Agathe had no desire to answer this at all.

Ulrich abandoned his question.

“Please don’t think I’m trying to set myself up as being on the side of the angels!” he pleaded. “I did not mean to suggest that I never do anything bad. I just don’t like having to do it in secret. I love the bandits of morality, not the thieves. So I want to make a moral bandit out of you,” he joked, “and I won’t allow you to offend out of weakness.”

“For me, there’s no point of honor in this!” his sister said from behind her smile, which was very far removed from her now.

“It’s really terribly funny that there are times like ours where all the young people are so in love with the bad!” he interjected with a laugh, in order to move the conversation to a less personal plane. “The current passion for the morally gruesome is of course a weakness, probably due to a surfeit of the good among middle-class people; they’ve had enough of it. I too used to think one should say no to everything. Everyone who’s between twenty-five and forty-five today thought this way; but of course that was just a kind of fashion; I could imagine a reversal happening soon, and with it a younger generation that pins morality instead of immorality to its lapel. Then the oldest fools, who have never in their life felt the excitement of morality and merely spouted moral platitudes here and there, will suddenly be the precursors and pioneers of a new character!”

Ulrich had stood up and was walking restlessly back and forth. “Maybe we could say it like this,” he suggested. “The good is almost a commonplace by its very nature, whereas evil is still a critique! The immoral attains its divine right as a drastic critique of the moral! It shows us that life has other possibilities. It gives the lie to hypocrisy. We are grateful for this; in exchange we show it some forbearance! The fact that there are forgers of wills who are unquestionably charming should prove that something is amiss with the sanctity of private property. Maybe no proof is needed; but that’s where the task begins: because for every kind of crime we must conceive of the possibility of pardoned criminals, even for infanticide and whatever other horrors there may be—”

He had been trying to catch his sister’s eye, without success, despite his teasing reference to the will. Now she made an inadvertent gesture of resistance. She was no theoretician, she could only find her own crime excusable; basically his comparison felt like a new affront.

Ulrich laughed. “It looks like a silly game, but it means something that we can juggle like this,” he assured her. “It proves there’s something wrong with the way we evaluate our actions. And something really is skewed there. In a society of will-forgers, you would doubtless be in favor of the sanctity of the law; but in a society of the righteous these things get blurred and turned inside out. I’d even say that if Hagauer were a scoundrel, you would be fervently righteous: it’s truly calamitous that even he is a decent fellow! This is how we all get pushed and pulled!”