B008AITH44 EBOK (69 page)
Authors: Brigitte Hamann
Valerie even confided to her diary how unbearable it was to know that “beloved Ischl”—that is, the imperial villa—would eventually be Rudolf and Stephanie’s possession. She found the idea “so terrible that I would like to put the beloved villa to the torch.” Elisabeth reassured her by hinting that she had long ago discussed the matter with the Emperor and that not Rudolf but Valerie would inherit the house (as was
eventually
the case).
43
The Empress did everything to secure her daughter’s future even beyond Franz Joseph’s death, demonstrating a great distrust, even dislike, of
Rudolf
. Valerie: “During a walk in Schönbrunn, Mama and I talk about Rudolf as a person, as the next Emperor, as possible brother-in-law to Franz [Valerie’s fiancé]. Mama thinks that he would hold Franz down, hinder him in his military career.” As a solution, Elisabeth proposed, “If he [Franz] has the character I wish for you … he will not stand for such
suppression but will develop his capabilities in German service”—that is, leave Austria. “Mama would like to suggest to Franz the idea that if the war between Germany and France breaks out before ours with Russia, to enter the German army as a volunteer until duty calls him back here. That way he would gain glory…. That would show whether he is a man or merely an archduke.”
44
Elisabeth, who never carried on a political conversation with her highly talented only son, asked her daughter’s bridegroom-elect for his political opinion. Valerie’s diary records the following discussion between Elisabeth and the twenty-year-old Archduke Franz Salvator. Elisabeth began by asking “whom he would prefer to take the field against—Germans,
Russians,
Italians?”
“No matter.”
Mama: “If it goes against the Germans, so sad … brothers….”
Franz: “But one cannot rely on their friendship, I cannot stand the Prussians, calculating, unreliable.”
Mama: “If they seek the advantage for their country and are capable of gaining it, one cannot really blame them for it … and not all Germans are Prussians….”
And then Mama explained how devout and hardworking the Westphalians were, how bright and cultured the Rhinelanders, Badensians, Württembergers, how they learn and discuss things so very differently from us, where conditions are lax and
without
unity and firm order.
Elisabeth added that it was “such a pleasure to fight the Russians, for I hate them and the Italians as well…. The Italians are false and cowardly”
45
—a remark hardly calculated to please the Italian-born Franz.
Elisabeth also told the Crown Prince about the young couple’s plans to emigrate. Rudolf was horrified at the idea that the son-in-law of the Austrian Emperor might enter the service of Germany because the Empress of Austria felt conditions in her own country to be too unfavorable. Rudolf to Valerie: “Papa will never allow it, and it would have the most disastrous effect on the whole army.” If study abroad was considered absolutely necessary, then he, Rudolf, would recommend the artillery college in Woolwich.
46
At this suggestion, however, the bridegroom-elect fell into real despair, since he could not speak English.
Elisabeth’s mind became set on Valerie’s emigration. The logic of this
fixed idea is difficult to reconstruct today. It serves to show, however, the depth of Elisabeth’s antipathies for Austria. On May 5, 1888, Archduchess Marie Valerie’s diary captured one of Elisabeth’s typical reactions. “Franz talked about the deterioration of conditions here,” it reads. “Of course, this made Mama very happy.”
Marie Valerie, who drifted more and more into German Nationalist waters, interpreted Elisabeth’s ideas in her own way and urged the
irresolute
bridegroom on with the following arguments, astonishing in the daughter of a Habsburg emperor. “First we are Germans, then Austrians, and only in third place Habsburgs. The welfare of the German fatherland must be the first thing in our hearts—so long as it flourishes, it does not matter whether under Habsburgs or Hohenzollerns…. That is why you are wrong to say that in the service of Emperor Wilhelm, you would be in foreign service.—German is German, and the fatherland comes before family.”
47
Given these views, any last chance of arriving at an
understanding
with her brother was gone; he was an emphatic, even fanatical Austrian, and to him Wilhelm II was the archenemy.
*
But the Empress did not make Valerie’s life easy once the engagement was announced. Now she complained that “she hated people in general, and men in particular, more than ever,” wrote Marie Valerie. And shortly thereafter: “Mama said, if I ever marry she will never be glad to see me again, she is like some animals who abandon their young as soon as someone touches them.”
48
In her conversations with her future son-in-law, Elisabeth repeatedly expressed thoughts of death. “You must not believe, as many people do, that I want to see Valerie married to you so as to keep her near me. When she marries, it does not matter whether she goes to China or remains in Austria—she is lost to me in any case. But I trust you, your character, your love for her, and if I were to die today, I could die in peace only because I entrust Valerie to you.”
49
All fears based on Rudolf’s supposed hostility vanished when Elisabeth brought him the news of Valerie’s engagement in December 1888. As Valerie described it:
he was not at all unfriendly, and so I felt encouraged for the first time in my life to throw my arms about his neck…. Poor brother, so he does have a warm heart in need of love, for he embraced me and kissed me with the full fervor of true
brotherly
affection—again and again he drew me to his heart, and
one could feel that he was pleased at my showing him the love that for so long had been almost stifled by fear and timidity. Mama begged him always to be good to me, to us, once we are dependent on him, and he solemnly swore it, simply and warmly. At that she made the sign of the cross on his forehead and said God would bless him for it and bring him good luck—she assured him of her love, and he fervently kissed her hand, deeply moved. I thanked him and enfolded him and Mama in a single embrace, while I said almost instinctively: “We should be this way always!”
