by Greg King
Equally popular in the days immediately following Rudolf’s death was the rumor that he’d been shot in a duel. Once again it was the unencumbered French press that took the lead in printing what was only whispered in Vienna. On February 2 Le Figaro reported rumors that Rudolf had “caused serious offense to someone almost as noble as he,” a young woman from a prominent aristocratic family. As a result one of her relatives challenged him to a duel, during which Rudolf was killed.21 That same day Le Matin noted that talk in Vienna “traced the origin of the mystery to the seduction of a young girl of princely family who was an intimate of Archduchess Marie Valerie.” According to this, her brother had shot Rudolf during a duel.22 More details emerged over the next few days: The young woman was a princess and had found herself pregnant with Rudolf’s child. When she confided her situation to her brother, he challenged Rudolf to a duel; Rudolf refused to fire his gun, but not so the outraged brother, who killed him. A lot of hints were dropped about “one of the first families of Austria,” but not until February 9 did Le Temps finally mention the name Auersperg in connection with the gossip.23
Princess Aglaia von Auersperg had indeed been one of Marie Valerie’s confidantes. According to these stories, Rudolf seduced her. When she confessed her pregnancy to her brother Karl, ran the tale, the outraged prince challenged Rudolf to something called an American duel: Two balls, one black, the other white, were placed in a sealed box. When Rudolf blindly pulled out the black ball, he had a set period of time to do the honorable thing and kill himself.24 There was, in this absurd story, no explanation as to Mary’s demise or of her suicide notes. No one took it seriously except the Auerspergs: As late as 1955 the princess’s descendants sued one Viennese newspaper for repeating the salacious gossip.25
Nothing, it seemed, could suppress the wild tales spreading through Vienna. On learning of the tragedy, Papal Nuncio Luigi Galimberti had rushed to Mayerling on the afternoon of January 30. Ostensibly he came to pray over Rudolf’s body, but Court Commissioner Heinrich Slatin thought that Galimberti was more interested in chasing down rumors that Mary Vetsera was there and might also be dead.26
In the week following the tragedy Galimberti seems to have absorbed all the stray bits of gossip circulating in Vienna and passed them on to the German ambassador. On February 9 Prince Reuss reported to Bismarck on the “increased support for the rumor that the Crown Prince, as well as the young lady found on his bed, were murdered.” If true, Reuss speculated, the imperial court had been forced to lie as any judicial investigation would have revealed “the entire, rather immoral circumstances” of Rudolf’s death. “To avoid this, the Emperor is said to have made the possibly much worse and more damaging admission of suicide, which could then be exonerated by insanity.” Then Reuss repeated the rumors about Rudolf that Galimberti had shared: “The bullet did not pass from right to left, as officially stated, but from back left behind the ear upwards, where it left the head. Moreover, other wounds were found on the body.” According to the papal nuncio, the revolver found hadn’t belonged to Rudolf, and its chambers were empty, suggesting that all six bullets had been fired. As for Mary, Galimberti confided that her wound was “not at the temple, as has been maintained, but at the center top of her head. She, too, is said to have had other wounds.”27
This dispatch has loomed large in Mayerling conspiracies, yet closer examination suggests that Reuss was merely passing along what was at best thirdhand gossip—albeit highly placed gossip—as whispered by Papal Nuncio Galimberti. Speculation about the number of bullets fired, for example, circulated in Vienna: In a February 15 article, the correspondent for Le Temps traced them to an unnamed Hungarian aristocrat, who seems to have repeated the claim freely.28 While reporting the tales to Berlin, even Reuss noted that they did “not fit in with the fact that a great many circumstances point to suicide.”29
Galimberti, Reuss noted, heard these rumors from Grand Duke Ferdinand of Tuscany “and from other quarters.”30 Not that these were the only claims circulating: A spurned Mary, went one, castrated Rudolf and then killed herself; he’d suffered numerous wounds fighting off some unnamed assassin, claimed his aunt Archduchess Maria Theresa and Duke Miguel of Braganza to various courtiers; his hands were so injured that they had to be gloved, he had a broken jaw, he was “frightfully mutilated”—on and on the rumors went.31
On July 3, 1907, the Milan newspaper Corriere della Sera noted the death two days earlier of the former Italian ambassador to Vienna, Count Constantine Nigra. The obituary included some startling claims about Mayerling. Nigra, it was said, had accompanied Papal Nuncio Galimberti to the lodge on the afternoon of January 30 and was taken to see Rudolf’s body. A bandage swathed the head; without a word Loschek supposedly unwound the wrappings, and Nigra saw that the skull “was shattered, as if it had been hit with a bottle or a thick stick. Hair and splinters of bone penetrated the brain. A wound gaped under and behind the right ear.”32
In fact some serious questions surround the story attached to Nigra’s name. Between January 31 and February 7, the ambassador sent a total of seven official dispatches back to Rome; in none did he mention having visited the lodge or viewed the corpse—curious omissions if, in fact, the count possessed such vital firsthand information.33 The article also claimed that Nigra accompanied Professor Widerhofer to Mayerling—something patently untrue—and that Franz Josef had arrived at the lodge that afternoon and thrown himself into Nigra’s arms, a touching scene that never happened, as the emperor remained in Vienna.34 The most that can be said is that Nigra may have been at the lodge that afternoon with Galimberti and perhaps viewed Rudolf’s body. But his official dispatches, and the fictitious details attributed to Nigra only after his death, undermine the controversial claims advanced in his name.
