Flurries of snow fell throughout the night at Mayerling; by the morning of Wednesday, January 30, 1889, a fine powder cloaked the lodge’s steep roof in a blanket of white. Dawn broke late, gray, and gloomy, the dark fringe of forest ringing the estate standing in dim shadow against a leaden sky.
Loschek was up early that morning. At ten past six Rudolf—dressed in his usual hunting clothes—came into the small anteroom, closing the bedroom door behind him. He asked Loschek to see to the horses and carriages needed for the day’s hunt, and to order breakfast for half past eight, by which time he expected Prince Philipp to have returned from Vienna. Until then Rudolf wanted to get a little more sleep, and he asked Loschek to wake him at half past seven. Rudolf’s mood seemed lighthearted as he turned and disappeared back into his bedroom: He was, Loschek remembered, whistling a tune.1
Within a few minutes, Loschek later claimed, he heard two gunshots, fired in quick succession. Running back to the anteroom, he thought he smelled gunpowder in the air. Seeing nothing obviously wrong, he tried the door to Rudolf’s bedroom: It was locked on the inside. This was odd: Rudolf normally left his bedroom unlocked. Yet Loschek did not alert anyone; hearing nothing further, he walked across the courtyard to order breakfast and carriages for the hunt.2
Loschek passed Bratfisch, who sat on the box of his carriage, waiting to take Mary back to Vienna.3 At seven, as the imperial huntsman Franz Wodicka crossed the courtyard to prepare for the day’s shooting, Bratfisch called him aside, announcing, “No good rallying the beaters! There will be no shoot!” When a puzzled Wodicka asked what he meant, Bratfisch declared, “The Crown Prince is dead.”4 The remark remained unexplained at the time.
Half past seven arrived, and Loschek went to wake the crown prince; there was no response to his repeatedly insistent knocking. The door was still locked from within, and Loschek could not find the key. Increasingly worried, the valet left the anteroom, climbed the main staircase, walked through Stephanie’s apartments above, and descended the smaller staircase to the corridor that gave access to Rudolf’s bathroom. There another door opened to the crown prince’s bedroom; when Loschek tried to open it, he found that this, too, was locked on the inside. Returning to the anteroom, Loschek grabbed a length of firewood and used it to bang against the closed bedroom door. It was not unusual for Rudolf to pass out from drinking or overindulgence in morphine, but he’d been up ninety minutes earlier; even if the crown prince was now unresponsive, surely Mary Vetsera would answer the door.5
But after twenty minutes Loschek had worked himself into a panic, and he sent Alois Zwerger, the Schlosswärter (lodge warden) at Mayerling, to fetch Hoyos.6 Hoyos was preparing for breakfast when his valet knocked on the door a few minutes before eight: Zwerger now explained that Loschek was unable to wake the crown prince.7 Hoyos was unconcerned. Rudolf, he told Zwerger, was “probably tired, let him sleep.”8 Zwerger, though, insisted, and Hoyos accompanied him back to the lodge.9
Loschek was still in the anteroom, banging on the door, when Hoyos entered. Was the bedroom, Hoyos asked, heated with a coal stove, and could fumes have overcome Rudolf? No, Loschek replied, the bedroom stove used wood for fuel. Hoyos rapped loudly against the door, yelling out Rudolf’s name; still, there was no reply. The “death-like silence in the bedroom,” Hoyos thought, gave “obvious reason for suspecting disaster.” Loschek refused to break down the door; when Hoyos insisted, the valet confessed that Rudolf was not alone but had Mary Vetsera with him. “This news naturally caused me the greatest embarrassment,” Hoyos later unconvincingly claimed, “all the more as I had neither suspected the presence of the Baroness at Mayerling nor had I known of her relations with the Crown Prince.”10
Hoyos looked at his watch: 8:09 a.m. Prince Philipp should soon be returning from Vienna for the morning’s shooting; it was better, Hoyos decided, to wait and let Rudolf’s brother-in-law take responsibility for breaking into the room. Ten minutes ticked by before Coburg’s carriage arrived. Hoyos flagged him down, pulled him into the billiard room, and quickly explained the situation. The prince ran to the anteroom, closed the door to the corridor behind him, and ordered Loschek to break into the bedroom; because of “the exceptionally delicate circumstances,” Hoyos said, they asked Loschek to enter the room alone and report back to them.11
Loschek fetched an ax, but his blows couldn’t break the lock. Finally he turned the blade to the upper panel, chopping a hole through the bedroom door. It had been dark when Rudolf came out of his bedroom a few minutes after six; he must have lit a lamp or a candle, and it was in this poor light, with the curtains drawn and the windows shuttered, that Loschek first peered through the smashed panel. Yet with a quick glance, before having entered the room and without a moment’s hesitation, Loschek announced that both Rudolf and Mary were dead.12
