it. Decisive for this interpretation of mine is the deep emotion with which Franz Kafka once referred me to the anecdote which Flaubert’s niece mentions in her introduction to his correspondence. The passage runs: “May not Flaubert have regretted even in his last years that he had not chosen an ordinary vocation? I could almost credit it when I think of the touching words which once burst from his lips when we were returning home along the Seine; we had been visiting one of my friends, and had found her in the midst of her brood of lovely children. ‘They’re in the right of it’ ( Ils sont dans le vrai ), he said, meaning the honest family life of those people.”

Like the hero of The Trial , K. puts his faith in women who are destined to show him the right way, the right vocation; but yet he rejects every half-truth and falsehood and insincerity; for on no other terms will he accept this vocation, and it is precisely this incorruptibility that makes his struggle for love and integration in the community a religious struggle. At one point in the story, where he certainly overestimates his successes, he himself defines the goal of his struggle: “It may not be much, but I have a home, a position and real work to do, I have a promised wife who takes her share of my professional duties when I have other business, I’m going to marry her and become a member of the community.” The women have (in the language of this novel) “a connection with the Castle”⁠—and in this connection lies their importance, though from it result many things that lead both men and woman astray, also much injustice, real and illusory, for both. A deleted passage in the manuscript (this, too, shows the uniqueness of Kafka as a writer, that the deleted passages in his manuscripts are just as beautiful and important as the rest⁠—one does not need to be a prophet to foresee that a later generation will insist on having those passages printed as well)⁠—the deleted passage, then, concerning the chambermaid Pepi, runs: “He had to admit to himself that if he had encountered Pepi here instead of Frieda and had suspected that she had some connection with the Castle, he would have sought to get possession of the mystery by means of the same embrace which he had had to employ in Frieda’s case.”