by Greg King
An argument between mother and daughter ensued, and Mary fled to the Grand Hotel, seeking refuge with Marie Larisch. Mary, the countess saw, “was deathly pale and her eyes seemed far too big for her face; she looked as if something dreadful had happened.” She collapsed into an armchair and erupted in tears. “Oh, Marie darling, do get me away from Vienna! I shall die if I have to remain at home!”21
Larisch eventually calmed Mary and returned her to the Vetsera Palace. But, entering her mother’s house, Mary promptly fainted and had to be put to bed, “deathly pale and speechless,” as Helene remembered. “What have you done to her?” Larisch demanded of the baroness, but Helene was too angry to answer questions. To appease her Larisch lied, saying that the case engraved with Rudolf’s name had originally been given to her; she had merely passed it on to Mary as a gift.22
While this drama at the Vetsera Palace played itself out, a far more momentous confrontation was taking place at the Hofburg. Two days earlier Rudolf had attended a dinner given by the British ambassador, Sir Augustus Paget. According to Lady Paget he “seemed somehow different, less sarcastic, less down on people, and for the first time he looked me in the eyes when speaking.”23 His good mood disappeared a few hours later, however, when he went to the opera to see Die drei Pintos. The emperor had not been expected, yet everyone noticed that he soon arrived in the imperial box and had a strained conversation with his son. Having said what he meant to say, Franz Josef rose and abruptly left the theater after the second act.24
Whatever drove a worried Franz Josef to this sudden confrontation erupted again that Saturday. As usual the emperor arose a little after four, dressed, and was at his desk by five to read the latest reports and newspapers. Something that morning shocked him into action: He sent word through an adjutant demanding that Rudolf appear before him in a formal audience at nine. The order left Rudolf tense and agitated. He put on his full-dress uniform as inspector general of the infantry, walked through the marble halls from his bachelor apartment to his father’s rooms, was announced, and entered Franz Josef’s study. Controversy surrounds precisely what took place behind those closed doors, but something left Franz Josef infuriated. The “stormy” and “violent” interview went badly.25 The emperor, Latour von Thurmberg asserted, was “overwhelmed with grief and rage” and spoke to Rudolf “in terrible agitation and with brutal candor.”26 When Rudolf finally opened the study doors, it seemed obvious to a courtier that “something frightful” had taken place between father and son. Sophie von Planker-Klaps, Stephanie’s principal Kammerfrau (lady of the bedchamber), or lady-in-waiting, saw Rudolf rush back to his own apartment through the halls. He “looked terribly upset, on the point of collapse, and his hand carrying his general’s hat shook visibly.”27
Thoroughly unnerved, Rudolf decided that it was best if he left Vienna. He wouldn’t wait for February, but would go to Mayerling on Tuesday, January 29. He told Rudolf Püchel, his Kammerbüchsenspanner (personal gun loader), to head out to Mayerling on Monday with a small domestic staff and make preparations for the crown prince’s arrival Tuesday.28 Rudolf also sent word to Franz Wodicka, a huntsman attached to Mayerling, to relay the change to Hoyos, bidding him to come out to the lodge for two days, January 29–30.29
Plans made, Rudolf went unannounced on Sunday morning to see Larisch in her suite at the Grand Hotel. “I want you to bring Mary tomorrow to the Hofburg. You must persuade the Baroness to allow Mary to go out with you.” He was, Larisch recalled, “very excited” and looked pale and nervous as he spoke.30
That same Sunday morning, an anxious Mary had begged her mother to let her go out driving in the Prater with Larisch, saying that “this was her only pleasure.”31 Mary, Helene thought, still looked “deathly pale” after the previous day’s contretemps; nevertheless she kissed her and “implored her to see reason and to end all of this nonsense” before finally giving her permission to see Larisch.32 It was half past two when the countess called at the Vetsera Palace and collected Mary. Princess Louise also happened to be in the Prater when she spotted her brother-in-law’s carriage stopped along the main avenue; he was speaking to Larisch and Mary.33 As soon as Rudolf saw Louise, he waved Larisch off and went to speak to his sister-in-law. He had a “peculiar look,” “pale and feverish,” and “seemed on the verge of a nervous breakdown.” Before leaving he asked Louise to tell “Fatty”—the nickname he had ungraciously bestowed on his brother-in-law—that he would be expected at Mayerling on Tuesday.34
