Chapter 59After the Catastrophe in the TempioNACH DER KATASTROPHE IM TEMPIO
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So I was in the Tempio again, greeted this time by Johanna with a certain shyness and reserve. —
Herr Zappe had kept his word, bath and central heating were in order again — I had only to pay. And in the garden too — always only to pay! And in the hall bare walls gaped. In every room I discovered, every day for the first weeks, fresh losses. Ten thousand marks Zappe had reckoned. But sixty thousand were not enough1, when I counted it all up. Not by a long way. And every day fresh pain, fresh outrage and fresh discoveries! Not for nothing had I trembled before the return.
I now roamed from early till late among the antique dealers; I did manage to rediscover a few of my stolen treasures, but most had long since passed into channels that could not be traced — after so long a time.
The Jentsches themselves were discovered by chance, soon after their flight, in a small Baden village. And reported. But the swindler had the effrontery to bewilder the police commissioner so thoroughly that the man ended by apologizing most politely to the thief. A true piece of Abdera2! An hour later the precious fellow had vanished with his companion and all my valuables. The very valuables on account of which the local light of the police had written to our own district station: the person in question “appeared to live in good circumstances, he had beautiful art objects in his home.”
Despite wanted notices3 and the endless exertions of the most various authorities, Jentsch was not run to earth in Paris until many long months later. But by the time the German embassy there had reached an understanding with the French police as to whether they were permitted to arrest him, and had notified me of it at long-winded length, he was over the hills and far away again. He had a fine nose. I had told them so beforehand.
When everyone who hears of the frightful story grows indignant at my credulity, far more credulous and more helpless was the conduct of every police station with which the crafty swindler came into contact. To this criminal genius no one was equal. My lawyer accordingly advised me to bring an action against the state of Baden, because the Abderites of Kreuz-Steinach had let the pair slip away after their full guilt had been reported to them. I even had an audience with the Baden minister in Karlsruhe on the matter, and asked for damages. But it was all in vain.
With what feelings I walked about, after so long a time, in Karlsruhe grown to a great city, the place of my first youthful dreams4!
When I came back to the Tempio after five days, Johanna fell on my neck and wept: “A little misfortune has happened to me.” “Speak!” I cried, with a foreboding of nothing good.
“The bath boiler has exploded.”
I rushed upstairs.
There lay the bath boiler in ruins, there hung the long shreds from the walls, all the copperplate engravings were streaked with yellow-brown, all the furniture in pieces. But not only in the bathroom, next door in the dining room and in the boudoir too the same frightful destruction.
It looked ghastly, but the most frightful thing in it all, for me, was that I had to put off the children's visit to a later date. I then had six weeks of hell with workmen as well, until everything was in order. The damage the insurance was willing to make good, but not the bath boiler.
At last the children could come!
Those were days again that, short as they were, were all the sunnier for it. But our whole thinking and feeling turned on Jentsch. Johanna spoke little of it. She had been ill, and with her childlike nature had trusted the Jentsches blindly5. And now reproached herself bitterly.
Sadly she was no longer equal to the work in the Tempio. She resolved to leave in a year's time, on the first of June.
I am almost ashamed to admit it, but when I woke sometimes in the night, I howled about it. The children too were sorry she was going, for we all knew that, unpractical and easily influenced and therefore wholly unreliable as she was, her heart was gold-true and blindly and touchingly devoted to me. And I said to myself: now that I have lost the children6, this is the one human being who in my great loneliness clings to me with her whole soul and inwardly belongs to me. —
The lovely days with the children dwindled — all too fast. They were now to go to boarding school, to St. Aubin near Neuchâtel. My plan was laid. I would visit them in the winter. First travel to Nice, to my friend Princess Baratov, then to Rome, and then by way of Vevey arrive at St. Aubin as though by chance. Beforehand I might say nothing — I had to surprise them — take them unawares.
But for now I still had my hands full with the Jentsch case. Of the man himself, since he slipped through the hands of the Hermandad in Paris just before the gate closed, every trace is blurred and lost. I often think about where he may be lurking. And how many he has cheated since me. But a fatter morsel he will surely never find again. All my books with authors' dedications had vanished too. Hundreds of them. And from various necklaces the finest stones had been prised out with a crowbar. Well, he had time enough, over weeks and months, to pick the raisins out of the Tempio dough with relish and love. But some things had been destroyed out of sheer wantonness too, the sewing machine forcibly bent out of shape, the heart on the flagstaff used by him as a target for his pistol. He had also shot birds through the windowpanes.
