Of course Wilhelm realized damn well who was obscuring his magnificence and didn’t wait too long with a counterblow. It came out of the blue at a reception in the Palace. Walking up to his Habsburg hosts Wilhelm suddenly rapped out a series of pronouncements: He was Austria’s military ally. As such he was obliged to draw Franz Joseph’s attention to a mistake made by the Austrian Army. It had ordered several hundred thousand Mannlicher Repeater Rifles with a caliber of eight millimeters. This ammunition was much too heavy to be carried by soldiers in quick-firing quantities! Responsibility for this rested squarely on the Inspector General of the Austrian Infantry!
Rudolf stood among the group to whom this declaration was made. He was the Inspector General. But since he had assumed his office less than seven months ago—when the Mannlicher decision had already been made—he could have defended himself easily. He said nothing, however. He bowed and left. Franz Joseph limited himself to observing that he was aware of the matter. His wife, the Empress Elisabeth, turned her back on Wilhelm and followed her son. A Russian diplomat (St. Petersburg’s Ambassador to Brussels) who witnessed the scene found it mortifying.
Somehow the surface of the incident was smoothed over. On the night of October 5, Wilhelm departed for a shoot in Styria, and Franz Joseph escorted his guest. The King of Saxony joined the party. Rudolf came along, too, after a day’s delay. There was no “elegant hunting accident” to dispatch Wilhelm. Still, the Austrians obtained another, though smaller satisfaction. Soon the newspapers reported that the Emperor, the Crown Prince and the King of Saxony bagged a stag each. The Kaiser scored zero. He was getting wet for nothing. It had begun to rain and to freeze.
“While sitting in my blind in the storm,” Franz Joseph wrote his wife on October 7, “my beard and the entire left side of my face became encrusted with ice…” Three days later his lines to Frau Schratt reported worse woe. “It is snowing higher up, storming everywhere and yet we hunt daily. In the very early morning while everybody else is sleeping, I work by lamplight, and at night at dinner and afterwards I must keep up my amiability…horrible…”
It was no pleasure for Rudolf either. The rain kept raining and the Emperors kept hunting because protocol demanded it and because Wilhelm’s martial ego would have it so. He finally did bring down his stag. Yet the rain would not let up until he left Austria at the end of the week.
Chapter 11
The Prussian was gone, and had left behind him a city which, as Szeps put it in a letter to Rudolf, “suffered a hangover without having first enjoyed a spree.” Habsburg had performed well against Hohenzollern during most of the ceremonial joustings, and yet the aftertaste of the visit was bitter. Wilhelm had not come as a junior emperor deferring to his senior. He had descended on Vienna as a generalissimo descends on some outpost in Graustark, allowing himself to be entertained by the native chief—and finding the bayonets of the garrison sheer marzipan. Nothing great had come of the experience. Only a whiff of contempt.
Whiff became gust after the Kaiser returned to Germany. Here Wilhelm’s press began to close in on one Viennese in particular. Two German journals, the Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung and the Neue Deutsche Kreuzzeitung, outdid each other in stabbing, without naming, Rudolf: The Reich could not tolerate a comrade-in-arms rotting at the center. The Reich deserved better than an ally corrupted by highly placed bleeding hearts, by liberal sermonizers and questionable financiers. The Reich could not allow this clique—this Golden International—to foment trouble between two German nations.
“The Golden International” was a not-so-oblique spit at Rudolf and his Jewish friends Baron Hirsch and Moritz Szeps. Naturally Rudolf decided to fight back. But he thought that the answering salvo would be fired more effectively from a source other than Szeps’s Wiener Tagblatt. Toward the end of October a new weekly in Vienna, Schwarz-Gelb (“Black-Yellow,” the Austrian colors) carried a cool polemic against “the peculiar overconfidence” prevailing in Berlin. “We ought not to risk the bones of one of our soldiers to defend Prussian domination…” The unpronounced but unmistakable target of the article was the German Emperor. Wilhelm counted on Austria’s obedient support for any of his military ventures in pursuit of a greater Reich—and Schwarz-Gelb was sniping at this presumption.
Only one culturally prominent voice in Austria spoke in Wilhelm’s defense—and then in private. It came from a German resident in Vienna. “This young man [the Kaiser],” wrote Johannes Brahms to a friend, “who has surely prepared himself for his high office with seriousness and dignity…should not be unfairly attacked.”