The most persistent of all Mayerling theories, though, whispers of a raucous party gone wrong, with Rudolf beaten over the head—usually with a Champagne bottle—and Mary shot by a drunken guest. The next morning, so these stories go, the lodge was in a shambles, with furniture overturned and broken glass strewn across the carpets.35 In 1942 a carpenter at Mayerling named Friedrich Wolf insisted that there were signs of “a bitter struggle” in Rudolf’s bedroom. Blood, he claimed, was spattered over the walls and floor, chairs were overturned and broken, and at least five bullet holes pocked the walls and furniture—evidence that apparently eluded every other person who inspected the room.36
Death by Champagne bottle first appeared in the 1897 German booklet, Der Mord am Kronprinzen Rudolf.37 The story soon took on a life of its own. The anonymous Society Recollections in Paris and Vienna repeated the story in 1907, claiming information from Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s adjutant.38 Then, in 1910, a curious article appeared in The New York Times, quoting an enigmatic “Doctor H”—described as a confidant of Stephanie’s sister Louise, who had supposedly confessed all to him. According to this bit of secondhand gossip, a drunken party at Mayerling, having “reached the point when it was about to turn into an orgy,” took a deadly turn when Rudolf boasted of Mary Vetsera’s physical charms and demanded that she display them to his guests. When she refused, he ripped the bodice from her dress; insulted, she hurled a heavy Champagne glass at his head. Injured and infuriated, Rudolf pulled out his revolver and shot her. Fearing for their lives, the rest of the party fell on Rudolf, battering him over the head—albeit with a candlestick.39 As Princess Louise actually insisted that Rudolf had killed himself, this suspicious tale only further muddied the waters.40
When the theory next arose, it came from a source undeniably close to the Habsburgs: Princess Louisa, daughter of Grand Duke Ferdinand of Tuscany. In her 1911 memoirs Louise described her father’s visit to the Hofburg on the morning of January 31. When Franz Josef took him to view Rudolf’s body, Louisa wrote, the grand duke “was horrified to see that the skull was smashed in, and that pieces of broken bottle glass protruded from it. The face was quite unrecognizable, and two fingers of the right hand had been cut off.” When the gra
nd duke questioned Loschek, the valet supposedly spoke of “a very uproarious dinner” at Mayerling on the night of January 29, during which Rudolf was fatally injured in a drunken brawl. Louisa speculated that Mary had struck him over the head with a Champagne bottle, after which some crazed guest shot her.41
Thereafter the essentials of the story—a drunken brawl with Rudolf beaten over the head with a Champagne bottle, and Mary then shot dead by someone else—regularly cropped up in the accounts of Habsburg courtiers. Young Elisabeth’s governess repeated them in her 1916 anonymously published memoirs, as did Count Roger de Ressegtier, son of one of Franz Josef’s chamberlains, in his 1917 book.42 Laurenz Mayer, the Hofburg court chaplain at the time of Rudolf’s death, repeated the claim to several people, including Artur Polzer-Holditz, head of the Court Chancery under Austria’s last emperor, Karl I.43 Karl Wagemut, chaplain to the family of Duke Robert of Parma—whose daughter Zita became Karl I’s consort—echoed the tale, as did a forester at Mayerling and the son of a policeman who had been on duty at the lodge.44
