A Nervous Splendor

by Frederic Morton

  In the street the people packed the sidewalks, waiting. They watched footmen seated on long red-plush benches in the lower lobby, immobile in their top hats and their long livery coats ribboned with the colors of the houses they served. On their knees rested, ready, the precious furs and great wraps of their lordships.

  At 10:30 P.M. the performance ended. The streaming-out was as concerted a splendor as the streaming-in. On the street the crowd swelled still further, until finally it swept aside the barricades. An iron railing broke in the crush. Twenty people were hurt, over a dozen women fainted, and the tumult to see the Emperor made a policeman faint and fall off his horse.

  It was much ado about very much indeed. Next morning the newspapers glittered with the event. They reported that His Majesty, creator of the Ringstrasse, had been most pleased with this, its luminous culmination. Strolling with the King of Serbia, with Rudolf (who wore the uniform of the 10th Infantry Regiment) and with the Prince of Wales, he had examined Gustav Klimt’s ceiling murals during intermission, approved of them again but also noted some of their interesting elongations. Full of good humor, the sovereign had explained to his companions that apparently the pictures had come out too small and therefore “had to be added on to.” A pride of archdukes had promenaded with the Rothschild clan. Professor Johann Schnitzler had chatted with Johann Strauss.

  And the evening had produced a veritable flood tide of fashion. A lush, deep-colored tide, because the walls of the new theater were white; naturally the ladies chose tones which would let them stand out by contrast. In the absence of the Empress (she had left again for Greece) the papers paid dutiful attention to the Crown Princess’s ensemble: her lace décolletage, her faille dress of brocade, dark-red roses patterned against blue, her fichu of white lace trimmed with diamonds, her diamond rivière, and the blue feathers with diamond needles in her pompadour.

  Various archduchesses received their due of haute-couture homage, differing in intensity in different journals. But all reporters sang in the same high pitch about a party that was definitely sub-ducal.

  “Many an admiring glance was cast,” the Wiener Tagblatt wrote, “on the parterre box of the Baroness Helene Vetsera who sat with her daughters Hanna and Mary. The young Baronesses wore décolletages of white tulle with dark Atlas bands. Baroness Mary, who wore a half-moon of diamonds in her beautiful hair, provoked especially widespread admiration.”

  The half-moon of diamonds audaciously resembled the tiara seen as a rule only on princesses or the consorts of kings.

  Mary Vetsera’s intention, implied by the jewels in her hair, struck a resonance in Rudolf’s mood. He had participated in the surface bombast of the premiere—but to what avail? In what way had it helped the city? What had it changed in his life? He needed to embrace something truly revivifying.

  Vienna’s sense of dissatisfaction matched his own, and the new Court Theater had contributed only an extra wrinkle to an old malaise. It was now pointed out how many of the higher aristocrats had stayed away from the theater’s opening. Apparently they considered it just another Ringstrasse to-do, another nouveau-riche festival. The foreign press admired the brilliance of the debut, but noted that much of the showmanship had taken place among members of the audience: the theater’s boxes were arranged so that they contemplated one another rather than the stage. No wonder a prince was apt to train his binoculars on a young baroness, not on the play. And the imperfect acoustics only encouraged such distractions. (Vienna’s wicked tongues pronounced all this to be quite logical: In the new Court Opera you couldn’t hear. In the new Parliament you couldn’t see. In the new Court Theater you could neither see nor hear.) In general, critics felt that the emphasis on technology backstage and the insistent look-at-me! pomp of the auditorium would lead to a neglect of true theater values. Actors complained of a lack of intimacy in the new house—indeed, Frau Wolter dared voice this opinion to the Emperor himself.

  Again a “hangover without a spree?” The spree, at any rate, was obliterated by the hangover. Once more a great promise had ended in a letdown. There was such beauty and such potential in Vienna, but somehow, lately, it always fell short of realization.

  On the day after the great theater opening the city was shocked by a double suicide. A young man had poisoned himself and his lovely girlfriend because he had not lived up to his father’s expectations in school.

  Even the blue Danube itself, the heart of the Austrian myth, was tainted now. In Vienna the river constituted a menace. Some of its wild arms near the Prater had become pestilential swamps that badly needed cleaning up. They had already infected part of the city’s water supply. Typhoid cases were reported here and there toward the end of October.

