A bedroom in Vienna’s Hofburg Palace.
Joseph woke to the sound of military boots.
“Rise, Your Imperial Highness.”
In response, Joseph got up, swallowing a yawn.
Like any other noble child, he wanted to bury his face deeper into the soft pillow, but he could not.
Before he could even sit up, a cold wet towel came flying at him.
“You must come to your senses. The future emperor has no time to show weakness.”
After washing his face and saying his prayers, Joseph put on a simplified cadet’s uniform and looked at the clock.
‘Half past four….’
Breakfast was bread and milk.
“Finish your meal within ten minutes.”
Savoring food was a luxury.
To an emperor, a meal was no more than fuel for survival.
“Today, from six to eight, you have French. From eight to nine, Hungarian. From nine, riding practice, and at eleven, Introduction to Tactics.”
In the timetable recited by Colonel Coronini, words such as rest or play did not exist.
“Colonel.”
“Yes, Your Highness.”
“Today… could I not take a walk in the palace garden with my younger brother Maximilian?”
The instructor’s expression turned cold.
Instead of answering, he pointed to the map of the empire hanging on one side of the room.
“The place Your Highness must walk through is not the garden outside, but the Austrian Empire. The rebels of Lombardy, the insolent Magyar nobles of Hungary, the Hussites of Bohemia. All of them are weeds in the garden that Your Highness must prune with your own hands.”
It was too difficult for seven-year-old Joseph to understand.
But he nodded.
‘It is what Mother wishes.’
*
During tactics class, toy soldiers were arranged on the desk.
“Your Highness, where will you deploy the artillery? A messenger has reported that the enemy cavalry is circling around the left flank.”
With his small hand, Joseph moved the model cannon onto a hill.
“H-here. And the infantry will hold the center—”
“Wrong!”
The instructor’s thunderous rebuke fell.
“If you deploy them like that, the infantry will be isolated! With one clumsy judgment from Your Highness, thousands of soldiers have died! Do it again!”
Joseph wanted to cry and be held in his mother’s arms.
But remembering his mother’s words that “an emperor does not cry,” he held back his tears.
While the lesson was being repeated in earnest, Archduchess Sophie entered.
Her gaze went not to her son, but to the disordered map.
“Franzi.”
“M-Mother.”
“Have you still not mastered the basics of tactics?”
“…….”
Instead of approaching her son and stroking his hair, Sophie straightened the rumpled collar of his uniform.
“Do not forget. Your uncle is kind, but weak. Your father cannot bear the imperial throne. The future of the Habsburgs rests on your shoulders. Franzi, before you are a single human being, you must become the pillar of the empire.”
Sophie’s eyes were filled with ambition.
“You must govern your emotions. You must control your desires. You must exist only for the empire.”
Looking at that mother of his, Joseph lowered his head and answered.
“Yes… Mother.”
At thirteen, he received as his birthday present the title of colonel and commander of the 3rd Dragoon Regiment.
From that day on, Joseph the human being disappeared.
Only Crown Prince Franz Joseph, who moved according to the empire’s timetable, took his place.
After receiving the title of regimental commander, Joseph’s time flowed only through the empire, the army, and documents.
Joseph’s teachers changed from Colonel Coronini to active generals, and the toy soldiers were replaced by reports from real regiments.
‘Even at this moment, when the empire is in danger, Maximilian still speaks of art and freedom.’
Five years passed as he confirmed, day after day, the expectation held in Sophie’s eyes.
Before long, Joseph was eighteen.
March 1848.
All of Europe began to burn.
“Your Highness! You must not go outside!”
Shouts came from beyond the study window.
Freedom, constitution, down with Metternich.
The things Joseph had been taught since childhood were weeds to be managed had grown as if they would topple the palace.
“This is… revolution.”
Joseph looked down expressionlessly at the chaos beyond the window.
The process by which citizens became a crowd, and a crowd became a mob.
Then Archduchess Sophie opened the door and entered.
“Franzi. Metternich has fallen.”
The great tree that had upheld the empire for thirty years had collapsed.
‘Do not reveal your emotions.’
‘As my teacher taught me, emotions only cloud judgment.’
“Mother, what must we do?”
“We must flee.”
Flee. It was a word absent from Joseph’s education.
The imperial family escorted Emperor Ferdinand I and took refuge in Innsbruck.
The Habsburg emperor had been driven from his own capital.
In the carriage bound for Innsbruck, Sophie looked at the enraged crowd outside the window and said to me,
“Look, Franzi. That is the true face of the freedom you must guard against.”
Uncontrolled emotion, disorderly demands.
Those things are a cancer gnawing at the empire.
Mother was right.
