Monday, January 28, 1889, dawned cold and clear in Vienna: A sheen of frost glistened over the frozen snow banking the broad avenues. That morning Rudolf rang for his servant Püchel and announced a sudden change of plan. Rather than travel to his hunting lodge on January 29, Rudolf explained, “I am going to Mayerling today.” Püchel needn’t see to the arrangements: Rudolf had already dispatched some servants to the lodge earlier that morning. “I am only waiting,” Rudolf told Püchel, “for a letter and a telegram.” When the letter arrived, Püchel brought it to his master. He found Rudolf standing at his bedroom window, staring out vacantly and “quite lost in thought. He held his watch in his hands, turning the winder. He did not seem to have noticed me.” Püchel silently placed the letter on a desk and left. Some thirty minutes later the expected telegram arrived. Püchel found Rudolf still standing at the window, watch still in hand, and still staring out. The crown prince scanned the contents, remarking enigmatically to himself, “Yes, it has to be.”1
At a quarter past ten that morning, Larisch climbed into a carriage at the Grand Hotel and asked the driver, Franz Weber, to take her to the Vetsera Palace. There she collected Mary, telling Helene that they planned to go shopping.2 Mary wore an ice-skating ensemble from the imperial couturier Josef Fischer to guard against the cold: an olive-green pleated skirt and tight, matching jacket trimmed with black lace over a silk blouse; a small green felt hat trimmed with black ostrich feathers and a thin veil; and an ostrich-feather boa wrapped around her neck.3 “I thought she had never looked so handsome,” Larisch recalled. Once settled in the carriage, Larisch said she turned to Mary, imploring her to “finish this episode, otherwise I fear the results of it will be disastrous for us all.” But Mary merely smiled. They first went to the Weisse Katze to shop for lingerie; after this Weber drove to the Hofburg, stopping at Larisch’s directions at the iron door in the Augustiner Bastion, where a servant waited to lead them up to the crown prince’s apartments.4
Mary, Larisch thought, seemed “strangely well acquainted” with this circuitous route through the palace. According to Larisch, while waiting for Rudolf, Mary kissed her, saying, “I want you to forgive me from the bottom of your heart for all the trouble I have caused you. Whatever happens, don’t think I wished to deceive you or play you false.”5 This seems an unlikely declaration; more probably Larisch invented the conversation as “proof” that the lovers had “used” her and abused her trust.
Soon Rudolf appeared and asked to speak to Mary privately; after some minutes he returned, this time alone. Mary, he told his cousin, had already left the Hofburg. Larisch was to return to the Vetsera Palace and report that Mary had disappeared while they were shopping. Larisch later claimed to be horrified. When she objected Rudolf grabbed her violently and, waving a revolver in her face, growled, “Do you want me to hurt you? Unless you swear to be quiet, I’ll kill you!” He needed to speak to Mary: “A great deal may happen in two days,” Rudolf explained, “and I want Mary to be with me. I stand on the edge of a precipice.” He gave his cousin 500 gulden (approximately $3,200 in 2017) with which to bribe her driver to back up her story about Mary’s “disappearance.”6
Rudolf had told his coachman Bratfisch to wait with his carriage at the iron door in the Augustiner Bastion. Shortly before eleven Mary Vetsera came out of the Hofburg, and Bratfisch beckoned to her. Soon they were speeding through the city, toward the Roten Stadl, the Red Barn Inn, some ten miles outside Vienna, where Rudolf planned to meet them.7 A few minutes later Larisch drove to Rodeck’s on the Kohlmarkt. Apparently armed with a bribe, Franz Weber later insisted to officials that Mary had been with the countess, and had disappeared from his carriage while Larisch was shopping.8
As soon as the two ladies had gone, Rudolf made a rare excursion to his wife’s rooms. He hadn’t come for Stephanie; instead he asked her lady-in-waiting to go and find his young daughter: he wanted to see her before leaving for Mayerling. Sophie von Planker-Klaps returned in a few minutes. Little Elisabeth’s nanny, she sheepishly explained, had said the girl was otherwise occupied and could not see her father.9 Rebuffed, Rudolf left the Hofburg at half past eleven, driving himself in a phaeton through Vienna and out into the country to keep his rendezvous with Mary at the Roten Stadl. He wore a knee-length Hungarian lancer fur coat over his hunting tweeds, with a flat cap atop his head.10
Mary, Bratfisch remembered, had been unusually quiet during the drive to the Roten Stadl and hadn’t said a word to him. They arrived early, and Bratfisch drove back and forth for nearly an hour, waiting for Rudolf. When he finally did appear, the crown prince left his phaeton and quickly slipped into Bratfisch’s carriage: With a smile he apologized for having kept them waiting, and then asked Bratfisch to drive them to Mayerling. He didn’t want to go via the normal route, instead asking that Bratfisch take a series of back roads and that he drive slowly enough so that they would not arrive before dusk.11 They bypassed the old resort village of Baden, where both Beethoven and Mozart had once spent summers, and disappeared along little-used roads slippery with snow. Several times the carriage wheels slid into ruts; Rudolf had to get out and help Bratfisch push the vehicle back onto the roadway.12
It was late in the afternoon when the carriage rumbled through a forest of pine and spruce, emerging into the Vienna Woods’ Helenenthal (valley) as the sun was rapidly fading from a cold clear sky. Ahead, nestled in a hollow fringed by gently rolling hills and open fields some sixteen miles southwest of the imperial capital, Mayerling lay in shadow. There in the fourteenth century, monks from the nearby Cistercian Abbey of Heiligenkreuz had laid out a farm and built the Church of Saint Laurenz. Over the centuries the estate had passed into private hands and grown to include several small villas for guests, a kitchen block, and stables. Though the surrounding forest offered superb hunting, the estate itself was a rather ramshackle collection of buildings that fell decidedly short of the usual imperial standards.13 But there were other attractions: It was probably no accident that Rudolf bought Mayerling from Count Reinhard von Leiningen-Westerburg in 1887. The count lived in a villa on the estate with his beautiful wife, Anna—who just happened to be the former actress Anna Pick, who had shared the crown prince’s bed and who had accompanied him to Brussels when he went to ask for Stephanie’s hand. Having the new, sympathetic countess near at hand only added to Mayerling’s attraction.14 Spending more and more time there, Rudolf added a bowling alley and a rifle range along one side of the walled garden to the south. At the center stood the main lodge, a simple, whitewashed two-storey building dotted with shuttered windows, capped by a steeply hipped gray roof, and protected by gateways to the east, south, and west.15
Rather ungallantly Rudolf stopped the carriage at the edge of the forest and asked Mary to wait there while he went ahead to the lodge. She stood hidden in the snowy copse until Bratfisch returned, collected her, and quickly drove her through the southern gate, where she was able to slip inside through a service door without attracting any notice.16 Her destination was Rudolf’s private apartment at the southeastern corner of the ground floor. East of the lodge’s main corridor, a door opened to an anteroom, where Rudolf’s desk sat beneath an impressive set of antlers; beyond, reached by a white enameled door, was his corner bedroom, with two shuttered windows on each of its outer walls and a small gas chandelier hanging from its ceiling. Sofas and chairs covered in red velvet stood grouped around a tiled stove; against the center of the eastern wall stood a double bed of dark oak, its high headboard decorated with turned spindles. A second door to the right of the bed opened to a small hallway, where a private staircase ascended to Stephanie’s apartments above.17
As ungallantly as he had arranged Mary’s arrival, Rudolf kept her hidden away in the bedroom, beneath its vaulted ceiling and behind its heavily draped and shuttered windows. Concealing her from inquisitive eyes demanded seclusion: In addition to Bratfisch, twenty-four others were at the estate, including three policemen who might jot any comings and goings in their little notebooks.18 Yet aside from Bratfisch, only one member of the staff apparently knew of Mary’s presence: Johann Loschek, who had come out to Mayerling earlier that afternoon. Born in 1845, Loschek had joined the imperial court as a gamekeeper at eighteen; in 1883, he was named Saaltürhüter, or hall porter, to the crown prince and acted as his occasional valet. Like Bratfisch, Loschek knew all of his master’s secrets: In addition to stories that Rudolf used him to obtain morphine, Loschek had also regularly delivered letters to and from both Mary and Larisch.19 He too settled in at Mayerling, taking a small bedroom just off the anteroom so that he would always be close at hand to serve Mary’s meals and answer her summons if needed.
