On the first day of fall that year came the letter that shut the office. I informed the count, who leaned on the piano and smiled. “Well, my friend,” he said, “what will you do now?” That’s all he said, although I should have known that for him it was a fatal blow. Two days later, as I gathered my papers, there was a knock at the door, and four determined-looking workmen loaded the piano on their backs and took it away. It was quite an effort for them to get it through the gate, and the old Steinway must have hit some corner or other because its voice rose from the street in a kind of death knell. The whole time the operation lasted, the count didn’t leave his room, but when I shook hands with the countess, who was visibly moved, and walked out of the house, I saw him at the window, raising his hand and waving to me. There was something so uncompromising in his gesture that I responded in the only way I thought appropriate: I put my bag down on the pavement and bowed.

For a few days after the office closed, I stayed in my hotel, pondering my future. The only thing the contacts I’d made through the magazine could offer me was a job in a pharmaceutical firm outside the city, where I would have to write advertising material from nine in the morning to six in the evening. I decided to wait for something to happen. Like an aristocrat under siege.