The Hundred Days

I

Many people visited Jan Wokurka during those days. His old comrades, the Polish Legionnaires, kept bringing new men with them, homeless friends, Imperial soldiers who were left even more helpless by the Emperor’s great new misfortune. Before, they had only been unhappy; now they were completely lost. The ground quaked beneath their feet and they could not understand why, for it was their native ground. It was Paris, the capital of their country! Yet their native Earth was collapsing under the feet of its own sons. The soldiers of the enemy armies were marching fully armed through the streets of Paris. One could hear the enemy’s marches played and trumpeted by the enemy’s military bands. All the armies of Europe, or so it seemed to the old Imperial soldiers, had arranged to meet in Paris. They drilled every morning. After that they marched, well fed and flawlessly uniformed, through the streets of the city. Meanwhile, the soldiers of the Imperial Army crawled along the edge of the pavement, ragged and starving. They were like masterless dogs. The Emperor was far away! He was sailing around somewhere upon unknown seas toward an unknown but certainly horrible fate. A new leader, a former leader, sat upon the throne of France — a fat, jovial king. They did not hate him, but the enemy had arrived with him, the well-fed troops with their hostile march music. The Imperial soldiers gossiped about the fact that the King’s carriage, in which he had returned to his capital, had been preceded by English cannon, Prussian cavalry, and Austrian hussars. The rest of the people had the very same thought. Since the enemy had brought the King, the King was also an enemy. Was he even the ruler of France at all, this man through whose capital the foreign soldiers were marching? Did France still have a leader? Was it not already the prey of the whole world?

Once upon a time, the whole world had been the great Emperor’s prey. Every soldier of the Imperial Army had been at home in each country of the whole great, colorful world. Now they were all strangers and vagrants, shuffling through the streets of their own capital. And that was why they gathered, as evening fell and dusk made them seem even more homeless, in the apartments of old friends. For they were hungry, and they wished longingly for a tobacco pipe and a glass of wine. And people such as the cobbler Wokurka were hospitable.

They were clear, cloudless summer days. The old soldiers felt that the summer was mocking them; that the sky was demonstrating quite clearly that it did not care about the misfortunes of France or her Emperor. In a steady serene blue it arched over the sorrowful earth. Distant and aloof, the sun cast its rays upon the enemy’s hated banners. Summer itself was celebrating the victory of the enemy.

II

One hot day the cobbler went to the palace to look for Angelina. He had already been there a few times before. He loved her with all the might of his simple soul. He worried about her these days. What if she said something rash and put herself in danger? She could potentially get herself killed. She had not sought him out yet, even though he had told her he would be waiting for her if there were trouble. She was certainly in distress by now, and yet she had not come. So he set out on his way to win her back.

He stepped out blithely into the scorching sun. The sweat ran down his face, made his bushy mustache tacky, soaked his shirt, and made the poor stump of his leg, packed in leather padding, sting with the ferocity of an open wound. It was just after noon when he reached the Elysée. He asked to speak to Véronique Casimir. One of the soldiers on duty went to find her but it took a long time for her to come. The burning sun was unrelenting but Wokurka was not allowed even to wait in the narrow strip of shade just past the gate. Véronique finally arrived, embraced him emotionally, with sadness, but also with a somewhat duplicitous warmth. She actually needed him now; what a miracle that he had come! She and Angelina had a handcart and were just packing their things. All the palace servants had to take an oath to the returned King, and whoever refused was released. Naturally, she and Angelina were among those leaving. How good it was to have a man’s help, she said — and then looked at Wokurka’s wooden leg. He saw her staring, knocked on the wood with the knuckle of his forefinger, and said: “It’s good and strong, Mademoiselle Casimir. Better than my old one!”

She left. He had to wait half the afternoon, but despite the heat he was not one bit tired. He hobbled back and forth, up and down, back and forth, eventually awakening the suspicion of the secret police on patrol around the palace. He was well aware of them but was not afraid. He had already prepared an answer in case one of them questioned him. He had worked hard on his response, and he thought to say something like: “Ask your Minister Fouché, what he’s doing with the King!” He thought it was a perfect reply; ambiguous yet meaningful, witty yet non-contradictory.

