The Days of the King Read Online Free PDF

the Cathedral of the Metropolia and he did not stride into the main (in fact, rather small) chamber of Parliament to utter the first word of Romanian he had ever spoken in his life
("Jur!"—
"I swear!") and then follow Manolache Costache Epureanu (in his capacity as president of the Constituent Assembly), who was coughing and clearing his throat, to be proclaimed
domnitor
(in other words, a kind of king) of that land. But, since nothing is perfect in this world, not even differences, their arrivals in Bucharest did have one thing in common. Prince Karl Eitel Friedrich Zephyrinus Ludwig, before being named Carol I, and Herr Joseph Strauss, immediately after arriving in the center of that city, stared wide-eyed in amazement at the numerous swine wallowing in the mud, unfettered and fat, under the very windows of the house that passed as the princely palace. And that was all.
    As the twenty-fifth day of June was fading, the clouds of dust were dispersing, and the mounds of garbage were slowly, slowly melting into the darkness, the dentist stopped at an inn by a river, where he was served some very tallowy sausages. That evening he had no strength left to dip his pen into an inkwell. It was not until morning, after dissolving ten drops of quinine in brown sugar and procuring a glass of milk for the tomcat, that he had leisure to write to his benefactor. On one of the days that followed, after he had been received by the sovereign in his office and after the latter, in return for the lead soldier, had entrusted him to a lieutenant of the guard, who was to help him find a place to live, Joseph came across a German street, with all kinds of merchants, functionaries, craftsmen, pharmacists, notaries, bank clerks, jewelers, and watchmakers. It was called Lipscani Street, recalling Leipzig. Soon, the Berliner doctor discovered that he was not the only shadow that had followed the captain of dragoons, as he had, naively and without troubling his head, imagined for a while. Around the throne there thronged countless other shadows, among them a physician with the rank of colonel, who had apparently been a foundling; a gentleman named Brătianu, with the initials
I
and
C;
and a professor who spoke very oddly, as if in Latin, though it was Romanian he was trying to drum into the prince. Moreover, Joseph discovered that he was not the city's first dentist. Among romances, poesy, and scientific tomes, he found a slim volume printed in Cyrillic letters, whose reddish cover the bookseller read for him:
I. Seliger, dantist in Bucuresci; Guidance for the Cleanliness of the Mouth and the Preservation of Healthy Teeth.
It had been printed in 1828. He purchased it.

3. Stained Sheets
    W HEN IN YOUR pipe-tobacco pouch there are stashed a copious number of groschen, guilders, and florins, it seems an easy matter to choose a spruce little house and set up a surgery there. Especially if under the floorboards, as a safeguard against hard times, you have a diamond ring hidden away. And Herr Strauss, whom the torrid summer found in precisely such a position, under a munificent star and having managed to pull up one of the floorboards and nail it back again without leaving a trace, had settled in the Saint Nicholas quarter, on the street that teemed with his compatriots, Lipscani as it was named, where he occupied two rooms on the upper floor of a redbrick building. At the same address, number 18, he had also rented the ground-floor shop. It was narrow and long, with a large, shuttered window, a former haberdasher's. He did not dawdle, he began at once to alter it, but not in the two weeks he had thought this would take, rather in five, because the workmen were idlers and drunkards, always ready to demand more money than the initial reckoning. He chased away the first crew one Tuesday, paying them as much as he thought they deserved. From their mouths he heardall kinds of filthy curses (which he intuited, rather than understood), but did not allow