B008AITH44 EBOK (75 page)

During the 1897 Badeni crisis, ugly nationalist struggles shook the monarchy; the Empress took no stand. At the beginning of the Jubilee Year of 1898, the fiftieth anniversary of Franz Joseph’s reign, martial law had to be declared in Prague because the nationalist struggles had grown to uncontrollable proportions; the Empress remained disinterested. Social hardship ravaged the great cities as well as the villages of the monarchy; the Empress took no notice. Her daughter Valerie looked on her mother’s apathy with concern. “How differently Mama would view life’s joys and sorrows if only once she could realize the value of time and action.”
⁵⁵

The Empress, now sixty years old, spent the winter of 1897–1898—her last one on earth—on the French Riviera, steeped in illness and
melancholy.
Once again, Franz Joseph visited his wife for two weeks, but later he told the German ambassador that, because of his worry about the Empress’s health, “the whole stay in Cap Martin had been spoiled…. Further, intercourse with the sovereign lady seems to be more than usually disturbed because of her great nervousness.”
⁵⁶
In February 1898, Elisabeth wrote her husband “that she is alive and feels as if she were 80 years old.”
⁵⁷

Archduchess Valerie did not see her mother again until May 1898, when they met in Bad Kissingen. “Mama looks terribly ill. But everyone here says she is better…. According to everything I am told here, Mama’s winter was even worse than we knew … all the grief of this poor, desolate life, now aggravated by age and sickliness, and still without that
comforting
light which alone can help to overcome all the misery.” Valerie was, of course, once again referring to the religious faith Elisabeth continued to lack.
⁵⁸

Elisabeth’s steps, once almost floating, had grown slow and heavy. She could no longer take her long walks. She was restricted mostly to rounds through such spas as Bad Kissingen, Bad Gastein, Karlsbad, and Bad
Nauheim, and to shopping expeditions to purchase mainly toys for her numerous grandchildren.

In the summer of 1898, the Emperor and Empress met for two weeks in Bad Ischl, where Archduchess Valerie joined them. Elisabeth was “in low spirits, as always,” and Valerie criticized “the melancholic effect of court life, this exclusion from all natural situations, which one must become accustomed to all over again even if one has grown up in it oneself. What must Papa’s usual life be like for him to find life here comfortable and enjoyable?”
⁵⁹

After Elisabeth’s departure for Bad Nauheim, Valerie remained her father’s guest in Bad Ischl for a few more weeks and felt strong pangs of conscience. “It makes me so sad, and yet I am unable to change the fact that being with Papa places a constraint on me as if I were with a stranger.”
⁶⁰
She understood very well why overly sensitive Elisabeth could not endure being with her husband for long, though she laid the blame for all the family misery on Archduchess Sophie (who had been dead for twenty-six years). “This year more than ever I felt the fossilized court life to be oppressive … since it seeps suffocatingly between the most intimate family relationships, turning them from spontaneous pleasure only to indescribable constraint. If that is the result of Grandmama Sophie’s system, it may well prepare a bitter Purgatory for her … this awful court life, which artificially robbed Papa of the ability to enjoy simple, unforced relations.”
⁶¹

The cure in Bad Nauheim did not improve Elisabeth’s outlook one whit. “I am in bad humor and sad, and the family can be glad that they are away from me. I have a sense that I will not rally again,” she wrote her daughter in late July.
⁶²

*

From Bad Nauheim she traveled to Switzerland. Valerie: “She felt drawn to Switzerland all summer long, she wanted to enjoy her beloved mountains, warmth and sunshine, and she did enjoy them, with a sense of improved health.”
⁶³
Elisabeth loved Lake Geneva: “It is altogether the color of the ocean, altogether like the ocean.” Of all Swiss cities, she had always preferred Geneva. “It is my favorite place to stay, because there I am quite lost among the cosmopolites: it confers an illusion of the true human condition,” she once told Christomanos, who diligently wrote down her every word.
⁶⁴

