----- 1. Summer of 1899.
Note.—The assassination of the Empress
of Austria at Geneva, September 10, 1898, occurred
during Mark Twain’s Austrian residence.
The news came to him at Kaltenleutgeben, a summer
resort a little way out of Vienna. To his friend,
the Rev. Jos. H. Twichell, he wrote:
“That good and unoffending lady, the Empress,
is killed by a madman, and I am living in the midst
of world-history again. The Queen’s Jubilee
last year, the invasion of the Reichsrath by the police,
and now this murder, which will still be talked of
and described and painted a thousand a thousand years
from now. To have a personal friend of the wearer
of two crowns burst in at the gate in the deep dusk
of the evening and say, in a voice broken with tears,
‘My God! the Empress is murdered,’ and
fly toward her home before we can utter a question—why,
it brings the giant event home to you, makes you a
part of it and personally interested; it is as if
your neighbor, Antony, should come flying and say,
‘Caesar is butchered—the head of the
world is fallen!’
“Of course there is no talk but of this.
The mourning is universal and genuine, the consternation
is stupefying. The Austrian Empire is being
draped with black. Vienna will be a spectacle
to see by next Saturday, when the funeral cort`ege
marches.”
He was strongly moved by the tragedy, impelled to
write concerning it. He prepared the article
which follows, but did not offer it for publication,
perhaps feeling that his own close association with
the court circles at the moment prohibited this personal
utterance. There appears no such reason for
withholding its publication now.
A. B. P.
The more one thinks of the assassination, the more
imposing and tremendous the event becomes. The
destruction of a city is a large event, but it is
one which repeats itself several times in a thousand
years; the destruction of a third part of a nation
by plague and famine is a large event, but it has
happened several times in history; the murder of a
king is a large event, but it has been frequent.
The murder of an empress is the largest of all events.
One must go back about two thousand years to find
an instance to put with this one. The oldest
family of unchallenged descent in Christendom lives
in Rome and traces its line back seventeen hundred
years, but no member of it has been present in the
earth when an empress was murdered, until now.
Many a time during these seventeen centuries members
of that family have been startled with the news of
extraordinary events—the destruction of
cities, the fall of thrones, the murder of kings, the
wreck of dynasties, the extinction of religions, the
birth of new systems of government; and their descendants
have been by to hear of it and talk about it when all
these things were repeated once, twice, or a dozen
times—but to even that family has come
news at last which is not staled by use, has no duplicates
in the long reach of its memory.
