by Greg King
“I no longer find it within me to worry about anything at all,” Rudolf confided to Latour von Thurmberg that October.43 His mental detachment from previous interests, friends, and pursuits increased as the months passed.44 “The pursuit of high ideals has died within me,” Rudolf wrote to Szeps in November.45 And his behavior had grown increasingly reckless. In January he’d been out shooting with his father at Höllgraben when he carelessly discharged his rifle: The bullet missed Franz Josef by mere inches and seriously wounded a beater in the arm.46 Furious, the emperor barred his son from shooting the following day and refused to speak to him. According to Stephanie he suspected that Rudolf had meant to kill him and disguise it as an accident; afraid of his son, the emperor now avoided Rudolf and would see him only if others were present.47
By the autumn of 1888 the few remaining members of Rudolf’s circle found him nervous and antagonistic.48 “The Crown Prince recently took supper with me,” wrote Franz Karl, Prince Khevenhüller-Metsch. “He then lay on the sofa in the library smoking and drinking sherry. He babbled away incongruously about liberty and equality, railed against the nobility for representing an attitude whose time had passed and stated that his preferred position would be president of a republic. I thought, You are either intoxicated or you are a fool.”49
Stephanie got an unwelcome taste of Rudolf’s decline when she returned to Vienna from a holiday: “His decay was so greatly advanced as to have become conspicuous. He was frightfully changed: his skin was flaccid, his eyes were restless, his expression was completely changed. It seemed … as if a process of internal dissolution was going on. I was profoundly sorry for him and wondered how the devastation would end.” Concerned and anxious to “save us both from disaster,” Stephanie went unannounced to the emperor. “I began,” she recalled, “by telling him that Rudolf was extremely ill, and that my husband’s appearance and behavior caused me great anxiety. I earnestly begged the Emperor to send his son on a journey round the world, which might remove him from a life that was wearing him down.” But Franz Josef interrupted. “You are giving way to fancies, my dear,” he condescendingly told his daughter-in-law. “There is nothing wrong with Rudolf. I know he is rather pale, gets about too much, expects too much of himself. He ought to stay home with you more than he does. Don’t be anxious.” With this he arose and embraced Stephanie. “I had been dismissed, and had not been allowed to pour out my heart in the way I expected.” An official soon called on Stephanie: In the future the emperor wanted her to follow protocol and approach him only by asking his adjutant for a formal audience.50
Empress Elisabeth, too, worried about her son, though unlike Stephanie she failed to act. That autumn her youngest daughter and favorite child, Marie Valerie, was about to become engaged to Archduke Franz Salvator. Something about Rudolf’s behavior unnerved her. “Never be nasty to Valerie,” she warned her son.51 Visiting Vienna from her married home in Bavaria, Gisela found that “the whole family” now regarded Rudolf “as a person to be treated with caution.”52 For her part Marie Valerie was so afraid of her volatile brother that she kept word of her impending engagement from him until the middle of December. Rudolf, she confided to her diary, had an “unstable, often bitter, sarcastic expression” that made her fear being alone with him.53
Thoughts of death increasingly filled Rudolf’s head. Vienna celebrated its supremacy in coffee, pastries, and waltzes, yet it also held the unwelcome distinction of having Europe’s highest suicide rate.54 “At the slightest difficulty these people meet,” Walburga Paget recorded in astonishment, “they at once resort to suicide. There must be something in the air of Vienna that makes people do this.”55 Servants, she noted, “kill themselves because they break a plate, children of seven or eight hang themselves because they cannot do a lesson, soldiers because they do not like the army, girls because they cannot marry their first loves.” The situation was so bad, she remembered, that officials actually warned her to avoid early-morning rides in the Prater before they could cut down the previous evening’s suicides hanging from the trees.56
Rudolf eagerly consumed florid accounts of the latest suicides that Vienna’s newspapers spun out to shock their readers.57 There was the handsome young couple who, having enjoyed a last luncheon of chicken and Champagne, entered a cemetery and shot themselves; the woman aboard the express to Budapest who changed into a wedding dress before leaping to her death from the speeding train; and the young student who poisoned himself and his girlfriend after receiving low marks at school.58 One woman loyally sang the national anthem, then leaped from her third-floor Vienna apartment; a tightrope walker hanged himself from a window, declaring in a note, “The rope was my life and the rope is my death”; in the middle of his performance a trapeze artist who had quarreled with his wife deliberately let go and plummeted to his death.59 When the Hungarian sportsman István Kégl shot himself, Rudolf could talk of nothing else, devouring all the details, including the fact that Kégl had used a small hand-held mirror to adjust his aim.60 The more theatrical the exit, the more Vienna’s newspapers lingered over the details. Suicide had become entertainment, obsession with death the latest fashion.
