Joseph Roth - The Hundred Days

When the royalists saw that little Angelina, even as she was being tossed into the air like a ball, was still attempting to sing the “Marseillaise” with a closing throat and a heart that sensed imminent death, one of them thought it amusing to throw the effigy of the Emperor Napoleon along after her. So it was that when Angelina, after being spun about in mid-air, finally fell upon the rocky bank of the Seine, the miserable doll landed just beside her smashed body. She could not tell that it was a doll, a mockery of the Emperor, just an effigy of pathetic scraps. She could not distinguish fake from genuine and her eyes perceived the real Emperor next to her, lying close to her battered body. And she could read, very clearly, the opening words of the “Marseillaise,” “ Allons enfants de la patrie! ” As she read the first line of the great anthem, she began to sing the song that she could never quite get enough of, despite having heard it so frequently. With the song on her lips she fell asleep beside the figure of the Emperor, an Emperor of rags and scraps. Before her fading eyes lay the first verse of the “Marseillaise” and Napoleon’s little black hat, the comically fashioned, tattered, Imperial hat.

After the procession finally passed, which took an eternity, Wokurka hobbled over. He found Angelina lying on the embankment. Her blood reddened the pebbles. It trickled slowly and steadily from her mouth.

He sat at her side the whole night. But he dared not look at her face. Instead, he tirelessly stroked her hair, which still offered a gentle rustle. The Seine gurgled busily past him as he sat there stunned, staring vacantly at the water rushing by. It was a mirror to the heavens. It carried the sky along with it and all the silvery stars too.

Joseph Roth’s (1894–1939) prodigious output included numerous novels, novellas, short stories, and newspaper articles in the space of only sixteen years (between 1923 and 1939). While much of his fascinating œuvre has been made available to the English-speaking world in recent times, The Hundred Days has remained out of print in English for seventy years. With the publication of The Hundred Days , all of Roth’s completed novels are now available in English.

Born Moses Joseph Roth of Jewish parentage in the town of Brody, Galicia (present-day Ukraine), about fifty-four miles north-east of present-day Lviv (then called Lemberg), Roth was a product of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After service in the Austrian Army during the First World War he moved to Berlin in 1920. After Hitler came to power in early 1933, Roth fled Germany permanently, spending the rest of his life living in hotels in France and other parts of Western Europe.

The setting for the majority of Roth’s novels is Eastern Europe from the turn of the twentieth century to the 1920s, and so The Hundred Days ( Die Hundert Tage , 1935) is a departure from the usual Roth formula, in both its time period and setting. Written immediately after The Antichrist ( Der Antichrist , 1934, Roth’s journalistic and autobiographical novel about the dangers of modern civilization in the early 1930s), The Hundred Days takes place in a much earlier era (1815) and much further west (France) than the rest of his works. The novel is divided into four books, two told from Napoleon’s perspective and two from the vantage point of the diminutive, freckled Imperial laundress Angelina Pietri, who happens to be utterly smitten with the Emperor.

So why did this Austrian writer, who was clearly fascinated by the dynamics surrounding the events leading up to and immediately following the First World War — including the collapse of the Austrian Empire, the rise of communism, the Weimar Republic, and Nazism — choose to write about Napoleon? In a letter to his French translator, Blanche Gidon (whose translation of this book was published as Le Roman des Cent-Jours in 1937 by Éditions Bernard Grasset in Paris), Roth explained the motivation behind writing the novel. He told her, with some degree of excitement, that he wished to chronicle the transformation of Napoleon from a god to man over the course of the hundred-day period of his return to power from exile on Elba in the spring of 1815. “I would like to make a humble man out of a grand one,” he wrote in November 1934. He was interested in the idea of the great Napoleon as someone who has, for the first time in his life, become truly small: “This is what attracts me.”

Besides the attraction of the topic itself, Roth was likely happy for the chance to set one of his novels in Paris. His love affair with the city began in 1925, when he was assigned to Paris as a foreign correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung. Flight Without End (1927) is partly set in Paris, and the city also plays a role in the book that followed The Hundred Days, Confession of a Murderer . The essays Roth wrote while in France have been published as Report from a Parisian Paradise . Roth said in a mid-1930s interview: “The only thing I love after my ‘lost Vienna’ is Paris. I love my Latin Quarter, my Hotel Foyot. .”

At the time of its first English-language publication, the critics’ reception of The Hundred Days was lukewarm. The Daily Independent called Roth’s Napoleon “much too benevolent,” but in the end proclaimed the book still “a fine piece of work.” The New Statesman and Nation cited “long passages of literary dithyramb” and opined that The Hundred Days was a “prose-poem dressed as a novel.” The Sunday Times said it lacked realism, while the Observer called Roth’s attempt at dealing with the subject matter “an impossible task” and “an inevitable failure.” On the other hand, the Gloucester Journal called it “enlightening” and “moving.” Across the Atlantic, while acknowledging Roth’s fine abilities as a writer, the New York Times stated that the story lacked reality, charm, passion, and warmth. Evidence indicates that Roth himself may have been somewhat disappointed in the way his book turned out. In any case, its initial reception may in part have been the reason why The Hundred Days remained unavailable in English for so long.

But, like The Antichrist , the other Roth work that had until recently remained out of print in English and had had mixed reviews at the time of its debut, The Hundred Days comes across differently today than it would have in the mid-1930s, that turbulent time when Hitler rose to power and readers may not have been very receptive to a pathos-filled story about a dictator’s fall.

As is usual in his work, Roth expertly employs atmospheric details to convey mood. The somber and stultifying library where the Emperor says farewell to his mother; the Imperial room where Angelina waits, with its heavy green curtain; the cramped flat of the cobbler Jan Wokurka; the many shimmering dawns and starlit evenings — these are practically characters in themselves, invested with personality and emotional weight. Roth remarked that he was often “haunted by a place, by an atmosphere.”

Roth expends great effort trying to convince the reader of Napoleon’s constantly fluctuating mental state over the course of his final days in power. In the two sections of The Hundred Days told from the Emperor’s perspective, Napoleon at turns loves and despises the French people, and throughout the book has similar and frequent changes of attitude toward his family, his ministers, power, war, God and the Church, and life in general. “I no longer believe in all those things in which I used to have faith — in force, might, and success,” he tells his brother when he is ready to abdicate. Yet, once he discovers that the enemy has arrived at Paris he dictates a letter to his adjutant, to be dispatched at once: “You may now look upon your Emperor as your General and call upon my services as someone inspired solely by a desire to be useful to his country.” Moments later, however, the Emperor is filled with unhappiness and regret at the letter he has just dispatched.