This was Herr Settembrini’s workshop, where he wrote articles in belles-lettres to contribute to the encyclopaedia of human suffering. The young man rested his elbows on the slanting surface of the desk, and announced that he found the little apartment very retired and cosy. Thus, he presumed, aloud, might Ludovico’s father, with his long, aristocratic nose, have bent over his work at Padua⁠—and learned that he was standing, indeed, at the very desk of the deceased scholar; nay, more, that the chairs, the table, even the water-bottle, had been his, and that the chairs had come down from the Carbonaro grandfather, the walls of whose law office at Milan they once had graced. That made a great impression on the young people; the chairs straightway began in their eyes to betray affinity with political agitation⁠—Joachim, who had been sitting all unconscious on one, with his legs crossed, got up at once, looked at it mistrustfully, and did not sit down again. But Hans Castorp, at the elder Settembrini’s desk, thought how the younger now laboured here, to mingle the politics of the grandfather and the father’s humanism in a blend of literary beauty. At length they all went off together, the author having offered to see his friends to their door.