But it was Rudolf who suffered the really unkind cut. It came from an unexpected direction: Paris, where in October an anti-Semitic tract called La Fin d’un Monde was published. In the preface the author, Edouard Adolphe Drumont, described Austria’s Crown Prince as a dissolute, shiftless libertine, a marionette whose strings were pulled by Jewish fingers.
It stung. After all, Rudolf had long been the champion of the French in the Imperial Palace. His dream was to replace the Vienna-Berlin alliance with an Austro-French alignment. One of the ties that bound him to Szeps was the fact that a Szeps daughter was married to the brother of Georges Clemenceau, the powerful French politician destined to become famous as premier during the Great War. As a matter of fact, in 1886 Szeps had smuggled Clemenceau into Rudolf’s apartments in the Palace for a talk. The rapport thus established might have changed world history—had Rudolf been alive in 1914.
But now it was 1888, and arrows came hurling at the Crown Prince from across the Rhine. “Frischauer was with me,” Rudolf wrote Szeps. (Frischauer was one of the Tagblatt’s chief correspondents). “He is almost scandalized by my philosophic calm. I can no longer manage to get very angry over anything, least of all over things that concern me. I am a Francophile, intimate with the journalists and newspapers there, and for those very circles to attack me means they are shitting in their own nest.”
The French attack infuriated Rudolf not only because it was French but because it hinted at debaucheries. Rudolf felt that if a profligate must be named, Wilhelm should be the one. Actually he didn’t just feel. He knew. The guerrilla war between the royals ranged from skirmishes in the public prints to very, very private reconnoitering.
Rudolf, for example, kept in steady communication with a certain Frau Wolf. A multinational madam of the first order, Frau Wolf operated from Vienna a network of girls reaching across the border into the innermost weaknesses of the highest personages. Frau Wolf was the unofficial wing of a system that monitored Wilhelm. Lieutenant Karl von Steininger, military attaché of the Austrian Embassy in Berlin, constituted the more official contact. Rudolf himself provided liaison between the two.
Frau Wolf “would like certain events in Berlin to be known here in Vienna,” Rudolf had written in a letter as remarkable as it was confidential. He had addressed it to von Steininger in 1887, not long before Wilhelm’s accession. “These are [Frau Wolf’s] statements: In the course of the winter, Wilhelm has had frequent trysts with an Austrian girl named Ella Somics, resident at Linkstrasse 39, who was once the lover of our Ambassador. In front of this Ella, and in the presence of Frau Wolf herself, who recently came to Berlin for business reasons, Wilhelm made some inebriated and tactless revelations about his most intimate thoughts. He spoke less than respectfully about our Emperor, slanderously about me, put me in the same category as his father—that is as a Judaized, vain, arty, scribbling popularity-seeker without ability or character. He said that only Prussia was sound…that our Monarchy was in decay and close to dissolution, and that our German-speaking regions would drop like a ripe fruit into Germany’s lap; that they would end up as an insignificant duchy, more subordinate [to Prussia] than even Bavaria…He said furthermore that he didn’t mind hunting with us [Habsburgs], we are a not unpleasant lot, but that we are also useless and sissified sybarites incapable of survival; that there was no such thing as sentiment in politics; it would be his task to raise Germany to greatness at our
cost…After praising himself…as generously as he derided me as well as his wife and his parents, he closed this edifying conversation…”
Rudolf continued: “I must also mention that I’ve had in my possession for five years a letter which Wilhelm sent officially, in his own undisguised hand, to Frau Wolf in Vienna and which is…a collector’s item of imprudence and incivility…Nobody knows anything on this subject except Szögyény [Rudolf’s confidant in the Foreign Ministry]. I did not inform Count Kálnoky [the Foreign Minister] because he would take it too seriously. It must never be known to the Emperor. It would shake our noble-minded sovereign too deeply and perhaps lead to a chill in our relations with Wilhelm and with Berlin in general, which would not be opportune right now…Please burn this letter instantly…* Through it I wanted to alert you about the above-mentioned Ella Somics. Perhaps one can gain further information through this channel…”
It was through a similar channel, however, that information also flowed the other way, toward Wilhelm, about Rudolf. Rudolf’s Sweet Girl, Mitzi Caspar, knew through her family a lawyer named Florian Meissner. She had no idea that Meissner handled some discreet legal business for the German Embassy in Vienna and operated even beyond legal perimeters for the same client. Through him Rudolf’s affair with Fräulein Caspar was no secret to Wilhelm.
