Chapter 17The Founder of a Religion — The False SystemDER RELIGIONSSTIFTER — DAS FALSCHE SYSTEM
📖 This chapter with the German alongside →
A Baron S. had resigned his commission as a first lieutenant and wanted to become a “founder of a religion.” He began writing his new “Bible,” but his money ran out. So he started studying the tables of play at Monte Carlo, and got it into his head that he had found a “system.” He had great mathematical gifts. For half a year he won with his method every day. He now decided to conduct the business on a larger scale and break the bank. That required capital. Two comrades from his regiment entrusted their fortunes to him. He tried to win the rich Princess Baratov over to his system as well. But she was too timid, or rather too prudent. The old Herr von Bülow, though, shortly before his death, and Maria gave him some of their capital. Then the gold fever seized me too, and I entrusted him with 25,000 francs of my savings1. S. had nearly 200,000 francs together, and was looking for two more players to work for him.
I proposed “Genio” to him.
His second assistant was a pensioned Russian general, Racoul (whom I have immortalised in my novella “Der Hemdenprinz”). The three of them now played for months at Monte Carlo and made large winnings daily. They were called “les trois grâces” there.
If I had been less delicate about it and insisted on daily or weekly payment of my winnings, my stake would have been covered by the day of the collapse. I should very much have liked that, but S. said it gave him so much trouble, and that a larger sum once a month would give me more pleasure. The tender, considerate “paschal lamb” in my soul2, which anxiously avoided every discord, let itself be satisfied. It would have been better if my other nature, the robber-knight's, had won. I decided to travel to Namur myself, where the “trois grâces” were “working” for the summer, and have a close look at the business and at my future riches. — The gold fever had gone to everybody's head there by then. S. had sent for his divorced wife (with whom he had formerly lived in a childless marriage) as his “mistress.” Racoul appeared daily in new and epoch-making linen and with new little walking sticks (the good Shirt Prince!). And “Genio” went about in nothing but white, and forced his fat fingers daily into new kid gloves. (“White is the simplest!” he said.) They had put up at the arch-Catholic Hotel Saint Aubain, frequented mostly by Catholic priests. I took a room there too. In spite of all that priesthood, the cocotte “Princesse de Saint Amant” lay in the room next to mine. She died there in fearful torments of dropsy. Through the door I went through the whole misery with her, how she screamed for cocaine even in her death agony, for she had fallen to the cocaine devil. My novella “Nur eine Dirne” in “Halbweiber” deals with that sad story.3 — Daily from morning to evening the “three graces” played at Marquet's gaming bank, with short breaks for lunch. Every evening I stood behind their chairs and watched the thousand-franc notes pile up in front of them. — But one evening S. waved me away as I came in. “Go!” I went back to the hotel, full of bad forebodings. Shortly afterwards the three graces came, and had lost everything.
The bank had taken its revenge! S. ordered champagne, to show himself great in misfortune. We drank it beside the table of Marquet, the holder of the gaming concession. — — How all that colourful life and bustle has scattered! And how the war has cleared Namur out since4! The mood of the landscape at the fortress, with the enormous luxury hotel on the mountain top above it and its fairy-tale view, gave me many poems, which appeared later in “Flammenmal.” But my twenty-five thousand francs were now finally lost.
I travelled sadly back to my “Waldfrieden.” Maria Bülow too had heavy losses. The cleverest of us had been the Princess Baratov, who had not let herself be dazzled by the “infallible” system. S. went to Spa. I visited him there the next year, in passing. He was living on water and bread — or rather tea and bread (for thirty centimes a day), writing at his new book of religion and reading me passages from it. “Von den Quellen der Lust in Not und Tod.” In it he maintained that with an ideally simple life all sensuality falls away from a person, and he recommended his own way of living for imitation. — When I got back I told Maria Bülow-Scala about his sad existence. His brother-in-law then sent him to board with a parson's wife in the high Rhön. There he was to finish his book. He stood it for a year, then left, nobody knew where. The book is still not finished today. He himself has vanished, as far as his friends and relations are concerned. Here and there he gives lectures on social policy. — The poor benefactor of mankind!5
Notes
Sources, identifications, and points where the German carries something English cannot. Added by this project; not in the original.
