At nine o’clock in the evening, on the 3rd of March, 1848, Princess Louise Sulkowski was in her bedchamber in the company of her maid, Rosalie Reindel, and her foster daughter, Julie Welzig. The window shutters remained open. The princess, suffering from rheumatic pains, wished to retire earlier than was her custom. Rosalie had just removed her mantilla, placing it within a wardrobe; Julie had stepped out of the room to fetch some errand. Louise requested that the shutters and the adjoining chamber door be closed. The servant complied. She was turning back toward the casement when a sudden flash lit the room. A shot was fired from without.
“I am hit,” the princess reportedly cried. Rosalie sprang forward to support her and guided her toward the bed, believing at first that she had merely been seized with fright. Then blood seeped through her garments. The outcry brought running the secretary Gerstenberg and the merchant Polizer, who had just quitted the house after settling his accounts with the princess. They found her in her death throes. According to the account in the Pitaval, Louise pointed to her son Maximilian: “It is my son Max who has done this to me!” They reminded her that he was not present. She is said to have replied that he had threatened her.
Less than an hour after the shot, she was dead. This scene and these words are handed down to us through a compilation published eleven years thereafter, and not through an official deposition recovered here. Their dramatic force does not transform them into independent proof of the son’s complicity. Maximilian was then in Vienna, whither he had journeyed at the end of February; it is precisely this absence that compels us to distinguish between the accusation uttered in a bedchamber and the later, far more intricate judicial question of who pulled the trigger.
The examination of the body, as recorded by the chronicler, established a violent death. Two lead balls had entered near the right shoulder blade, traversed the chest from below upward, and pierced the lungs. They were discovered near the stove, lying some distance apart. The shot had shattered the pane. The marksman, the narrative contends, could scarcely have taken aim from the ground, for the window was situated too high. He might have set a stool against the exterior wall. Yet the text expressly marks this supposition as a deduction; no one had caught sight of the man, nor recovered in the nocturnal confusion any weapon or overturned piece of furniture that might point to his identity.
The terror of a broader uprising initially overshadowed the pursuit of the assassin. Europe was then shaken by the revolutionary convulsions of 1848; the Pitaval recalls the pervasive apprehension of a riot or the plundering of the castle. Nevertheless, a judicial inquest was commanded without delay. The chronicle dwells upon the contrast between the domestic violence of the murder and the political turmoil raging about it. It likewise imparts to the affair the design of a family drama, nearly accomplished in advance: the victim had just denounced her son, whilst suspicion soon widened to encompass a mistress, a steward, a foreman, and a laborer. Such is the architecture of a retrospective narrative; it does not in itself constitute proof of a conspiracy.
The family circle already offered plausible motives, yet by no means an incontrovertible explanation. Prince Maximilian was encumbered with debts and chafed, according to the chronicle, against a mother whose continued presence curtailed his financial freedom. Flora Tschaskalik, sister to the wife of the foreman Joseph Franke and the prince’s mistress, was alleged to have said that she would find someone to “put the old woman aside.” The majordomo Michael Paffy supposedly overheard this remark before reporting it to the magistrates, only to deny any recollection of it when placed before the jury. The compiler presents these words as the seed from which the scheme took root. The conditional mood must be preserved: we are reading an account of shifting testimony, transmitted by an author who is himself interpreting the case files.
The chronicle records another disturbing occurrence, which took place toward the close of February. Two unknown assailants allegedly attacked the princess in a corridor; she succeeded in tearing herself free and regaining her room. Mention was made of a dagger glimpsed in the struggle, yet the text notes that no rigorous investigation seems to have been conducted at the time. This antecedent might retroactively lend meaning to the silhouettes observed by night in the courtyard and the movements ascribed to Franke. It does not, however, permit one to link that earlier assault with any certainty to the assassination of the 3rd of March.
The name of Karl Obst, a former saddler turned day-laborer, eventually emerged into the foreground. He had associated with Franke and the prince’s circle. According to one version of his words recorded in the source, Obst had boasted in an inn of having dispatched the princess. The Pitaval advances several interpretations of this declaration: the braggadocio of a compromised man, an endeavor to impress a woman, or a genuine confession. Obst was ultimately tried as the gunman and condemned. Yet, upon his deathbed, he is said to have offered a different account: he asserted that Franke had offered him money and advancement in exchange for the deed, that he had refused, and that he had merely witnessed Franke handling or priming the weapon. The two accounts are irreconcilable. The compiler favors the latter, deeming it psychologically more credible; this preference remains that of the chronicler alone.
The initial proceedings did not bring before the bench all those suspected by the narrative. Obst was found guilty. The laborer’s wife and Paffy were acquitted at this first hearing. Paffy had initially reported the words attributed to Franke—a promise to slay the princess—and had subsequently recanted them. He could therefore not be treated as a steadfast witness. Franke’s absence further entangled the dossier: after the murder, he had fled the region. The source charts an escape across several borders under various aliases, from Austria to Turkey, and thence to England and Heligoland. It concedes that it cannot explain how he broke out of the fortress prison of Ofen, nor who assisted him.
Franke resurfaced in Hamburg, where the police apprehended him after years of pursuit. He was extradited to Silesia and brought before the jury at Gleiwitz on the 28th and 29th of October, 1856. The prosecution maintained that he had suborned Obst to commit the murder, induced him with promises of reward, and procured the firearms fully aware of their intended purpose. This theory collided with the obstacle raised by Obst’s two declarations: if one credited the initial confession identifying him as the gunman, one could not simply employ his subsequent deathbed narrative as evidence against Franke. The documents did not all point in the same direction.
At this trial, Paffy once more retracted the statements that incriminated Franke, claiming that he no longer remembered the words he had previously reported. Other matters were laid before the court: visits paid by Franke to the prince, utterances ascribed to Flora, weapons, sums of money, and the contradictory recollections of witnesses. The defense contested the reliability of these accounts and the sinister construction placed upon every encounter. The Pitaval stitches a coherent thread through these fragments, yet allows the seams to show: what had been stated during the preliminary examination was not always maintained under oath; what had appeared decisive against a prisoner lost its weight the moment another narrative was preferred.
The session of October 1856 did not conclude the case: the court adjourned the proceedings after a witness alleged that Maximilian’s elder brother, Duke Ludwig, then residing in America, possessed knowledge of the murder. The Pitaval records that the magistrates sought to obtain his deposition across the ocean. The trial resumed before the jury at Gleiwitz on the 17th and 18th of June, 1857. The OCR transcript of the text gives an erroneous year at this juncture, but the printed page consulted clearly bears 1857. Upon this resumption, Franke’s presence in the district before and after the crime, the weapons, the transactions with Obst, and Paffy’s reversals were once more examined. A witness newly arrived from America spoke of a stranger seen lurking near the house; a letter attributed to a Pole named Kośchielski suggested that one man had personated another, but the prosecution disputed its authenticity or relevance. None of these elements supplied an eyewitness account of the fatal shot.
Upon the conclusion of these proceedings, the jury found Franke guilty. The court passed sentence of death. The Pitaval, however, records no execution. By mid-1858, when the author composed his chronicle, Franke was still languishing in prison: the King had not signed the death warrant. The chronicle sets forth the explanations then circulating in the province—the sovereign’s failing health or the expectation of further revelations—without being able to verify them. It likewise repeats a rumor that Flora had written from London announcing her imminent return to Silesia. Here again, the text blurs the boundaries between judicial fact, hearsay, and conjecture, and the reader must remain mindful of the distinction.
The trial thus delivered a verdict against Franke, but left the history itself unillumined. The murder is dated by the Pitaval to the 3rd of March, 1848; a biographical notice published later gives the 3rd of March, 1849, a discrepancy that the sources assembled here cannot reconcile. The mother perished by a shot fired from without, the son was in Vienna, Obst was condemned as the assassin only to leave a conflicting confession, and Franke was condemned for having procured the crime—without the narrative ever establishing that he went to the scaffold. The compiler himself presents the affair as an unresolved mystery. Its final door opens neither upon a certain resolution nor upon proven innocence: it remains closed upon the evidence accepted by the tribunal, and upon that which the chronicle failed to make speak.