The next day I receive a letter from America from a friend whom I had heard nothing of for twenty years, informing me that an order in connection with the Chicago Exhibition had been following me in vain all over Europe. It carried with it an honorarium of 12,000 francs, an enormous sum for me in my desperate circumstances, which I could very easily find use for. This 12,000 francs would have secured my future, and no one besides myself would have guessed that the loss of this money was a punishment for an evil deed which I had committed out of anger at the treachery of a literary colleague.
In another dream of wider significance I saw Jonas Lie,[2] with a gilt bronze clock curiously ornamented. Some days later, when I went to walk on the Boulevard St. Michel, a watch-maker's shop-window attracted my attention. "Jonas Lie's clock!" I exclaimed aloud.
It was indeed the same. It was crowned by a celestial globe on which two female figures leaned; the works were supported by four pillars, and on the globe a date-indicator pointed to the 13th of August. In a future chapter I will explain what the fateful 13th of August brought with it. This and other occurrences took place during my stay in the Hôtel Orfila between 6th February and 19th July, 1896. Concurrently with them a larger adventure pursued its often interrupted course till, with my exit from the hotel, a new section of my life began.
Spring has returned; the valley of tears and sighs under my window is green and blossoming. Foliage hides the bare ground and its unsightliness. The Gehenna has turned into a Vale of Sharon full of lilies, lilacs, and acacias. I feel very melancholy, but the merry laughter of the girls who play unseen beneath the trees, reaches me and rouses me again to life. Life hurries by and old age approaches: Wife, children, home, dispersed and wrecked; without is spring, within is autumn.
The Book of Job and the Lamentations of Jeremiah comfort me, for, at any rate, there is a certain resemblance between Job's lot and mine. Am I not smitten with incurable boils? Am I not visited with poverty and forsaken by my friends? "I go blackened, but not by the sun; I am a brother to dragons and a companion to ostriches; my skin is black and falleth from me, and my bones are burned with heat. My harp is turned to mourning, and my pipe unto the voice of them that weep."
Thus Job. And Jeremiah with two words fathoms the depth of my sadness: "I forgat prosperity."
In this mood I sit one oppressive afternoon bent over my work, when, all of a sudden, behind the foliage of the garden in front of me, I hear the playing of a piano. Like a war-horse at the sound of the trumpet, I prick up my ears, straighten myself, and in a great state of excitement struggle for breath. Someone is playing Schumann's Aufschwung; and what is more, he is playing—he, my Russian friend, my pupil who called me "Father," because he owed all his culture to me, my assistant who called me "Master" and kissed my hands, whose life began where mine ended. He has come from Vienna to Paris to ruin me, as he ruined me in Vienna—and why? Because Fate has arranged that his present wife, before he knew her, was my sweetheart. Was it my fault that matters so fell out? Surely not, and yet he hated me with a deadly hatred, hindered my plays from being accepted, wove intrigues, and deprived me of the barest means of subsistence. Then, in a fit of rage, I reversed the spear and struck him, indeed, in such a brutal and cowardly way, that it made me feel like a murderer. The fact that he has come to kill me comforts me, for death alone can deliver me from my pangs of conscience.
It was he, then, who lurked behind those letters with false addresses which I always saw near the porter's lodge. Well, let him strike! I will not defend myself. For he is right, and my life is nothing to me. He continues to play the Aufschwung, which no one can play so well. He plays invisible behind the green wall, and his magic harmonies rise above its blossoming creepers like butterflies flying towards the sun.
But why is he playing? Is it to inform me of his coming to frighten me and drive me to flight? Perhaps I shall find out in the restaurant where the other Russians have long been talking about the arrival of their countryman.
I go for my evening meal there, and already at the doorway encounter hostile glances. The whole company, informed of my conflict with the Russian, has turned against me. In order to disarm them, I open fire myself.