The same evening when all in the restaurant were in high spirits, a circle was formed round a doctor of music. My friend the philosopher, to whom I had imparted the discovery of our relationship to the gods, asked to hear Mozart's Don Juan, especially the finale of the last act.
"What is that about?" asked one, who was not at home in the classical repertory of music.
"The devil comes and carries away the Sybarite."
The abysmal torment, so well described by Mozart—who very likely knew pangs of conscience of this kind, as the husband of a woman he had seduced committed suicide on his account—is unrolled in a succession of melancholy tones like a cutting neuralgia. The laughter stops, the jests cease, and when the piece is finished there is a painful silence.
"Here's to your health!" says some one.
They drink. But the cheerfulness is at an end, the Olympic mood is quenched, for the night is coming on and the terrible chromatic successions of notes echo like innumerable waves which rise and fall, and hurl human derelicts aloft in the air in order to swallow them the next moment.
While the descendants of the gods make vain attempts to assume a tone becoming their high birth, night has come, and the restaurant is closed. The party must break up and go, each to his lonely bed. As we pass the Cathedral veiled in the shadows of the night, a white light suddenly flashes on the façade, on which are depicted saints and sinners kneeling before the throne of the Lamb.
"What is that?" we ask, for there is no thunderstorm. We are startled, and remain standing, only to find that it is a photographer working in his shop by the magnesium light. We are annoyed at our nervousness, and for my part I involuntary think of the theatrical lightning when Don Juan is carried off.
As I enter my room I feel a kind of alarm, chilly and feverish, at the same moment. When I have taken off my overcoat, I hear the wardrobe door open of itself. "Is any one there?"