working, clever nineteenth-century tycoon whose son was only the second generation to sport a baronial escutcheon in his Ringstrasse palais. For Austria's 'First Society ' the Ringstrasse was parvenu; Baron was a title denoting a Jew. The princes and counts constituting major nobility usually had as their Vienna seats mansions of dusty rococo raised centuries ago on the cobbles of the Inner City.
A number of the founders of these clans-the Schwarzen- bergs, the Auerspergs, the Wilczeks, the Palffys, et al.-had been medieval bullies of the first water. Sometimes Habsburg had recruited their prowess by bettering their blazons with a lion rampant or two, sometimes by investing them with a fief that would make them zu as well as von.
Many of their descendants ignored the twentieth century. They kept on leading lives exquisitely detached from middleclass reason. Their elegance seemed heedless, spontaneous, barbaric, anachronistic, enviable. During sojourns in their country castles, they would often still use the chaise percee; a small portable neo-Gothic cathedral, it would be borne into the bedroom by footmen whenever the need arose. Highness would enter it as if to make a sacrament of nature's call. Highness would emerge again; footmen would bear away the temple of digestion.
It was all still a normal part of country life. In the capital it seemed almost as normal that the First Society would claim as their inalienable estates the twenty-six Parquet Circle boxes of the Court Theater and the Court Opera. Nary a diva dared complain if a blue-blooded latecomer scraped back a chair during a performance. Since the noise came from one of their boxes, it expressed not rudeness but a world that wafted a marvelous distance away from irritabilities lower down.
On the other hand, Austrian aristocrats were most sensitively subject to what the outside eye did not even recognize as the done thing. They knew it wouldn't do to dance a left-turn waltz with an archduchess; that it was gauche to take the reins of a one-horse coach; that it was all right to order caviar for a ballet girl at the Sacher bar or to treat her to a chocolate eclair at Demel's-establishments devoted to princes and their peccadilloes; that it was not all right to do the same at restaurants like the Bristol Hotel's, designed for the gawking monocle of the arriviste. They knew what worn lederhosen to don for the chase and what game to hunt when: the stag in the fall; the black chamois in the winter; the woodcock, heathcock, and capercaillie in the spring; the red roebuck in the summer. They knew how to greet each other the right way by the right name. They didn't say: 'Guten Tag, Nicholas.' They said: 'Serous, Niki.' It was Niki and Kari and Koni and Turli-a code of rarefied diminutives.
In the late winter of 1913 the Nikis and Konis still met and joked and kissed hands (more often ironically than ardently) at the right At Homes at the right times of the week. On Sundays at the Princess Croy. Mondays at the Countess Haugwitz. Tuesdays at the Countess von Berchtold in the Ballhausplatz Palais, the office of her husband, the Foreign Minister. Wednesdays at the Countess Buquoy… and so on to the Saturdays of Countess Ferenczy, lady-in-waiting to the late Empress Elizabeth.
But there was a 'but.' By 1913 most such gatherings had become afternoon receptions, grayed by the winter sun. Where was the dash of nightly galas that once continued into spring? What had happened to the post-Lent soirees of yesteryear?
Money was blamed: Soirees demanded extra footmen, who nowadays demanded higher pay; so did midnight musicians. Therefore one made do with one's in-house staff serving Doboschtorte at 4 P.M. The mobility of modern times was blamed: Vienna emptied after the carnival; too many of the Nikis and Konis suspected that they might be missing something at St. Moritz, at Biarritz, or on the Riviera. Do-Somethingness was blamed: gossiping over champagne was no longer enough; one had to do something like join the bridge tournaments at Countess Larisch's or the weekend ski outings to the Semmering Alp organized by Countess Sternberg.
But all this compulsive busyness smelled of a wholesale grocer sweating his way toward a bankruptcy. It did not become a Niki or a Koni. The top was still the top-but did it still have its instinct for the au fait?
Many thought that the First Society needed, urgently, one paramount and centering social leader. Once upon a time, of course, the Emperor had played that role. Now he had become too old, too reclusive. Pauline Princess Metternich, daughterin-law of the great chancellor, was almost as ancient and still quite robust. But though her parties enjoyed a good press, they were so full of waltzing Jewish bankers that she had acquired the title of Notre Dame de Zion.
