Spring: -I- -II- -III-
The Stamp Album: -IV- -V- -VI- -VII- -VIII- -IX- -X- -XI- -XII-
In the Municipal Park: -XIII- -XIV- -XV- -XVI-
Springtime Twilight: -XVII-
The Villa: -XVIII- -XIX- -XX- -XXI- -XXII- -XXIII- -XXIV- -XXV- -XXVI- -XXVII-
Bianka’s Lineage: -XXVIII- -XXIX- -XXX- (XXXI) -XXXII- -XXXIII-
Hiatus: -XXXIV- -XXXV- -XXXVI- -XXXVII-
Finale: -XXXVIII- -XXXIX- -XL-
XXXI
CAN IT be regarded as chance that a great theatre of illusion arrived in those very days, a magnificent waxworks exhibition, and pitched its camp in plac Świętej Trójcy? I had long foreseen it, and filled with triumph, I announced it to Rudolf.
It was a windy and distraught evening. It was turning to rain. On the pale and yellow horizons the day was already making ready to depart; it hastily drew a grey and waterproof hood over its train of wains, drawing in a procession toward the late and cool beyond. Beneath an already half drawn, darkening curtain, the distant and final trails of sunset came into view for a moment longer, descending along a great and flat, endless plain full of immense lakelands and mirrorings. A yellow and dismayed, already doomed gleam came from those bright trails, obliquely through half of the sky — the curtain promptly fell, the roofs shone palely with moist reflections, it grew dark, and, a moment later, the gutters began monotonously to sing.
The waxworks exhibition was brightly lit now. In that distraught and hasty twilight the dark silhouettes of people, sheltered by umbrellas in the fawn light of the waning day, flocked to the lighted anteroom of the marquee, where, with deference, they payed their entrance fee to a colourful, décolletaged lady, shining with jewels and with gold set into her teeth — a living bust, laced up and rouged, vanishing lower down by incomprehensible means into the shadow of a velvet veil.
We entered the brightly lit space through a half open door curtain. It was already filled with patrons. Groups in overcoats, wet with rain and with their collars upturned, sauntered in silence from place to place, pausing in tight semicircles. Without difficulty I discerned those others among them who now belonged merely outwardly to this world of ours, while in reality they led a separate, representative and embalmed life on a pedestal, a life put on show and ostentatiously empty. They stood in terrible silence, dressed in solemn frock coats and morning coats, made to measure from good cloth — ghastly pale and still flushed with the fatal illnesses that had done away with them — and their eyes shone. For a long time now there had been not a single idea in their heads, merely their habit of showing off on all sides, an addiction to representing their empty existence, which they upheld with last of their strength. They should have been lying long in their beds having taken a spoonful of medicine, wrapped up in cool sheets with their eyes closed. It was ill-treatment to keep them up so late into the night, on their narrow pedestals and chairs where they sat stiffly in their tight, patent-leather footwear, far remote from their former existence, their eyes shining and utterly devoid of memory.
Each had hanging from his lips — dead now, like the tongue of one strangled — his final cry since leaving the lunatic asylum, where they had spent a considerable time as if in purgatory, passing for maniacs — before coming to occupy these final dwellings. When it came down to it, these were not quite the authentic Dreyfuses, Edisons and Lucchenis. To a certain extent you might say that they were simulations. Perhaps they really were madmen, caught in flagranti at the moment when that bedazzling idée fixe had first taken hold of them, in the instant when their madness had for a moment been true, and, skilfully distilled, had become the foundation of their new existence, as pure as an element, all staked on that one card, and no changing it. Since then they have had only that one thought in their heads, like an exclamation mark, and there they have come to a halt, on one leg as if in mid-air, at a standstill, in a half motion.
My eyes sought him out in that crowd, going from group to group, filled with unease. At last I found him, not in quite the magnificent uniform of an admiral of the Levantine fleet, in which he had sailed out from Toulon that year on the flagship Le Cid, when he was to assume the Mexican throne, nor either in the cavalry general’s green dress coat which he wore so proudly in his last days. He wore a common overcoat with long, voluminous tails, and bright trousers; a high collar and plastron pushed up his beard. Rudolf and I paused with reverence and emotion in the group of people surrounding him in a semicircle. All of a sudden I was deeply numbed. Three steps away from us, in the first row of onlookers, stood Bianka in a white dress, with her governess. She was standing and looking. Her tiny face had grown pale and thin in the last few days, and her eyes, black-ringed and full of shadow, looked on, sad as the grave.
There she stood, motionless, her crossed hands hidden in the folds of her dress, gazing from beneath her serious brows, her eyes full of deep mourning. My heart was seized achingly at that sight. Involuntarily my glace followed the direction of her deadly, sad look, and this is what I saw: his face stirred, seemingly awakened, the corners of his lips rose up in a smile, his eyes shone and began to roll in their orbits, and his breast, shining with orders, heaved a sigh. This was no miracle; it was the usual mechanical trick. Suitably wound up, the archduke held his cercle according to the principles of his mechanism, masterfully and ceremoniously, as he was accustomed to do in life. He turned his gaze to those present in turn, attentively holding it for a moment on each one.
He met their gazes in this way for a precise moment. He gave a start, hesitated, and cleared his throat as if he was about to say something; but then, a moment later, obedient to his mechanism, his gaze continued to wander and he turned it with that same encouraging and radiant smile toward still more faces. Had he become aware of Bianka’s presence — had she touched his heart? Who could say? After all, he was not even himself in the full meaning of the word; he was barely his own remote double, much reduced and in a state of deep prostration. But on the basis of the facts, one had to accept that he was, as it were, his own closest agnate; perhaps he even was his real self, to the degree in which it remained at all possible in that state of affairs, so many years after his death. In that waxen resurrection it was surely difficult to be quite at one with oneself. Unintentionally, through this opportunity, something new and menacing must have been been stolen into him; something alien must have been admixed, stemming from the madness of that brilliant maniac who had, in his megalomania, conceived him; and now it must have filled Bianka with its menace and dismay. After all, one who is very ill will withdraw and recede from his former self, to say nothing of one so improperly resurrected. For how was he now comporting himself toward the blood of his blood? Full of artificial gaiety and bravura, smiling and magnificent, he played out his Clownish & Imperial comedy. Did he really need to mask himself to such an extent; was he so very afraid of the attendants who watched him from all sides, put on show in that hospital of wax figures where they all lived menaced by hospital strictures? Cleaned up, restored to health and saved at last, distilled with difficulty out of someone’s madness, must he not tremble that they might cast him into turmoil and chaos again?
When my gaze once more sought out Bianka, I observed that she was hiding her face in a handkerchief. Her governess put her arm around her, her enamelled eyes shining emptily. I could no longer look upon Bianka’s pain; I felt a spasm of weeping seize me, and I tugged Rudolf by the sleeve. We made our way to the exit.
Behind our backs that rouged ancestor, that old fellow in his prime, went on sending his radiant, regal salutations in all directions; he even raised his hands in a surfeit of zeal; he was practically blowing kisses to us in that inert silence, amid the hissing of acetylene lamps and the quiet pitter-patter of the rain on the canvas of the marquee; with the last of his strength, he stood on tiptoe, gravely ill, and like all of them, yearning for his own ghastly corpse.
In the anteroom the rouged bust, the lady cashier, spoke to us, her diamonds and the gold in her teeth shining against a black backdrop of magical draperies. We went out into the night, dewy and warm from the rain. The roofs glistened, streaming with water; the gutters wept monotonously. We ran through a splashing downpour lit by burning lanterns rattling in the rain.
> -XXXII- >