That good and unoffending lady the Empress is killed by a mad-man, and Iam 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 the crown 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.We are invited to occupy a room in the sumptuous new hotel (the "Krantz" where we are to live during the Fall and Winter) and view it, and we shall go.
Speaking of Mrs.Leiter, there is a noble dame in Vienna, about whom they retail similar slanders.She said in French--she is weak in French--that she had been spending a Sunday afternoon in a gathering of the "demimonde." Meaning the unknown land, that mercantile land, that mysterious half-world which underlies the aristocracy.But these Malaproperies are always inventions--they don't happen.
Yes, I wish we could have some talks; I'm full to the eye-lids.Had a noble good one with Parker and Dunham--land, but we were grateful for that visit!
Yours with all our loves.
MARK.
[Inclosed with the foregoing.]
Among the inadequate attempts to account for the assassination we must concede high rank to the German Emperor's.He justly describes it as a "deed unparalleled for ruthlessness," and then adds that it was "ordained from above."I think this verdict will not be popular "above." A man is either a free agent or he isn't.If a man is a free agent, this prisoner is responsible for what he has done; but if a man is not a free agent, if the deed was ordained from above, there is no rational way of making this prisoner even partially responsible for it, and the German court cannot condemn him without manifestly committing a crime.Logic is logic; and by disregarding its laws even Emperors as capable and acute as William IIcan be beguiled into making charges which should not be ventured upon except in the shelter of plenty of lightning-rods.
MARK.
The end of the year 1898 found Mark Twain once more in easy, even luxurious, circumstances.The hard work and good fortune which had enabled him to pay his debts had, in the course of another year, provided what was comparative affluence: His report to Howells is characteristic and interesting.
To W.D.Howells, in New York:
HOTEL KRANTZ, WIEN, L.NEVER MARKT 6
Dec.30, '98.