Austrian Chancellor Clemens Lothar Metternich, nicknamed The Grand Inquisitor of Europe, and to whose persistence and good taste we owe the invention of the Viennese chocolate torte, or Sachertorte, once said that coffee should be hot as love, sweet as sin, and black as hell. Vienna had adopted the habit of drinking coffee thanks to the invasion of the Turks, who were defeated once and for all in 1683, that Year of Wonders, annus mirabilis, following the unsuccessful siege mounted by the Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa. This didn't keep the city from teaching the world forty different ways of preparing coffee, not always hot, sweet, or black.
But Vienna, whose city walls had disappeared at the beginning of the century to give way to the beautiful avenue known as the Ringstrasse, is also the city originally founded by the Romans as Vindobona or Vindominia. It's the city where the Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius died, and that was devastated by the plague in 1679. The plague was a scourge from God, and was often a crueller and better-aimed weapon than the infidel's scimitars and catapults: St Louis, King of France, died of plague in the final Crusade. Vienna showed the world the pomp and splendour of a triumphant and resplendent Baroque era that combined Gothic and Renaissance art, frivolity and exuberance, in temples like Karlskirche, in palaces like Schönbrunn, and in monuments like the Column of the Holy Trinity. The city always manifested its joy in living, its love for pageantry, and its gluttonous tendencies as well.
It showed its love of nature in 1552 in the great enthusiasm that an elephant, a gift to the emperor from the Grand Turk, awakened in the Viennese; by the amazement caused by a giraffe bestowed upon Vienna by the Egyptian Viceroy (which resulted in a giraffe craze, consisting of dances, hairstyles, skirts, and makeup à la girafe); and by the admiration provoked when Captain Hadlock brought a pair of Eskimos from the North Pole – promptly put on display in Belvedere Park, to the endless amazement of the Viennese. Not for nothing did Franz Schubert die from typhoid fever and extreme poverty: Vienna turned to and then taught the world the delights of pop music – the dizzying waltz, the diabolical violin of Johann Strauss, as well as the mechanical tunes that seemed to come out of nowhere every time a clock struck the half hour (with minuets), or the quarter hour (with gavottes); every time, in short, that a window or a snuff box was opened, or an ivory ball was placed on the blue felt of a billiards table. In keeping with the times, the Viennese upper-middle class, who weekly ordered a vat of hot bathwater for their houses, also hung Aeolian harps from trees in their gardens to be played by the Alpine winds.
But Vienna, this Vienna, which from 1556 had been the capital of the most illustrious emperors of the house of Habsburg – those founders of the principle of universal monarchy, whose control through the course of the centuries extended from Portugal to Transylvania, from Holland to Sicily, and to four-fifths of the American continent – had also taken it upon itself to teach Piedmont patriots how to dance to the sound of whip-cracks, and to the rhythm of falling truncheons. And this same Vienna had hanged Hungarian rebels so that they too could learn to dance, to the beat of a vulture's wings.
In that city, in Schönbrunn Palace, on July 6, 1832, Ferdinand Maximilian Joseph was born. He was the brother of the future Emperor of Austria-Hungary and himself the future emperor of one of those American countries where a dazzling sun still hung, then, from its zenith, illuminating a great vastness of tropics and deserts, albeit when this pale sun, shining on the Alcazar of Toledo and the cathedral of Vienna, had already begun to hide beyond the horizon.
Better known by his second name, that of his notable ancestor Maximilian I – patron of the arts, deer hunter, founder of the Spanish Habsburg branch via the arranged marriage of his son Philip the Fair to Juana the Mad, claimant of a lineage leading back to Priam, and aspirant to the papacy – Ferdinand Maximilian Joseph came into the world two weeks before the death (perhaps of consumption or from a poisoned melon), in that same Schönbrunn Palace, of a boy with a spirit of iron and a body of glass, called the "King of Rome" in some quarters. This boy didn't really have a chance to say very much on his deathbed, since his mouth was constantly filling up with a bloody mucus that Moll, his faithful servant, had to wipe away with a handkerchief.
Some say his last words were "Poultices! Ampules!" Others say that they were "Harness the horses! I must see my father. I must embrace him one more time!" It's also possible, of course, that the King of Rome – who was never a king, and was never in Rome – had died of love for Maximilian's mother, the Archduchess Sophie.
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Translated by Alfonso González and Stella T. Clark.
