The Memorable Assassination / Mark Twain

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.

It is an event which confers a curious distinction upon

every individual now living in the world: he has stood alive and

breathing in the presence of an event such as has not fallen

within the experience of any traceable or untraceable ancestor of

his for twenty centuries, and it is not likely to fall within the

experience of any descendant of his for twenty more.

Time has made some great changes since the Roman days. The

murder of an empress then--even the assassination of Caesar

himself--could not electrify the world as this murder has

electrified it. For one reason, there was then not much of a

world to electrify; it was a small world, as to known bulk, and

it had rather a thin population, besides; and for another reason,

the news traveled so slowly that its tremendous initial thrill

wasted away, week by week and month by month, on the journey, and

by the time it reached the remoter regions there was but little

of it left. It was no longer a fresh event, it was a thing of

the far past; it was not properly news, it was history. But the

world is enormous now, and prodigiously populated--that is one

change; and another is the lightning swiftness of the flight of

tidings, good and bad. "The Empress is murdered!" When those

amazing words struck upon my ear in this Austrian village last

Saturday, three hours after the disaster, I knew that it was

already old news in London, Paris, Berlin, New York, San

Francisco, Japan, China, Melbourne, Cape Town, Bombay, Madras,

Calcutta, and that the entire globe with a single voice, was

cursing the perpetrator of it. Since the telegraph first began

to stretch itself wider and wider about the earth, larger and

increasingly larger areas of the world have, as time went on,

received simultaneously the shock of a great calamity; but this

is the first time in history that the entire surface of the globe

has been swept in a single instant with the thrill of so gigantic

an event.

And who is the miracle-worker who has furnished to the world

this spectacle? All the ironies are compacted in the answer. He

is at the bottom of the human ladder, as the accepted estimates

of degree and value go: a soiled and patched young loafer,

without gifts, without talents, without education, without

morals, without character, without any born charm or any acquired

one that wins or beguiles or attracts; without a single grace of

mind or heart or hand that any tramp or prostitute could envy

him; an unfaithful private in the ranks, an incompetent stone-

cutter, an inefficient lackey; in a word, a mangy, offensive,

empty, unwashed, vulgar, gross, mephitic, timid, sneaking, human

polecat. And it was within the privileges and powers of this

sarcasm upon the human race to reach up--up--up--and strike from

its far summit in the social skies the world's accepted ideal of

Glory and Might and Splendor and Sacredness! It realizes to us

what sorry shows and shadows we are. Without our clothes and our

pedestals we are poor things and much of a size; our dignities

are not real, our pomps are shams. At our best and stateliest we

are not suns, as we pretended, and teach, and believe, but only

candles; and any bummer can blow us out.

And now we get realized to us once more another thing which

we often forget--or try to: that no man has a wholly undiseased

mind; that in one way or another all men are mad. Many are mad

for money. When this madness is in a mild form it is harmless

and the man passes for sane; but when it develops powerfully and

takes possession of the man, it can make him cheat, rob, and

kill; and when he has got his fortune and lost it again it can

land him in the asylum or the suicide's coffin. Love is a

madness; if thwarted it develops fast; it can grow to a frenzy of

despair and make an otherwise sane and highly gifted prince, like

Rudolph, throw away the crown of an empire and snuff out his own

life. All the whole list of desires, predilections, aversions,

ambitions, passions, cares, griefs, regrets, remorses, are

incipient madness, and ready to grow, spread, and consume, when

the occasion comes. There are no healthy minds, and nothing

saves any man but accident--the accident of not having his malady

put to the supreme test.

One of the commonest forms of madness is the desire to be

noticed, the pleasure derived from being noticed. Perhaps it is

not merely common, but universal. In its mildest form it

doubtless is universal. Every child is pleased at being noticed;

many intolerable children put in their whole time in distressing

and idiotic effort to attract the attention of visitors; boys are

always "showing off"; apparently all men and women are glad and

grateful when they find that they have done a thing which has

lifted them for a moment out of obscurity and caused wondering

talk. This common madness can develop, by nurture, into a hunger

for notoriety in one, for fame in another. It is this madness

for being noticed and talked about which has invented kingship

and the thousand other dignities, and tricked them out with

pretty and showy fineries; it has made kings pick one another's

pockets, scramble for one another's crowns and estates, slaughter

one another's subjects; it has raised up prize-fighters, and

poets, and villages mayors, and little and big politicians, and

big and little charity-founders, and bicycle champions, and

banditti chiefs, and frontier desperadoes, and Napoleons.

Anything to get notoriety; anything to set the village, or the

township, or the city, or the State, or the nation, or the planet

shouting, "Look--there he goes--that is the man!" And in five

minutes' time, at no cost of brain, or labor, or genius this

mangy Italian tramp has beaten them all, transcended them all,

outstripped them all, for in time their names will perish; but by

the friendly help of the insane newspapers and courts and kings

and historians, his is safe and live and thunder in the world all

down the ages as long as human speech shall endure! Oh, if it

were not so tragic how ludicrous it would be!