  Many of the sick were sent to the Billroth Clinic, but a mishap in that very clinic cast a shadow on another Austrian byword: the supremacy of Vienna’s medical school. Theodor Billroth was its most eminent surgeon; most popular, too, because though German-born he had become so Viennese in spirit: He made his home the city’s foremost musical salon and enjoyed the jus primae noctis (as he phrased it) over all of Brahms’s compositions. Just a few weeks ago, Brahms had played his newest Lieder in Billroth’s apartment. And now the Billroth Clinic, maintained mostly for the poor at public expense, had degenerated into a scandal. Despite Billroth’s appeal for funds, it was so badly kept up, its ventilation system had fallen into such disrepair, that a medical student watching an appendectomy fainted from the fumes and nearly fell on top of the patient.

  Then there was the matter of Parliament—this Parthenonlike palace, one of the ornaments of the young Ringstrasse, a neoclassic jewel. On October 22 a deputy pulled a huge hunk of concrete out of his briefcase to display it to his colleagues. It was a piece from a cornice of the building. It had dropped as he passed, nearly killing him. Only nine years old, the neoclassic monument had already started to crumble.

  Inside the monument, life was getting ever more abrasive and fragmented. Did those deputies have to be so rude? So dismal? Every ethnic group snarled at every other. The Grecian pavilion rang with a polylingual babel of curses. It concentrated all the conflicts caused by the multilevel nationality problems of the Empire. The situation disheartened Rudolf, since he had no power to improve it. His father’s realm was not only a contending arena of component states; but each state was in turn wracked by its own ethnic friction. Leaders of the Czech delegation were threatened by a younger, more drastically nationalistic faction, thus straining the government coalition based in part on the older Czechs. Back in Bohemia itself, the German representatives stalked out of the local Diet. Slovenes in Celje, Styria, threatened to secede from the largely German-language province if the local grammar school refused to institute Slovene classes. In Galicia, the Ruthenians swore to stop oppression by the Poles. From Hungary the Croats could be heard yelling that they had had enough of the Magyar yoke. Resentment and revenge rose up everywhere, converged on the pillared hall on the Ringstrasse to clang and clash and clamor away.

  The weather added to the sullenness. A chill wet fog licked the streets. A glum foretaste of winter. It was time to start lighting the stoves. In Ottakring and other workers’ districts, meals must be skimped on to save up coal money. On Sunday, their one rest day, many workers trudged off to forage for kindling in the Vienna Woods. On street corners the public porters—the Dienstmänner—put on overcoats to keep from freezing while standing around. Few could afford to hire them during the colder months.

  Their idleness was shared at the other end of the scale. The Crown Prince found himself less gainfully employed than ever. King Milan of Serbia was in town and had to be given a most tedious state dinner at Laxenburg, Rudolf’s suburban castle. That on the one hand. On the other, Rudolf had once more been left uninformed about the proceedings of another Imperial military conference to which he, the Inspector General, had again not been invited. And meanwhile the Kaiser’s hirelings in the German press kept hissing at him. He was being attacked for deficiencies in the Aus
trian Army—the very Army over which he had no real control.

  How was he to console himself? With his smug lump of a wife who studied folk singing while not caring a whit about the folk? With yet another hunt at which the King Milans might tag along with their enervating blather? With still another dose of sweetness from Mitzi Caspar?

  He needed something fresh and fierce. And he remembered now: that young face under the tiara at the Court Theater opening; the one who had raised her opera glasses at him with such directness from the parterre box. The Vetsera girl Marie Larisch had mentioned.

  He had intended to go to Mayerling with his driver Bratfisch and compose an angry pseudonymous piece for the Wiener Tagblatt; a polemic against the outmoded and therefore dangerous influence of feudal ideas in both military affairs and social issues in Austria. But right now he was too tired for anger; too distracted for sustained brain work. It was much simpler to send his old valet Nehammer with a message to the Countess Larisch.

  * * *

  * After her divorce in 1896, she used the hyphenated combination of her maiden and married names.

