Royal Pains: A Rogues' Gallery of Brats, Brutes, and Bad Seeds

by Leslie Carroll

  During the honeymoon at Laxenburg Castle, the newlyweds had nothing to say to each other—literally as well as metaphorically. Having learned only schoolroom German, Stephanie didn’t speak the Austrian dialect. The castle itself was unwelcoming: chilly, dreary, damp, and devoid of the slightest touches of warmth or hospitality—hardly a romantic venue for a bridal couple.

  In her memoirs, penned decades after Rudolf’s tragic demise, and published in 1935, Stephanie claimed to have been repelled by her husband’s physical advances on their wedding night. We’ll never know whether she was inexperienced, frightened, prudish, or whether Rudolf was not a tender or patient lover. Stephanie also claimed that she got to see him only when she accompanied him on his shooting expeditions, writing that “the Crown Prince cared little outside his own pleasure and sport.”

  The newlyweds settled in Prague, where Rudolf returned to his regiment. Two months into the marriage, Stephanie realized she was pregnant. With a child on the way, education reform was in the forefront of the prince’s mind, although even before they’d met, Rudolph had voiced his radical political sentiments regarding the subject, writing in February 1881: I would much rather send my children to a school whose headmaster is a Jew than to one whose headmaster is a clergyman. . . . The State has to treat all denominations equally; a strengthening of the Catholic hierarchy has so far brought always evil consequences.

  Obviously Rudolf had a lot more on his mind than “pleasure and sport.” Either he never shared his passionate intellectual opinions with his wife, or else Stephanie had a reason to write a revisionist history of their relationship. She did remarry after Rudolf’s demise and perhaps it was in her own interest to recast their life together in a decidedly unpleasant light.

  Concerned about the sort of world their child would inherit, in November 1881 Rudolph drafted a twenty-page memorandum for his father, suggesting a number of wellconsidered progressive reforms.

  The crown prince sent the draft to Latour for comment, confiding that, “Our emperor has no friend, his whole character and his disposition do not permit it. . . . Thus he knows little of the thoughts and feelings of the people, of their views and opinions. . . . He believes that we are living in one of the happiest periods of Austrian history, he is officially told so. In the newspapers he only reads the passages marked in red and so he is divorced from every human intercourse, from all impartial and really loyal advice.”

  And of his mother, Rudolf admitted, “There was a time when the Empress frequently concerned herself with politics, whether with luck or not I will not discuss now. . . . These times are past. The great lady no longer cares for anything but sport.”

  The crown prince and princess gave the outward impression, at least, of being very happily married. It was Stephanie, of all people, whom Rudolf pinned his hopes on, confessing to his mentor, “I am very much in love with her and she is the only one who would tempt me to do many things.” Apparently Rudolf didn’t see the woman his beloved mother referred to as “a moral heavyweight,” an “ugly elephant,” and “das hässliche Trampeltier”—the ugly, clumsy oaf.

  Evidently Stephanie’s 1881 pregnancy was a false alarm, or else she lost the baby, because there was no birth. In the beginning of 1883 she was enceinte again, and on September 2, the crown princess gave birth to a little girl they named Elisabeth.

  As always with this couple, there were conflicting reports of their reactions. Regarding the birth of a daughter, Stephanie claimed in her memoirs that, “The Crown Prince was absolutely stricken, for he had set his heart upon an heir to the throne!” while Rudolf wrote of his delight to his friend the Jewish newspaper editor Moriz Szeps that when Stephanie had fretted over not having a boy, he had consoled her with the words, “Never mind, a girl is much sweeter.”

  Whom to believe when it comes to the events of Crown Prince Rudolf’s life remains one of history’s mysteries. Although Rudolf’s biographer Fritz Judtmann insists that many documents survive regarding Rudolf’s demise, an event known as the Mayerling tragedy, most of the correspondence between the crown prince and princess was burned or otherwise destroyed. Only one letter from his wife can be found among Rudolf’s surviving papers. It was written in French and dates from 1887—the same year she traveled to a spa town in Bohemia in search of a cure for her infertility. Stephanie’s letter to Rudolf is affectionate, but lacks the effusiveness of his known letters to her, in which he penned such phrases as, “I am longing terribly for you and count the days which still separate us. Embracing you with all my heart.”

