On each stamp, on every coin, and on every postmark his likeness confirmed its stability and the dogma of its oneness. This was the world, and there were no other worlds besides, the effigies of the imperial-and-royal old man proclaimed. Everything else was make-believe, wild pretense, and usurpation. Franz Joseph I rested on top of everything and checked the world in its growth.

By inclination we tend to be loyal, dear reader. Being also affable and easygoing, we are not insensitive to the attractions of authority. Franz Joseph I was the embodiment of the highest authority. If that authoritarian old man threw all his prestige on the scales, one could do nothing but give up all one's aspirations and longings, manage as well as one could in the only possible world—that is, a world without illusions and romanticism—and forget.

But when the prison seemed to be irrevocably shut, when the last bolt-hole was bricked up, when everything had conspired to keep silent about You, Oh God, when Franz Joseph had barred and sealed even the last chink so that one should not be able to see You, then You rose wearing a flowing cloak of seas and continents and gave him the lie. You, God, took upon Yourself the odium of heresy and revealed this enormous, magnificent, colorful blasphemy to the world. Oh splendid Heresiarch! You struck me with the burning book, with that explosive stamp album from Rudolph's pocket. I did not know at that time that stamp albums could be pocket-size; in my blindness I at first took it for a paper pistol with which we sometimes pretended to fire at school, from under the seats, to the annoyance of teachers. Yet this little album symbolized God's fervent tirade, a fiery and splendid philippic against Franz Joseph and his estate of prose. It was the book of truth and splendor.

I opened it, and the glamour of colorful worlds, of becalmed spaces, spread before me. God walked through it, page after page, pulling behind Him a train woven from all the zones and climates, Canada, Honduras, Nicaragua, Abracadabra, Hipporabundia ... I at last understood you, Oh God. These were the disguises for your riches, these were the first random words that came to your mind. You reached into your pocket and showed me, like a handful of marbles, the possibilities that your world contained. You did not attempt to be precise; you said whatever came into your mind. You might equally well have said Panphibrass and Halleleevah, and the air among palms would flutter with motley parrot wings, and the sky, like an enormous, sapphire, cabbage rose, blown open to its core, would show in its dazzling center your frightening peacock eye, would shine with the glare of your wisdom, and would spread a super-scent. You wanted to dazzle me, Oh God, to seduce me, perhaps to boast, for even You have moments of vanity when you succumb to self-congratulation. Oh, how I love these moments!

How greatly diminished you have become, Franz Joseph, and your gospel or prose! I looked for you in vain. At last I found you. You were among the crowd, but how small, unimportant, and gray. You were marching with some others in the dust of the highway, immediately following South America, but preceding Australia, and singing together with the others: Hosanna!

VIII

I became a disciple of the new gospel. I struck up a friendship with Rudolph. I admired him, feeling vaguely that he was only a tool, that the album was destined for somebody else. In fact, he seemed to me only its guardian. He catalogued, he stuck in and unstuck the stamps, he put the album away and locked the drawer. In reality he was sad, like a man who guesses that he is waning while I am waxing. He was like the man who came to straighten the Lord's paths.

IX

I had reasons to believe that the album was predestined for me. Many signs seemed to point to its holding a message and a personal commission for me.