“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.