A Nervous Splendor

by Frederic Morton

  For others, like Franz Joseph, the world remained painfully real. Painfully real were the reports of certain agents; and so were some wire messages Rudolf had dispatched to Hungary and elsewhere. The Marquis of Bacquehem, as His Majesty’s Commerce Minister, ran the Imperial and Royal Telegraph Service and kept a meticulous file on all of Rudolf’s cables. Copies of significant ones were submitted to the monarch before they were destroyed. By the end of January Franz Joseph appeared to feel that his son, incomprehensible to him in recent years, might now have become dangerous. The young man must be brought to his senses.

  But by the last week of the month Rudolf spun in an orbit beyond the reach of even the All Highest command. During those days the two Lipizzaners of his phaeton seemed never to stop trotting. Even the fast Bratfisch was not fleet enough for the Crown Prince. His carriage kept flitting in and out and through the city. On Thursday, the twenty-fourth, he met Mary Vetsera on a deserted Prater meadow. They set the date for Mayerling for the coming Monday, for a hunt to which Rudolf had already invited a couple of shooting companions. After that he drove to the Palace to dress, and from the Palace to the opera to see Mahler’s Drei Pintos.

  An odd double conjunction marked the week. In Budapest the next forty-eight hours would see the Mahler premiere of The Valkyries sung in Magyar, together with the parliamentary bombshell of Rudolf’s friend Count Károlyi. But in Vienna, too, there was an intertwining of the fortunes of Gustav Mahler and Rudolf Habsburg. On the night of the twenty-fourth Rudolf did not remain alone in the Court Opera’s Imperial Box. At the last moment the curtains were drawn aside. Franz Joseph entered.

  Nobody had expected him. The monarch hardly ever partonized musical events. He much preferred the Court Theater—even before the advent of Frau Schratt—and only ballet could attract the All Highest Presence to the opera house. Yet he came that night to the Weber-Mahler opus so tepidly received by the critics. His entrance during the overture upstaged that of any of the singers, and many in the audience kept watching the way the Crown Prince rose to kiss the Emperor’s hand; how the two whispered intensely in what appeared to be a very serious and sustained conversation; and how, after the second act, the Emperor left most abruptly—but not before the Crown Prince had risen to part the curtain for his father.

  It was a historic whisper to which Mahler’s harmonies soared, even if its content has been lost to history. One thing is sure. By that evening Rudolf had assumed one more mask, one of the final ones: unyielding correctness vis-à-vis his father. Let the Emperor dam him for his Hungarian rashness or for his Vetsera escapade. He would accept censure impassively, imperviously, with a face into whose pallor his youth and the fresh blue of his eyes had vanished. He would give his father the surface of respect, no less, no more. He had already surrendered himself to something much grander than a dual crown. And toward that he charged now with the unceasing tingling somnambulist energy of the insomniac.

  The next day, Friday, the phaeton whirled out of the Palace gate again and drove fast, too fast, east beyond the Prater into the Danubian swamps for more hunting. Then Rudolph drove back into town, to Hodek’s the taxidermist at Mariahilferstrasse 51. At Hodek’s they were stuffing his recent trophies; drawing the correct simulation of life over the hollow corpses of six wide-tailed eagles in various facsimiles of flight. He liked that. He complimented the craftsmen, walked out into the street, was recognized with cheers, drove back to the Palace, changed into the uniform of a general of the Infantry, drove to the Gusshausstrasse, to the studio of the artist Taddheus Ajdukiewicz where he sat for a portrait showing him on horseback in the supple, slightly bent-forward casualness the Gigerln so admired. He posed with a steely patience for his taxidermist: the painter coloring animation over a core that was nothing but speed galloping over a thousand byways toward Monday in Mayerling. Session finished, he drove back to the Palace for a dinner.

  The next two days, Saturday and Sunday, he kept plunging through the winter air in his open carriage: hunting, Hodek’s (which stayed open for him on weekends), the painter’s studio. On Sunday afternoon he raced from the portrait session to the Palace; changed into civilian clothes; drove to the tradesmen’s entrance of the Grand Hotel; hurried up the back stairs; met Countess Larisch in her suite to discuss how she would manage things for him on Monday with the Vetsera family; hurried down the stairs, leaped into the phaeton for a drive to the outer Prater; found Mary on the appointed meadow; had quick words on final arrangements; scudded back to the Palace where the valet waited with his next uniform. And that was how the days drummed away with Lipizzaner hooves.

