by Greg King
Rudolf had gone to dinner knowing that he would die but expecting that Mary would listen to reason, obey him, and let Bratfisch take her back to Vienna early the next morning. But now he found that she’d written her notes and was resolute in joining him in death. An argument erupted: Loschek later said that he heard Rudolf and Mary “speaking in very serious tones,” though he claimed he had no idea what was being said.10 This doesn’t ring true: If Loschek described the conversation as “very serious,” he must have heard at least some of what was being discussed.
And there can be little doubt that the conversation turned on suicide: Rudolf’s decision to kill himself, his efforts to talk Mary out of joining him, and her adamant stance that she die by his side. The more he argued, the more she insisted: “she probably did not want to be sent home,” was the way Franz Josef’s adjutant Eduard Paar phrased it to Helene Vetsera, who recorded her daughter’s “resistance” to leaving the lodge.11 Mary seems to have done everything in her power to remain: She undid her hair, took off her ice-skating ensemble, folded the skirt, jacket, and blouse, and neatly placed them on a chair—presumably in the hope that her nakedness would prevent Rudolf from forcing her out of the bedroom, that she might tempt him with her body and thus prolong the illusion of romance. Yet Rudolf apparently resisted. When found he was fully clothed and wore his boots, making it extremely unlikely that he undressed that night.
Countless books and films have portrayed what happened next: a contented Mary quietly lying down on the bed, closing her eyes, and drifting off into an untroubled sleep; a watchful Rudolf, gazing on his beloved, waiting until she was at peace before finally putting his revolver to her head. Yet the evidence tells a very different story. Mary was found completely covered in congealed blood that had erupted from her nose and mouth and gushed down to her waist; her eyes were open and she clutched a handkerchief in her left hand. Had she been supine on the bed at the time of her death, the flow of blood would have been limited to her face, neck, and shoulders. The blood extending to and pooling on her waist meant that Mary was awake, sitting up on the right side of the bed, when she was shot; the handkerchief suggests that she was crying. Loschek confirmed this positioning: Mary’s head, he recorded, “hung down”—an impossibility if she was flat upon the bed.12
The shot came abruptly and took Mary by surprise. Rudolf seems to have fired his revolver in the midst of the ongoing “very serious” discussion. What may have been said can never be known: perhaps the impulsive Mary, in a last bid to convince Rudolf to let her stay and die at his side, threatened to reveal everything if he forced her to return to Vienna. Something must have suddenly set him off and pushed Rudolf over the edge. The same man who had wanted Mary to leave Mayerling suddenly pulled his revolver and apparently shot her without warning. He must have been at the left side of the bed as he suddenly thrust the gun at Mary’s head and pulled the trigger; powder burns around the entrance wound, as well as scorching of her hair, indicate that the revolver was only a few inches from her forehead when she was shot. The bullet traversed her skull at roughly a thirty-degree downward trajectory, passing from the upper left temple through the brain and exiting just above her right ear canal. Death was immediate.13
And, despite conflicting stories that emerged after the 1959 exhumation, it is clear that Mary was shot in the head. The evidence is overwhelming: Loschek, Hoyos, Widerhofer, Auchenthaler, Heinrich Slatin, Alexander Baltazzi, and Georg Stockau, all saw the bullet wound in Mary’s temple; so too did Alois Klein when he pulled Mary’s skull from her shattered coffin in 1959. The Viennese forensic expert Dr. Christian Reiter confirmed this during his own examination in the 1990s. Despite the skull’s fragmented state, Reiter located a small groove just above and behind the left eye socket, whose beveled edges indicated the bullet’s entrance; a corresponding wound on the right side of the head where the projectile exited had caused extensive fracturing to the skull.14
Loschek must have heard the shot that killed Mary. That he knew more than he was willing to admit seems clear. When Loschek dictated his memoirs in 1928, he claimed to have heard two gunshots shortly after six that morning. This seems to have been invention, at least about the number of shots. Not only did Loschek fail to mention hearing any such shots to Hoyos that morning, but he also omitted this claim when speaking to officials: The protocol written by Chief of Police Krauss the following morning repeated the essentials of Loschek’s story but made no reference to any gunshots being heard.15
