A Nervous Splendor

by Frederic Morton

  On sudden impulse, he walked with the Lord Chamberlain down the steps. Not only that, but when the casket came to rest in the crypt, he dropped to his knees, kissed the wood of this still-temporary coffin, weeping, and, weeping, whispered the Pater Noster. For one minute he was the broken, heedless, poor sinning father of a poor dead sinner.

  Then he rose to his feet without assistance. He took out his handkerchief, applied it to his face. He walked out, dry of eye and firm of step. He was by God’s grace the Emperor of Austria and the Apostolic King of Hungary, ready to rule another twenty-seven years. The episode was over.

  Chapter 25

  “Throughout these heavy days,” reported the German military attaché in Vienna, “the Emperor kept to his schedule of military briefings, political decisions, and the dispatch of executive decrees…After January 30, his work proceeded at the same pace as before.”

  Franz Joseph had purged himself of private calamity through meticulous pyrotechnics of public grief. His capital could not recover so efficiently. Spectacle failed the city, perhaps for the first time. The day after the funeral Vienna awoke as from a dismal jag. The sun was gone. From the funerary pageant only street litter was left, and Lipizzaner droppings rimed with frost.

  The show was over and the fact sank in. How could it have happened? What exactly was it that yesterday’s great dark circus had tried to celebrate away? What had turned this fairy prince, this arrow toward greatness—into a corpse? Nobody knew for sure. Everybody distrusted everything, particularly official bulletins. Many people believed the forbidden, that is, newspaper stories printed abroad, beyond the reach of censorship.

  It hadn’t escaped the foreign press that a young lady of social fame had vanished just when the Crown Prince died. Outside the Empire, front-page sensations exploded like gushers and then poured across Austrian borders. It became the job of the police to confiscate a flood tide. On a single day, February 19, they impounded 4790 copies of various foreign journals in Vienna. Still, a black market of Rudolf revelations developed fast. Most fiacre cabbies—those eternal foilers of authority—kept a Mayerling lending library under their seats. The fee was forty kreuzers, and the maximum loan period ten minutes. For that long you could wolf down a copy of Munich’s Neueste Nachrichten whose headline contained the word “Vetsera.”

  But double suicide with the Baroness was by no means the only popular plot line. Another was put forth by a book published in Bavaria only fourteen days after the funeral. It had a pregnant Mary as the Prince’s murderer, and his bodyguards as her executioners. Yet other versions saw Rudolf as the victim of Mary’s brothers, or of the Duke of Braganza, or of a forester avenging the seduction of his wife, or of a cunning dagger hired by the Crown Princess, by the Crown Princess’s brother, by the Jesuits, by the Freemasons, by Bismarck, by the German Kaiser, by the Tsar’s secret police…

  These rumors did not really titillate. They disturbed. The funeral itself, with its daubs of high color, only added to the bafflement, now that one looked back at it in cold retrospect. Empress Elisabeth, the Crown Prince’s own mother, had not participated. Nor had his widow, the Crown Princess Stephanie. Why? The official Wiener Zeitung stated that the shock had endangered the health of these august ladies. Their doctors had not permitted them to attend. Neither Loschek nor old Nehammer, Rudolf’s most intimate servants, had been in the procession. The newspapers explained that Loschek suffered from an abscess on the neck and that both were incapacitated by grief. But Bratfisch, whose stamina matched the Emperor’s—where was he?

  And there had been a more crushing absence of much greater official weight. The Cardinal Archbishop of Budapest had not come. Nor was he the only gap in church ranks. Pope Leo XIII had approved of the funeral and telegraphed his condolences. Yet at the solemn requiem mass held for the Crown Prince in the Church of Santa Maria dell-Anima in Rome on the day of the funeral—the Vatican’s entire College of Cardinals had stayed away.

  Austrian newspapers didn’t publish the fact. But all Vienna knew it by the next morning. Vienna also knew very quickly that at Trient, in South Tyrol, the requiem had been read only in mutilated form; that in Merano a defiant priest had tried to close his church on the funeral day; that in Linz only the Protestant churches had rung bells in Rudolf’s memory; and that even in the Emperor’s favorite Alpine resort of Ischl, the parish priest had kept the bells silent during the Crown Prince’s burial.

  Of course many ecclesiastics considered Rudolf, not without reason, a radical, an Imperial infidel come to a heathen end. But he was no longer a danger. His official memory was now the Emperor’s property. Why should that property be defaced—even by cardinals? Had Rudolf’s life been so unforgivable? Or his death? Something seemed to have gone awry between Church and Crown. These two had been the joint impresarios of the great Austrian centuries. Together they had cast over reality’s daily mud an authorized fantasy that was palliating and redemptive. Now a rift had cut between them. The hope of the future had become a painted cadaver in a crypt. A crack ran through a fundamental premise of the realm. The city shivered.

  “I have lived through the saddest catastrophes in Vienna,” wrote Eduard Hanslick, the supreme music critic of the Neue Freie Presse. “I have lived through revolutions, the loss of lands, murderous devastations by flood and fire—nothing of all this is comparable to the horror of January 30…The disconsolate, desperate turbulence which ripped through the entire population is indescribable…”

  And yet, slowly, a semblance of normality had to be attempted. On February 10, the Court Theater resumed performances. Through unfortunate scheduling it reopened with Grillparzer’s Sappho; that is, a tragedy featuring premeditated suicide, the very thing the government had been at pains to exorcise from the Rudolf melodrama.

  On the same day an official portrait of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Franz Joseph’s nephew, was issued. Many newspapers published it. Franz Ferdinand’s father, as the Emperor’s next eldest brother, was by Habsburg house law next in line for the throne. The father had not yet officially relinquished the claim to the son. Still, the ubiquity of the son’s portraits foretold such an act, as did the announcement that the Emperor had received Franz Ferdinand in a long audience. Unofficially, the young Archduke was the new Crown Prince.

  But who was this Franz Ferdinand? Court intimates spoke of his weak lungs, his jagged temper, his clerical disposition. The Wiener Tagblatt, which ran his picture, also wrote an editorial about the fate of Europe’s great liberal princes: the passing of progress-minded German Emperor Friedrich, who reigned only ninety days before his death, had put Kaiser Wilhelm into power. And now Rudolf’s tragedy in Austria had brought Franz Ferdinand to the fore. “A nemesis seems to pursue those men fit for rule not only by birth but by ability…”

  Nemesis hung over the roofs. On February 11, Franz Joseph with his Empress and his entire Court traveled to Budapest for an indefinite stay. True, the move had been planned before Mayerling; indeed Magyar politics demanded it. And yet the capital felt forsaken. The same week Archduke Ludwig Viktor left for Kleesheim, his castle in Salzburg. Archduke Karl Ludwig went to Merano for a cure. Archduke Albrecht had military business in Arco where he joined Archduke Karl Salvator. Archduke Eugen sojourned in Olmütz, Bohemia, on some prolonged official occasion. Franz Ferdinand, the de facto heir apparent, returned to garrison duty in Prague, and the Crown Princess Widow Stephanie (as she was styled henceforth) must for her health’s sake take to the sun at Miramar on the Adriatic. The Neue Freie Presse summed up all these trips in one laconic sentence: “For the first time almost no members of the Imperial Family are present in Vienna at this season.”

  But “this season” was no longer The Season. Carnival had died. The ballrooms were closed, the great chandeliers remained unlit, the orchestra stands empty, the waltzes undanced. Why linger?

  Many high aristocrats followed the All Highest example. Every day, luxury sleeping cars had to be added to trains leaving the Southern Railway terminal. The co
mpartments filled up with Their Serene Highnesses, the Princes Lobkowitz, the Esterházys, the Windischgrätzes, with their trunks and their retinues. “Suddenly many of our great nobles find it necessary to go south,” said the Wiener Tagblatt on February 21. “Wintertime is not merry enough for them this year. Let the lower echelons in Vienna do all the mourning. The people of our city, who must absorb the grievous death of the Crown Prince, will survive this blow too. But they won’t forget it either.”

  “The Crown Prince” still meant Rudolf. In the popular mind that name and that office were still so intertwined that even a grand-opera funeral could not part them. It was not: The Crown Prince is dead—long live the Crown Prince! It was: The Crown Prince is dead…Silence. Emptiness. Grandees scatter, maggots twitch. And the cold wind blows.

  “In the annals of 1889,” said a financial article, “our true Ash Wednesday will be fixed not on March 6 but on January 30.”

  The death of our Crown Prince necessarily entails the demise of our carnival. This signifies a material loss to Vienna which its inhabitants will bear with the same selflessness with which they are bearing the moral loss. Thousands of ball preparations, agreements, contracts, budgetary allocations by corporate and private parties have been canceled overnight. The huge entertainment établissements will suffer, but their damages are easier to bear than the ones sustained by innumerable other trades, from those concerned with the manufacture of ladies’ favors to fashion workshops producing evening gowns or specializing in masquerade costumes. Leather-goods firms are particularly hard hit. Their carnival novelties are usually ideas of the moment and cannot be used again next year. A great loss has been suffered by charities who will not receive the proceeds they expected. This applies to the balls of the White Cross, the Red Cross, the Railway Employees’ Benefit Ball, and dozens of District Welfare Balls…

  For some the catastrophe resulted in overwork. Three seamstresses fainted on February 10 in a plant in the Ottakring District. They had sat for fourteen hours straight at sewing machines stitching mourning clothes together. For many more workers the opposite held true: Mayerling meant neither an overtime windfall nor a perfumed Grand Guignol—it meant no food on tomorrow’s table.

  On February 16, Dr. Rainer von Reinöhl, an economics professor at the University, published statistics showing that two hundred thousand of Vienna’s less than two million lived below the starvation level. That for a majority of Viennese workers the expenses of raising a family resulted in the beginnings of malnutrition. And that the so-called Greater Vienna Plan would only aggravate the destitution: If the working-class neighborhoods outside city limits were to be incorporated into the City of Vienna, then their poor inhabitants must pay city taxes and thereby have less money than ever for food.

  This study used findings obtained before Mayerling. Afterward the picture became still grimmer. Carnival-connected firms cut back, employees were let go, at least for the time being. Charity funding dried up. And, to complete the wretchedness, in mid-February the temperature fell to the year’s brute low point, eleven degrees below zero Celsius.

  In slum districts like Ottakring and Erdberg—candidates for inclusion in Greater Vienna—many hundreds shivered their way to the Wärmestuben. These “warming rooms” were maintained at government expense for the indigent who either had no roof or could not afford coal and kindling wood for whatever shelter they had. But the Wärmestuben, soon crammed beyond capacity, had to turn back half the people pressing against their doors.

  On February 20, a woman was hauled into court for living with her little son down in the windproof sewers, close to the warm effluents. The charge: endangering her child’s health. The defense: there was no other way to keep the child from freezing. The judge acquitted her and condemned society. The result: mother and child were free to go out into the cold again.

  Chapter 26

  Franz Joseph, residing in Budapest, seemed to have averted his face. Rudolf lay in his temporary coffin. The aristocrats raced their greyhounds in sunny Abbazia. Only the people were left in the city, to starve, to shiver and to grieve. Some turned angrily away from Habsburg to Hohenzollern—to the north, toward Germany. Pan-Germanism was a soiled sentiment since von Schönerer’s jailing. Nevertheless it enjoyed a sturdy life underground as well as above. In bad times it could ignite unexpectedly. On February 7, it singed Hugo Wolf.

  On that date one of the first cultural events after Mayerling took place. It was a Lieder recital and as such not out of key, having not a merry but a serious nature. The Wagner Society gave an evening largely devoted to Hugo Wolf songs, performed by the great baritone Ferdinand Jäger. The young composer himself sat at the piano, but hardly in the state of elation he ought to feel on “his” evening. He was irritated by a quarrel with his publisher, worn out by the secrecy of his affair with Melanie Köchert, depressed by the funereal atmosphere in the city. In addition, a false rumor had been making the rounds in the Wagner Society. It whispered, to his vexation, that Wolf was a Jew.

  So he acknowledged the opening applause with a glare. But it wouldn’t have helped him if he had been in a better mood that night. Herr Jäger was singing “Heimweh” (“Homesickness”) based on an Eichendorff poem. An ovation broke loose when he came to the line “Grüss dich, Deutschland, aus Herzensgrund!” “A salute to you, oh Germany, from the heart’s depths!” The applause here took no note whatsoever of Wolf’s music. It was a purely political noise. Nor would the clapping and the stamping cease. Finally the Society chairman had to get up and remind the audience that the song was not finished. Herr Jäger began from the start again. Again he was interrupted at the same point by a pan-German demonstration. Wolf slammed his music sheets together, cursing. Pandemonium. Calls for the police on the part of the nonpolitical music-minded. Herr Jäger threatened to leave, and would have, if the Teutons hadn’t marched out first in closed formation.

  During those frigid weeks they made their presence known everywhere. A pan-German sheet called Kyffhäuser printed a warning: Let Jewry stop its machinations; it no longer had protectors in high places. The same sheet had printed the news of the Crown Prince’s death as a small item in the “Miscellaneous” column.

  Young Dr. Schnitzler ran into a related viciousness. The Polyclinic Ball had already taken place and the Ball Committee met at an inn to review finances. A member got up, the same one who earlier had placed a ball ad in an anti-Semitic paper and been rebuked for it by Schnitzler. Now he rose to accuse “this Jewish gentleman”—Schnitzler—of a felony committed during the ball: The Jewish gentleman had had the gall to ask the orchestra leader to repeat a waltz instead of letting the music go on to the quadrille scheduled next in the dance program. The accuser grew increasingly vehement and finally demanded a formal and humble apology from “the offender.” Even more astounding than the virulence of the charge was the vote of the committee when the Jewish gentleman refused to drop to his knees. Only the month before they had voted with Schnitzler to rebuke the anti-Semitic member. Now, on the question of forcing Schnitzler to apologize, they voted five-five. Whereupon the committee chairman broke the tie in favor of the Jewish gentleman, presumably because his father controlled the Polyclinic.

  There was an outbreak of veiled thrusts. In Parliament, German-nationalist deputies proposed a complicated bill which, without spelling out the issue involved, would make it hard for Jews to change their names. And from the Winter Palace of St. Petersburg—always Rudolf’s bête noir and the most anti-Semitic of all courts—came curious news.

  Apparently the Tsar had permitted a break of the etiquette observed by all other crowned heads in Europe. Barely a week after obsequies for the Austrian Crown Prince, a court ball had been held in the Russian capital. To be sure, it had been a “black ball.” The master of ceremonies had wielded a black staff. The ladies had danced in black decolletage dresses with long black trains. Decorations had been black and Lucullan dishes were served on black china. The Tsarina had worn a virtual cap of diamonds set o
ff stunningly by her black gown. It had been a most piquant and animated affair. Something very different. Among the guests only one diplomat had appeared. No others had been invited. That one had been the Ambassador of His German Majesty, the Prussian King.

  By then the word Mayerling had already begun to phosphoresce throughout the world. Abroad it tingled and thrilled. In Vienna it was like some hidden hell machine of which nothing was known except that it was made of gold. Now and then the city tried to shake off the giant riddle that undermined its boulevards. There erupted rumors of some rational solution. At one point word spread that Johann Pfeiffer, King of the Birds, had heard his parrots speak the truth of what had happened in Rudolf’s hunting lodge. A crowd formed at the Schottenring. The police brought the man and his black-craped cage to a precinct house. But the birds just blithered and jabbered in panic, and their King lost his renowned humor. The bafflement continued.

  In the second week of February a Monsignor Luigi Galimberti drove up to Mayerling itself. Ordinarily nobody could enter the estate. Guards kept the gates barred. But the Monsignor was Papal Nuncio to the Empire. He had to be admitted.

  At the lodge the Lord Marshal’s agent, Dr. Heinrich Slatin, was still busy, drawing up an inventory of assets and objects for the Emperor in his capacity as Rudolf’s executor. Slatin had to stop work when the Nuncio walked in, his corpulence beautifully caped, his hands folded. Since he didn’t speak German, he and Slatin communicated in an awkward mixture of Italian and Latin. The Nuncio conveyed blessings from the Holy See and then expressed the desire to sanctify “all the unfortunate places” with humble prayer. He asked that these be pointed out to him, with appropriate explanations of what had transpired where in this most deplorable tragedy. He particularly wanted to pray over the spots where the bullets had struck after leaving the poor flesh. “Quam multi globuli?” he asked in his Church Latin. “How many bullets?”