  Parenthetically, Rudolf’s parents wrote adoring letters to each other when they were apart, but Sisi couldn’t stand to be in the same room with Franz Joseph when they were together; therefore, even primary source material doesn’t always tell the whole story. Some biographers have hinted (without providing details) that Rudolf gave his wife a venereal disease that necessitated an operation and made her unable to conceive again. They mention that the royal couple’s sex life seems to have continued; yet in her memoirs Stephanie asserted that she was unable “to lead the affectionate existence of a young married couple.”

  The intense, über-angsty Rudolf could not have been easy to live with, although his brand of Mittel-European morbidity was in the air in fin-de-siècle Vienna. In 1882, when the crown prince was still a newlywed, his current mentor, Moriz Szeps, made note of a disturbing conversation in which Rudolf had confided, “From time to time I look for an opportunity to watch a dying person and to overhear his last breath. It is always for me a curious sight and of all the people whom I have seen dying, each has died in a different way. I observe with attention dying animals and try also to get my wife used to the sight.”

  Four years later, in 1886, Rudolf told the anatomist Professor Zuckerkandl (who had wed Szeps’s daughter Bertha), “One should face the idea of death straightforwardly.” The following year, Rudolf requested a skull from Zuckerkandl, which he awarded a place of honor on his desk.

  Rudolf’s friendship with Szeps was yet another problematic connection for the bureaucracy, because Szeps was a Jew as well as a journalist. And their relationship became increasingly suspicious as time wore on. The twenty-something crown prince was probably not being paranoid when at one point during the early 1880s he told his mentor, “I must draw your attention to a number of odd things. They are becoming very watchful and suspicious of me, and I see more clearly every day what a tight circle of espionage, denunciations, and supervision surrounds me. . . . I have good reason to believe that our relations are known in high quarters [likely by his own father].”

  It would have been no surprise that Franz Joseph disapproved of his heir’s personal, professional, and political associations. After all, the crown prince seemed to disdain or seek to contradict everything his father represented and believed. On July 26, 1882, Rudolf wrote to Szeps, “I consider the enmity of nations and races a decisive step backwards, and it is characteristic that just those elements hostile to progress in Europe indulge these principles and exploit them.”

  Rudolf was known to openly consort with what we might call “real people.” Whether the gossip was accurate or part of a campaign to smear him, we may never know, but stories of his libertinism, rather than his liberalism, made the rounds of smoke-filled coffeehouses as well as elegant salons. He had become something of a darling among Vienna’s emerging middle class, the progressive and enlightened segment of society that was at odds with the rest of Austria, just as New York City is anomalous to much of the balance of the rural and predominantly conservative New York State.

  In May of 1883, Rudolf and Stephanie moved to Laxenburg Castle, just outside Vienna. That year, the crown prince was appointed commanding officer of the 25th infantry. Soon after the birth of their daughter, they moved into the Hofburg palace, although Rudolf maintained his bachelor quarters at the Hofburg as well. Stephanie hated the oppressive and backward atmosphere of the imposing palace, which still lacked bathrooms and running water and was illuminate
d with oil lamps, despite the recent introduction of electricity into bourgeois homes and the common use of gas lighting.

  The move to Vienna was also part of the crown prince’s overarching professional agenda. As he matured, Rudolf keenly acknowledged his duty as a royal. In January 1884, hyperaware of the tenor of the era, he wrote to Szeps: In a time like the present, members of dynasties must show themselves frequently and work hard to prove their right to exist. This is the reason why my wife and I intend this winter to visit many establishments. . . . It would be good if the people were to learn from your paper what we are doing so that we are not taken for useless parasites.

  Yet Franz Joseph continued to keep Rudolf idle. As late as 1887, the crown prince remained deprived of any government post or responsibilities; nor did the emperor discuss with his heir the rationales behind his domestic and foreign policies in order to provide his perspective on the myriad issues plaguing the Austro-Hungarian empire.

  As the 1880s rumbled on, Rudolf and Stephanie grew even farther apart. She was pretentious and pushy, ambitious for a lifestyle that Rudolf had disdained for years. Her lack of warmth may have chased him from the marital bed, although by then she may also have been tainted by venereal disease, the victim of his infidelities.

  In the early months of 1886 Rudolf fell ill. Various diagnoses included an inflammation of the peritoneum and a catarrh of the bladder. A veneral infection was supposed but never conclusively confirmed.

  Emil Franzel, a twentieth-century author who wrote a psychological study of the crown prince, observed that, . . . in his last years Rudolf not only drank a lot but also took drugs. It has been surmised that an abdominal complaint of his, as well as a complaint of his wife which prevented her from having any children after their only daughter, was probably of venereal origin, but this cannot now be proved. Certainly Rudolf’s private life had been decidedly objectionable for years.

  Other sources, including biographies of the Crown Princess Stephanie and the unpublished papers of one of Sisi’s biographers, Egon Caesar Conte Corti, also refer to Stephanie’s awareness that her inability to conceive any more children was because her husband had infected her with a venereal disease. And the Vienna court pharmacy’s prescription book for 1886 refers to scrips filled in Stephanie’s name for zinc sulfate and Copaiva balsam capsules, medications used to treat gonorrhea, in addition to huge doses of morphine, prescribed as a painkiller.

  Whether the allegations are true or not, Rudolf lacked outlets—for his sexual as well as his political passions. Stephanie lacked an amorous personality and her husband looked elsewhere for stimulus, as well as for the brand of sympathy that can be found only in a pair of soft and willing arms.

  According to the memoirs of Count Monts, the legation counselor at the German Embassy in Vienna, Female hearts positively dropped into the lap of the Crown Prince. . . . Rudolf was too soft and too weak to tear himself away . . . from this whirl. . . . Thus the young Prince did too much in matters of Venus. . . . His body was not up to the demands he made on it, and so the Prince resorted to alcohol and the hypodermic. . . .

  Rudolf began to spend hours every day engaged in shooting parties. As he began to lose hope and faith in a better future, his world outlook grew bleak and his personality became cynical and impatient. In 1886 or 1887 he commenced a love affair with Mizzi Kaspar, a demimondaine who has euphemistically been described by some biographers as a dancer. Unfortunately for the crown prince, who in some respects was still a naïf, Mizzi was a mini Mata Hari. She was connected with a lawyer named Florian Meissner, who was an informer for the German embassy. Consequently, Rudolf’s movements were known by the German as well as the Austrian authorities. Rudolf drank more during these years and indulged in outrageous behavior—such as sheltering another archduke who had pulled a particularly disrespectful stunt by jumping his horse over a coffin during a funeral procession and days later horsewhipped a member of Austria’s parliament. According to Rudolf’s biographer Richard Barkeley, the crown prince became an “imperial playboy,” which sapped him of his will to further his political interests, but left him with enough energy to drink and whore with impunity.

  Although Rudolf was promoted to inspector general of the infantry in 1888, conservative, anti-Semitic newspapers across Europe attacked him for leading a dissolute life, partially to discredit him because of his friendship with father figure Moriz Szeps.

  In 1887 he began taking morphine to combat a chronic cough, and after suffering a fall from his horse on November 19, 1888, he ingested significant amounts of it to combat his pain. The hallucinogenic sedative, combined with Rudolf’s alcohol consumption, was a disastrous combination. Stephanie noticed that, “He was frightfully changed; his skin was flaccid, his eyes were restless, his expression had completely changed.”

  Stephanie was so concerned about her husband’s outlook and appearance that she asked Franz Joseph for his help, urging him to send his son on a long, recuperative holiday. But the emperor, who was raised never to admit impediments or weakness of any sort, dismissed Stephanie’s fears by insisting that there was “nothing the matter with Rudolf . . . He is rather pale, gets about too much, expects too much of himself. He ought to stay at home with you more than he does.”

  In early October of 1888, during a visit by “Bertie,” the Prince of Wales, Rudolf was introduced to a minor member of the nobility, Baroness Helene Vetsera and her daughter Mary—who at the time ostensibly had an “understanding” (a pseudoserious commitment to an engagement) with the much older Miguel, Duke of Braganza. According to Bertie (who had a notorious eye for feminine pulchritude), Mary “seemed a charming young lady and certainly one of the prettiest and most admired in Vienna.”

  Only seventeen years old, naive and romantic, Mary Vetsera had developed a raging crush on the crown prince the previous spring, when she saw him at the horse races, admitting that she would do anything to be with him. The girl visited the track so often she’d earned the nickname “turf angel.” Although Helene found out about her daughter’s infatuation and brought Mary to England for the summer in the hope that she would forget about Rudolf, absence only made the teen’s untested heart grow fonder. She wrote him a letter expressing her attraction and Rudolf had replied, suggesting that they meet. Mary would later be tarred by the imperial family as nothing but a tawdry temptress who had led their precious heir astray.

  Empress Sisi’s cousin and lady-in-waiting, Countess Marie Larisch, became Rudolf’s go-between with Mary, if not his outright procuress. Unlike Stephanie, Mary Vetsera was a very girly girl and as eager to please as a puppy.

  Mary poured out her heart to Hermine, her former governess (who evidently did not condone the royal liaison), writing: I cannot live without having seen him or spoken to him. Dear Hermine, don’t worry about me, I know that everything you say is true, 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.

  Mary and Rudolf enjoyed their first meeting in the Prater, the amusement park that at the time lay just outside Vienna, and on November 5, the countess conveyed Mary to the prince’s bachelor rooms in the Hofburg. Marie Larisch lied to Baroness Helene Vetsera, telling her that she was chaperoning her teenage daughter on shopping expeditions. Days later Mary wrote to Hermine about her visit to Rudolf’s rooms at the Hofburg: Today you will get a happy letter from me because I have been with him. Marie Larisch took me shopping with her and then to be photographed—for him of course. Then we went . . . to the Burg. An old servant was waiting for us; he led us up several stairs and through several rooms until we reached one in which he left us. At our entrance a black bird—some kind of raven—flew at my head. A voice called from the next room “Please come in.” Marie introduced me, then he said to me “Excuse me, but I would like to talk to the Countess privately for a few minutes.” Then he went with Marie to another room. I looked around me. On his desk was a revolver and a skull. I picked up the skull
, took it between my hands and looked at it from all sides. Suddenly Rudolf came in and took it from me with deep apprehension. When I said that I wasn’t afraid, he smiled.

  In the letter, Mary sought Hermine’s promise not to tell a soul about the encounter and expressed her despair that any subsequent rendezvous with Rudolf would have to be postponed, owing to the Countess Larisch’s departure for her home in Bohemia. Despondent without her pimping chaperone, Mary wrote to Hermine: . . . I wither with longing and cannot await the day of her return. . . . I count the hours, because since I have met him and talked to him my love has so much deepened. I ponder day and night how I could contrive to see him.

  “He is my god, my everything!” she confessed to Hermine. In turn, Mary received from Rudolf an assurance of his love for her, accompanied by the revelation that he would go mad if he were deprived of ever seeing her again.

  Although Rudolf never broke off his adulterous relationship with Mizzi Kaspar, he gave Mary Vetsera an iron wedding ring, which she wore suspended from a slender chain about her neck. It was inscribed with the initials ILVBIDT, an acronym for the words In Liebe vereint bis in den Tod—united in love till death.

  The overly romantic Mary told her former governess: If we could live together in a hut we would be so happy! We constantly talk of this, and love doing so; but alas, it cannot be! If I could give my life to see him happy, I would gladly do it, because I do not value my own life.

  Mary also admitted to Hermine that she and Rudolf had made a suicide pact, in which—after spending a few happy hours together—they would kill themselves, although she had regrets about the prince taking his own life because “he must live for his nation. All that surrounds him must be splendor and glory.”