Countess Dracula (35 page)

Elisabeth was not buried until November, exactly three months after her death. In those days, the bodies of nobles were preserved in underground grottoes on blocks of ice covered with sacking until the formal funeral arrangements had been completed. If she had been buried as a common criminal, there would have been only the shortest delay. As the patron of the local Protestant church, its benefactor and the owner of the land on which it stood, the Countess had every right to be interred there and, according to the official village chronicles composed a century later, she was. There is a story that the local people were so outraged by her crimes that they petitioned to have her body removed, and that it was taken under cover of darkness either to the family vault at Nyirbátor or north into Poland. On 7 July 1938 the crypt of the parish church at
Č
achtice was opened, but there was no sign of the tomb of the Blood Countess. A proper excavation remains to be done. In 1995 some tentative work began on uncovering the Báthory family tombs at Nyirbátor, but no trace of Elisabeth has yet been found. There are no lapidary inscriptions to meditate upon, but a paper epitaph was appended by Závodský to his diary entry. It is not one that would have appeased the Countess: ‘Few kings descend to Ceres' son-in-law [Pluto, lord of the underworld] without slaughter and bloodshed, and few tyrants suffer a dry [bloodless] death'.

Count Nicholas Zrínyi's wife Lady Anna Nádasdy died on 13 August 1615, almost exactly one year after her mother. The cause of death
was not recorded and there were no children of the marriage. Kate, who married George Homonnay Drugeth, gave birth to a daughter, who was named Elisabeth after her grandmother and grew up to marry László Révay, the scion of another noble family of Upper Hungary. The sons-in-law took up their respective inherited posts in the administration of the Kingdom, and led uncontroversial, unheroic lives: Drugeth failed to win power in Transylvania and Zrínyi failed to live up to his revered grandfather's reputation. Elisabeth's son Paul Nádasdy also married into the Révay family. His wife Judith gave birth to three sons, one of whom, Francis Nádasdy II, the last male of that line, was executed in 1671 for plotting against the Empire.

From Elisabeth's death in 1614 there followed an inexplicable silence lasting more than a century. No letters survive in which her fellow-aristocrats comment upon her tragedy; no songs, poems or broadsheets celebrated her notoriety; and stranger still, there is no recorded mention of her by the zealots of the Counter-Reformation, who usually seized any opportunity to exploit the real or imagined sins of the Protestant nobility.
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Better than crypts and candles were my friendships,
Better than leaf and parchment was my grief.

D. M. Thomas,
Elegy for Isabelle le Despenser

The Báthory case in the earliest chronicles ~ historians' conclusions ~ concealed agendas ~ a new consensus and some first conclusions ~ inside the court in a secret womens' world ~ punishments, cruelties and lawlessness ~ the early Modern world picture ~ therapy, torture and madness ~ a peculiar Hungarian heritage ~ monsters in our collective memory

In Tewkesbury Abbey in England is preserved a lock of the red-brown hair of Isabelle ‘le Despenser', Countess of Warwick, dated 1429. Elisabeth Báthory's biographer, frustrated by the paucity of material remaining from her lifetime, longs for such a keepsake: something that touched her, something that she touched. Somewhere there are perhaps a few hanks of her hair still sticking to a dusty skull, a few scraps of taffeta and cambric, or a shred of a winding-sheet – but they are lost. There is no talisman for us to grasp, and, more prosaically, almost no
documentary evidence exists to illuminate the circumstances of her birth and her childhood, and even the period of the Lady's married life with Hungary's pre-eminent soldier and war-hero has little more than the handful of letters quoted here to show for it. The only extensive documentation referring to Elisabeth – and that itself is incomplete – consists of the papers of investigation into her alleged crimes, and is in no way an objective assessment: the very nature of inquisitorial justice and the fact that Elisabeth's judges were involved, whether they were all aware of it or not, in a conspiracy against her means that all that we can retrieve from the archives is partial, mediated and finally flawed and inconclusive.

In tracking the reports of Elisabeth Báthory's crimes, her persecution and her imprisonment through the earlier histories, the modern investigator searches in vain for anything other than the most fleeting reference to the case by her own contemporaries. Apart from the reports of Elisabeth's death and the epitaphs already quoted, the only other mention of the affair that has been cited is a passage in a letter from Miklós Istvánfíy, the noble scholar and tutor to the Thurzó family, to Countess Pálffy in which he dismissed the confessions of Elisabeth's servants as ‘horrible blabbering' or ‘horrible gossip' (the Hungarian word used has both senses). Very unfortunately, because it would represent a unique dissenting voice from Elisabeth's time, the letter's whereabouts are unknown.
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The curiosity which was awakened in Hungary's neighbours once the Turks had been expelled coincided with the first stirrings of ethnography, anthropology and psychology as intellectual distractions for the cultivated European. These highminded interests were inseparable from a desire to know the darker secrets of an underground heritage that the Enlightenment was confronting. Learned guidebooks and the works of the Brothers Grimm rubbed up against one another in the traveller's baggage, and in their pages the lost tale of the murdering Countess appeared in print for the first time.

