But there were omens which others noticed even if Elizabeth herself was blind to them. It was observed that, while her reader was reading aloud from Marion Crawford’s Corleone—a romance dealing with the crimes of the Mafia—a raven wheeled and circled round the Empress, returning as often as it was driven away; and she told her suite, one morning, that the moon, seen at midnight from her bedroom window, had looked like the face of a woman weeping. Moreover, the Parisian sorceress who prophesied under the name of the Angel Gabriel had made a significant prediction: that one of the sensational events of the year would be—l’assassinat d’une souveraine au cœur malade. No Queen or Empress of the time was known to be suffering from physical heart disease; but Elizabeth was living as a woman whose heart was bowed by grief and sickened by disappointments. It must be to her, the superstitious whispered to each other, that the warning of the Angel Gabriel pointed.
The fatal year was spent, as usual, in whirling about Europe: from Biarritz to San Remo; from San Remo to Caux; from Caux to Kissingen; from Kissingen to Bruckenau; from Bruckenau to Vienna—where Elizabeth shut herself up, and refused even to receive a newly-accredited ambassador; from Vienna to Lainz; from Lainz to Ischl; from Ischl to Nauheim; and from Nauheim back again to Switzerland, where she established herself in one of the hotels at Caux. At Caux she had, or thought she had, a vision which foreboded evil. A mysterious woman in white appeared in the hotel grounds, when the Empress was sitting on her balcony, and stared up at her with a fixed and menacing gaze. The sight made her nervous, and she told one of her retinue to send the woman away; but though every path in the hotel grounds was searched, and every bush was beaten, no woman in white could be discovered anywhere, and people remembered and recalled an old Austrian legend: that a woman in white always appeared on the eve of a Habsburg tragedy—had appeared at Schönnbrunn in 1867, and again in 1889, on the eve of the tragedies of Queretaro and Meyerling.
Whether the suite believed in that legend none can say; the normal attitude of unphilosophic mankind towards such a legend is to discredit it, and yet, at the same time, to wonder whether there may not be “something in it.” The thing really to be dreaded was its possible effect on the Empress’s mind, already impressed by the omen of the circling raven, and the resemblance of the midnight moon to the countenance of a weeping woman. It was thought unwise, in the circumstances, to let her pay a promised visit to Baroness Adolphe Rothschild, in her villa at Prégny, near Geneva. But, though she was nervous, she was also obstinate. She spoke, as it was her habit to speak, as a fatalist:
“I am always on the march,” she said, “to meet my fate. Nothing can prevent me from meeting it on the day on which it is written that I must do so. Fate often closes its eyes; but, sooner or later, it always opens them again, and sees us. The steps which one ought to avoid in order that one may not encounter Fate are precisely those which one inevitably takes. I am well aware that I am taking such steps every day of my life.”
So she insisted, and set out; and, this time, Fate was indeed waiting on the road which she chose to travel. She met Fate, just as one may meet any chance acquaintance when going on any journey. She was not the object of any individual hatred; she was merely the tallest poppy in the path of one of those anarchists who conceive it to be their function to lay the tallest poppies low. The assassin said as much to M. Paoli, who went to see him in prison:
“I struck” (he said) “at the first crowned head that came along. I don’t care. I wanted to make a demonstration, and I succeeded.”
His name was Luccheni; he made his demonstration while Elizabeth was walking along the Quai du Mont Blanc towards the landing-stage of the steamer. His weapon was a shoemaker’s awl, sharpened to a deadly point; he sprang like a panther, and drove it into her heart; then he ran for his life—soon to be overtaken, and caught, and held. It was all done so quickly that no one—not even the victim—realised what had happened. She could still speak, and supposed that she had been hustled by a pickpocket with a view to theft. “What is it?” she asked, with rather a dazed manner; and it was not until she had got on board the boat that she first sat down, and then fainted. There was only a single spot of blood—the weapon having closed the wound it made; but Elizabeth was now unconscious—dying of internal hæmorrhage. The steamer, which had started, was put back; a litter was improvised with the oars and sail of one of the boats; but it was all over by that time, and the doctors could do nothing. Luccheni, in custody, was already boasting cynically:
“I struck well. I feel sure I must have killed her. I hope I didn’t bungle it. I hope she’s really dead.”
Such was her end: as sudden and tragic as her son’s, though not, like his, enveloped in any shroud of mystery. It only remained to break the news to Francis Joseph; and Countess Starztay despatched two telegrams to Count Paar. The first ran thus:
“Her Majesty has sustained a serious injury. I hope you will announce the fact to the Emperor with all possible consideration for his feelings.”