Hertzog too was missing, by the way. True, it’s not customary for physicians to come to the bier of patients whose passage to the beyond they have scrupulously made more difficult—and thus all the more desirable (after all, Professor Leblanc did not attend Gaia’s funeral either). However, this very special case was more than just a medical relationship, and one might have been justified in expecting that the Great Psychopompous would describe, in his full-weighted presence, the ticklish cases to which he had been summoned to help out not merely qua scientist but also qua philosopher. But as luck would have it (and luck occasionally has a fatality that goes against the rules), a congress of psychologists and psychiatrists had been convened in Münster on that very day. And a dillar-a-dollar scholar of Professor Hertzog’s stature could not fail to attend.

However, the ranks of mourners were serried seamlessly even without these two figures (so important in the history of the deceased): from the grieving to the sympathetic; from the mutely moved to the deeply affected; from the long-time supplier (of alcohol) to the relative by marriage; from the dutifully attending representative of the Municipal Agency for Culture (black hat) to the stigmatized newspaper reader who had once felt profoundly touched by a feuilleton by the deceased and had responded with a letter to the editor, presenting his own intricate thoughts, which had eventually degenerated into a correspondence and finally a meeting in person—

(after all, even when moving house, everyone learns how much unexpected property has gathered in the nooks and crannies of his home: because you acquired it sometime or other for a temporary necessity or even quite spontaneously and with no special purpose in mind, and you were too neglectful to get rid of it in time . . . Now just imagine what has been collected in the spaciousness of a lifetime exposed to so many random events, even if one leaves it in the prime of manhood! . . .)

Here, a man had passed on who, whether he liked it or not (and whether or not he might have wished for other cities as his adopted home), had been rooted in the solid, land-cultivating citizenry of a Hanseatic Gotham, which, only yesterday, had been planted in the green countryside with gabled gingerbread houses:

—one of the still well-housed comfort lovers whose childhoods were gaily illustrated with anecdotes of the clan, from which a whole chest full of the toy German world comes into being: Grandfather’s shop close to the free harbor (which shop proliferated into a supermarket chain) and Mother’s farm in the marshlands, which farm his uncle had run into the ground, alas, because he had been rather easygoing and a bit status-hungry during his stint in the cuirassiers (nevertheless, the moor meadows had brought in some twenty million as the building site for a squadron of high-rises); the pharmacist cousin in Ochsenzoll with his jars of poison and his officinal bottles from days of yore (monthly turnover: sixty thousand deutschmarks); and the aunt who had displayed such a great gift for the piano that she had been sent to the conservatory (where she began her rather shady life, which she ended, prosperously, as the owner of a guesthouse on Schwanenteich): all these Buddenbrooks in miniature and mini-miniature had leaped into the new era so successfully that they became its masters; the wind of freedom had swept them out of their respectable nook-and-cranny existences into mass administration, and they now carefully throttled that wind in order to steer it, house-fatherly, to their mills—so archetypal in their tough, sly, prudent economics and attachment to objects that any world-beatifying zeal is wasted on them and must ultimately admit defeat in the face of the welfare brilliance of their now-fattened necks—