By the autumn of 1888 Rudolf’s fascination with death had shifted to an unwholesome embrace. “From time to time,” Rudolf wrote to Latour von Thurmberg in October, “I look for an opportunity to see a dying person and attempt to enter into his sensations as he draws his last breath. I also make it a practice to intensely study dying animals, and attempt to accustom my wife to such sights, for one must learn to reckon with the last necessities of life.”61
A devastating escalation of circumstances and events, both minor and major, began to prey on Rudolf’s mind. “You know how badly Stephanie and I get on,” he once confided to Marie Larisch. He had infected his wife with venereal disease, caused her sterility, and deprived himself of an heir. Painful symptoms of his gonorrhea came and went without warning, fueling Rudolf’s escalating descent into alcoholism and drug addiction. Depression, anxiety, and feelings of inadequacy left him alienated and embittered. “Altogether I’m in a bad way,” he told Larisch. “I’m tired of life.” He was a “despicable puppet,” someone “dressed up to please the people,” with no purpose in life other than to await his father’s demise.62
Rudolf took his repeated exclusion from the Army High Command conferences, his clashes with Archduke Albrecht, and his father’s request that he resign his post as inspector general of the infantry as humiliating personal and professional failures. The death of the liberal German emperor Friedrich III tore away at Rudolf’s hopes for the future, while a chance political victory by Prime Minister Taaffe in the autumn of 1888 cemented his bitter enemy in power and ensured that his opinions and ideas would continue to be rejected. On top of this the persistent attacks on Rudolf in the German press shamed the crown prince by presenting him as the disreputable “other,” an unbalanced man unfit for the Habsburg throne.
The accumulated blows led to talk of suicide. At first it was loose talk, the kind of talk that consumed suicide-mad Vienna. In his erratic, unpredictable way, Rudolf spoke of suicide to his cousins Archdukes Johann Salvator, Franz Ferdinand, and Otto, as well as to the Duke of Braganza.63 Once he even pointed to Franz Ferdinand during a shoot, announcing, “That man walking toward us will become Emperor of Austria.”64 It seemed like a bad joke: No one took him seriously. There was something so lighthearted, so cavalier, about Rudolf’s manner—even Mitzi Caspar thought so when, in the midst of his affair with Mary Vetsera, he’d suddenly talked about killing himself. But Mitzi laughed off the idea as the result of too much alcohol and morphine.65
But the loose talk solidified that autumn as Rudolf began asking members of his staff to join him in a suicide pact. Lieutenant Viktor von Fritsche, Rudolf’s personal secretary, was stunned when the crown prince asked if he would die with him; although he considered it a great honor, Fritsche explained, he was unwilling to kill himself. Rudolf then turned to Flügeladjutant Baron Artur Giesl
von Gieslingen, one of his staff officers; but Giesl, like Fritsche, had no wish to die and politely declined the request.66 This unnerving state of affairs led many men on the crown prince’s staff to ask for reassignment.67 Rudolf even threatened Stephanie, raging that he was going to shoot her and then himself.68
In December Rudolf again asked Mitzi to join him in a suicide pact, saying that honor demanded that he kill himself: They would shoot themselves in the Husarentempel at Mödling in a spectacularly symbolic coup de théâtre. Erected to the glory of hussars who had fallen in the emperor’s service, the temple offered Rudolf an altar on which he could make the ultimate gesture of contempt for his father’s conservative ideas of heroic loyalty.69 This time Mitzi didn’t laugh off the suggestion. Something about Rudolf’s manner scared her, and she apparently reported his request to the Viennese chief of police, Baron Franz von Krauss. Krauss was not receptive: Ignoring her information, he threatened to prosecute Mitzi if she repeated a word of the crown prince’s plea to anyone else.70
Three aromatic blue fir trees, branches alight with wax candles and bedecked with gilded ornaments, stood over tables crowded with gifts when the imperial family gathered at the Hofburg to celebrate Christmas. Rudolf had bought toys for his young daughter at Vienna’s traditional Christkindlmarkt, or Christmas market; for his mother he had purchased some original letters written by her favorite poet, Heinrich Heine—a thoughtful gift that the empress all but ignored.71 Indeed, Elisabeth seemed most taken with showing off her latest, unlikely acquisition: Much to her husband’s horror, she’d had her shoulder tattooed with an anchor.72
Smiles and gifts couldn’t conceal the undercurrent of tension. Something was so obviously wrong with Rudolf that Elisabeth pulled Marie Valerie aside and again warned her of her brother’s malicious behavior. Then she turned to her son. After making him promise that he would be kind to Marie Valerie, Elisabeth embraced Rudolf and said that she loved him. Hearing this, Rudolf collapsed into agonized sobs; his mother, he cried, hadn’t said those words “for a long time.”73 Franz Josef and Elisabeth were embarrassed at the display; neither recognized their son’s emotional breakdown as a last, dramatic cry for help as Rudolf slipped ever closer to the edge of an abyss.