That evening Larisch wrote a short letter to Rudolf assuring him that she would bring Mary to the Hofburg the following morning. The tone undermined her later assertions that she loathed her cousin: “You know that I am blindly devoted to you and that I will always obey your command whenever you call me! I shall naturally come along under these threatening circumstances, I cannot expose her to unpleasantness on her own—I shall therefore certainly come, no matter what happens!”35
Letter dispatched, Larisch then returned to the Vetsera Palace. That evening the German ambassador, Prince Heinrich Reuss, was holding the soiree at his embassy to celebrate Kaiser Wilhelm II’s thirtieth birthday. As a loyal ally—and despite the court mourning still in place for his father-in-law—Franz Josef and his family, except for the empress, would attend—and so would the Vetseras. Larisch found Mary drinking tea with her mother and Hanna, though Mary had laced hers with rum and sat smoking as Helene Vetsera chastised her. Larisch followed Mary to her bedroom, watching as the young woman donned her light-blue gown trimmed in yellow. “Do I look nice?” Mary asked, smiling and “coldly” saying that Stephanie was sure to notice her and be jealous. “Her eyes,” Larisch recalled, “looked positively evil.”36
Mary’s antagonism was on full display when she snubbed Stephanie that night at the soiree: The contemporary press reported “a violent scene” in the ballroom, presumably when Helene had to pull her daughter into a reluctant curtsy.37 The humiliation was too much: Stephanie sent for Karl von Bombelles, Rudolf’s lord high chamberlain, and asked him to tell her husband that she wanted to leave. She bade a gracious farewell to Prince Reuss and approached the ballroom door, but Rudolf stood motionless in the center of the hall as Mary walked up to him and began to speak. Rudolf hesitated before finally joining his wife. “The whole scene,” recorded one witness, “was so strange that it struck everyone present.” As they descended the crimson-carpeted staircase, several witnesses supposedly heard “a violent exchange of words” between Rudolf and Stephanie that left everyone in the ballroom embarrassed.38
Rudolf had asked his friend Moritz Szeps to meet him at the Hofburg late that night. He found the crown prince “in a dreadful state of nervous excitement.” The previous day’s confrontation with his father had left Rudolf shaken. Now he complained that during the soiree Franz Josef had deliberately turned away and thus publicly humiliated him. If this indeed happened it must have been so quick as to escape notice, though perhaps the emperor had briefly expressed his displeasure at seeing Mary Vetsera strutting about the ballroom. Rudolf was clearly embittered, fixated not on the scene caused by his mistress but by his father’s apparent slight. “The Emperor,” he told Szeps, “has openly affronted and degraded me. From now all ties between us are broken. From now I am free.”39
At midnight, after bidding Szeps farewell, Rudolf went to see Mitzi Caspar. His mood was black: Entering her house, he grabbed a bottle of Champagne and drank for the next two hours. Alcohol loosened his tongue. Now Mitzi listened as Rudolf announced that he planned to “shit on the government.” Honor, he insisted, demanded that he kill himself while at Mayerling; his cousin Archduke Franz Ferdinand could take his place as heir after his death. Mitzi had heard such drunken talk of suicide before, but the last time she’d gone to the police they’d threatened her with prosecution if she said anything. All she could do was listen as her lover rambled on incoherently. Rudolf finally left at three that morning. As he stood in the doorway he raised his hand and made the sign of the cross on Mitz
i’s forehead—something he had never done before and a gesture completely out of character for the atheistic Rudolf.40
CHAPTER EIGHT
Monday, January 28, 1889, dawned cold and clear in Vienna: A sheen of frost glistened over the frozen snow banking the broad avenues. That morning Rudolf rang for his servant Püchel and announced a sudden change of plan. Rather than travel to his hunting lodge on January 29, Rudolf explained, “I am going to Mayerling today.” Püchel needn’t see to the arrangements: Rudolf had already dispatched some servants to the lodge earlier that morning. “I am only waiting,” Rudolf told Püchel, “for a letter and a telegram.” When the letter arrived, Püchel brought it to his master. He found Rudolf standing at his bedroom window, staring out vacantly and “quite lost in thought. He held his watch in his hands, turning the winder. He did not seem to have noticed me.” Püchel silently placed the letter on a desk and left. Some thirty minutes later the expected telegram arrived. Püchel found Rudolf still standing at the window, watch still in hand, and still staring out. The crown prince scanned the contents, remarking enigmatically to himself, “Yes, it has to be.”1
