WHAT IS MAN? AND OTHER ESSAYS OF MARK TWAIN

and something in the ruler’s name or career will suggest the

pictorial symbol. The effort of inventing such things will not

only help your memory, but will develop originality in art. See

what it has done for me. If you do not find the parlor wall big

enough for all of England’s history, continue it into the dining-

room and into other rooms. This will make the walls interesting

and instructive and really worth something instead of being just

flat things to hold the house together.

—–

1. Summer of 1899.

—————————————————————–

THE MEMORABLE ASSASSINATION

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

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