People streamed out of the theatres, cinemas and restaurants, hurrying into the streets in silence, some of them still buttoning up their coats as they went, others muttering to each other in low voices. Everyone was going home and, as they went, they stopped in little groups, huddled in front of the newspaper stands where one single announcement was headlined in huge letters of black. On most evenings the people of Budapest, sick of the monotonous sadness of war news, would hurry past the depressing newsstands – but tonight they stopped to look and read. On this evening their minds were no longer preoccupied by the gentle panacea of crossword puzzles, nor by their fears of growing poverty: today, for a while, they put aside their daily anxiety for those on the front line, their fears and worry for husbands, sons and brothers who were prisoners-of-war, their anguish for the dead. Today all were overcome by the sense of a great national disaster, by the fear of what was to come and the terror of an unknown future.

What was drawing everyone to those brightly lit newsstands was the announcement of the death of Franz Joseph. Everyone knew that it must be true, and yet it seemed almost impossible to believe that the man whom few men living could recall ascending the throne, who had in himself enshrined the whole concept of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and of the Hungarian kingdom, and who, for most of those who trudged the streets that night, had been a disembodied symbol rather than a real man of flesh and blood was now no more. The bald facts had to be faced: from this day there would be a new ruler – a young man that as yet few people knew anything about and that the old familiar sovereign who, although infinitely aged and infinitely mysterious, had been to all his peoples the unchangeable and ultimate arbiter of their lives, had finally said his last farewell.

From the police headquarters in the city messages were telephoned to order that all performances should cease in the theatres, cinemas and concert-halls, and that all restaurants should close. As it happened, these messages arrived after the news itself. The music had been stopped, the curtains rung down, and the people themselves were already on their way home. It had not needed a police order for the Budapest public to know how it should show respect for such news as this.

It had been the same for me. At noon that same day the news was spread abroad that the old king had taken a turn for the worse. That night I did not, as I otherwise always did, go to the opera but remained instead at the Kaszino Club, which was always in close touch with the office of the Minister-President. There I was sure to be contacted at once if there were any official instructions for whose dissemination I would be responsible. Immediately I had heard the news of the king’s death I had telephoned to officials at the Opera1 and the National Theatre, and both informed me that the news had already reached them, been announced from the stage and that by now most of the audience had left.

The next day was cloudy. Everything seemed darker than usual.

After the official obituaries and leading articles written to bid adieu to the old monarch came the details of his last hours: simple, dispassionate, crystal-clear – and as cold and as transparent as crystal too – just as he had lived his whole life. He had worked at his desk, as he always did, until he had finished everything he had to do. This was a discipline he had always imposed upon himself, a duty he had performed daily. At the end of each day there was no unfinished business to be later put in order, and at the end of his life it was the same, even in his last hours. Before he went to bed he took the document case in which all those confidential papers that had been sent to him that day were kept. His last words were as simple and unpretentious as his life: ‘I am tired.’

Only that – a phrase he might have uttered any evening during the last half-century when he, the man who worked hardest of any in the kingdom, retired to bed.

The funeral was held on the last day of the month.

I had hardly returned to Budapest after the funeral – and certainly had not yet rid myself of the disagreeable impressions made by the chaotic arrangements inside St Stephen’s Cathedral – where the noise and tumult and confusion were all the more unexpected because of the fastidious manner in which all state occasions were usually handled at the court of Vienna – when I was summoned to the meetings held to start preparations for the coronation in Hungary. I had to present myself at the old royal palace in Buda that very morning, 1 December.

We gathered in the anteroom of the Minister-President’s office. Present were several ministers, the chairman of the Council for National Monuments, the chief of police, several heads of various departments of the civil service … and the press.

Everyone was in a subdued mood, for all had heard the news of a terrible train disaster that had occurred during the night on the Brusk line. The express from Vienna, packed with people returning from Franz Joseph’s funeral, had run head-on into a passenger train going in the opposite direction. The morning papers only contained a few lines about the disaster, but there was enough to tell the world that there had been hundreds who were badly hurt and at least thirty dead, among whom, it was almost certain, must be counted Lajos Thallóczy, the eminent historian, creator of Bosnia and a trusted confidant of the dead emperor. Many of those at our meeting had had relatives returning from Vienna that night, but no one knew whether it had been on that train that they had been travelling. Each time that some newcomer arrived at the meeting he would be quickly surrounded and asked what new details had become known. Although the atmosphere was calm and controlled, there was an underlying feeling of anxiety and fear … and each new arrival brought more horrifying and surprising details. It was a black day.

Around the table everyone sat with set expressions on their face, trying not to show that they all felt that this terrible accident occurring on the night of the old king’s funeral, in the third year of war and almost on the eve of the new king’s coronation, was a sinister omen. Everyone had the same thought, but no one put it into words lest it should be tempting fate.

However the time was passing and, whatever might have been in our hearts, there was work to be done and decisions to be made. Therefore, setting aside their gloom and personal anxieties, the members of the Council got down to their task.