- ↑I entrusted him with 25,000 francs of my savings — An enormous sum — of the same order as everything she had earned from five years of touring Mors Imperator — handed to a cashiered lieutenant who was writing a Bible and had a roulette system. It also dates the episode, and awkwardly. The old Herr von Bülow puts money in “shortly before his death,” and by the press congress of 1899 he is already dead — yet this chapter follows the congress in the book's order. Another reminder that the memoir is arranged by theme, not by the calendar. Two other things fix the outer edge: the poems Namur gave her went into Flammenmal (1903), and the novella she got out of the hotel went into Halbweiber (1905). So the scheme runs somewhere in 1899–1902, and probably early in that span: a Crucifix near Namur was among the pictures of her Paris exhibition of November 1900. Note who else is ruined here: Maria von Bülow, her closest friend, and two officers of the regiment.
- ↑The tender, considerate “paschal lamb” in my soul — »Osterlamm« against »Raubritter« — the paschal lamb and the robber-knight. This is her standing account of herself, in her own words, and it runs through the whole memoir. The two figures are not idle. The paschal lamb is the sacrificial animal, the one that avoids discord and is eaten; the Raubritter is the medieval baron who lived by taking what he wanted off the road. She casts her own character as a fight between them and, here, blames the lamb for losing her twenty-five thousand francs — she had wanted her winnings paid out weekly and had not liked to insist. It is worth noticing how the sentence is built: the failure she reports is not that she gambled her savings on a roulette system but that she was too polite about the receipts.
- ↑My novella “Nur eine Dirne” in “Halbweiber” deals with that sad story. — “Only a Whore,” in her 1905 collection Halbweiber — and here is the woman it was written about, dying of dropsy behind a hotel door in Namur, screaming for cocaine. That is now three works identified as drawn from life in two chapters: the trafficker in Yoshiwara, the Russian general in Der Hemdenprinz, and this. The method she stated at the end of the last chapter — that bitter experience is finally worth having because it yields material — is being demonstrated on the page. Note the setting she builds around the death: an arch-Catholic hotel full of priests, a cocotte dying next door in agony, and Preuschen on the other side of the door listening to all of it and, in due course, using it. The title of the collection, Halbweiber, means half-women; the title of the novella is the verdict the world passed on its subject, quoted rather than endorsed.
- ↑how the war has cleared Namur out since — The fortress of Namur was one of the first objectives of the German invasion of Belgium: its ring of forts was shelled to pieces by siege howitzers in four days in August 1914 and the town was burned in part. She is writing about twenty years after the champagne and about three after the guns, from Berlin, in the country that did it. The sentence gives no sign of which side she thinks was responsible — »wie hat erst der Krieg in Namur aufgeräumt« uses the verb for clearing out a room. The paragraph then goes straight on to the poems the place gave her, and ends on the money. It is characteristic: a fortress, a war and a personal fortune disposed of in four sentences, in that order of interest.
- ↑The poor benefactor of mankind! — »Weltbeglücker« — one who sets out to make the world happy, and by 1917 an entirely sarcastic word. It is the last line of the chapter and her whole verdict on him. The arc is worth following, because she does not moralise it once. A lieutenant leaves the army to found a religion; runs out of money; discovers a roulette system; talks a princess, an envoy, two brother officers and a painter into two hundred thousand francs; loses all of it in an afternoon; and ends on thirty centimes a day of tea and bread in Spa, writing a book arguing that an ideally simple life frees a person from all sensuality — and recommending his own way of living to others. He never finished it. Note the last detail, given in the present tense: he is still alive somewhere as she writes, lost to his family, giving occasional lectures on social policy. She lost more money to him than to anyone else in the book and gives him the gentlest exit of any of her swindlers.