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 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 cortege marches.”
He was strongly moved by the tragedy, impelled to write concerning it.
He prepared the article which here 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.