The Crown Prince Rudolph—His quarrel with the German Emperor—His
affability and his hauteur—A spoiled child—His search for
a wife—Marriage to Princess Stéphanie—Disappointment and
disillusion—Stéphanie’s book—“A long, long, terrible night has gone
by for me”—Mary Vetsera and her family—How Mary Vetsera was taken
first to the Hofburg and thence to Meyerling.
The name Rudolph had not been borne by a Habsburg ruler for five
hundred years. A curious fatality seemed to attach to it, and probably
had inspired a superstitious fear of it. Rudolph II. had died mad.
Rudolph III. and Rudolph IV. had died young—the one at twenty-seven
and the other at twenty-six. But people had ceased, as it seemed with
good reason, to think of such ominous things; and the Crown Prince
Rudolph inspired great hopes as well as great affection.
That he was really a degenerate, touched by the hereditary taint, is
hardly, indeed, to be doubted; but the symptoms of degeneracy were
not conspicuous, and, on the whole, passed unobserved. He must be
classed with the brilliant Habsburgs, or, at least, among those who
had literary and artistic tastes, which they cultivated, and were
proud of. He travelled, and wrote a book about his travels; he edited
a monumental work on the scenic beauties of the Austrian Empire; he
consorted, on very affable terms, with artists and men of letters. He
was also one of the friends of the late King Edward, who remarked of
him that he was a good German—“at all events in the sense of being
anti-Prussian”; and he showed character in a passage-at-arms with the
German Emperor, who spoke contemptuously of his preoccupation with the
fine arts:
“Nonsense of that sort,” the Emperor is reported to have said, “is
unworthy of a soldier and a Crown Prince.”
“There is only one thing,” Rudolph is reported to have replied, “which
is unworthy of a Crown Prince, and that is to aspire to the throne
during his father’s life-time.”
And yet, when Countess Marie Larisch came to tell what she knew of the
Meyerling tragedy, her “secret” was to the effect that Rudolph himself
had not only aspired to, but also conspired for, the throne of Hungary
during Francis Joseph’s life-time. But neither story can be said to
disprove the other; for one can discover no grounds for crediting
Rudolph with firm and consistent principles.
He was capable of affability; but he was also capable of _hauteur_. One
might compare him, as one might compare a good many of the Habsburgs,
to a poker which will unbend itself, but declines to be unbent by
others. Some workmen employed in the Palace discovered that, when
he came among them, as a child, and talked to them while they were
engaged in decorations and repairs. “Well, what is your name, young
fellow?” they presumed to ask him; and the little boy drew himself up.
“Papa and mamma call me Rudolph,” he answered. “Other people call me
Monseigneur.” He was young enough for the snub to amuse without giving
pain. Most likely the workmen declared him to be whatever is the German
for “a chip off the old block.” At any rate he grew up to be popular
with people who did not know him, or only knew him slightly. He was
“unser Rudi,” just as the German Emperor Frederick was “unser Fritz.”
Still, he was a spoiled child, and precociously cynical; and perhaps,
in view of the way in which he was brought up, it would have been hard
for him to be anything else. The legend of his mother’s devotion to
him is found at the circumference of his circle, but cannot be traced
to its centre. From an early age, he saw and understood too much for
innocence. Among other things he saw the “go-between,” and knew for
what purpose she went between. There was no example before his eyes to
lead him to look upon happiness in marriage as an easily attainable
ideal; and he held women cheap, because so many of them made themselves
cheap with him. One of Countess Marie’s stories is to the effect that
she boxed his ears for laughing at “love-sick girls,” and boasting of
his conquests, and saying of a certain Elizabeth T——: “The silly
goose thinks I adore her, and so I can do anything I like with her.”
It was, therefore, as a young man who had already lost his illusions
that Rudolph set out in search of a wife. The story has been told that
another lady travelled with him as a provisional companion while he
was looking for a wife, and was, at least once, caught in his company
in compromising circumstances by his prospective mother-in-law. He was
too eligible a _parti_ for any prospective mother-in-law to attach
more importance than she could help to such a _contretemps_; and after
Rudolph had rejected the suit of Princess Mathilde of Saxony, on the
ground that her style of beauty was of too luxuriant an effulgence,
then, “weary,” to quote Countess Marie, “of a choice of many evils,
he decided to take the least of them, as represented by the Princess
Stéphanie of Belgium.” And Stéphanie said, or is said to have said, “He
asked me for my hand so prettily that I could not possibly refuse it to
him.”
[Illustration: THE CROWN PRINCE RUDOLPH.]