Order had to be built with blood.
News arrived in Innsbruck.
The Italian front. Lombardy-Venetia had risen in rebellion.
“I will go to the front.”
I requested it first.
To confirm once more the weeds my instructor had pointed out to me.
I immediately joined the army of Field Marshal Radetzky, an old commander in his eighties.
May 5, 1848, the Battle of Santa Lucia.
Shells exploded with a roar, and bullets grazed past my ears.
The smell of blood was everywhere, and the adjutant beside me was terrified, but I was strangely calm.
It was the same as the tactical problems I had solved in my room eleven years before.
Only now, instead of toy soldiers, real human beings were dying.
That day, I received a new baptism in blood.
I realized that not the wordplay of liberals, but only guns and cannons were true order.
That autumn, General Windisch-Grätz retook Vienna.
The revolution was suppressed. The weeds were pulled out.
On the night I returned to Vienna, Mother called for me.
In that room sat my father, Franz Karl, and my uncle, Emperor Ferdinand I.
My uncle was still smiling foolishly, unable to grasp the situation, while my father was anxiously biting his nails.
Mother requested my uncle’s abdication.
“Your Majesty. It is time for you to lay down that burden.”
Ferdinand only blinked, not understanding.
“Burden…?”
“The empire needs a new pillar.”
Then Mother turned to my father.
“And you. You cannot bear the seat of emperor.”
My father could not refute Mother’s words and lowered his head.
All eyes turned to me.
I stepped forward.
I neither cried, nor smiled, nor hesitated. It was the sole reason for my existence, prepared over a long time.
December 2, 1848.
My uncle abdicated, and my father renounced the throne.
At the age of eighteen, I stood upon the ashes of a burned empire.
“Long live His Majesty the Emperor!”
Amid the cries of my vassals, I looked at Mother.
Those eyes, satisfied with everything.
Those eyes that looked at me not as a son, but only as an emperor, tempered me into strength.
The weeds I thought had all been uprooted had survived tenaciously.
Because of the Hungarian Revolution and an attempted assassination, Mother wished for me to marry quickly, and we went to Bad Ischl.
And there, I met Elisabeth.
For the first time since I was seven, I offered Elisabeth the cotillion bouquet not out of imperial duty, but of my own will.
She received the flower from me.
“Joseph, wake up.”
What?
“Joseph, quickly!”
Awakened by Sissi urging me on in my dream, I looked at the Sissi before my eyes.
“It moved!”
A dream…?
“Would you like to touch?”
My heart, not yet escaped from the dream, pounded violently.
It had been a dream.
There was no smell of blood from 1848, nor the danger of assassination from 1853.
My blurred vision came into focus.
A warm room filled with afternoon sunlight. And before my eyes was my empress, Sissi, who had just awakened me.
She had covered my hand with hers and placed it on her belly.
“Sissi?”
“Shh. Stay still…!”
She whispered to me with sparkling eyes.
Since returning to Vienna, my mind had once again been filled with the words empire and order.
But she had come to me again.
As if the night in Milan had not been a midsummer night’s dream.
Tap.
It was very faint, but I felt something against my palm.
“Did you feel it? Just now, again!”
Startled, I looked at Sissi.
Her face, bathed in the afternoon sunlight, was brighter than I had ever seen it.
Tap-tap.
Once more. This time, a slightly clearer movement.
An heir.
Mother wanted an heir for the continuity of the dynasty.
That was a duty. But this sensation tickling my palm could not be expressed with any of the words I had learned.
It was an extension of the crack that had formed when I first saw her in Bad Ischl, emerging from the forest in defiance of every rule.
I raised my other hand and, without realizing it, placed it over Sissi’s hand.
The movement of the heir, felt through the thin fabric of her dress.
“Joseph, are you crying?”
Sissi asked me with a flustered expression.
I could not say a word.
Eighteen years of statecraft and imperial duty were being helplessly shaken by that one tiny kick beneath my palm, and by Sissi’s smile.
***
… Why is he crying?
“Are you not happy?”
“I am happy.”
“I came running to you first, you know.”
During the afternoon rest hour, I had slipped out through the connecting passage without the maids knowing and asked a footman to let me into Joseph’s bedroom.
“Since you are carrying the heir, tell me one thing you want.”
Honestly, Joseph.
I told you not to lock yourself inside the duties of the emperor when it is just the two of us.
“What will you do if it is a daughter, saying such things already?”
Even if it is semi-Salic law, as far as I know, our daughter would inherit the throne only if every last male relative were gone.
“It does not matter. Is this not our first child?”
“Next time, say that first.”
A brief smile passed over Joseph’s face.
“I understand, Sissi.”