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memorandum and short for Asserviert —Awaiting Further Consideration.
    No such prevarication had been necessary when, in the great days of the system, His Excellency had instantly determined that a 21A or a 42B did not merit a street name on its number-plate.

FOUR

Only the Band Plays On
    K u K , all the same, never lost its spell over Trieste. Charles VI is that peremptory emperor on his column in the Piazza Unita. Leopold I holds his orb and sceptre above the Piazza Borsa and the Empress Elizabeth, “Sissy,” Franz Joseph’s wayward Bavarian wife, stands in the shade of the trees outside the railway station. Official buildings of the imperial prime still dominate many streets like so many mummified swells. Banks and insurance offices boast of old glories, with their marble and mahogany counters, their mosaic floors and their portentous statuary: within my own memory you had to bang a big silver bell with your hand to get attention in such a place, your cheque was authorized by rubber stamps with big wooden handles, and your money was discharged with a masterly hiss through a polished brass tube.
    It is easy to enter the home of one of imperial Trieste’s presiding grandees. It is a museum now, but a very personal one—a museum of him, really. Baron Pasquale Revoltella was an enormously rich bachelor, Venetian by origin, who had made his fortune by sometimes dubious speculations in grain, timber and meat. He spent a short time in jail, but worked his way back to respectability, and converted himself in later years into an archetypal tycoon of Franz Joseph’s Trieste. He had a finger in a multitude of pies. He was a founder of the Assicurazioni Generale, one of the greatest of European insurance companies, and he owned the Hôtel de la Ville, the best in town. Most profitably of all, he was among the first to recognize the benefits of a canal through the Suez isthmus, eventually becoming the Austrian representative on the board of the Suez Canal Company, and its largest private shareholder. He had a villa in a suburban park, with its own chapel for his eventual burial, beside his mother; but it is his town house, designed for him by a German architect, that best expresses him, his vocation, his time and his city. Nowadays it overlooks the Piazza Venezia. When he built it the square was called Piazza , Giuseppina, in honour of the Emperor Joseph II, and outside its windows was a statue of Rear-Admiral the Archduke Maximilian, late commander of the Imperial Navy, bald but bearded and in full uniform. Franz Joseph had been present at its unveiling, and the Baron was a prominent member of its sponsoring committee, which met inside his house.
    Revoltella died in the 1870s and left his house to the city, stuffed with the works of art that testified to his culture and his wealth—“handsomely fitted up,” commented Baedeker’s Austro-Hungary approvingly in 1905. It has been enlarged in recent years to incorporate Trieste’s civic gallery of modern art, but much of it is the same today as it was when he and his mother lived in it, an opulent hothouse of silks, velvets, chandeliers, tassels and gilts. It is not exactly Germanesque, it is not precisely Italian: it is in a mercantile high capitalist style that is very Triestine. Up its velvet-railed staircase, on one of Revoltella’s grand reception nights, we imagine the beau monde of Trieste sweeping with their fans and sashes, some genuinely flattered to be invited to the house of the legendary nabob, some still loftily condescending.
    Clutching the catalogue which the Baron has had printed for his guests, they inspect the wonders of his affluence. They marvel (or scoff) at the emblematic sculpture, half-way up the stairs, which is called Cutting the Isthmus of Suez: this has a plaque of Ferdinand de Lesseps on one side of its plinth, and a plaque of the Khedive Abbas of Egypt on the other, and is illuminated by a red electric bulb held between the wrought-iron fangs of