arise, as if he didn’t want to know him, or rather as if he wanted to know that he was a scoundrel. I consider that right and proper, an official must behave like that; unfortunately with my nature I can’t follow out this principle; you see yourself how frank I am with you, a stranger, about those things, I can’t act in any other way. But Sordini, on the contrary, was seized by suspicion when he read our reply. Now a huge correspondence began to grow. Sordini enquired how I had suddenly recalled that a Land Surveyor shouldn’t be summoned. I replied, drawing in Mizzi’s splendid memory, that the first suggestion had come from the chancellory itself (but that it had come from a different department we had of course forgotten long before this). Sordini countered: ‘Why had I only mentioned this official order now?’ I replied: ‘because I had just remembered it.’ Sordini: ‘That was very extraordinary.’ Myself: ‘It was not in the least extraordinary in such a long-drawn-out business.’ Sordini: ‘Yes it was extraordinary, for the order that I remembered didn’t exist.’ Myself: ‘Of course it didn’t exist, for the whole document had gone a-missing.’ Sordini: ‘But there must be a memorandum extant relating to this first communication, and there wasn’t one extant.’ That drew me up, for that an error should happen in Sordini’s department I neither dared to maintain nor to believe. Perhaps, my dear Land Surveyor, you’ll make the reproach against Sordini in your mind, that in consideration of my assertion he should have been moved at least to make enquiries in the other departments about the affair, But that is just what would have been wrong; I don’t want any blame to attach to this man, no, not even in your thoughts. It’s a working principle of the Head Bureau that the very possibility of error must be ruled out of account. This ground principle is justified by the consummate organisation of the whole authority, and it is necessary if the maximum speed in transacting business is to be attained. So it wasn’t within Sordini’s power to make enquiries in other departments, besides they simply wouldn’t have answered, because they would have guessed at once that it was a case of hunting out a possible error.”