Having listened at the bedroom door closely enough to relate that Rudolf and Mary had a “very serious” conversation, and perhaps having heard talk of possible suicide, Loschek may eventually have retired to his own adjacent room. While the outer walls of the lodge were up to three feet thick in places, the inner walls were not: An ordinary masonry wall separated the two bedrooms, and the doors were only an inch thick.16 Loschek could not have missed the gunshot that killed Mary, fired less than twenty feet away from his bed. His immediate reaction must have been worry, especially if he suspected that the crown prince had suicide in mind: Logically he would have rushed to knock on Rudolf’s bedroom door, asking if his master was all right. If this happened, Rudolf must have given Loschek some assurance, speaking to him either through the closed door or cracking it open to alleviate his concerns. Given Rudolf’s unnerving habit of carelessly waving pistols around, perhaps he simply explained away the noise as an accidental discharge; perhaps he admitted that Mary was dead and ordered Loschek to say nothing until he could think through the situation. But whatever happened left Loschek open to later charges of incompetence: If he’d heard the first shot and done nothing for six hours, he might be held responsible for not having intervened and saved the crown prince’s life. With his master dead, facing investigations, and now reliant on the imperial court for his job and pension, Loschek claimed complete ignorance at the time; only later did he invent his tale of hearing two shots after six that morning, offering a scenario in which he thought history would hold him blameless.
Loschek also likely heard the single gunshot sometime after six that morning—the shot that Rudolf put through his brain. And this accounts for some otherwise inexplicable statements that have haunted the Mayerling story. How else, for example, with just a quick glimpse through the hacked-open door panel and before he actually set foot in the bedroom, was Loschek able to tell Hoyos and Coburg that both Rudolf and Mary were dead? He must have put together the argument he overheard, his master’s talk of suicide, the first gunshot, the second, later shot, and the locked bedroom door and concluded that the worst had happened. It also seems likely that early that morning Loschek told Bratfisch—waiting in his carriage to take Mary back to Vienna—that both Rudolf and the baroness had died; this would explain the coachman’s startling declaration to Wodicka, ninety minutes before the bodies were found, that Rudolf was dead.
Having likely dealt with a worried Loschek, Rudolf returned to the macabre scene of his lover’s corpse. In death, as he wrote to his mother, Mary became a “pure, atoning angel.”17 But the man who for so long had toyed with the idea of death now saw the reality of what he had done in a fit of anger: the singed and bloody entry wound in Mary’s temple, the ugly gush of crimson that had poured from her nose and mouth and covered her body. The sight must have unnerved him, for he did nothing to conceal the horror: He did not even close her vacant, staring eyes.
Looking at Mary’s increasingly cold body, Rudolf lost his own nerve to act. Had he really desired death with her, had he really believed that his life was meaningless without her, Rudolf would have killed himself immediately. Instead he passed the next six hours drinking, perhaps taking morphine, and writing his own letters as he tried to work up his courage. In one sense Mary’s death forced his hand. He was already politically humiliated, shamed by his father, and psychologically overwhelmed. Shooting Mary only added to the burdens crushing him. Yet even at this last minute, had Rudolf truly wanted to live, it wouldn’t have been impossible for h
im to escape the consequences of his actions: Mary’s death could be disguised, the true circumstances concealed, and her relatives bribed into silence. But too many disappointments had already fallen on Rudolf’s shoulders for him to think clearly. Mary might have been his willing victim, but he’d killed her.
In those lonely hours Rudolf’s determination gradually took hold. There was, to be sure, an element of hostility in his act. He had once thought to theatrically kill himself with Mitzi Caspar in a neoclassical temple dedicated to the emperor and his empire, a flamboyant rebuke to all that Franz Josef held dear. While reflecting his disillusion with life, Rudolf’s suicide at Mayerling also carried a message of revenge against his father, the inert government, his neglectful mother, and his despised wife.