In 1932 Princess Louisa’s brother Archduke Leopold agreed with his sister’s account of Grand Duke Ferdinand’s visit to the Hofburg. “Standing by the bedside, very cool and collected was the Emperor’s chief physician Dr. Widerhofer,” he wrote, “and Father could hardly restrain himself from crying out in horror when he saw the doctor drawing out of Rudolf’s skull with most business-like precision large pieces of broken green glass. The skull was obviously fractured, for it had several ugly gashes from which the brains were protruding and it was evident that the wound which had been inflicted must have caused instantaneous death.” According to his son, the grand duke believed that some unnamed man—identified only as one of Mary’s admirers—arrived at Mayerling to protest her presence there. An inebriated Rudolf insulted him, and the mysterious visitor picked up a Champagne bottle and struck him over the head, accidentally killing him. On learning of this Mary poisoned herself. “The whole thing,” Leopold quoted his father as saying, “was so frightful that it had to be hushed up.”45
Grand Duke Ferdinand of Tuscany certainly arrived at the Hofburg on the morning of January 31, and seems to have accompanied Franz Josef when the emperor went to view his son’s corpse. He spread any number of rumors questioning the official version of events at Mayerling, principally to Galimberti, but the one thing he apparently never did was to make any claim about seeing glass pulled from Rudolf’s head. That story comes only from two of his children and, under closer examination, collapses.
One problem involves the timeline: Franz Josef received Widerhofer at 6:00 on the morning of January 31; the audience was over by 6:40, when the grand duke arrived at the Hofburg, and shortly after 7:00 Franz Josef—and presumably Ferdinand—entered Rudolf’s bedroom. Widerhofer had wrapped Rudolf’s head at Mayerling; the doctor would have had to race through the Hofburg after meeting Franz Josef, hastily rip the bandage from Rudolf’s skull, and immediately begin extracting glass in order for the grand duke to see him at work. But Widerhofer had no need to examine the head that morning: He’d done so the previous afternoon, and would assist at the autopsy that night. Nor does it make any sense that the emperor would be admitted to view his son’s body if a medical procedure was taking place, much less when Rudolf’s shattered skull was unwrapped and his lacerated brain exposed.
More problematically, as Archduke Leopold admitted, it was “some years later” when the grand duke supposedly confided these details to his children, likely placing it at a time after the Champagne-bottle theory had already appeared in print.46 Princess Louisa published her book in 1911, three years after the grand duke’s death. By this time her family had all but disowned her after she left her husband, Crown Prince Friedrich August of Saxony, and ran away to Switzerland with her children’s French tutor. Her husband divorced her, and in 1903 Franz Josef deprived Louisa of her Austrian rank and titles. Four years later she abandoned the tutor to marry the musician Enrico Toselli; she sought her revenge against the Habsburgs in her memoirs.
Nor did her brother, who confirmed her account several decades later, enjoy a stellar reputation. Like his sister, Archduke Leopold had fallen from favor when, in 1902, he ran off with a woman of notorious reputation and married her, renouncing his rank and titles in the process and adopting the name Leopold Wölfing. Divorce followed in 1907, and thereafter the former archduke moved swiftly from scandal to scandal. Wölfing’s 1932 memoirs are filled with the most absurd, demonstrably false information. Perhaps he simply repeated and elaborated what his sister had claimed in 1911 in an attempt to bolster her story. But their contradictory accounts and varied theories reveal that Louisa and Leopold—like many others—were merely repeating gossip and speculating on what may have happened at Mayerling.
