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became more and more demanding. At first purely out of a desire to improve but subsequently from the tyranny of habit as well, he so organised his life that, for as long as he was working in one establishment, he spent his whole time, day and night, on his trapeze. His very modest needs were all met by relays of servants who kept watch below and who raised and lowered everything required up above in specially constructed containers. His way of life occasioned no particular difficulties as far as those around him were concerned, except that, during the other acts on the programme, it was slightly disturbing that he stayed aloft – the fact could not be concealed – and that the audience, though it usually remained calm, let its gaze stray in his direction. The management forgave him this, however, because he was an outstanding and irreplaceable artist. Also, of course, they appreciated that he did not live like that out of mischief and that it was in fact the only way he could keep himself in constant form and maintain his act at the level of perfection.
    The problem was harder to manage when his seasons ended and the trapeze artist had to travel to another town. His manager saw to it that he was spared any unnecessary prolongation of his sufferings: for trips in towns they used racing cars, dashing, if possible at night or in the very early morning, through the deserted streets at top speed, though of course still too slowly for the languishing trapeze artist; in trains, they took a whole compartment, where, adopting a pathetic but at least partial substitute for his normal way of life, he spent the journey up in the luggage rack; in the next theatre on their tour the trapeze was in place long before the acrobat’s arrival and all the doors between them and the auditorium were wide open and all the corridors clear, so that he could be back up on high without losing a second. “Seeing him set foot on the rope-ladder,” Rorschach wrote, “and climb back up to his eyrie with the speed of lightning, were the happiest moments of my life.”
    * * *
    The day came, alas, when the artist refused to come down from his trapeze. He had just done his last performance at the Grand Theatre at Leghorn and was due to leave that evening by car for Tarbes. Despite Rorschach’s and the music hall manager’s pleadings, increasingly hysterical appeals from the other members of the troupe, from the musicians, the entire staff, the technicians, and from the crowds who had begun to leave but had stopped and returned on hearing all this noise, the acrobat, in a fit of pride, cut the rope he could have come down by and began to perform, at ever-faster pace, an uninterrupted succession of grand circles. This supreme performance lasted two hours and caused fifty-three spectators to pass out. The police had to be brought in. In spite of Rorschach’s warnings, the policemen brought a long fire-ladder and began to climb up. They didn’t even get halfway: the trapeze artist opened his grip, and, with a long scream, describing a perfect parabola, he crashed to the ground.
    After paying compensation to the theatre owners who had been trying to get the acrobat for months, Rorschach had some capital left, and he decided to invest it in an export-import business. He bought a stock of sewing machines and shipped them to Aden in the hope of trading them for perfumes and spices. He was persuaded to adopt a different course by a trader he became acquainted with on the crossing, who was lugging various copper instruments and utensils, from valve rods to spiral condensing tubes, from pearl-sieves to frying pans and fish kettles. The spice market, so this businessman explained, and more generally everything to do with trade between Europe and the Middle East, was tightly controlled by Anglo-Arabian syndicates which, in order to keep their monopolies, did not flinch from even physically eliminating their most minor rivals. On the other hand, business between