“Our horror and grief,” Hoyos said, “were beyond words.” But what if Loschek was wrong? Should a doctor be called? Coburg and Hoyos finally asked Loschek to enter the room and look more closely.13 Loschek reached through the panel, found the key, and opened the door. “An appalling sight” met his eyes: Mary Vetsera was on the right side of the bed, closest to the door, while Rudolf sat on the opposite side, his legs extended over the side of the bed and torso bent forward. Both of their heads, Loschek said, were hanging down, and it was obvious that both were dead. The top of Rudolf’s skull was gone; brain tissue oozed from the cranium, spattering the headboard, and blood had poured from his nose and mouth. His revolver lay on the bed. A single bullet wound to Mary’s left temple had shattered the right side of her skull.14
“It was clear at first view,” Loschek recalled, “that Rudolf first shot Mary Vetsera and then killed himself. There were only two well-aimed shots.”15 Yet Hoyos claimed that the valet stumbled from the room declaring that Rudolf and Mary had died after taking strychnine, insisting that this often caused bloody hemorrhages.16 This story sounds suspicious: Loschek, a former gamekeeper, had seen Rudolf’s shattered skull and the revolver—why would he think that the crown prince had died by poison? As for Hoyos, he later insisted that he never entered the room, but this isn’t convincing: Would he and Coburg, two of Rudolf’s closest friends, really leave all examination to Loschek?17 The German ambassador, Prince Reuss, who seemed remarkably well informed on events at Mayerling, confidently reported to Berlin, “I know for certain that Count Hoyos and the Prince of Coburg saw the two bodies immediately after the door was broken down.”18 To diplomat Count Eugen Kinsky, Hoyos confessed that he and Coburg had briefly entered the room and looked at the corpses.19 Coburg also admitted, in a letter to Queen Victoria, that he “saw everything.”20 And, to his friend Justice Adolf Bachrach, the prince confided: “Hoyos and I found the Crown Prince already dead. We were the first to see his body. Poor man! His head was terribly disfigured.”21 Neither could have missed the obvious gunshot wounds to the corpses.
Hoyos and Coburg held a quick conference: It was obvious that both Rudolf and Mary were beyond assistance, but what should they do? The most important thing was to keep word of what had happened secret until Franz Josef had been told. Coburg “was so broken with grief that he was hardly capable of action,” and so the unfortunate duty of taking news of the tragedy to Vienna fell on Hoyos. The count told Loschek to telegraph Rudolf’s court physician, Dr. Hermann Widerhofer, asking him to come immediately to Mayerling on a matter of grave urgency; a servant brought the count’s fur coat, and at 8:37 a.m. Hoyos climbed into a carriage, ordering Bratfisch to drive him quickly to the station at nearby Baden, where he could board a train and travel to the capital. Prince Philipp was left to stand guard over the scene at Mayerling.22
Throughout the drive, Hoyos recalled, Bratfisch “tried to question me,” but the count insisted that the crown prince was merely indisposed. He warned Bratfisch to say nothing about the situation. At the Baden station Hoyos ordered Bratfisch to wait with his carriage for Widerhofer and then ran into the telegraph office, where he sent a message to Prince Constantine von Hohenlohe, lord high chamberlain of the imperial household, warning that he was on his way to the Hofburg on a matter of great urgency. Hoyos then checked with the stationmaster: The next train, the express from Trieste, would pass through the station at 9:18. Ordinarily it didn’t stop, but Hoyos demanded that it do so, saying that “I was traveling on the most important official business and I was given permission to board the express.” According to Hoyos, his “greatest care was to keep everything as secret as possible, and neither in Mayerling itself nor during my journey did anyone learn anything from me.”23
In fact, to persuade the stationmaster to stop the train and allow him to board, Hoyos told him that “the Crown Prince has shot himself.”24 This confession demolishes any idea that Hoyos actually believed Rudolf had been poisoned. As soon as Hoyos boarded the train, the stationmaster ran to the telegraph office. Baron Nathaniel Rothschild, and not the Austrian state, owned the Southern Railway, on which the Trieste express traveled; within minutes the baron had a telegram informing him of Rudolf’s death at Mayerling. Rothschild immediately telegraphed the news to his youngest brother and head of the family business Baron Albert Rothschild, who rushed to the German Embassy and informed Prince Reuss of the tragedy; Reuss in turn summoned Count Anton Monts, his embassy counselor, and broke word of the crown prince’s suicide.25 Albert Rothschild then ran to the British Embassy. “I have come to tell you a very sad thing,” he told Sir Augustus and Lady Paget. “Your Crown Prince is dead.”26 Diplomatic Vienna thus learned of Rudolf’s suicide before the emperor did.
