Baroness Mary Vetsera
| Baroness Marie ("Mary") Alexandrine von Vetsera | |
|---|---|
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| Born |
19 March 1871 Vienna, Austria-Hungary |
| Died | 30 January 1889 (aged 17) Mayerling, Lower Austria, Austria-Hungary |
| Title | Baroness von Vetsera |
| Partner(s) | Rudolf, Crown Prince of Austria |
| Parent(s) | Baron Albin von Vetsera Eleni Baltazzi |
Baroness Marie Alexandrine von Vetsera (19 March 1871 – 30 January 1889) was a member of Austrian "second society" (new nobility) and one of Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria's mistresses. Vetsera and Rudolf were found dead, an apparent murder suicide, at his hunting lodge, Mayerling (see Mayerling Incident).
Known by the fashionable English form of her name, "Mary" (her maternal grandfather's second wife was English), she was the youngest child of Baron Albin von Vetsera, a diplomat in foreign service at the Austrian court, and his much younger wife, Hélène (known as Eleni) Baltazzi, member of a wealthy Greek family from Chios island, then part of the Ottoman Empire. Albin, who was made a Baron in 1870 by the Emperor Franz Joseph, was twenty-two years older than his young and socially ambitious wife. She had three older siblings: Johanna (known as Hannah), Ladislaus, and Franz Albin. Both of Hélène's sisters had married counts, and Mary and her sister were expected to raise the family's social status by continuing the tradition of marrying into families of importance.
Instead of attending a school or the gymnasium, Mary Vetsera attended an "Institute for Daughters of the Nobility". These exclusive boarding schools, for girls of noble birth between the ages of 12 and 17, were geared to a moral education, not an academic one (which was thought to give a young woman "intellectual pretensions"). So, those institutes emphasized "social graces", French, music, drawing, dancing, and handicrafts, in order to prepare young women for their roles in society as aristocratic wives and mothers.
"Viennese society had, since the days of Austria's eclipse at Sadowa, sought to conceal the injured patriotic emotions born of that disaster by affecting a hysterical sort of gaiety which was somewhat foreign to the real character of the people ... like all forced characteristics, the new-found frivolity of the Viennese degenerated quickly into a positive mania for wickedness, without, at the same time, taking on any of the picturesque artistry which conceals – and often condones – the refined viciousness of Parisians ... who, also, after 1870, went through for many years a phase of social madness similar to that which affected Austria. ... Viennese society was probably the most dissipated in Europe, and so became a happy mart for ladies of that type that serves the foibles of a prince."
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