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