Double-Eagle

"Who is there?" cried a solemn, monkish voice last week, responding to a thunderous knock on the great door of the crypt beneath Vienna's Church of the Capuchins. "Who is there?"

"The body of the Archduke Rainer Karl!"

"We do not know him. Who is he?"

"A poor sinner."

At these last talismanic words the great, rusty doors of the crypt groaned open to receive a Royal corpse for the first time since they closed in 1916 on the body of Franz Josef, Austrian Emperor, King of Hungary, In the presence of a brilliant assemblage, including the Ministers of Spain and France, former Austrian Prime Minister Ignaz Seipel and a host of demoted nobility, the coffin entered the crypt. It was draped with the colors of Imperial Austria. On a yellow field the black, two-headed eagle of the Habsburgs screamed again.

"Poor Sinner." The Habsburg thus buried with traditional Catholic rites for Royalty (similar rites were observed for the King of Spain's mother [TIME, Feb. 18, 1929]) may or may not have been a sinner but he died desperately poor. The expensive pageant in his honor was financed by an astute woman: Zita, widow of ill-starred Emperor Karl, mother of famed "Little Otto" who pretends to both the Imperial Austrian and the Royal Hungarian thrones (TIME, Feb. 23, 1925, et seq.).

In the opinion of Zita it is about time that her Otto received proper publicity in Vienna, for he reaches his majority next November. She therefore staged the first full-dress Habsburg funeral in Vienna since the War. Pope Pius XI is supposed to favor the candidacies of Otto, which would account for the presence of beak-nosed, bald-headed former Prime Minister Seipel, a Monsignor. Quite unimportant was the presence of the dead man's father, Archduke Leopold Salvator von Habsburg who recently published his piquant autobiography: From Archduke to Grocer (TIME, May 26).

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