"I wish to speak with lackey Baum," cried Bruno suddenly. The intendant was obliged to dispatch a telegram to the summer palace, asking that Baum should be sent to the king's aid-de-camp.
Bruno let down the curtains, ordered lights and more wine, and gave orders that no one should be admitted. The intendant was in despair, but Bruno exclaimed:
"My dear friend, everything on earth is suicide, with this difference, however--here, one can always come to life again. The hour one kills is the only one that is rightly spent."
The intendant feared an outbreak of delirium, but Bruno was not one of those cavaliers who have only as much mind as the champagne they have just tossed down inspires them with, and who, at best, can only write a gallant billet-doux or devise a witty impropriety. At other times, Bruno would have laughed at the man who would ask him to adopt a system as his own, and yet he now asserted that he had one, and, filling his glass again, exclaimed: "Yes, my friend; there are only two kinds of human beings in the world."
"Men and women?" said the intendant, who thought it best to fall in with his vein, in order more easily to divert him from it.
"Pshaw!" interrupted Bruno. "Who is speaking of such things? Listen, my friend; the two human species are those who enjoy and those who suffer. He who lives for so-called ideas--for the good, the beautiful, the true. The man with an ideal may sacrifice his life, or be burnt at the stake. It is his duty. His life is a short and uneventful one, but is compensated by the long and enduring remembrance in which he is held by posterity. That balances the reckoning. Is it not so?"
The intendant was obliged to assent. What could he do?
"And the second species," added Bruno, "includes ourselves--those who enjoy. The best thing in the world is enjoyment without consequences. After I have been smoking, gaming or listening to music, I can do anything; nothing disturbs me then. Other pleasures unfortunately have consequences. One ought to have no family--no family--by all means, no family."
Bruno suddenly burst into tears. The intendant was at a loss how to help him, and reproached himself for not having induced Bruno to refrain from drinking and talking. Bruno threw his head back, and the intendant wrapped a piece of ice in a handkerchief and laid it on his forehead.
"Thanks!" said Bruno, closing his eyes; "thanks!"