Her outfits did her no good, I thought, sitting in the wing chair, nor did her husband’s do him any good. His attempts at upward mobility into the aristocracy came to grief even more pitifully and calamitously than hers. It was, as I know, his life’s ambition to be an aristocrat, nothing less: the sad truth is that he would rather have been a witless aristocrat than a respectable composer. As long as I have known him he has always dressed like a Styrian count, and of course he would never be seen without the ostentatious signet ring on his left hand. He has always cut a ludicrous figure; though not lacking in wit, as people always remarked, he was a hopeless figure of fun. Auersberger isn’t stupid — anything but, I thought, sitting in the wing chair — but in this one respect, his desire to be an aristocrat, a count at the very least, he was always the most idiotic of social climbers, I thought as I sat in the wing chair. At Kilb he made himself look vulgar and ridiculous by screaming This food’s abominable, in the same way, it now occurred to me, as he’s made himself look vulgar and ridiculous hundreds and thousands of times in my presence. Whenever he straightened his neck and pursed his little lips to pass sentence of death on food or drink or some other trifling matter, what came out was not witty, but pathetic — merely foolish and distasteful. And the most distasteful thing of all about him is that, although officially he is called Auersberger — which is naturally what I have always called him — he once decided, in an access of