On the journey from Baden to Vienna, Hoyos apparently realized that, having just come from the lodge, he would be pressed for details at the Hofburg. Although he’d seen the bodies and blurted out to the stationmaster that Rudolf had shot himself, the idea of having to break such awful news to the emperor or empress—not to mention that Rudolf had apparently also shot Mary Vetsera—was simply too unnerving. With Widerhofer on his way to Mayerling, the facts would emerge soon enough. Until then Hoyos seems to have decided to obfuscate. At this point the poisoning story probably entered his head; later it would be easy enough to claim confusion and blame any misunderstanding on the dead crown prince’s valet. But for now Hoyos almost certainly believed that it was best to spare the emperor and empress the terrible truth—and himself the odium of having to inform them of Rudolf’s suicide.
After arriving in Vienna, Hoyos went straight to the Hofburg; it was, he recalled, 10:11 a.m. as he raced through the Schweizerhof to the rooms of Karl von Bombelles. Hoyos quickly briefed Bombelles on “the terrible state of affairs” at Mayerling and asked him to tell the emperor. “I cannot possibly,” the count insisted. “Her Majesty is the only person who can tell His Majesty such a thing.” The oppressive Spanish etiquette of the Hofburg kicked in: Bombelles decided that Baron Ferenc Nopcsa, lord high chamberlain of the empress’s household, should inform Elisabeth of the tragedy. But Nopcsa too protested that etiquette prevented him from acting, and so the trio shuffled off to ask Prince Hohenlohe what to do. Rudolf had been a lieutenant general in the imperial army; only a military man, Hohenlohe insisted, could approach the emperor. And so they went to ask Count Eduard Paar, Franz Josef’s Flügeladjutant. Like the others, Paar wanted no responsibility in breaking the news: Only the empress, he declared, could tell the emperor of such a tragedy. Nopcsa, he pronounced, must inform Elisabeth and let her tell her husband.27
Empress Elisabeth was having a Greek lesson that morning; Nopcsa sent for her reader, Ida von Ferenczy, and asked that he be announced at once. Elisabeth was obviously irritated at the interruption, saying that Nopcsa “must wait and come back again later.” But the countess pressed, confessing, “He has bad news, grave news, about His Imperial Highness the Crown Prince!” Hearing this, Elisabeth dismissed her Greek tutor, and Ferenczy ushered Nopcsa into the room. The baron now repeated what Hoyos had said: Rudolf was dead at Mayerling, and Mary Vetsera with him; it seemed likely that she had poisoned him and then, consumed with guilt, taken her own life. A few minutes later, when Ferenczy returned, she found the empress sobbing loudly. But Elisabeth quickly dried her tears and kept a stoic face as an unsuspecting Franz Josef was ushered into the room. A few minutes later the emperor emerged, face ashen and head bowed at word of his son’s death.28
By coincidence Katharina von Schratt arrived at the Hofburg that morning to see the emperor. Overwhelmed by her own grief, Elisabeth decided the kindest thing she could do was let the actress provide Franz Josef with the emotional comfort she could not give him.29 “You must go to him,” Elisabeth told her. “You must try to help him. I can do nothing more.”30
No one had yet told Stephanie of her husband’s death; it says something about the empress’s loathing of her daughter-in-law that, rather than send for the unsuspecting widow, Elisabeth next called for her favorite child, Marie Valerie. The archduchess found her mother weeping in her bedroom. “Rudolf is very, very ill,” the Empress sobbed. “There is no hope!” Marie Valerie was no fool: “Has he killed himself?” she asked. Elisabeth recoiled: “Why do you think that? No, no. It seems probable, even certain, that the girl poisoned him.”31 Soon Franz Josef joined them and, as Marie Valerie wrote, “The three of us held each other close and cried.”32
