by Greg King
Among those names whispered as her father was one very highly placed individual indeed: Emperor Franz Josef. The rumor has floated through the Mayerling story like a piece of fetid flotsam no one wanted to touch.13 Stephanie’s sister Louise hinted that with the affair, Mary had placed Rudolf “in an impossible position.”14 And Rudolf’s cousin Louisa of Tuscany wrote of her belief that the emperor had made “certain disclosures” to his son “in order to prove that an insurmountable barrier existed between Mary Vetsera and himself, and that any affection between them, as lovers, was impossible.”15 This was as close as any member of Rudolf’s family would come to hinting at this rather scandalous possibility.
This terrible concern, runs the speculation, led a frantic Franz Josef finally to confront his son over the affair and confess the dark secret that Mary Vetsera might be his illegitimate daughter. In this case the truth was irrelevant: There was, in 1889, no way to know for sure, but the slightest hint that this was indeed a possibility—that Rudolf might now be involved in an incestuous romance with his half sister—would have threatened the monarchy. If word of this got out—and Franz Josef, knowing Helene Vetsera’s reputation, may well have worried that it would—the scandal would have been immense. He may even have suspected that Helene had engineered her daughter’s liaison with the crown prince to launch an elaborate blackmail scheme. For Rudolf a possibly incestuous liaison would have been bad enough; but if Mary was indeed pregnant, or told Rudolf that she was, the crown prince now faced an untenable situation.
Another crushing blow was about to land on Rudolf’s shoulders. Given the empire’s extensive network of informers and secret agents, it would not have been difficult to ferret out the crown prince’s links with those agitating for independence in Budapest. This would have been worrisome enough, but on January 25, Rudolf’s friend István Károly inadvertently blew up the entire affair.
That Friday, Károly had leaked word to the press that he was in regular contact with Rudolf; in a heavy hint he told reporters that “a very trustworthy source” had assured him that Hungary would soon be independent.16 Károly followed this opening salvo when he rose from his parliamentary seat in Budapest that afternoon and spoke out against the pending Army Reform Bill that Prime Minister Tisza had proposed at Vienna’s request. If Károly could win enough support to his side when the vote was taken on Monday, January 28, he could force a no-confidence vote and bring down Tisza’s government—and thus set in motion plans for Hungarian independence. Károly’s indiscretions left official Vienna in little doubt that the crown prince was involved in a traitorous plot. Indeed, when Count Szögyény-Marich searched Rudolf’s desk in the Hofburg on January 31, he did so under the watchful eye of an official sent by Franz Josef specifically to retrieve “a document which relates to the last major controversies in the family,” likely a reference to the Hungarian misadventure.17
Within hours of Károly’s remarks, already saddled with worry over the Vetsera affair and facing his son’s disloyalty, the emperor apparently learned of yet another of Rudolf’s transgressions: that the crown prince had foolishly asked that his marriage be annulled. This, at least, is what many believed—and not without some evidence; indeed, two weeks after the tragedy at Mayerling newspapers in Berlin were thrilling their readers with tales of “a very violent confrontation” between the emperor and his heir over an annulment request.18 Although the purge of official documents makes it impossible to verify, some surprisingly consistent and convincing information moves the idea beyond mere rumor. Marie Festetics, Empress Elisabeth’s faithful lady-in-waiting, confirmed that Rudolf requested an annulment; so too did Auxiliary Bishop Dr. Gottfried Marschall, chaplain to the household of Franz Josef’s brother Archduke Karl Ludwig, and someone with impeccable ties to both the court and Church hierarchy.19 And few in the Mayerling story were better placed than Princess Louise of Coburg: Intimate information came from both her sister Stephanie and from her husband, Prince Philipp, who, as one of Rudolf’s few trusted friends, was undoubtedly privy to the crown prince’s secrets. And Louise insisted that Rudolf tried to get his marriage dissolved.20
Four others, indisputably in the crown prince’s confidence, also confirmed his annulment request. Latour von Thurmberg, Rudolf’s faithful friend and former tutor, confidently asserted that Rudolf had written to Pope Leo XIII asking to have his marriage dissolved.21 Rudolf also apparently discussed the issue with Moritz Szeps, as his daughter Bertha—drawing on private conversations and her father’s papers—related.22 Viktor von Fritsche, his private secretary, later claimed that Rudolf had applied for an annulment on the grounds of Stephanie’s infertility, but that Pope Leo had refused the request.23 Perhaps most convincingly, Ladislaus von Szögyény-Marich, Rudolf’s friend and the executor of his estate, told the Russian chargé d’affaires that the crown prince had asked that his marriage be annulled.24 As the man who sorted through Rudolf’s private papers after his death, and handed off any potentially damning documents to the emperor’s representative, Szögyény-Marich would have known if such correspondence had once existed.