That in spite of the compromising discovery of the provisional lady
companion in his rooms. His manner must indeed have been charming
if it removed the impression of that surprise; but Rudolph could be
fascinating when he chose, and his ready wit may have prompted a
plausible explanation. Moreover, Stéphanie was little more than a
child—too young to understand; and her father, Leopold II., was not
a man into whose calculations either sentiment or morality entered.
We all know him as the King who neglected the Austrian Archduchess to
whom he was married for such persons as Cléo de Mérode and the Baroness
Vaughan; and he may well have said to himself that he saw no reason
why his daughter should expect to be any happier in her marriage than
his wife, or why his younger daughter should expect to be any happier
in her marriage than her elder sister.
It is notorious, at any rate, that no love was ever lost between
Leopold and either of his daughters. The marriages of both of them
were failures; and anyone who has ever lived in Brussels knows how
many stories are current there as to his callous indifference to their
matrimonial calamities. Again and again the story ran round Brussels
that Princess Louise of Saxe-Coburg had run away from her husband and
taken refuge at Laeken, and that her eyes were not only red but black:
that Philip of Saxe-Coburg, in fact, had been knocking her about,
and that she had vowed, with tears streaming down her cheeks, that
nothing would induce her to return to him. But Leopold always sent her
back; for why—one pictures him asking—should his daughter Louise
expect to be any happier than his wife Henrietta, and why should his
son-in-law be expected to behave any better than he himself behaved?
No doubt there was logic of a kind—though not of the best kind—in
the argument. No doubt, too, the same logic was brought into play when
Stéphanie’s marriage was arranged.
Countess Marie protests that Stéphanie was plain, and had no style. She
speaks of her red arms, her deplorable figure, her unbecomingly dressed
hair; but that is not the verdict of contemporary Brussels, where
she was to be seen daily in the Park and the streets. What Brussels
remembers is a little girl—a “flapper,” as people say nowadays—simple
and exceedingly attractive: a little girl who reminded Brussels of a
Dresden china statuette; a little girl in short frocks, with her hair
hanging down her back. She was not grown up, Brussels declares, when
she was married; she was only dressed to look as if she were grown up.
She was put into long skirts, and her hair was done up, _du jour au
lendemain_, before the proper time, because this chance of a brilliant
marriage had suddenly come her way.
Presumably there was something of the gawkiness of the schoolgirl
about her when she was thus first dressed as a woman. Presumably that
gawkiness did not entirely vanish in the course of the journey from
Brussels to Vienna, where she was certain, as a foreigner, to encounter
far more captious criticism; Vienna being nearly as _chic_ as Paris,
quite as quizzical in a heavier way, and decidedly less disposed to
make smooth the path of the stranger. Stéphanie, in short, must at
first have seemed a little “provincial” to the Viennese; and there were
plenty of Viennese ladies—Palast Damen and others—whose cue it was to
make the worst of her, and to rejoice that, as Rudolph had married such
a wife, “there was no possibility,” to quote Countess Marie, “of his
ever becoming a model husband.”
Assuredly he did not become one, and there does not even seem to have
been an interlude of sunshine before the gathering of the clouds. Even
the daughter presently born to the Archduke and the Archduchess is
said to have been a cause of contention between them; and Stéphanie,
with that passion for self-expression which she shared with almost
every member of the House of Habsburg except Francis Joseph, has
written out and published a confession of the emotions which her
experiences of marriage brought her, and the lessons which she drew
from them. This is the essential passage:—
“Two quite young persons see each other for the first time, know each
other a quarter of an hour, and speak the binding word which death
alone can untie.
“If there is something beautiful in the thought that two human beings
who love and respect one another are joined before God in holy
matrimony, so there is something uncommonly repulsive in the idea that
such a union can be formed without any preparation and remain a lie
from the altar to the grave.
“I regret I was not born in humble circumstances in some fisherman’s
hamlet on the seashore. There one is nearer to happiness and peace
than in our high positions and in our complex society. Happiness
depends on living naturally, and what increases our distance from
nature decreases our happiness.
“Is it possible? A long, long, terrible night has gone by for me, and
I see a rosy dawn of hope on the clouded sky, a ray of light which
tells of the rising sun of joy. Will the sun rise in full glory? Will
he warm me with his rays, and dry the tears from my cheeks? Come,
my sun, come! You find a poor faded flower whose freshness has been
destroyed by the hard frost of fate.”