  The nights were harder, particularly the last two of the week. Both were devoted to celebrating his enemy, Kaiser Wilhelm of the Prussians. On Saturday at 6 P.M. Franz Joseph summoned the Court to the great marble hall in the Palace for a dinner honoring the German Emperor’s birthday. Rudolf had to appear as Colonel of the Second Brandenburg Uhlan Regiment, had to lift goblets, had to smile for hours through toasts and speeches glorifying a bounder. But he bore up well—as well as any of the spruce and glass-eyed creatures at the taxidermist’s.

  The next night, Sunday, he had to wear the Teuton uniform again. Prince Reuss, the German Ambassador, gave his own reception to mark his suzerain’s anniversary. It was a de rigueur gala for the Austrian Imperial Family (and “an unenjoyable prospect” as Franz Joseph wrote Frau Schratt). But at least it was held late, at 9:30 P.M., which gave Rudolf more time to run his phaeton through the day, preparing for what was to come tomorrow.

  At the German Embassy not only the Court and government members converged but the elite of Vienna’s haute bourgeoisie—and therefore the Vetsera clan. For one moment in the course of the cercle a confrontation came to pass: the girl who exulted in an august triangle, and the wife who suspected and despised it. Crown Princess Stephanie in a regal gray gown, with diamond tiara, stood face to face with Mary Vetsera, who had met the Crown Prince in the Prater grass only a few hours earlier and who now glowed fiercely in her pale-blue ball dress with yellow appliqué. For one moment—later there were reports that it was more than one—it looked as if the Baroness would not curtsy to Her Imperial Highness. But then she did…and the chatter resumed in the Embassy salon.

  Throughout the reception Rudolf was as quiet as he was pale. If he talked at all it was mostly to the sculptor Viktor Tilgner, one of the few commoners present. During an otherwise bland chat the Crown Prince suddenly twitched his shoulders, as if to shake off the silver epaulettes. “This whole uniform is distasteful to me,” he said to Tilgner. “Unbearably heavy…”

  It was less than an outburst. It passed quickly. Rudolf noticed Count Hoyos among the guests, admonished him, jocularly, not to forget their hunting date at Mayerling. Franz Joseph departed. Rudolf kissed his father’s hand, bowed to Mary with whom he had exchanged only glances, bowed to the other Vetseras, made his various good-byes, and within minutes sat once more in his phaeton. Again hooves sparked against cobbles, wheels spun and bowled around midnight corners to Heumühlgasse 10 where Mitzi Caspar received him.

  He now had twelve hours left in the capital he would never inherit. He used the time to rehearse once more, in sovereign, summarizing speed, all the roles he had enacted in Vienna.

  At Mitzi’s simple flat he drank his cognac-laced champagne, bantered and caressed, and incidentally remarked that tomorrow before noon he would leave for a hunt, forever. He said it lightly, with his quick offhand charm, and of course he had said something like that before. It made her laugh; it was so absurd. But she was surprised that he, an unbeliever, made the sign of the cross on her forehead when they parted at three A.M.

  By seven in the morning he was up and about again in his apartments in the Palace. A copious agenda waited for him. He dealt with it briskly, item by item. He studied the telegrams (monitored before delivery by his father’s agents) on parliamentary skirmishings about the Army Bill in Budapest. To his staff he expressed vivid but carefully neutral impatience that voting on th
e issue had been postponed. He received Berthold Frischauer of the Tagblatt, who brought him the latest bulletins on the French elections, cabled to the newspaper’s offices during the night. Next came Prince Battenberg, about to leave for Venice. He thanked the Crown Prince for being so accomplished a host; but Rudolf, like any accomplished host, smiled away Battenberg’s gratitude and only regretted that his guest’s plans would not let him join tomorrow’s hunt at Mayerling.

  After that, Lieutenant Colonel Albert Meyer had an audience. Meyer was Chief of Staff of the 25th Infantry Division which Rudolf nominally commanded. The Colonel brought him dozens of orders to be signed—a figurehead’s busywork. This done, there was still another meeting on the schedule, with Archbishop Count Schönborn-Buchheim, as well as a conference to be attended at the Army Museum. But then the clock on Michaeler Tower struck 11 A.M. The Crown Prince called in an adjutant to cancel his last appointments.