Elisabeth’s preference for Switzerland developed only during her last years. In the 1880s, she had still written quite chilly lines referring to Switzerland’s generous right of asylum for anarchists. In the final years of
her life, however, even the danger of anarchists was unable to frighten her: She longed for death. Danger began to attract the Empress, who was weary of life. In spite of urgent recommendations from the Swiss police, she still refused the protection of security agents.
⁶⁵

Elisabeth was staying, as she had several times before, in Territet, outside Montreux, where she intended to take a four-weeks’ cure. From here, she and Countess Sztaray set out on September 9, 1898, for an excursion to Pregny. They were going to visit Baroness Julie Rothschild the wife of Adolphe Rothschild from Paris and the sister of the Vienna Rothschilds Nathaniel and Albert. (There could, of course, be no real friendship with Julie Rothschild. Elisabeth’s sister, ex-Queen Marie of Naples, defrayed her high cost of living with Rothschild funds, in return honoring the socially ambitious family with her royal company. Elisabeth’s visit in Pregny, the first in decades, was a service done for her sister.) The three ladies had lunch, walked around the splendid old park, visited the orchid nursery, and engaged in very animated conversation in French. As Countess Sztaray confirmed, Elisabeth felt well during the visit.

Of course, even on this occasion the Empress preserved her incognito. (She was traveling under the name of Countess von Hohenembs.) The fact that at the time of the largest groundswell of anti-Semitism, aroused by the Dreyfus trial, in Paris, the Empress and Queen of Austria-Hungary was calling on a member of the Rothschild family would surely have
occasioned
headlines.

After a three-hour visit, Elisabeth and her lady-in-waiting continued on to Geneva, where they planned to spend the night before returning to Montreux the following day. Here in Geneva, which she knew very well, the Empress visited her favorite pastry shop, bought toys for her grandchildren, and, as always, retired very early. In the hotel, too, she was registered as Countess von Hohenembs. But the hotel manager was aware, from her previous stays, of the prominence of the guest who graced his establishment.

The following morning, a Geneva newspaper carried a news item to the effect that Empress Elisabeth of Austria was staying at the Hotel Beau Rivage. It was never established who had informed the newspaper. This report sealed Elisabeth’s fate.

A member of the “Regicide Squad,” the Italian anarchist Luigi
Luccheni,
had been preparing himself for a “great deed.” He had purchased the murder instrument—a file he had ground to a triangular shape and given a knife edge. But his intended victim, Prince Henri of Orleans, pretender to the throne of France, had not, as planned, come to Geneva.
Nor did Luccheni have money for the fare to travel to Italy and stab his preferred victim, King Umberto of Italy. The newspaper item came as a godsend—Luccheni had found his target. For Elisabeth fulfilled the chief prerequisites for Luccheni’s victim: She was an aristocrat (Luccheni hated all aristocrats) and of sufficient prominence to assure that the deed would cause a sensation.

The twenty-five-year-old anarchist bided his time. On September 10, he observed the comings and goings outside the hotel, the file concealed in his right sleeve. The Empress intended to return to Montreux from Geneva by the lake steamer scheduled to leave at one forty in the afternoon. Her servant had already gone ahead with the luggage, watched by Luccheni.

Accompanied by Irma Sztaray, as always dressed in black, her fan in one hand and the parasol in the other, “Countess von Hohenembs” walked to the landing stage, only a few hundred meters from the hotel. And it was along this path that Luccheni was lying in wait. When the two ladies came abreast of him, he threw himself at them, cast a swift glance under the parasol to make certain, and stabbed. He had earlier consulted an
anatomical
atlas to learn the precise location of the heart. His aim was accurate.

Elisabeth fell on her back. But the force of the fall was broken by the weight of her heavy, pinned-up hair. The assassin fled, was captured by passersby, and taken to the police station. At first it was not realized that he was a murderer; for the foreign lady got to her feet immediately after the fall and thanked all those who had helped her, speaking in German, French, and English. Her clothes were dusted off. The hotel porter, who was a witness to the deed, begged the two ladies to return to the hotel, but Elisabeth refused. She wanted to get to the boat.

