DR. FAUSTUS - Chapter XXIII

"Jeanette was a writer of novels. Grown up between two languages, she wrote ladylike and original studies of society in a charmingly incorrect idiom peculiar to herself alone. They did not lack psychological or melodic charm and were definitely a literary achievement. She noticed Adrian at once, and took to him; he, in his turn, felt at home in her presence and conversation. She was aristocratically ugly and good form, with a face like a sheep, where the high-born and the low-born met, just as in her speech, her French was mingled with Bavarian dialect. She was extraordinarily intelligent and at the same time enveloped in the naively inquiring innocence of the spinster no longer young. Her mind had something fluttering and quaintly confused about it, at which she herself laughed more heartily than anyone else - though by no means in the fashion of Leo Zink, who laughed at himself as a parlour trick, where she did the same out of sheer lightness of heart and sense of fun. She was very musical, a pianist, a Chopin enthusiast, a writer on Schubert; on friendly terms with more than one bearer of a great name in the contemporary world of music. Her first conversation with Adrian had been a gratifying exchange upon the subject of Mozart's polyphony and his relation to Bach. He was and remained her attached friend for many years.

But no one will suppose that the city he had chosen to live in really took him to her bosom or ever made him her own. The beat of the grandiose village under the melting blue of the Alpine sky, with the mountain stream rushing ad rippling through it: that might please his eye; the self-indulgent comfort of its ways, the suggestion it had of all-the-year-round carnival freedom, might make even his life easier. But its spirit - sit venia verbo! - its atmosphere, a little mad and quite harmless; the decorative appeal to the senses, the holiday and the artistic mood of this self-satisfied Capua: all that was of course foreign to the soul of a deep, stern nature like his. It was indeed the fitting and proper target for that look of his I had so long observed: veiled and cold and musingly remote, followed by the smile and averted face.

The Munich I speak of is the Munich of the later Regency, with only four years between it and the war, whose issue was to turn its pleasantness to morbidness and produce in it one sad and grotesque manifestation after another; this capital city of beautiful vistas, where political problems confined themselves to a capricious opposition between a half-separatist folk-Catholicism and the lively liberalism professed by the supporters of the Reich; Munich, with its parade concerts in the Feldherrenhalle, its art shops, its palaces of decorative crafts, its recurring exhibitions, its Baurem-balls in carnival time, its seasonal "Marzbrau" and week-long monster fair of the "Oktoberweise," where a stout and lusty folkishness, now long since corrupted by modern mass methods, celebrated its saturnalia; Munich, with its residuary Wagnerism, its esoteric coteries performing their aesthetic devotions behind the Siegestor; its Bohemia, well bedded down in public approval and fundamentally easy-going. Adrian looked on at all that, moved in it, tasted of it, during the nine months that he spent at this time in Oberbayern - an autumn, a winter, and a spring. At the artist festivals that he attended with Schildknapp in the illusory twilight of artistically decorated ballrooms he met members of the Rodde circle, the young actors, the Knoterichs, Dr. Kranich, Zink and Spengler, the daughters of the house. He sat at a table with Inez and Clarissa, Rudiger, Spengler, and Kranich, perhaps Jeanette Scheurl."