  He was now ready. He summoned his Note Bearer, a faithful soul named Püchel. The man was instructed to have Rudolf’s Palace quarters ready again by 5 P.M. the next day, when he would be back to attend a family dinner given by the Emperor. Rudolf repeated the same intention to Stephanie and to his little Elisabeth when he said good-bye to them in their apartments. Püchel held the horses as he leaped into the phaeton. He drove a few paces toward the Palace gate, but turned and came back.

  “Did I hear you say something, Püchel?” he asked his servant of many years. “Can I do something for you?”

  “No, Your Imperial Highness, I said nothing,” Püchel said. “Good shooting at Your Imperial Highness’s hunt.”

  The Crown Prince nodded. The Crown Prince was gone from the Palace.

  That was at half past eleven in the morning on Monday the twenty-eighth of January, the Crown Prince’s progress through the city being routinely reported by Special Agent Wiligut in a telegram to Police Headquarters. Yet one essential fact eluded Wiligut and his superiors. They had no idea that Rudolf’s phaeton was at this point only part of a precisely timed maneuver already in progress.

  Somewhat earlier, at 10:30 A.M. Mary Vetsera and Countess Larisch had left the Vetsera mansion on the Salesianergasse. They would—so they told Mary’s mother—do an errand on the Kohlmarkt, the smart shopping street. The public fiacre they hailed took that direction. But after two blocks the Countess leaned out the window and gave the cabbie a different address: the Augustiner Bastei, one of the remoter bastions of the old part of the Palace. Here the ladies skipped out and were swallowed up by an iron door left open for them. Rudolf’s ancient valet Nehammer stood behind it, ready to guard the ladies until fifteen minutes later when, exactly on time, Bratfisch arrived. It took two seconds for Mary Vetsera to step out of the iron door into the fiacre. At 11 A.M. sharp her journey began to the Vienna Woods.

  At 11:30 Rudolf departed with his phaeton.

  The two vehicles rolled along the same route, separated by a distance of about ten miles. The first was pulled by Bratfisch’s black steeds; the second by the Crown Prince’s light-gray Lipizzaners. They moved down the Ringstrasse, its historic gestures and heroic contours woodcut-sharp in the clarity of the chill day. They wheeled past the Court Opera to the quay of the River Wien, crossed the Wien over the Rudolf Bridge, named after the Crown Prince, and then headed south past Schönbrunn Palace, south into the first meadows of the Vienna Woods, and toward a grove of beeches where the Rotes Stadel, the Red Barn Inn, lay sequestered. Here the first fiacre stopped. The inn was closed for the winter. Mary Vetsera waited inside the cab. Bratfisch whistled a slow sweet waltz and to its rhythm beat his arms against the cold.

  It took about twenty minutes for a man in a fur-collared overcoat to appear, strolling among the trees. The Crown Prince. When his phaeton had passed a thicket a bit farther back, he had handed the reins to the accompanying coachman, ordered him to turn the carriage around, and jumped out. The police, trained on the phaeton, followed it as it emerged from the thicket and headed back to Vienna. His pursuers gone, Rudolf walked to the Rotes Stadel. He climbed into the fiacre with a jest: Had he kept Their Lordships waiting too long?

  They laughed. Bratfisch’s tongue clicked the horses into motion. Whistling, he steered through the mounded snow. The white hills and the black trees glided by slowly. No hurry, the Crown Prince said. No need to arrive before dusk fell on Mayerling.

  On this Monday night of the twenty-eighth of January 1889, the sun set at 4:52 P.M. The planet Venus, which had been curving toward earth for months, was now marvelously close. Its brilliance struck the naked eye in early twilight, by half past four. Icicle-like, it pierced a sky lucid and violet.

  The official Abendpost was moved to remark on the phenomenon that week. And Rudolf and Mary had leisure to admire so rare a brightness from the billiard-room window of the lodge. The hunting party would not arrive until next morning. And not until the next night would they consummate their great departure. Meanwhile they were alone with a few servants, with flames purring in the fireplace, and with the frozen peace of the Vienna woods.

  Fifteen miles away, in the carnival city, a hundred orchestras tuned up. Thousands of gentlemen knotted white ties. In boudoirs the ladies scented their décolletages. Only at the Palais Vetsera did Fasching grind to a halt on Monday, twenty-four hours before it would suddenly founder through all of Vienna.