Finally, as the shadows were getting longer and the guard was being changed, Véronique Casimir and Angelina arrived. They were pushing a small two-wheeled cart before them. Piled upon it and tied down with ropes were their belongings. Each of the women was holding one of the cart handles. They were held up at the gate by the guard and then by a policeman in civilian clothes. Véronique talked her way past them, waving her papers. They would be back in an hour, she said.

Wokurka had not seen Angelina for quite a while. Yet as he looked at her now, it hardly seemed a day had passed since they parted. Her face was so familiar and endearing to his enamored eyes. The Emperor had come and then gone, the King had returned, thousands of soldiers had fallen, Angelina’s son was also dead — but the cobbler Wokurka felt that it was just yesterday, or the day before, that Angelina had left him. Great and important events had transpired during their separation, but those months were obliterated in one moment. He offered Angelina his hand, but said nothing. Then he took both handles of the cart in his callused fists and asked, with an anxious heart: “So, where to?”

“To Pocci’s, naturally,” said Véronique.

He limped along between the two women, rolling the heavy cart along like a toy. He was cheerful and spoke loudly so as to be heard over the stamping of his crutch and the rumbling of the cart on the bumpy stones. What did he, Jan Wokurka, care that afternoon about all the miseries of Paris, France, of the world? For all I care one hundred great Emperors could leave and one hundred fat old Kings come back, he thought, what did it matter? And he expressed his thoughts: “You see, Angelina, I told you so! Why should we care about the fate of the great ones? If only we had gone to my village in Poland back then! By now you would be quite at home and would have forgotten everything!” He was not exactly certain what it was that Angelina was supposed to have forgotten, but he became emotional as he spoke those two words “forgotten everything” and was filled with an overwhelming feeling of compassion for Angelina. “One should not,” he went on, “give one’s heart to the great and mighty when one is as small and insignificant as we are. I’ve been saying this for a long time and lately I’ve been repeating it to my unfortunate friends. You see, Angelina! You see, Mademoiselle Casimir! What did it get me? I hung my heart on a great ideal and a great Emperor. I wanted to free my fatherland. Yet here I am, still a shoemaker, I’ve lost a leg, my country has not been liberated, and the Emperor is defeated! Nobody should ever tell me again to concern myself over the great advance of the world! The little things, the little things are what I love. I care about you alone, Angelina! Tell me now, after all this, are you coming? With me?”

“I thank you,” she said simply. “We shall speak of this later.” She could not possibly have explained what was running through her mind, for she lacked not only the courage to voice her thoughts but also the ability to choose the right words and express herself properly. In her opinion what Wokurka said was not false, but the great ideal for which she had sacrificed her heart happened also to be her own personal little ideal, and it was all the same whether God intended one to fall in love with a great Emperor or with some ordinary fellow. Ideals were both great and small at the same time, she believed. But could she explain it? And even if she could, would anyone understand? For all the confusion, agony, and shame that she had experienced since arriving in this city, she knew that nothing was more powerful than her precipitous love, which encompassed everything else — longing and homesickness, pride and shame, desire and sorrow, life and death. Now that the Emperor was lost forever — oh, how well she knew this! — even though she was far removed from him, in the distant reaches of the lengthy shadow he cast, she felt certain that she drew life from him alone; from his Imperial existence alone. Her son was dead and the Emperor was a prisoner. How could she feel anything except numb? Wokurka was good to her. But was kindness alone great and strong enough to revive a heart, a dead little heart? If only I were a man! she thought. She accidentally said it aloud: “If only I were a man!”

“What would you have done?” Wokurka asked.

“I would not have let him go. I would have gone with him!”

“The great events of the world,” said Wokurka, “do not depend on men, either. One would have to be just as great a man as he to affect anything. When one is a nobody, it’s all the same, man or woman!”

It was already full in Wokurka’s workshop, as it was every day at that time, when they arrived. He typically left his door open so that his friends could come and go as they pleased. Some of them were standing outside talking to the neighbors. Dusk was falling, the fearsome dusk of the lonely and unfortunate. They helped to bring the luggage up to the midwife Pocci’s room. How did things look in the palace, and had she seen the King? they asked Véronique Casimir. One of them asked the women if they knew where the Emperor was being taken. Another interrupted and said he knew for certain — to London, where they would behead him. Angelina trembled. It was as if her own death sentence had just been pronounced.

