“Have you found lodgings already?”
“Yes.”
“So!” said his interlocutor, rather puzzled with the new arrival. I remember the scene well. Half a dozen of the men were standing in one corner of the room, smoking, drinking beer, and laughing over some not very brilliant joke; we three were a little apart. Courvoisier, stately and imposing-looking, and with that fine manner of his, politely answering his interrogator, a small, sharp-featured man, who looked up to him and rattled complacently away, while I sat upon the table among the fiddle-cases and beer-glasses, my foot on a chair, my chin in my hand, feeling my cheeks glow, and a strange sense of dizziness and weakness all over me, a lightness in my head which I could not understand. It had quite escaped me that I had neither eaten nor drunk since my breakfast at eight o’clock, on a cup of coffee and dry Brödchen, and it was now twelve hours later.
The pause was not a long one, and we returned to our places. But “Tannhauser” is not a short opera. As time went on my sensations of illness and faintness increased. During the second pause I remained in my place. Courvoisier presently came and sat beside me.
“I’m afraid you feel ill,” said he.
I denied it. But though I struggled on to the end, yet at last a deadly faintness overcame me. As the curtain went down amid the applause, everything reeled around me. I heard the bustle of the others—of the audience going away. I myself could not move.
“Was ist denn mit ihm?” I heard Courvoisier say as he stooped over me.
“Is that Friedhelm Helfen?” asked Karl Linders, surveying me. “Potz blitz! he looks like a corpse! he’s been at his old tricks again, starving himself. I expect he has touched nothing the whole day.”
“Let’s get him out and give him some brandy,” said Courvoisier. “Lend him an arm, and I’ll give him one on this side.”
Together they hauled me down to the retiring-room.