Everything that came to hand was treated by this poor woman as a sentient, living thing. She lingered over it, talked to it and called it to mind, remembering just when it had first come into the house to give pleasure to or perhaps, in some cases, to slightly unsettle the woman's now dead daughter. Here, for instance, was a smashed shepherdess in porcelain and thereby hung a tale and this proud mother told it to herself, to me and to the multi-coloured gilded ornament with all its twists and turns, exactly as it had happened. Then, as my hands wandered absent-mindedly over the piano keys behind me, a look of jealousy flashed across the face of that much-to-be-pitied narrator: would the hand of a stranger dare to play again those notes that had once belonged to the deceased?

As the woman once more cast her livid face downwards, my glance chanced to fall on the songbook lying open on the music-holder. The song contained therein was a sad one. Was it just a coincidence that the songbook lay open at that particular place or had the dead girl, somewhat ominously, turned to it herself? It read as follows:

Should fate bestow on you a precious gift,
Needs must you lose some other dear advantage;
Pain, like success, is gathered bit by bit,
And what you long for most will do most damage.

A human hand is like a childish hand
That grabs at life, then wantonly destroys it.
It ruins what it cannot understand
And clings to something though it ne'er enjoys it.

A human hand is like a childish hand,
Man's heart a childish heart, full of childish fears.
Never lose your grip! … Life's a burning brand
And laughter, soon or late, for aye changed to tears.

Should fate bestow on you a garland wreath,
You needs must pluck away its finest flower;
You to yourself destruction will bequeath
And over scattered petals cry and cower.

With this song came the first reminder of a bygone age to which, however, a further reminder would need to be added before the series of thoughts and impressions recorded in these pages finally developed.

The sky outside was cold and blue over the roofs opposite. The sun was still shining through the high casement windows, but the ice crystal patterns thereon, which had melted slightly in the heat of the noonday sun, were already re-forming. I had picked up from a sewing table an ornamental ballroom spray of artificial flowers and the sun also shone on this bouquet.

It was an artful and delicate concoction of white and blue elderflowers and leaves and a single strand of long blonde hair had got mixed up in it when the girl who was now dead had taken it out of her hair after the ball held the night before her fatal fever started.

There are many kinds of laurel wreaths in the world and just as many ways of running after them to win them or to lose them. Is not every life an attempt to weave a garland by and for oneself? We all set about the work to the best of our strength and ability and are all more or less successful in completing it. Often very fine work is produced, but then again hopelessly botched jobs as well come to light. Many a wreath is destroyed before completion and many a proud garland, having adorned the head of some elevated personage, eventually falls into the hands of a total stranger who, while holding it, examines it and tears it apart leaf by leaf as an austere winter sun, ill-disposed to all borrowed plumes and tinsel, looks on impassively.

The decorative spray I was holding in my hand just then was not, of course, destined to suffer that fate. It consisted for the most part of elder blossoms and, though it was only an artificial, trumped-up thing, its heart-warming vivacity was such that, old as I was, with white hairs on my head that had not sprung up there overnight, I was plunged into the contemplation of increasingly remote and wild blue yonders. Memories awoke in me which had, at bottom, little to do with the deceased youngster's ballroom favour.

Blame those elder blossoms for the deep and bitter seriousness with which I now thought of the wreath that had twisted itself around my own life, in part due to the efforts of my own hands, and the two ends of which would soon now make contact with each other.

The song lying open on top of the piano had been written more for me than for the young dead girl who had now, after a short and happy sojourn on earth, fallen softly, painlessly and quietly asleep, having worn this little wreath of fair spring flowers on an even fairer head as a lovely symbol of her life and her success in plaiting garlands.

I had been flung out into the world to fend for myself quite early on in life and had lived as an orphan, heir to a not inconsiderable fortune, in the house of a relative who was also a bilious hypochondriac carrying morbid thoughts of death even into the most cheerful of days and binding me with iron fetters to my daily chores and then to unremitting study. Discontented and recalcitrant, I would sit in a darkened room and my childhood, which contains the happiest days of your life under normal circumstances, passed by wretchedly and inauspiciously enough under the watchful gaze of those surly eyes. The unbridled pleasure and the heady exaltation to be found in a circle of carefree companions were unknown to me then. I never once got a thrashing for a silly puerile prank, and that an incalculable blessing was denied me in this way, which no grammatical treat could ever take the place of, is something that more than one well-educated gentleman can testify to.

There was much that was fascinating and exotic in many of the books over which I had to pore all day long, but even the most splendid and dazzling of gods and goddesses came over to me as no better than grisly torturers, and ancient heroes and philosophers appeared to me to fight their battles and impart their wisdom only as a way for them to vent on me their arbitrary spleen, poor prisoner that I was. They had lived their lives and carried out their exploits only to drag me, thousands of years later, through terrifying labyrinths full of monstrous vocabulary and to push me over gloomy precipices bristling with the brambles of complex grammatical constructions.

When this seven-year apprenticeship to misery had finally finished, I naturally broke loose like a wild animal from its chain and the first and hitherto imponderable consequences of such an upbringing came to the fore. I belonged at university to the wildest and the most anarchic of its confraternities and my standing in the eyes of my dignified tutors was appreciably less than it was in the eyes of my distinctly undignified cronies.

I naturally got as far away as possible from the area in which my guardian and relative lived and embarked on my academic career in Vienna, which was still, in those days, Mozart's Vienna of 'wine, women and song'. And when the ground beneath my feet had grown too hot for me there, and too many eyes were taking too much notice of what I was doing, I went to Prague, a city world-famous for its Schools of Medicine.

The sun was dancing still over the ballroom favour in my hand and the solitary hair, which its beautiful wearer had left behind between the white and now reddish blossoms, glowed like a thread of spun gold. I remembered the old city of Prague with its one hundred towers and another fair maiden whose hair though had been black and I remembered other elderflowers. Prague! A town of lunacy and gaiety! A town of martyrs and musicians and beautiful women! Prague! How much of my freedom-loving soul you have taken away from me!

They say that when a Czech mother has given birth to a child, she lays it on the roof: if it stays there it is