Mozart laughed aloud when he saw my long face. He turned a somersault in the air for laughter’s sake and played trills with his heels. At the same time he shouted at me: “Hey, my young man, you are biting your tongue, man, with a gripe in your lung, man? You think of your readers, those carrion-feeders, and all your typesetters, those wretched abettors, and sabre-whetters. You dragon, you make me laugh till I shake me and burst the stitches of my breeches. O heart of a gull, with printer’s ink dull, and soul sorrow-full. A candle I’ll leave you, if that’ll relieve you. Betittled, betattled, spectakled and shackled, and pitifully snagged and by the tail wagged, with shilly and shally no more shall you dally. For the devil, I pray, will bear you away and slice you and splice you till that shall suffice you for your writings and rotten plagiarisings ill-gotten.”

This, however, was too much for me. Anger left me no time for melancholy. I caught hold of Mozart by the pigtail and off he flew. The pigtail grew longer and longer like the tail of a comet and I was whirled along at the end of it. The devil⁠—but it was cold in this world we traversed! These immortals put up with a rarefied and glacial atmosphere. But it was delightful all the same⁠—this icy air. I could tell that, even in the brief moment that elapsed before I lost my senses. A bitter-sharp and steel-bright icy gaiety coursed through me and a desire to laugh as shrilly and wildly and unearthily as Mozart had done. But then breath and consciousness failed me.

When I came to myself I was bewildered and done-up. The white light of the corridor shone in the polished floor. I was not among the immortals, not yet. I was still, as ever, on this side of the riddle of suffering, of wolf-men and torturing complexities. I had found no happy spot, no endurable resting place. There must be an end of it.