II.
On the ground floor was the shop, which occupied the entire breadth and nearly the entire depth of the house, a silk and cloth business, large, according to the ideas of the time, which was managed by my father and grandfather together until my eleventh year, when Father began to deal wholesale on his own account. It was nice in the shop, because when you went down the assistants would take you round the waist and lift you over to the other side of the semi-circular counter which divided them from the customers. The assistants were pleasant, dignified gentlemen, of fine appearance and behaviour, friendly without wounding condescension.
Between my fifth and sixth years some alterations were done at the shop, which was consequently closed to me for a long time. When it was once more accessible I stood amazed at the change. A long, glass-covered gallery had been added, in which the wares lay stored on new shelves. The extension of the premises was by no means inconsiderable, and simultaneously an extension had been made in the staff. Among the new arrivals was an apprentice named Gerhard, who was as tall as a grown man, but must have been very young, for he talked to me, a six-year-old child, like a companion. He was very nice-looking, and knew it. "You don't want harness when you have good hips," he would say, pointing to his mightily projecting loins. This remark made a great impression upon me, because it was the first time I had heard anyone praise his own appearance. I knew that one ought not to praise one's self and that self-praise was no recommendation. So I was astonished to find that self-praise in Gerhard's mouth was not objectionable; in fact, it actually suited him. Gerhard often talked of what a pleasure it was to go out in the evenings and enjoy one's self--what the devil did it matter what old people said?--and listen to women singing--amusements which his hearer could not manage to picture very clearly to himself.
It soon began to be said that Gerhard was not turning out well. The manner in which he procured the money for his pleasures resulted, as I learnt long afterwards, in his sudden dismissal. But he had made some slight impression on my boyish fancy--given me a vague idea of a heedless life of enjoyment, and of youthful defiance.
III.
On the landing which led from the shop to the stockroom behind, my grandfather took up his position. He looked very handsome up there, with his curly white hair. Thence, like a general, he looked down on everything--on the customers, the assistants, the apprentices, both before and behind him. If some specially esteemed lady customer came into the shop, he hurriedly left his exalted position to give advice. If the shopman's explanations failed to satisfy her, he put things right. He was at the zenith of his strength, vigour, and apparently of his glory.
The glory vanished, because from the start he had worked his way up without capital. The Hamburg firm that financed the business lent money at too high a rate of interest and on too hard conditions for it to continue to support two families.
But when later on my grandfather had his time at his own disposal, he took up the intellectual interests which in his working years he had had to repress. In his old age, for instance, he taught himself Italian, and his visitors would find him, with Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata in front of him, looking out in a dictionary every word that presented any difficulty to him, and of such there were many.
The old man was an ardent Buonapartist, and, strangely enough, an even more ardent admirer of the Third Napoleon than of the First, because he regarded him as shrewder, and was convinced that he would bequeath the Empire to his son. But he and I came into collision on this point from the time I was fourteen years of age. For I was of course a Republican, and detested Napoleon III. for his breach of the Constitution, and used to write secretly in impossible French, and in a still more impossible metre (which was intended to represent hexameters and pentameters) verses against the tyrant. An ode to the French language began:
"Ah! quelle langue magnifique, si belle, si riche, si sonore,
Langue qu'un despote cruel met aux liens et aux fers!"