For the most part lay on my bed, and reflected on the affairs of Spain.

2000 A.D., April 43

TO-DAY is a day of the greatest rejoicing. Spain has a King. He has been discovered. I am that King. It was only to-day I found it out. The revelation came to me like a flash of lightning. It is inconceivable that I should have imagined myself to be a Titular Councillor. How could that crazy, insane idea ever have entered my head? It was lucky nobody realized that the right thing to do was to send me to a lunatic asylum. Now all has become clear to me. I see through everything. Until now, strange to say, everything to me was as in a mist. And all this must have been due to people imagining that the human brain is situated in the head; quite wrong: it is brought over by the wind from the direction of the Caspian Sea. I began by telling Mavra who I was. When she heard that the King of Spain was standing before her, she clasped her hands and almost died of fright. The silly woman had never seen a King of Spain before. However, I tried to reassure her, and in gracious words tried to convince her of my benevolent feelings towards her; I said that I was not in the least displeased with her for having sometimes cleaned my boots so badly. This is the right way with the lower orders: it is no use talking to them of anything more elevated. Her fright was caused by her idea that all Kings of Spain resembled Philip II. But I made it clear to her that there was very little resemblance between me and Philip, and that I had not got even one Capuchin. I didn’t go to the Department. To Hell with it! No, my friends, you won’t induce me to come there again. I am not going to copy your horrid papers any more.

MARTOBER 86, BETWEEN DAY AND NIGHT

TO-DAY our executive clerk came to summon me to the Department. It was three weeks, he said, since I had been there last.

But men are unfair, with this way of reckoning in weeks. The Jews invented it because it’s their Rabbi’s washing time. However I went to the Department, just for the fun of it. The head of the section was expecting that I should salute him and apologize before him; but I only looked at him in a detached way, not too angrily and not too graciously, and sat down in my place, pretending not to notice anything. As I looked at all that office rabble I thought to myself: What if you knew who is sitting in the midst of you! . . . Great God! wouldn’t there be a hullabaloo! The head of the section himself would at once start doubling himself in two before me, the way he bows to the Director.