“Who says so? Who says so?” she cried through the chaos of voices.

“It can’t be helped,” one man said. “The great ones have made their decision.”

The little room was jammed. They stood crowded together or crouched on crates they had brought, or on chairs, stools, and Wokurka’s bed, as thick gray clouds of smoke wafted from their pipes; it looked as if there were even more guests than there actually were, all with the same faces. One of them — an old Polish legionnaire, with the Legion of Honor upon his tattered, heavily stained uniform, a gray black beard, and bright red cheeks — took a bottle from his coat pocket, raised it, took a big gulp and said: “Ah!” so loudly and so severely that it could not be mistaken for satisfaction but sounded like resentment and annoyance; and it was true that resentment and ill humor has long been smoldering within his heart and the drink was stoking the flames. He took another swig, for he felt he would very soon need to say something extraordinary. Quite simply his honor demanded it. He was good-hearted, excitable, and boisterous. Wokurka knew him well. Together they had marched, together they had fought, together they had drunk and eaten — even sharing the same plate and the same pipe. Although amid the thick smoke all the faces were cloudy and distorted, Wokurka could recognize in the eyes of his friend — Jan Zyzurak was his name and he had once been a blacksmith — that old flickering flame that meant this Zyzurak was in a state of extreme agitation. Wokurka was afraid of what Zyzurak would do; there were women present. The midwife Pocci, Angelina, and Véronique Casimir sat silently on the bed where a spot had been cleared for them. They were scared, uncertain what would happen next. The men and the spirits they were consuming — each of them carried a flask in his threadbare pocket — their desperate faces and their grim talk instilled a great fear in the women. Yet they did not dare get up.

As for Zyzurak, his second long gulp made him see the guests not double but tenfold. He believed himself to be standing outside before a vast crowd of people, and spirits came over him, the spirit of his ill-fated Polish fatherland, and also the spirit of the Emperor. Both of these spirits commanded him to speak and he felt he had numerous and important things to say. He raised both hands imploringly and in a loud voice requested silence and light (“for it is already evening,” he said, “and I need to see you when I speak to you”). Someone lit the three candles in the lantern. The light was immediately lost within the grayish-blue smoke, not bright enough for the blacksmith to see his friends. Nevertheless, he believed he could see his audience of thousands perfectly. He was standing under open sky on a warm summer’s night, and eight lanterns were shining as brightly as eight moons. “People of Paris!” he began. “Yes, people of France! I have received a secret message that right now the Emperor Napoleon is being dragged to England, to the Prince Regent’s fortress in London. They are already sharpening the hatchet that will behead him. Can you hear the blade being honed? Are we girls or men? The Emperor did not leave the country willingly, as the newspapers would have us believe. Those whom he thought were his closest friends betrayed him and forced him onto a ship. A general — you all know who, and I would be ashamed to speak his name — betrayed his plans to the enemy three hours before the battle. Treachery! Betrayal! Everywhere treachery!” He paused and stretched out his hand.

“Treachery! Treachery!” cried the others. “He’s right! He’s right!”

The blacksmith continued on in this vein for some time, but the others were no longer listening. They were only a small group of twelve men, but each of them had drunk too much and eaten too little. They were all seeing double and triple, and Zyzurak’s salutation still rang in their ears — “People of Paris!” — and every one of them felt the words were addressed to him specifically. They did not even notice when eventually their comrade stopped speaking. He had broken off in the midst of his speech. One of them, a sergeant of the Thirteenth Chasseurs, was convinced that the only thing left to do was raise a cheer, the old cheer that he had so often voiced. “Long live the Emperor!” All answered with the same cry. They removed their pipes from their mouths and set their bottles upon their lips once again. Suddenly someone began to sing that old tune whose melody had been ever present as they were transformed into men and soldiers. They sang, hoarsely and with drunken hearts, the “Marseillaise,” the song of the French people, the song of the Emperor and his battles. The lantern rocked violently over Zyzurak’s head and the windows rattled. Those who were seated stood up and sang. They kept the beat by tapping their feet. Although they remained in their seats they all felt they were marching along the great roads of the world, roads along which the Emperor had once led them. Only when the song was over did they look upon each other helplessly and foolishly. The magic had vanished. Gone were the broad highways of their army days. They realized they were still in Wokurka’s room.