Unlike Mary, Rudolf wrote only four letters in those early morning hours. With the possible exception of the letter to Marie Valerie, those later found in his locked desk at the Hofburg—to Stephanie, to Baron Maurice Hirsch, and to Mitzi Caspar—were almost certainly written in the weeks and—as with the one to Mitzi, even as early as seven months—before he went to Mayerling.18 Rudolf had thus been preparing for his possible death for some time. Of the Hofburg letters, only those to Stephanie and Marie Valerie hinted at his motives. “Death alone can save my good name,” Rudolf wrote to his wife.19 To his sister Rudolf mentioned only “the need” to kill himself but, she recorded, “gave no reason.”20 Ida von Ferenczy told Empress Elisabeth’s early biographer Count Corti that it also included the line, “I do not die willingly, but I must do so to save my honor.”21
Rudolf’s messages to Loschek and the draft telegram to Abbot Grünböck at Heiligenkreuz said nothing of his motives. Only the letter to Empress Elisabeth offered possible explanations, though they were contradictory. “I no longer have the right to live,” he apparently wrote. “I have killed.”22 Only now do these words make sense. Mary had been willing to go to her death at his side, but he’d actually murdered her. She was his victim. After declaring that death was necessary “to save his stained honor,” Rudolf wrote of his father, “I know quite well that I am not worthy to be his son.”23 This repeated nearly exactly the emperor’s dismissal of his son after their contentious Saturday meeting: “You are not worthy to be my successor!”
The words to Rudolf’s mother carry two implications. The first, and most apparent, suggests that exposure of his traitorous behavior finally overwhelmed Rudolf’s conscience, and that he truly believed his actions had left him dishonored and unworthy. But there is a second, perhaps more likely, psychological explanation. By using his father’s own words in his suicide note, by throwing them back as the driving force behind his desperate act, Rudolf was laying the blame for his suicide squarely at the emperor’s doorstep. This explanation seems likely, especially when taken together with the fact that Rudolf pointedly wrote no letter for his father. He wanted Franz Josef to feel responsible for his death, to exact the only revenge he had left against the man he blamed for many of his miseries in life.
These two reasons—saving his name and his honor—again point to the Hungarian conspiracy as the principal motivation behind Rudolf’s decision to end his life. He had made a similar claim to Mitzi Caspar in the summer of 1888, indicating that he had begun flirting with the idea far earlier than previously suspected. Yet repeated use of the word “honor” also suggests that Rudolf was suffering from delusions of grandeur, a characteristic of his possible Bipolar I disorder, which led him to exaggerate events and his role in them until they assumed critical importance. “Honor” became an excuse, a means by which Rudolf sought to absolve himself of his own decision.
Rudolf’s letter to Count Szögyény-Marich offers the clearest insight into his final thinking. “I must die—it’s the only way to leave this world like a gentleman,” he explained. That it was written in Hungarian is telling; even more telling was its line, “With warmest regards and with all good wishes for yourself and for our adored Hungarian fatherland.”24 There was no mention of Austria or the empire—only Hungary, confirming that this had been the sole focus of Rudolf’s thoughts. Failure of the conspiracy became the final, staggering blow in a life already overwhelmed with disappointments and traumas both physical and psychological.
The later autopsy finding that Rudolf had been of unsound mind when he killed himself was a religious convenience, meant to ensure his Catholic burial. He was not insane, but the physicians unknowingly hit upon a truth that would not become apparent until the advent of modern psychiatry. After having killed Mary, after sitting with her stiffening corpse for hours, after having written his own suicide notes, Rudolf could whistle lightheartedly after speaking to Loschek at 6:10 that Wednesday morning. In the last hours of his life Rudolf may thus have been in the midst of a manic episode caused by Bipolar I disorder.25 A few minutes later, with the door locked behind him, Rudolf sat on the bed beside his lover’s corpse, put his revolver to his right temple, and calmly blew his brains against the wall, finally snuffing out a life begun with such promise and now ending alone and in such misery.
