Chapter 21The BlackmailDIE ERPRESSUNG

draft

Machine translation, not yet checked. This chapter is a raw AI-assisted draft made from the public-domain German. Expect mistakes of fact and of tone; it is here to make the work readable in English, not to be quoted.

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Then I found a human being, Paul Z.1 he was called, was a journalist, a critic and a musical genius. He had written a flippant review of my recitations at one of my great “Preuschen Exhibitions.” Thereupon I invited him to visit me and convince himself how wrongly he had judged me. — He came, seemed honestly interested in me, and began to play the piano. How his music gripped me, what it came to be to me! He was engaged at the time; this engagement dissolved, then the two united again. One day Z. told me his fiancée was very jealous; if I wanted him to come to me at all after the marriage, I must reconcile her and settle ten thousand marks on her for his playing. Great artists were always paid. He could pay it back to me later. I was outraged, not only at the presumption, but still more at the baseness of mind that lay in it. But it seemed to me that without his music I could no longer exist. So I began to bargain with him. Five hundred marks, a thousand marks — the shameful haggling lasted three hours, then we agreed on a sum that came bitterly hard for me to pay, but which he promised to give back as soon as he possibly could.

I was disgusted to my depths by the woman! Then he brought her to me. A charming creature. After I had seen her often, and grown fonder and fonder of her, I told her one day that I could not bring her way of acting into harmony with her whole being. How could she ever have done such a thing!

She was deeply indignant and unhappy about it. It had been a secret attempt at blackmail by her husband, of which she had had no inkling. Of this money he had then spent the most part on women. Now she has long been divorced from him and has become happier with another. — When after years — urged on to it by her, since I had had great losses and he had inherited considerably, — I demanded my money back, he was ready to swear an oath in court that I had made him a present of the sum. — Yes, I have not had good experiences; at times a disgust seized me at world and life.

Notes

Sources, identifications, and points where the German carries something English cannot. Added by this project; not in the original.

↑Paul Z. — Journalist, music critic and pianist, unidentified — one more man the memoir reduces to an initial. A Berlin journalist, critic and pianist around 1900–02, reduced — like the memoir's other exploiters, the confidence man Otto B. (chapter 16) and the roulette Baron S. (chapter 17) — to an initial: she prints full names for her friends and initials for the men who cost her money. Not yet identified; but the profile is specific — music journalism, an engagement broken and remade, a marriage that ended in divorce, a considerable inheritance — and the Berlin press directories of the day may some day give him back his name.