The apparent calm at Mayerling stood in stark contrast to the chaos that Rudolf and Mary’s sudden departure caused in Vienna that Monday. After leaving Rodeck’s, Larisch went to the Vetsera Palace, arriving about half past eleven that morning. She burst in, said Helene Vetsera, “as if demented.” “I lost her!” Larisch shouted dramatically. “She left me!” The countess claimed that she had gone into Rodeck’s alone, leaving Mary in her carriage; the young woman had disappeared when she returned—having slipped out of the carriage and, said Larisch, climbed into another vehicle that sped away.20
Hearing this, Helene turned pale and said, “I was certain that she would do something rash.”21 In her memoirs Larisch claimed that Hanna Vetsera searched Mary’s room and discovered a letter, but according to Helene, the countess handed it over, explaining that she had found it in the carriage: “I cannot go on living,” Mary had written. “Today I have gained a lead on you; by the time you catch up with me I shall be beyond saving, in the Danube, Mary.”22
This note, Larisch insisted, was yet another example of Mary’s theatrics. “Don’t you believe it,” she told Helene of the ominous message. “She is much too fond of life. Perhaps she disappeared with the Crown Prince.” At this Helene later claimed to have protested: “But she does not know him at all!”23 This bit of retroactive whitewashing was clearly meant to save her own reputation. But Helene, too, calmly dismissed the note as “folly,” adding, “Let us see whether she will return. I will not have any scandal; it would be fatal to our position in Vienna.” This “dread of gossip,” Larisch later wrote, “seemed to affect her far more than the loss of her daughter, and I could not help feeling sorry for Mary when I saw how little real affection her mother seemed to have for her.”24
Deeply implicated in the liaison, Larisch hoped to conceal the truth when she now volunteered to intervene with Chief of Police Krauss. “Let me go to him alone,” she told Helene. “I will secretly tell him all my conjectures. If you go, and someone saw you, there would be talk.”25 To Krauss, Larisch was careful to repeat her tale about Mary’s disappearance from the carriage while she had been shopping in Rodeck’s, and feigned ignorance of the affair; as for Mary’s letter, Larisch insisted it wasn’t to be taken seriously.26 “The chief object,” she claimed, “is to persuade the girl to return to her mother at once.” But then Larisch dropped a bombshell: Mary’s disappearance was probably connected to the crown prince: Would the baron please help her locate Rudolf and resolve the situation? Hearing this, Krauss immediately said that he could not possibly interfere in Rudolf’s private affairs.27
Krauss had little sympathy: Any scandal might well fall on the aggravating Vetseras and drive them from Vienna in disgrace. By the time Larisch returned to the Vetsera Palace and reported this interview, Helene had summoned her brother Alexander to a hasty family conference. Baltazzi, Larisch recalled, “was perfectly furious over his niece’s behavior.” Something seems to have left him unhinged. Baltazzi declared that he meant to find the crown prince and confront him over the affair, even as Helene kept repeating that there must be no public scandal. Finally, said Larisch, Baltazzi asked her to accompany him to see the chief of police early that evening and request that his department search for Mary.28
This second interview went no better. Mayerling, Krauss explained, was an imperial residence and thus outside his jurisdiction. “If I were to mix myself up in the love affairs of the Imperial House,” the chief of police declared, “I should have my hands full. Indeed, I dare not.” Hearing this, Baltazzi erupted. “What?” he shouted. “Are the Habsburgs allowed to behave like common ravishers and yet go unpunished? Is there no justice in Vienna?”29 But any investigation, Krauss explained, meant that word of Mary’s disappearance would inevitably leak to the press—something Helene Vetsera was desperate to avoid.30 Finally Krauss agreed that he would make some discreet inquiries; after they left a suspicious Krauss recorded of Larisch: “She came not to make a statement, but because she wanted to exculpate herself.”31
Fear that investigation would expose her role in the liaison drove Larisch to write Krauss an urgent letter as soon as she returned to her suite at the Grand Hotel. Helene Vetsera, she warned:
will probably turn to His Majesty the Emperor as a last resort—I request you urgently to keep silent about my confidences even in that case. It cannot be avoided that the future will be investigated, but one’s wish is to have the past remain as un-elucidated as possible, and I ask you therefore to do your utmost; besides the events that have taken place are of no use—and as for the future events there is nothing left but to go on in the usual way! My request is merely to treat the matter up to the present day with consideration. Because no one wants a lot of innocent people to be implicated.32
Not content to stop there, Larisch followed this with a second letter, which Krauss did not receive until the morning of January 30:
I am speaking to you completely frankly in the knowledge that you will treat my information as private but it is necessary that I should tell you the full truth because I fear that the matter will turn out more serious than it seems! I do not know if I told you that in addition to the note, which I handed over to the lady’s uncle, there was also a letter in the cab—which was the real reason for my coming to see you at all and making my report to you on those lines! Although—no more than the family, I had no suspicion whatsoever—of the lady’s possible relations—an occurrence like that of yesterday never came into my head at all, and I probably do not have to tell you that as far as this escape—I stand entirely outside and was only most reluctantly involved in this affair!33
Something was clearly wrong. Perhaps Larisch had heard some loose talk about suicide. Her rising panic, though, stemmed less from worry about Rudolf and Mary than it did from fear for her own reputation and position. Krauss had no doubt as to the intent behind the letters: Larisch was covering her tracks.
* * *
The night’s snow had turned to rain when Philipp of Coburg and Josef Hoyos left Vienna early on the morning of Tuesday, January 29. A train took them to Baden, where a carriage waited for the short journey to Mayerling. Arriving at half past eight, they saw that all the shutters were still closed, “as if the place was uninhabited,” Hoyos later wrote. But a servant opened the gate and led them into the lodge’s billiard room on the ground floor. Rudolf soon appeared, still wearing a dressing gown, and took a “very cheerful” breakfast with them. But Rudolf declined to join his companions in the day’s shooting, explaining that he’d caught a cold the previous day after his carriage had become stuck crossing a snowy mountain pass and he’d had to help push it back onto the roadway. Hoyos found this odd route to the lodge “incomprehensible” and “very mysterious,” but said nothing. Rudolf remained at the lodge while Coburg and Hoyos set off into the surrounding forest.34
Franz Josef and Elisabeth planned to leave for Budapest on January 31, but at six that Tuesday night they were giving a family dinner at the Hofburg to celebrate Marie Valerie’s engagement.35 Both Rudolf and Coburg were expected.36 But when Coburg returned to the lodge at half past one, he found Rudolf looking embarrassed and wringing his hands; finally he told his brother-in-law that he would be staying at Mayerling. He asked Prince Philipp to kiss the emperor’s hand and explain that he had a cold.37 Coburg left just before three; Rudolf waited until 5:10 to send Stephanie what must have been an unwelcome telegram: “Please write to Papa that I respectfully beg his pardon for not appearing at dinner, but I have a bad cold and think it best that I should not make such a journey this afternoon but instead stay here with Josl Hoyos. Embracing you all warmly, Rudolf.”38
“Oh God, what shall I do?” Stephanie cried out on reading the message. “I feel so strange.”39 Perhaps she understood just how significant and calculated Rudolf’s decision really was. His absence was not only a silent rebuke to both his father and to Marie Valerie’s favored position in the family, but in waiting until the last minute to cancel his appearance and throw the careful arrangements of the imperial court into disarray, Rudolf struck at the traditions Franz Josef held so dear.40 Stephanie attended the dinner alone; she could not shake the nagging sense that something was very wrong.41
