointed Mary out to Rudolf and offered to introduce them; aware that the crowd was watching, Rudolf bowed his head politely and quickly moved away.49 He repeated this charade a few days later. On October 12 Rudolf and Stephanie attended the final performance at the old Burgtheater. By now most of aristocratic Vienna had heard of the affair, and the audience seemed most amused when Mary Vetsera took her seat in the theater and stared quite openly and obviously at the imperial box.50
Two days later the Prince of Wales joined the imperial family for the inaugural performance at the new Burgtheater. Architects, builders and artists had labored for fourteen years to create this elaborate building, with its four thousand electric lights and stairway ceilings decorated by Gustav Klimt. A uniformed Franz Josef appeared in the imperial box to the strains of “God Save Our Emperor”; Empress Elisabeth was, as usual, absent, but Rudolf, wearing the uniform of the 10th Infantry Regiment, and Stephanie—in a blue brocade gown trimmed with white lace and adorned with diamonds at her throat and in her hair—escorted the Prince of Wales to the row of gilded armchairs.51 A triumphant Mary Vetsera watched the scene from her mother’s box; she wore a décolleté white tulle gown, with a diamond crescent in her dark hair. “Many an admiring glance,” reported the following day’s Wiener Tagblatt, was cast in her direction, and Mary’s appearance “provoked widespread admiration.”52 But when the Prince of Wales pointed her out to Rudolf, saying “how handsome” Mary looked, the crown prince evinced disdain and “spoke, I thought, disparagingly of her.”53
On November 5 Larisch collected Mary in her carriage from the Vetsera Palace. They went shopping, then drove to the studio of the fashionable Viennese society photographer Adele, where, dressed in black, they had their pictures taken, “for him, of course,” Mary confided to Hermine Tobias. Bratfisch waited with Rudolf’s carriage at the Grand Hotel’s rear entrance; the pair climbed in, wrapping feather boas around their necks to shield their faces, and, “at a great pace” set off for the Hofburg. The carriage stopped at the palace’s old Augustiner Bastion, where Rudolf’s Kammerdiener (valet) Karl Neuhammer waited by a small iron door. The two ladies followed the same circuitous route that Rudolf used to escape the Hofburg: along a dark corridor and up a steep staircase to a rooftop terrace and a glassed-in porch opening into the crown prince’s bachelor apartments.54
Although Larisch omitted this visit from her narrative, Mary described the event in her letter to Hermine Tobias.55 As the two women entered Rudolf’s rooms a pet raven swooped down with fluttering wings, alerting his master to their arrival. “Won’t you please come in, ladies,” he called from his Turkish salon. The trio, or so Mary claimed, chatted idly about Viennese society before Rudolf asked to speak to Larisch privately. Left alone to examine the exotic room, Mary walked over to Rudolf’s desk. A revolver lay on the blotter, but it was a polished human skull that riveted her attention. Mary was turning the skull over in her hands when Rudolf reappeared and quickly took it from her. “When I said that I was not at all afraid,” she reported to Hermine, “he smiled.” In her “happy letter” to Hermine, Mary swore her former piano teacher to secrecy, melodramatically protesting that if her mother or sister learned of the visit, “I would have to kill myself.”56
Was this Mary’s first visit to the Hofburg? This, at least, is what both Mary’s mother and Rudolf’s friend and hunting companion Count Josef Hoyos later suggested.57 Hoyos—perhaps out of loyalty—insisted that Mary only visited the Hofburg five times, but Bratfisch later estimated that he secretly delivered her to the palace on at least twenty different nights.58 This must have included the time she came to Rudolf in September, wearing only a fur coat over her nightgown. Her visits were so frequent that, even today, a small flight of steps leading to Rudolf’s former apartments is known as the Vetsera Staircase.59 And, if “accidental” encounters in the Prater were innocent, it’s unlikely the same can be said of Rudolf and Mary’s midnight meetings, assignations in Eduard Palmer’s apartment, or r
eunions in the privacy of the Hofburg. Sometime that autumn Rudolf seems to have commissioned a portrait of his latest lover, a painting depicting a nude Mary Vetsera in all her seductive glory—a provocative bit of art that left little doubt as to what he temporarily found so diverting in the young baroness.60
Mary convinced herself that Rudolf was desperately in love. As evidence, she wrote to Hermine Tobias that, in a letter, he had insisted that “he could not live without her and would go mad if he could no longer see her.” But she couldn’t provide the actual letter: Larisch, Mary complained, took all of Rudolf’s correspondence back from her as soon as she’d read it.61
“If we could live together in a hut we would be happy,” Mary wrote to Tobias. “We always talk about how happy it would make us. But unfortunately it is not to be. If I could give my life for him I would gladly do so, for what does my life mean to me? We have made a pact toward this possibility.”62 And Rudolf apparently commemorated this pact—however loosely made or unrealistic it may have been—by giving his lover a ring made of plain, inexpensive iron. Mary prized the trinket, wearing it on a chain around her neck and referring to it as a “wedding ring.” Engraved inside the band were the initials ILVBIDT for the phrase In Liebe Vereint bis in den Tod (United by Love Until Death).63
Triumph drove Mary’s behavior in these months as she spiraled out of control. The affair, conducted according to Rudolf’s terms and schedule, thrived in a hothouse atmosphere that amplified every development. It isn’t surprising that the immature young woman took a perverse delight in causing deliberate public scenes. When Rudolf attended a performance by Sarah Bernhardt at the Theater an der Wien, Mary was front and center in her mother’s box, staring openly at her lover as the audience watched her every move.64 Then there was the night she appeared at the opera in an extremely low-cut gown of white crepe de chine accented with diamonds. “I think you display very questionable taste in flaunting yourself,” Larisch warned the young baroness, but to no avail: Mary was determined to attract attention, knowing that Stephanie would also be present. When Rudolf entered the imperial box with his wife, Mary fixed the crown princess with “an insolent gaze.” Not to be outdone, and “with a refinement of maliciousness,” Stephanie proudly leveled her opera glasses and stared back as the auditorium erupted in whispers.65