A century has transformed the bloody scene at Mayerling into romantic tragedy: star-crossed lovers who preferred death together than to be parted by cold unfeeling propriety. The story has been replayed countless times, in histories and in novels, in movies and musicals, and through ballet. For too long, rumor has displaced fact. The time has come to rend the veil of gauzy romanticism and bizarre conspiracies, revealing—as much as is possible—the byzantine truth that led to tragedy.
In the end evidence suggests that only two people were responsible for the events at Mayerling: Rudolf and Mary. Yet exactly what took place between them behind that locked bedroom door can never truly be known. From the distance of more than a century, both emerge as deeply flawed, emotionally damaged, high-strung, and desperate actors. But the question of motive remains: What drove Rudolf and Mary to such a tragic end? Did they, as sentimental historians suggest, find the idea of life without each other simply too much to bear? Or did Rudolf and Mary die for reasons that may have had no connection to each other? A new look suggests a far more plausible—and ultimately more shocking—scenario surrounding Mayerling.
“There is no doubt,” Queen Victoria wrote of Rudolf after Mayerling, “that the poor Crown Prince was quite off his head.”1 The official declaration of mental instability likely stemmed from religious expediency, but few doubted that Rudolf had been a deeply disturbed man. The question of just how disturbed he may have been—and what role this played in his ultimate end—has long plagued history. But new analysis suggests some startling possibilities.
Generations of incestuous marriages brought physical and mental infirmities to Rudolf’s ancestors. “With us,” his cousin Archduke Franz Ferdinand once complained, “man and wife are always related to each other twenty times over. The result is that half of the children are idiots or epileptics.”2 The archduke wasn’t exaggerating. Rudolf’s parents were first cousins; his grandmothers were sisters; and Franz Josef and Elisabeth shared the same grandfather in King Maximilian I Josef of Bavaria.3 The crown prince’s genealogical tables, as his official biographer Baron Oskar von Mitis so delicately phrased it, revealed “a scarcity of ancestors.”4
The Habsburg inheritance was not untroubled. Emperor Ferdinand I has often been described as “an epileptic idiot,” a man who “could hardly put two sentences together,” while his sister Archduchess Marie displayed signs of mental instability.5 Varying degrees of eccentricity exhibited themselves in Rudolf’s paternal relatives: His uncle Ludwig Viktor haunted Vienna’s bathhouses to seduce young male soldiers and liked to be photographed in elaborate ball gowns; Archduke Karl Ludwig, an otherwise sober and serious uncle, had a reputation as a religious fanatic who terrorized his third wife, Maria Theresa. And Rudolf’s favorite cousin, Archduke Otto, was an overt sadist who delighted in torturing both animals and the soldiers in his regiment.6
Stephanie’s memoirs deemed Rudolf “more of a Wittelsbach than a Habsburg. He was clever, indeed brilliant, highly cultivated, with a broad, generous mind. He was as sensitive as his mother. He was impulsive, mercurial, highly strung. He had terrific outbursts of temper, moods.”7 This Bavarian heritage was particularly troubling. King Maximilian I Josef’s brilliant but highly eccentric son King Ludwig I lost his throne over his stunningly indiscreet liaison with the notorious dancer Lola Montez; Ludwig’s sister Alexandra went through life believing she had once swallowed a piano made of glass. The king’s grandson Prince Otto was declared insane in 1878 and spent the rest of his life locked away in a castle, howling at imaginary voices, tearing apart his food, and smashing flies against the windows.8
Then there was King Ludwig II of Bavaria, Empress Elisabeth’s unfortunate second cousin. He’d come to the throne at the age of eighteen, tall, handsome, and decidedly odd, envisioning himself as a hero in one of the Wagner operas he so loved. After a disastrous engagement to Elisabeth’s sister Sophie ended in 1867, the homosexual king flung himself into a world of nocturnal fantasies, building his famed castles, picnicking in the snow, holding conversations with phantoms, and cavorting with handsome young soldiers. His delusions led the Bavarian government to depose him as insane in 1886; a day later Ludwig’s body was found floating in an alpine lake along with that of his doctor, the former monarch apparently having drowned his keeper and then himself rather than endure life locked away like his brother Otto.9
Finally, of course, there was Empress Elisabeth. Her paternal grandfather, Duke Pius, had been feebleminded and lived in isolation; after marrying his second cousin Ludovika, Elisabeth’s father, Duke Max in Bavaria, grew noticeably eccentric. Of Max and Ludovika’s children, the eldest son, Ludwig—Marie Larisch’s father—was a recluse with a reputation for restlessness, while daughters Elisabeth and her sisters Helene, Sophie, Marie, and Mathilde all suffered from serious depression, feelings of persecution, and occasionally erratic behavior.10
As Baron von Mitis noted in his biography of the crown prince:
What effect, if any, this genetic inheritance may have had on Rudolf remains a mystery, but there is no denying the accumulated psychological and physical forces that, by the beginning of 1889, led him to tragedy.
The profound incentive to his actions was not formed by one single motive. A mass of personal irritations and tragic associations of a higher order, which were often inter-related, fostered the germination of a seed, which was already biologically present in his being. The unbearable burden of the whole dragged him down to the depth of life and made him covet death. Each individual of the component causes might seem to a cool observer hardly sufficient in itself to destroy the joy of living but in a sick mind and all being united they can develop the lurking consent to death until only the moment of release is needed to stage the last scene of the tragedy.11
Rudolf had always been psychologically fragile, subject to anxiety and depression. Franz Josef was too preoccupied with the business of ruling, too consumed with exalted conceptions of his role, too emotionally aloof, and too judgmental to offer his son any real guidance or affection, and his disapproval likely fueled in Rudolf a sense that he was a disappointment. Rudolf was two when his mother first fled Vienna, and she was frequently absent for months thereafter. When Elisabeth did appear, she was often battling Rudolf’s grandmother Archduchess Sophie, tearing the young boy’s affections in differing directions. Although he idolized Elisabeth, she was too elusive a presence to provide Rudolf with the love and acceptance he craved. His forced separation at six from his sister Gisela and his nanny undermined any stability, while the empress’s obvious favoritism toward Marie Valerie likely reinforced Rudolf’s sense of inadequacy and resentment.12 The educational regime instituted by Gondrecourt was physically and emotionally abusive, and the trauma manifested itself in Rudolf’s persistent bed-wetting, wild mood swings, and nightmares.
Early on Rudolf developed an unhealthy fascination with death. When his grandmother Archduchess Sophie died in 1872, he insisted on hearing every detail of her last moments over and over again. Walking through a park one day, he saw a man drink caustic soda and die in agony; Rudolf was so obsessed with the episode that for days he talked of little else.13 He also showed a tendency to aggression, not only when denied something but also in his artwork. Childish drawings and paintings of dead animals, decapitated heads, and men dueling—with splotches of crimson vividly slashed into the wounds—suggest a propensity toward violent thoughts.14 Marie Festetics remembered how even as a child Rudolf compulsively shot bullfinches from his window. “Every creature that breathes or has wings is doomed to death,” she wrote, adding that Rudolf had “become possessed by a sort of lust for killing.”15 This wasn’t a passing fancy: Rudolf had a disconcerting and dangerous habit of waving his guns around—in 1878 he’d accidentally shot himself in the hand.16 And, shortly before his wedding, Rudolf amused himself by having caged animals set loose in the palace courtyard so that he could cold-bloodedly shoot them down.17 Yet no one seems to have expressed any concern over his obsessive behavior.
A journal entry Rudolf wrote at the age of fifteen is telling: “Thoughts of all kinds race through my head; it seems confused, all day long my brain boils and toils the whole day long; one goes out, another comes in, and each possess me, each tells me something different, sometimes serene and happy, sometimes black as a raven, full of fury; they fight and from the struggle truth slowly develops.”18 Retrospective analysis is a tricky and inexact thing, but some evidence suggests that Rudolf may have suffered from Bipolar I disorder; his mention of racing thoughts is indicative of a manic episode, one of the symptoms usually attributed to the disorder. Others include depressive episodes; grandiosity; restlessness; irritability; aggression; paranoia; pronounced decrease in sleep; reckless personal and sexual behavior; and increased suicidal thoughts. Rudolf displayed elements of all these symptoms throughout his life.19
Rudolf’s sense of political impotence gnawed away at his self-esteem and left him depressed: Neither his father, government officials, nor his extended family took him seriously. His constant complaints of being ignored and excluded likely emphasized Rudolf’s sense of despair.20 When, on his thirtieth birthday, he wrote to Szeps of his “empty” life, his growing frustration, and his increasing weariness at “waiting for great times of reform,” Rudolf gave vent to the suppressed hostility raging within.21 Repeated exclusion from the Army High Command conferences, his clashes with Archduke Albrecht, and his father’s request that he resign his post as inspector general of the infantry fell on Rudolf as personal and professional failures, leaving him humiliated. The death of the liberal German emperor Friedrich III tore at Rudolf’s hopes for the future; the persistent attacks in the German press that autumn of 1888 shamed the crown prince by presenting him as the disreputable “other,” an unbalanced man unfit for the Habsburg throne.22 In the last months of his life Rudolf isolated himself from former friends and lost interest in writing, hunting, and scientific pursuits.
At the beginning of 1889 a new outbreak of gonorrhea left his eyes infected and added to the crown prince’s depression.23 The painful symptoms came and went without warning, fueling Rudolf’s escalating spiral into alcoholism and drug addiction. Suffering from insomnia, headaches, and joint pains, Rudolf grew thin and pale, his face ashen, his restless eyes rimmed with dark circles. The regimen of Champagne, Cognac, and morphine not only rendered his behavior increasingly unstable but also took a toll on Rudolf’s sense of masculinity by frequently leaving him impotent. It is impossible to verify what precisely Rudolf was told about his disease, but with his tendency to hypochondria and overreaction, he may have feared that he was infected with syphilis. This would have been a death sentence, the shameful idea of gradual madness preying on a mind already burdened with emotional turmoil.24 After Mayerling, Queen Elisabeth of Romania hinted at this in a letter to Stephanie, writing, “I think that he himself, being a man of outstanding intelligence, saw the approach of destruction and despairingly flung himself into the abyss, hastily seizing all life could give him before the night came.”25
Stephanie chronicled the “nervous unrest,” “violent temper,” and “complete mental decay” that characterized Rudolf’s final years.26 His mind was filled with grandiose ideas for the future, but his inability to put them into practice left him restless and irritable. Although the trait had been present since childhood, in the last years of Rudolf’s life Stephanie, Marie Larisch, Empress Elisabeth, and Marie Valerie, among others, all noted his hostile demeanor. Soon after their marriage Stephanie recalled that, while her husband often kept late hours, he was always ready for work the next morning; in the last few months of his life he was sleeping only four or five hours a night—another sign of possible Bipolar I disorder.27
And Rudolf was increasingly reckless in the last year of his life. There was the 1888 incident in which he nearly shot his father, and the numerous occasions on which he appeared intoxicated in public and had to be quickly rescued by anxious courtiers before he caused a scandal. Then there was Rudolf’s sexual behavior. Not only did he indiscriminately bed any number of women, sometimes fathering their children, but he was careless enough to pick up a case of gonorrhea and then infect his wife with the disease. By 1889 his private life was in a shambles, his marriage existed only in name, and Rudolf had few intimates with whom he could share his disappointments.
An increase in suicidal thoughts grew as hope faded. Rudolf’s fascination with death and avid interest in reports of the latest suicides was not only a reflection of an imperial Vienna consumed with such things: Unhappiness eventually drove him to ponder death as preferable to an unfulfilling life. This despair took dangerous form when Rudolf asked Mitzi Caspar to die with him that summer of 1888. When she laughingly dismissed his request, he asked members of his staff, and even threatened to kill Stephanie and then shoot himself. While these all seem to have been genuine declarations of intent, perhaps subconsciously Rudolf hoped that someone would intervene, assuring him that his life and future mattered.
These threads unfortunately wove together in January 1889. Rudolf’s Hungarian misadventure was bad enough, an unmistakably traitorous act driven by political despair and personal failure, but it had no connection to his liaison with Mary Vetsera. That relationship, begun as nothing more than another temporary diversion, at first kept the crown prince occupied, but with the passing weeks it became an intricate web of intrigue, pushed ever further by Marie Larisch, Helene Vetsera, and by Mary herself.
Kept on the social sidelines because of her illegitimacy and perpetually in debt from gambling, Larisch was already intimately tied to Mary’s family, not merely by friendship but through her affair with her uncle Heinrich Baltazzi, who fathered her third and fourth children. Ever on the lookout for possible financial rewards—and attendant chances at blackmail—Larisch may have suggested an affair to Helene Vetsera, letting it be known that she was amenable to using her position and influence to facilitate a liaison in exchange for financial consideration. Certainly someone, either Larisch or Helene Vetsera, pushed—and pushed hard—given that Mary and her mother went to London in 1887 and let it be known that while there, the young baroness would prove sympathetic to the crown prince’s amorous needs.
