More and more, she worked herself into the world of my thoughts and my mail, so that finally, I could, with every confidence, leave the entire correspondence up to her. Her husband was proud of it. Almost even prouder was her mother a very hard working, down to earth woman, accustomed to a simple life, who would have liked so very much to lend a hand, if it had been possible, for she also possessed a soul which would not want to stay in the lower reaches, but was seeking to rise upwards. [a] See my footnote in chapter V. "Du" is the informal German word for "you", which is only used to address close friends, relatives, and children. Using it against anybody else would be a sign of disrespect and an insult. So, it was this friend whom I instructed to take my affairs as forcefully as possible into his hands, and he did it as well as he could. He hired a lawyer from Dresden to conduct the lawsuit and informed the entire German press that I was momentarily in Asia, but would not hesitate, after my return home, to defend myself against the intended gross violation of my rights. More could not be done for the moment, because it had been impossible for me to abort my journey. From my wife, I received no news. She was incapable of dealing with such serious business matters. But the Plöhns wrote, though those letters only caught up with me in Padang, on the island of Sumatra. They contained alarming news. The press had started to write about my Münchmeyer novels, and had done this in a manner which was unfavourable for me. Rumours were spread about me, which were partially ridiculous, partially unscrupulous. The newspapers wrote that I was not in the Orient at all, but that I was hiding, on account of a malignant disease, in the iodine resort Bad Tölz, in upper Bavaria. If I had suspected that this would go on in this deceitful, hateful, and vicious manner for an entire decade, I would have interrupted my journey after all and would have returned home as quickly as possible. If I had done this, I would have been spared all this inhumane torture and pains, which I have suffered during this long time. But unfortunately, I did not know yet at this time what had happened to my novels and what had been the guiding ideas concerning me, which were going around in Münchmeyer's business and are still going around today. I believed that I could still settle the matter from afar and thought that I needed to do nothing more than to get precise information, from which the steps to be taken would have to result. Thus, I wrote home that my wife should come to Egypt with the Plöhns, where I would meet them in Cairo. They came, though much later than planned, because Plöhn had become ill on the way. What I found out from them did not sound favourable at all, and it furthermore struck me as very unspecific. The lawyer was still in the earliest stages of preparing the case. Fischer had declared that he would fight back