Who else could be the center? Crown Prince Rudolf with his ingratiating wit, his fascinating quirks, had shot himself a quarter of a century ago in the Vienna Woods. The new lodestar should have been his successor, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand. His Imperial and Royal Highness, however, displayed none of the grace of Rudolf; none of the bonhomie of Edward, Queen Victoria's Prince of Wales, whose visits had set aglow so many Viennese salons. By contrast, Vienna's own heir apparent did nothing but disquiet the town-with his absences, for one thing.
Of course his principal seat was here, the magnificent Belvedere. Not one but two palaces defined this domain within the city; they were joined by a French garden splashing with fountains, perfumed by rose beds, mazed with yew. Franz Ferdinand's shadow cabinet worked on both sides of the maze, ready to take over a moment after the old Emperor's last heartbeat.
As for the Crown Prince himself, he seldom stayed at his official residence-less than ever as the icicled March of 1913 thawed reluctantly toward Easter. The weeks were raw and squall-wracked. The rumors were evil. They whispered that Franz Ferdinand was quarantined in his Bohemian castle at Konopiste. His fits had passed beyond sanity. Sober observers like Wickford Steed, correspondent of the London Times, heard alarming reports: The Crown Prince lay all day on the floor of his children's playroom at Konopiste, busy with their toys; anybody entering was commanded to lie down, too, to help hookup electric trains. Other accounts had the Archduke using his clock collection as a pistol range where any moving second hand became his target. One persistent story claimed that half the lackeys in Konopiste were really psychiatrists dressed in footmen's breeches.
And, in truth, Franz Ferdinand was mad. But he was mad at a number of things. Apart from many lesser angers, he had two major ones. Both tended to keep him away from Vienna during the frosty pre-Easter weeks of 1913.
Anger animated his war with Alfred Prince Montenuovo, First Lord Chamberlain of his Majesty. A vintage feud, it went back thirteen years to 1900 when the Archduke had proposed marriage to Sophie von Chotek. The Chotek escutcheon brimmed with the full sixteen quarterings of major nobility but still fell far short of prerequisites for a Habsburg bride. The woman lacked royal blood. She was 'only' a countess, as Montenuovo kept reminding the monarch who had to rule on the permissibility of the match; Franz Ferdinand had met her in the household of his cousin where she served as lady-inwaiting to the Archduchess Isabella.
Montenuovo himself descended from a lopsided union, namely the marriage of the Archduchess Marie Louise, Napoleon's widow, to 'only' an officer of her guard, Major Adam Neipperg (German for New Mountain, or Montenuovo, in Italian). Perhaps for that reason he orchestrated an all the more insidious anti-Chotek campaign. At thirty-four, the Countess was four years younger than the Archduke; but Montenuovo thought nothing of circulating a photograph of her to which retouched wrinkles had been added. It was the portrait of an aging wanton who had seduced the Crown Prince into a scandal.
Out of sheer spite-at which the Crown Prince was very good-the very scandal seduced the Crown Prince all the more. His anger incandesced his ardor. He let everybody know, from the Emperor down: It was Sophie Chotek or no one; it was Sophie, or he would remain a bachelor foreverunthinkable for a Habsburg heir.
The Emperor had to give in. But he gave in with a crushing proviso, formulated by Montenuovo. Franz Ferdinand must perform a permanent and irrevocable renunciation for his wife as well as for any children issuing from their marriage of all rights to succession as well as all archducal privileges. This solemn humbling took place in the Imperial Palace before the Emperor, the Cardinal, the principal ministers of His Majesty's Government, and every adult male Habsburg, on June 28, 1900. Neither the Emperor nor the Cardinal nor any minister nor any archduke (not even Franz Ferdinand's two brothers) attended the Crown Prince's wedding three days later at Reichstadt, an out-of-the-way castle in Bohemia. A common parish priest officiated.
The couple spent their honeymoon at the groom's estate in Konopiste. Here he bitterly named their favorite garden walk 'Oberer Kreuzweg'-the Upper Stations of the Cross. It was to remind them that the road to fulfillment had been paved with sufferings.
But the sufferings continued into an otherwise happy marriage. By way of a wedding gift, Franz Joseph had raised Sophie from Countess Chotek to Princess Hohenberg (Hohenberg being one of the seventy-two ancillary Habsburg titles). But she was still an abysmally morganatic wife, unable to share the perquisites and precedence not just of her husband but of a number of his inferiors. At all court functions the Crown Prince entered immediately after the Emperorwifeless, alone. The Princess Hohenberg must lead the backstairs existence of a nonperson while
