Here his nerve left him. What he had seen was too terrible to be telegraphed. But now he felt it was also too monstrous a thing to say. Never could he say it to His Majesty’s face. He stumbled into the office of Rudolf’s First Lord Chamberlain who led him to Baron Nopsca. With Nopsca’s help he gained admittance to the Empress, stuttering that Mary Vetsera had poisoned the Crown Prince and then herself. This was the slightly mitigated ghoulishness which the Empress sobbed out to Franz Joseph as he entered.
At the same time the news spread from the Baden train depot. To stop the express train at the local station, Hoyos had been forced to give the stationmaster a hint of the extremity. The stationmaster promptly telegraphed the railroad’s owner, Baron Nathaniel Rothschild. That afternoon the stock exchange, like all public institutions, closed abruptly. But thanks to Rothschild it closed a bit more knowledgeably than the others. Most traders dumped. But soon long-term calculation won over short-term shock. On Thursday, when the death of the Imperial leftist was official, the stock exchange opened in a buying mood.
After the first crushing moment Franz Joseph appeared to absorb the blow almost as well as the market did. He was stunned, and being stunned was an armor against agony. Stunned, he consoled his wife. Katharina Schratt arrived and tried to console them both. Then he went back to his study to stun himself further with work. He worked late and at 10 P.M. that night telegraphed his Hungarian Prime Minister to take resolute measures against any further disturbances over the Army Bill.
At 4 A.M. he was up as usual, ready to work once more. Soon afterward, with dawn reddening the Palace windows, he received the chief Court physician, Dr. Widerhofer, just back from Mayerling. The doctor could not withhold what he had found. And now came the full, throttling news: The Crown Prince, he reported, had not been poisoned. His Imperial Highness had killed Mary Vetsera with a revolver shot about two hours before killing himself with another bullet.
But that wasn’t all. There was also the matter of Rudolf’s last letters. Only one of these had been written in Mayerling, with Mary already dead beside him. “I have no right to go on living,” said the letter to his mother, “I have killed,” and then requested that he and Mary be buried together at Heiligenkreuz Monastery near Mayerling.
In another letter Rudolf advised his sister Valerie to emigrate after Franz Joseph’s death, “for what will happen then in Austria is unforeseeable.” To his wife Stephanie he wrote that she was now liberated from his presence and the burden he had been to her; she should be kind to their little daughter. He left letters to Baron Hirsch and to Mitzi Caspar which the Emperor read but whose contents remain a Habsburg secret. To his valet Loschek he wrote a letter requesting him to fetch a priest as his last order and thanking him for many years of loyal service.
For his father, the Emperor, there was nothing. No letter. Not the briefest note. Not a line. Nothing.
It was an appalling, eloquent omission. Dr. Widerhofer had to convey it to Franz Joseph, that very early morning of Thursday, January 31. The two men stood alone on hard marble in the palace dawn, monarch and physician, and the monarch sank slowly to the floor, and cried.
He refused help. He must be left there, to lie shaking. He stopped shaking. He stood up again. He asked if the body had been returned to the Palace and placed in Rudolf’s bed, as ordered. He was assured the order had been carried out. He then instructed his son’s Adjutant General to put white officer’s gloves on his son’s hands. He girded himself with his saber, pulled on his own white gloves. He walked to his son’s bedroom.
Here the Crown Prince lay, gloved hands crossed over a blanket pulled up to his neck, forehead covered by a snow-white bandage—all as ordered. Franz Joseph stood straight, immobile, sculpted, throughout a fifteen-minute vigil. In accordance with custom and regulation, he was saying good-bye to a brother officer.
The son had completed his only possible and desperate insurgence. Outside the Palace, Vienna had begun to quake with it. But inside, the last confrontation took place on the father’s terms—correct down to the color of the gloves.
The ceremony restored paramount perspectives. Franz Joseph became himself again. Majesty re-entered his veins. Once more he was his people’s central symbol. Such symbols do not weep. They are structuring and orienting energies. They radiate order into the world’s grievous chaos. Even this, even the abomination of Mayerling, must be ordered into a proper scheme. Here lay the Emperor’s task: to bureaucratize the unspeakable, to resolve it into administrative responses and thus render it more tolerable to himself and to his subjects.
