Rudolf and Stephanie were becoming estranged. After the birth of a daughter, Rudolf returned to his mistresses, falling in love with Mitzi Kaspar, teenaged actress and courtesan from Madame Wolf’s Viennese bordello. He soon infected Stephanie with gonorrhoea. Unsurprisingly she turned against him, and started an affair with a Polish count. Pursuing his liberal views, Rudolf was friendly with the open-spirited Bertie, who was friends with Rothschilds and other Jewish magnates. Both were connoisseurs of courtesans, but even Bertie thought, ‘For a young man of his age, Rudolf knows a lot about sexual matters.’ Rudolf loathed his grotesque fellow heir, Wilhelm of Prussia, whom he called ‘a diehard Junker and reactionary’, joking to Stephanie that he would ‘only invite Wilhelm along … so as to hasten him out of this world through an elegant hunting adventure’.
Rudolf meanwhile watched the tragedy of his cousin, Ludwig of Bavaria, who for twenty years had spent extravagantly on swan castles and Wagnerian operas, ignoring state business and having love affairs with male favourites. Only his cousin Empress Sisi was sympathetic. ‘The King wasn’t mad,’ she believed, ‘just an eccentric living in a world of dreams.’ Ludwig planned to dismiss his ministers, who appealed to Bismarck. In 1886, a psychological report by doctors declared him insane. That June, when ministers and doctors arrived to depose him, a loyal baroness tried to beat them off with an umbrella and Ludwig took them prisoner, then tried to escape. Since he had no children, his uncle Luitpold became regent. ‘Have you declared me insane?’ Ludwig asked Dr Bernhard von Gudden, director of the Munich Asylum. ‘You’ve never examined me.’ Next day, transferred to Berg Castle on Lake Starnberg, Ludwig and Gudden did not return from a walk around the lake shore. Found dead in the water, Gudden had been strangled, the king’s cause of death still unknown.*
Rudolf fantasized about watching someone else die and proposed a suicide pact to Mitzi, not least because he was sure his own succession was hopeless. ‘On the day Papa closes his eyes for ever, things will grow very uncomfortable in Austria,’ he warned his sister. ‘I advise you to emigrate’ – as millions of Germans were doing.*
He had already had an affair with a promiscuous married woman of recent nobility, Baroness Helene Vetsera, who had slept with him when he was barely out of his teens. Now she introduced him to her teenaged daughter, Mary, who grumbled about her mother: ‘Ever since I was a little girl she has treated me like something she means to dispose of to the best advantage.’ Mary fell wildly in love with Rudolf, who was captivated by ‘the power of her full and triumphant beauty, her deep black eyes, her cameo-like profile, her throat of a goddess, and her arresting sensual grace’. He declared, ‘I can’t tear myself away from her.’ But she was far from his only paramour.
On 29 January 1889 Rudolf slept with Mitzi, his real love, but the next day he and Mary set off for his shooting lodge at Mayerling. ‘If I could give him my life,’ wrote Mary, ‘I should be glad to do it, for what does life mean for me?’ Rudolf wrote to his mother, describing Mary as ‘a pure angel who accompanies me to the hereafter’.
The next day in the early hours, the seventeen-year-old Mary lay down on the bed, her hair around her shoulders, holding a rose; Rudolf, now thirty, shot her in the temple or gave her poison to drink – the details are still mysterious – then spent several hours with her body before shooting himself. When they were discovered, Sisi was told first; she received the news icily, insisting that ‘the girl poisoned him’, but calling Schratt and instructing her to soothe Franz Josef as she gave him the news. Sisi then summoned Stephanie, telling her maliciously, ‘Things would have been different if he’d had a wife who understood him.’* Mary’s mother Helene turned up wanting to know if anyone had seen her daughter. Sisi told her. Helene sobbed: ‘My child, my beautiful child!’
‘But you do know Rudolf is dead too?’ said Sisi.
Helene fell to her knees: ‘My unhappy child, what has she done?’
‘Remember,’ Sisi said. ‘Rudolf died of a heart attack.’ Back at Mayerling, courtiers were frantically covering up: Rudolf’s body was sent back to the Hofburg, but Mary’s two uncles smuggled out her body, dressed and seated upright in their carriage. The court announced that Rudolf had killed himself while insane, which meant that he could be buried in the Capuchin Chapel. Sisi returned to her travelling, her behaviour ever more idiosyncratic.