Prince Heinrich Reuss—having heard the story—decided to tackle it head-on by confronting Monsignor Luigi Galimberti, the papal nuncio to the Habsburg court. In a dispatch to Berlin dated February 5, 1889, Reuss reported that Galimberti “denied all knowledge. Nothing concerning such a matter had passed through his hands.” But then Galimberti added a curious caveat: Perhaps, he suggested, the pope had not answered Rudolf directly but instead sent the request on to Stephanie’s father, King Leopold II, in Brussels; the king of Belgium, Galimberti said, could then have forwarded it to Franz Josef in Vienna.25 If no such request had been made, it was unlikely that Galimberti would lay out such a detailed scenario regarding transmission of the pope’s alleged nonreply.
Despite intensive searches, no request for an annulment has ever been found, but then, nearly all of the sensitive documents concerning Rudolf’s last months and his death have disappeared. In this particular case, absence of evidence cannot be taken as evidence. That Rudolf was unhappy in his marriage was widely known. Having infected Stephanie with gonorrhea and made her barren, he knew that she could never bear him the son and heir he needed. Surely the future emperor of the very Catholic Habsburg empire would have recognized the impossibility of an annulment or divorce—if he intended to sit on the Austrian throne. But if Rudolf was indeed involved in a conspiracy aimed at taking the Hungarian crown, it is possible that any annulment request concerned the throne in Budapest. He would establish a new dynasty, and a dynasty must have heirs to cement continuity. Once on the throne, Rudolf would need a suitable consort, some princess from a proud and ancient Magyar family who could then provide him with children clearly Hungarian in dynastic origin. If, as seems likely, Rudolf not only threw in his lot with the rebels in Budapest but also asked for an annulment—an unthinkable action for the future emperor of Austria-Hungary and crown prince of the proudly Catholic Habsburg dynasty—it only underlines just how unstable his thinking had become.
The accumulated weight of these threatening scandals was too much for even the notoriously nonconfrontational emperor to bear. Early on the morning of Saturday, January 26, Franz Josef unexpectedly summoned Rudolf to that urgent audience at the Hofburg. Precisely what was said remains a mystery, but it seems likely that this uncomfortable confrontation, perhaps spurred on by the previous day’s developments in Budapest, encompassed not only Rudolf’s Hungarian conspiracy but also his requested annulment. The first was not merely a traitorous act: It went against every concept of loyalty and honor that Franz Josef held dear, an overtly hostile effort aimed directly at the emperor. As to the second, both Latour von Thurmberg and Szögyény-Marich repeated that the annulment request infuriated Franz Josef, who may have feared that his son wanted to wed Mary Vetsera once Stephanie was presumably out of the way. “Overwhelmed with grief and rage,” Latour von Thurmberg asserted, “he summoned the Crown Prince to his presence and told him in terrible
agitation and with brutal candor that on no condition would he sanction such insane behavior.”26 There was, Szögyény-Marich said, a “violent scene” between father and son. “After this I know what remains for me to do,” Rudolf was quoted as telling his father. “Do whatever you like,” the emperor supposedly replied. “I will never agree to your separation.”27 According to Stephanie, Franz Josef told his son that there was “only one way out” of his predicament.28 The crown prince left the audience visibly shaken and pale, his father shouting, “You are not worthy to be my successor!”29 As Rudolf had presumably pledged to end the affair with Mary, these words cannot have referred to that relationship. Instead they seemed aimed at either the Hungarian plot or the annulment request or both. In this context the emperor’s later remark to Widerhofer about Rudolf’s death is telling: “God’s ways are inscrutable. Perhaps He has sent me this trial to spare me yet a harder one.”30 This strongly hinted that, had his son lived, the emperor would have faced some fearful ordeal over his son’s behavior.