Walking quickly, because little time was left before the ship’s departure, the ladies went to the landing stage. Elisabeth, in Hungarian, to Countess Sztaray: “What did that man actually want?”

Countess Sztaray: “The porter?”

Elisabeth: “No, the other one, that dreadful person.”

“I do not know, Your Majesty, surely he is a vicious criminal.”

“Perhaps he wanted to take my watch?” the Empress conjectured.
⁶⁶

The ladies walked about a hundred meters from the site to the ship. It was not until they were on board the steamer, just departing, that Elisabeth collapsed. It was thought that she had fainted as a result of the fright she had endured. It was only when her bodice was unbuttoned so that her chest could be rubbed that a tiny brownish spot and a hole in her batiste camisole became apparent. Only then was the extent of the tragedy evident.

The ship’s captain was informed—he was unaware that the Empress of Austria was one of his passengers. The boat turned around and sped back to Geneva. A litter was improvised from oars and velvet chairs; the Empress was bedded on it and returned to the hotel as quickly as possible. There the doctor could do nothing but pronounce her dead.

Elisabeth died without pain. Heart specialists explained the fact that she was not even aware of her fatal wound and could still walk a hundred meters at a rapid pace by the smallness of the wound: The blood trickled so slowly into the pericardium that the heart’s action stopped very
gradually.
Only a single drop of blood escaped. That is also why some of the witnesses thought it was a leech bite.

In the meantime, the murderer was subjected to a preliminary
interrogation.
He was elated, filled with pride at his deed, which he was unwilling to share with anyone: He insisted that he had acted alone and that he alone could lay claim to the “fame” that attended it. He saw the assassination as the culmination of his life, and he asked for the death sentence. Each time he was questioned about his motive, he repeated the same sentence: “Only those who work are entitled to eat!”

Luccheni had had several previous arrests for vagrancy, and he had led a wretched life: Abandoned at the foundling home by his unmarried mother, taken from institution to institution, pushed from one foster family to another. At one time, he was an unskilled laborer working on the railroad. His military service with the Italian cavalry in North Africa had been the best time in his life. Then, for a few months, he worked as a servant in the home of an Italian duke, who dismissed him. Then he lived by roving from place to place, picking up odd jobs along the way.

Only a few days of Luccheni’s life had been spent in the
Austro-Hungarian
monarchy—in Fiume, Trieste, Budapest, and Vienna. But this sojourn had no influence on his political ideology; the problems of the Italian nationalities in the monarchy played no part in his motive. It was entirely rooted in the ideas of international anarchism, which he had picked up in Switzerland. Nor was there a special link with Empress Elisabeth. All he knew about her was from the newspapers. She was a crowned head; assassinating her would make headlines and confer fame on the name of Luccheni.

Luccheni gave one more command performance, at his trial. His name was in the newspapers: He was sentenced to life imprisonment. Then there was silence. In 1910, after eleven years in prison, Luigi Luccheni killed himself in his cell by hanging himself with his belt. Almost no one paid any attention.
⁶⁷

This sensational act of violence in Geneva was a deliverance for a deeply
unhappy, emotionally disturbed, and physically debilitated woman whose parting left hardly a gap. Though the shock of the news of Elisabeth’s death was terrible enough for the immediate family, Archduchess Marie Valerie, for one, found grounds for consolation. “Now it has happened as she always wished it to happen, quickly, painlessly, without medical treatment, without long, fearful days of worry for her dear ones.” Valerie
remembered
Elisabeth’s lines, “And when it is time for me to die, lay me down at the ocean’s shore,” and the Empress’s repeated remark to Countess Sztaray that Lake Geneva was “altogether the color of the ocean, altogether like the ocean.”
⁶⁸

Elisabeth’s friend, the poet Carmen Sylva, found suitable words when she pointed out that this death was terrible “only for the world,” but that for Elisabeth it was “beautiful and calm and great in the sight of beloved great nature, painless and peaceful.” She continued: