gossamer white veil, long white silk dress with a red and white bouquet of roses tucked into her red sash, ermine stole draped over her shoulders.
After a long siege of rain, the sun shed on them the radiance of a doubly special day. This Sunday marked not only St. Vitus Day for the Serbs but also the anniversary of a marriage sorely tried yet victorious. Exactly fourteen years ago, on June 28, 1900, Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand and the Countess Sophie Chotek had taken their vows in stealth, in disgrace, in the pointed absence of the Emperor and the entire Imperial clan. For fourteen years the Crown Prince had had to announce his own wife's inferiority of blood. During all court functions of all those years she had had to enter alone after the Emperor; he had had to wait for Sophie to creep in at the tail end of protocol, after the youngest Archduchess toddled by in diapers.
Today would atone for much of that. This morning's dazzle at Sarajevo would be his revenge and her redress.
At the first stop, inspecting the honor guard at Filippovic Barracks, he undid a good deal of those fourteen years. To Sophie's glory he upended military proprieties. Today the colors dipped for the Duchess no less than for the Archduke. At his instruction she stood not behind him, but at his side. When he walked past the reverence of rifles presented at attention, his hand rested not on the hilt of his saber but on the handle of her parasol as his Sophie strode with him, shoulder to shoulder. Today, instead of denying her existence, he celebrated it. He exalted it. He, Crown Prince of the realm, was her servitor. He carried her parasol at a most public occasion.
And therefore the cannons starting their roar while the Imperial party re-boarded their six automobiles-the cannons booming their twenty-four-fold salute-boomed in her honor as well as his. They boomed while the motorcade rolled along slowly at Franz Ferdinand's orders; he wanted his Sophie to savor her triumph in leisure, and he wanted her to see at least some of Sarajevo's one hundred mosques and ninety churches. The cannons boomed from the hilltop fortress specially repainted for the occasion-its Habsburg yellow matched the black-yellow flag fluttering from Franz Ferdinand's car. The cannons boomed as the procession passed Cemaszula Street just renamed Franz Ferdinand Boulevard. They boomed as the huge cars turned into Appel Quay along the Miljacka river. They boomed across spires, domes, minarets, whitewashed houses on one side of the street; they boomed across poplars and cypresses greening the hills against the sky on the other. They boomed above gold-crested police helmets behind whose thin line stood a somewhat thicker crowd of people crying 'Zivio!' They boomed over portraits of the Archduke placed on many window sills-hundreds of stern Franz Ferdinands glaring down from picture frames at the Prince's now more amiable live face, gliding by in the seat next to his wife.
The last boom reverberated away. A peculiar echo followed it. One of the cars behind the Archduke's seemed to have blown a tire. The Duchess reached for the back of her neck where she thought a gnat had stung her. At the same time, confused shouting spread along the quay. Gendarmes started running toward some sort of scuffle that was tumbling down the river embankment.
The Archduke's raised hand signaled the procession to a halt. A member of his retinue, Count Franz von Harrach, jumped out to reconnoiter.
Two minutes later he was back, breathless: A bomb had been thrown at the car behind them. It had injured some bystanders as well as Lieutenant Colonel Erich von Merizzi of the Archduke's escort. But Merizzi had only been hit in the hand, by a splinter. The perpetrator had just been arrested as he'd tried to escape across the river.
Pale but composed, the Duchess said that a splinter must have touched her, too, in the back of her neck. Instantly the Archduke examined her. He found the barest evidence of a tiny scratch; the skin had not been broken.
'Madness!' the Archduke said. 'But let's go on.'
They went on. Count von Harrach did not resume his seat by the chauffeur. He stood on the running board to shield the Archduke. Shortly after 10 A.M. the motorcade reached City Hall. It was just a few minutes late, as though nothing had happened.
And nobody at City Hall thought anything had. Under the red-gold moorish loggias, on top of a white staircase, bowed an array of Bosnian notables. Turbaned mullahs, bishops in miters and gilt vestments, rabbis in kaftans, municipal personages with sash and decorations. The mayor Fehim Effendi Curcio, in fez and tailcoat, had heard a bang; to him and to the others it had sounded like some additional salute from a smaller cannon. Blithely the mayor launched into his own fulsome greeting: 'Your Imperial and Royal Highness, our exalted Crown Prince! Your Serene Highness, our Crown Prince's most esteemed wife! At this most happy moment our hearts are overflowing with gratitude for the most gracious visit bestowed-'
'Mr. Mayor!' The Archduke's gravel voice cut through the air. 'What kind of gratitude! A bomb has been thrown at us! Outrageous!'
The mayor gagged. Fezzes, turbans, kaftans trembled and huddled. The Duchess whispered briefly into the Archduke's ear. The glare in his eyes softened. 'Very well,' the Archduke said. 'Very well. Mr. Mayor, get on with your speech.'
The Duchess's intervention allowed everything to continue with remarkable smoothness. The mayor went through the rest of his oration. For a moment it seemed as if Franz Ferdinand would not be able to answer because the text of his response (with its Slavic finale) had been left in the car disabled by the bomb. Just then an equerry came running with white pages blotched red from the wounded officer.
Franz Ferdinand ripped the script out of the man's hand. The Duchess put one finger on her husband's arm. Once more her touch composed him. Evenly he wiped the blood away with a handkerchief offered by the equerry. Evenly he began to read his speech, improvising only one deft change. 'I consider,' he said, 'the welcome extended to my wife and me as expressions of joy that the attempt on our lives has been foiled.'
All dignitaries clapped hands in relief. The Archduke went into his Serbo-Croat peroration: 'Standing in this beautiful capital city, I assure you, our Slav and Mohammedan citizens, of our august Emperor's continued interest in your well-being and of my own unchanging friendship.'
'Zivio!' from the dignitaries. Much applause. A courier roared up on a motorcycle. Good tidings from the garrison hospital to which the injured officer had been brought. Doctors confirmed that he had only a slight flesh wound.
Now the ceremonies resumed their planned course. The Duchess went upstairs to the second floor of City Hall where Muslim ladies wanted to tender their respects to her unveiled. Franz Ferdinand recovered his mordant humor. 'Did you hear?' he said to an aide. 'The bomb thrower wanted to swallow cyanide? Idiot! Doesn't he know our Austrian criminal justice system? They'll give the man a decoration!' Thinlipped smiles from the retinue. 'And maybe they'll have to give out more than one decoration. Maybe we'll have some more Kugerln coming our way.' The Archduke was speaking in Viennese dialect, relishing its sardonic diminutives. 'Kugerln' meant 'bulletlets.'
More thin-lipped smiles all around. With a mocking bow the Archduke turned to General Potiorek, Bosnia's Military Governor. 'What do you think, General? Any more Kugerln in your valued judgment?'
'Your Imperial Highness, it was an isolated lunatic,' Potiorek said. 'I think Your Imperial Highness can go on at ease.
'The program, then, as scheduled,' Franz Ferdinand said. 'But first I'll visit Merizzi in the hospital.'
'Your Imperial Highness, the wound is nothing,' Potiorek said. 'Merizzi will be released within an hour-'
'This man is my fellow officer,' the Archduke broke in. 'He is bleeding for me. You'll have the goodness to understand that. You'll have the further goodness to order another car to take my wife back to her hotel-'
Now it was the Archduke who was being interrupted. The Duchess had returned from the upper floor. She stopped his sentence not with words, but with a silent headshake. She stepped closer to her husband. A small step, but irrefutable. She was not going to the hotel in a different car. Not under any circumstances. She was staying by his side.
The Archduke gave a mellowed nod; revoked his order for another automobile. As they walked out of City Hall he took her parasol again. Just outside the entrance, he gripped her hand. They stood in the blinding sunshine on top of the stairs, a clear target for any sharpshooter in the multitude below.
The multitude did nothing but cheer. 'Zivio!.. Zivio!'
From Sarajevo's church towers the clocks struck half past ten in the morning. To the notables at City Hall the clangor ended a crisis.
The same church bells tolled a very different message to the ears of a teenage schoolboy with a bomb and a pistol under his jacket. 'All is over, all is over,' they tolled for Gavrilo Princip. It was all over. It had all been for
