Albert was living quietly in a district inhabited by the genteel poor—clerks, journalists, small shop-keepers, artists—and kept aloof from his compatriots. But the news he was receiving from “home”—for he never ceased thinking of Germany as his home—was disquieting. The news came to him from various sources, but chiefly from pilgrims who were coming to worship at his shrine. Every aspiring poet, every young writer with an idea in his head, every agitator, came either to pay homage to his genius or to see the poet in exile in order to give first-hand information to their friends at home. Albert had the misfortune of having had woven around him myths and legends that reflected upon his morality. To the Germans he was a Don Juan. His flippant speech (often only the flash of the moment), his witty epigrams (at times uttered for the sheer love of wit), his blasphemy (rarely intended), gave credence to all the shocking things his enemies told about him. Furthermore, his imaginary love affairs narrated, and hinted at, in his poems were taken too literally. His countrymen failed to realize that one actually given to licentiousness rarely writes about it, never glorifies it in song and rhapsodies; that one who yields to dissipation rarely indulges in sweet day dreams about it. The Germans have always been too stolid, too ponderous, too matter of fact to comprehend the subtlety of fine humor. While an elephant can easily lift a log with his trunk he is quite helpless with a feather. V. One day he was at work in his room, Marguerite and the parrot in the other room, the door between them shut. Marguerite had found a way of keeping the parrot quiet when Albert was at work. A family with small children had recently moved in on the floor below and their noises were irritating Albert beyond endurance, so Marguerite was taking pains to keep the parrot quiet. She was feeding him bonbons and carrying on a deaf-and-dumb conversation with the hook-nosed chatterer. “You mustn’t make a sound,” she whispered in a soft lisp, as if talking to a babe, and waved an admonishing finger. “Not the least bit of sound, for we don’t want Albert to be angry, do we?” The parrot buried his beak in the down under his left wing and muffled his suppressed laughter. “There goes the postman! That fool, he rings the doorbell as if the house were on fire! Albert has told him a thousand times not to do it in the morning as it disturbs his thoughts——”