The Storyteller by Walter Benjamin Page B

September 1884. At the time, the inheritor was notfar off his fiftieth birthday and was certainly no longer a bon viveur. Had he ever been one? The question did indeed crop up. Were someone to insist that he had never once stumbled across the name of the Baron in the chronique scandaleuse of Paris, and even that the mouths of the most unscrupulous club denizens and the most gossipy coquettes had never referred to him, it would be impossible to disagree: the Baron, in his shepherd’s plaid trousers, with his puffed-out Lavalliere cravat, was more than a swanky apparition; there were a few wrinkles on his face which bespoke a connoisseur of women who had paid for his wisdom. The Baron had remained a riddle until now, and to see this large, long-awaited inheritance finally in his hands effected in his friends, alongside their unbegrudging goodwill, the most discreet, most spiteful curiosity. What no fireside chats, no bottle of Burgundy had been able to do – lift the veil from this life – they believed they might be able to expect from this sudden wealth.
    But after two or three months, they were all of one mind: they could not have been more thoroughly disappointed. Nothing – not a shadow – had changed in the Baron’s clothing, mood, the way he divided up his time, even in his budget and accommodation. He was still the noblest idler, whose time appeared as filled to the brim as that of the most minor clerk. Whenever he left the club, he took his quarters in his bachelor apartment on the Avenue Victor Hugo, and never were any friends, who wanted to accompany him home of an evening, dismissed with excuses. Indeed, it sometimes happened that, right until five o’clock in the morning or even later, the man of the house acted as banker at a green table that was just where a wonderful Chippendale cabinet once stood in his parlour. The Baron liked to play by fluke – that was clear from the rare occasions when he had appeared at the card table in the past.Now, though, even the most long-standing players could not recall experiencing such runs of luck as those that the winter of 1884 brought. It lasted all through the spring and remained as the summer streamed across the boulevards with its rivulets of shade. How could it be, then, that by September the Baron was a poor man? Not poor, but floating indefinably between poor and rich, just like before, though now robbed of the expectation of a great inheritance. Poor enough that he began limiting himself to visiting the club only for a cup of tea or a game of chess. No one dared to wager a question. What would have been questionable anyway about an existence that took place within its narrow, sophisticated limits in front of everybody’s eyes, from his morning ride, to the hour’s fencing, and lunch until the bell rings a quarter to six, when he left the Café de Paris in order to dine two hours later with company at Delaborde? In those intervening hours, he did not touch another card. And yet these two hours of the day robbed him of his whole fortune.
    It was only years later that people in Paris discovered what had happened, after the Baron had retreated to Lord knows where – what would the name of a remote Lithuanian manor mean here? – and one of his friends, in the middle of the most aimless strolling one rainy morning, winced in shock – he himself did not immediately know in response to what – a sight or an idea? In truth, it was both. For the monstrosity which swayed down at him from the shoulders of three transport workers on the flight of steps at the Palais D…y was that precious Chippendale piece, which one day had given way to the talismanic gambling table. The cabinet was splendid and could not be mistaken for any other. But it was not only because of this that the friend recognised it. Just as waveringly, his broad shoulders shaking, did the mighty back of its ownerappear and disappear that day when he