Peter Altenberg

SO SHOULD IT ALWAYS BE

A gentleman strode up to me in the coffeehouse and said: "I'm a fanatic admirer of yours.

“Very kind," I said. "Perhaps then you wouldn't mind standing a fine champagne?"

"With the greatest of pleasure."

We drank three glasses of G. and H. Mumm, extra dry, sweet.

It became seven in the morning. I went to the central baths, 27 degrees centigrade, porcelain tubs. A young woman with aristocratically delicate hands sat at the cash register. I said to her with my eyes:

"Sweetest cashier -" And: "One ought to be allowed to purchase you as well

Then I breakfasted in a charcuterie. Cold smoked sturgeon from the Volga, 12 hellers a serving. Crayfish from Ostende. Large green olives from Spain, ten pieces 60 hellers. Prague ham, 6 hellers a serving, 90 hellers.

Two bananas, gold-yellow-black flecked, from Africa, 30 hellers apiece, 60 hellers.

Then I bought a blue phototype picture postcard: "Path along the lake." In a winter landscape.

I imagined it set in a five-centimeter-wide ash-wood frame.

Because of these reveries I got home at nine-thirty in the morning. The young housemaid who led me to the lift said to me: "Herr Altenberg must have been knocked around again last night -- -'

'Yes indeed," I said, "you know, the philistine world order!"

She thought: "Well, he paid 40 hellers for the lift though it's already counted into the rent -- -.

"So sollte es immer sein," 1911. Original text in Neues Altes, 3d ed. (Berlin: S. Fischer Verlag, I911), 83-84.