  * The Dukes in Bavaria were a collateral line to the reigning Dukes of Bavaria—the family that provided Bavaria with its kings.

  Chapter 13

  “I have two friends,” Mary Vetsera wrote her former governess that year. “You and Marie Larisch. You work for my soul’s happiness. Marie works for my moral misfortune.”

  On a raw fall day late in October, not long after the Court Theater opening, Countess Larisch drove into the Prater park. Mary Vetsera sat by her side. Their coach stopped under a huge chestnut tree, next to a fiacre. Bratfisch already stood by to open the doors of both vehicles. He did this deftly; you could not see from the road who was passing between them.

  Within seconds Mary Vetsera had left the Larisch carriage and entered the fiacre. Then, preceded by Bratfisch’s soft whistle, Rudolf and Mary floated together through the cool mist of the afternoon, beyond the formal view of the park into the wild heather by the Danube’s banks, and back again to where Marie Larisch’s coach was still waiting.

  A few days later Countess Larisch told the elder Baroness Vetsera that she needed her daughter Mary’s advice on buying a shirtwaist. It sounded reasonable. Mary, after all, was a fashion leader.

  “Today you will get a happy letter because I have been with him,” Mary Vetsera wrote her old governess, her chief confidante. “Marie Larisch took me shopping with her and then to be photographed at the Adele Studio—for him, of course. After that we went to the rear entrance of the Grand Hotel where the fiacre driver Bratfisch waited for us. We climbed in, hid our faces in our boas, and off we zoomed in a gallop to the Imperial Palace. An old servant [Nehammer] was waiting for us by a small iron door. He led us through a number of dark stairs and rooms, until he asked us to enter a certain door.

  “As I crossed the threshold a black bird, some kind of raven, flew at my head. A voice called from the next room, ‘Please come in.’ Marie ushered me in. We talked awhile about Vienna, then he said to me, ‘Pardon me, but I would like to talk to the Countess privately for a few minutes.’ Then he went with Marie to another room. I looked around me. On his desk was a revolver and a skull. I picked up the skull, took it between my hands and looked at it from all sides. Suddenly Rudolf came in and took it from me with deep apprehension. When I said that I wasn’t afraid, he smiled…

  “You must swear never to tell anyone about this letter, neither Hanna [her sister] nor Mama, because if either one heard about it, I would have to kill myself.”

  All this took place on November 5 in Rudolf’s old bachelor apartments on the third floor of the Palace; quarters he had kept even after moving with the Crown Princess into still more spacious quarters nearby.

  His early meetings with Mary Vetsera produced enormous intensity but—by every reliable account—no consummation. From the very first the affair took a course extraordinary for both members of the pair. Most of Rudolf’s amours—before and after his marriage—were marked by his flair for combining gallantry with expeditiousness. Mary Vetsera, on her part, was not the kind to spin out preliminaries for preliminaries’ sake. She was discreet, but not prissy. Fashion was not her only precocity.

  Better than most women she knew what one did with clothes. But she was just as clever about what one did without them. She had learned the art of consent though she never lived to reach the age for it. In 1886, not yet sixteen, she had taken a trip to Egypt with her mother and there had already been an English brigadier. There was the Duke of Braganza. There were other admirers—always select ones and chosen on an ascending scale—whose admirations she had not let languish too long.

  Suddenly everything changed. With Mary, Rudolf was not Rudolf. With Rudolf, Mary was not herself. Why? For one thing, she kindled in the Crown Prince a necessity unknown to him until then. He had begun to need a woman who could offer him more than surrender. He needed to be embraced by a mystery. He must be saved by some midnight beyond reason: the logic of daytime was sinking so fast. The very shimmer and vastness of his inheritance had become frustration—frustration, taunts, and despair. All his faith in liberalism, in science, in reason and technology and progress—where had it left him? In a dead-end alley with golden walls. Now he must place his trust in something more transcendent.

  He had been brushed by that something once before. Soon after the Crown Prince had met Baroness Vetsera he had ordered that three dozen red roses be placed on a certain grave in Prague. The executor of this instruction was Victor von Fritsche, one of his aides-de-camp. From Fritsche’s sworn testimony emerges a story that began long before Mary Vetsera. Despite its fairytale gothic it is an all too believeable augury of Mary’s advent.

