“‘No, no, not in the least,’ I told him.
“I have asked in the hotel if this man is crazy, and they have told me that he is not, but is a professor, a man of science, who is known to have these strange fits of gaiety.
“Another of the Norwegian’s doings has been to compose a serenade, with a vulgar melody that would disgust you, and which he has dedicated ‘A la bella Italia.’ He wrote the Italian words himself, but as he knows no music, he had a pianist come here and write out his serenade. What he especially wants is that it should be full of sentiment; and so the pianist arranged it with directions and many pauses, which satisfied the Norwegian. Almost every night the serenade ‘A la bella Italia’ is sung. Somebody who wants to amuse himself goes to the piano, the Norwegian strikes a languid attitude and chants his serenade. Sometimes he goes in front of the piano, sometimes behind, but invariably he hears the storm of applause when it ends, and he bows with great gusto.
“I don’t know whether it’s the other people who are laughing at him, or he who is laughing at the others.
“The other day he said to me in his macaronic Italian:
“‘Mr. Spaniard, I have good eyesight, good hearing, a good sense of smell, and... lots of sentiment.’
“I didn’t exactly understand what he meant me to think, and I didn’t pay any attention to him.
“It seems that the Norwegian is going away soon, and as the day of his departure approaches, he grows funereal.”
THE SADNESS OF LIFE
“I don’t know why I don’t go away,” Cæsar wrote to his friend another time. “When I go out in the evening and see the ochre-coloured houses on both sides and the blue sky above, a horrible sadness takes me. These spring days oppress me, make me want to weep; it seems to me it would be better to be dead, leaving no tomb or name or other ridiculous and disagreeable thing, but disappearing into the air or the sea. It doesn’t seem natural; but I have never been so happy as one time when I was in Paris sick, alone and with a fever. I was in an hotel room and my window looked into the garden of a fine house, where I could see the tops of the trees; and I transformed them into a virgin forest, wherein marvellous adventures happened to me.