PART II
CHAPTER SEVEN
All seemed well that January of 1889 as revelers flung themselves into the social season; mourning for Empress Elisabeth’s father had canceled the court ceremonies, but aristocratic Vienna went on with its celebrations. Strauss led his musicians through waltzes at the annual Opera Ball; society crowded the Industrialists’ Ball, the Coiffeurs’ Ball, the Laundresses’ Ball, the Bakers’ Ball, the City of Vienna Ball, and the undoubted highlight of the season—the Fourth Dimension Ball, where trees and flowers bloomed upside-down from a garden on the ceiling and malevolent-looking witches and warlocks moved among the guests.1 But beneath the surface an ominous sense hung over the city, a “general air of discontent,” a “breath of melancholy” that rippled through society.2
Rudolf and Stephanie spent the last week of 1888 together at the Villa Angiolina in the Adriatic resort of Abazzia; on December 29, he decided not to remain through the New Year but instead return to Vienna.3 From the Hofburg he dispatched a letter to his wife: “I send you every possible good wish for the New Year, health and pleasant days, cheerful times, the fulfillment of all your desires.”4 But Rudolf’s tone when writing to Moritz Szeps was dark: “The current peace that now reigns is ominous, like the calm before the storm. It can’t go on like this; that is my consolation.”5 In his reply Szeps did what little he could to counter Rudolf’s depression:
The oppression cannot last forever, and soon a year of change will arrive. When that which is rotting, faded, and old gives way to that which is fresh and run, it is really an act of rejuvenation, which is necessary for the world.… Your task is to keep your spirit and your flesh strong for the day of action.… You have had to experience malice and treachery but have shaken it off with fortitude. All know that you desire great things, that you are capable of achieving them.… You have many enemies. But rely on yourself, on your genius and talents, your strength and endurance … and you will accomplish great things.6
The empire’s semiannual Army High Command conference was scheduled for January 1, 1889; as usual Rudolf had not been invited, but this time he ignored the slight and appeared unannounced, adding his unsolicited opinions as his uncle Archduke Albrecht scowled in silence.7 Rudolf lived a confused, schizophrenic existence in these weeks: regimental duties and visits by Prince Leopold of Bavaria, Prince Alexander of Battenberg, and a group of Russian dignitaries kept him busy by day; at night he slunk away to seedy cafés, called on Mitzi Caspar, and shot himself full of morphine when already intoxicated with Champagne and Cognac. When Stephanie returned to Vienna on January 11, she was “struck by the change in the Crown Prince, and this time more strongly than ever. He was rarely sober, he did not get home to the Hofburg until dawn; and as for the company he kept, the less said the better. His restlessness and nervous irritability had become intensified. He spoke menacingly of horrible things and in my very presence would cruelly toy with the revolver he always carried about. Indeed, I had become afraid to be alone with him.”8
Not that Stephanie had to worry about being alone with her husband—Rudolf did as much as humanly possible to exclude her from his life. On January 20, while shooting eagles at Schloss Orth, the country estate of his cousin Archduke Johann Salvator, he asked his friend Hoyos to join him at his hunting lodge of Mayerling in the Vienna Woods—he thought he’d probably go there at the beginning of February.9 When Stephanie learned of this, Rudolf “expressly informed me that my presence was not wanted.”10 No fool, she worried that he planned to take Mary Vetsera with him. One morning she appeared unannounced at the Coburg Palace, “anxious and disturbed,” as her sister Louise recalled. “Rudolf,” Stephanie told Louise, “is going to Mayerling, and intends staying there some days. He will not be alone. What can we do?”11 But Louise, whose husband, Prince Philipp, had also been invited to the lodge, could offer no suggestions.
