by Greg King
“The heaviest blow which could hit a father’s heart,” read the emperor’s message to his subjects, “the immeasurable loss of My Dear Son, had filled with the deepest mourning Myself, My House, and My Faithful Peoples. Shaken to My very depths, I bow My head in humility before the unfathomable decision of Divine Providence.”49 Past events replayed themselves constantly in his mind as he sought answers and absolution; the fact that Rudolf had pointedly left him no farewell letter stung deeply.50 “There is no purpose in going over it all again,” he admitted to Schratt, “but one cannot think of anything else.”51 Life became a charade, with Franz Josef acting the part of stoic emperor, but to Marie Valerie he admitted, “I am becoming sadder with every passing day.”52
Franz Josef not only buried Rudolf in the Capuchin Crypt but also, as one historian noted, under “a cloak of fictive recollection.”53 Never, the emperor insisted, had there been any trouble between them: Rudolf’s death, he said, was “the first vexation my son has caused me.”54 For Franz Josef death had suddenly transformed Rudolf into “such a clever man, with such a good heart.”55 To Schratt he described Rudolf as “the best of sons” and the “most loyal of subjects.”56 It was the only way he could make peace with the situation and with himself.
All investigation into Rudolf’s death was called off. “The Emperor has expressed the desire that silence be maintained about the tragedy at Mayerling,” an official warned the press, appealing to “feelings of loyalty and decency” in asking that newspapers stop reporting the story.57 Those papers and journals that questioned the official story continued to be confiscated and destroyed. Secrecy descended over events at Mayerling. “Anything,” Franz Josef declared, “is better than the truth!”58
PART III
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Rudolf’s interment did nothing to stop the onrush of escalating rumors about events at Mayerling. Within twenty-four hours of his funeral, newspapers had managed to ferret out the basic circumstances, describing the movements and actions of Loschek and Hoyos at the lodge.1 But few were convinced by the official version. “The story that someone killed Rudolf is as of much value as the carefully elaborated account of his suicide,” The New York Times reported on February 3. “Berlin, Brussels, and Paris are full of rumors, all discrediting the theory that the Prince took his own life.”2
It didn’t take long for the foreign press to learn of Mary Vetsera and spin out a tale of tragic romance. On February 2 Munich’s Neuesten Nachrichten reported that the young baroness had committed suicide with Rudolf at Mayerling.3 The following day Le Figaro noted “much talk about of a single disappearance: the Baroness Mary W[sic], who has not been seen since Tuesday. The family claims she is at Schloss Pardubitz [Pardubice, the Larisch estate in Bohemia] but no one has seen her and the public does not believe it.”4 By February 5 Le Temps was reporting that “the death of a beautiful young girl, whose father was a baron, has produced a great sensation in Vienna.”5 But the rival French paper Le Matin scooped its competitors with “the fantastic tale of the mysterious disappearance of Baroness Vetsera related to the tragic drama of Mayerling.” Mary, it declared, was “among the most beautiful women in Vienna, with velvety eyes, a queenly attitude, and a romantic character; her appearance was very admired in worldly circles, which always welcomed her with murmurs of admiration.” Hours after the public learned of Rudolf’s death, “word got around that the young lady had committed suicide and been mysteriously buried at night.”6
Vienna was still reeling. “It is all too sad and dreadful,” recorded Walburga Paget. “They are most anxious to believe it was Mary Vetsera who inveigled the Crown Prince into all this. But how so silly a girl could have persuaded so clever a man as the Crown Prince of Austria to end his life in such a stupid, dirty, undignified and melodramatic way I cannot conceive. I cannot see the logic—it was not baffled on love. The fact is he was a maniac and she a vain, unprincipled girl who wanted the world to speak of her.”7
Those privy to the intimate details unanimously echoed Franz Josef’s insistence that “anything” was “better than the truth.” “It is horrible, horrible,” Prince Philipp of Coburg cried to his wife. “But I cannot, I must not, say anything except that they are both dead.”8 Rudolf’s death, Coburg wrote to Queen Victoria, was “a terrible, frightful, unspeakable misfortune. It is a mystery to me how such a talented, clever man, who was so revered in Austria-Hungary, who so clung to Emperor and country, could commit such a deed! I, who was at Mayerling, who saw everything, can assure you that only the assumption of a disturbed state of mind can make this terrible thing comprehensible.”9
