From The Adorations:

Stefanie put down her pen, suddenly aware of distant noise, her attention distracted by a growing commotion outside. The even pitch of traffic sounds had been jarred into dissonance. A concentrated shouting rose from the busy street below, the knotted clamor of an accident or other intrusive event. She went to the window and looked down on the Mariahilferstrasse. Traffic was moving, but slowly, and a trolley car sat immobile in the middle of the roadway. Some of its passengers were dismounting gingerly, as if dazed, but not, apparently, injured; there was no blood, at least, and everyone was upright. On the pavement small groups were breaking apart and coming together again like plant cells under a magnifying glass, moving here and there with no apparent purpose until, as Stefanie watched, one tight nucleus of a dozen or so raincoated men made in a body for the neighboring offices of the Neue Freie Presse. Shouts rose, faintly. Stefanie opened a window. She heard yells and cries, but none of the laughter that might be expected from crowds celebrating the traditional Viennese feast day of Peter and Paul. Her neighbor, Frau Schmidt, an aging ex-actress from the Burgtheater of yore, was leaning out her window next door.

“What is it, Fraulein von Rothenberg?”

“I don’t know, Frau Schmidt. Perhaps an eminent personage has died.” Had Franz Josef applied once again at death’s door and finally been admitted? No; the alarums in the street had all the earmarks of something more violent, unexpected, and crowd-creating. There was continued shouting, but no aggression or arguing, therefore no opinions in opposition as there would be after, say, an election, or a sports event. A few men were leaning against the wall of the building opposite, clearly stunned by some great herd-emotion. A unit of mounted policemen was cantering three abreast down the broad avenue with no other apparent purpose than to convey the reassurance of armed authority.

       “Franz Ferdinand!” bawled a youth directly below, seeing the inquisitive faces at the windows. He mimed a gun, held it to his head. “Dead!”

“A suicide? Like Rudolf?” screamed Frau Schmidt, leaning so far out of her window that the strong hands of (presumably) Herr Schmidt intervened from behind to grab her around the midriff. “Oh my God! And the Duchess Sophie? Fraulein von Rothenberg, do you know?”

“No, Frau Schmidt, but I will find out.”

Impatient at the distraction, but impatient also to learn the truth, Stefanie ran downstairs and crossed the street to the offices of the Neue Freie Presse, a short journey that was nevertheless long enough for her to piece together from overheard scraps of conversation the dreadful news that the Archduke and his Duchess were dead—murdered—assassinated—somewhere in the Balkans, either Croatia or Montenegro, or was it Herzegovina...?

“What’s the latest?” she inquired of a rough-looking man smoking a

cigarette outside the newspaper offices. The man shrugged and took a deep pull on his cigarette.

“FF got shot, didn’t he?” he said in a Hungarian accent, and pointed to a freshly posted notice on the newspaper’s public bulletin board.

“Although we join the entire Imperial family in deepest mourning, as a result of the fatal attack by Serbian nationalists on Their Imperial Highnesses Franz Ferdinand and Sophie in Sarajevo this office will remain open indefinitely for official dispatches ONLY. All other business is suspended. Accredited representatives please contact Herr Direktor Kommerz-Rath Dr. Heiliger for any further information, Telephone (Schšnbrunn Exchange) 122-8.”

It was a violent re-awakening of the hard world of human reality to which Stefanie, adrift in mysticism and speculation, had given so little thought for so long.

“Please tell me what it means, Fraulein von Rothenberg,” begged Frau Schmidt, when Stefanie had returned with the news.

“It means that Charles will be the next Emperor, Frau Schmidt,” said Stefanie. “Or maybe we’ll get a republic when the old Emperor dies. I really don’t know.” And of course she knew not what it meant (indeed, beneath her quite genuine shock she was still, foolishly, irritated at having been torn away from her journal, in which she now wrote, “June 28, The Archduke is dead. Sophie too.”), but it carried away beyond the horizon of the irretrievable past a shimmering glimpse of the Archduke and his lady on a fine summer morning in Linz in 1907; and onto the blank wall of the future it cast the ominous shadow of Momentous Change.