LXIII
THE LAST YEAR
Premonitions · Bloch’s death · The Transvaal · Stanhope on the situation · My husband’s sudden illness · Three letters · Congress in Monaco · The Oceanographic Museum · Prince Albert I · The corrective · Pierre Quillard on the Armenian horrors · The crag castle · Venetian night · The Duke of Urach · From Prince Albert’s after-dinner speech · A dedication to the German Emperor · Return home · An act of D’Estournelles’s · The first controversy before the Hague Tribunal · Opening of the Bloch Museum at Lucerne · Anti-dueling League · A letter from Prince Alfonso de Borbon · Offer for a lecture tour in the United States · Hodgson Pratt on America · Visits of Emanuel Nobel and Princess Tamara of Georgia at Harmannsdorf · Sojourn in Ellischau · A surprise · Adjournment of the Interparliamentary Conference at Vienna · The end · From the will · Provisional conclusion · What is yet to follow
The last year of him who was my all.
On New Year’s Day, 1902, all sorts of trifling annoyances happened to us.
“You will see,” said My Own, more in jest than in earnest, for he was not superstitious, “this is going to be a bad year.”
During the first week indeed came bad news, a dispatch from Warsaw,—“Johann von Bloch dead of heart disease.” Once more a mighty fellow-combatant gone from us!
The war in the Transvaal still kept on. It was now in its third year. At first the English believed that it was merely a little military promenade; and now these unending sacrifices and losses. I wrote to Philip Stanhope asking him if he could give me some information regarding the situation, and perhaps raise his voice against the continuance of the strife. He wrote back:
3 Carlton Gardens, S.W.
January 25, 1902
Dear Baroness de Suttner: