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.' and fired into the air a pistol produced from my breastpocket.29 Many things seem to point to the fact that Franz Jospeh was in reality a powerful but sad demiurge.His narrow eyes, dull like buttons embedded in triangular deltas of wrinkles, were not human eyes.His face, with its milky white sideburns brushed back like those of Japanese demons, was the face of an old mopish fox.Seen from a distance, from the height of the terrace at Schonbrunn, that face, owing to a certain combination of wrinkles, seemed to smile.From nearby that smile unmasked itself as a grimace of bitterness and prosaic matter-of-factness, unrelieved by the spark of any idea.At the very moment when he appeared on the world stage in a general's green plumes, slightly hunched and saluting, his blue coat reaching to the ground, the world reached a happy point in its development.All the set forms, having exhausted their content in endless metamor- phoses, hung loosely upon things, half wilted, ready to flake off.The world was a chrysalis about to change violently, to disclose young, new, unheard-of colours and to stretch happily all its sinews and joints.It was touch and go, and the map of the world, that patchwork blanket, might float in the air, swelling like a sail.Franz Joseph took this as a personal insult.His element was a world held by the rules of prose, by the pragmatism of boredom.The atmosphere of chan- ceries and police stations was the air he breathed.And, a strange thing, this dried-up dull man, with nothing attractive in his person, succeeded in pulling a great part of creation to his side.All the loyal and provident fathers of families felt threatened along with him and breathed with relief when this powerful demon laid his weight upon everything and checked the world's aspirations.Franz Joseph squared the world like paper, regulated its course with the help of patents, held it within procedural bounds, and insured it against derailment into things unforeseen, adventurous, or simply unpredictable.Franz Joseph was not an enemy of godly and decent pleasures.It was he who invented, under the spur of kindliness of a sort, the imperial-and-royal lottery for the people.Egyptian dream books, illus- trated calendars, and the imperial-and-royal tobacco shops.He stan- dardized the servants of heaven, dressed them in symbolic blue uniforms, and let them loose upon the world, divided into ranks and divisions – angelic hordes in the shape of postmen, conductors, and tax collectors, The meanest of those heavenly messengers wore on his face a reflection of age-old wisdom borrowed from his Creator and a jovial, gracious smile framed by sideburns, even if his feet, as a result of his considerable earthly wanderings, reeked of sweat.But has anyone ever heard of a frustrated conspiracy at the foot of the throne, of a great palace revolution nipped in the bud at the beginning of the glorious rule of the All-Powerful? Thrones wilt when they are not fed with blood, their vitality grows with the mass of wrongs committed, with life-denials, with the crushing of all that is perpetually different and that has been ousted by them.We are disclosing here secret and forbidden things; we are touching upon state secrets hidden away and secured with a thousand seals of silence.Demiurge had a younger brother of an entirely different cast of mind, with different ideas.Who hasn't a brother under one form or another who follows him like a shadow, an antithesis, the partner in an eternal dialogue? According to one version, he was only a cousin; according to another, he had never been born.He was only suggested by the fears and ravings of the Demiurge, overheard while he was asleep.Perhaps he had only invented him anyway, substituted someone else for him, in order to play out the symbolic drama, to repeat once more, for the thousandth time, ceremoniously and ritually that prelegal and fatal act that, in spite of the thousand repetitions, occurs again and again.The conditionally born, unfortunate antag- onist, professionally wronged, as it were, because of his role, bore the name of Archduke Maximilian.The very sound of that name, mentioned in a whisper, renews our blood, makes it redder and brighter, makes it pulsate quickly in the clear colours of enthusiasm, of postal sealing wax, and of the red pencil in which happy messages are printed.Maximilian had pink swallows, squeaking with joy, cut across his path.The Demiurge himself loved him secretly while he plotted his downfall.First, he nominated him commander of the Levant Squadron in the hope that he would drown miserably on an expedition to the South Seas.Soon afterwards he concluded a secret alliance with Napoleon III, who drew him by deceit into the Mexican adventure.Everything had been planned in advance.The young man, 180 181SANATORIUM UNDER THE SIGN OF THE HOURGLASS SPRING full of fantasy and imagination, enticed by the hope of creating a new, happier world on the Pacific, resigned all his rights as an agnate of the crown and heir to the Hapsburgs.On the French liner Le Cid he sailed straight into a prepared ambush.The documents of that secret conspiracy have never seen the light of day.Thus the last hope of the discontented was dashed.After Maximil- ian's tragic death, Franz Joseph forbade the use of red under the pretext of court mourning.The black and yellow colours of mourning became official.The amaranth of enthusiasm has since been fluttering secretly only in the hearts of its adherents.But the Demiurge did not succeed in extirpating it completely from nautre.After all, it is poten- tially present in sunlight.It is enough to close one's eyes in the spring sun in order to absorb it under one's eyelids in each wave of warmth.Photographic paper bums that same red in the spring glare.Bulls led along the sunny streets of the city with a cloth on their horns see it in bright patches and lower their heads, ready to attack imaginary torreros fleeing in panic in sun-drenched arenas.Sometimes a whole bright day passes in explosions of the sun, in banks of clouds edged with a red glow.People walk about dizzy with light, with closed eyes that inwardly see rockets, Roman candles, and barrels of powder.Later, towards the evening, the hurricane fire of light abates, the horizon becomes rounder, more beautiful, and filled with azure like a glass globe with a miniature panorama of the world, with happily arranged plans, over which clouds tower like a crown of gold medals or church bells ringing for evensong.People gather in the market square, silent under the enormous cupola of light, and group themselves without thinking into a great, immobile finale, a concentrated scene of waiting; the clouds billow in ever deepening pinks; in all eyes there is calm and the reflection of luminous distances.And suddenly, while they wait, the world reaches its zenith, achieves in a few heartbeats its highest perfection.The gardens arrange themselves on the crystal bowl of the horizon, the May greenery foams and overflows like wine about to spill, hills are formed in the shape of clouds; having passed it supreme peak, the beauty of the world dissolves and takes off to make an entry into eternity.And while people remain immobile, lowering their heads still full of visions, bewitched by the great luminous ascent of the world, the man whom they had unconsciously all been waiting for runs out from among the crowd, a breathless messenger, pink of face, wearing raspberry-coloured tights, and decorated with little bells, medals, and orders.He circles the square slowly six or seven times in order to be in everybody's view, his eyes downcast, as if ashamed, his hands on his hips.His rather heavy stomach is shaken by the rhythmical run.Red from exertion, the face shines with perspiration under the black Bosnian moustache, and the medals, orders, and bells jump up and down in time on his chest like a harness
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