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self-laughter, to which I have become prone over the years through being constantly alone. Yes, you’ve first got to write the work in order to be able to publish it! I exclaimed to my own amusement. By suddenly laughing at myself like this I had actually released all my tension; I got up and went to the window. But I couldn’t see a thing. Thick fog clung to the windowpanes. I leant against the sill and tried, by continuous concentration, to descry the wall on the other side of the yard, but despite the most intense concentration I couldn’t make it out. Only twenty yards away and I can’t see the wall. To exist alone in such fog is madness! In a climate like this, which makes anything and everything a thousand times more difficult! It oppressed me, as it always did at this time of the year. I knocked on the windowpane with my index finger to see whether I could scare some bird outside, but nothing stirred. In the same way as I had tapped the pane I now tapped my head and dropped back into the chair. Ten years and not one successful piece of work! I thought. Naturally that has robbed me of all credibility. My sister spreads it around in Vienna that I am a failure, especially in those quarters where the effect is most devastating for me. I’m continually hearing her say to all and sundry My little brother and his Mendelssohn Bartholdy. She’s not embarrassed to call me a madman in everybody’s hearing. Someone who’s no longer quite right in the head. I know she talks like this about me and gets me an exceedingly damaging reputation everywhere. She recoils from nothing in order to get money, that is to do business, and rather than ruin a party she’d call me anything. She has no scruples, and she can behave abominably. On the other hand I’ve always loved her, with all her dreadful faults — loved her and hated her. Sometimes I’ve loved her more than I’ve hated her, and vice versa, but most of the time I’ve hated her because she’s always acted against me, quite consciously, by which I mean clear-mindedly, for her clear-mindedness has always been beyond question. She’s always been the realistic one, just as I’ve always been the imaginative one. I love you because you’re so imaginative, she often says, but there’s more disdain than admiration in this remark. When someone like her says I love you it’s mere hypocrisy. Or am I being grossly unjust? She always said I love you to her husband, until he could no longer endure it and cleared off to Peru, which to us seems like the end of the world, never to return. Husbands who have been deceived and lied to and made to look fools have for centuries fled to South America, never to return. It’s a tradition that goes back a long way. I’m one for lovers , she once said. I’ve always been unsuited to marriage. The very idea of having a husband round my neck for life has always been distasteful to me. I don’t know why I did marry in the end. Was it perhaps to please our parents? The business she was left with when her marriage broke up involved — and still involves — nothing but the biggest and most desirable properties in Austria, the value of which runs into millions. When her husband left her she turned the business into one which some people — the serious ones — would call disgusting and others would call incredibly successful. I am on the side of the serious ones, rightly or wrongly. To me the life my sister leads now is something to be ashamed of, being built solely on profit. Donating a million to charity at the end of the year, then gleefully reading about it in the newspapers and laughing herself silly for weeks, as she herself says she does — I find that revolting. On one occasion she made over to the church a palace near Siena — admittedly over-run by rats — to be used as an old people’s home, at the same time contributing two million schillings for extensions to the building. She had inherited it from a certain old Prince