Joseph Roth - The Hundred Days

“Charles,” he replied.

“Good,” said Angelina. And now she felt that everything was in order and in good standing.

She spent the night with Commissariat official Charles Rouiffic. At this point she discovered, to her slight horror, that he seemed to have the ability to change himself from hour to hour — and at even shorter intervals. To start, when he removed his coat, he was a second Charles, a Charles in a vest and shirt; when he removed his vest, he was a third man, more strange than the second; and when he leaned over her and started to caress her, he was a third man who had become terrifyingly strange. After several hours he woke her, fresh, cheery, mustache brushed and pomaded, and his face looking like a little round and pink sunlit morning cloud. He was already fully dressed, and his sword hung faithfully at his hip as though it had never left his side. Now he was a fourth man, even more strange than the others.

During the day she forgot about him, and if he now and then did enter her thoughts she was soon able to chase his image out of her mind. She was ashamed — he was a stranger, and yet she needed him. That she needed a stranger only deepened her shame. But the hour was rapidly nearing when she had promised to meet him again. As she grew closer to him, he became ever clearer and more familiar, and finally he was a real person.

All this happened to Angelina in the last days before the great confusion in the land. So perhaps the state of bewilderment in which she found herself was down to the all-encompassing terror that was passing over the land like an evil, low-hanging storm cloud. Before the actual thunder of the enemy cannon was audible in Paris, it seemed to all that they could already hear the first echoes of enemy gunfire. Before it was known that the Emperor was truly defeated and was fleeing to the capital with the remnants of his army, everyone had a foreboding that he had lost and was retreating. This premonition was more terrible than the actual certainty a few days later. Evil forebodings bewilder the simple hearts of men, but evil certainty only worries and weakens them.

Angelina was no exception. She was bewildered amid the general bewilderment and terrified amid the general terror.

One day Charles, the Commissariat official, disappeared. For some days his presence at a specific place and at a definite time had been a humiliating but certain refuge. Now Angelina waited in vain. She sat in the little tavern, accordion music playing loudly, under the gaze of the staff who knew her and seemed themselves to be waiting on the appearance of Commissariat official Charles Rouiffic. All around her they were already gossiping about the misfortune of the Emperor, the misfortune of France. Angelina finally left.

Many people in France at that time in 1814 were living in a state of chaos and distress. The enemy arrived. He came as enemies invariably do, with the full hellish retinue of the victor — vindictiveness, despotism, and a lust for spreading pointless misery. Numerous and very diverse were the enemies of France, but they all spread the same terror and they all promulgated sorrow and disaster through the same methods. Greater still than the confusion in the country and in the city of Paris was the confusion at the Imperial court. It was even stronger among the lower-level servants than among the high officials who were in the Emperor’s service. For the simple and lowly are always the first to feel disaster’s approach and also the first to suffer. The simple and the lowly are innocent of the faults and errors, the sins and fates of the great ones. Yet they suffer more than the famous ones. Storms destroy poor weak huts but they sweep past the strong stone houses.

Two days before the Emperor left the city and the country, the lesser ones began to leave him. All their simple hearts were concerned with was fear for their lives, fear of an unknown and thus terrifying danger. They fled aimlessly in all different directions. The servant men and women took refuge with friends who were also serving the Emperor, but in other palaces, as though those who had not shared a roof with the great Emperor were less exposed to danger and as though their daily proximity to him would implicate them in some type of crime for which they might have to suffer. Meanwhile, the servants in these other palaces also left, equally lost, aimless, and foolish. Véronique Casimir left as well. She who was once so magnificent could be seen packing a significant amount of luggage and driving away in a spacious coach in which even her figure, formerly so heavy with dignity, appeared at that moment to have shrunk.

Angelina took a sorrowful leave of her. She remained alone in the enemy palace. New servants appeared, dressed in unfamiliar royal uniforms. Day after day she waited for some sign from her son. There was no more work, no smoothing-iron to brandish, no cambric, no silk. There were only new and enemy faces. Perhaps her son was dead too. She recalled the hour of his birth — so long ago — the snowflakes were falling gently and pleasantly outside her window. She remembered his first smile, his first babbling, and that happy Sunday when she saw him take his first steps on his own. . and then that dreadful Sunday, much later, when she first noticed that he had become a stranger to her and was his father’s son. The child she had borne and fed at her breast was long since lost. The little drummer was even more alien to her than Sergeant-Major Sosthène.

Three days after the good-natured but cold-hearted King returned, a new head of staff appeared among the court servants, Véronique Casimir’s successor. Scrawny and hard, ugly and haggard, she was reminiscent of an icicle. But as she wore white lilies in her hair, upon her chest and at her waist, she was also reminiscent of a cemetery.

This new head of staff told Angelina that she must leave the King’s palace.

So Angelina sought the only woman she really knew, the midwife Pocci. Her poor little woven straw box, which she had carried so cheerfully with her into Paris, grew more massive and heavy. Soon she was hardly able to drag herself along, so she put her burden down at pavement’s edge and sat on it. She believed that all her distress and utter desolation was due solely to the exhaustion of her feet. As she sat there, however, she felt after a moment an uneasiness even greater than her fatigue. Strange dangers seemed to be closing in and were already lurking at the next corner. When she looked up she saw menacing clouds blowing by close over the rooftops. From a nearby street came the confused shouts of the rejoicing people who were cheering for the King and cursing the defeated Emperor. The crowd neared and she could clearly hear it cry: “Long live the King!” Tears came to her eyes. She was afraid to be seen weeping; it could put her in grave danger. The noise faded. Angelina now continued along with slow, measured, and deliberate steps. She was alone, afraid, and beaten — just like the Emperor, she thought. This thought lightened her deep despair. She believed herself to be walking so hopelessly through the streets for him, for the Emperor. He was also invisibly treading the most agonizing of paths. Who knew, maybe it was not true that he had been exiled; he could still be living in his capital, disguised as a common soldier for example, and she could encounter him and converse with him on various subjects.

Dusk was falling as she stood before the house and looked up at the familiar window. It was dark, so perhaps the midwife Pocci had also left. Angelina waited a while, afraid that she was right, but with a trembling hope that someone would emerge from the house and let her in. At the same time, however, she feared that person would be the Polish shoemaker who worked during the day in the dark passage outside his door. She had known him for two years already but was still afraid of him. She had feared him from the first moment she saw him. With his wooden leg, which made an eerie noise on the tiles of the hallway and on the cobbles in front of the house; with his ashen-colored and exotic Polish Legion lancer’s mustache; with his hard, foreign accent, which ground the words instead of enunciating them; with the ill-tempered demeanor of a barbarous soldier; and with his leather-blackened hands; with all of this, he inspired Angelina with a vague but serious fear. She kept forgetting his foreign name and had reservations about pronouncing it. This made the cobbler seem even more sinister.