“. . . So, take Goethe for example—you had a German upbringing, I mean, even in Vienna they shared the attitudes that were circulating in Germany, not in society of course, where with very few exceptions they read nothing at all, not in my day at any rate, and in the schools my sort attended they set more store by homegrown talents: Grillparzer, etc., but with nothing like the emphasis bourgeois circles placed on literature, I know because I have a lot of Austrian friends, and of course also relatives both on the Lobkowitz and the Rohan sides—I mean the Czech Rohans who belong to the five Bohemian dukes, and then the Clarys etc., we have relatives all over Europe, including Russia back then, and so as children and adolescents we were often together when our parents visited one another to go hunting, etc., and I was able to compare what they tried to teach us, only briefly in public schools, most of us had private tutors before they ever got to those institutions to prepare for their final examinations, but even in the private lessons it was apparent what would be dispensed in general, the tutors were all bourgeois intellectuals and of course wanted to teach us their conception of things, that wasn’t the case just in Austria, but in general and everywhere, my friend John Fox—you know him—and an Englishman himself, even claims that the decline of the aristocracy stems from the fact that all of us, including the non-English, had English nannies and tutors in the Victorian era inculcating us with their bourgeois ideas, among them naturally the unbelievable overvaluation of novels, an influence so strong that many people took them as a guide to life, we know that when Goethe’s Werther was published dozens of young people committed suicide, you were taught that too, but it’s a big misunderstanding that’s never been cleared up, on the contrary, it became all the more entrenched, namely, that young Werther shot himself out of love for Charlotte, it ain’t so, I’ve read Werther very carefully because I was curious to see what could bring a person in the bloom of youth to put a bullet through his head if it isn’t a case of gambling debts his family can’t or won’t pay, or simply boredom or because he was told he has syphilis—which was, by the way, quite frequent in my day—and sooner or later is going to go soft in the head despite Salvarsan and such treatments, but nobody shot themselves out of love and if they did it was extremely rare, you’d really have to be a housemaid to believe that Archduke Rudolf, the heir apparent, shot himself with Baroness Vetsera in Mayerling, that’s pure nonsense and I’m not even going to discuss it, I’ll leave that to the journalists, I’m talking about something else entirely, because if you read Werther closely, you’ll discover that the troubles caused by his unfulfillable love affair weren’t his real motive for killing himself at all, of course they constantly preoccupied him, but that was because he was young, at that age you don’t think about anything else and so naturally, it can happen that a guy who’s got a certain girl in his sights and she doesn’t let him get nearer, that he’s going to go crazy even though he knows that once he’s slept with her most of the fascination will be gone, at the end of the great majority of love affairs you can’t explain what drove you into the necessary mental state and that is exactly what I’m saying: it’s the influence of reading novels that put so much store in love, but as I said, if you read Werther again all the way through and carefully—you can read it here, there’s a nice first edition in the library, and one of the Cotta ur-Faust as well and the first English translation with engravings by Retzsch—if you give Werther a thorough reading you’ll see that he shot himself because he wasn’t admitted to an aristocratic party, they turned him away at the door and for a young person with an exalted opinion of himself and perhaps the intention to be a private tutor in a great house, that’s a real insult, but strangely enough, precisely the people who could have been in the same situation couldn’t empathize with it, no, they all stubbornly insisted that it was love that made him kill himself, although shortly after him—after Goethe, I mean—novels still had a love interest but it wasn’t their main focus anymore, which was society, especially the French with Balzac and Stendhal, one in a more bourgeois milieu and the other in aristocratic circles, but always the tension of the individual who somehow is askew in society, as for instance Madame Bovary. She’s a particularly graphic example, not to mention the great Russians, of course, Tolstoy and then especially that stigmatized idiot Dostoevsky and whoever else you can think of, the English with Thackeray and Dickens, that’s where it starts to get interesting again, who cares anyway how much Monsieur Dupont loves Mademoiselle Legrand—at least, that’s what one would think, but the great reading public is just extraordinarily slow on the uptake, and once it finally realizes there’s something it needs to understand, you can bet your life that it misunderstands, it’s been that way since the world began: all great ideas get immediately corrupted and it’s the same with discoveries, you’ve got to shove people’s noses into something and even then they misunderstand it and turn it into something they’re familiar with, Goethe knew that very well or he wouldn’t have written Elective Affinities so close to his end, a novel that takes the theme of love ad absurdum, I mean, why do you have to bring metaphysics—or rather, metaphysiology—into play to have two healthy and attractive couples discover they’re not just attracted to their respective partners, but also crossways, nowadays that’s positively become a sport, only people aren’t as discreet about it as we used to be in our circles, but then, there used to be a lot more urbanity back then, people knew that if you invited a friend to be a houseguest, don’t tell me you didn’t know what you were doing, especially if you loved your wife and wanted to have a free hand yourself, just take Putzi Schrempff—you know, from the Schrempffs in Auffenberg who went to Hungary and had the most fabulous stags in the Danube meadows—he always said ‘Je veux bien être embêté par les femmes, mais pas tout le temps par la même,’ and burst out laughing at himself, especially when his wife was present when he said it, but she was so good-natured, dear old Tina, if she hadn’t porked up so much in her last years there are quite a few who would have gladly been guests in her house, of course, it takes a sedentary nature to do that and there weren’t many of those among Putzi’s friends, and that’s why he didn’t share the same fate as Edoard and Carlotta (I call them that because I read Elective Affinities in Italian, where the house guest is called Ottone, which unfortunately loses the piquant similarity of Otto and Ottilie, not completely, but still) but that’s just one of Goethe’s ironical artifices and you know, the irony in Werther is even more subtle. It’s not true that young Werther is hopelessly in love with Charlotte, not at all, she’s constantly offering herself in the most shameless way, just read it once through and pay attention, it’s very interesting, even as a married woman she’s still making innuendos and you’ve got to be a dope to misunderstand them, take the scene with the bird she wants to get to ‘peck’ her, for example—couldn’t be much clearer than that! But no, the jackass acts like he doesn’t get it. He just doesn’t dare go for it. That’s the real suffering of young Werther, and then he gets turned away from the party and that’s enough for him to doubt himself and reach for his pistol. But that’s a nonissue in Elective Affinities. They’ve completed the sex act long since in their minds, what’s at issue is just that one shouldn’t think love is the only power that makes the world go round, people like Putzi and Tina were much too well brought up to think that, they understood the irony, but for others—the great crowd of readers that can get drunk on novels—it was for them that he wrote that story of the lovers attracted crisscross to one another and had a good laugh at people for thinking it unbelievable that, for example, Charlotte bore a child with the red hair of one man and the mole on his cheek of the other and God knows what other personal characteristics from the other two members of the quartet, and the gruesome outcome of the whole calamity, like in Greek tragedy, where everyone knows there are more serious things involved than love, Goethe ironized the whole thing with colossal delicacy and I consider Elective Affinities at least as important a book as Don Quixote, it’s totally in Cervantes’s spirit, who would want to write a chivalric romance after Don Quixote and who’d have a word to say about erotic attraction after Elective Affinities, and I’m not just talking about sex life, but the illusion of spiritual connections spun back and forth between us when we’re in the condition of physical attraction. Especially when you’ve lived too long in the country and haven’t been out in the world for a long time—but I can see you aren’t interested in what I’m rattling on about, you can’t keep your eyes open anymore—no no, no need to apologize, I know at your age you need twice as much sleep as me, it’s one of nature’s injustices: you could get more out of life if was the other way round—at least when you’re young, it’s of no use to me now. . .”