Word: emperor
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...Emperor's best friend. She had been an actress, in the old Burgtheater hard by the Palace grounds. Franz Josef liked her histrionics very much. Reports of their first meeting differ (she was 29, he 49), but it was not long before Käthi's husband, Nikolaus Kiss von Ittebe, had been appointed to a permanent consular post in far-off Morocco, Käthi had been given the not-so-far-off cottage, and wags in the Court guard were referring to their Emperor behind his back as "Herr Schratt...
...mugs, entertained him with folk tales and Tarock-pleasures the stiff castle denied him. The severe Empress Elizabeth, who, as she bluntly put it, "was sick and tired of being brood mare to His Majesty," openly encouraged the relationship. Soon all Vienna knew of it, and approved. On the Emperor's birthday, little children would come with flowers to watch the pre-dawn passage of der alte Kaiser from his secret gate to that of "Käthi, the uncrowned Empress...
...hard times. Because she knew so much of the inside story of the Habsburgs, she was plagued by publishers, syndicates, authors' agents, cinema representatives with fantastic offers. But with wonderful loyalty she refused them all, lived off occasional sales of the Gobelins, pictures, china, and jewels the Emperor had given her (once, after a hunt, he had sent her a boar dressed up in necklaces, earrings, diamond bracelets). She made only one important revelation: in 1931 she made it clear that the mysterious double death of the Archduke Rudolf and his beautiful Baroness Maria Vetsera at the famed hunting...
...centuries fishermen on little (one square mile) Lake Nemi, 20 miles from Rome in the Alban Hills, reported mysterious fouling of their nets and shadowy hulks beneath the blue-grey water on clear days, told tall tales of two legendary floating palaces once belonging to monstrous Emperor Caligula, now rotting in the mud. In 1446 curious Cardinal Prospero Colonna made the first attempt to raise the pleasure barges, succeeded only in irreparably damaging their superstructures with the iron grappling hooks...
...pleasure craft on the tiny lake remained largely a matter of speculation. Best bet was that tyrannical Caligula used them to escape political or physical heat in Rome, taking with him his debauched court for protracted binges. Legend had it that from just such a party the catastrophe-loving emperor slipped ashore, amused himself by having the ships sunk with all on board. More probable, in view of the paucity of precious metals found on them, was the contention that succeeding rulers, sick of anything remotely pertaining to the hated Caligula, stripped the ships and allowed them...