But just then, in the fall of 1888, Mitzi had become less important to the Crown Prince. They still shared dear episodes. With Bratfisch whistling as he drove the fiacre, they rode fast, too fast, into the Vienna Woods and looked at the leaves whose death made the slopes so beautiful. When they returned to the city, Rudolf’s cheeks were still gray with anticlimax and frustration.
He’d given the Prussian as good as he’d gotten; yet when all was said and done and thrust and parried—why, then Wilhelm was still the new Kaiser about to supersede a Bismarck, while Rudolf was cut off even from business directly under his jurisdiction as the Army’s Inspector General. No Mitzi Caspar could cure that. Mitzi Caspar could not undo the latest insult from the War Minister. Undoubtedly at All Highest behest, that gentleman had again failed to invite Rudolf to an Imperial Command Conference, this one to take place from the twenty-first to the thirty-first of October. Wilhelm ruled, Rudolf rusted. Rudolf was a chained Prince Charming, good for dressing up a diplomatic maneuver perhaps, but waiting forever, waiting for fulfillment, legendary but incomplete, waiting as the rest of the world sped on toward things grand and new, waiting while the Empire fissured along the Danube.
Meanwhile Mitzi Caspar was sweet. Only sweetness was no longer enough. Rudolf needed stronger stuff. On October 8, he joined the Prince of Wales in Görgény Szt. Imre, Hungary, for some arduous hunting. He bagged three bears and enjoyed Wales’s jests. Then he had to return to Vienna.
“I could not fail to notice an alarming change in him,” his wife would say in her memoirs. “It was not only that he was more restless and distraught than ever before. In addition he had become prone to outbursts of fierce anger on the most trifling occasions…he was often quite unrecognizable.”
The register of the Court Apothecary shows, toward the end of 1888, renewed morphium prescriptions for the Crown Prince, supposedly to cure a chronic cough. But neither this drug nor the champagne he liked to lace with cognac could soothe much else in Rudolf that October. He was not a drunkard, but he was not a happy man either. The concentration he needed for his secret journalism came harder and harder. In his letters to Moritz Szeps he harped increasingly on the hope that “war must come soon, a great time when we shall be happy because after its glorious end we could build the foundation of a great and beautiful Austria.”
He meant war with Russia, the realm of satanic reaction, doubly tainted because the Tsar was being wooed by Wilhelm in 1888. Fighting St. Petersburg was a holy cause to liberals, but to Rudolf it signified something more. Such a war would be a drastic denouement, a beautiful explosion, a convulsive redemption in which present staleness would find a brilliant end.
Other contemporaries—Herzl, Freud, Schnitzler—also longed for release. But Rudolf’s need for greatness was more desperate still, exacerbated by the spotlight of universal expectancy forever trained on his face. Would a crusade against Muscovy deliver him?
It did not. The Russian war never came for Rudolf. But in October 1888, Mary Vetsera did.
* * *
* Obviously, this instruction was not obeyed.
Chapter 12
Her approach had to cover a considerable and difficult distance. Yet she moved inexorably.
“Dear Hermine, don’t worry about me,” Mary Vetsera wrote to her former governess that fall, replying to a cautionary letter. “Everything you say is true. Still, I cannot change the facts.” The facts were “that I cannot live without having seen or spoken to him.”
She was still seeing “him” the way an audience sees a star. After that initial encounter at the Freudenau races, she glimpsed Rudolf at the farewell performance of the old Court Theater on October 12. Goethe’s Iphigenie auf Tauris was on the bill, but in the Vetsera box Mary paid little attention to the sacrifice of the Greek maiden on stage. In the Imperial Box Rudolf sat, slender in his blue uniform, rather quiet between the whisperings of his wife Stephanie and his sister Valerie. The Emperor came in late, and when the play was over a footman handed him a scissors with which to cut off small snips of satin drapery as mementoes for his family.
Baroness Vetsera was not a Habsburg and therefore could exercise no proprietary rights over the Court Theater. But she, too, had scissors ready, small and secret but also gleaming and sharp like her teeth that were so admired in the fashion columns. When she climbed into her coach, her reticule enclosed a few choice bits of Imperial substance from her own box curtain.
Now she turned toward more important booty. After this new sighting of the Crown Prince her tiny incisors would have bitten through steel doors if they had barred her way to her destiny. It happened that there was no need of that. She had a high-society acquaintance, a woman who was a specialist in making forced entries look natural.
That woman has gone down in the history of intrigue as Countess Marie Wallersee-Larisch*—the very lady who had been so impressed recently by Mary Vetsera’s “nerve” in shrugging off a duke’s courtship. Marie Wallersee’s father, the Duke Ludwig in Bavaria,* was the Austrian Empress’s brother. Therefore she had access to the Imperial family. Her mother was a Jewish actress named Henriette Mendel (raised, after Ludwig married her morganatically, to the rank of Baroness Wallersee). Therefore Marie Wallersee knew people like the Vetseras who wanted to know the Imperial Family. Marie herself was not quite accepted by the first world nor content with the second. Instead of the acceptance she had not inherited, she tried for usefulness she might earn. Merchandising her hybrid nature, she acted as a go-between. In 1887 she had married a Count Larisch, but it was a rather remote relationship and she conducted much of her life in a spirit not too different from Frau Wolf’s.
To Countess Larisch Mary unburdened herself of her feelings for Rudolf. And two days later, in mid-October, Countess Larisch asked for an audience with her cousin, the Crown Prince. After some minutes of idle chatter about Nicky Esterházy’s bad luck with horses, she mentioned, not quite so idly, her friend Baroness Mary Vetsera’s great thrill at having been introduced to Rudolf by the Prince of Wales at the Freudenau races recently—and Mary’s regret that the occasion had not allowed her to express the loyalty and admiration she felt for the Crown Prince.
When discussing trivialities Marie was often on carefree terms with Rudolf. Now her sudden formality of language conveyed the message underneath.
Wasn’t this the young lady very much in the fashion news? Yes, Countess Larisch said, her friend was a most interesting and captivating person. Then wouldn’t she be present at the new Court Theater opening? Of course, Countess Larisch said. The Vetseras would occupy a parterre box to the left. He would make a note of that, the Crown Prince said.
For sixteen years Vienna ha
d waited and now the time was at hand. English journals had already called the new Court Theater the most beautiful temple to Thespis in history. From all parts of the Monarchy, from all over the world, the curious came to gape.
And on October 14, the theater opened at long last. By noon hundreds jostled one another on the sidewalks for a good view of something which would not happen for hours. In the afternoon guards brought barricades. At 5 P.M. the crowd was estimated at seven thousand. It grew by the minute. Mounted police were ready to clear a path for the audience proper.
At 6 P.M. that audience began to arrive. Only a few humble ones among these elect came by foot. They had their own Pedestrian Gate. The coach-borne nobility used a different door. Archdukes and duchesses alit by their portals. At last the Imperial Family itself arrived in their great coaches. They vanished into an exclusive entrance which led through a hidden passageway to a hidden Imperial Lobby, which in turn led to the gala Imperial Box. Thus the All Highest group could reach its chairs without passing through corridors used by anyone else.
By then the sun had set—a signal for another sun to rise. Suddenly four thousand electric light bulbs crystallized the edifice in the dusk. Its ultratheatrical facade flashed up; a statue-studded neo-Renaissance wedding cake, flanked by two huge wings containing nothing but grandiose staircases for entrances and exits.
That was the spectacle outside, and the one inside matched it. Naturally the true star of the evening was the landlord. The show began with the Emperor arriving in his box and accepting, with small hand waves, a series of standing ovations. At last the lights—electric lights again!—dimmed, and on stage a series of dramatic presentations contrasted the spirit of the old Court Theater with that of the new, flattering them both. Frau Charlotte Wolter—her delicate throat cured once more by Professor Schnitzler—scintillated. So did the ever-rosy Frau Schratt, whose image, copiously Rubensesque, shone also from the painted curtain as Thalia, the comedic muse.
A Nervous Splendor Page 11