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schools in accordance with the Law of 21 July 1864, the Minister of Religion, Culture, and Education mostrespectfully takes the liberty of calling Your Lordship’s attention to the circumstance that, in accordance with the Edict of 21 March 1840, the primer selections of historic significance, in particular those relating to the august person of His Majesty Emperor Franz Joseph as well as other members of the Supreme Imperial House, are to be adjusted to the intellectual capacities of the pupils and kept consistent with the best possible pedagogic goals. The text in question, No. 15, as mentioned in Your Lordship’s complaint, was submitted personally to His Excellency the Minister of Religion, Culture, and Education, who approved the use thereof in the school system. It was the intention of the higher educational authorities and no less that of the lower educational authorities to introduce the pupils in the Monarchy to the heroic deeds performed by members of the Armed Forces and to depict them in accordance with the juvenile character, imagination, and patriotic sentiments of the developing generation without altering the veracity of the events portrayed, but also without rendering them in a dry tone devoid of any spur to the imagination and any patriotic sentiments. In consequence of the above and similar considerations, the undersigned most respectfully begs Your Lordship to be so good as to withdraw his complaint
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    This document was signed by the Minister of Religion, Culture, and Education. The colonel handed it to Captain Trotta with the fatherly words, “Let it be!”
    Trotta took it and remained silent. One week later, through official channels, he petitioned for an audience with His Majesty, and one morning three weeks later he stood in the palace, face-to-face with the Supreme Commander in Chief.
    “Listen, my dear Trotta!” said the Kaiser. “The whole business is rather awkward. But neither of us comes off all that badly. Let it be!”
    “Your Majesty,” replied the captain, “it’s a lie!”
    “People tell a lot of lies,” the Kaiser confirmed.
    “I can’t, Your Majesty,” the captain choked forth.
    The Kaiser inched closer to the captain. The monarch was scarcely taller than Trotta. They locked eyes.
    “My ministers,” Franz Joseph began, “must know what they’re doing. I have to rely on them. Do you catch my drift, my dear Trotta?” And after a while. “We’ll do something. You’ll see!”
    The audience was over.
    His father was still alive. But Trotta did not go to Laxenburg. He returned to the garrison and requested his discharge from the army.
    He was discharged as a major. He moved to Bohemia, to his father-in-law’s small estate. Imperial favor did not abandon him. A few weeks later, he was notified that the Kaiser had seen fit to contribute five thousand guldens from the privy purse to the education of the son of the man who had saved his life. At the same time, Trotta was raised to the barony.
    Baron Joseph von Trotta und Sipolje accepted these imperial gifts sullenly, as insults. The campaign against the Prussians was waged and lost without him. His resentment simmered. His temples were already turning silvery, his eyes dim, his steps slow, his hands heavy, his words fewer than ever. Though a man in the prime of life, he appeared to be aging swiftly. He had been driven from the paradise of simple faith in Emperor and Virtue, Truth, and Justice, and, now fettered in silence and endurance, he may have realized that the stability of the world, the power of laws, and the glory of majesties were all based on deviousness. Thanks to the Kaiser’s casually expressed wish, Reading Text No. 15 disappeared from the monarchy’s schoolbooks. The Trotta name survived only in the unknown annals of the’ regiment.
    The major now vegetated as the unknown bearer of ephemeral fame, like a fleeting shadow that a secret object sends into the bright world of the living. On his father-in-law’s