To his brother Philippe, count of Flanders, King Leopold II of the Belgians confided: “It is absolutely imperative to maintain the suicide version. It may seem difficult, in the eyes of our Catholic people, to see the House of Habsburg insisting on the suicide story. But suicide while of disturbed mind is the only way to avoid an unheard of scandal.”10 Franz Josef’s brother Ludwig Viktor insisted that “the whole truth is so frightful that one can never confess it!” Hoyos used the same word—“frightful”—to describe what he had seen, adding, “I have given the Emperor my word that I shall not say a word.”11
No one knew what to believe. The British prime minister, Lord Salisbury, assured Queen Victoria that he was positive Rudolf and Mary had been murdered. The Prince of Wales, though, was equally adamant: “It seems poor Rudolf has had suicide on the brain for some time,” he reported to his mother; sources in Vienna assured him that Rudolf’s action had nothing to do with Mary Vetsera. The entire episode, the Prince of Wales wrote, “is like a bad dream.”12
Authorities moved quickly to tie up loose ends. Several courtiers were ordered back to the lodge to destroy any remaining trace of Mary’s presence there.13 Coburg, Hoyos, Widerhofer, Rudolf’s servants, and members of the court commission had originally been asked to answer questions during a meeting on the evening of January 31.14 Loschek was discussing the tragedy with Prince Constantine Hohenlohe shortly before five that afternoon when Prime Minister Taaffe strolled into the room. He was “in exceptionally high spirits” as he announced that the session was cancelled. Two days later the emperor ordered Taaffe to preside over a secret meeting; Widerhofer was present, but Loschek was surprised that Coburg, Hoyos, the court commissioners, and Rudolf’s other servants were excluded. Taaffe read out a short summary of events—so quickly, Loschek recalled, that he could scarcely follow what was being said. At the end Taaffe confiscated all official files and papers concerning Rudolf’s death and warned everyone to keep silent about events at Mayerling.15
Taaffe kept his promise to the emperor: The confiscated files seem to have been shuffled off to his Bohemian country estate, Schloss Ellischau, for safekeeping.16 After his death in 1895, his son, Heinrich, took control of the Mayerling papers. Heinrich claimed to have deposited them in a wooden chest handed over to his Viennese lawyer; in 1912, when he asked for the return of the box, the files had allegedly been removed.17 The Mayerling historian Fritz Judtmann thought it was likely that the box never held any of the contentious papers: The clumsy story of their disappearance was simply meant to throw future historians off their scent.18 That this was the correct interpretation was later shown by two facts: In 1919 Countess Zoë von Wassilko-Serecki was staying at Schloss Ellischau. Her grandfather, Baron Franz von Krauss, had been Vienna’s chief of police at the time of the Mayerling tragedy; she also happened to be a cousin of Heinrich Taaffe’s second wife. While at Ellischau, the countess recalled, Taaffe abruptly asked if she would like to read the missing Mayerling files before he destroyed them. She spent the entire night examining the documents before handing them back to Heinrich Taaffe, presumably to be burned.19
But Heinrich Taaffe did not burn the papers, as he told the countess: in 1922—three years after their supposed destruction—he allowed Professor Artur Skedl of Prague University access to a selection of the files for inclusion in a book on Prime Minister Taaffe—proof that they contin
ued to exist after allegedly being destroyed.20 In 1926 fire swept through the library at Schloss Ellischau, and the press reported that the conflagration destroyed the missing Mayerling papers.21 But the documents had been kept, as Countess Wassilko-Serecki recalled, in the castle archives, which were not harmed in the blaze. Heinrich Taaffe died in 1928. Nine years later his widow told the Neues Wiener Tagblatt that she believed her husband had destroyed the Mayerling papers to ensure that “the confidence placed by the Emperor in his father was not betrayed.”22 This was more obfuscation. Possession of the papers passed to Heinrich’s son, Eduard, who in 1937 moved to Ireland—presumably with the documents. In correspondence with Fritz Judtmann in the 1960s, Eduard Taaffe did not deny that the Mayerling papers still existed, but he refused to allow access to them, explaining that he had given “a solemn promise” never to reveal their contents. “The circumstances of the Mayerling affair,” he added, “were far more frightful than was imagined.”23 When Eduard Taaffe died in 1967, the papers apparently passed to his cousin Rudolf Taaffe, who both confusingly denied any knowledge of their whereabouts and then later hinted obliquely about the possible contents.24 Whatever secrets Rudolf Taaffe possessed went with him to his grave in 1985. It seems likely that the enigmatic Taaffe papers do indeed still exist, frustratingly hidden away somewhere and apparently destined to remain so—the “holy grail” of Mayerling materials—suspected of containing momentous secrets surrounding events at the lodge.