At a quarter past ten that morning, Larisch climbed into a carriage at the Grand Hotel and asked the driver, Franz Weber, to take her to the Vetsera Palace. There she collected Mary, telling Helene that they planned to go shopping.2 Mary wore an ice-skating ensemble from the imperial couturier Josef Fischer to guard against the cold: an olive-green pleated skirt and tight, matching jacket trimmed with black lace over a silk blouse; a small green felt hat trimmed with black ostrich feathers and a thin veil; and an ostrich-feather boa wrapped around her neck.3 “I thought she had never looked so handsome,” Larisch recalled. Once settled in the carriage, Larisch said she turned to Mary, imploring her to “finish this episode, otherwise I fear the results of it will be disastrous for us all.” But Mary merely smiled. They first went to the Weisse Katze to shop for lingerie; after this Weber drove to the Hofburg, stopping at Larisch’s directions at the iron door in the Augustiner Bastion, where a servant waited to lead them up to the crown prince’s apartments.4
Mary, Larisch thought, seemed “strangely well acquainted” with this circuitous route through the palace. According to Larisch, while waiting for Rudolf, Mary kissed her, saying, “I want you to forgive me from the bottom of your heart for all the trouble I have caused you. Whatever happens, don’t think I wished to deceive you or play you false.”5 This seems an unlikely declaration; more probably Larisch invented the conversation as “proof” that the lovers had “used” her and abused her trust.
Soon Rudolf appeared and asked to speak to Mary privately; after some minutes he returned, this time alone. Mary, he told his cousin, had already left the Hofburg. Larisch was to return to the Vetsera Palace and report that Mary had disappeared while they were shopping. Larisch later claimed to be horrified. When she objected Rudolf grabbed her violently and, waving a revolver in her face, growled, “Do you want me to hurt you? Unless you swear to be quiet, I’ll kill you!” He needed to speak to Mary: “A great deal may happen in two days,” Rudolf explained, “and I want Mary to be with me. I stand on the edge of a precipice.” He gave his cousin 500 gulden (approximately $3,200 in 2017) with which to bribe her driver to back up her story about Mary’s “disappearance.”6
Rudolf had told his coachman Bratfisch to wait with his carriage at the iron door in the Augustiner Bastion. Shortly before eleven Mary Vetsera came out of the Hofburg, and Bratfisch beckoned to her. Soon they were speeding through the city, toward the Roten Stadl, the Red Barn Inn, some ten miles outside Vienna, where Rudolf planned to meet them.7 A few minutes later Larisch drove to Rodeck’s on the Kohlmarkt. Apparently armed with a bribe, Franz Weber later insisted to officials that Mary had been with the countess, and had disappeared from his carriage while Larisch was shopping.8
As soon as the two ladies had gone, Rudolf made a rare excursion to his wife’s rooms. He hadn’t come for Stephanie; instead he asked her lady-in-waiting to go and find his young daughter: he wanted to see her before leaving for Mayerling. Sophie von Planker-Klaps returned in a few minutes. Little Elisabeth’s nanny, she sheepishly explained, had said the girl was otherwise occupied and could not see her father.9 Rebuffed, Rudolf left the Hofburg at half past eleven, driving himself in a phaeton through Vienna and out into the country to keep his rendezvous with Mary at the Roten Stadl. He wore a knee-length Hungarian lancer fur coat over his hunting tweeds, with a flat cap atop his head.10
Mary, Bratfisch remembered, had been unusually quiet during the drive to the Roten Stadl and hadn’t said a word to him. They arrived early, and Bratfisch drove back and forth for nearly an hour, waiting for Rudolf. When he finally did appear, the crown prince left his phaeton and quickly slipped into Bratfisch’s carriage: With a smile he apologized for having kept them waiting, and then asked Bratfisch to drive them to Mayerling. He didn’t want to go via the normal route, instead asking that Bratfisch take a series of back roads and that he drive slowly enough so that they would not arrive before dusk.11 They bypassed the old resort village of Baden, where both Beethoven and Mozart had once spent summers, and disappeared along little-used roads slippery with snow. Several times the carriage wheels slid into ruts; Rudolf had to get out and help Bratfisch push the vehicle back onto the roadway.12