So Stéphanie wrote, after the tragedy had set her free, and at the
hour when she was about to make use of her freedom and seek in a
marriage of her own choice the happiness of which she had not enjoyed
even the illusory semblance in the marriage into which she was hurried
“without any preparation”—suddenly transformed from a schoolgirl into
a grown woman—by a father to whom no sacrifice was too precious to be
offered up on the altar of the Mammon of Unrighteousness. She was too
young and innocent—too _bourgeoise_, perhaps—to enter into the spirit
of the sacrifice. It was idle for anyone to tell her that Crown Princes
would be Crown Princes, and that Crown Princesses who raised jealous
objections to their doing so only made themselves ridiculous; that her
splendid position was the substance, and love only the shadow. Taught
by instinct, she knew better. She was too simple to wear a mask—or,
if she did sometimes wear one, it was continually falling off; and she
was too proud to pretend not to see the things which were happening
under her nose. Moreover, just as there were women whose cue it was to
make her feel provincial, so there were women—in many cases the same
women—whose cue it was to make her feel neglected.
The list of the women for whom Rudolph neglected Stéphanie would be
long and difficult to make out; but Mary Vetsera is the only one who
matters. All the world knows—and knew at the time—that Mary Vetsera
died with Rudolph on the day of the mysterious Meyerling tragedy;
but there was a good deal of unnecessary reticence about her in the
narratives written at the time. She figured as “Marie V——,” as “a
beautiful Jewess,” etc., etc.; but she was, as a matter of fact, a
well-known member of a family which was at that time very well known
indeed in Vienna.
Her mother, the Baroness Vetsera, was _née_ Baltazzi; and the Baltazzis
were people who were in Viennese society without being of it. Their
precise position in that society may be fixed by the fact that they
received invitations to the _bal beim Hof_, but not to the more
intimate and exclusive _bal am Hof_. The people who did not like them
called them “rastas,” meaning that they cut a dash, but that the
account which they gave of their antecedents was not quite satisfactory
to inquisitive aristocrats. They came from Constantinople by way of
London, and they threw their money about. One always finds such people
even in the most exclusive societies: people whom Society accepts,
without taking them to its bosom.
Some of the brothers were—and still are—tolerably well known in
England, as well as in their own country. Alexander Baltazzi won the
Derby with the Hungarian horse Kisber in 1876. Hector Baltazzi is now
connected with the picture-dealing business, and is sometimes to be
met at the Ritz Hotel in London—a dapper little man, standing with
his hands in his pockets. One of the brothers is prosperously engaged
in some mercantile undertaking in Roumania; and both the sisters made
good marriages. Evelyn married Count George Stockau; and Helen, with
whom we are more immediately concerned, married Baron Vetsera. But the
reputation of Helen, Baroness Vetsera, was not without its flaws; and
Viennese society did not always exercise charity in determining its
attitude towards her. It frequented her entertainments; but it also
called her _la Baronne Cardinal_.
Readers of Halévy’s _M. et Madame Cardinal_ and _Les petites Cardinal_
will understand the significance of that _sobriquet_. The Madame
Cardinal of fiction was the typical _mère d’actrice_: a well-known
French type, distinguished by taking a purely business-like view of
a daughter’s attraction for wealthy patrons of the drama. Countess
Marie Larisch, who was everybody’s confidante in the matter, depicts
the Baroness Vetsera as a woman of exactly that character—albeit, of
course, on a more exalted plane. She was not rich, she says, but was
living on her capital, relying on her daughters as her assets. They
must make wealthy marriages, or failing that——
“Will you,” she asked Countess Marie, “undertake a very difficult
mission for me? I want you to talk plainly to the Prince about Mary.
You might even give him a hint that matters might be arranged if he is
really desperately in love with her. At any rate, I’ve no objection to
discussing the matter with the Crown Prince.”
There we have the dots on the i’s in so far as Mary’s mother is
concerned. Mary, for her, was an article of merchandise; and Countess
Marie was, for her as for the Empress, a heaven-sent “go-between.”
Unfortunately, however, from the mother’s point of view, Mary was not
an ideal daughter. It is not impossible, Countess Marie thinks, that
she might, in cold blood, have fallen in with her mother’s plans.
It is certainly not by considerations of morality, Countess Marie
maintains, that she would have been restrained from doing so; for
those considerations had already gone by the board in the course of an
“affair” with an English cavalry officer in Cairo. But Mary’s blood
was, at the moment, anything but cold. She was at once infatuated,
and vain, and wilful; and all three emotions—wilfulness, and vanity,
and infatuation—had combined to prompt her to the same rash course
of action. She had a chance—or, at all events, believed that she had
one—of marrying Miguel of Braganza; but she preferred Rudolph. She
threw herself at Rudolph’s head, and stuck to him like a leech. Rudolph
himself declared that she was not like the others—she could not be
shaken off.
