“No, not for mortal food,” Zorn intoned wistfully. “The other day,” Krebsfleisch said in a plaintive tone, “I did some copying for a rich idiot who took i a notion into his head that he had a new theory about the universe. He paid me four silver Thalers! Yes, sir, I had four silver Thalers in the hollow of my hand and was on my way to Jagor’s to have a real spread—_Braten_ and white bread and a bottle of wine—and invited two friends for the feast. On the way to the restaurant I met a fellow-student and we dropped into Lutter and Wegner’s for a drink. I don’t know how it happened but we both got drunk and when night came the four Thalers were gone. One of the students, who had been invited to the spread, waited for me at Jagor’s until midnight, and then he challenged me—that fool! Must I lose my life in addition to the loss of my four Thalers? I have no more chance of a dinner at Jagor’s,” he ended with an audible sigh. “Rich idiots with new theories do not grow on trees.” He rose and stretched his arms, with a downward look at his tightly fitting trousers. “Can you perchance spare a top coat to cover this misfit?” Yes, Albert had a top coat. It was hanging on a peg in the open closet. “A fur coat and a top coat! You are not related to the Rothschilds?” “Just distantly—the same as to the Prophets and to some of the Apostles.” The jest was lost on Krebsfleisch. Later in the day Albert hunted up a friend and borrowed five Louis d’or and then went to 20 Friedrichstrasse, where he announced to Frau Varnhagen von Ense that he had discovered a kindred spirit in the form of a starving genius. IV. Months passed. Albert began to tire of Berlin. Every phase of the city’s life, like the pages of a book conned too often, bored him. He yearned for idealism, for truth, and because he could find neither he began to scoff and blaspheme. Here, as elsewhere, sham and falsehood ruled life. Politics, religion, literature, philosophy—a veritable Tower of Babel, where no one understood the other and all were bent on building something colossal, eternal. When he had first arrived here his zeal for so many things was kindled, now it was waning, cooling, dying. He suffered the pain of lost illusions, and that at an age when most people commence to have illusions. Despite his keen mind he had not yet learned that no one can see truth and live—peacefully. And he not only saw the truth but he was unwise enough to shout it from the housetops. He always took the world into his confidence, without realizing that one who gives the world his confidence gets none in return. The scales were falling off his eyes. The Salon, the literary Bohemians—he saw the sham and sickly sentimentality of it all! The Salon was but a nest of chattering parrots, where one repeated the phrases and syllogisms dropped by Goethe, by Herder, by Hegel, by Schelling. If these parrots had at least croaked their own tunes!