Not until the evening of January 13 did Rudolf again see Mary, when Bratfisch delivered her to the Hofburg. “Oh, it would have been so much better had I not gone to see him today!” Mary cried to her maid, Agnes, on returning home. “Now I no longer belong to myself alone but exist only for him. From now on I must do everything he asks.”12 And to Hermine Tobias, Mary explained: “I must confess something to you that will make you very angry. I was with him yesterday from seven to nine. We both lost our heads. Now we belong to one another body and soul.”13 Two days later Mary used 400 gulden ($2,556 in 2017) she had received as a Christmas gift from her uncle Alexander to purchase a gold cigarette case from the exclusive Vienna jeweler Rodeck’s. She had it engraved with the date January 13, and the words Dank dem Glücklichen Geschicke (in gratitude to kind fate) before giving it to Rudolf.14
After the tragedy at Mayerling, those most closely involved with Rudolf, Mary, and their liaison made concerted efforts to erase history, insisting that the relationship only began on November 5 and that January 13 marked the affair’s consummation. But circumstance weighs heavily against this. The relationship began in April 1888, much earlier than previously suspected; there were regular assignations at Eduard Palmer’s apartment, and Bratfisch had delivered Mary to the Hofburg on at least twenty nights throughout the autumn of 1888, including the time in September when she provocatively arrived with only a fur coat covering her lingerie. With his sense of entitlement and relentless pursuit of pleasure, Rudolf was not the sort of man to long delay gratification “once his desires were in question,” as Larisch recalled.15 Rudolf’s sexual conquests were legion, and he was not accustomed to being denied. Nor was Mary the type of woman to stand on moral propriety: With her “fast” reputation and string of past lovers, she had already abandoned any claim to virginal innocence. Given their characters and desires, it is extremely unlikely that Rudolf and Mary wai
ted nine months to consummate their relationship.
A disapproving Hermine Tobias had repeatedly warned Mary against pursuing her relationship with the married crown prince. “I know everything you say is true,” Mary had replied, “but I cannot change the facts. I have two friends, you and Marie Larisch. You work for my soul’s happiness, and Marie works for my moral misfortune.”16 Given this, it is likely that Mary was not entirely forthcoming in her previous letters to Tobias, evading the truth and concealing the sexual nature of the liaison until she believed that circumstances finally compelled her to do. It now seems that January 13 marked not sexual consummation but rather some shared confidence, some new secret that, in Mary’s impressionable mind, cemented the personal romantic fairy tale she had woven around the liaison and inexorably tied her to Rudolf.
Mary soared in elation for a week. On Saturday, January 19, she ignored a previously accepted invitation to attend a ball and slipped away to the Hofburg to see Rudolf.17 She briefly saw him again in the Prater on the afternoon of January 24, and a happy mood the following evening sent her ice-skating.18 As she left the ice Mary spotted a fortune-teller and, over her maid’s protests, disappeared into the tent for a reading. A few minutes later Mary emerged looking “shocked and excited.” She was unusually quiet, but Agnes found her tossing and turning later that night. “God, I am feverish,” Mary sobbed. “I keep thinking of what that woman told me.” The seer, she said, had warned of an impending death—probably a suicide—within her family. Mary seemed horrified by the idea.19
Tired and anxious, Mary watched the following morning as her mother searched her room. Increased gossip about the affair, Mary’s reckless behavior, a sense of impending danger, Agnes Jahoda’s confession that her mistress had purchased an expensive cigarette case the previous week—something drove Helene Vetsera into a sudden panic. Helene later claimed that she only now suspected the affair; in fact she’d been behind the liaison for months, bribing Larisch with cash and expensive gowns and even joking about the romance. Breaking open Mary’s locked jewelry case, Helene found some photographs of Rudolf; a will Mary had made and dated on January 18; and a silver cigarette case engraved with Rudolf’s name—his standard farewell gift to one of his sexual conquests.20