Bribes in the form of pensions and monetary gifts also helped suppress the truth. Loschek received some of Rudolf’s clothing and his guns; although only forty-five years old, he was immediately pensioned off with the promise of 1,300 gulden a year ($8,307 in 2017).25 Josef Bratfisch, who knew all of Rudolf’s secrets, proved more troublesome. On behalf of the imperial court, Lord Chamberlain Prince Alfred Montenuovo discreetly approached the carriage driver and asked him to leave Vienna in exchange for a considerable amount of money.26 Bratfisch refused, insisting that he could be trusted. No one was convinced, and Chief of Police Krauss warned the prime minister that his agents had Bratfisch under constant surveillance. “I have also ordered them,” he wrote, “to see that no journalists should get in touch with him.” He worried that Bratfisch, “who occasionally goes in for excessive drinking,” might become inebriated and in that state begin to spill his secrets.27 Two months after Mayerling, Bratfisch suddenly bought a house and started his own cab company complete with horses from the imperial stables—developments suggesting that the court had bought his silence with a sizable amount of money.28
No one in Vienna, though, worried as much as Countess Marie Larisch. She’d accepted Helene Vetsera’s bribes of gowns and money to facilitate the affair; she’d blackmailed Mary in exchange for arranging meetings; and she’d extorted enormous sums from Rudolf to do his bidding and ensure her silence. She’d lied to the police, denied any involvement, and desperately tried to exculpate herself when the house of cards threatened to come tumbling down. Married to a minor aristocrat, the empress’s illegitimate niece lived on the fringes of society, accepted only because she was in favor at the Hofburg—and now that imperial favor threatened to evaporate.
Trapped in the web she had helped spin, Larisch could only sit helplessly in her suite at the Grand Hotel, hoping that the storm would pass. Then, on the morning of February 5—the day of Rudolf’s funeral—a group of officials arrived to question her about her role in the liaison. Larisch tried to deny everything, but it was futile. Several of her letters to Rudolf, offering to arrange meetings between her cousin and Mary Vetsera, had already been found in the crown prince’s desk; two days earlier Frau Wolf—Mitzi Caspar’s madam—described to police agent Florian Meissner how Larisch had been acting as a go-between for the crown prince and Mary Vetsera, information Rudolf had apparently confided to Mitzi.29
At first Larisch insisted that Loschek and Bratfisch had actually arranged everything; she had only been following her cousin’s orders. But then officials brought Mary’s maid, Agnes Jahoda, into the room and the accusations began to fly as each woman blamed the other for encouraging the young baroness. The empress had sent a courtier to ask her niece about Rudolf’s state of mind; sensing an opening, Larisch admitted that her cousin had been behaving strangely.30 This confrontation—and details of Larisch’s involvement in the affair—were reported back to the Hofburg; when Larisch went to see her aunt, she was stunned to find herself abruptly turned away. Empress Elisabeth refused ever to receive her niece again.31
Suspicion turned to anger after Rudolf’s funeral, when an accidental discovery sealed the countess’s fate. Tadeusz Ajdukiewicz, a Polish artist who had been painting an equestrian portrait of the crown prince, still had the dolman Rudolf had worn to his last sitting; a search of the pockets disclosed a highly compromising letter from Larisch to her cousin, detailing her complicity in the liaison and exposing her persistent blackmail. Ajdukiewicz turned the letter over to Franz Josef; from that moment, Larisch complained, “a vicious circle enveloped me.”32 Orders came from the Hofburg: Marie Larisch was forbidden ever to appear at the imperial court again. The empress, Larisch insisted, had “made use of me, and she threw me aside without a regret.”33
Now designated the “crown princess widow,” Stephanie, too, was a victim caught in the web of her husband’s misadventure. Her marriage had existed only in name, and she soon made her peace with Rudolf’s actions. Stephanie even developed a kind of sympathy for Mary Vetsera, viewing her as yet another of her husband’s victims. Rudolf, she complained, had “traded upon Mary Vetsera’s passion” in seeking death at her side. In turn Mary’s “profound and sincere love” for him, however immature, excused her “poor, misguided” actions.34
