Explore "Hadrian the Seventh" by Frederick Rolfe on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
On the night of the second of October, the German Emperor sat in the Imperial box at the Berlin Schauspielhaus. They were playing Wilhelm Tell. William II looked-on at the mummer portraying the audacious genius who, by skill and courage, delivered a people from tyranny. He looked on the presented incident with a humorous sense of its coincidence with his present intention: for, in the imperial mind -- that agile predominant mind at which inferior minds (led by the Pall Mall Gazette) were used to mock -- was stored certain knowledge of another scene yet to be enacted in which he himself would play the part of the deliverer. An aide-de-camp entered during the interval, while the house gave itself up to conversation, apples, nuts, pfefferkuchen. He handed a locked portfolio to the Kaiser.
"The papers are all here?"