God knows! He could chat with them and laugh
at their senseless twaddle; and so he made an impression. Once, speaking
of a very corpulent man in the place, he said that he looked as if he
went about with his breeches full of lard. And he laughed at that joke
himself, though I should have been ashamed of it. Another time, after we
had come to live in the same house together, he showed his foolishness
in an unmistakable way. My landlady came in one morning and asked what I
would have for breakfast, and in my hurry I happened to answer: "A bread
and a slice of egg." Thomas Glahn was sitting in my room at the time--he
lived in the attic up above, just under the roof--and he began to
chuckle and laugh childishly over my little slip of the tongue. "A bread
and a slice of egg!" he repeated time over and over, until I looked at
him in surprise and made him stop.
Maybe I shall call to mind other ridiculous traits of his later on. If
so, I will write them down too, and not spare him, seeing that he is
still my enemy. Why should I be generous? But I will admit that he
talked nonsense only when he was drunk. But is it not a great mistake to
be drunk at all?
When I first met him, in the autumn of 1859, he was a man of
two-and-thirty--we were of an age. He wore a full beard at that time,
and affected woolen sports shirts with an exaggerated lowness of neck;
not content with that, he sometimes left the top button undone.
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