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regulated brothels, tabled statistics, sent reminders, received petitions, published decrees and sorted out problems of imperial etiquette. Trams, those emblematic mechanisms of Austro-Hungary, which trundled down the imperial streets in Serbia as in Poland, and were a part of the very ethos of Vienna—trams came early to Trieste, eventually even finding their way up the steep hill to Opicina and the Obelisk. Every house in the city was marked not only with a number, but with the name of its street too, with a single category of exception—and one can still hear some Undersecretary telling his clerk “But not, Ulrich, make it quite clear, not houses with subsidiary numbers like 41 A, or 24B”—“Oh most certainly, Excellency, I shall see to that, most definitely not street names for houses with subsidiary numbers . . .”
    Most citizens of Trieste were undoubtedly grateful for these benefits. They were grateful for the order of it all, for the safety of the streets and for the huge municipal hospital, occupying two whole city blocks in the most valuable part of town. They enjoyed themselves when the military bands played, the 87th Infantry Regiment drilled outside its barracks, or best of all when the Emperor himself ceremonially appeared, like a god from over the Karst, with infinite splendour of flags, feathers, gun-salutes and fireworks. They knew that theirs was more than just another city of the southern provinces, like Bozen, Agram or Laibach (one day to be transformed into Bolzano, Zagreb and Ljubljana). It was unique. Its style was set and its affairs were largely governed not by any languid local aristocracy, but by the Morpurgos, the Carciottis and the other powerful go-getters of the Chamber of Commerce. And the most important functionaries in town were not members of Ministries or armed forces, but of the Imperial Maritime Government, which had its headquarters in Trieste itself rather than in Vienna, in a charmingly pedimented waterfront building with white picket-boats on davits outside it.
    This institution was the agent of the Dual Crown in everything to do with the sea, and it was very big in Trieste, where almost everything revolved in one way or another around the docks. It was a proud calling, to be a member of the Maritime Government or its ancillary the Trieste Port Authority. The Authority’s grades of seniority were rigid, in the best imperial manner, and were emphasized for all to see by niceties of uniform: cocked hats for one grade, flat caps for another, dashing cloaks for senior functionaries, pilots’ hats to have brims two and a half inches wide. Cap-badges, of course, displayed a gold two-headed eagle surmounted by the imperial crown, and outfits were supplied by the uniform-makers Guglielmo Beck and Sons of Vienna, who had a lucrative local branch.
    WHEN the Italians took over Trieste, in 1919, even they admired the legacy of the Maritime Government, but long before then the empire had been losing its assurance, and Trieste had grown less and less the Most Faithful City. Musil satirized K u K in decline as the kingdom of Kakania, the kingdom of shit, and despite appearances by the turn of the twentieth century the whole grand structure was beginning to rot. Its methods were tangled in obfuscation, its protocols had become absurd, its armies were ineffective and Baron von Bruck’s international fraternity was falling apart. It is the way of all empires, when they last too long. As their confidence shrivels and their apparently permanent convictions fade, they become caricatures of themselves. In my own empire the Victorian archetypes of lean frontiersmen or utterly incorruptible pro-consuls gave way in the end to silly old Colonel Blimp, with his walrus moustaches and his antediluvian ideas. In the empire of the Habsburgs the genial philosophy of muddling through degenerated into what Musil characterized as “the magic formula Ass” written at the bottom of almost every official