rudeness without any apparent compunction, and to my great surprise his hand was not trembling as he held his coffee cup and took an occasional sip from it. We enter a house, thinking it’s a friendly house, he said. Because the actor had recently been so incensed, even Auersberger was now wide awake, listening to what he said. Anna Schreker, the two young writers, and all the other guests were now listening attentively, for the actor had again forced everybody’s attention on himself by the strong language he used. Words like vicious, rude, insolent, hypocritical, infamous, megalomaniac, stupid rained down on the company in the Gentzgasse, and in particular on Jeannie. He kept on repeating that it was not just ill-mannered, but positively vicious to confront him with such stupid questions, as this person had done. This person, he said, referring to Jeannie, was all I needed, this person whom I instantly loathed, because she’s absolutely stupid. If I’d known that this person was going to be present, I’d never have taken up your invitation, the actor told the Auers-bergers with some feeling. I hate people like this who are out to destroy everything, who talk incessantly about art and have no notion of art, people who blabber away on evenings like this with a mindlessness that reeks to high heaven, said the actor indignantly. When I saw this person sitting here I thought of turning around and leaving, but decency forbade me. He repeated the word decency several times, then leaned back — in relief, I thought, but I was mistaken. He immediately sat up again, and in a sudden access of breathlessness he said to Jeannie, You’re one of those people who know nothing and are worth nothing and consequently hate everybody. It’s as simple as that. You hate everybody because you hate yourself and your own pitiful inadequacy. You talk incessantly about art, without having the faintest notion of what art is. He wanted to shout these words at Jeannie, but he was prevented by his sudden breathlessness and had to speak them in a monotone. You’re a stupid and destructive person, and you’re not even ashamed of it, he said, and then fell silent. I have to own that the actor’s attack on Jeannie gave me great delight, for I had seldom seen anybody say such things to her face or requite her with such asperity for one of her impertinences. Although I still found the Burgtheater actor repugnant, he had momentarily earned my esteem. Never before has Jeannie Billroth been told how lacking in decency she really is, I thought. Nobody’s ever told her that for a long time she’s been utterly incompetent in discussing ideas, I thought. Nobody’s ever told Jeannie to her face that she’s rude, even vulgar, as the actor just has. We feel a great delight when we believe that somebody is getting his just deserts, so to speak, by being reproached with his own rudeness and shamelessness, his own stupidity and incompetence, I thought, especially when we’ve waited years to see it happen. Jeannie’s never before been told that she’s basically a common little woman and a low character, but the actor from the Burgtheater has just spelled it out. I had the impression that everyone who witnessed the actor’s outburst felt not only a certain momentary pleasure, but a satisfaction that would last rather longer than that. Naturally they did not express what they felt: they had no occasion to do so, nor could they have afforded to. The actor could afford to, however, just as I could afford, if only by my silence, to endorse everything he had said about Jeannie. For years, perhaps for decades, we may have wanted to tell someone the truth to his face, the truth that he has never heard because no one has dared to tell it to him to his face, and then at last someone does it for us. And I reflected that by telling Jeannie the truth to her face, whatever that truth may or may not have been, the actor had made it worthwhile for me to have accepted the invitation to the artistic dinner after all. You’rea thoroughly dishonest person, the actor had told her. For hours you lie in wait for an opportunity to degrade someone. People like you are dangerous. One is well advised to give people like you a wide berth. Were the actor’s words not still ringing in my ears I would not now believe them possible, but they are recorded here exactly as he uttered them that evening. It’s quite likely, I thought, that Jeannie had launched her insolent attack on the actor before I left the dining room and entered the music room, that she had for some time been playing the part of the repulsive Jeannie Billroth I know all too well from the time when I was still having an affair with her. She has not changed. If she is not the focus of attention at any gathering, she makes every effort to put this right by mounting what one might call a frontal attack and insulting the person who is meant to be the focus of attention, as the actor from the Burgtheater was at this artistic dinner. And she must have started provoking him even before I entered the dining room, for otherwise his angry explosion would have been inexplicable. I now knew the reason for the curious outbursts which I had heard from the music room while I was still sitting in the anteroom and which I did not understand at the time, loud exclamations such as Ekdal? Rubbish! or Gregers? Rubbish! or The Wild Duck? Rubbish! They had clearly been directed at Jeannie when she began her attack. Yes, said the actor, getting up to leave and handing his empty coffee cup to Auersberger’s wife, who had also risen from her chair, how I hate gatherings like this, which seek to destroy everything that means anything to me, to drageverything I’vealways held dear in the dirt, where people exploit my name and the fact that I’man actor at the Burgtheater! HowI long, not so much for peace, as to be leftin peace! Ifonly I’d been borna different person, I’vealways thought, if only I’dbecome a completely different person from the one I have become, a person who was leftin peace! Butthen I’d have had to be born of different parents and have grown up in quite different circumstances, surrounded by nature, a nature that was free and unconfined, instead of being surrounded by artificiality. For we’ve all grown up amid artificiality — not only I, who have always suffered under it, but everyone here. And turning to Jeannie he added, Even you, my dear, who pursue me with your hatred and contempt. He now turned to me, but did not address me. Finally he turned to Auersberger, who was once more asleep in his chair, completely drunk, and remarked that it was a misfortune to have been born at all, but the greatest misfortune of all was to have been born a person like Herr Auersberg. To enter into nature, to breathe natural air, to be utterly at home in nature — that, he felt, must be the greatest happiness. To go into the forest, deep into the forest, said the actor, to yield oneself up to the forest, that had always been his ideal — to become part of nature oneself. The forest, the virgin forest, the life of a woodcutter — that has always been my ideal, he said with sudden excitement, as he made to leave. Although everyone had drunk a good deal, the only person who was totally drunk as the party broke up was Auersberger; this was how it had been thirty, twenty-five and twenty years earlier. Slumped in his chair, he was unaware that all the guests were now standing up and about to take their leave. As I stood up myself, I recalled hearing the actor utter the words the forest, the virgin forest, the life of a woodcutter earlier in the evening, once during dinner, as he was eating his pike, and again in the music room, though at the time I had not known what he meant. Much of the time my attention had naturally been concentrated not on him, but on Jeannie Billroth; all through supper I had hardly taken my eyes off her, paying no attention to what the actor was saying most of the time, catching only the odd half sentence, never a full sentence. During the meal I had not been in the least interested in what he had to say; it was only much later, in the music room, after he had drunk more than was really good for him, that he began to interest me, because he had meanwhile become a different person, as it now strikes me. Everything he had said in the dining room was drivel, the kind of vacuous small talk we are accustomed to hearing from aging or aged actors, whom I always try to avoid because I cannot endure their conversation, and because the so-called wisdom of old age they purvey, which is in fact merely the crass imbecility of old age, grates on my nerves. I have repeatedly been struck by this and have accordingly always taken care to avoid such people’s company. But after a few glasses of wine a change had come over this actor from the Burgtheater: all at once he had become an interesting person, with a philosophical cast of mind that suddenly revealed itself when he uttered the words