50
Countess Festetics described still another emotional scene, which took place on Christmas Eve of 1888. The Crown Prince threw his arms about his mother’s neck “and broke out in long sobbing, which would not stop, and which frightened her deeply.” The ladies-in-waiting and adjutants, who were invited to join the family at the Christmas tree immediately afterward, “found the members of the imperial house still tear-stained and emotional.”
51
At this, the final Christmas celebration of his life, the Crown Prince gave renewed proof of his great veneration of his mother. The public outcry attending the plans for a Heine memorial in Düsseldorf (
see here
.) had erupted. Rudolf—who, like Elisabeth, was attacked by the
anti-Semites
—believed that in the mother he loved so passionately he had now found an ally, a fellow fighter in the cause of liberalism against German Nationalism and anti-Semitism. Furthermore, in this affair, too, he felt himself to be the opposite number of the hated young Wilhelm II, who sided with the anti-Heine faction.
In order to
prove that he revered his mother, Rudolf paid an outrageous price in Paris for eleven Heine autographs and placed them under the Christmas tree for the Empress. Elisabeth, however, was so preoccupied with her daughter’s engagement that she did not pay Rudolf’s gift the attention he had expected.
No one took very seriously the thirty-year-old Crown Prince’s frequent mentions of his imminent death. Significantly, he spoke of his feelings not to family members, but to Marie Festetics. She, in turn, was too sparing of the Empress to give her even the slightest hint of them.
When the historian Heinrich Friedjung interviewed the Countess in 1909 and heard the many excuses she was quick to make for Elisabeth, he raised the same objection that must occur to anyone who thinks about the tragedy of Mayerling. Friedjung:
I could not refrain from telling the Countess that, no matter how deeply her statements moved me and filled me with
sympathy
for the Empress, I could not comprehend how a mother as deeply sensitive as the Empress could remain ignorant of what was disturbing the Crown Prince and how she could not know how far he had strayed. The Countess then repeated
emphatically
a remark she made several times: You must never forget that persons of high rank live quite differently from other people, that they find out less and that actually they may be called very unhappy because the truth reaches them only rarely and never completely.
52
The family was wholly unprepared for the tragedy that struck on January 30, 1889. It was the Empress who was the first to be told. Count Joseph Hoyos, Rudolf’s hunting companion from Mayerling, interrupted Elisabeth as she was reading Homer with the news of her son’s death. Hoyos also mentioned a second victim: a young girl named Mary Vetsera. He said that she had given the Crown Prince poison before taking it herself.
The control and composure the otherwise overly sensitive Empress showed in this situation is astonishing. She did not run from any of the obligations awaiting her. It was she who gave the news to the Emperor. Then Elisabeth went to Ida Ferenczy’s apartments, where she knew that Katharina Schratt was waiting for the Emperor. She herself took the actress to Franz Joseph, because she knew that his friend was the only person who could comfort the stricken man.
The Empress continued on to her favorite daughter, Marie Valerie. Elisabeth was shocked when the young woman’s first assumption was that Rudolf had taken his own life. Elisabeth said, “No, no, I will not believe that, it is so likely, so certain that the girl poisoned him.”
53
The confusion persisted.
Next Valerie brought Rudolf’s widow, Stephanie, to the Emperor and Empress. Stephanie described the scene in her memoirs. “The Emperor sat at the center of the room, the Empress, dressed in dark clothes, her face white and rigid, was with him. In my bewildered, shaken state, I believed that I was being looked at like an unfaithful wife. A crossfire of questions, some of which I could not answer, some of which I was not permitted to answer, descended on me.”
54
In the meantime, Baroness Helene Vetsera, in her desperate search for her daughter, had also made her way to Ida Ferenczy’s antechamber and would not be turned away when she requested to speak to the Empress.
“I have lost my child, she is the only one who can give her back to me,” she sobbed, unaware that her daughter was already dead. Ida first requested Baron Nopcsa to give the news to the Empress. Then the Empress went to Helene Vetsera, whom she knew from more pleasant times of horse racing in Hungary, Bohemia, and England at the center of a merry, shallow crowd. Helene Vetsera had always gathered admirers around her, among them, at times, the same men who surrounded Elisabeth, especially Count Nikolaus Esterházy. During the 1870s, Helene Vetsera had also made clear advances to the Crown Prince, barely out of his teens—with every
appearance
of success.
55
Her reputation was far from impeccable. Now, hysterical with fear, a desperate mother, she stood before the Empress.
The scene that followed was described later by Ida Ferenczy, who was present, to Archduchess Valerie, who recorded it in her diary.
Her Majesty, full of grandeur, stands before the agitated woman who demands her child, and speaks to her softly. She tells her that the girl is dead. At that, Vetsera breaks out in loud weeping: My child, my beautiful child!
But do you know, says Her Majesty, raising her voice, that Rudolf is dead as well? Vetsera staggered, fell to her knees before Her Majesty, and clasped her knees. My unhappy child, what has she done? This is what she has done!! So she, too, saw the matter in that light and believed, as did Her Majesty, that the girl had poisoned him. A few words more, then Her Majesty leaves Vetsera with the words, “And now remember that
Rudolf
died of a heart attack!”
56
It was not until the following day that the Emperor and Empress learned from their personal physician, Dr. Hermann Widerhofer, how the lovers had really died. According to Valerie’s notes, Widerhofer saw the “girl stretched out in bed, hair loose over her shoulders, a rose between her folded hands—and Rudolf in a half-sitting position, the revolver on the ground, fallen from his stiffened hand, nothing but cognac in the glass. He laid down the corpse, long ago turned cold, the skull cracked, the bullet in one temple, out the other. Same wound in the girl. Both bullets found in the room.
57
Elisabeth’s comment: “Great Jehovah is terrible as He marches onward sowing destruction like the storm.”
58
