too isMozart. Mozart's music is also full of petticoat and frilly undies kitsch, he said. And the state composer Beethoven, as the Tempest Sonata above all demonstrates, is positively ridiculously serious. But where would it get us if we subjected everything to this deadly kind of examination, Reger said. Fussiness and kitsch, after all, are the two principal characteristics of so-called civilized man, highly stylized as he has become into a single human grotesque over hundreds and thousands of years, he said. Anything human is kitschy, he said, there can be no doubt about that. And so is high art and the highest art. Returning from London to Vienna, when in fact he had felt more at home in London than in Vienna, had been a real shock to him. But I could not have remained in London under any circumstances, if only because of my unstable health, which has always been close to flipping over into a dangerous disease, a fatal disease, Reger said. In London I had lived, in Vienna I have never truly lived, in London my head felt well, in Vienna my head never really felt well, in London I had my best ideas, he said. My time in London was my best time, he said. In London I always had all the opportunities I never had in Vienna, he said. After the death of my parents it was a matter of course for me to return to Vienna, to this grey wardepressed, spiritless city in which initially I existed for several years but only in a state of shock. But at the moment when I did no longer know which way to turn I met my wife, he said. My wife saved me; I had always been afraid of the female sex and in fact in a manner of speaking hated women body and soul and yet, he said, his wife had saved him. And do you know where I met my wife? he asked; have I ever told you? he asked, and I thought that he had often told me but did not say so and he said, I met my wife at the Kunsthistorisches Museum. And do you know where in the Kunsthistorisches Museum? he asked, and I thought of course I know where in the Kunsthistorisches Museum and he said, here in the Bordone Room, on this settee, he said this as if he really did not know that he had told me a hundred times that he had met his wife on the Bordone Room settee and I pretended, as he told me again, that I had never before heard it. It was a gloomy day, he said, I was in despair, I was studying Schopenhauer very thoroughly at the time, having lost all interest in Descartes, as indeed, then, inFrench thought generally, and I was sitting here on this settee, meditating over a particular sentence of Schopenhauer's, I cannot now tell you which sentence, he said. Suddenly some headstrong woman sat down on the settee next to me and remained there. I had made a signal to Irrsigler, but Irrsigler at first did not understand what my signal was intended to mean and subsequently proved unable to induce the woman sitting next to me to get up and leave, the woman was sitting there, staring at the White-Bearded Man, Reger said, and I believe she stared at the White-Bearded Man for an hour. Do you really like Tintoretto's White-Bearded Man that much? I asked the woman sitting next to me, Reger said, and at first I received no answer to my question. Only after a long while did the woman utter a No which truly fascinated me, a No such as I had never heard before this No, Reger said. So you do not like Tintoretto's White-Bearded Man at all? I asked the woman. No, I do not like him, the woman replied. A conversation, as I have said, then developed about art, in particular painting, about the old masters, Reger said, and suddenly I had no wish to cut the conversation short for a long time yet, throughout that conversation I was interested not in its content but in the way it was conducted. In the end, after prolonged reflection one way and another, I proposed to the woman that I take her to lunch at the Astoria and she accepted, and not very much later we were married. Then it turned out that she was also very wealthy, being the owner of several shops in the Inner City, also of blocks of flats on the Singerstrasse and on the Spiegelgasse, and indeed of one on the Kohlmarkt, he said. In addition to everything else. Suddenly I had a wife who was an intelligent, wealthy cosmopolitan, Reger said, who saved me with her intelligence and with her wealth, because my wife did save me, I was, as the saying goes, down and out when I met my wife, he said. As you see, I owe a lot to the Kunsthistorisches Museum, he said. Maybe it is actually gratitude that makes me go to the Kunsthistorisches Museum every other day, he said with a laugh, but of course it is not that. Do you know that in my wife's so-called Himmelstrasse house in Grinzing there was a safe large enough for several people to walk into without difficulty? he said. In this safe she kept the most valuable Stradivarius, Guarneri and Maggini, he said. In addition to everything else. Like me, my wife had spent the war in London and it is most astonishing that I did not make her acquaintance in London, because my wife was then, that is at the same time, moving in the same London circles as I was. For years we had passed one another in London, Reger said. Incidentally, before we were married, my wife donated several paintings to the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Reger said, including a very valuable and not at all unsuccessful Furini, which by the way you will find right next to the Cigoli and the Empoli, which incidentally I do not care for at all. After our marriage my wife donated no more pictures, he said, I made her see that there was no point in making presents, making presents is altogether distasteful, he said. Just imagine, before we were married my wife made a present of a Biedermeier town panorama of Vienna, I think by Gauermann, to one of her nieces. A year later, when, more by accident than out of interest, merely, as it were, to kill time between two meals, she walked round the Museum der Stadt Wien, the Museum of the City of Vienna, she discovered in that Museum of the City of Vienna, which, in my opinion, is absolutely worthless, the Gauermann she had given to her niece. You can imagine the shock this was to her. She went straight to the management of the museum and learned that her niece had sold the picture, within a few weeks if not a few days of receiving it as a present from her aunt, my future wife, to the Museum of the City of Vienna for two hundred thousand schillings. Giving presents is one of the worst kinds of foolishness, Reger said. I very soon made my wife see that this is so and she never gave any presents of any kind afterwards. We tear an object which is dear to us, an object to which, as the phrase goes, our heart is attached, we tear a work of art out of our life, and the recipient goes along and sells it for a shameless, for a horrendous sum, Reger said. Giving presents is a terrible habit, motivated of course by a guilty conscience and very often also by a widespread fear of loneliness, Reger said, a wicked malpractice, and the present, the gift received, is not appreciated because it should have been more, and more still, and it ultimately only creates hatred, he said. I have never in my life given presents, he said, but I have also always declined to accept presents, indeed I have all my life been afraid of being given presents. And do you know that Irrsigler too had a part in my marriage? Irrsigler, as it subsequently turned out, had suggested to my wife, who was suddenly leaning, utterly exhausted, against the wall in the Sebastiano Room, that she should sit down for a while in the Bordone Room on the Bordone Room settee, Irrsigler had led her from the Sebastiano Room into the Bordone Room, and on his advice she had sat down on the Bordone Room settee, Reger said. If Irrsigler had not led her into the Bordone Room I probably would have never met her, Reger said. You know that I do not believe in chance, he said. Seen in this light, Irrsigler was our match-maker, Reger said. For a long time my wife and I never realized that basically Irrsigler had been our matchmaker, until one day, during a reconstruction of our relationship, we discovered it. Irrsigler once said that he had