Two imperatives loomed above everything else: A Catholic burial must be obtained for Rudolf, circumstances notwithstanding. And Mary Vetsera must be erased from public view—her name, her death, her body. The last necessity was the most urgent of all.
Mary’s mother felt the pressure first; that is, to the degree that she could feel anything at all. Throughout her life the older Baroness had been a woman of burnished will. Her great wardrobe, her command of fashion, her jewelry, her social arts, her parties, her daughters—Mary most of all—had always been aimed upward. And now those heights that had been her aspiration and unflagging pilgrimage—they suddenly came down on her like a vile avalanche. Her Mary had been swallowed up by them. Now they crushed her rights as a mother. They came crashing down on her life’s purpose.
She had been at the Palace Wednesday morning, searching for her daughter. Quite unexpectedly she’d found herself received by the Empress. A lifelong dream came true, as nightmare. Her Majesty told the Baroness that both their children were dead. Numb, the Baroness returned to her home. Immediately the Emperor’s Adjutant General called to say that Mary had poisoned the Crown Prince. The mother must leave Vienna before nightfall to escape the wrath of the populace.
There wasn’t enough life in her now to ask questions, to object, even to comprehend. She left for Venice the same afternoon but stepped from the train midway, at a station in the Alps, to turn around. Not in resistance, but out of the dumb insensate urge to be with her daughter’s body. A northbound train took her back home. Instantly the heights struck at her again. She found her palais surrounded by police agents. It was suggested strongly that she leave once more.
In one last instinctive convulsion the social climber in her reared: She would entertain such a proposal only from a suitable high emissary, sent by the Emperor himself.
Within an hour the Prime Minister Count Taaffe arrived, gallant and merciless, with top hat and cigar. He was most suitable indeed—the only man in the capital to draw a certain acrid savor from the day. The Crown Prince had never been his cup of tea. But this crisis was. It demanded the highest kind of fortwursteln.
The Prime Minister began by conveying to the Baroness his personal condolences. The tragic situation, he said, had now been clarified as a double suicide by gun. It was therefore in everybody’s interest that the Baroness depart from the capital at once, at least for the duration of Rudolf’s obsequies. That she consent, also at once, to her daughter’s secret but Catholic interment in an inconspicuous grave at Heiligenkreuz Monastery. And furthermore, the Baroness must not draw attention to the burial site either by her presence or by any other sign until a time in the future when public curiosity might have vanished. If the Baroness agreed, His Majesty’s government would be grateful; indeed it would release to her brother-in-law Count Stockau, and therefore to her, her daughter’s last letters found at Mayerling. In saying all this he was expressing the All Highest will. He was quite sure that the Baroness, being the lady she was, would not run the risk of obstruction.
Count Taaffe, leaning back with his Havana, had trained on her the murderous smoothness feared in Parliament. The Baroness had nothing left but acquiescence. That day she was given poor Mary’s farewell words. She read them. Like the Emperor, she cried.
“Dear Mother,” Mary wrote. “Forgive me for what I have done: I could not resist love. In agreement with him I wish to be buried by his side at the Allan
d churchyard. I am happier in death than in life. Your Mary.” The letter to her sister recommended that she marry for love; and Mary asked that a gardenia be placed on her grave every January 13, the day Rudolf had become her lover.
But through the macabre came glints of the high-spirited belle, the Turf Angel queening it over the races, the gay, conquering beauty. “Bratfisch whistled wonderfully,” said her postscript to her sister. And the letter to the Duke of Braganza, one of her more favored admirers, was one long tease about willing him her famous boa so that he could hang it above his bed. “Cheers, Waterboy!” Rudolf added to that letter—“Waterboy” being Braganza’s nickname because he sported neckerchiefs like the boys who watered horses at the cab stands.
Cheers!…the gaiety from on high. Its laughter came echoing through a ghastly veil. The Baroness cried and departed.
