# The Jail/Chapter XX

XX.
I finished reading the biography of Julius Caesar. A fascinating book,—in the hours when I was reading it, I was not in jail. If the worthy authorities had an inkling how and whither a man's spirit is carried away by such reading, they certainly would not allow any books here at all. If the body is deprived of liberty, then the spirit ought not to be allowed to rove about,—and certainly not in ancient Gaul and in times two thousand years removed. But that is the old materialistic slovenliness; they attend to the body, but the spirit,—what do they care about the spirit!
This work is a strictly scientific history of Julius Caesar, the greatest genius of ancient times, and a rhapsodic apotheosis of the idea of Napoleonism. It is as if behind the figure of the Roman imperator there stood the figure of the first French Emperor, illuminated by every deed, every notion, every plan of the Roman. And nowhere can it be said that the book, as a result, suffers from an obtrusive political tendency,—it is a thoroughly honest, scientific work, written in a witty, sparkling style such as only French historians can contrive to write. There is only one circumstance to which I take exception, not in the text, but on the cover: the author's name, ​Napoleon III,—no, this book did not proceed from his pen. The spirit might have been his, the involuntary tendency, above all, might have been his, but this work was not produced by him. That unfortunate political intriguer, who let himself be led into a Sedan, the clumsy stylist, whose journalistic draft discovered in the Tuileries after September 2nd 1870, aroused only a compassionate smile, this weary "Sphinx", gliding through the diaries of the Goncourts,—decidedly did not possess such a fund of intellect as to be able to produce the history of Julius Caesar. It was Duruy, Victor Duruy, to whom Bonapartism, or I should rather say Napoleonism, was a religion, who certainly wrote this work from the first line to the last—the Sphinx, at the most, attended to the archaeological discoveries relating to ancient Gaul. The history of the Roman Empire, which Duruy issued under his own name, is a direct continuation of Julius Caesar—the same style, the same spirit. It is Duruy of whose enthusiastic Napoleonic creed in the preface to the memoirs of Barras I could not help thinking as l read: that before the countenance of eternity it is no crime to have people slain. That the human plant has a claim only to a short span of life, he who cuts it down before its time, helps it, for it then springs up anew. But it is a crime to degrade and dishonour the soul of a nation—man passes away—the soul is left, new mortals are born, but there is no means to bring about the uplifting of the soul, for wounds inflicted on the soul are deep, and heal very slowly. And Napoleon I did not commit the crime of damaging the soul of a nation. And a nation which often hastens to dissolution and decay, is preserved by war, as by a necessary surgical operation,—but how great was the error of Duruy, whose view and knowledge of the past was so clear, in respect of events and persons of the present. Precisely this Napoleon Ill, whose throne was to be supported both by Julius ​Caesar and the great Corsican, degraded, dishonoured France and led it to its downfall. And here again the truth is that poets see clearer and better than historians. Victor Hugo judged and condemned Napoleon Ill, and history has shown him to be in the right. Our Rieger—assuredly in agreement with his father-in-law—submitted a memorandum to this same Napoleon III a few years before Sedan. That Mickiewicz, a poet, regarded him as the saviour of Poland, oh, he might believe it then. Half Europe rose up against the despotic Tsar Nicholas I, and Napoleon, that great and glorious name, stood at the head of this coalition. This was six years after the spring of 1848, when Europe seemed to have recognized that "Leipzig was the cross and Waterloo the grave of its liberty."
Yes, such are the reflections that occur to one when reading in jail. These and also others. The State in its own interests really ought to watch most carefully over the spirit of those whom it imprisons.
It is a pity that the history of Julius Caesar is unfinished. It breaks off on the threshold of the civil war. And the worst of it is that after such a book which fills the soul with emotion, one has no desire to read anything else. I had already obtained my Molière, but I will here break off for a little.
What were our young friends doing in the room? The same as usual. One batch was doing its spell of walking, the sergeant was sitting opposite Mr. Karl and gazing into his mouth, while Mr. Karl was whistling some Vienna ditty to him; the censorists were playing wolves and sheep—for a bottle of wine and three cigars again—Papa Declich was standing on the straw mattresses, very laboriously brushing his cap and giving a sly glance into the courtyard, the artillery-man had crept with somebody else into a corner and was playing at cards,—ah yes, his fellow-player had reached us that morning; he was a corporal in the mechanical transport corps at ​Klosterneuburg, and he had been put in prison on account of two bicycles. Two rubber-tired bicycles which he had seen while out for a walk with his comrade, who had also been in prison since that morning on the first storey; the bicycles were lying by the roadside in a field, and they both declared that they did not know how they had got there; but the examining superintendent declared that they did know how they got there. Although he saw that I was reading and did not want to be disturbed, he had already come up to me three times and explained that he was innocent, and how the bicycles were lying there, and how they had gone past quite by chance and had caught sight of them,—it was not untilI pointed out to him that it was their duty for one of them to wait by the things they had found, and for the other to go and report it immediately, and when Mr. Fels told him that I had been a soldier and that my opinion would probably be correct, then he went away once and for all, came to terms with the artillery-man who told him the story of his confounded boots, whereupon they started gambling.