She had begun by writing to Rudolph, imploring him to see her; and
he had plunged into the adventure, as he had plunged into so many
previous adventures, with a light heart, not guessing whither it would
lead him. She had gone on to insult the Crown Princess—staring her
full in the face, and not recognising her presence in a ball-room. Her
mother, crimson with anger—for her own social position was obviously
imperilled by such behaviour on her daughter’s part—had hurried her
off and locked her up in her room; and then Rudolph, hearing what had
happened, went to see Countess Marie, and required a service of her:
“Listen. I want you to bring Mary to me at the Hofburg.”
“I assure you it is necessary for me to see Mary. Besides, I myself am
in great danger.”
“I must speak to Mary _alone_; it may possibly help me to escape the
trouble which threatens me.”
Those are the essential sentences; and they strike one as madly
inconsequent. For why should a private interview with Mary be
necessitated by the fact that Rudolph was “in danger”? How could such
an interview help him to escape the trouble which threatened him,—that
trouble being, as he went on to explain to Countess Marie, political?
Countess Marie does not answer these questions; she writes as if she
did not even perceive them to be questions which a sceptical critic of
her narrative would inevitably ask. She goes on, instead, to speak of
Rudolph’s political troubles, and of the part which he called upon her
to play in covering them up:
“‘Listen!’ he said. ‘If I were to confide in the Emperor, _I should
sign my own death warrant_.’ My heart nearly stopped beating at this
dreadful disclosure, and I could say nothing.”
[Illustration: THE HOFBURG, VIENNA.]
Then Rudolph handed Countess Marie a steel casket which he asked her to
take charge of, saying:
“It is imperative that it should not be found in my possession, for at
any moment the Emperor may order my personal belongings to be seized.”
And then:—
“How long am I to keep this dreadful thing in my possession?”
“Until I ask for it,” answered Rudolph, “or until someone else asks
for it. If it should come to that,” he added gravely, “you must know
how to act. There is one person who knows the secret of this casket,
and he alone has the right (failing me) to ask for its return.”
“His name?”
“Never mind his name. You can deliver it to the person who can tell
you four letters. Write them down now, and repeat them after me.
Listen: R.I.U.O.”
It is as mysterious, and apparently as meaningless, as any conspiracy
in a melodrama or a comic opera; and it may be permissible to mention
here that Countess Marie was warned, before her story was printed, that
nobody would believe it. She nevertheless insisted. She could not be
positive that the casket was of steel, because it was wrapped up in a
covering which she did not undo. But it was a casket—or at any rate
a box of some kind; and it was heavy. She afterwards handed it over,
in circumstances to which we shall come, to the mysterious person who
gave the mysterious password; and she related all this in London in a
very matter-of-fact manner, which gave her interlocutors the impression
that, if her story were not true, it would have been absolutely beyond
her capacity to invent it. But, true or false, what relation did it
bear to the necessity for a private interview with Mary at the Hofburg?
That is what Countess Marie does not explain; and her failure to see
that any explanation is required and will be demanded may perhaps be
taken as an indirect proof of her _bona fides_. An inventor would
not have failed to supply the missing link, which neither a criminal
investigator nor a sensational novelist would have any difficulty
in conjecturing. Granted that Rudolph had involved himself in a
political plot—whether to get himself crowned King of Hungary or for
any other purpose—then the whole of the evidence relating to the
plot cannot have been contained in the mysterious steel casket. Some
further evidence—a letter or some other scrap of paper—must have
been in Mary Vetsera’s possession. She must have been holding it over
Rudolph’s head as an instrument of blackmail—demanding, perhaps, that
he should divorce his wife and marry her; or, at all events, he must
have suspected her of the intention to do so, and have wanted to get
the document back from her. On that assumption—but on no other—the
political necessity of the interview on which Rudolph insisted is clear.
In any case, he did insist; and Countess Marie yielded to his
entreaties. The allegation has been made that he offered her a
pecuniary inducement to do so; but there is no reason for believing
that. It would have been worth his while; but it can hardly have been
necessary. So she found a pretext, drove Mary to the Hofburg, and left
her there. “I want,” Rudolph said, “to keep Mary with me for two days,
in order to come to an easy understanding with the Baroness over her.”
He also said, alluding to the political trouble: “A great deal may
happen in two days, and I want Mary to be with me”—for what reason
(seeing that, according to the same narrator, he had spoken of Mary as
a woman who refused to be shaken off) we are left to guess.
And so Mary was whisked away to Meyerling; whence the telegraph
presently sped the first intimation of the famous and mysterious
tragedy.