Twice the Empress entered Vienna in state. The
first time was in 1854, when she was a bride of seventeen,
and then she rode in measureless pomp and with blare
of music through a fluttering world of gay flags and
decorations, down streets walled on both hands with
a press of shouting and welcoming subjects; and the
second time was last Wednesday, when she entered the
city in her coffin and moved down the same streets
in the dead of the night under swaying black flags,
between packed human walls again; but everywhere was
a deep stillness, now—a stillness emphasized,
rather than broken, by the muffled hoofbeats of the
long cavalcade over pavements cushioned with sand,
and the low sobbing of gray-headed women who had witnessed
the first entry forty-four years before, when she and
they were young—and unaware!
A character in Baron von Berger’s recent fairy
drama “Habsburg” tells about the first
coming of the girlish Empress-Queen, and in his history
draws a fine picture: I cannot make a close translation
of it, but will try to convey the spirit of the verses:
I saw the stately pageant pass:
In her high place I saw the Empress-Queen:
I could not take my eyes away
From that fair vision, spirit-like and pure,
That rose serene, sublime, and figured to my sense
A noble Alp far lighted in the blue,
That in the flood of morning rends its veil of cloud
And stands a dream of glory to the gaze
Of them that in the Valley toil and plod.
A SCRAP OF CURIOUS HISTORY
Marion City, on the Mississippi River, in the State
of Missouri—a village; time, 1845.
La Bourboule-les-Bains, France—a village;
time, the end of June, 1894. I was in the one
village in that early time; I am in the other now.
These times and places are sufficiently wide apart,
yet today I have the strange sense of being thrust
back into that Missourian village and of reliving
certain stirring days that I lived there so long ago.
Last Saturday night the life of the President of the
French Republic was taken by an Italian assassin.
Last night a mob surrounded our hotel, shouting,
howling, singing the “Marseillaise,” and
pelting our windows with sticks and stones; for we
have Italian waiters, and the mob demanded that they
be turned out of the house instantly—to
be drubbed, and then driven out of the village.
Everybody in the hotel remained up until far into
the night, and experienced the several kinds of terror
which one reads about in books which tell of nigh
attacks by Italians and by French mobs: the growing
roar of the oncoming crowd; the arrival, with rain
of stones and a crash of glass; the withdrawal to
rearrange plans—followed by a silence ominous,
threatening, and harder to bear than even the active
siege and the noise. The landlord and the two
village policemen stood their ground, and at last
the mob was persuaded to go away and leave our Italians
in peace. Today four of the ringleaders have
been sentenced to heavy punishment of a public sort—and
are become local heroes, by consequence.
Copyrights
What Is Man? and Other Essays from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
