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As Leopold’s profits poured out of Congo, so did stories of his atrocities, first publicized in the novel Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, a Polish steamboat officer in Congo, and then in the damning report of the British consul Roger Casement. In London, Leopold was named in court as the paedophilic patron of a ‘disorderly house’ to which he paid £800 per month for a supply of virgins, aged ten to fifteen. In Paris, the sixty-five-year-old king fell for a prostitute, Blanche Delacroix, aged fifteen, ‘plump but graceful’, dispatching his female pander with a message: ‘Madame, I am sent to you by a gentleman who’s noticed you. He’s a very high personage, but his exalted position obliges me to withhold his name.’ Summoned for a comical interview at which the ‘high personage’, whom she mistakenly called ‘King Oscar’, examined her in silence, she passed the test. Blanche became his paramour, mother of two sons and proprietress of millions of Congo shares; she was also created baronne de Vaughan.

Yet he had not completely neglected his family. In 1880, he had triumphantly married his daughter Stephanie to the Habsburg crown prince, Rudolf, at a wedding in Vienna, attended by Bertie, prince of Wales, and Wilhelm, crown prince of Prussia. But Rudolf was wild, if not insane; Stephanie grew desperate, but no one could have predicted the tragedy that followed.^*

RUDOLF AND MARY AT MAYERLING; INSPECTOR HIEDLER AND ADOLF AT BRAUNAU

Long ignored by his self-obsessed mother Sisi and coldly lectured by Franz Josef, who had refused to let him study at university, Rudolf was intelligent and surprisingly liberal with republican tendencies, seeking out liberals, even Jews, writing anonymous articles attacking the nobility and an ethnographic study of the empire that his father approved. Whenever Sisi swept into his life on one of her visits to the court, ‘The crown prince’s eyes glowed … he’s very like his mother, whom he worships.’

Franz Josef was bemused by his untameable wife and alienated son. Sisi spent most of her time hunting in England, obsessively slimming and exercising, both seeking privacy and courting publicity, but she had at least helped him in Hungary where the reconquest of 1848–9 had never been forgiven. Cultivating an intimate friendship, possibly an affair, with a dashing Hungarian ex-rebel who favoured the gold-embroidered, tiger-skinned Attila dress of the nobility, Count Gyula Andrássy, she orchestrated the negotiation of a new arrangement, a Dual Monarchy of Austria–Hungary. Andrássy became foreign minister, drawing Austria close to Germany, but the rise of the Hungarians, coupled with the emergence of new Slavic countries, encouraged the seething nationalism of Czechs and other Slavs.

Sisi encouraged her plodding husband, now fifty-three, to console himself with a married actress, the thirty-year-old Katharina Schratt, whom he had admired from the imperial box in the Burgtheater. The kaiser’s seduction was glacial. ‘I didn’t have the courage,’ he wrote to her, ‘while one is observed from all sides through opera glasses and the press hyenas are everywhere.’ But finally their affair was consummated. ‘Yesterday it was exactly six weeks since I left you in your bed, hoping in two days I should be sitting on it again!’ wrote Franzl to Kathi. ‘We’ll have a wonderful reunion.’ Sisi helped him by visiting Kathi herself. ‘You will control yourself,’ Franzl assured Kathi, ‘so will I, though it will not be easy for me,’ adding, ‘The empress has repeatedly expressed herself in favourable terms about you.’ Privately Sisi thought Schratt bovine, but as their daughter Marie Valerie put it, ‘Her calm, very natural ways are attractive to papa.’ Soon Schratt was part of the inner Habsburg family, the only thing except shooting that made Franz Josef cheerful: ‘Poka [Hungarian for turkey, her nickname for Franz Josef] is happy tonight,’ Sisi told her daughter. ‘I’ve invited his friend.’

Neither parent had much time for Rudolf, who resented Sisi’s slick hunting boyfriend Bay Middleton and ridiculed her spiritualist fortune tellers. Sisi did not help by bullying her daughter-in-law, calling her a ‘mighty bumpkin’.

The crown prince, needy and heedless, became ‘mad about women’, addicted to drugs and courtesans, keeping a ledger of sexual conquests (virginities taken in red ink), and established a hierarchy of gifts for his conquests, depending on whether they were royalty, nobility or commoners.