Chapter 24
Mary Vetsera’s body was now abandoned to the Imperial machinery whose gears had already begun to grind. The All Highest family stood constitutionally beyond the reach of police or judiciary. Under the Emperor’s direction the so-called Lord Marshal’s Office (Obersthofmarschallamt) executed the legal business of the House of Habsburg with supreme authority, not reviewable by any court in the realm. This Lord Marshal’s Office processed the Mayerling case.
Mayerling would be a difficult job, even for so lofty a bureau. Mary Vetsera, not being a Habsburg, was subject to common authorities in life or death. If these authorities declared her a murder victim—which she assuredly, though willingly, was—a homicide report would have to be filed with the district attorney in Baden, to incalculable consequences. But if Mary Vetsera were to be declared a suicide, then the Crown could not honor its pledge to give Mary a Catholic funeral; then the consecrated earth at Heiligenkreuz Monastery would be denied her. That is, under ordinary circumstances.
The Lord Marshal’s Office telegraphed Abbot Grünböck at the monastery. In addition Rudolf’s First Lord Chamberlain wrote him a letter, conveying an All Highest wish. A police courier galloped off with it to Heiligenkreuz in the Vienna Woods. Double-pressured, the Abbot made an extraordinary accommodation. His graveyard would receive the body.
Thus the true manner of Mary’s death could be legally obliterated. Next came her physical disappearance.
In the afternoon of the same day, January 31, Alexander Baltazzi and Count Georg Stockau, Mary’s uncles, went to Mayerling. They drove in Stockau’s unobtrusive carriage, avoiding the main roads. A representative of the Lord Marshal’s Office followed, together with a Court physician. They passed the armed guards, the unquiet ravens, the howling dogs. Inside the lodge they removed an Imperial seal put on a certain door. Behind it, under a heap of old clothes, lay Mary Vetsera, now forty hours dead. Her discolored fingers still clutched the wilted rose.
“Had I read about such a scene in a penny dreadful,” the Lord Marshal’s agent, Heinrich Slatin, would later recall, “I should have regarded as an extravagant nightmare what I was now experiencing.”
The agent’s official findings read as follows: “On the morning of January 30, 1889, a female corpse was discovered in the village area of Mayerling. The Court physician Dr. Franz Auchtenthaler diagnosed undoubted suicide by means of a firearm…The undersigned Herr Georg Count Stockau as well as the co-undersigned Herr Alexander Baltazzi identified the body as that of their niece, Marie Alexandrine Baroness von Vetsera, born in Vienna on March 19, 1871…”
While the agent drew up the document, the physician washed caked blood from the corpse. Then it was dressed in coat and hat, in boa, veil and shoes. It was stood up. The two uncles linked arms with their niece and walked her slowly out into the night, past any possible suspicious eyes, through the howling winds, past Rudolf’s barking dogs, to Count Stockau’s carriage. A hearse would, of course, have given away too much and provoked too much attention in an area that might at any moment become infested with journalists.
The two uncles lifted Mary into the carriage, propped her into sitting position, wedged her between them, pushed a broomstick between her dress and her spine to keep her erect. A detective climbed in as well.
Then the carriage began to move, lit by a single lantern. The agent from the Lord Marshal’s Office followed in a second vehicle with the Court physician. The shadows of horses and wheels moved past those of leafless trees. And so the cadaver that, alive, had made the boa the rage of Vienna, still bore the chic trademark. And so Mary Vetsera, spark of so many costume balls, starred in a final masquerade. And so Alexander Baltazzi, who had won the English Derby in 1876, must content himself with slower horsemanship, that night of January 31, 1889.
Slowly, over icy ruts, in sudden, driving rains, the small caravan bounced and creaked along byways through the dark. Drops whipped against the window. Mary swayed to every jolt. The horses kept slipping. Often the drivers had to stop to caulk their hooves. Though the distance wasn’t great, the carriages labored longer than planned. They arrived not much before midnight at the churchyard of Heiligenkreuz Monastery. A group of high-ranking police awaited them.
Mary’s carriage stopped at the burial chapel where her uncles placed her in a makeshift coffin hastily nailed together by a carpenter. The Lord Marshal’s agent proceeded to the abbey itself where the district governor signed the death deposition and completed other paperwork which provided a veneer of legality along with utter secrecy.
