ROYAL SUICIDE.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LV, Issue 304, 21 November 1935, Page 16

ROYAL SUICIDE.

WIDOW’S MEMOIRS BANNED. AUSTRIAN TRAGEDY CLEARED UP. Police recently visited every bookshop in Vienna and seized all copies or the book, “I Was to Be an Empress, embodying the memoirs of the widow of the Crown Prince Rudolph, now the Countess Lonay. The book, which was published in Leipzig recently, breaks a 45 vears’ silence on the Prince’s suicide after killing his mistress, a 17-year-old baroness. The tragedy, which in the intervening years has been! the subject of innumerable articles, occurred in the Prince’s shooting lodge after a wild night of drinking. The widow teils how she watched the Prince’s life of dissipation without being able to stop it. “My efforts to make liis marriage happy were in vain,” she writes, “because he had no feeling for family life, as the result of his adventures with women from his early years. He despised women as something lower than men, but he could be a loyal friend to men. He never loved the Baroness Marie Vetsera. For him she was only one of many, but he did not want to die alone, and persuaded her to sacrifice herself. Her love for him was deep and real. Let me. tho wronged widow, lay this tribute to her great love on the grave of this unhappy and blinded girl.” , Countess Lonay publishes Rudolph s last letter to her, in which the phrase occurs, “I go peacefully to my death, which alone can save my good name. ’ Ever since the day in 1889 when Rudolph and tho beautiful Baroness Marie Vetsera were found dead in the royal hunting lodge at Mayerling, near Vienna, historians have disagreed about the case. Some had said an injured husband took vengeance; some blame the Hungarian nobles. Rudolph s widow now makes it clear that there was a suicide pact between Rudolph and the Baroness. . Princess Elizabeth WindiScligraetsch, daughter of Prince Rudolph, has protested against the publication of the memoirs, saying that “piety and those religious feelings, which my mother has always paraded should have kept her from such an act.” The Princess has been doing all she can to get the book withdrawn from publication, owing to, she declares, the slur on her father’s memory.”