The Emperor's Tomb
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
[I]
[II]
[III]
[IV]
[V]
[VI]
[VII]
[VIII]
[IX]
[X]
[XI]
[XII]
[XIII]
[XIV]
[XV]
[XVI]
[XVII]
[XVIII]
[XIX]
[XX]
[XXI]
[XXII]
[XXIII]
[XXIV]
[XXV]
[XXVI]
[XXVII]
[XXVIII]
[XXIX]
[XXX]
[XXXI]
[XXXII]
[XXXIII]
[XXXIV]
Joseph Roth titles published by The Overlook Press
Joseph Roth titles
published by The Overlook Press
Hotel Savoy
Flight Without End
Right and Left and The Legend of the Holy Drinker
Job
The Radetzky March
Tarabas
The Emperor’s Tomb
Confession of a Murderer
The Silent Prophet
The Spider’s Web and Zipper and His Father
This edition first published in the United States in 2002 by
The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
New York, NY
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Copyright © 1950 by Verlag Allert de Lange, Amsterdam, and
Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Köln
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system now known or to be invented without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Roth, Joseph, 1894–1939.
The emperor’s tomb.
Translantion of: Die Kapuzinergruft.
I. Title.
PT2635.084K’.912 84–5663
ISBN : 978-1-590-20846-5
http://us.penguingroup.com
[I]
OUR NAME IS Trotta. Our people came from Sipolje, in Slovenia. I say ‘people’, because we are not a family. Sipolje no longer exists, nor has it existed for a long time past. Merged with a number of neighbouring parishes, it has become quite a sizeable market town. That, as we know, is the way of the world these days. People cannot live alone, therefore they form themselves into futile groups, and their villages cannot live alone, either. Senseless patterns are thus evolved which drive the peasantry into the towns, and the villages into wishing to become towns themselves.
I knew Sipolje while I was still a boy. My father had taken me there, one seventeenth of August, on the eve of Emperor Franz Joseph the First’s birthday, which used to be celebrated even in the tiniest hamlets of the old Monarchy. In present-day Austria and in the former Crown Lands there can be very few people left in whom our name will evoke a memory.
In the forgotten annals of the old Austro-Hungarian Army, however, our name is recorded and I admit that I am proud of it, precisely because those annals are forgotten. I am not a man of my time. In fact I find it hard not to declare myself its enemy. Not, as I often remark, that I fail to understand it. My comment is merely a pious one. Because I am easy-going I prefer not to be aggressive or hostile and therefore I say that I do not understand those matters which I ought to say that I hate or despise. I have sharp ears but pretend to be hard of hearing, finding as I do that it is more elegant to feign this handicap than to admit that I have heard some vulgar sound.
My grandfather’s brother was that plain lieutenant of infantry who saved the Emperor Franz Joseph’s life at the battle of Solferino. The lieutenant was ennobled. For a long time he was known in the army, as in the schoolbooks of the old Monarchy, as the Hero of Solferino until, in accordance with his own wish, a veil of forgetfulness sank over him. He took his leave and lies buried in Hietzing. On his tombstone stand the proud and tranquil words: ‘Here rests the Hero of Solferino’.
The Emperor’s grace was extended to his son, who became a district commander; and even to the grandson who fell as a Jäger lieutenant in the autumn of 1914 in the action at Krasne-Busk. I never saw him nor, indeed, did I ever see any of the titled branch of our people. The titled Trottas were pious and devoted servants to Franz Joseph. My father, however, was a rebel.
My father was a rebel and a patriot, both—a species which only existed under the old Dual Monarchy.
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