She was so blameless, the Empress; and so beautiful, in mind

and heart, in person and spirit; and whether with a crown upon

her head or without it and nameless, a grace to the human race,

and almost a justification of its creation; WOULD be, indeed, but

that the animal that struck her down re-establishes the doubt.

In her character was every quality that in woman invites and

engages respect, esteem, affection, and homage. Her tastes, her

instincts, and her aspirations were all high and fine and all her

life her heart and brain were busy with activities of a noble

sort. She had had bitter griefs, but they did not sour her

spirit, and she had had the highest honors in the world's gift,

but she went her simple way unspoiled. She knew all ranks, and

won them all, and made them her friends. An English fisherman's

wife said, "When a body was in trouble she didn't send her help,

she brought it herself." Crowns have adorned others, but she

adorned her crowns.

It was a swift celebrity the assassin achieved. And it is

marked by some curious contrasts. At noon last, Saturday there

was no one in the world who would have considered

acquaintanceship with him a thing worth claiming or mentioning;

no one would have been vain of such an acquaintanceship; the

humblest honest boot-black would not have valued the fact that he

had met him or seen him at some time or other; he was sunk in

abysmal obscurity, he was away beneath the notice of the bottom

grades of officialdom. Three hours later he was the one subject

of conversation in the world, the gilded generals and admirals

and governors were discussing him, all the kings and queens and

emperors had put aside their other interests to talk about him.

And wherever there was a man, at the summit of the world or the

bottom of it, who by chance had at some time or other come across

that creature, he remembered it with a secret satisfaction, and

MENTIONED it--for it was a distinction, now! It brings human

dignity pretty low, and for a moment the thing is not quite

realizable--but it is perfectly true. If there is a king who can

remember, now, that he once saw that creature in a time past, he

has let that fact out, in a more or less studiedly casual and

indifferent way, some dozens of times during the past week. For

a king is merely human; the inside of him is exactly like the

inside of any other person; and it is human to find satisfaction

in being in a kind of personal way connected with amazing events.

We are all privately vain of such a thing; we are all alike; a

king is a king by accident; the reason the rest of us are not

kings is merely due to another accident; we are all made out of

the same clay, and it is a sufficient poor quality.

Below the kings, these remarks are in the air these days; I

know it well as if I were hearing them:

THE COMMANDER: "He was in my army."

THE GENERAL: "He was in my corps."

THE COLONEL: "He was in my regiment. A brute. I remember

him well."

THE CAPTAIN: "He was in my company. A troublesome

scoundrel. I remember him well."

THE SERGEANT: "Did I know him? As well as I know you.

Why, every morning I used to--" etc., etc.; a glad, long story,

told to devouring ears.

THE LANDLADY: "Many's the time he boarded with me. I can

show you his very room, and the very bed he slept in. And the

charcoal mark there on the wall--he made that. My little Johnny

saw him do it with his own eyes. Didn't you, Johnny?"

It is easy to see, by the papers, that the magistrate and

the constables and the jailer treasure up the assassin's daily

remarks and doings as precious things, and as wallowing this week

in seas of blissful distinction. The interviewer, too; he tried

to let on that he is not vain of his privilege of contact with

this man whom few others are allowed to gaze upon, but he is

human, like the rest, and can no more keep his vanity corked in

than could you or I.

Some think that this murder is a frenzied revolt against the

criminal militarism which is impoverishing Europe and driving the

starving poor mad. That has many crimes to answer for, but not

this one, I think. One may not attribute to this man a generous

indignation against the wrongs done the poor; one may not dignify

him with a generous impulse of any kind. When he saw his

photograph and said, "I shall be celebrated," he laid bare the

impulse that prompted him. It was a mere hunger for notoriety.

There is another confessed case of the kind which is as old as

history--the burning of the temple of Ephesus.

Among the inadequate attempts to account for the

assassination we must concede high rank to the many which have

described it as a "peculiarly brutal crime" and then added that

it was "ordained from above." I think this verdict will not be

popular "above." If the deed was ordained from above, there is

no rational way of making this prisoner even partially

responsible for it, and the Genevan court cannot condemn him

without manifestly committing a crime. Logic is logic, and by

disregarding its laws even the most pious and showy theologian

may be beguiled into preferring charges which should not be

ventured upon except in the shelter of plenty of lightning-rods.

I witnessed the funeral procession, in company with friends,

from the windows of the Krantz, Vienna's sumptuous new hotel. We

came into town in the middle of the forenoon, and I went on foot

from the station. Black flags hung down from all the houses; the

aspects were Sunday-like; the crowds on the sidewalks were quiet

and moved slowly; very few people were smoking; many ladies wore

deep mourning, gentlemen were in black as a rule; carriages were

speeding in all directions, with footmen and coachmen in black

clothes and wearing black cocked hats; the shops were closed; in

many windows were pictures of the Empress: as a beautiful young

bride of seventeen; as a serene and majestic lady with added

years; and finally in deep black and without ornaments--the

costume she always wore after the tragic death of her son nine

years ago, for her heart broke then, and life lost almost all its

value for her. The people stood grouped before these pictures,

and now and then one saw women and girls turn away wiping the

tears from their eyes.

