Countess Dracula

For Françoise, Cécile and Mathilde. Girls who died.

Preface

Introduction

1 An Incident at Midwinter

2 Ordeals and Confessions

3 The Pastor's Denunciation

4 The Black Bey and the Heiress

5 At the Court of Lady Nádasdy

6 The Palatine and His Enemies

7 A Notorious Dynasty

8 The End of Elisabeth

9 Posthumous Verdicts

10 Stories of Witches and Widows

Epilogue

Plate Section

Maps

Acknowledgements

The Báthory Dynasty

Dramatis Personae

Bibliography

Notes

Notes on Pronunciation

During the 1980s a band of young musicians (operating in the hinterlands of the Goth, Industrial and Death-Metal genres) in their search for an arresting name with exotic and sinister associations chose to call themselves
Bathory.
The group has since disappeared and its leader, the reclusive Quorthon, gone to ground. Since 1991 horror fans have been able to subscribe to a fanzine dedicated to the macabre, published in Topeka, Kansas. Its name is
Bathory Palace
.
¹
In 1993 in Sunderland in the northeast of England a young vagrant raped and almost killed a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl, attempting during the attack to drink the blood from his victim's wounds. At his trial police claimed that crime had been inspired by Malcolm Foster's obsession with the sixteenth-century Hungarian noblewoman who was renowned for murdering female virgins and using their blood to preserve her beauty and who was sometimes referred to as ‘Countess Dracula'.
²
A year earlier, a radically different reading of the same historical personage had inspired a young Dutch artist to change her Christian name legally to the Hungarian
Erzsébet,
to pluck her eyebrows and hairline to resemble more closely the images of her heroine and to appear in her own installations and at social gatherings in the costumes that her muse had once worn.

At the time of writing the most eminent movie-makers in Prague and Bratislava are trying to raise the funds to film a pre-war novel (Niž
ň
ansky's
Lady of
Č
achtice)
based on the life of this same Countess Báthory – Meryl Streep is current favourite to play the title role – but in the meantime the anti-heroine is already on her way, like Nosferatu on his plague ship, heading westwards from her European home towards Hollywood where new patrons are waiting to reinvent her and exhibit her to a wider world. In the centenary year of that one dimensional fictional villain, Bram Stoker's Transylvanian Count, Elizabeth Báthory, the woman caricatured in English as ‘Countess Dracula', is an icon whose hour has come around.

Nowadays the standard biography in English resembles the middle-class novel with its use of an omniscient narrator telling a story woven seamlessly from unseen earlier histories and from the results of library researches. If the subject is a figure from English history, an an Elizabethan grandee, for instance (Elisabeth Báthory was a contemporary of her royal English namesake and of Shakespeare), the wealth of original documents that survive, together with the commentaries of successive generations of experts, will give a modern writer a head start. In the case of a Hungarian of the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, even one of the very highest rank, the chances of retrieving sufficient material for a comprehensive treatment are very remote indeed. The archive papers are scattered and incomplete, many collections are still unsorted and inaccessible following the turbulence of the last hundred years. In Elisabeth's own day Hungarian nobles very rarely knowingly destroyed documents but many were lost in the upheavals such as the aftermath of the Rákóczi rebellion in the eighteenth century when the Habsburgs left many Hungarian castles and manor houses in ruins.

This book, the first to attempt to reconstruct and deconstruct Countess Dracula in all her many incarnations, is offered simultaneously to the vampire enthusiast, the armchair time-traveller, the amateur detective and the simply curious; it is not designed primarily for an academic readership, although it is hoped that scholars will approve of it. The intention is to gather together as many as possible of the fragments of information that remain, assemble them into a rough mosaic and see if a pattern or a picture emerges. Such a book, with its mix of history, digression, anecdote and opinion, is more likely to resemble not a twentieth-century novel, but an eighteenth-century picaresque or an amateur travelogue of the nineteenth.

To do justice to a being who is not simply ambivalent but multiple it seems best to begin by letting the past speak for itself. For this reason trial transcripts, letters, chronicles and contemporary opinions are reproduced here in something like their original form, often at length, enjoying the same status as authorial insights and perhaps helping the reader to come to some conclusions uncoerced. The reader will have to trust the writer in one respect; none of the important material relating to the Countess exists in the original in English, so almost every word has been subject to the added intervention of the translator. In another attempt at preserving authenticity, all sources have been translated expressly for this book, most of them for the first time. For the sake of coherence some concessions have been made to English style, but where strange formulations occur, these are (it is hoped) an approximation of those voices from the past as they were first recorded. Sources are given in the chapter end-notes and in the bibliography, but anyone requiring more detailed references is invited to contact the author, who will be glad to provide them if he can. Documents are reproduced with the permission of the institutions where they are held. All translations are the responsibility of the author: his gratitude to those who helped him is expressed in the acknowledgements at the end of the book.