The melodrama surrounding Mary’s disappearance continued to unfold in Vienna on Tuesday. That morning Helene Vetsera and Alexander Baltazzi called on Chief of Police Krauss. Helene claimed that, until Mary’s disappearance, she had no reason “to attach any importance to her daughter’s infatuation” with Rudolf, but now Larisch was certain that the crown prince was somehow involved. Was it possible, Krauss asked, that Larisch had been lying to Baroness Vetsera about the relationship? No, Helene insisted, she’d known Larisch “for fifteen years.” Krauss had spoken to cab driver Franz Weber, who had confirmed Mary’s “disappearance” while Larisch was in Rodeck’s, but the police chief suspected that “he has probably been bribed.” When Helene pressed for further investigation, Krauss again explained that if he launched an official inquiry, Mary’s name would inevitably appear in the press; apparently by this time the baroness was worried enough to consent, leaving a photograph of Mary with the baron, who promised to keep the situation “as secret as possible.”42
Aware of the family’s rather sordid reputation, Krauss called on Prime Minister Taaffe that afternoon and briefed him on the situation. But the prime minister seemed unconcerned, saying that he thought Helene Vetsera “was herself involved in this business, since her own life, and that of her daughter, are not free from wild escapades.” He ordered Krauss to do nothing.43
By nightfall Alexander Baltazzi managed to work his sister into a frenzy over Mary’s disappearance; soon after Krauss’s visit Helene Vetsera stormed into the prime minister’s office, demanding an audience. At first Taaffe was politely patronizing, explaining that he was in no position to speak directly with the crown prince about the issue as he was “not on good terms with him and had no standing to raise his private affairs.” The crown prince was expected back in Vienna that evening; if he failed to appear, Taaffe would then have detectives make some inquiries, “though this made him very uncomfortable.”44 Until and unless Rudolf failed to return, the prime minister warned, the baroness should keep her silence. When Helene threatened to go directly to the emperor, however, Taaffe’s tone immediately changed. After all, he gleefully asked her, what made Helene think that Mary, profligate as she apparently was with her favors, was with the crown prince? All Vienna knew of the young lady’s reputation: Rudolf, Taaffe told her, certainly couldn’t have hoped to deflower Mary Vetsera. When he went further and named Prince Heinrich von Liechtenstein as one of Mary’s “very intimate admirers,” Helene blushed “blood red” and quickly left the prime minister’s office.45
Six o’clock arrived, and Rudolf did not appear at the Hofburg. Learning this, Taaffe again met Krauss. Now the prime minister advised the chief of police to quietly send an inspector out to Mayerling the following morning. He also wanted to know if the crown prince had confided in Mitzi Caspar. Krauss was to send for police agent Florian Meissner and have him question Rudolf’s mistress about his plans, and especially about his relationship with Mary Vetsera.46
Rudolf had spent most of that Tuesday in his rooms at Mayerling, where Mary remained hidden and took her meals. Late that afternoon he summoned one of the gamekeepers, Hornsteiner, and said that he would not participate in the next day’s hunting. Something about his manner struck Hornsteiner as strange. “What’s up with the Crown Prince?” Hornsteiner asked Loschek. “He just spoke with me now, but seemed to be thinking of something else entirely.”47
Hoyos returned to Mayerling at half past five that afternoon: He’d managed only a bad shot at a single stag, and gamekeepers had to chase the wounded animal most of the afternoon before finishing it off.48 At seven he left his room in the old gamekeeper’s lodge and walked across the courtyard to join Rudolf for dinner in the billiard room—the usual spot for informal meals. Mary remained in Rudolf’s bedroom; Hoyos later insisted that he had no idea she was at the lodge. Rudolf seemed to be in a good mood: He ate the soup, goose pâté, roast beef, venison, and pastries “with considerable appetite,” and “drank plenty of wine.” After the meal the two men chatted and smoked. Talk turned to the following day’s hunt, but at nine and complaining of his cold, Rudolf said that he wanted to retire early. He rose, shook his friend’s hand, and disappeared into his own apartments, while Hoyos returned to his lodgings some thousand feet away.49
But Rudolf did not retire. He apparently called for Bratfisch and asked him to wait with his carriage early the following morning: Mary, he said, would be returning to Vienna.50 Loschek tended to the lovers as they retreated to Rudolf’s bedroom. “You are not to let anyone in,” Rudolf warned him, “not even the Emperor!”51 Mary took a small gold watch set with diamonds from her pocket, handed it to Loschek, and said, “Take this as a keepsake of this last time.”52 With these ominous words Rudolf and Mary disappeared into his bedroom and closed the door behind them.