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to enter it, the Academician went to the little boule Santa Inés writing table and took a sheet of paper. Would she take these lines of introduction to his friend Siegfried, a noted composer, although his works were seldom performed? But … how could one compose music if one was the son of Richard Wagner? And now his pen stopped its calligraphic career, adorned with Greek “e”s and tall “l”s: “
Voici, Mademoiselle
.” Would she greet Cosima affectionately from him? He warned her that the seats in the Festspielhaus were rather uncomfortable. But the pilgrimage to Bayreuth was something that every cultivated person must experience, even if only once in a lifetime—just as the Mohammedans went to Mecca or the Japanese climbed Fujiyama.
    Taking the letter he had embellished with a Renaissance flourish composed of very carefully drawn capital letters, Ofelia left us, with renewed demonstrations of affection for such a kind father, who indulged her in everything—although to tell the truth I hadn’t given the smallest sign of pleasure at the idea of this sudden journey, which in fact thwarted my plan for her to act as hostess to a reception shortly to be given here in honour of the editor of the
Revue des Deux Mondes
, who was very much interested in publishing a long article on the splendid prosperity and stability of my country. Her kisses on my forehead had been pure humbug and play-acting for the benefit of our visitor, because in fact she never needed myadvice or consent to do whatever she fancied. She used and abused the terror inspired in me by her appalling rages, sudden losses of control whenever I tried to oppose her wishes—rages expressed in frantic stamping, obscene gestures, and such foul and insulting language that it seemed to come from a brothel or low nightclub. At such moments the “cunts” and “pricks” of the Infanta—as my secretary called her—reached as high as the allegoric figures on the Arc de Triomphe. But when the storm had passed, and she had got what she wanted, Ofelia used to return to her usual delicate language full of such subtle nuances that sometimes, after listening to her, I had to go to the dictionary to discover the exact significance of some adjective or adverb, possibly destined in the future to fill the sails of my own oratory.
    When we were alone again, the Academician suddenly seemed depressed, remembering the years of poverty Richard Wagner had gone through, and the contempt that was felt for true artists in this horrible epoch. There was no Maecenas, no Lorenzo the Magnificent, no cultured Borgias, no Louis XIV, no Ludwig of Bavaria. Perhaps some Louis of the card table? He himself, in spite of his successful literary career, was not immune from want—so very far from immune, in fact—that under pressure from emissaries of the Law in cocked hats who might be knocking on the door of his house tomorrow with their symbolic ivory sticks (would such a thing have been conceivable in the Grand Siècle?) he had sorrowfully made up his mind to sell the manuscripts of two plays:
Robert Guiscard
(a historical pageant, whose chief characters were the Norman condottiere, his brother Rogerio, and the unfortunate Judith d’Evreux, which in spite of a masterly interpretation by Le Bargy, was a resounding flop) and
L’absent
(a drama of conscience: David and Bathsheba, whose nights of love were poisoned by the ghost of Uriah, etc.) which had beenperformed more than two hundred times at the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin, to the great fury of that swine of a Jew Bernstein, who had thought of writing a piece on the same theme … But the bookshop around here hadn’t any funds available, and lawsuits couldn’t be postponed: tomorrow those men in cocked hats with their ivory-handled sticks … But perhaps the National Library of my country …?
    He had no need to say more. I quickly wrote him out a cheque, which he received with the distrait air of a nobleman,