objetsd’artand their money. They don’t speak for themselves: they let their furniture and their money speak for them, just as they’ve done tonight, I thought. As this thought struck me, their true indigence was borne in upon me. The Auersbergers believe themselves to be objects of admiration, yet the truth is that those who visit them really admire only their furniture, their objetsd’art, and the skill with which these are disposed about their residences. They think people admire them, I thought, while in fact people admire only their polished cabinets and sideboards, their tables and chairs, the many oil paintings on their walls, and their money. It is by no means farfetched to think that what people admire about them, what draws people to them and inspires admiration, is their wealth, and the more or less shameless life-style it enables them to sustain. It’s not only the emperor’s clothes that make the emperor, but the emperor’s furniture and art treasures, I thought. But in the dimly lit music room it’s quite impossible to see any of these art treasures, I thought — not that I had any wish to see them, for I would undoubtedly have been sickened by the sight. How sickened I was by this whole apartment in the Gentzgasse, which once more struck me as perversely ostentatious! Such perfection, which hits you in the eye and crowds in upon you from all sides, is simply repellent, I thought, just as all apartments are repellent in which everything is just so, as they say, in which nothing is ever out of place or ever permitted to be out of place. We find such apartments repellent and would never feel at home in them, I thought, unless we were to some extent absentminded, as I was thirty years ago when I first set foot in this apartment. Being the last to take my place, I found myself sitting between the actor and Auersberger. The former now looked like a retired infantry general, and I noticed that even his loquacity had been dampened by the large intake of food: he had suddenly become silent, and as he sat with his legs stretched out in front of him there was something military about his whole demeanor, I thought. Such knife-edge creases are seen only in officers’ trousers, I thought — generals’ trousers, field marshals’ trousers. The hostess was circulating among the guests with a decanter of white wine, but by now everybody was tired and showed scarcely any interest in the wine or any other drink. Only Auersberger continued to drink nonstop. He was probably due for another drying-out cure at Kalksburg, I thought, looking at him from the side — at the sunken temples and the fat spongy cheeks that hung from them. Had the sight not been so repulsive I would have thought it merely grotesque, but I was devastated to see him in this condition. This is somebody you were once more or less in love with, I thought to myself as I viewed him from the side; there was a time when it might have been said that you’d fallen in love with this man. And now he was sitting next to me, I thought, puffy and bloated, able to draw attention to himself only by mumbling something from time to time in a drink-sodden voice. He’s wearing those grotesque knitted socks again, I thought, and that utterly tasteless peasant jacket, and that linen shirt with the colorful embroidery and stiff collar, which looks even more ridiculous on him than it would on anyone else. His wife obviously suffered under her husband’s perversely demented condition, which she could do nothing about. An hour earlier she had tried, without success, to persuade him to leave the party and go to bed; now she made a second attempt to get her husband, who had meanwhile drunk himself into a thoroughly infantile condition, out of his chair, out of the music room, and into his bed, but Auersberger pushed her away with a full glass of wine in his hand; in doing so he hurt her eye and spilled the wine on the floor, at the same time calling her a silly goose‚ as he had done throughout the evening. He had behaved no differently thirty years earlier. I was used to these scenes at the Auersbergers’—I know them well. The present one was relatively innocuous. Such evenings usually ended with Auersberger flinging his wine glass against the wall and smashing up one of the priceless Empire chairs. Their chairs were constantly having to be repaired by a restorer in the city center who made a good deal of money out of the Auersbergers’ mania for destruction. Every now and then Auersberger succeeded in saying something, even in getting whole sentences out. One of these was The human raceought to be abolished, a pronouncement with which he more than once attracted the attention of the company in the music room, delivering it with a rhythmic precision that came from his musical training. He delivered himself of other pronouncements, such as: Society ought to be abolished and Weshould all killone another. I was too familiar with such pronouncements to find them original, but on this occasion I was not embarrassed by them, as the others no doubt were, not having heard them before, among them the actor from the Burgtheater, who had clearly not heard them before this evening and found them embarrassing, as I could see. Butmy dearAuersberger,he said, what’s the matter with you? Why are you getting so worked up? The world’s a beautiful place and the people in it are good people. Why do you get so worked up and run everything down when everything is essentially so agreeable and well ordered? Having said this, he added, Whydo you have to drink yourself almost into a stupor? He shook his head and drew on his cigar, which the hostess had lighted for him. Jeannie Billroth, sitting opposite me, remained silent, observing the scene between Auersberger, with whom she had been even more infatuated than I had been twenty-five years earlier, and the Burgtheater actor, with whom she had hoped to have what she always termed an intellectual conversation, though no such conversation had materialized: the actor had not been willing to respond to any of her questions or enter into any discussion with her, and thus had given her no chance to strike up an intellectual conversation, choosing rather to confine his attention to the genuine Balaton pike and the recounting of his own anecdotes. Jeannie always wanted to have intellectualconversations and took every opportunity to stress that this was all that mattered to her in her social dealings, that this was her sole motive for attending parties; but most of the time she had no precise notion — or even a rough notion — of what constituted an