TT. London, 1997

I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres . . .

William Shakespeare,
Hamlet

In the years before she killed herself the Argentine surrealist Alejandra Pizarnik wrote dozens of tiny, fragmentary poems, or perhaps one great poem with many interruptions, a series of messages of anguish, delirium and violence, all seemingly dispatched from the edge of a private nightmare.
¹
She also wrote one short story, in the style of the
ficciones
of Jorge Luis Borges; the piece, which was written in the late 1960s, was entitled ‘Acerca de la Condesa Sangrienta' – ‘Concerning the Bloody Countess'.

In this narrative, really a series of vignettes, Alejandra Pizarnik tells the story of a European aristocrat who rules a private, hidden world of torture chambers inside her mediaeval castle. Within this underground kingdom the Lady gives herself up to the passions of endless cruelty, watching from her throne as her silent crones whip, burn, cut and pierce the bodies of a procession of helpless peasant girls
and seamstresses. Sometimes the beautiful and deranged Countess would simply sit and stare ecstatically, occasionally erupting in peals of demonic laughter or torrents of blasphemy; at other times she would take part in the torment herself, stabbing the girls with needles or pinching their flesh with silver tongs, placing red-hot spoons and irons on the skin of their arms and the soles of their feet, and when she was exhausted or prostrate with illness, reaching from her bed to bite them.

One episode – ‘The Lethal Cage' – tells of a refinement in the method of torture used by the Lady and her assistants. This involves an iron cage lined with knives and decorated with sharpened blades which can be raised towards the roof of the stone chamber by a pulley. A naked maiden is shut into the cage by one of the old women and is lifted ceremonially into the empty air: ‘The Lady of These Ruins appears, a sleepwalker in white. Slowly and silently she sits upon a footstool placed beneath the contraption . . .' The servant-woman, Dorkó, taunts the cowering girl from below with the glowing end of a heated poker. When the terrified victim recoils, she is pierced by the blades, ‘while her blood falls upon the pale woman who dispassionately receives it, her eyes fixed on nothing, as in a daze. When the Lady recovers from the trance, she slowly leaves the room. There have been two transformations: her white dress is now red, and where a girl once stood a corpse now lies.'
²

Pizarnik took her black fairytale, abridged but almost unchanged, together with its title from
La Comtesse Sanglante,
a work published in Paris in 1962 by another surrealist, Valentine Penrose, the first wife of the English painter and critic, Roland Penrose, and a friend of Pablo Picasso. In Penrose's 200 pages, which purport to be a work of history but read as a sustained hallucination, the Countess Elisabeth Báthory is situated in time and place: the end of the sixteenth century and Hungary. She is a being with a past and a future, a family, and a role in the world, who gradually allows her madness, coupled with her absolute power over her subjects, to transform her into an implacable monster: ‘Foul stenches did not revolt her; the cellars of her castle stank of corpses, though lit by a lamp of burning oil of jasmine, her room . . . reeked of spilled blood.' Like those ascetic sectarians of the universal Mother, who kept their hands impregnated with the smell of rotting skulls which the Ganges sometimes throws up upon its banks, she did not shrink from the odour of death . . .
³

Valentine Penrose also presents a series of cameos reminiscent of
dark fairytales, many of which she adapted like much else in her book from a nineteenth-century source in the German language. This was one of the most widely quoted of the studies of the Báthory case, and the origin of the grim sobriquet which has stuck to Lady Elisabeth ever since it appeared:
Die Blutgräfin
– ‘The Blood Countess'. The work was published in Breslau in 1894 and its full title was
Die Blutgräfin (Elisabeth Báthory): Ein Sitten und Charakterbild
(‘A Study of Character and Behaviour'). The author was R. A. von Elsberg, actually the pen-name of the Austrian gentleman-essayist Ferdinand Strobl von Ravelsberg. Von Elsberg emphasises Elisabeth's yearnings after her husband's death:

She was still a woman desired, and
lebenslustig
[with a desire for life], surrounded by young lords. Once it was that she was riding to the castle accompanied by one of her ardent lovers and they passed by a
mütterchen
[little old lady] who was standing there on the wayside. ‘How would you feel if I commanded you to kiss this woman?', the Lady asked her swain. ‘Brrr!' he answered with a grimace. And she was struck with terror in the depths of her soul, for it would happen to her as well, just a short time would pass and she would turn from a desirable and celebrated beauty, whose kisses were the dream of every young gentleman, to an ugly and neglected old woman.