All the repairs to house, hall and garden cost many thousands. The gardener had come upon Jentsch once as he was rummaging at the beehives. He locked the hive up afterwards. Zeus and Hera, the pair of peacocks, he saved as well out of hands he did not trust. Poor Zeus — poor Hera — how happy I was then that they had escaped the robber. Now they are dead — and a second and a third pair of peacocks likewise. I no longer dare to buy new peacocks at all! They all die away on me.
The action against the burglary insurance I had lost, because it had been no burglar but “only” a house-thief7 who robbed me of my goods and chattels and took valuables out of locked chests that he broke open.
There is nothing like justice and resourcefulness. I learned to value the help of the police and the courts through the Jentsch case.
A few of the stolen pictures I did discover at auction after all; it cost me much money and trouble to get them back.
I may well say that I lost months with running about and chasing, and with all the dragging-down thoughts of this frightful experience.
I now began to write film dramas8, and had turned the Jentsch material to account in a film, “In the Tempio.” Of course I could not place it, any more than I could place my pictures in these last years. Luck had long since turned its back on me. But if the film “In the Tempio,” which I hold to be very effective, with the inserted scenes in which I am carried through the lion desert, were ever to be performed — it would gladden my whole heart.
Many large photographs of Jentsch's mistress in my kimonos I found. They had given parties at which the two of them rustled about in my gowns; the four hundred marks stolen from my chest of drawers9 before my departure they squandered on champagne and delicacies.
Antique dealers had come almost daily (they told me so themselves) and picked out from among my valuables (which Jentsch had supposedly brought home from his travels) whatever suited them best. I must not think of it, or fury seizes me.
Johanna had undertaken a journey to Munich to track down the fictitious Jentsch father, a supposed colonel10 — without success.
Notes
Sources, identifications, and points where the German carries something English cannot. Added by this project; not in the original.
- ↑sixty thousand were not enough — The true figure, six times the architect's first estimate — and the only place in the book where the cost of the robbery is stated. Zappe's letter in chapter 53 put the damage to the house provisionally at ten thousand marks and added that it would certainly not be enough; he was out by a factor of six. For scale, from inside the memoir: the picture hall with its building ground was to cost her under fifteen thousand marks, and she hesitated a year over that. Sixty thousand is four picture halls — the whole of Konrad Telmann's inheritance and the children's portion had been fifteen. This is the sum that ends her as a collector, and it is set down in a subordinate clause.
- ↑A true piece of Abdera — Abdera in Thrace, the proverbial town of fools, and in German the byword for official stupidity ever since Wieland's satirical novel of 1774. Christoph Martin Wieland's Die Abderiten (1774–80) made the Greek city a standing German joke: a town whose magistrates deliberate solemnly and get everything exactly wrong. Calling the scene "ein echtes Abdera-Stückchen" puts the commissioner in a book, and she returns to it two paragraphs later with "die Abderiten von Kreuz-Steinach" — the only literary allusion in the chapter, and she spends it on the police. (Wieland, Die Abderiten (1774))
- ↑Despite wanted notices — Steckbriefe, and one of them survives: a warrant of 1 August 1912, with photographs of both of them and an itemised list of what they took. Issued by the examining magistrate of the Königliches Landgericht II in Berlin on 1 August 1912 — days before she came home — and printed, of all places, among the advertisements of a Munich humour weekly, Fliegende Blätter of 30 August 1912. The magistrate bought the space, and the notice says why: it was suspected that Jentsch would seek contact with artistic circles, so the warrant was placed where artists would see it. It names him Franz Cesare Jentsch (Jentzsch), bookseller, painter and writer, born 19 September 1891 at Karlsruhe; it names his companion Alix Sammet, "allegedly Frau Jentsch"; and its ninth item lists about fifty pictures painted by Hermine von Preuschen, by country — Japan 8, Siam 8, Sumatra 5, Italy 5, Ceylon 4, China 3, Java 3, India 3, Corfu 3, Burma 2, Madeira 2, Corsica 2 — noting that they bore her name at the time of the theft. The police expected the signatures to be removed before sale. (Steckbrief, Fliegende Blätter Nr. 3501, 30 Aug 1912, p. 157)
- ↑the place of my first youthful dreams — Karlsruhe is where she began as a painter, under Ferdinand Keller. It is also, though she never says so, where the man she is chasing was born. She is in Karlsruhe at fifty-eight to petition a minister of state about a thief, in the city where she had been an art student. The coincidence she misses is sharper than the one she names: the police warrant gives Franz Cesare Jentsch as born on 19 September 1891 at Karlsruhe. He was a Baden man, which is why the pair went south into Baden when they ran — and why the village that let them go was a Baden village. She was walking about his birthplace, and looking for him in Munich.
