A Nervous Splendor

by Frederic Morton

  They smiled. They toasted each other with good Baden County wine, lit cigarettes. “The Crown Prince,” Hoyos would later say, “turned on me the whole beguiling force of his personality.”

  At 9 P.M. Hoyos retired to his quarters in the former farm part of the estate, about five hundred yards away. Only then did Mary Vetsera emerge from Rudolf’s bedroom. Her “shopping dress,” worn since early the day before, was wrinkled. She was hungry. It hadn’t been possible to bring her food while she hid behind discreet blinds. None of it mattered.

  Loschek served her cold venison. He sat out new goblets before her and Rudolf, put new candles in the candelabra, new logs in the fireplace, hauled champagne from the cellar, rapped against the door of Bratfisch’s room in the servants’ wing. Bratfisch came out, knowing what was expected of him. Rudolf and Mary applauded his entrance into the billiard room. He settled himself on a stool in cabdriver’s position, and began to sing and to whistle all the tunes the pair knew so well and of which they could not get enough: the sad songs about Vienna long before the Ringstrassse, lost and dear; wistful songs about good wine drunk long ago; funny songs like the fighting-lovers ditty from Die Gigerln von Wien; sentimental songs about the nut tree dying slowly by the Danube; and last but not least the song about Archduke Johann who had married a postmaster’s daughter back in the eighteenth century—yes, especially that one, because it was Rudolf’s and therefore Mary’s favorite.

  Bratfisch sang deep into the night, until the logs were ashes, the champagne drunk, the candles burned, and Venus faded. Then that was over, too. Hand in hand, Rudolf and Mary went to the bedroom.

  Behind them Loschek carried a final set of tapers. Rudolf instructed him: at 8 A.M. breakfast alone with Hoyos and with Coburg who was due back from Vienna early in the morning; after that, another hunt which Rudolf might join. “Meanwhile,” the Crown Prince said smiling, “don’t let anyone into my room, even if it is the Emperor.”

  The Emperor did not come. But sleep came to Loschek, most loyal of servants, for by then it was already after 2 A.M. He did not sleep long. At 6:30 steps waked him. The Crown Prince stood by the bed, hands in the pockets of his dressing gown, the silk scarf still slung about his neck. He ordered Loschek to call him at 7:30 for breakfast and to have Bratfisch ready with his horses at the same hour. Then Rudolf walked back to the bedroom, whistling softly one of last night’s tunes.

  Loschek dressed, alerted the kitchen staff, and went to see about Bratfisch. At 7:30 sharp he knocked at the Crown Prince’s door. He knocked again. Outside, ravens cawed on snow rosy with the dawn sun. Loschek knocked. Wind sounded in the great black firs. Loschek knocked louder. Usually the Crown Prince slept lightly. Loschek knocked louder still. “Your Imperial Highness!” he called, “Your Imperial Highness!” The ravens cawed. Loschek ran up the main stairs of the two-story lodge, and down a small spiral staircase leading to the back door of the bedroom. He reached the back door. He knocked there. Ravens cawed. The pack of hunting dogs, alerted by the noise, had started barking. Loschek knocked. He knocked as hard as he could. He knocked and called. He screamed to wake his master. He ran up and down the staircases again, to the front door of the room. He grabbed a log of firewood and began to beat it against the door.

  By then the other servants had gathered in the back of the anteroom. Bratfisch kept them from coming close. Count Hoyos came running from his quarters. Almost immediately afterwards the Prince of Coburg raced up, just arrived from his overnight stay in Vienna. Both noblemen joined in the knocking and the calling. Then they stopped. They couldn’t believe this was happening. They ordered Loschek to break down the door. Loschek, out of breath, half crying, whispered that he had to inform Their Serene Lordships that a lady, that Baroness Mary Vetsera was staying in His Imperial Highness’s room.

  Coburg and Hoyos recoiled. They retreated to the billiard room. They had to make a decision. Loschek kept knocking and calling. A kitchen maid began to whimper. Within a minute the two stepped from the billiard room, pale, and repeated their order. Break down the door. Some servant had already brought a wood-chopping axe. Loschek raised it to smash the lock. The lock resisted. Loschek hacked away at the white-painted door panels. The axe crashed, the panels splintered. Ravens fluttered up from the snow outside. The dogs barked and howled to the echoing blows. Loschek hacked out a gash. The gash became a hole. Framed in jagged wood, smoky with burned candles, dark with the drawn blinds, the room inside was visible.

