“But also happy man!” the author retorted coldly.
The devil shrugged his shoulders.
They left the churchyard, and before them lay a street,—two rows of houses, and between them was darkness in which the miserable lamps clearly proved the want of light upon earth.
“Tell me,” the devil spoke after a pause, “how do you like your grave?”
“Now I am used to it, and it is all right: it is very quiet there.”
“Is it not damp down there in the Fall?” asked the devil.
“A little. But you get used to that. The greatest annoyance comes from those various idiots who ramble over the cemetery and accidentally stumble on my grave. I don’t know how long I have been lying in my grave, for I and everything around me is unchangeable, and the concept of time does not exist for me.”
“You have been in the ground four years,—it will soon be five,” said the devil.
“Indeed? Well then, there have been three people at my grave during that time. Those accursed people make me nervous. One, you see, straight away denied the fact of my existence: he read my name on the tombstone and said confidently: ‘There never was such a man! I have never read him, though I remember such a name: when I was a boy, there lived a man of that name who had a broker’s shop in our street.’ How do you like that? And my articles appeared for sixteen years in the most popular periodicals, and three times during my lifetime my books came out in separate editions.”
“There were two more editions since your death,” the devil informed him.