Read "The Memorable Assassination" by Mark Twain online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
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!'