Word: otto
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...Habsburg custom is that the King-Emperor does not sully himself with money (convenient since Otto's family never had much); so someone had to accompany him wherever he went, and dig down into unregal jeans whenever the Emperor wanted some cigarets. Under the Schuschnigg regime, Austria restored a few estates to the family, but the Nazis took them away again and gave them to war veterans...
...days after the death in 1922 of his father-Karl I, last of the ruling Habsburgs-little Franz Josef Otto Robert Maria Anton Karl Maximilian Heinrich Sixtus Xavier Felix Renatus Ludwig Gaetano Pius Ignaz, known to the world by his third name, lay ill of a fever in the tiny, damp-walled, smoky house of exile in Madeira to which the family had been banished. He called for his "Treasure Box"-a stationery case in which he kept pictures of his family, pressed Hungarian flowers, a lump of his native soil, a silver coin his father had given...
...years since that day, Archduke Otto has devoted his life, with the sober zeal of a Gilbert & Sullivan clown prince, to the cause of Restoration outlined in that childish paper. From Madeira the impoverished family moved to Spain, where 40 Spanish grandees bought them a villa...
There they lived in pathetic fake grandeur on a bourgeois $40,000 a year-eating more fish than meat, traveling in state in a motorbus, scrimping so as to surround themselves with a bevy of hair-combers and coat-holders-always playing at monarchy with Otto. They addressed him "Your Imperial Highness." In the nursery his seven little brothers and sisters bowed and curtsied...
...shrewd, ambitious mother kept telling Otto that he would one day be Emperor. Fanatically religious, she went to church five times a day, and entrusted Otto's education to three Benedictine monks. Because he might one day rule over many lands, she made him learn many tongues: Hungarian, German, French, English, Spanish, Basque, Croatian, Czech, and "300 words of Finnish." When Otto was ready for a university, his whole family moved to Belgium so he could attend Louvain. Otto learned to live with the austerity of his great granduncle Franz Josef-in a two-room suite like Franz Josef...