AUSTRIA UNDER FRANCIS JOSEPH
and publicity was not tolerated in Vienna—though, of course, the Viennese bourgeoisie and the Bourse rejoiced in court gossip. Francis Joseph dreaded, above all, éclat; when Baron Dumba and his officials had to leave Washington because of his alleged dishonest plots and intrigues, Austria-Hungary urged the United States to put forward illness as its official explanation of the change. That is the true Austria-Hungary of Francis Joseph. Outward appearance, not intrinsic virtue and reality, was, and is, the aim of all Austro-Hungarian policy.
Of the man, the husband, the father, the head of a great family, I do not speak. Not even the pungent phrases of a Tacitus could do justice to the theme of Habsburg degeneration.
Francis Joseph: An Elusive Personality
Those whose business it has been to watch close at hand, year in year out, the doings of the late Emperor Francis Joseph must have read with lively interest the obituary notices and "appreciations" published at his death. Conceived, for the most part, as panegyrics and prepared long in advance, these "memoirs" retained, despite the war, obvious traces of their origin, notwithstanding the efforts of authors and editors to adjust old material to a changed perspective. The memory of my own adventures in search of a reliable estimate of Francis Joseph's character is, however, too keen to inspire in me aught but sympathy with writers striving to do justice to his memory.
Some fourteen years ago my residence was changed from Rome to Vienna. My view of Francis Joseph was then probably the view held by the great majority of ordinary Europeans—that he was a wise and venerable ruler much tried by unmerited misfortune, a pillar of European peace, and the only remaining influence that could restrain his "mosaic of peoples" from resolving itself into its component parts and bringing on a European conflagration in the process.
That winter (1902–03) Francis Joseph caught one of his many colds. Sinister rumours spread. The great catastrophe seemed to be at hand. What estimate of the Emperor's
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