me feel, Father? And he reproaches us with ‘unchristian behaviour!’ ”
“You’ll let yourself be bluffed by this miserable scribble, will you?” Johann Buddenbrook strode across to his son, dragging the extinguisher on its long stick behind him. “ ‘Unchristian behaviour!’ Ha! He shows good taste, doesn’t he, this canting money-grabber? I don’t know what to make of you young people! Your heads are full of fantastic religious humbug—practical idealism, the July Monarchy, and what not: and we old folk are supposed to be wretched cynics. And then you abuse your poor old Father in the coarsest way rather than give up a few thousand thaler. . . . So he deigns to look down upon me as a business man, does he? Well, as a business man, I know what faux-frais are!—Faux-frais,” he repeated, rolling the r in his throat. “I sha’n’t make this high-falutin scamp of a son any fonder of me by giving him what he asks for, it seems to me.”
“What can I say, Father? I don’t care to feel that he has any justification when he talks of ‘influences.’ As an interested party I don’t like to tell you to stick out, but—It seems to me I’m as good a Christian as Gotthold . . . but still . . .”
“ ‘Still’—that is exactly it, Jean, you are right to say ‘still.’ What is the real state of the case? He got infatuated with his Mademoiselle Stüwing and wouldn’t listen to reason; he made scene after scene, and finally he married her, after I had absolutely refused to give my consent. Then I wrote to him: ‘Mon très cher fils: you are marrying your shop—very well, that’s an end of it. We cease to be on friendly terms from now on. I won’t cut you off, or do anything melodramatic. I am sending you a hundred thousand marks as a wedding present, and I’ll leave you another hundred thousand in my will. But that is absolutely all you’ll get, not another shilling!’ That shut his mouth.—What have our arrangements got to do with him? Suppose you and your
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