verre églomisé, mainly seventeenth century, painted with exquisite artistry. It also has a copy of Schedel’s World Chronicle, colored by my great-grandmother, which lies on a heavy Josephine writing desk from Styria. The desk is covered by a slab of Carrara marble eight inches thick, a great rarity north of the Alps. Uncle Georg used to say that at this desk, with its marble slab, he had the perfect place for putting his ideas down on paper. It was here that he started writing what he called his Anti-autobiography,a two-hundred-page manuscript in which he recorded everything he thought worth recording and on which he went on working for two decades in Cannes. When he died, none of us could find the manuscript, and it was suspected that he’d burned it shortly before his death, as we had evidence from his entourage that he’d made an entry relating to Wolfsegg two weeks earlier. The good Jean himself had seen the entry but could tell us nothing about it except that it was very short and concise. Having known Uncle Georg, I’m sure it was a fairly pungent remark that might have shocked my family greatly. Maybe the good Jean himself spirited the manuscript away, I said, but I can’t exclude the possibility that my mother destroyed it, as she had access to Uncle Georg’s study before anything was moved. The manuscript had always been kept in a desk drawer, but two days after my mother had been in the room this undoubtedly interesting document was missing and nowhere to be found. My mother probably came off worse than anyone in his Anti-autobiography, and I wouldn’t put it past her to have shut herself in his study for a while, as if grieving, and read the manuscript. She may have been outraged by what she read and made short shrift of the damaging document. After all, Uncle Georg had throughout his life blamed her for everything. He always told me, Your mother is the bane of Wolfsegg, and it’s quite probable that he recorded this observation in the Anti-autobiography. The slab of Carrara marble on the Styrian writing desk is always cold, ice cold, I told Gambetti, whatever the temperature outside; even at the height of summer, when everyone’s wilting under the heat, the Carrara marble is ice cold. It was over this ice-cold slab that Uncle Georg noted down his ideas. Altogether the best place to think is over this cold marble slab, he used to say. In my last years at Wolfsegg, having consciously or unconsciously taken my leave of the place forever, as it were, I too sat at this marble slab and wrote down a few things I thought worth recording, I told Gambetti, philosophical ideas that admittedly led to nothing and that I later destroyed, like so much else. We do our best thinking over a cold stone slab, I said, and our best writing. This slab of Carrara marble was unique, absolutely unique. And it was one of the things that now and then made the Huntsmen’s Lodge attractive. Normally I never set foot in the Huntsmen’s Lodge, as I’ve told you, and certainly not during the hunting season. The huntsmen were my brother’s friends, not mine; my friends were the gardeners. I visited the Gardeners’ House frequently, nearly every day, in order to see ordinary people. That was what I craved, and I was happier there than anywhere else. I loved simple people with their simple ways. When I went to see them they treated me just as they treated their plants, with affection. They understood my troubles and anxieties. The huntsmen showed no such understanding. They were always ready with their overbearing remarks and saw fit to regale me, a small child, with their suggestive jokes; they thought to cheer me up by waving their liquor bottles above their heads, though in fact such crude behavior only made me feel sadder and more insecure. The gardeners were quite different: they understood me, without wasting words, and could always help me. Even from a distance the huntsmen would bear down on me in their boastful fashion and address me in their loud, drunken voices, but the gardeners behaved toward me in a way that was sensitive and reassuring. It was the gardeners I sought out when I was unbearably unhappy and distressed, not the huntsmen. There were always two opposing camps at Wolfsegg, the huntsmen and the gardeners. They had tolerated one another for centuries, and that can’t have been easy. It’s interesting that every so often one of the huntsmen would kill himself, naturally with a gun, whereas no gardener ever did. There were many suicides among the huntsmen at Wolfsegg, but none among the gardeners. Every few years a huntsman shoots himself and a replacement has to be found. The huntsmen don’t live long in any case; they soon go gaga and drown themselves in drink. The gardeners at Wolfsegg have always lived to a ripe old age. Quite often a gardener will live to be ninety, but the huntsmen are usually finished at fifty because they’re no longer capable of doing their job. They tremble when taking aim, and even at forty they have problems with their balance. They’re mostly to be found in the village, sitting around in the inns, fat and bloated, their guns beside them with the safety catches off, holding forth with their absurd political opinions and often getting involved in brawls, which naturally end in injury or even death, as always happens in the country. The huntsmen were always hooligans and troublemakers. If they didn’t like the look of somebody they would take the next opportunity of shooting him and claim subsequently in court that they had mistaken the victim for an animal. The history of the Upper Austrian courts is full of such hunting accidents, which usually earn the offender a caution, on the principle that anyone shot by a huntsman has only himself to blame. The huntsmen were always fanatics, I told Gambetti. In fact it can be shown that huntsmen are to a large extent responsible for the world’s ills. All dictators have been passionate huntsmen who would have paid any price and even killed their own people for the sake of hunting, as we have seen. The huntsmen were Fascists, National Socialists, I told Gambetti. In the village it was the huntsmen who ruled the roost during the Nazi period, and it was the huntsmen who blackmailed my father, as it were, into National Socialism. When National Socialism emerged they were the strongmen; my father was the weakling who had to yield to them. So it was that because of the huntsmen Wolfsegg underwent a rapid switch to National Socialism. I must tell you, Gambetti, that my father was blackmailed into becoming a Nazi, and of course egged on by my mother, who was a hysterical National Socialist, a