At first there was very little reading matter for the curious outsider to consult and the one or two texts produced before the eighteenth century perforce became the standard sources. The Bratislava Constable George Wernher's 1549 description in Latin of Hungary's thermal baths,
Hypomnemation,
was published in Basle and later in Vienna, Brussels and Zurich, sold widely and was reprinted every few years; works in French, Italian and English copied parts of it almost word for word. It was not
until 1744 that the first general guide to Hungary's topography and history appeared:
Ungaria Suis cum Regibus Compendio Data
(‘A Short Description of Hungary together with its Kings'), composed in Latin in 1729 by the Jesuit priest László Túróczi, provided a comprehensive survey of the Kingdom, a sort of Baedeker for educated foreign visitors or curious armchair explorers.
²

Hidden among the geographical descriptions, historical anecdotes and sometimes tedious homilies couched in baroque rhetoric, there were a dozen pages of sensational narrative that chimed perfectly with the early stirrings of a gothic sensibility and its taste for horror.

And I hesitate to bring the horrible crime to light, for I hardly believe that anyone will credit what I have uncovered, not only because it bloodily besmirches and brings disgrace upon the princely Báthorys who are deserving of the best from the Christians of this country, but because, moreover, the barbarity of it is so enormous, it will be a cause of eternal horror.

This was the first report of the crimes and incarceration of Elisabeth Báthory to appear since the papers of the case had been folded in parchment, tied with string and ribbon and filed away in the archives of the Thurzó family at Byt
č
a and the Erd
ő
dy family at Galgóc 112 years before. The essence of Túróczi's story was borrowed, adapted and reprinted in the dozens of guides and anthologies which appeared in central Europe in the following decades. Until the last years of the nineteenth century, no scholar substantially expanded on, or thought to question seriously, the Jesuit father's version of the events surrounding Elisabeth, in which the blood-bathing story is presented for the first time in print.

Elisabeth, washed in that deadly bath, appeared to herself yet more beautiful, under no other influence, no one will doubt, than diabolic mockery. This first crime, born of her wilfulness, rendered her more courageous and thus thereafter many others were committed. The wicked deeds went on year after year and, you will be astonished to learn, even after the death of her husband, the widow, now advancing in years, was responsible for a sacrilegious shedding of blood.

In 1794 Michael Wagner cited the Hungarian ‘Countess B.' among his case studies in psychopathology in one of the earliest works in the field (which he referred to as ‘philosophical anthropology'). His brief account of her actions was entitled ‘The Craving for Beauty, a Source of Inhuman Cruelty'.
³
In 1812 the aristocratic polyglot Baron Mednyánszky wrote his own account of Elisabeth's case which appeared under the title ‘Eine Wahre Geschichte' (‘A True Story') in the journal
Hesperus, ein Nationalblatt für Gebildete Leser
(‘a national paper for the cultured reader'), published in Prague. The story titillated the German-speaking readership and in 1817 Mednyánszky translated the transcripts of the servants' trial from Hungarian and printed them in the same periodical. In the meantime, in a fragment entitled
‘Nach Einem Wiener Fliegende Blatt'
(a play on words which can mean ‘a Flying Leaf, ‘a Handbill' or ‘a Rumour on the Wind . . . from Vienna'), the Brothers Grimm referred to a seventeenth-century folktale telling of an unnamed Hungarian lady who murdered eight to twelve maidens. It was not until 1839 that the papers of the investigation were published for Hungarian readers by György Gyurikovics, in an inaccurate and badly edited version, in the journal
Tudományos Gyüitemény.
Earlier in the year Gyurikovics had published a list of the existing sources referring to Countess Báthory and prefaced the transcripts with his own brief summary of the case: ‘Elisabeth Báthory wished to preserve her youth, therefore she washed her face in the warm blood of her maids.'
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He gave the date of her death correctly, but wrote, without offering corroboration, that she may have died of starvation.

In the meantime Alajos Mednyánszky had produced his own guide to the geography and history of Upper Hungary in German,
Malerische Reise auf dem Waagflusse
(‘A Picturesque Journey on the River Váh') published in Pest in 1824, followed by
Erzählungen, Sagen und Legenden aus Ungarns Vorzeit
(‘Stories, Fables and Legends from Hungary's Remote Past') in 1829, from which the Englishman Paget learned of the legends of
Č
achtice. A more famous work,
Die Geschichte der Ungern und Ihrer Landsassen
(‘The History of Hungary and its Yeomen') by the eminent traveller and scholar Ignác Aurel Fessler, appeared in the same year and asserted that Lady Báthory washed in human blood daily and that her sinister passion had caused the death of 600 noble maidens. The girls were kept in readiness in the
Č
achtice cellars and bled one by one to provide the contents of their mistress's baths, after which, wrote Fessler, their drained bodies were interred in the same
vaults. Parents and relations of the unfortunate girls were informed that they had succumbed to illness.

These were the principal writings by means of which the reputation of the Blood Countess was spread beyond the borders of her homeland. In all there were, between Father Túróczi's ‘Tragica Historia' in his compendium of 1729 and Jozef Ko
č
iš'
Alžbeta Bathoriová a Palatín Thurzo
which appeared in Slovakia in 1981, 136 publications which were either entirely dedicated to Elisabeth Báthory or which touched upon her story. Most were in the German language, the lingua franca of middle Europe, or in Hungarian; a handful appeared in Slovak or French. Among the many authors' names the only one apart from that of the Grimms which resonates for us today is Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, who referred to Elisabeth in several of his novellas and made her the basis of his short story, ‘Eternal Youth', published in 1874. (His casting of Báthory as a dominatrix was emulated by more than one anonymous pornographer who incarnated her as an exultant Venus-in-Furs in illustrations from the 1930s and 1940s: not surprisingly, she made an appearance in Berlin during the Weimar Republic as one of the ‘Titans of the Erotic'.)
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