It was late in the afternoon when the carriage rumbled through a forest of pine and spruce, emerging into the Vienna Woods’ Helenenthal (valley) as the sun was rapidly fading from a cold clear sky. Ahead, nestled in a hollow fringed by gently rolling hills and open fields some sixteen miles southwest of the imperial capital, Mayerling lay in shadow. There in the fourteenth century, monks from the nearby Cistercian Abbey of Heiligenkreuz had laid out a farm and built the Church of Saint Laurenz. Over the centuries the estate had passed into private hands and grown to include several small villas for guests, a kitchen block, and stables. Though the surrounding forest offered superb hunting, the estate itself was a rather ramshackle collection of buildings that fell decidedly short of the usual imperial standards.13 But there were other attractions: It was probably no accident that Rudolf bought Mayerling from Count Reinhard von Leiningen-Westerburg in 1887. The count lived in a villa on the estate with his beautiful wife, Anna—who just happened to be the former actress Anna Pick, who had shared the crown prince’s bed and who had accompanied him to Brussels when he went to ask for Stephanie’s hand. Having the new, sympathetic countess near at hand only added to Mayerling’s attraction.14 Spending more and more time there, Rudolf added a bowling alley and a rifle range along one side of the walled garden to the south. At the center stood the main lodge, a simple, whitewashed two-storey building dotted with shuttered windows, capped by a steeply hipped gray roof, and protected by gateways to the east, south, and west.15
Rather ungallantly Rudolf stopped the carriage at the edge of the forest and asked Mary to wait there while he went ahead to the lodge. She stood hidden in the snowy copse until Bratfisch returned, collected her, and quickly drove her through the southern gate, where she was able to slip inside through a service door without attracting any notice.16 Her destination was Rudolf’s private apartment at the southeastern corner of the ground floor. East of the lodge’s main corridor, a door opened to an anteroom, where Rudolf’s desk sat beneath an impressive set of antlers; beyond, reached by a white enameled door, was his corner bedroom, with two shuttered windows on each of its outer walls and a small gas chandelier hanging from its ceiling. Sofas and chairs covered in red velvet stood grouped around a tiled stove; against the center of the eastern wall stood a double bed of dark oak, its high headboard decorated with turned spindles. A second door to the right of the bed opened to a small hallway, where a private staircase ascended to Stephanie’s apartments above.17
As ungallantly as he had arranged Mary’s arrival, Rudolf kept her hidden away in the bedroom, beneath its vaulted ceiling and behind its heavily draped and shuttered windows. Concealing her from inquisitive eyes demanded
seclusion: In addition to Bratfisch, twenty-four others were at the estate, including three policemen who might jot any comings and goings in their little notebooks.18 Yet aside from Bratfisch, only one member of the staff apparently knew of Mary’s presence: Johann Loschek, who had come out to Mayerling earlier that afternoon. Born in 1845, Loschek had joined the imperial court as a gamekeeper at eighteen; in 1883, he was named Saaltürhüter, or hall porter, to the crown prince and acted as his occasional valet. Like Bratfisch, Loschek knew all of his master’s secrets: In addition to stories that Rudolf used him to obtain morphine, Loschek had also regularly delivered letters to and from both Mary and Larisch.19 He too settled in at Mayerling, taking a small bedroom just off the anteroom so that he would always be close at hand to serve Mary’s meals and answer her summons if needed.
The apparent calm at Mayerling stood in stark contrast to the chaos that Rudolf and Mary’s sudden departure caused in Vienna that Monday. After leaving Rodeck’s, Larisch went to the Vetsera Palace, arriving about half past eleven that morning. She burst in, said Helene Vetsera, “as if demented.” “I lost her!” Larisch shouted dramatically. “She left me!” The countess claimed that she had gone into Rodeck’s alone, leaving Mary in her carriage; the young woman had disappeared when she returned—having slipped out of the carriage and, said Larisch, climbed into another vehicle that sped away.20