EPILOGUE
In his last will, dated March 3, 1887, Rudolf had named his father as guardian of his young daughter, Archduchess Elisabeth. It was an unsubtle slap at Stephanie, who in the wake of her husband’s death found herself pushed aside and ignored as a nonentity. In the empress’s absences, Franz Josef asked his sister-in-law Archduchess Maria Theresa to take over Stephanie’s previous role as the highest-ranking lady to preside over court functions.1 However, it did not take Stephanie long to recover from whatever grief she felt over Rudolf’s death: In letters to her sister Louise she seemed most upset at the loss of her position as future empress. Scarcely a month after Mayerling, she was again using Louise to arrange meetings with her lover, Artur Potocki, explaining that it was easier for them to reunite in Vienna than elsewhere.2
As the crown princess widow, Stephanie kept her apartments at the Hofburg, though feeling unwelcome in Vienna, she lived mainly at Schloss Laxenburg and at Miramar in Trieste. In these years she nursed a growing resentment of her late husband and his family—and not without some justification. Empress Elisabeth still blamed her for Rudolf’s death: “You hated your father, you did not love your husband, and you do not love your daughter!” she once shrieked at Stephanie.3 Entirely dependent on the emperor’s financial largesse, Stephanie felt belittled and humiliated. Franz Josef also used young Elisabeth as a weapon in the battle, refusing to let Stephanie take her out of Austria to visit her relatives in Belgium.4 The emperor doted on Erzsi, showering her with the gifts that Stephanie could not, and as a result the girl came to resent her mother. Elisabeth had adored her father, and—like her paternal grandmother—unfairly blamed her mother for his death.
A further break came in 1900, when Stephanie did the unthinkable and remarried. Potocki had died of cancer in 1890: “I have lost my best friend,” Stephanie confided to Louise, “a man I valued so highly and love so much.”5 By 1900 she had fallen in love with Hungarian Count Elemér Lónyay de Nagy-Lónyay és Vásárosnamény. Franz Josef greeted the news with horror, regarding the marriage as an insult to Rudolf’s memory.6 When, on March 22, 1900, Stephanie married Lónyay at Miramar, the emperor stripped her of her titles of crown princess widow and archduchess of Austria.7 The newly married couple withdrew almost completely from public life, living at his Schloss Oroszvár in Slovakia. Young Erzsi, now sixteen, followed her grandfather’s lead and cut off all contact with her mother.
Erzsi proved herself equal to her difficult parents, falling in love with Prince Otto Weriand von Windisch-Grätz. Not only was he a decade older than Erzsi but he was also engaged to another woman at the time. Elisabeth went straight to her grandfather, insisting that he let her marry Otto despite the scandal. The prince soon found himself summoned to an imperial audience, where the emperor ordered him to break off his current engagement and instead propose to Elisabeth.8 The prince complied, and he and Elisabeth were married at the Hofburg in January 1902.
Elisabeth could do nothing about her marriage while her grandfather lived—and as Rudolf had feared—Franz Josef seemed destined to live forever. While, after Mayerling, Franz Josef retreated further and further into a narrow world dominated by bureaucratic paperwork, Empress Elisabeth continued to wander Europe, a dangerously thin figure habitually draped in black. In 1898 an Italian anarchist stabbed her to death while she was on holiday at Geneva. “No one,” the emperor cried on hearing the news, “knows how we loved each other!”10
The emperor did his best to forget Rudolf, though every January 30 he faithfully visited his tomb at the Capuchin Crypt to pray. “Tomorrow,” he wrote to Elisabeth in 1896, “is the painful day when our thoughts unite us in prayer for our dear Rudolf. Seven years have passed, the pain has eased, but the tragic memory and the irrevocable loss to the future remains.”11 Everyone at court knew never to mention the late crown prince’s name. In 1901, when a newly appointed courtier casually spoke of Rudolf, Eduard Paar, the emperor’s adjutant, warned him, “Leave that. That’s a subject we don’t like to talk about.”12 In 1903 Franz Josef took his revenge against Mariano Rampolla, the Vatican state secretary who had objected to a Catholic burial for the crown prince and who, in protest, had persuaded his fellow cardinals to boycott the requiem held in Rome for Rudolf. When Leo XIII died, everyone expected the College of Cardinals to elect Rampolla as pope. But, using an antiquated relic of Habsburg days as Holy Roman Emperors, Franz Josef vetoed his election; instead the conclave was forced to select Cardinal Giuseppe Sarto, who became Pius X.13