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Minister (so-called — he’s Minister of Culture and Agriculture combined!), who had had his villa thoroughly restored and whom I find more repellent than all the others, she said to the assembled company in the so-called blue drawing room (!), He’s been writing a book about Mendelssohn Bartboldy for the last ten years and still hasn’t even got the first sentence in his head. This evoked uproarious laughter from all these brainless people sitting in their repulsively soft armchairs, and one of them, a specialist in internal medicine from the neighbouring town of Vockla-bruck, actually asked who Mendelssohn Bartholdy was. Whereupon my sister, with a devilish laugh, blurted out the word composer ; which brought forth yet more sickening laughter from these people, who are all millionaires and all brainless, among them a number of seedy counts and senile barons who go about year in year out in leather shorts, the stench of which has been building up over decades, and occupy their pathetic days with gossip about society, illhealth and money. At that moment I wanted to leave this company , but one look from my sister was enough to stop me. I should have got up and left, I now reflected, but I remained seated and allowed myself to be subjected to this dreadful humiliation, which went on late into the night. It would after all have been impossible to leave my sister alone in this company, which suited her in every respect, since it consisted entirely of highly respected people with large, indeed vast amounts of money behind them and all kinds of breath-taking titles. Probably, I thought, she’s on to the scent of a business deal. After all, she did her biggest deals with these old counts and barons who, shortly before they died, often disposed of huge slices of their even huger estates in order to make things easier for themselves, and of course for their heirs. Naturally this kind of evening in this kind of house can bring my sister a deal running into millions, I thought. To me it means nothing, but of course I have to consider her. She crosses her legs and says something flattering and utterly insincere to some old baron and thereby earns herself a whole year’s high living. Even as a child my sister had an incredibly acute business sense. I remember how she would openly approach every visitor who turned up here and ask him for money. People found it cute in a child of seven or eight, though they ought to have been disgusted, as I was even then. Our parents naturally forbade it, but even at that time she took no notice of parental prohibitions. At the party I have just mentioned she ended up by prevailing on Baron Lederer — as he is called, though he is not a baron in fact, as I happen to know — to invite her to the Bristol on his next visit to Vienna. What must have struck everybody as a piece of impudence was in fact a superb move on her part; she’s always known just how to prepare the ground for her deals. And she’s always been successful. When she now says that after the death of our parents she was able to treble her fortune I am bound to assume that she trebled it not once, but probably three or four times, for she has always lied to me in matters of business, lest it might one day occur to me to demand something from her. She need have no fear of that. What I still have will suffice for as long as I live, because I shan’t live much longer, I told myself, getting up from my chair and going to the kitchen. Now that I’ve failed in my plan to start my work on Mendelssohn Bartholdy early in the morning, I told myself, I can sit in the kitchen and have breakfast. As I sat in the kitchen, forcing myself to eat the bread and drink the tea, which had meanwhile gone cold — and I couldn’t be bothered to make fresh tea — I kept hearing my sister say, Do come and stay with me in Vienna, just for a few weeks. You’ll see it will do you good. It’ll get you away from everything, take you out of yourself, she