Free A Perfect Vacuum by Stanislaw Lem

language comes into use; in it may be worded any news that makes its way—roundabout, to be sure—in from the outside world, such as the possibility that the “nation” may be threatened by intervention on the part of the Argentine government; meanwhile these wordings, conveyed to the King by his high officials, dare not lay bare—that is, state point-blank—the unsovereignty of the monarch and the throne. Argentina, for example, is always called “Spain” and treated as a neighboring country. Gradually they all become so much at home inside their artificial skins, and learn to move about so naturally in splendid robes, to wield the sword and the tongue with such address, that the lie sinks deeper—into the very warp and woof of this fabric, this living picture. The picture remains a humbug, but a humbug now that throbs with the blood of authentic desires, hatreds, quarrels, rivalries; for at the unreal court are hatched real intrigues, courtiers strive to undo others, to draw nearer the throne over the bodies of their rivals, that they may receive from the hands of the King the high ranks and honors of the toppled; therefore the innuendo, the cup of poison, the informer’s whisper, the dagger, begin their hidden, altogether genuine work; yet only so much of the monarchistic and feudal element continues to inhere in all of this as Taudlitz, the new Louis XVI, is able to breathe into it from his own dream of absolute power, a dream dramatized by a pack of former SS men.
    Taudlitz believes that somewhere in Germany lives his nephew, the last of the line, Bertrand Gülsenhirn, whose age was thirteen at the time of the fall of Germany. To seek out this youth (now twenty-one) Louis XVI sends the Due de Rohan, or Johann Wieland, the only “intellectual” among his men, for Wieland had been a physician in the Waffen SS and had carried out, in the camp at Mauthausen, “scientific studies.” The scene where the King entrusts the Due with the secret mission to find the boy and bring him to the court as the Infante is among the finest in the novel. First the monarch is gracious enough to explain how he is much troubled by his own childlessness, out of consideration for the good of the throne, that is, the succession; these opening phrases help him continue in this vein; the insane savor of the scene lies in this, that now the King cannot admit even to himself that he is not a real king. He does not, in fact, know French, but, employing German, which prevails at court, he maintains—as does everyone after him, when the subject arises—that it is French he is speaking, seventeenth-century French.
    This is not madness, for madness would be—now—to admit to Germanness, even if only in language; Germany does not exist, inasmuch as France’s only neighbor is Spain (that is, Argentina)! Anyone who dares utter words in German, letting it be understood that he is speaking
thus,
stands in peril of his life: from the conversation between the Archbishop of Paris and the Due de Salignac (Vol. I, p. 311), it may be inferred that the Prince de Chartreuse, beheaded for “high treason,” in reality had drunkenly called the palace not simply a “whorehouse,” but a “German whorehouse.”
Nota bene
: the abundance of French names in the novel, which bear a striking similarity to the names of cognacs and wines—take, for example, the “Marquis Châteauneuf du Pape,” the master of ceremonies!—undoubtedly derives from the fact (though nowhere does the author say it) that in the brain of Taudlitz there clamor, for readily understandable reasons, far more names of liquors and liqueurs than those of the French aristocracy.
    In addressing his emissary, then, Taudlitz speaks as he imagines King Louis might speak to a trusted agent being sent on such a mission. He does not tell Monsieur le Due to put aside his sham apparel, but, on the