It had not previously been known in Hungary.
In order of rank, each lady to be presented enters the room. She walks to the throne where, on this occasion, only the queen is seated. The king stands behind her, and the crown prince, the little Archduke Otto, is at her feet. There, as the Lord Chamberlain has read out her name, she makes a low reverence and then walks back to the far end of the adjacent drawing-room.
When the ceremony started there were long waits between each lady, and where I was in the drawing-room there would be five or six minutes between the arrival of one lady and another. However the royal couple were anxious to board their train for Vienna no later than six o’clock and something had to be done to speed things up if the presentation of several hundred ladies was not to go on for hours. Accordingly they started to hurry them in, the chamberlains calling out, ‘Quick! Quick! Hurry there!’ until the ladies were scrambling in, now singly, now in groups, pushing up to the throne, and elbowing each other out of the way at the doors to the drawing-room.
Everyone was exhausted, for most had been in full evening dress since early in the morning, wearing tiaras or diadems on their heads and supporting the weight not only of their trains but also of the heavy gold and silver embroidery of the dresses themselves. Many had been up most of the night waiting their turn with some fashionable hairdresser.
Tired and faltering, pale with exhaustion and tottering under the weight of their finery, they came into the drawing-room and at once sank thankfully into the few chairs and sofas that lined the walls of the apartment. The room was by no means brilliantly lit; indeed it was rather dark, as not all the chandeliers had been lit. More light came in from the windows, for the lamps in the palace courtyard cast up a helpful glow through the shadows cast by the rain that had just started to come down.
In this poor light every vestige of beauty and pageantry was drained from these poor ladies. The silver veils looked merely grey, the gold-braid a dull black, even the jewels lost their sparkle. Makeup ran on the older faces, powder vanished. In the early evening light these formerly radiant creatures were a sorry sight.
***
I went home very late.
The city returned to its normal wartime aspect.
After the royal couple had left at the end of the afternoon, the evening was just like any other during the winter. The departure of the king and queen quenched all rejoicing and sense of occasion. Rumours and gossip started spreading at once. People whispered about imaginary ill omens, that the crown had been placed crooked on the monarch’s head, and that he had stumbled just at the moment when he was reading the words of the oath…but all this passed me by. Only one thing did happen which could have provided food for this kind of gossip, but I do not think any one knew about it. The cathedral had only just emptied after the coronation when the inch-thick glass plate in the purple tent above the altar split in the heat and crashed like a giant guillotine to the altar and the prie-dieux below. However, no one was told about this except those who had work to do in the church on the following day and afterwards no one spoke about it.
Later in the evening the rain turned to snow and for a brief moment the white flakes lay on the pavements and glistened in the light of the street lamps. Then all turned to mud and slush, and everything returned to an all-enveloping greyness.
Already, on the very same evening of the coronation, the pageantry and colour seemed no more real than a half-forgotten dream.
Notes
2. The office of Ban was equivalent to that of a governor appointed by the monarch.
3. This, as we can see from contemporary photographs, was Empress Maria-Theresia’s diamond crown that, according to a note in the treasure house of the Hofburg in Vienna, has not been seen since 1918.
From My Memories
We were sitting at our regular Monday evening dinner table. This had started some years before the war when, on the first day of each week, the same group of friends would come together at Gusztáv Heinrich’s table in a private room at the National Kaszino. Ferenc Herczeg, Andor Miklós, the playwright Ferenc Molnár, Jëno Heltai, Ambrus and myself were the regulars, while Géza Papp was a ‘visiting member’ who occasionally joined us. These had been enjoyable evenings devoted principally to serious literary discussions interspersed by amusing analysis of the day’s news and laughter over the latest items of town gossip. Our evening meetings would pass quickly. With the war, however, the literary talk and the light-hearted telling of amusing anecdotes were dropped, and for the past six months everyone had been preoccupied with the news from the Front, and lately with growing worry at the general situation. Although our discussions had changed character during the war, they had been no less interesting, and it was at these dinners that we gained important insights from men of many different backgrounds: insights that were made all the more valuable coming, as they did, from so many viewpoints. As a result, we were lucky to be provided with an exceptionally true and vivid picture of those critical times. So, if one of us was away from the capital for some time – perhaps on some official mission or with the army at the Front – on his return he would hurry there as soon as possible knowing that he would find friends whose positions had kept them in the capital and who would therefore be fully informed about everything, whether it was public knowledge or a supposed secret, that had transpired during his absence.
When I returned from the eastern Carpathians to be greeted by the news of the Bulgarian armistice, I could hardly wait for the next Monday dinner.
The previous two weeks had been terrible. Everywhere there had been confusion and a general breakdown of order.
There were those who called for a message to be sent to President Wilson, others backed a direct approach to England.
Chapter One 
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