Papritz had me called into the office.
He stood up in front of me, looked me up and down several times from tip to toe, and burst forth: "You have sent in an application to be allowed to get your food from a restaurant? What ground have you for that?"
"I have sent in no application, I have no ground."
"There lies your application" he thundered.
"It is not my application."
"But you know about it."
"Yes, Dr. Frank showed it to me, and I asked him in most emphatic terms to throw it into the waste-paper basket."
"So you want to dictate to us what we are to do? A fine state of things! You have been ill under an operation, you will get your ​food from a restaurant. I will not tolerate any wilfulness, just remember that. You will let Fiedler have a list of what you want to eat."
I went no further and remained silent. My stubbornness was broken. For Dušek's theory that it sufficed for a man to eat once a day in the evening did not somehow hold good in my case. Those hams which often used to have the first indications of decadence, the rancid butter, the cheese from which the mouldiness had to be pared away, no, it was not possible, I used to eat only just enough so as not to have a feeling of cold emptiness in my stomach, but at the same time I was continually hungry. If I had got the better of Papritz—the final authority—and had my own way, I should have gone on starving courageously, but as it was,—ye gods, pardon a man for being too much a man, it was more agreeable. When I left Papritz I was quite elated.
And with Mr. Fiedler we arranged a menu for ten days,—soup, meat, an extra dish, a bottle of wine. Coffee in the morning, coffee in the afternoon.
Mr. Kranz by the way, was now bringing me black coffee in the morning and towards evening. This coffee was better than that issued to us, and it was sweetened. I divided it with our batch. Papa Declich mixed his share with the ordinary coffee, added condensed milk, and sipped at it then throughout the day. It was about this time that I was really impressed by Kranz; he probably noticed that I was not well, and when we were returning from exercise, he called me behind the corner of the passage and thrust upon me a small bottle of cognac, real cognac. "Keep your eye on it, or it will get stolen" he advised me with the air of one who knows.
I do not remember ever having eaten more greedily and eagerly, or having enjoyed food so much as that first meal from the restaur​ant. Perhaps not even during the starvation of my student days, nor when I was in the army. I gulped down the soup, fell upon the meat, but then my enjoyment ceased; I happened to look round the room and saw about fifteen pairs of eyes, not human eyes, but starving, greedy, brutish eyes, watching my exertions. They sank, turned away, but I had seen them, and every morsel stuck in my throat. Papa Declich received a piece of meat, Budi a piece of pudding, in order that I might bribe my conscience and go on eating.
I ate my fill, in spite of the sharing. Papa Declich prepared a cup of his cold black coffee, I lit a cigar and a pleasant mood came upon me. Thank goodness, in that way we shall hold out for months, years, and survive everything safely and enter into a different epoch and different conditions. And it will be better than it is, perhaps will even be quite good. We have lived with Austria but have not grown together with it; everything we have done was only temporary, as it were; even when we ate, we ate standing and with a walking-stick in our hands, and when we lay down to sleep, we slept fully dressed and prepared at any hour to start on a journey. Like Simon Lamm, when he arrived, like the Old Testament Jews in the land of Egypt.
These and similar things were my cogitations, as with a feeling of comfort, I watched the smoke of my cigar. Resignation vanished, and was replaced by a zest for life and work, faith in the future. Somehow the jail had become agreeable. After all, if you stood under the window and craned your neck a little, you could see a segment of blue sky above, and freedom, freedom. This here, Frank, Papritz, the superintendent, Sponner, Schmied, the endless drab hours, the dirt, the stench, the cold,—auch das geht vorüber, (that also will pass away), as Ada Christen used to say, a contemporary of Neruda and the greatest poetess of German Austria, ​passed by and forgotten only because she led a somewhat free life. "Auch das geht vorüber."
Yes. But an hour later I felt the old hunger. The chill emptiness in the stomach as on the day before, the day before that, a week previously. And I called to mind a very experienced woman, the mother of four marriageable daughters, who often used to explain to young men that restaurant fare is not and never can be the same thing as meals at home, in the family: even though you eat better and more in a restaurant, an hour later you will be hungry. A wise woman—she had observed with accuracy.
I reflected how the body might be helped. What about a nap? After all, sleep is strengthening. I would try to sleep a few hours in the course of the day, for instance between three and four in the afternoon.
If a man is well fed, his humour is warm; with this chill emptiness in the stomach, the soul is also cold. A strict ruler, the stomach. But in certain respects one's comprehension becomes keener. I comprehended, for example, how a fly probably feels when it is caught in a spider's web. And the spider comes and ties and enmeshes it still closer.