  About 1 P.M. Countess Larisch had arrived at the Salesianergasse. Suddenly a great spasm of guilt had seized her. Certain hints Rudolf had thrown out, cryptic but dark, curdled into panic. Perhaps her help to the pair was a terrible complicity. She burst in on Baroness Helene’s lunch. She had lost Mary, she stammered to Mary’s mother. She had lost Mary on her “errand”—lost her perhaps to the Crown Prince—and she was scared.

  She could not or would not clarify much further, but her fear terrified the mother. Twice that afternoon the Baroness sent Larisch to the Police Commissioner of Vienna, Baron Franz von Krauss. Once Larisch went by herself; the second time with Alexander Baltazzi, the lost girl’s uncle. Each time they returned, nonplussed by the Commissioner’s iron prudence.

  The little Baroness was gone? he had said. The famous little fashion personality? Well, the little Baroness would come back from her outing. No, he would not advise filing a missing-person notice. Not if His Imperial Highness was involved. No point to that at all because the police force, even the highest-ranking detectives, were constitutionally prohibited from investigating or touching any premises of the Imperial Family anywhere. No, any information relating to such matters went only to the Emperor himself—nowhere else. No, the Commissioner would advise waiting till tomorrow when the little Baroness would no doubt return. After all, girls will be girls and Crown Princes will be Crown Princes, and in the end even lofty irregularities like these would regularize themselves nicely.

  And the next morning, on the twenty-ninth, everything did indeed look regular at Mayerling. Count Hoyos and Rudolf’s brother-in-law, the Prince of Coburg, arrived at the lodge for the shooting party. The blinds of all four windows of Rudolf’s ground-floor bedroom were drawn, but then they often were. In the billiard room, Rudolf greeted his guests, alone, in his dressing gown. A silk scarf was casually slung around his neck, and he gave one of his flawless performances of princely charm. He said that his nose had the impertinence to have contracted a cold; it would keep him from the hunt. But it didn’t prevent him from sharing a gay and hearty breakfast. He asked his friends what news they had heard from Budapest, the merry mess in the Parliament there? Even the birds in the trees here in the Vienna Woods were carrying on about that. They laughed, they enjoyed the coffee poured by Loschek, Rudolf’s valet, and then the Crown Prince cheered the others on their way to the chase.

  For the Prince of Coburg it was a short hunt. He came back to the lodge at 1 P.M. so that he could return to Vienna in time. As Rudolf’s in-law he had been invited to the family evening at the Imperial Palace. Surprisingly Rudolf announced that he himself would stay at the lodge. It was his impertine
nt cold, he said; it had had the nerve to get worse instead of better. So far it was just a nasty trifle, but the freezing ride to town might provoke it into pneumonia. Would Coburg be a dear? Would he tell the Emperor that his son respectfully kissed his hand and begged to be excused?

  Coburg promised and Coburg left. Shortly afterward Loschek sent one of the lower servants trudging to the nearest telegraph office at Alland village.

  TO HER IMPERIAL AND ROYAL HIGHNESS THE MOST SERENE LADY THE CROWN PRINCESS ARCHDUCHESS STEPHANIE, VIENNA, IMPERIAL PALACE.

  PLEASE WRITE PAPA THAT I ASK HIS PARDON MOST OBEDIENTLY FOR NOT APPEARING AT DINNER, BUT BECAUSE OF A HEAVY COLD I WISH TO AVOID THE JOURNEY THIS AFTERNOON AND STAY HERE WITH JOSL HOYOS.

  EMBRACING YOU ALL MOST WARMLY, RUDOLF

  Rudolf’s impeccability continued when Hoyos returned from the fields in the evening. They chatted in the billiard room. The day’s bag was meager. But Rudolf, playful, absolved his friend from poor huntsmanship. Hungarian politics must have scared off the game. That’s why he wasn’t cross with his cold for making him stay indoors all day.

  They sat down to a dinner of pâté de foie gras, roast beef, venison and red wine. The Crown Prince ate heartily, drank moderately. He showed Hoyos some of the messages he had received during the day. (With good reason, the staff of the telegraph office at Alland village was always tripled during Rudolf’s stays at Mayerling.) Most of the cables came from Budapest and brought inconclusive news of the Army Bill imbroglio. Rudolf shrugged his shoulders at rumors linking him to some of the firebrand oratory there. He compared the parliamentary caprices of Magyar counts to the quirks of first-rate gun dogs. He liked his Károlyis and Telekis; there was nobody less dull. But on the whole it was easier to deal with four-legged thoroughbreds than the other kind.