Empress Elisabeth of Austria - Mayerling Incident

Mayerling Incident

In 1889, Elisabeth's life was shattered by the death of her only son, thirty-year-old Crown Prince Rudolf. He was found dead together with his young lover Baroness Mary Vetsera. An investigation suggested it was murder-suicide by Rudolf. The scandal was known as the Mayerling Incident, after the name of Rudolf's hunting lodge in Lower Austria, where they were found.

Elisabeth never recovered from the tragedy; she sank ever deeper into melancholy. Within one year, she had lost her mother, her father, her sister, and now her son. After Rudolf's death she dressed only in black for the rest of her life. To compound her losses, Count Gyula Andrássy died a year later, on 18 February 1890. "My last and only friend is dead," she lamented. Marie Valerie declared, "...she clung to him with true and steadfast friendship as she did perhaps, to no other person." Whether their personal relationship was an intimate one or not, her feelings for him were ones she also felt for his country, and that she knew were wholeheartedly reciprocated by the Magyars.

The Mayerling scandal increased public interest in Elisabeth, and she continued to be an icon, a sensation in her own right, wherever she went. She wore long black gowns that could be buttoned up at the bottom, and carried a white parasol made of leather in addition to a concealing fan to hide her face from the curious.

Elisabeth spent little time in Austria's capital Vienna with her husband. Their correspondence increased during their last years, however, and their relationship became a warm friendship. On her imperial steamer, Miramar, Empress Elisabeth travelled through the Mediterranean. Her favourite places were Cap Martin on the French Riviera, where tourism had started only in the second half of the nineteenth century; Lake Geneva in Switzerland; Bad Ischl in Austria, where the imperial couple would spend the summer; and Corfu. The Empress also visited countries not usually visited by European royals at the time: Morocco, Algeria, Malta, Turkey, and Egypt. The endless travels became an escape for the empress from her life and her misery.