  A decade earlier, during his tour of duty as Colonel of the 36th Infantry Regiment in Prague, the Crown Prince had been visiting the ghetto cemetery just as a cantor was singing a body to its grave. Rudolf had been struck by the ceremony—and by a dark-haired girl who turned out to be the cantor’s daughter.

  No words were exchanged. No words were necessary. The girl became possessed by the vision of the pale, comely, silent Prince, surrounded by his officers. Her father, to stop the infatuation, sent her off to relatives in the provincial town of Kolin. But she returned and stood under the Prince’s window in the Hradz Castle, night after night in the shadow of the battlement, in the moonlit winds of winter. Rudolf learned too late of her vigils. By then, in January 1879, she had died of pneumonia. All he could do was to complete the opera, as it were, by laying roses on her tombstone.

  In the fall of 1888 he now saw her resurrected in the dark hair and sinuous fire of Mary Vetsera, who also had Jewish blood on her mother’s side. Sometime in mid-November he gave Mary an iron wedding ring with the inscription: ILVBIDT. The letters, he explained, stood for the phrase In Liebe Vereint Bis In Den Tod. (By love united unto death.)

  She wore it on a thin chain around her neck, under a bodice that was the latest cry of the fall vogue. A demon had driven this seventeen-year-old to the peak of fashion, ahead of much more fully blossomed sophisticates. The same demon now drove her past the Crown Princess, past Sweet Girls and demimondaines, past Mitzi Caspar and all other competitors, into an exclusive niche of the Crown Prince’s life. If that niche was redolent of something no longer quite of this world…why, then she would perfume herself with otherworldliness.

  “If I could give my life to make him happy,” she wrote her governess, “I would gladly do it, because I do not value my own life.” And talking of her and Rudolf’s fear that their meetings might become known, she wrote, “We have made a pact covering such an eventuality. After a few happy hours at a place nobody knows, we will enter death together.”

  For a while the concealment of their relationship was so intoxicating, it took the place of carnal fulfillment. Their meetings were less than trysts, and just because of that, so much more. To the physically routinized lovers they both were, this half-chastity was like a sacred mist the
y had created only for each other. Again and again they luxuriated in it: above disused Palace stairs guarded by old Nehammer; or on a coach ride through parks whose twilight heard nothing but the sound of hooves and Bratfisch’s low whistle.

  Their secret had no coarse practical purpose. Mary’s mother was herself an ambitious conspirator, an expert in the practice and detection of liaisons; her later protestations to the contrary, she would not have been shocked by her daughter’s high intrigue as long as it was nicely dressed in discretion. As for the detectives forever at Rudolf’s heels, they would have made just another smirking little entry in their little books. Yet for many weeks that fall nobody knew of Rudolf and Mary except their accomplices. They defeated the curiosities of the entire Empire with a cunning, with an agility that was as thrilling as coitus. Every day the Imperial machinery ground up Rudolf’s will anew; through this secret he asserted a superb willfulness—and Mary vibrated to her Prince’s wish. Together they became voluptuaries in deception.

  Chapter 14

  On November 1, Laurent Flönt, a tightrope walker in Vienna, knotted one end of a rope around a window handle, and the other around his neck. Then he jumped from the window of his tenement. A note taped to the wall said: “The rope was my life and the rope is my death.” He left a diary which consisted of paper scraps artfully tied together by a miniature rope. On the first little scrap was written: “My diary, several scraps of my now extinguished life, torn out and glued together by Laurenz Flönt, gallows humorist.”

  Just a few days later a famous colleague of Flönt’s elected a still more professional way of doing away with himself. This suicide event consisted quite literally of a show, complete with spotlight and orchestra. It took place in Vienna’s best variety theater, Ronacher, and starred the current program headliner, the renowned trapeze artist Don Juan de Caceido. Don Juan had an altercation with his wife a few minutes before his act. He went on just the same. But at the climax, poised high on the rope to the drums’ roll, he dramatically threw away his balancing staff and dove head first into the arena. It was done with such verve that the audience applauded—until they saw attendants running toward the lifeless body.