On the landing which led from the shop to the stockroom behind, my
grandfather took up his position. He looked very handsome up there,
with his curly white hair. Thence, like a general, he looked down on
everything--on the customers, the assistants, the apprentices, both
before and behind him. If some specially esteemed lady customer came
into the shop, he hurriedly left his exalted position to give advice.
If the shopman's explanations failed to satisfy her, he put things
right. He was at the zenith of his strength, vigour, and apparently of
his glory.
The glory vanished, because from the start he had worked his way up
without capital. The Hamburg firm that financed the business lent money
at too high a rate of interest and on too hard conditions for it to
continue to support two families.
But when later on my grandfather had his time at his own disposal, he
took up the intellectual interests which in his working years he had
had to repress. In his old age, for instance, he taught himself
Italian, and his visitors would find him, with Tasso's _Gerusalemme
liberata_ in front of him, looking out in a dictionary every word that
presented any difficulty to him, and of such there were many.
The old man was an ardent Buonapartist, and, strangely enough, an even
more ardent admirer of the Third Napoleon than of the First, because he
regarded him as shrewder, and was convinced that he would bequeath the
Empire to his son. But he and I came into collision on this point from
the time I was fourteen years of age. For I was of course a Republican,
and detested Napoleon III. for his breach of the Constitution, and used
to write secretly in impossible French, and in a still more impossible
metre (which was intended to represent hexameters and pentameters)
verses against the tyrant. An ode to the French language began:
"Ah! quelle langue magnifique, si belle, si riche, si sonore,
Langue qu'un despote cruel met aux liens et aux fers!"
On the subject of Napoleon III. grandfather and grandson could not
possibly agree. But this was the only subject on which we ever had any
dispute.