The Mayerling incident was a murder-suicide pact between Crown Prince Rudolph and his teenage mistress Mary Vetsera, and the resulting scandal was so fantastically lurid that it makes the travails of our own beloved royal family like nothing very much at all in comparison.

0:00break down the door. The room inside was visible. Only then did Losche drop his axe. The silence which followed changed the empire. Our killer is the 30-year-old heir to the Austrohungarian throne. Off his face on morphine and champagne, he is riddled with gonorrhea and he is the kind of man who keeps a skull as a paperwe. And then there is his accomplice and victim. And this is his teenage mistress. She's a

0:34party girl. She's a social climber. And she has become infatuated with him to the point of self-destruction. A scandal so fantastically lurid that it makes the travailes of our own beloved royal family like nothing very much at all in comparison. This episode is brought to you by the Lloyd's 5K house deposit. And this is something that was last seen in 1996. Yeah. So the 1990s looks now like a lost

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1:31mortgages. Now, the good news is that in a nod to the 1990s, Lloyds are offering 5K deposit mortgages to firsttime buyers. So search 5K firsttime buyer 1996 average firsttime buyer deposits are based on OS data. Subject to status your home may be repossessed if you don't keep up repayments and conditions apply. Kyos and the prince of Kberg ordered Losch to break down the door. Out of breath, half crying, Los whispered that

2:18he had to inform their serene lordships that a lady, the baroness Mary Vetzer, was staying in his imperial highness's room. Cobberg and Hyos recoiled. They retreated to the billiard room. Lost Jack kept knocking and calling. A kitchen maid began to whimper. Within a minute, the two emerged and repeated their order. Break down the door. Some servant had already brought a wood chopping axe. Lost raised it to smash

2:55the lock. The lock resisted. Lost hacked away at the white painted door panels. The axe crashed. The panels splintered. Ravens fluttered up from the snow outside. The dogs barked and howled to the echoing blows. Los hacked out a gash. The gash became a hole framed in jagged wood, smoky with blurred candles, dark with the drawn blinds. The room inside was visible. Only then did Losche drop his axe.

3:38The silence which followed changed the empire. So that is the climactic scene from Frederick Norton's great book a nervous splendor which is a portrait of fantasy Vienna at the end of the 1880s. Um, and it is a tremendously Gothic account of the most notorious murder suicide in European history. A scandal so fantastically lurid that it makes the travailes of our own beloved royal family. Well, like nothing very

4:14much at all in comparison. And the context couldn't be more colorful. We're just outside Vienna. The year is 1888. Um, Vienna, of course, at this period, the city of Mara, of Climpmped, the young Freud busy developing his theories of psychoanalysis, his notions about the the sexual eeology of neurosis and the question of sex and neurosis will not be irrelevant to this story. And Vienna is the capital of an empire that is