If Mary Vetsera was indeed the dominating force, and as Venus would not relinquish her prize, Rudolph, in an access of despair and rage, did not forgive her for placing him in an impossible position; but neither did he pardon himself.
On the morning after a nerve-racking orgy both lovers perished. It all happened with lightning-like rapidity.
It was impossible for Rudolph to continue keeping two households. Impetuous but enslaved, he could not endure a liaison which paralysed his energies, but which he lacked the strength to break, so great was the hold which Mary had obtained over him.
Novelists have often depicted the frightful situation of the thraldom of the body, and the desperate protests of the spirit which can only escape by death.
Rudolph at thirty years of age was utterly out of love with life. He was worn out from living in the atmosphere of a Court which suffocated him. His death by his own hand was due to several causes, of which the following are the principal:
First, his bitter regret of a marriage which did not give him what he expected, after his disappointment in knowing he could not have a son; the impossibility of realizing the wish to dissolve it—an impious wish in the eyes of his relatives, the Holy See and the Catholic Church; and, finally, the certainty he had as to the chances of the longevity of the Emperor, that heartless being, that living mummy, who had embalmed himself with selfish and petty cares.
Rudolph often remarked: "I shall never reign; he will not allow me to reign."
And if he had reigned?
Ah, if he had reigned! I knew all his plans and his ideas. Of these, I will only say, modernity did not frighten him. The most daring modern idea would have been acceptable to him. He had already destroyed, in imagination, the worn-out machinery of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. But, like pieces of invisible armour held together by expanding links, the constraints, the formulas, the archaic ideas, the ignorance and the disillusions from which he was always wishing to escape, closed in on him. His life was a perpetual struggle against a feeble, worn-out, blind and corrupt Court, the routine of which enslaved his body without shackling his intelligence. He was compelled either to go under or to reign for a time and then to conquer, and throw off the burning garment of Nessus, open the windows, overthrow the Great Wall of China and chase away the camarilla.
But the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy would perish rather than change. It went to its death with a courier in advance!