  Only then did Loschek drop his axe. The silence that followed changed the Empire.

  Chapter 22

  At dawn of this same Wednesday, January 30, a footman stood close to the door of the Emperor’s bedroom, listening. It was his duty to stay there the night through, until he heard the right sound. It came punctually at 4 A.M.: a sudden crisp creaking of the springs.

  His Majesty had risen from his iron bedstead. The footman knocked; entered; bowed deeply; and walked with candlestick, sponge and towel to the simple washstand. Franz Joseph, who disdained more modern bathroom conveniences, was already waiting there. In chaste sequence he began to fold back his nightshirt here and there, exposing to the sponge one part of his body after another. Segment by segment the footman moistened the monarch, soaped him, rinsed him, dried him; sometimes steadied himself on him too, for the night’s vigil was long and beer a not so secret fortifier. Franz Joseph submitted calmly. He was used to being his subjects’ pillar.

  The footman finished. Bowing again, walking backwards with his face toward the Emperor, he retreated to the door—and sleep. His shift was over. For Franz Joseph the day had started.

  Pachmayer, the chief valet, arrived next at 4:20 A.M. with the first of the day’s several uniforms. The Emperor dressed, had a cup of coffee and a crescent roll at the table by his bed, and walked to his rococo desk in the next room before five o’clock in the morning. Most of his. realm still slept; his cities snored from the Swiss to the Turkish border. But the candelabra already flickered on both sides of his rosewood desk.

  Franz Joseph sat down to what was bound to be a better day for once. On Monday he had undergone a gruesome number of audiences; they always piled up when he was about to leave town. Last night, Tuesday evening, there had been the annoyance about Rudolf’s absence from the family dinner. But this morning his eye quickly found the lovely item on his schedule. It jumped at him from the calligraphy of the huge agenda sheet clipped to the top of his portfolio. The entry said: “11 A.M.—His Majesty’s visit with Her Majesty.”

  In that one sentence lay not only delight but convenience. It meant that he wouldn’t have to drive all the way out to Schönbrunn Palace to meet Katharina Schratt. He needn’t walk the icy gardens at 7 A.M. and neither would she, poor thing, have to be all dressed up and coiffed at an unearthly hour, fit to meet her Imperial swain by prearranged accident. Only such detours made it possible (and decent) for commoner to meet Majesty outside the formalities of an audience.

  But today it would be much simpler. With the Empress’s help the pair could take advantage of one of her rare stays in the palace. Officially Frau Schratt’s Court position was “Reciter to Her Majesty.” Today the actress would be calling on Elisabeth in that capacity. And during this recital Franz Joseph would happen to visit his wife—at 11 A.M.

  But a world of chores must be done before that desired moment. At five o’clock in the morning couriers began bowing their way to the Emperor’s desk. The entire apparatus of state had learned to hum at the wee hours to suit the All Highest early habits. It hummed red-eyed to carefully supressed yawns, but it hummed. The Adjutant General of the Imperial Chancellery appeared to receive his assignments. The First Lord Chamberlain came to pay his respects.

  At 7 A.M. the Chief Secretary brought to the monarch’s desk the business that would occupy him through the morning. It was a sheaf of recommendations concerning the forthcoming sojourn in Budapest of Franz Joseph and his Court. His personal popularity—and especially that of his wife—was to appease Hungari
an turmoil and float the government Army Bill through the snares and rapids of Parliament. But the Imperial charisma must be deployed with care, and there was nobody more careful than the Emperor. His genius for detail was well known to the officers of state involved in the Budapest business—his Minister of War, his Hungarian Prime Minister, and the Hungarian Palatine. Hence they had worked out a set of suggestions for all phases of the All Highest residence in Hungary: the meetings over which Franz Joseph, as the Apostolic King of Hungary, was to preside; the audiences to be granted, the honors to be conferred, the appointments to be made; the dinners, déjeuners, receptions to be decreed and arranged; the lists of guests to be invited; the accents of protocol to be stressed, softened or subtly modulated.

  It was an exhaustive dossier whose proper treatment demanded a thousand decisions, some large, most small. Much of the morning Franz Joseph did what his ancestors had done before him, through many generations. He ruled and overruled with utter confidence, with axiomatic competence, and without the slightest inspiration. Inexorably the royal pen scratched on. He turned page after page, gathered rapid overviews, crystallized quick judgments. Every paragraph on every sheet received an All Highest comment on the margin. He approved wholly or partly or conditionally, on precisely stated terms; or demanded amplification or further advice from experts; or vetoed until further notice; or canceled instantly, outright and irrevocably. He seldom hesitated and he never stopped until shortly before 11 A.M.

  At about 10:58 he rose from his desk to walk past the salutes of adjutants and guards. Each one he returned meticulously, almost smiling. After all, he was striding toward his wife’s apartments, and therefore to Katharina Schratt.

  Before the Empress’s salon stood Baron Nopsca, her First Lord Chamberlain. The courtier bowed as the monarch approached; strangely enough, he also seemed to shake his head. Stranger still, he did not step aside as the Emperor came close, just shook his head still more. At last he straightened up to show a face made of wax and tears. The Emperor saw it at the very moment that he heard sobs from inside. He reached for the golden door knob, but the Baron held his arm. And then Franz Joseph faced a situation he could not grasp. For the first time in his life, a door before which he stood failed to open.

  Elisabeth the Empress and Queen had also risen at an early hour. Her Palace routine was quite different from her life away from Vienna—and she spent most of her year abroad.

  At fifty-one, Elisabeth remained a legend for her pallid beauty, for the diet and exercise with which she chastened her body into an exquisite attenuation, but most of all for her restlessness. She roamed half the world incognito as the Countess Hohenembs. Often just one lady-in-waiting accompanied her on the most unpredictable forays. Nearly as often she was alone, galloping through the Scottish heather, or taking a six-hour hike up a Bavarian Alp, or wandering veiled through bazaars at Smyrna, rowing a boat in the sunset sea off Amsterdam, or sitting on an empty Adriatic dune, the point of her parasol inscribing strange verses into the sand.

  She rarely lived palatially, except during her random sojourns in Vienna as in the weeks just before and after New Year of 1889. On that Wednesday morning of January 30, she rose at 6:30 to take a long scented bath in the tub attendants had carried into her room. Her masseur, a specialist from Wiesbaden, soothed the neuralgic sensitivities of her joints. Then it was the turn of the “hair maid.” By 8 A.M. the “hair maid” (discreetly excising some gray filaments) had finished combing what was still among the most lustrous manes of Europe. A chambermaid brought a breakfast of herb tea and toast. In her gymnasium a few steps away her fitness-physician, Dr. Kellgrün, awaited her and advised Her Majesty on some new exercises at the chinning rings and on the mat.

  At 10 A.M. her dressers helped her change from her gym clothes. She was toned up, ready for her Greek lesson. Her instructor, Monsieur Rhoussopholous, had already been ushered into the salon. He began to read a passage from the Iliad describing the character of Achilles. The Empress followed her custom of writing in her little leather notebook questions she wanted to ask the instructor about Homer’s language. The poetry was very beautiful, but it was also difficult, and a knock on the door annoyed her. The knock came too early. Her watch said 10:45—fifteen minutes before Frau Schratt’s time.

  It was not Frau Schratt, however. It was a lady-in-waiting, Ida von Ferenczi, who begged Her Majesty’s pardon to report that her First Lord Chamberlain, Baron Nopsca, had an urgent message from Count Hoyos. The Empress said curtly that the message would have to wait. At this moment the Baron entered without obtaining permission. Elisabeth rose in anger. But then she saw the Baron’s face. The little leather notebook dropped to the carpet. Her Majesty’s day, even more inviolable than her husband’s, stopped.

  Gradually everybody’s day stopped. On the same Palace floor the Crown Princess Stephanie was taking a singing lesson. Her music instructor, Frau Niklas-Kempner, was vocalizing the refrain of a Rumanian folk ballad—but the rococo door burst open, and she never finished.

  Nor did Prime Minister Taaffe complete his conversation with Galician deputies in a conference room at Parliament on the other side of the Ringstrasse. Shortly after the noon hour a page began making gestures at him which asked him to step away. The Count decided not to respond. This might be nothing more than another message about the missing Vetsera girl. The mother had already bothered him about it last night. But he would not let it disturb a busy afternoon, especially not an afternoon when the new electric illumination would be tried out in Parliament to shine on, among other things, the Prime Minister’s witty new cravat.

  So he waved the page away. To his surprise the fellow not only refused to go but actually bent down to whisper at his ear in the most forward fashion. Whereupon one saw a rare sight: the Prime Minister jumping up and running off, so suddenly that he forgot his trademark topper and his dashing overcoat.

  The disruption spread deeper and lower. On the Palace grounds a regimental band marched in together with the changing of the guard. After them trailed the usual crowd of oom-pah-pah lovers who didn’t mind the cold or the pickpockets working their trade. Shortly before 1 P.M. the band had just launched into “The March of the Huguenots,” when a palace official approached the leader. He cut off the tune with two sharp raps of his baton.

  The music stopped. In the street the people couldn’t believe it. When had that ever happened before? But the music stopped everywhere. It never even got started in the lofty hall of the Musikvereinssaal where Johannes Brahms was strolling toward the dais with Joseph Joachim, the violin virtuoso. Composer and soloist thought they were about to rehearse the second Vienna performance of Brahms’s Double Concerto. They were wrong. Before their incredulous eyes, the orchestra was leaving its seats. The concertmaster, when they reached him, was baffled. A secretary had just come running in from the front office to say that the rehearsal must be stopped, the performance was canceled.

  All over the city telephones rang with the same injunction: Cancel. They rang in the management offices of the Court Opera, of the Court Theater, of music halls, cabarets, ballroom establishments, and on the committee desks for Fasching events. Where there were no telephones, telegraph boys and messengers appeared. Some of them already wore black bands on their sleeves, without knowing for certain yet just what great death was abroad in the city. Rumors swirled like locusts down the streets; in minutes they had devoured the carnival.

  By midafternoon a gigantic though still uncertain whisper flooded the town. It carried the Crown Prince’s name on the crest of disaster. But still nothing conclusive was known. From everywhere crowds converged on the Palace. The guards stood impassive. Their rifles flashed as they presented arms to Court carriages. More and more archducal carriages raced toward the portals. Toward evening Venus rose through the cold half-light, as brilliant as on the night before.

  Finally, in the morning, the horror congealed into print. Every front page on every newspaper was a scream.

  OUR CROWN PRINC
E DEAD!

  Dead at thirty, of a stroke. Dead of a heart attack, another edition said, quoting another official source. Dead of an accidental gunshot wound, said a third—and was confiscated instantly.

  On February 1, the evening edition of the Wiener Tagblatt broke out into a black-framed monumental headline: THE MOST HORRIBLE TRUTH. It was the official suicide announcement. Crown Prince Rudolf had been found in Mayerling, alone, killed by a pistol he himself had fired.

  But what was the truth? What lay behind all these dazing reversals? The Viennese, who could obfuscate so gracefully, who could paint such rosettes and cherubs over the dreary real—they were stunned not only by the event but by the clumsiness with which the government had tried to doctor it. Suddenly the myth was a shambles. Only days ago the Crown Prince had danced his Lipizzaners down the Ringstrasse. Now something awful had fallen on the Empire.

  Chapter 23

  Terrified millions guessed at the truth. But only three men had seen it in its rank immediacy: the Prince of Coburg, Count Hoyos, and Loschek the valet. In Mayerling, at 8 A.M. on Wednesday, they had stared at it through the jagged fragments of a door. They had seen the couple on the bed, fully dressed, with their brains blown out. The girl stretched out, hair flowing loosely, hands cupping a rose. The man half-sitting, leaning against a night table whose mirror had helped him take aim at his temple. He was still bleeding from the mouth. His and her blood mingled partly dried on the white sheets.

  The Prince of Coburg collapsed at the sight. Hoyos ran with Bratfisch to the fiacre. They arrived at the Baden depot of the Southern Railway in time to stop the Trieste express by a special emergency signal from the stationmaster. At 9:18 A.M. Hoyos jumped onto the train. At 9:50 A.M. he jumped off at the Vienna Southern Railway terminal. He ran for a cab and reached the Palace just before 10:15.