listening to the letter; he smiled--a smile full of heartbreaking
melancholy--and answered her with the same invisible quiver of the
eyelids; it was as though he understood that gentle greeting and drew a
scrap of comfort from it for a mysterious, silent sorrow that depressed
him within himself, that lay on his breast like an oppression of the
breath, like a nightmare in his waking life.

But Prince Herman was already talking about the ministerial crisis: it
was momentarily expected that the authoritative government, rendered
powerless, since the new elections, in the house of deputies with its
majority of constitutionals, would proffer its resignation to the
emperor. The question, as always, was that of a revision of the
constitution, which the constitutionals desired and the
authoritatives--taking the side of the emperor--opposed. The Empress
Elizabeth heaved a sigh of fatigue: how often had not this question of a
revision of the constitution, which in Liparia always meant an extension
of the constitution and a restriction of the imperial authority, come
looming up during their twenty years' reign as a personal attack upon
her husband! Resembling his long line of Liparian ancestors,
hereditarily autocratic, Oscar could never forgive his father, Othomar
XI., for allowing a constitution to be passed in his more liberal reign.
And now, at this crisis, it was no small thing that they were asking,
the constitutionals. The house of peers, hereditary and authoritative,
the emperor's own body, which cancelled every proposal of a too
constitutional character sent up from the house of deputies, was no
longer to stand above them, hereditary and therefore, because of its
hereditary nature, invariably authoritative: they wanted to make it
elective! Even Othomar XI., with his modern ideas in favour of a
constitution, would never have suffered this attack upon one of the most
ancient institutions of the empire, an attack which would shake Liparia
to its foundations....

While Herman was debating this, casually, his words lightly touching
this all-important question, it seemed to Othomar as though he were
turning giddy. A world passed through his head, rushing with rapid
clouds through his imagination; and out of these clouds visions loomed
up before him, pale-red, quick as lightning, terrible as a kind of
apocalypse, the universe ending in a dynamite explosion. Out of these
clouds there flashed up for an instant a scene, a recolle