d got drunk, so drunk that Benjamin Dorn had to take him home.
It was a beautiful moonlit night.

IV

Not far from Hadebusch's was a little cafe known as The Paradise.
Everything in it was diminutive, the proprietor, the waitress, the
tables, the chairs and the portions. There the brethren from the Vale
of Tears assembled to drag the gods down into the dust and destroy the
universe in general.

Daniel wended his way thither. He knew the liliputian room and the
starved faces. He was personally acquainted with the painter who never
painted, the writer who never wrote, the student who never studied, and
the inventor who never invented anything. He knew all about the sculptor
who squandered such talents as he may have had in tinkering with plaster
casts, the actor who had been on a leave of absence for years, and the
half dozen mendicant Philistines who came here day after day to have a
good time in their own repelling fashion. He knew the young Baron von
Auffenberg who had broken with his family for reasons that were clear to
no one but himself. He knew Herr Carovius, who invariably played the
role of the observer, and who sat there in a sort of mysterious fashion,
smiling to himself a smile of languishing irony, and stroking his hand
over his long hair, which was cut straight across at the back of his
neck.

He knew, ah, he knew by heart, the grease spots on the walls that had
been rubbed in by the heads of the habitues, the indelible splotches on
the tables, the hartshorn buttons on the proprietor's vest, and the
smoke-coloured curtains draped about the tiny windows. The loud,
boisterous talking, the daily repetition of the same hackneyed remarks,
the anarchistic swashbuckling of the painter whom his comrades had
dubbed Kropotkin--all of these were familiar stories to him. He knew the
philosophic cynicism of the student who felt that he was the Socrates of
the nineteenth century, and who looked back on twenty-five wasted
semesters as on so many battles fought and won.

The most interesting personage was Herr Carovius. He was a well-read
man. That he knew a great deal about music was plain from many of his
chance remarks. He was a brother-in-law of Andreas Doederlein, though he
seemed to take anything but pride in the relationship. If any one
mentioned Doederlein's name in his presence, he screwed up his face, and
began to shuffle about uneasily on his chair. He was an unfathomable