In front of the Krantz is an open square; over the way was

the church where the funeral services would be held. It is small

and old and severely plain, plastered outside and whitewashed or

painted, and with no ornament but a statue of a monk in a niche

over the door, and above that a small black flag. But in its

crypt lie several of the great dead of the House of Habsburg,

among them Maria Theresa and Napoleon's son, the Duke of Reichstadt.

Hereabouts was a Roman camp, once, and in it the Emperor Marcus

Aurelius died a thousand years before the first Habsburg ruled

in Vienna, which was six hundred years ago and more.

The little church is packed in among great modern stores and

houses, and the windows of them were full of people. Behind the

vast plate-glass windows of the upper floors of the house on the

corner one glimpsed terraced masses of fine-clothed men and

women, dim and shimmery, like people under water. Under us the

square was noiseless, but it was full of citizens; officials in

fine uniforms were flitting about on errands, and in a doorstep

sat a figure in the uttermost raggedness of poverty, the feet

bare, the head bent humbly down; a youth of eighteen or twenty,

he was, and through the field-glass one could see that he was

tearing apart and munching riffraff that he had gathered

somewhere. Blazing uniforms flashed by him, making a sparkling

contrast with his drooping ruin of moldy rags, but he took not

notice; he was not there to grieve for a nation's disaster; he

had his own cares, and deeper. From two directions two long

files of infantry came plowing through the pack and press in

silence; there was a low, crisp order and the crowd vanished, the

square save the sidewalks was empty, the private mourner was

gone. Another order, the soldiers fell apart and enclosed the

square in a double-ranked human fence. It was all so swift,

noiseless, exact--like a beautifully ordered machine.

It was noon, now. Two hours of stillness and waiting

followed. Then carriages began to flow past and deliver the two

and three hundred court personages and high nobilities privileged

to enter the church. Then the square filled up; not with

civilians, but with army and navy officers in showy and beautiful

uniforms. They filled it compactly, leaving only a narrow

carriage path in front of the church, but there was no civilian

among them. And it was better so; dull clothes would have marred

the radiant spectacle. In the jam in front of the church, on its

steps, and on the sidewalk was a bunch of uniforms which made a

blazing splotch of color--intense red, gold, and white--which

dimmed the brilliancies around them; and opposite them on the

other side of the path was a bunch of cascaded bright-green

plumes above pale-blue shoulders which made another splotch of

splendor emphatic and conspicuous in its glowing surroundings.

It was a sea of flashing color all about, but these two groups

were the high notes. The green plumes were worn by forty or

fifty Austrian generals, the group opposite them were chiefly

Knights of Malta and knights of a German order. The mass of

heads in the square were covered by gilt helmets and by military

caps roofed with a mirror-like gaze, and the movements of the

wearers caused these things to catch the sun-rays, and the effect

was fine to see--the square was like a garden of richly colored

flowers with a multitude of blinding and flashing little suns

distributed over it.

Think of it--it was by command of that Italian loafer yonder

on his imperial throne in the Geneva prison that this splendid

multitude was assembled there; and the kings and emperors that

were entering the church from a side street were there by his will.

It is so strange, so unrealizable.

At three o'clock the carriages were still streaming by in

single file. At three-five a cardinal arrives with his

attendants; later some bishops; then a number of archdeacons--all

in striking colors that add to the show. At three-ten a

procession of priests passed along, with crucifix. Another one,

presently; after an interval, two more; at three-fifty another

one--very long, with many crosses, gold-embroidered robes, and

much white lace; also great pictured banners, at intervals,

receding into the distance.

A hum of tolling bells makes itself heard, but not sharply.

At three-fifty-eight a waiting interval. Presently a long

procession of gentlemen in evening dress comes in sight and

approaches until it is near to the square, then falls back

against the wall of soldiers at the sidewalk, and the white

shirt-fronts show like snowflakes and are very conspicuous where

so much warm color is all about.

A waiting pause. At four-twelve the head of the funeral

procession comes into view at last. First, a body of cavalry,

four abreast, to widen the path. Next, a great body of lancers,

in blue, with gilt helmets. Next, three six-horse mourning-

coaches; outriders and coachmen in black, with cocked hats and

white wigs. Next, troops in splendid uniforms, red, gold, and

white, exceedingly showy.

Now the multitude uncover. The soldiers present arms; there

is a low rumble of drums; the sumptuous great hearse approaches,

drawn at a walk by eight black horses plumed with black bunches

of nodding ostrich feathers; the coffin is borne into the church,

the doors are closed.

The multitude cover their heads, and the rest of the

procession moves by; first the Hungarian Guard in their

indescribably brilliant and picturesque and beautiful uniform,

inherited from the ages of barbaric splendor, and after them

other mounted forces, a long and showy array.

Then the shining crown in the square crumbled apart, a

wrecked rainbow, and melted away in radiant streams, and in the

turn of a wrist the three dirtiest and raggedest and cheerfulest

little slum-girls in Austria were capering about in the spacious

vacancy. It was a day of contrasts.

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.