Stephanie, meanwhile, was in her apartments having a singing lesson, when a lady-in-waiting interrupted and said she had grave news. “I realized instantly that the catastrophe I had so long dreaded had taken place,” Stephanie later wrote. “He is dead!” she cried out, and the courtier nodded silently before withdrawing. Stephanie would remain understandably bitter that the emperor and empress had ignored her and let a lady-in-waiting break news of the tragedy.33 “God have mercy on the soul of my dearly beloved husband!!” she wrote in her diary after receiving the “dreadful” news.34
The now-widowed crown princess had to wait for a formal summons from the emperor before Franz Josef and Elisabeth received her later that morning. When she finally called on her parents-in-law, she found Elisabeth had already dressed in black, “her face pale and rigid,” standing beside Franz Josef, who sat on a sofa. Rather than offer sympathy, Stephanie remembered, “they looked on me as a criminal. They assailed me with a crossfire of questions, some of which I could not, and others would not, answer.” Sensing that she was being blamed for the tragedy, Stephanie spoke of Rudolf’s erratic behavior and how Franz Josef had dismissed her warnings; Elisabeth refused to listen: “In her eyes, I was the guilty party.”35 It was all so sordid: the crown prince apparently poisoned by his young lover who had then killed herself. Nothing of the kind, Franz Josef and Elisabeth quickly decided, must ever be admitted. Before Stephanie was dismissed, they seem to have told her that officially Rudolf’s death would be ascribed to a heart attack. This only aroused her suspicions. Returning to her apartments, Stephanie cried out to Sophie von Planker-Klaps, “Have you heard that the Crown Prince died today at Mayerling of heart failure? Do you believe that?” It all proved too much: Stephanie collapsed, and a doctor sedated her and put her to bed.36 She was, she confided to her sister, “broken by the pain of this terrible misfortune,” and begged Louise to “pray for me and for him, who was so good.”37
One last bit of lugubrious business was enacted that morning at the Hofburg. Earlier, before word of the tragedy reached Vienna, Helene Vetsera had again called on Taaffe, asking what progress he had made in finding her daughter. The prime minister had nothing to report; if she believed the matter was so urgent, he finally suggested, Helene should seek an audience with the empress and ask her to intervene with Rudolf.38 The baroness agreed, but when she arrived at the Hofburg, Ferenczy tried to dismiss her, saying, “What do you want here? Kindly go away.” Helene, though, refused to leave: “I have lost my child,” she cried, “and she alone can restore her to me.” Eventually an irritated Ferenczy informed the empress of her insistent caller. “Does she know anything yet?” Elisabeth asked. On being told that she did not, the empress remarked, “Poor woman. Very well, I will go to her.” Elisabeth drew herself up and, “full of grandeur,” finally faced the unsuspecting mother, saying flatly: “Collect all your courage, Baroness. Your daughter is dead.”
“My child!” Helene cried out. “My dear, beautiful child!”
“But,” Elisabeth coldly said, her voice rising in anger, “do you know that my Rudolf is dead as well?”
Hearing this, Helene collapsed to the floor in sobs, clutching at the empress’s skirt and muttering, “My unhappy child! What has she done? Can this be her doing?” Elisabeth was silent. She freed herself from the baroness’s grasp and coldly dismissed her with the warning, “Remember, the Crown Prince died of heart failure!”39
A cover-up had been set in motion. No one wanted to admit that Rudolf had, presumably, been poisoned by his mistress or, worse, joined her in a suicide pact. While gossip filtered through Vienna’s foreign embassies, no one on the streets knew that anything had happened. It was, to all appearances, an ordinary winter Wednesday morning. A little after noon, a regiment of soldiers marched through the snowy streets as usual: The changing of the palace guard at the Hofburg was, at might be expected at Franz Josef’s court, a precise ritual, accompanied by rousing music. At half past twelve a regimental band launched into a noisy rendition of the march from Giacomo Meyerbeer’s opera Les Huguenots as smartly uniformed soldiers presented arms, clicked boot heels, and saluted in the Hofburg courtyard. Then, for the first time that anyone could remember, the music suddenly stopped without explanation.40