August left that night, taking with him half his creatures and leaving behind enough of them so that Hausenstein might continue operating the Zaubertheater if he wished. After all, it had been paid for with his money. August felt no desire for revenge, only a compelling need to be alone. He never saw Hausenstein again. At this point his recollections became brisk and fragmentary: he wandered with his creatures from town to town, renting small halls where he could, and staging performances in makeshift miniature theaters that were sometimes little more than a large empty box with a single hastily painted backdrop and a crude lamp that threw distorting shadows. The performances were sometimes well attended, but the audiences were generally scanty and a little confused. People seemed to come out of curiosity, as they might come to see a ventriloquist, a Fireproof Female, or a magician, and the Automaton Theater left them with a feeling of puzzlement, as if they had expected something else, something a little different. Hausenstein was right: automatons were dead. Here and there a face lit up with enchantment and understanding, and once a young woman burst into tears during a performance of Pierrot, but far more often there was coughing, a creaking of seats, a fanning of flushed cheeks. Once he heard someone say, “It must be some sort of trick—that box must have a false bottom.” Tired, always tired, he moved from town to town; often he thought of the magician in the drab green tent. Yes, the art of the automaton was a magical art, for when all was said and done there was something mysterious and unaccountable about clockwork: you breathed into the nostrils of a creature of dust, and lo! it was alive. And so the art of clockwork was a high and noble art: the universe itself had been constructed by the greatest clockwork master of all, and remained obedient to mysterious laws of motion. And on the moving earth, all was ceaseless motion: wind and tide and fire. One day, coming to still another town, August read everywhere of preparations for a fair. And he was pleased: in the rented tent, not green but yellow-brown, he displayed his automatons before children.