This confrontation left Rudolf unnerved. From the Hofburg he drove out into the countryside with his cousin Archduke Otto, relieving his frustration by shooting ducks.31 He was clearly still on edge the following morning, when he stormed unannounced into Marie Larisch’s suite at the Grand Hotel: Rudolf, she said, was “very excited,” and seemed shaken. “You cannot possibly realize the trouble in which I am plunged,” he told his cousin, adding that he was “in very great danger” from a “political” problem. It was then that he handed her the sealed box, explaining, “It is imperative that it should not be found in my possession, for at any moment the Emperor may order my personal belongings to be seized.” This was surely a reference to the Hungarian conspiracy, for he added, “If I were to confide in the Emperor, I should sign my own death warrant.”32
And the troublesome liaison with Mary also preyed on his mind—“I’m in a devil of a mess in more ways than one,” he told Larisch. Having agreed to his father’s demand that he end the affair, he asked Larisch to bring Mary to the Hofburg the following morning. He explained to his cousin that he’d tried to get rid of Mary but “she won’t be shaken off.” The situation had become critical. Mary, he complained, was “a perfect little devil” who had “lost her head” and now threatened to “kick over the traces and cause a regular scandal.” The affair, he finished, “would not matter so much if it did not clash with far more important things.”33
The remarks suggest something of Rudolf’s shattered nerves. He’d been trying to ease Mary out of his life but she wouldn’t go; now she was using her possible pregnancy to force some concession or she would cause a scandal—a possibility made even more worrisome if his father had indeed warned that Mary might be his half sister. The blows had followed rapidly, one atop another over a momentous forty-eight hours: Mary, revelation of his apparent request for an annulment, and exposure of Rudolf’s involvement with the Hungarian rebels. The crown prince’s world was collapsing.
Mary’s world, too, was collapsing around her. Since her January 13 meeting with Rudolf, she had moved blissfully through the month, certain that her future with the crown prince was secure. Then, on Saturday, January 26—just as Rudolf was facing his father at the Hofburg—Mary also found herself confronted. The previous night she’d heard the fortune-teller’s dire warning of impending death and agonized over the prediction. Something about Mary’s behavior finally unnerved her maid, Agnes Jahoda. She’d been Mary’s confidante, had known all about the liaison, had helped Mary slip into Bratfisch’s fiacre to keep assignations with Rudolf, and had seen the cigarette case Mary had purchased and sent the crown prince. She kept her silence, at least until that Saturday morning, when something pushed her over the edge. It is likely that, worried about her job—and that of her porter father—Agnes now went to Helene Vetsera and warned her that Mary might be pregnant.
Agnes was not only Mary’s confidante but also her maid: She would have known if her young mistress suddenly had no sanitary napkins to be washed. Whatever she suspected or had been told, Agnes no longer felt that she could keep Mary’s secrets. This at least helps explain Helene’s outburst: Mary’s “crazy action,” she warned, “could compromise her terribly.”34 Helene had centered all of her considerable ambitions on Mary. The liaison with Rudolf might be parlayed into social recognition, financial gain, and acceptance at court, but it would inevitably end; when that time came Mary would have to make a suitable marriage, perhaps to the duke of Braganza, to advance the family’s fortunes.