It was quiet for some time. The men all stood there, with numb arms, while the women looked on, faces hot, red, and embarrassed. “Let’s go!” cried someone amid the silence. “Let’s go!” others repeated. “Where to?” asked Wokurka.

“Where? Don’t listen to him!” cried the chasseur. “I’ll lead you! What is life to us? Who among you is afraid to lose it?”

They were inspired by the sound of their own voices, weak from the hunger raging within them for days, intoxicated by the liquor that had alone fueled them, light-headed from the smoke, and crushed by their misfortune. They saw their potential actions not as futile but easy and natural; not as foolish but useful. Yet still they hesitated, indecisive and tentative. Suddenly Angelina shouted, as if someone else were speaking through her, some unknown being crying out of her — “Let’s go!” She yelled it with such a piercing voice she shocked herself, and she actually looked around trying to determine from whom the cry had actually issued. She stepped forward, toward the door, and the astonished men made way almost as if her sharp cry had forged ahead and cleared a path for her. She was bareheaded, her red hair flamed and her poor little freckled face was hard, spiteful, grief-stricken, and suddenly quite old. She had no idea what was motivating her but after standing at the door briefly she went out and the men followed her. Into the street and under the silvery blue evening sky this ragtag little group marched, silent at first except for the sound of Wokurka’s wooden leg pounding against the stones. Suddenly, the chasseur began to sing the “Marseillaise.” The rest of them sang along. They filled the lane with their hoarse singing. Windows flew open. People looked out. Some waved. Others cried: “Long live the Emperor!” They were not far from the royal palace, and this realization awoke within them a fervent but senseless desire to head there. They were a small party, a ridiculously tiny party! But as they howled so loudly, cheers flying at them from numerous windows, it seemed to them they numbered in the hundreds, in the thousands, the entire population of France. A moment later, however, they heard from the bank of the Seine, the direction in which they were heading, a hostile song and an empowering cry from a thousand actual throats, a cry of: “Long live the King!”

So the ragged little band headed straight into the midst of a tremendous parade of royalists. At this point they stopped for a moment, but then turned around and scattered. Only Wokurka, who was at the tail end, tried to reach Angelina. He saw as she too hesitated at first. But then she ran forward straight into the flank of the crowd. Her red hair looked to be ablaze, truly on fire. She had raised her arms, her dress fluttered, and she seemed to be flying, her head crowned by a flaming torch. With a shrill scream, which to Wokurka sounded inhuman, savagely animal, and yet at the same time boomed with heavenly authority, she launched herself straight into the dense, dark throng. “Long live the Emperor!” she screeched. And once more: “Long live the Emperor!” Wokurka watched as they seized her. Part of the surging crowd paused for a second — no longer than that. Then Angelina was whirling about in the air above their heads. Her dark chest puffed out and hands were raised to catch. Once more she was tossed up high but this time she was not caught. She fell to the ground somewhere and the crowd marched endlessly onward.

In the midst of this royalist crowd someone was holding up an absurd effigy high above their heads, a doll patched together out of rags, out of colorful tattered comical rags. It represented the Emperor Napoleon, the Emperor in the uniform in which the people had known and honored him, the Emperor in his gray cloak and with the little black hat upon his head.

Upon the breast of this doll, hanging from a piece of coarse string, was a heavy white cardboard upon which was written in large black lettering, easily legible from a distance, the first verses of the “Marseillaise,” the song of France — “Allons enfants de la patrie!” The poor head of the Emperor, fashioned from miserable scraps, was attached to a piece of flexible material and drooped pitifully from one side to the other, or flopped backward and forward; he was like an already decapitated Emperor whose head still hung by a thread. The effigy of the Emperor Napoleon waved and swayed among countless royal banners, among the white banners of the Bourbons. The doll itself was a mockery, but the presence of the many banners increased the derision hundredfold.

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.