And then it was time to hide Mary in the earth. But the rainstorm had grown so cruel, the darkness so drastic, that the gravediggers would have needed too many lanterns for their work. Too much visibility would have been created. The commanding police officer, Commissar Gorup, telegraphed in cipher to police headquarters in Vienna. There a special council was meeting in an all-night session. Commissar Gorup obtained permission to postpone burial until daybreak.
The officials therefore adjourned to the abbey’s cellar for refreshments. Since the abbey’s wine was famous and since the importance of the mission was in itself intoxicating, the mood became animated. So animated that years later the Lord Marshal’s agent still remembered such Gemütlichkeit with distaste. As the night wore on and the jollity increased, a monk had to speak sobering words.
Finally the rain’s color changed from black to gray. In the wretched, pouring dawn a huddle of umbrellas bobbed over wet snow patches to the grave site. A prior pronounced a blessing while his hassock grew sodden. A body sank away. At 10 A.M. Commissar Gorup sent a telegram to police headquarters which, deciphered, said: ALL FINISHED.
It was all finished except for the death certificate which was never issued. And except for the entry into the parish death registry, which would not be made for many weeks. Otherwise it was all finished officially as far as the person of Mary Baroness Vetsera was concerned. Overnight she vaporized into virtual tracelessness. In all the far reaches of the Dual Monarchy her name reached print just once again, in a provincial sheet called Illustriertes Grazer Extrablatt. It ran a story claiming that young Baroness Vetsera, a social figure in the capital, had died in Venice and was now resting in the family tomb in Pardubice, Bohemia. Somehow the article had bypassed the censor.
But apart from this stray fantasy, her name never appeared again in any book, magazine or newspaper published in Austria-Hungary. No printed mention was ever made of her death or even her life. It was as though nobody remembered that she had walked the earth. Her existence as daughter, sister and niece, as flirt or lover, as ballroom magnet and race-course presence, her whole career as glamour princess in the fashion columns of the daily press—all extinguished from the root, all finished. It had never happened. It had never begun.
It was all finished, and it was not all finished. Her extirpation completed only half the business in which she had been involved. If Mary’s buriers must be thieves in the night, Rudolf’s interment must be a daylight pageant, with every pomp of church and state.
Toward that purpose an autopsy was performed on the Crown Prince. At 8 P.M. on January 31, while Mary’s uncle
s dressed her for her bizarre ride through the Vienna Woods, Court officials were busy in the Palace with her lover. A chamberlain opened the door of Rudolf’s bedroom to admit the autopsy commission. It consisted of Professor Hermann Widerhofer, physician-in-chief to His Imperial and Royal Majesty; Privy Councillor Dr. Eduard Hofmann, director of the Institute for Forensic Medicine, and Professor Hans Kundrath, director of the Institute for Pathological Anatomy.
These distinguished scientists dissected and examined the Archduke until 2 A.M. They spent the night drawing up their report. It stated that His Imperial and Royal Highness, the most serene Crown Prince, had died as a result of the shattering of his skull and the anterior parts of the brain. That a bullet fired from a medium-caliber revolver had produced the injuries described. That His Imperial and Royal Highness himself had fired the shot. And that, lastly and most importantly, certain pathological formations had been found, such as “the clear flattening of cerebral convolutions, and the distensions of the ventricles which…are usually accompanied by abnormal mental conditions and therefore justify the assumption that the deed was committed in a state of mental confusion.”
In short: Rudolf had not been quite lucid when he placed the revolver against his temple. By the lights of the Catholic Church he was not a suicide. Hence he could be buried, after the Habsburg manner and with Habsburg solemnity, in the crypt of the Capuchin friars, like all his ancestors before him.
Did the physicians bend the facts to allow this conclusion? In Austria many a coroner’s report adjusted the truth in such a manner. Vienna, as we have seen, was a city of Catholic suicide-artists. Its doctors often exercised much deftness in discovering brain pathology which would allow a religious funeral. In the baroque climate truth was a holy game, not a narrow pedantry.
A Nervous Splendor Page 23