- ↑had trusted the Jentsches blindly — The verdict, at last, and it is an acquittal: Johanna was a dupe, not an accomplice. Chapter 53 left the question open in six words — "Johanna liegt im Spital" — and it has hung over two chapters since. The answer arrives without ceremony and in the mildest possible terms: she had been ill, she has the mind of a child, she trusted them. Nothing is said of the vow of chapter 43 to lock the upper rooms the moment the car had gone, which Jentsch broke that same evening with Johanna in the house. Preuschen never once asks in print how the pair got upstairs.
- ↑now that I have lost the children — Helga and Inge were adopted away in 1906 by Telmann's sister and her husband, Admiral von Holtzendorff. They come to the Tempio as visitors, a fortnight at a time. The memoir gave the adoption itself a subordinate clause, in a sentence about a school in Kiel. Here is what it cost, said plainly for the first time: with the daughters gone, the one person left who belongs to her is a housekeeper she has just described as wholly unreliable, and who has given notice. The white-and-pink children's room stands ready in the mezzanine of the Tempio for a visit a year — and it is the room she let the Jentsches sleep in.
- ↑“only” a house-thief — Her quotation marks. German burglary policies covered Einbruchdiebstahl — theft by breaking in from outside; a thief already lawfully in the house was excluded, however many locks he forced. The second lawsuit she loses in one chapter, and the more galling of the two: she had invited the pair in herself, in writing, with a paper setting out what they might and might not do — and that invitation is what voided the policy. It also explains a word planted three chapters earlier. In chapter 43 she calls Jentsch "mein »Hausdieb«" while describing the title page he drew for her anthology; the quotation marks there are the insurer's term, which she had learned in court by the time she wrote it down.
- ↑I now began to write film dramas — A wholly unrecorded turn in her career: at fifty-eight, unable to sell pictures, she started writing for the cinema. Nothing in the literature on Preuschen mentions screenplays, and no film of hers is known. The date makes sense of it: 1912–13 is exactly when German writers moved into the cinema — the Autorenfilm year of Der Andere and Der Student von Prag, when publishers' authors first put their names to scenarios. She is following the market, and saying so. "In the Tempio" would have staged her own robbery, with her own African journey cut in; she could not place it, and says in the same breath that she could not place her paintings either. Whether a typescript survives among her papers is worth asking of any archive that holds them.
- ↑the four hundred marks stolen from my chest of drawers — The unsolved theft of chapter 43, solved here in a subordinate clause. On the morning after the summer festival for seven hundred guests she found the takings gone from the bathroom chest of drawers. She told Jentsch at once; Jentsch was beside himself in sympathy and suggested they search the hired waiter who had changed his clothes in that bathroom. She knew the man to be honest and let it go, and travelled the next day. It was Jentsch, and the money bought the champagne for the parties his mistress was photographed at, in her kimonos, in her house.
- ↑the fictitious Jentsch father, a supposed colonel — A Bavarian colonel who had disowned him for wanting to paint, he said at their first meeting, along with being Leo Putz's favourite pupil and the author of verses that were not his. All of it invented, and the warrant of August 1912 says how thoroughly: Franz Cesare Jentsch (Jentzsch), bookseller, painter and writer, born 19 September 1891 at Karlsruhe. A bookseller from Baden, and twenty years old at the robbery — Preuschen was fifty-seven when she let him into the house. There was no colonel, and there was nothing in Munich for Johanna to find. The city she should have been sent to was the one Preuschen had just walked about in herself.