He wanted to reform the Empire and save the Habsburgs. He understood too clearly the significance of the Austrian Monarchy. He therefore came under suspicion and had to flee the country. In his early years he went to America. He was by profession a chemist. People of his sort were needed in the tremendous expansion of the chemical industry in New York and Chicago. As long as he was poor he only felt homesick for his countryside, but by the time he was at last rich he began to feel homesick for Austria. He came back and settled in Vienna. He had money, and the Austrian police loved people who had money. Not only was my father not molested, but he even started to found a new Slovenian party, and bought two newspapers in Agram.

He made influential friends in circles close to the heir to the throne, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand. My father dreamed of a Slav monarchy under the rule of the Habsburgs. He dreamed of a joint monarchy of Austrians, Hungarians and Slavs. And I, as his son, may here be allowed to state my belief that, had my father lived longer, he could perhaps have changed the course of history. But he died, some eighteen months before the assassination of Franz Ferdinand. I am his only son. In his will he had made me executor of his ideas. Not for nothing had he christened me Franz Ferdinand. But in those days I was young and foolish: not to say thoughtless. In any case I was frivolous and lived my life, as the saying went, day by day. No! That is wrong: I lived it night by night; by day I slept.

[II]

ONE MORNING, HOWEVER—it was in April 1913—while I was still fast asleep, having reached home only two hours before, a cousin of mine was announced, a Herr Trotta.

In my nightshirt and slippers I went down to the anteroom. The windows were wide open. The early rising blackbirds in the garden were busily fluting away, and the morning sun flooded the room with happiness. Our maid, whom I had never previously observed at that hour, looked strange to me in her blue apron, for I was aware of her only as a young creature made of blonde hair, in black and white, rather like a flag. I saw her for the first time in a dark blue uniform, of the sort that mechanics and gasmen used to affect, with a reddish-purple feather duster in her hand. The mere sight of her would have been enough to give me quite a fresh and unfamiliar view of life. For the first time for several years I looked at morning in my own house and discovered that it was beautiful. I liked the maid. I liked the open windows. I liked the sun. I liked the blackbirds’ song, which was as golden as the morning sun.