Joseph Roth - The Hundred Days

He looked around the room for the first time since he had entered. He stood before the mirror. He observed the reflection of his upper body. He furrowed his brows, tried to smile, pursed his lips, opened his mouth, and regarded his healthy white teeth. He smoothed his black hair down onto his forehead with his finger and smiled at his reflection, the great Emperor grinning at the great Emperor. He was pleased with himself. He took a few steps back and examined himself anew. He was alone but he was strong, young, and vibrant. He feared no treachery.

He walked about the room, looked at the tattered lilies of the recently ripped-down tapestries, smirked, lifted one of the brass eagles that stood in the corner, and finally stopped before a small altar. It was a smooth piece made of black wood. A forlorn, faint odor of incense escaped from the closed drawer, and on the altar stood, spectral white, a small ivory crucifix. The bony, angular, and bearded face of the Crucified One stood out, unmoving, unchanging, and eternal, in the room lit only by flickering candlelight. They had forgotten to dismantle the altar, thought the Emperor. Here had the King kneeled every morning. But Christ had not heard him! “I don’t need it!” the Emperor suddenly cried out. “Away with it!” He raised his hand. And it was at that moment that he felt he should kneel. But at the very same instant he brushed the cross to the ground with the back of his hand, which he had opened as if to smack someone across the head. It fell with a hard, dull thud to the narrow swath of uncarpeted flooring. The Emperor bent down. The cross was broken. The Savior lay on the narrow strip of pale, bare floor, His thin ivory arms outstretched, no longer torturously constrained by the Cross. His white beard and narrow nose faced the ceiling, with only His crossed legs and feet still attached to what was left of the little crucifix.

At that moment someone knocked on the door and announced the Minister of Police.

The Emperor remained where he was standing. His left boot covered the whitish crucifix fragments. He folded his arms, as was his custom when he was waiting, when he was pondering or when he wished to create the impression he was thinking. He held himself such that he could feel his body and count and regulate his heartbeat with his right hand. People knew and loved this stance of his. He had rehearsed it hundreds of times before the mirror. He had been painted and drawn in this pose thousands of times. These pictures hung in thousands of rooms in France and all over the world, even in Russia and Egypt. Yes, he knew his Police Minister — dangerous, skeptical, old, and unchanging, a man who had never been young and had never believed in anything. A scrawny, brilliant spider who had woven webs and destroyed them; tenacious, patient, and without passion. This most doubtful of men, this faithless priest, was received by the Emperor in the stance in which millions of his followers were used to seeing him. As he stood there, arms crossed, he not only felt it himself but also made this hated man feel the faith of the millions of followers who revered and loved the Emperor with his folded arms. The Emperor waited for the Minister like a statue of himself.

The Minister was now standing before him in the room, head bowed. The Emperor did not move. It was as if the Minister had not bowed his head as one does before the great ones but rather as one does when one is hiding one’s face or searching for something on the ground. The Emperor thought of the broken crucifix, which he was covering with his left boot and would certainly have hidden from anyone, not only the glare of this policeman. It seemed to the Emperor undignified to move from his place yet also undignified to be concealing something.

“Look at me!” he ordered, injecting his voice with its old, victorious ring. The Minister lifted his head. He had a wizened face and eyes of indeterminable color, somewhere between pale and dark, which endeavored in vain to stay wide open, to counter the compulsion of the eyelids, which kept drooping on their own, although he seemed constantly to be trying to keep them up. His Imperial uniform was immaculate and proper, but, as though to indicate the unusual hour of night at which its wearer found himself requested, it was not completely closed. As if by accident, a button on his vest had been left undone. The Emperor was to notice this defect, and he did. “Finish dressing!” he said. The Minister smiled and closed the button.

“Your Majesty,” began the Minister, “I am your servant!”

“A faithful servant!” said the Emperor.

“One of your truest!” replied the Minister.

“That has not been particularly noticeable,” said the Emperor softly, “in the last ten months.”

“But in the last two,” answered the Minister, “I have been preparing myself for the joy of seeing Your Majesty here now. For the last two months.”

The Minister spoke slowly and faintly. He neither raised nor lowered his voice. The words crept out of his small mouth like plump, well-fed shadows, robust enough to be audible but mindful not to seem as vigorous as the Emperor’s words. He kept his long, slightly bent hands calmly and respectfully at his sides. It was as if he were also paying homage with his hands.

“I’ve decided,” said the Emperor, “to bury the past. Do you hear, Fouché? The past! It is not very pleasant.”

“It is not pleasant, Your Majesty.”

He grows trusting, thought the Emperor.

“There will be much to do, Fouché,” he said. “These people mustn’t be given time. We must anticipate them. Incidentally, is there any news from Vienna?”

“Bad news, Majesty,” said the Minister. “The Imperial Minister for Foreign Affairs, Monsieur Talleyrand, has spoiled everything. He serves the enemies of Your Majesty better than he has ever served Your Majesty. I have never — as Your Majesty will recall — taken him for sincere. There will be much to do, truly! A steady hand will be required to carry out all the tasks. .”

Fouché kept his hands at his sides, half closed, as if hiding something in them. The rather lengthy gold-embroidered palms on his sleeves seemed to purposely conceal his wrists. Only the long, eager fingers were visible. Traitor’s fingers, thought the Emperor. Fingers made for spinning malicious little tales at a writing-table. These hands have no muscles. I will not make him my Foreign Minister!

While he was pondering, the Emperor had unintentionally lifted his foot off the crucifix fragments. He wanted to go to the window. He thought he saw Fouché stealing a glimpse at the cross from under his sagging eyelids, and he felt embarrassed. He took a quick step forward, lifted his chin and said in a loud and commanding voice, so as to bring the meeting to a rapid end: “I appoint you my Minister!”

The Minister did not budge. Only the lid of his right eye rose a bit above the pupil, as though he were just waking. It seemed his eye was listening but not his ear.

In a voice that seemed to the Minister rather casually unceremonious, the Emperor continued: “You will head the Ministry of Police, which you have previously overseen in such a meritorious fashion.”

At that moment, the interested eyelid fell back over the pupil. It veiled a slight green gleam.

The Minister did not move. He is pondering, thought the Emperor, and he is pondering too long.

Finally Fouché bowed. From a rather dry throat came his words: “It gives me sincere pleasure to be permitted to serve Your Majesty once again.”

“ Au revoir , Duke of Otranto,” said the Emperor.

Fouché rose up from his bow. He stood rigidly for a little while, gazing wide-eyed with astonishment in the direction of the Emperor’s boots, between which lay the shimmering bits of the crucifix.