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Authors: Jan Morris
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proper, too, in a city of intelligent dialectic, that the management of the Caffè degli Specchi, which was obliged to close its doors during the months it took to clean everything off and resurface the square, should have declared the whole project just another example of The Arrogance of Power).
SIX
Sad Questions of Oneself
On July 2, 1914, the 22,000-ton battleship SMS Viribus Unitis arrived at the Molo San Carlo in Trieste bringing the corpses of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, nephew and heir to the Emperor, and his wife, Sophie. They had both been assassinated at Sarajevo, in the Austrian territory of Bosnia-Herzegovina, five days before.
Their coffins were carried in funeral procession through the streets of Trieste, before being sent by train to Vienna. This was an imperial frisson of an altogether new kind, and I can sense the shock of the occasion from an old photograph I have before me now. Sailors line the street, imperial infantrymen escort the cortège, led by mounted officers with cockaded hats. Every window and balcony, attic to ground floor, is crowded with people. Black flags or carpets hang from walls and flagstaffs. A mass of citizenry fills the pavements, the women in dark clothes, the men removing from their heads the boaters which every self-respecting male wore in summer Trieste. The photograph was taken by the local photographers Giuseppe and Carlo Wulz, whose very names give it a true Trieste evocation.
At the moment they clicked their shutter the procession has momentarily halted in the Corso, the main street of the city, now the Corso Italia. There is no apparent reason. Everybody in the crowd, from every window, is looking towards the coffins. The soldiers are rigid. The officers have turned in their saddles to see what is happening. Beside the bier a solitary courtier stands motionless, his top hat in his hand. Soldiers, sailors, citizens, officials, all wait still, silent and expectant. Did some of them guess that the saddest of angel messengers was passing by, foretelling the world’s tragedy, the empire’s humiliation, and their own proud city’s long decline?
IT WAS when those bodies returned from Sarajevo, I suppose, that tristesse was decreed for Trieste, but long before then melancholy had found its proper image here. Miramar contains its very essence. It stands on its promontory weeping, and to my eyes even in the sunshine its walls are never sparkling. A pleasant park surrounds it, and its rooms are full of treasures, but nobody who goes there can fail to sense its numen of regret.
Maximilian, having ably reformed the Austrian Navy, retired from the sea in 1856, but he did not get on well with his elder brother the Emperor, and was happy to live well away from Vienna with his devoted young bride. He was a dreamy sort of man, somewhat liberal in his views and much influenced by his uncle the crazed romantic Ludwig I of Bavaria, so he was not at ease with the stiff autocracy of K u K . He was actually removed from a post as Governor-General of Lombardy as being too progressive (and a good thing too, perhaps, for he wanted to plant the Piazza San Marco at Venice with orange trees, and turn its campanile into a lighthouse).
However, in 1864 he was called to take part in a fateful imperialist scheme. The French had suggested to Franz Joseph that to counter the growing strength of the United States, there should be an attempt to re-establish European sovereignty on the American continent. The idea was that with French military support a European monarchy should be restored to the throne of a key Latin American republic, Mexico. This was in the hands of a left-wing revolutionary, Benito Juarez, and there was thought to be a strong conservative faction in the country in favour of such an intervention. Besides, it was the nearest of all the republics to Washington. The Americans were in the throes of their civil war, and probably distracted from the principles of the Monroe Doctrine: an
SIX
Sad Questions of Oneself
On July 2, 1914, the 22,000-ton battleship SMS Viribus Unitis arrived at the Molo San Carlo in Trieste bringing the corpses of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, nephew and heir to the Emperor, and his wife, Sophie. They had both been assassinated at Sarajevo, in the Austrian territory of Bosnia-Herzegovina, five days before.
Their coffins were carried in funeral procession through the streets of Trieste, before being sent by train to Vienna. This was an imperial frisson of an altogether new kind, and I can sense the shock of the occasion from an old photograph I have before me now. Sailors line the street, imperial infantrymen escort the cortège, led by mounted officers with cockaded hats. Every window and balcony, attic to ground floor, is crowded with people. Black flags or carpets hang from walls and flagstaffs. A mass of citizenry fills the pavements, the women in dark clothes, the men removing from their heads the boaters which every self-respecting male wore in summer Trieste. The photograph was taken by the local photographers Giuseppe and Carlo Wulz, whose very names give it a true Trieste evocation.
At the moment they clicked their shutter the procession has momentarily halted in the Corso, the main street of the city, now the Corso Italia. There is no apparent reason. Everybody in the crowd, from every window, is looking towards the coffins. The soldiers are rigid. The officers have turned in their saddles to see what is happening. Beside the bier a solitary courtier stands motionless, his top hat in his hand. Soldiers, sailors, citizens, officials, all wait still, silent and expectant. Did some of them guess that the saddest of angel messengers was passing by, foretelling the world’s tragedy, the empire’s humiliation, and their own proud city’s long decline?
IT WAS when those bodies returned from Sarajevo, I suppose, that tristesse was decreed for Trieste, but long before then melancholy had found its proper image here. Miramar contains its very essence. It stands on its promontory weeping, and to my eyes even in the sunshine its walls are never sparkling. A pleasant park surrounds it, and its rooms are full of treasures, but nobody who goes there can fail to sense its numen of regret.
Maximilian, having ably reformed the Austrian Navy, retired from the sea in 1856, but he did not get on well with his elder brother the Emperor, and was happy to live well away from Vienna with his devoted young bride. He was a dreamy sort of man, somewhat liberal in his views and much influenced by his uncle the crazed romantic Ludwig I of Bavaria, so he was not at ease with the stiff autocracy of K u K . He was actually removed from a post as Governor-General of Lombardy as being too progressive (and a good thing too, perhaps, for he wanted to plant the Piazza San Marco at Venice with orange trees, and turn its campanile into a lighthouse).
However, in 1864 he was called to take part in a fateful imperialist scheme. The French had suggested to Franz Joseph that to counter the growing strength of the United States, there should be an attempt to re-establish European sovereignty on the American continent. The idea was that with French military support a European monarchy should be restored to the throne of a key Latin American republic, Mexico. This was in the hands of a left-wing revolutionary, Benito Juarez, and there was thought to be a strong conservative faction in the country in favour of such an intervention. Besides, it was the nearest of all the republics to Washington. The Americans were in the throes of their civil war, and probably distracted from the principles of the Monroe Doctrine: an
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