An unexpected pregnancy threatened these plans. If Mary’s reputation had been questionable before her affair with Rudolf, a possible pregnancy would leave her thoroughly damaged. There was also the possibility that an infuriated Franz Josef might exile the troublesome Vetseras from Vienna. After searching her daughter’s room, an infuriated Helene apparently summoned her brother Alexander Baltazzi to an urgent family conference before they confronted Mary with a new plan clearly born of desperation. Baltazzi would take Mary away to Constantinople at once and there marry her; this would allow her to give birth as a married woman and disguise the circumstances of the child’s paternity. Not that Helene had entirely abandoned her ambitions: After giving birth Mary could return to Vienna and, as she told Princess Nora Fugger, “do whatever she wished without ruining her reputation”—in other words, continue the affair with Rudolf.35
Mary was horrified. She had no wish to marry her uncle, nor did she want to abandon her relationship with Rudolf. The scene must have devolved into chaos as a terrified Mary fled her mother’s house, seeking refuge with Marie Larisch at the Grand Hotel. Larisch remembered that she was hysterical. “You’ve no idea what a cruel mother I have!” Mary sobbed. “Mama wants to sell me.” Helene, she complained, had “blamed me for bringing disgrace on our family—the virtuous Vetseras!” If Larisch sent her back, Mary declared, “I’ll throw myself in the Danube!”36
At the hotel Mary must have told Larisch about the confrontation with her uncle Alexander, for the countess wrote to Rudolf of an “incident” that Saturday between Mary and “A”—almost certainly Baltazzi—that left both women frightened. Larisch, in fact, said that she was afraid to leave Mary alone with “A” because she thought him “capable of anything.”37 When Larisch finally managed to return Mary to her mother’s house that evening, the unpleasantness started again, with an angry Helene complaining that her daughter was now “openly compromised.”38
Fate brought Rudolf and Mary publicly together one last time on Sunday evening at the Reuss soiree. Having ordered his son to end the affair, Franz Josef must have been stunned to see Mary Vetsera strutting about the ballroom, her eyes following Rudolf’s every move. Perhaps, as Rudolf complained to Moritz Szeps a few hours later, the emperor had turned his back to his son on witnessing the scene. This apparent slight, the scene between Mary and Stephanie, and the bitter words exchanged with his wife as they departed the embassy left Rudolf, as Szeps recalled, “in a dreadful state of nervous excitement.”39 By the time he appeared at Mitzi Caspar’s early Monday morning, Rudolf had apparently embraced the possibility that suicide offered the only escape from the avalanche of problems cascading down upon him. Mitzi had heard him speak of suicide before, but now Rudolf told her that he was about to “shit on the government” and kill himself at Mayerling.40 This interpretation is borne out by Rudolf’s final action when he left Mitzi at three that morning: For the first time he made the sign of the cross on her forehead, suggesting that, if the Hungarian plans collapsed, he was resolute in the decision to end his life.41
Rudolf and Mary were on two different paths. He had wanted to escape the liaison even before the confrontation with his father; possible revelation of questions about Mary’s paternity would have ensured his agreement to end it. If the following day’s parliamentary vote in Budapest went against the Magyar nationalists, Rudolf was prepared to end his life. But Mary was still deeply immersed in the personal romance she had woven around the affair. Happily u
naware that Rudolf had promised to end their affair, she was triumphant, defiant in the face of family resistance. In less than forty hours these two divergent paths would collide in a shower of blood and gore.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
After Saturday’s confrontation with his father, Rudolf abruptly changed his plans, deciding to go to Mayerling on Tuesday rather than wait until the middle of the week. Sunday morning he asked Larisch to bring Mary to the Hofburg the following day: He’d assured his father that he would end the relationship, and it is likely that he planned to do so that Monday. As the crown prince complained to his cousin, he had too many other, “far more important things” to consider: “I cannot waste my time on love.”1
But anxiety seems to have intervened. Mary was no shrinking violet: With her emotional tantrums and penchant for histrionics there might well be a scene—and prying servants with open ears filled the Hofburg. Things might go badly, and leaving a newly spurned Mary in gossip-hungry Vienna, in the clutches of her scheming and unpredictable mother, perhaps seemed too great a risk, especially if Rudolf still held out hope for the Hungarian scheme. The scene at the German Embassy Sunday night probably pushed Rudolf to change his plans. Early the next morning he abruptly decided to go out to Mayerling that afternoon instead of the following day, and to take Mary with him. Retreating with her to the lodge not only postponed the inevitable: Mayerling also offered privacy, ensuring that any outbursts could be contained. Rudolf’s decision was so abrupt, in fact, that he ignored everything else. He was so eager to get away from Vienna that he didn’t even bother to cancel a Monday-afternoon appointment with Archbishop Count Schönborn-Buchheim—perhaps in reference to his annulment request—nor did he apparently give any thought to a meeting he was scheduled to attend at the army historical museum, the Arsenal, later that same day.2