That hyena in woman's form was the more exasperated against the pretty
child, the lovely Jewess' son, because she herself could have no
children in spite of efforts worthy of a locomotive engine. A diabolical
impulse prompted her to plunge her young stepson, at twenty-one years of
age, into dissipations contrary to all German habits. The wicked German
hoped that English horses, Rhine vinegar, and Goethe's Marguerites would
ruin the Jewess' child and shorten his days; for when Fritz came of age,
Uncle Virlaz had handed over a very pretty fortune to his nephew. But
while roulette at Baden and elsewhere, and boon companions (Wilhelm
Schwab among them) devoured the substance accumulated by Uncle Virlaz,
the prodigal son himself remained by the will of Providence to point a
moral to younger brothers in the free city of Frankfort; parents held
him up as a warning and an awful example to their offspring to scare
them into steady attendance in their cast-iron counting houses, lined
with silver marks.

But so far from perishing in the flower of his age, Fritz Brunner had
the pleasure of laying his stepmother in one of those charming little
German cemeteries, in which the Teuton indulges his unbridled passion
for horticulture under the specious pretext of honoring his dead. And as
the second Mme. Brunner expired while the authors of her being were yet
alive, Brunner senior was obliged to bear the loss of the sums of which
his wife had drained his coffers, to say nothing of other ills, which
had told upon a Herculean constitution, till at the age of sixty-seven
the innkeeper had wizened and shrunk as if the famous Borgia's poison
had undermined his system. For ten whole years he had supported his
wife, and now he inherited nothing! The innkeeper was a second ruin of
Heidelberg, repaired continually, it is true, by travelers' hotel bills,
much as the remains of the castle of Heidelberg itself are repaired
to sustain the enthusiasm of the tourists who flock to see so fine and
well-preserved a relic of antiquity.

At Frankfort the disappointment caused as much talk as a failure. People
pointed out Brunner, saying, "See what a man may come to with a bad wife
that leaves him nothing and a son brought up in the French fashion."

In Italy and Germany the French nation is the root of all evil, the
target for all bullets. "But the god pursuing his way----" (For the
rest, see Lefranc de Pompignan's Ode.)

The wrath of the proprietor