The emperor and empress continued to blame Stephanie for Rudolf’s suicide and slowly but surely excluded her from their circle. Although she had basked in perpetual mourning following Prince Albert’s death, even Queen Victoria worried that the young widow needed a reprieve from an oppressive, opprobrium-filled Vienna. Would Stephanie, she asked, care to come and stay with her at Windsor Castle for a few weeks? But, as if exacting whatever punitive retribution against their daughter-in-law they could find, Franz Josef and Elisabeth flatly vetoed the proposal. Humiliated and insulted, feeling trapped amid her dead husband’s embittered family, Stephanie soon took young Elisabeth and retreated to Schloss Miramar in distant Trieste.35
* * *
The Austrian government had moved heaven and earth to hide Mary Vetsera’s death at Mayerling. Despite her secret burial, the continued confiscation of newspapers, and the lies her family were forced to repeat, though, inevitably word leaked out, and soon curious crowds began haunting the cemetery at Heiligenkreuz, searching for Mary’s unmarked grave. Within a week of the tragedy Helene Vetsera leaked two of Mary’s farewell letters to Le Figaro in Paris.36 “The mother of the young girl is now in Venice,” Prince Reuss reported on February 9, “where she is parading her daughter’s disaster without making any secret of the romance. This throws a clear light on this person, who claims to have received a promise that, provided she disappear and keep quiet before the burial, everything could be published later. Blackmail cannot be excluded here.”37
By the end of March, as Countess Eleonore Hoyos wrote in her diary, “the snake, the viper, the horrific” Helene Vetsera was back in Vienna.38 Helene was still careful to conceal her role in the affair, even from her own family. To her sister Elizabeth in England, she wrote:
I am so much ashamed of myself not having written to you up to now.… You see, in the beginning, I really could not. This thunderbolt that fell on me felled me to the ground. You know how I worshipped Mary, perhaps too much, and that is why I have been cruelly punished. I can assure you that my grief is worse than ever; I cannot see how I am ever to forget all this dreadful past and as long as I do so my life and my thoughts can only be full of anguish.… She left us three such beautiful letters, childish, but also showing that faith that there must be
a world the other side more beautiful than this one.… The last fortnight her nerves must have been very broken; we saw there was something the matter with her, but had no idea as I did not know they knew each other until they were both dead.… I spent six weeks in Venice to patch up my broken nerves and then I came back here to go and see her grave which I had not been able to do before leaving. The coming back into this house was dreadful. From morning to night she was about me (except for the few times she left the house with that bad woman Countess Larisch, who knew everything and who might have saved them through a word) that now I miss her every hour of the day.39
Larisch, for her part, was fighting her own battle against Helene and her Baltazzi brothers. It was, she complained, “a scandal” that they were attempting to “roll everything onto me” and blame her for the liaison. Heinrich had abruptly broken with her—“for him to rant against me,” Larisch raged to one of Helene’s relatives, “is a vile, shameful thing.” Now she was “bitterly set against him,” and she wanted her former lover to know that he “may tremble before my revenge” when she exposed “how the Messrs Baltazzi behave toward women.”40
Worried about the scenes at Heiligenkreuz, Prime Minister Taaffe tried to bribe Helene, offering her a considerable sum of money if she exhumed Mary’s body and took it away for secret burial elsewhere. Infuriated, she refused. Scheming social climber though Helene Vetsera may have been, she felt that she’d been treated appallingly. Brimming with resentment, she now decided to make a spectacle of her daughter’s grave as a permanent irritant to the imperial court. On May 16 she had Mary’s plain pine casket exhumed, placed within a large, ornate copper casket, and reburied in a more prominent grave at Heiligenkreuz, “the most beautiful spot in this world of God’s creation,” Helene wrote, “a heavenly spot, one can call it.”41 An elaborate wrought-iron grille surrounded the new grave’s monument: