All seemed well that January of 1889 as revelers flung themselves into the social season; mourning for Empress Elisabeth’s father had canceled the court ceremonies, but aristocratic Vienna went on with its celebrations. Strauss led his musicians through waltzes at the annual Opera Ball; society crowded the Industrialists’ Ball, the Coiffeurs’ Ball, the Laundresses’ Ball, the Bakers’ Ball, the City of Vienna Ball, and the undoubted highlight of the season—the Fourth Dimension Ball, where trees and flowers bloomed upside-down from a garden on the ceiling and malevolent-looking witches and warlocks moved among the guests.1 But beneath the surface an ominous sense hung over the city, a “general air of discontent,” a “breath of melancholy” that rippled through society.2
Rudolf and Stephanie spent the last week of 1888 together at the Villa Angiolina in the Adriatic resort of Abazzia; on December 29, he decided not to remain through the New Year but instead return to Vienna.3 From the Hofburg he dispatched a letter to his wife: “I send you every possible good wish for the New Year, health and pleasant days, cheerful times, the fulfillment of all your desires.”4 But Rudolf’s tone when writing to Moritz Szeps was dark: “The current peace that now reigns is ominous, like the calm before the storm. It can’t go on like this; that is my consolation.”5 In his reply Szeps did what little he could to counter Rudolf’s depression:
The oppression cannot last forever, and soon a year of change will arrive. When that which is rotting, faded, and old gives way to that which is fresh and run, it is really an act of rejuvenation, which is necessary for the world.… Your task is to keep your spirit and your flesh strong for the day of action.… You have had to experience malice and treachery but have shaken it off with fortitude. All know that you desire great things, that you are capable of achieving them.… You have many enemies. But rely on yourself, on your genius and talents, your strength and endurance … and you will accomplish great things.6
The empire’s semiannual Army High Command conference was scheduled for January 1, 1889; as usual Rudolf had not been invited, but this time he ignored the slight and appeared unannounced, adding his unsolicited opinions as his uncle Archduke Albrecht scowled in silence.7 Rudolf lived a confused, schizophrenic existence in these weeks: regimental duties and visits by Prince Leopold of Bavaria, Prince Alexander of Battenberg, and a group of Russian dignitaries kept him busy by day; at night he slunk away to seedy cafés, called on Mitzi Caspar, and shot himself full of morphine when already intoxicated with Champagne and Cognac. When Stephanie returned to Vienna on January 11, she was “struck by the change in the Crown Prince, and this time more strongly than ever. He was rarely sober, he did not get home to the Hofburg until dawn; and as for the company he kept, the less said the better. His restlessness and nervous irritability had become intensified. He spoke menacingly of horrible things and in my very presence would cruelly toy with the revolver he always carried about. Indeed, I had become afraid to be alone with him.”8
Not that Stephanie had to worry about being alone with her husband—Rudolf did as much as humanly possible to exclude her from his life. On January 20, while shooting eagles at Schloss Orth, the country estate of his cousin Archduke Johann Salvator, he asked his friend Hoyos to join him at his hunting lodge of Mayerling in the Vienna Woods—he thought he’d probably go there at the beginning of February.9 When Stephanie learned of this, Rudolf “expressly informed me that my presence was not wanted.”10 No fool, she worried that he planned to take Mary Vetsera with him. One morning she appeared unannounced at the Coburg Palace, “anxious and disturbed,” as her sister Louise recalled. “Rudolf,” Stephanie told Louise, “is going to Mayerling, and intends staying there some days. He will not be alone. What can we do?”11 But Louise, whose husband, Prince Philipp, had also been invited to the lodge, could offer no suggestions.
Not until the evening of January 13 did Rudolf again see Mary, when Bratfisch delivered her to the Hofburg. “Oh, it would have been so much better had I not gone to see him today!” Mary cried to her maid, Agnes, on returning home. “Now I no longer belong to myself alone but exist only for him. From now on I must do everything he asks.”12 And to Hermine Tobias, Mary explained: “I must confess something to you that will make you very angry. I was with him yesterday from seven to nine. We both lost our heads. Now we belong to one another body and soul.”13 Two days later Mary used 400 gulden ($2,556 in 2017) she had received as a Christmas gift from her uncle Alexander to purchase a gold cigarette case from the exclusive Vienna jeweler Rodeck’s. She had it engraved with the date January 13, and the words Dank dem Glücklichen Geschicke (in gratitude to kind fate) before giving it to Rudolf.14
After the tragedy at Mayerling, those most closely involved with Rudolf, Mary, and their liaison made concerted efforts to erase history, insisting that the relationship only began on November 5 and that January 13 marked the affair’s consummation. But circumstance weighs heavily against this. The relationship began in April 1888, much earlier than previously suspected; there were regular assignations at Eduard Palmer’s apartment, and Bratfisch had delivered Mary to the Hofburg on at least twenty nights throughout the autumn of 1888, including the time in September when she provocatively arrived with only a fur coat covering her lingerie. With his sense of entitlement and relentless pursuit of pleasure, Rudolf was not the sort of man to long delay gratification “once his desires were in question,” as Larisch recalled.15 Rudolf’s sexual conquests were legion, and he was not accustomed to being denied. Nor was Mary the type of woman to stand on moral propriety: With her “fast” reputation and string of past lovers, she had already abandoned any claim to virginal innocence. Given their characters and desires, it is extremely unlikely that Rudolf and Mary waited nine months to consummate their relationship.
A disapproving Hermine Tobias had repeatedly warned Mary against pursuing her relationship with the married crown prince. “I know everything you say is true,” Mary had replied, “but I cannot change the facts. I have two friends, you and Marie Larisch. You work for my soul’s happiness, and Marie works for my moral misfortune.”16 Given this, it is likely that Mary was not entirely forthcoming in her previous letters to Tobias, evading the truth and concealing the sexual nature of the liaison until she believed that circumstances finally compelled her to do. It now seems that January 13 marked not sexual consummation but rather some shared confidence, some new secret that, in Mary’s impressionable mind, cemented the personal romantic fairy tale she had woven around the liaison and inexorably tied her to Rudolf.
Mary soared in elation for a week. On Saturday, January 19, she ignored a previously accepted invitation to attend a ball and slipped away to the Hofburg to see Rudolf.17 She briefly saw him again in the Prater on the afternoon of January 24, and a happy mood the following evening sent her ice-skating.18 As she left the ice Mary spotted a fortune-teller and, over her maid’s protests, disappeared into the tent for a reading. A few minutes later Mary emerged looking “shocked and excited.” She was unusually quiet, but Agnes found her tossing and turning later that night. “God, I am feverish,” Mary sobbed. “I keep thinking of what that woman told me.” The seer, she said, had warned of an impending death—probably a suicide—within her family. Mary seemed horrified by the idea.19
Tired and anxious, Mary watched the following morning as her mother searched her room. Increased gossip about the affair, Mary’s reckless behavior, a sense of impending danger, Agnes Jahoda’s confession that her mistress had purchased an expensive cigarette case the previous week—something drove Helene Vetsera into a sudden panic. Helene later claimed that she only now suspected the affair; in fact she’d been behind the liaison for months, bribing Larisch with cash and expensive gowns and even joking about the romance. Breaking open Mary’s locked jewelry case, Helene found some photographs of Rudolf; a will Mary had made and dated on January 18; and a silver cigarette case engraved with Rudolf’s name—his standard farewell gift to one of his sexual conquests.20
An argument between mother and daughter ensued, and Mary fled to the Grand Hotel, seeking refuge with Marie Larisch. Mary, the countess saw, “was deathly pale and her eyes seemed far too big for her face; she looked as if something dreadful had happened.” She collapsed into an armchair and erupted in tears. “Oh, Marie darling, do get me away from Vienna! I shall die if I have to remain at home!”21
Larisch eventually calmed Mary and returned her to the Vetsera Palace. But, entering her mother’s house, Mary promptly fainted and had to be put to bed, “deathly pale and speechless,” as Helene remembered. “What have you done to her?” Larisch demanded of the baroness, but Helene was too angry to answer questions. To appease her Larisch lied, saying that the case engraved with Rudolf’s name had originally been given to her; she had merely passed it on to Mary as a gift.22
While this drama at the Vetsera Palace played itself out, a far more momentous confrontation was taking place at the Hofburg. Two days earlier Rudolf had attended a dinner given by the British ambassador, Sir Augustus Paget. According to Lady Paget he “seemed somehow different, less sarcastic, less down on people, and for the first time he looked me in the eyes when speaking.”23 His good mood disappeared a few hours later, however, when he went to the opera to see Die drei Pintos. The emperor had not been expected, yet everyone noticed that he soon arrived in the imperial box and had a strained conversation with his son. Having said what he meant to say, Franz Josef rose and abruptly left the theater after the second act.24
Whatever drove a worried Franz Josef to this sudden confrontation erupted again that Saturday. As usual the emperor arose a little after four, dressed, and was at his desk by five to read the latest reports and newspapers. Something that morning shocked him into action: He sent word through an adjutant demanding that Rudolf appear before him in a formal audience at nine. The order left Rudolf tense and agitated. He put on his full-dress uniform as inspector general of the infantry, walked through the marble halls from his bachelor apartment to his father’s rooms, was announced, and entered Franz Josef’s study. Controversy surrounds precisely what took place behind those closed doors, but something left Franz Josef infuriated. The “stormy” and “violent” interview went badly.25 The emperor, Latour von Thurmberg asserted, was “overwhelmed with grief and rage” and spoke to Rudolf “in terrible agitation and with brutal candor.”26 When Rudolf finally opened the study doors, it seemed obvious to a courtier that “something frightful” had taken place between father and son. Sophie von Planker-Klaps, Stephanie’s principal Kammerfrau (lady of the bedchamber), or lady-in-waiting, saw Rudolf rush back to his own apartment through the halls. He “looked terribly upset, on the point of collapse, and his hand carrying his general’s hat shook visibly.”27
Thoroughly unnerved, Rudolf decided that it was best if he left Vienna. He wouldn’t wait for February, but would go to Mayerling on Tuesday, January 29. He told Rudolf Püchel, his Kammerbüchsenspanner (personal gun loader), to head out to Mayerling on Monday with a small domestic staff and make preparations for the crown prince’s arrival Tuesday.28 Rudolf also sent word to Franz Wodicka, a huntsman attached to Mayerling, to relay the change to Hoyos, bidding him to come out to the lodge for two days, January 29–30.29
Plans made, Rudolf went unannounced on Sunday morning to see Larisch in her suite at the Grand Hotel. “I want you to bring Mary tomorrow to the Hofburg. You must persuade the Baroness to allow Mary to go out with you.” He was, Larisch recalled, “very excited” and looked pale and nervous as he spoke.30
That same Sunday morning, an anxious Mary had begged her mother to let her go out driving in the Prater with Larisch, saying that “this was her only pleasure.”31 Mary, Helene thought, still looked “deathly pale” after the previous day’s contretemps; nevertheless she kissed her and “implored her to see reason and to end all of this nonsense” before finally giving her permission to see Larisch.32 It was half past two when the countess called at the Vetsera Palace and collected Mary. Princess Louise also happened to be in the Prater when she spotted her brother-in-law’s carriage stopped along the main avenue; he was speaking to Larisch and Mary.33 As soon as Rudolf saw Louise, he waved Larisch off and went to speak to his sister-in-law. He had a “peculiar look,” “pale and feverish,” and “seemed on the verge of a nervous breakdown.” Before leaving he asked Louise to tell “Fatty”—the nickname he had ungraciously bestowed on his brother-in-law—that he would be expected at Mayerling on Tuesday.34
That evening Larisch wrote a short letter to Rudolf assuring him that she would bring Mary to the Hofburg the following morning. The tone undermined her later assertions that she loathed her cousin: “You know that I am blindly devoted to you and that I will always obey your command whenever you call me! I shall naturally come along under these threatening circumstances, I cannot expose her to unpleasantness on her own—I shall therefore certainly come, no matter what happens!”35
Letter dispatched, Larisch then returned to the Vetsera Palace. That evening the German ambassador, Prince Heinrich Reuss, was holding the soiree at his embassy to celebrate Kaiser Wilhelm II’s thirtieth birthday. As a loyal ally—and despite the court mourning still in place for his father-in-law—Franz Josef and his family, except for the empress, would attend—and so would the Vetseras. Larisch found Mary drinking tea with her mother and Hanna, though Mary had laced hers with rum and sat smoking as Helene Vetsera chastised her. Larisch followed Mary to her bedroom, watching as the young woman donned her light-blue gown trimmed in yellow. “Do I look nice?” Mary asked, smiling and “coldly” saying that Stephanie was sure to notice her and be jealous. “Her eyes,” Larisch recalled, “looked positively evil.”36
Mary’s antagonism was on full display when she snubbed Stephanie that night at the soiree: The contemporary press reported “a violent scene” in the ballroom, presumably when Helene had to pull her daughter into a reluctant curtsy.37 The humiliation was too much: Stephanie sent for Karl von Bombelles, Rudolf’s lord high chamberlain, and asked him to tell her husband that she wanted to leave. She bade a gracious farewell to Prince Reuss and approached the ballroom door, but Rudolf stood motionless in the center of the hall as Mary walked up to him and began to speak. Rudolf hesitated before finally joining his wife. “The whole scene,” recorded one witness, “was so strange that it struck everyone present.” As they descended the crimson-carpeted staircase, several witnesses supposedly heard “a violent exchange of words” between Rudolf and Stephanie that left everyone in the ballroom embarrassed.38
Rudolf had asked his friend Moritz Szeps to meet him at the Hofburg late that night. He found the crown prince “in a dreadful state of nervous excitement.” The previous day’s confrontation with his father had left Rudolf shaken. Now he complained that during the soiree Franz Josef had deliberately turned away and thus publicly humiliated him. If this indeed happened it must have been so quick as to escape notice, though perhaps the emperor had briefly expressed his displeasure at seeing Mary Vetsera strutting about the ballroom. Rudolf was clearly embittered, fixated not on the scene caused by his mistress but by his father’s apparent slight. “The Emperor,” he told Szeps, “has openly affronted and degraded me. From now all ties between us are broken. From now I am free.”39
At midnight, after bidding Szeps farewell, Rudolf went to see Mitzi Caspar. His mood was black: Entering her house, he grabbed a bottle of Champagne and drank for the next two hours. Alcohol loosened his tongue. Now Mitzi listened as Rudolf announced that he planned to “shit on the government.” Honor, he insisted, demanded that he kill himself while at Mayerling; his cousin Archduke Franz Ferdinand could take his place as heir after his death. Mitzi had heard such drunken talk of suicide before, but the last time she’d gone to the police they’d threatened her with prosecution if she said anything. All she could do was listen as her lover rambled on incoherently. Rudolf finally left at three that morning. As he stood in the doorway he raised his hand and made the sign of the cross on Mitzi’s forehead—something he had never done before and a gesture completely out of character for the atheistic Rudolf.40