Nothing apparently came of the visit to England, but the efforts were renewed in the spring of 1888. Despite her later claims of ignorance, Helene Vetsera not only knew of her daughter’s liaison with Rudolf but also helped engineer it. She’d made little attempt to disguise her ambitions, chasing after the imperial family and, more particularly, Rudolf, a decade earlier at Gödöllö. Her behavior stretched the bounds of propriety, but Helene seemed unconcerned. And now Mary became her tool for advancement, as Helene became submerged in her daughter’s romantic career. The mother assured men that her daughter was sympathetic, boldly invited them to her palace, and pushed Mary toward them as she left the room—unsubtle hints that few mistook. This wasn’t a search for potential husbands: Gentlemen didn’t marry young ladies who acted so outrageously and bore such terrible reputations. Helene’s calculated actions promoted Mary to various potential lovers in exchange for coveted invitations to social events, introductions to important aristocrats, rewards of money or, more ominously, perhaps blackmail to keep word of any indiscretions from spreading through Vienna.
Mary was no innocent: A string of romantic conquests lay behind her when she first met Rudolf. Yet it is impossible to view her as calculating. She was only sixteen, a teenage girl, immature, erratic, and accustomed to maternal obedience. Without moral guidance, propelled by fantasy, and pushed by her ambitious mother, Mary easily gave in to the exciting new adventure of pursuing Rudolf. That she came to care deeply for him over time seems likely. Perhaps in her girlish imagination she believed that he was desperately in love with her; it was, after all, just the sort of forbidden and dangerous romance that filled the lurid French novels she regularly devoured, and she began to envision herself as the heroine in some epic royal love story.
Rudolf was oblivious to the women manipulating his affair. All he saw was a pretty, willing young woman who evinced nothing short of hero worship where he was concerned. Mary temporarily cemented her hold by appealing to his vanity. Rudolf was accustomed to fawning adoration and breathless romanticism among his conquests: It was all part of the game, a fire that briefly burned bright before inevitably being extinguished. And he was practiced in the illusion of participating in the passing charade as long as he was entertained and amused. For him the affair became yet another well-acted, diverting, but ultimately ephemeral romance.
The affair played itself out across the autumn of 1888, with meetings in the Prater, assignations at Eduard Palmer’s apartment, and Mary’s repeated visits to Rudolf at the Hofburg. Although history often portrays Rudolf as so desperately in love with Mary that he regarded death at her side as preferable to life without her, the truth is that by the end of 1888 the liaison had run its course. Evidence disputing the romantic myth is clear: There is no doubt that in the last months of his life Rudolf was slowly but surely pulling away from Mary. This wasn’t an unexpected development. “He loved many women in his time,” recalled Rudolf’s cousin Archduke Leopold of Tuscany, “but no one woman for long, and I am convinced in my own mind that he knew well enough that the infatuation he felt for poor Mary would very soon pall.” He would “pluck at every fair flower within his reach, and cast it aside as soon as he was done with it.”28
On December 21, 1888, Bratfisch collected Mary and took her to see Rudolf at the Hofburg. This was the last time the lovers met that year. It also seems to have marked the beginning of Rudolf’s attempts to distance himself from Mary, attempts ironically spurred on by her own mother. Increasingly Mary’s flagrant and erratic behavior unnerved Helene Vetsera. There was too much gossip about her daughter in Vienna now: Everyone, it seemed, knew of her relationship with Rudolf—that might have been acceptable had Mary’s immaturity not driven her to cause constant public scenes, especially when the crown princess was present. Helene wasn’t stupid: A liaison with the crown prince could be mined for potential financial and social rewards, but she knew it would one day end. When that time came, she pinned her hopes on the duke of Braganza; she erroneously believed that, as a widower, he might be amenable to a young lady of damaged reputation.
But Mary’s behavior threatened these plans. She’d turned a discreet liaison with the crown prince into a delicious society scandal. If Helene hoped to salvage anything of the future, Mary had to be reined in. Given her romantic flights of fancy and conviction that Rudolf was desperately in love with her, Mary wouldn’t willingly end the relationship, and so her mother tried to force the issue and contain the damage. It is said that she actually wrote to Rudolf in December 1888—surely an odd letter, coming from a woman he had apparently slept with a decade earlier, and whose daughter now shared his bed—asking him to put an end to the affair.29
This alleged request coincided with Rudolf’s waning interest in the affair. By December, according to the anonymously published Last Days of Archduke Rudolf, the crown prince’s “attachment to Mademoiselle Vetsera, renewed and broken again by intervals of absence or, indeed, of disagreements—which were not infrequent—was undergoing its inevitable denouement.”30 In the wake of Mayerling, a police investigation revealed that Rudolf had recently embarked on another affair with a chorus girl named Glaser at the Karl Theater, and given her a diamond ring worth 1,200 gulden ($7,668 in 2017).31 Artur Polzer-Hoditz, who served as head of the imperial chancellery to Karl, Austria’s last emperor, later wrote of a collection of telegrams exchanged by Rudolf and Mary Vetsera at the end of 1888 that had been briefly deposited at a government archive in Vienna. These telegrams, he said, revealed that, “the Baroness’s love had become an inconvenience to the Crown Prince. This was obvious in spite of the careful language in which his refusals were couched.”32 And the exceptionally well-informed Walburga, Lady Paget, stated “as a positive fact” that she’d learned Rudolf “was not the least in love” with Mary, “and only wanted to get rid of her, but that she would not let him go.”33
Rudolf had come to realize that the ambitious Helene Vetsera was using the liaison to attain social status and financial security—“Mary represents the last throw of the dice,” he once commented bitterly.34 Particularly telling were his remarks about Mary to Louise of Coburg during the soiree given by Prince Reuss on January 27: “Oh, if somebody would only deliver me from her!”35 On more than one occasion Rudolf implored Marie Larisch to take Mary away from the capital. He even mentioned the idea to Mary, who sobbed, “I know what that means!” “Goodness knows I have tried my utmost to persuade her to accept Miguel of Braganza,” Rudolf confided to Larisch. “It would suit me admirably.”36 A man who desperately tried to get rid of his current mistress, wanted to send her away, and attempted to marry her off to another, was unlikely to have been besotted beyond all reason. His remarks to Marie Larisch and Louise of Coburg and his apparently curt telegrams suggest that Rudolf was attempting to end the liaison.
Rudolf, having enjoyed the fruits of the affair, was now consumed with other interests: his new chorus girl, and especially the impending Hungarian conspiracy. He was usually adept at ending his liaisons, abruptly dispatching farewell letters and gifts once his interest had waned. And most of his conquests accepted this arbitrary cessation of imperial favor. But most of his conquests weren’t unpredictable teenage nobles given to causing public scenes. With Mary, Rudolf lacked the courage of his convictions: He’d always resorted, Latour von Thurmberg complained, to prevarication and avoidance to escape confrontation. But ending his current affair was fraught with potential dangers. With her breathless romanticism, and her spectacular capacity for attracting unwelcome attention at the opera, theater, and at balls, Mary was something of a loose cannon; pushing back against her idealized version of reality might lead to some uncomfortable display or, worse yet, propel her into some scandalous action. Rather than make a clean break, he simply withdrew, made himself unavailable, and became terse in his communications. And, sometime after December 21, perhaps driven to act by Helene Vetsera’s letter, he sent his young lover a cigarette box engraved with his name—his standard farewell present when concluding a liaison.
But Helene did not wait for imperial action. That December she also discussed the situation with her brothers, asking them to intercede and help end the affair—though in typically tangled fashion this involved a bit of duplicitous chicanery. Aware of Franz Josef’s liaison with Katharina Schratt, Hector Baltazzi had cultivated a friendship with the actress, hoping that his flatteries and offers of fine thoroughbreds might convince her to push for his acceptance at court.37 In the summer of 1888 a concerned Franz Josef warned Schratt that it was best that she not go riding with Hector or be seen with him in public. Although he admitted that he had occasionally spoken to Baltazzi and that the empress had once been quite friendly with him and his brothers, the emperor wrote to Schratt that Hector “does not have an entirely correct reputation in racing and in money matters.”38
When Hector’s overtures failed, his brother Alexander apparently took over: Dashing and elegant, Baltazzi supposedly charmed his way into the actress’s bed hoping to win her influence. But by December 1888 what Baltazzi most wanted was for Schratt to speak to Franz Josef about the liaison between Rudolf and Mary, asking if the emperor would end the affair.39 Surrounded by a wall of courtiers who kept him shielded from anything unpleasant, Franz Josef was likely the only aristocratic man in the capital who had no idea about the liaison. Schratt agreed, but because of an illness and the Christmas holiday she was not able to see the emperor until the middle of January; by that time unforeseen circumstances had intervened, setting the stage for the tragedy at Mayerling.