Who, according to these tales, killed Rudolf? On the morning of January 30, Princess Louise of Coburg wrote, an unnamed courtier arrived at her Vienna palace with the alarming news that her husband had murdered the crown prince. Prince Philipp had attended the dinner for Marie Valerie on the evening of January 29 and then promptly disappeared; he did not return home until the afternoon of January 31.47 In a bit of secondhand gossip, it was later said that Duke Miguel of Braganza confided to an official—while intoxicated—that Coburg had killed Rudolf by striking him with a Champagne bottle.48
In 1963 Karl Albrecht, whose policeman father, Thomas, had been on duty at Mayerling, claimed that the duke of Braganza had been responsible for the deaths at Mayerling, apparently acting out of jealousy. According to Albrecht, “Prince Lónyay”—presumably a reference to Elemér Lónyay, who in 1900 became Stephanie’s second husband—had joined the duke in this misadventure.49 In fact the duke of Braganza was with his regiment in Graz on January 29–30.50
But most of these tales name one of Mary’s uncles—usually Alexander or Heinrich Baltazzi—as the man who allegedly wielded the Champagne bottle. Storming into Mayerling to rescue Mary, and finding her in bed with the crown prince, Baltazzi supposedly erupted in anger, battering Rudolf over the head with a bottle and either accidentally shooting his niece as she tried to protect her lover or else killing her in a fury.51 More than a few of these versions insisted that Baltazzi was seriously injured in the battle over Mary’s honor and either quickly succumbed to his wounds or was forcibly exiled from Austria when his crime was discovered.52 Both claims are demonstrably false. Mary’s uncles lived on for several decades, and in Vienna, where they continued to dominate smart society.
Stories of vengeful Baltazzis have a certain appeal but, like the rumors of a murderous forester, they collapse under scrutiny. Who, under this scenario, wrote the suicide letters? And what of the fact that Mary died hours before Rudolf? Few but the most conspiratorially minded took the notions seriously: Had a Baltazzi killed Rudolf, there would have been no reason to obfuscate the truth. The imperial court could certainly have put forward a more convincing—and morally acceptable—story than the version that Rudolf had killed himself. This didn’t stop Baltazzi descendants from strenuously objecting. As late as 1976 Mary’s nephew Heinrich Baltazzi-Scharschmid threatened to sue for libel one author who had repeated the claim.53
Death by Champagne bottle has lingered on in Mayerling theories for more than a century. But, if true, why would the imperial court resort to the far more damaging story that he had killed himself? How would a blow to the head, under any circumstances, be worse for the Catholic emperor than admitting to the suicide of his only son? Three things are apparent. Accounts of drunken parties and glass in Rudolf’s head began to appear only after the 1897 publication of the German booklet Der Mord am Kronprinzen Rudolf, and all are, at best, second- and often third- or fourth-hand versions of supposed events at Mayerling. Then, too, nearly all stemmed from Habsburg relatives or their courtiers. Under ordinary circumstances their intimate proximity to events and actors would lend such tales an aura of credibility. Here, though, it’s hard to escape the sense that these stories originated in a shared goal: to under
mine the idea that Rudolf had killed Mary and then himself, and thus free his memory from the moral odium of murder and suicide.
A strong sentimental romanticism still surrounds the Habsburgs in modern Austria; many refuse to accept that Rudolf shot himself, much less that he killed Mary Vetsera.54 And so, in a quest for more morally palatable alternatives, theories that Rudolf died in a political assassination have increasingly taken hold.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Over the decades tales have emerged from the shadows of history, tales suggesting that Rudolf was murdered for political reasons. Unlike some of the more imaginative stories surrounding his death, these, at least, offer a motive firmly grounded in one of Rudolf’s more troubling misadventures.
Hungary looms large in several of these alternative theories. Although Rudolf had once insisted that the country must forever remain part of the Habsburg empire, his views softened over time and he discreetly threw his support to those aligned against the liberal Hungarian prime minister Kálmán von Tisza.1 Hoping to counter Rudolf, Tisza sought to neutralize the crown prince with a powerful appeal to his vanity. The Ausgleich of 1867 preserved, at least in theory, Hungary’s right to demand its own king; in 1883 Tisza suggested that Rudolf could assume the throne. Hungary would remain part of the Habsburg empire, but Rudolf would take Franz Josef’s title as Apostolic King of Hungary.2
Agents shadowed Rudolf’s every movement, and a network of spies regularly intercepted, read, and reported his private correspondence to his great-uncle Archduke Albrecht. The humorless Albrecht was aghast on learning of the Hungarian proposal. “I must warn you against it,” he counseled Rudolf, “because the title of Majesty that you would acquire would only flatter your vanity.”3 And so the crown prince let himself be talked out of the idea—a move he deeply regretted as the years passed and political power and influence remained elusive.