Outside, on the street, it was raining. Anton found a cab and gestured to Katrin and Delphine to come over from the shelter of the restaurant porch. Before leaving home, he had counted out the money for the fare back to Döbling and put the coins in his waistcoat pocket so he wouldn’t spend them by mistake on a tip at the cloakroom. It had meant no lunch for three days, but it seemed worth it as he pressed the money into the hands of the driver. Delphine had her back to him as she climbed into the cab. He stood in the rain, watching. The cab was already under way when he saw her – as an afterthought it seemed – turn and lift her hand. It was too dark to see if she was smiling.

To pass the idle hours, of which there were many, Anton imagined the life he would have with Delphine. Theirs would be an unconventional ménage, of course. They would live in a hunting lodge, somewhere he pictured at first as a sort of dacha not far from Moscow – before settling on a sleepy part of Bavaria, in a forest clearing with a river nearby. Sometimes he pictured them both naked, children of the woods. At other times, Delphine was dressed in her green dress, at the piano for hours while he chopped logs and prepared dinner – with a previously unsuspected talent that went well beyond ‘stoking the range’. There was sex in his fantasies, though it drew little on his night in Berlin and not at all on the circus postcards. For this, he and Delphine both seemed to be naked again, he asleep on a huge couch at the fireside, she bending over and guiltily waking him with hands and lips, being, against her better judgement, unable to resist. In what happened next, the failure of Viennese society to deal with the passions of its people was quite thrillingly resolved. When they lay together afterwards, under a bearskin rug while she told him more about her sisters and he kissed her upper lip, the shortcomings of the world – unhappiness itself – seemed to exist only as a remote and rather comic hypothesis.

In reality, the lady companion stayed fully dressed in the nineteenth district, while Anton was stuck in the narrow streets of Spittelberg. Although he made enough money to pay the rent and feed himself, his imagined apartment off the Ringstrasse seemed as remote as when he had first arrived in Vienna.

Anton’s career as a journalist was fitful, but not hopeless. It was easier for established newspapers to keep one or two correspondents in the big capitals than to send reporters from Vienna on expensive and time-consuming journeys. One day in 1911, two years before he met Delphine, he read that the Mona Lisa had been stolen from the Louvre. The editors he approached dismissed it as ‘another French scandal’, probably instigated by the government itself. So, in the end, he had borrowed some money from Friedrich and paid for his own train ticket, arriving in Paris just in time to see the poet Guillaume Apollinaire arrested for the theft. To Anton’s delight, Apollinaire tried to palm the blame off on his friend Picasso.