The House on Mengstrasse (Part 1)

"What is that? — What... is that?"

"Well, what, then, deuce take it! C'est la question, ma très chère demoiselle!"

Madame Buddenbrook glanced at her daughter-in-law, who sat beside her on the straight-backed white sofa with its yellow cushions and its gilded lion's head, and then came to the help of her little granddaughter, who sat on her grandfather's knee by the window.

"Tony," she prompted, "I believe that God..."

And little Antonie, eight years old and delicately built, in a frock of light, shot silk, her pretty blond head turned a little away from her grandfather's face, stared with her grey-blue eyes thoughtfully into the room without seeing anything in it, and repeated once more: "What is that?" and then said slowly: "I believe that God created me, together with all creatures," and, her face suddenly bright, went on rattling it off without stopping: "and has given me body and soul, eyes, ears and all my limbs, reason and all my senses, and still preserves them; and furthermore clothing and shoes, meat and drink, house and home, wife and child, fields and cattle..." At which point old Johann Buddenbrook burst out laughing, a high, suppressed giggle, out of the sheer pleasure of being able to make fun of the catechism.

It was a Thursday in October 1835, and the Buddenbrooks were celebrating their move into the great house on Mengstrasse, which the firm had bought from the heirs of the Ratenkamps, a once brilliant family that had gone downhill, slowly and then quickly. Its "landscape room," where the family now sat, was hung with tapestries on which shepherds and shepherdesses idled among ruins and blue waters, in the taste of the last century.

The last century sat by the window in the person of old Johann Buddenbrook himself: round, rosy, benevolent, in his powdered hair and a coat the color of a mouse, with a lace jabot under his double chin. He loved French phrases and Low German oaths, Voltaire and good dinners, and he regarded the pious inclinations of his son with a gentle, unshakable irony. His second wife, Antoinette, a stately lady with white curls, presided over the household. His son, Consul Johann, whom everyone called Jean, was a different kind of man: thin, earnest, with deep-set eyes, a man who prayed, who kept a family chronicle, who believed that the firm of Johann Buddenbrook was a trust from God, and who looked at his father's jokes with a slight, respectful pain. His wife Elisabeth, Bethsy, born a Kröger, had the slow, elegant charm of her family and a way of saying "Ah, Jean!" that was famous among her friends.

Of their children, Thomas, nine years old, already resembled his grandfather around the chin and nose, and was quiet and attentive; Antonie, Tony, was everybody's pet, and knew it; and Christian, seven, thin and long-nosed, already had a gift that made his elders laugh and then look at each other uneasily: he could imitate anyone.

The guests filled the rooms: Jean Jacques Hoffstede, the town poet, who had written verses for the occasion; Dr. Grabow, the family physician, who prescribed for every illness a little pigeon and a little French bread; Pastor Wunderlich; Lebrecht Kröger, the "à la mode cavalier," Bethsy's father, the most elegant old gentleman in the city; merchants and senators and their ladies. They went in to dinner in the great dining room, where the walls were painted with white gods on a sky-blue ground, and the long table was laid with the heavy family silver.

Then the dinner proceeded as dinners proceeded in that house: herb soup with toasted bread, fish, a colossal brick-red smoked ham with brown shallot sauce and so many vegetables that everyone could have satisfied himself from a single dish; then the famous "Plettenpudding," a layered pudding of macaroons, raspberries, biscuits and custard, the pride of the kitchen, which made Christian ill, so that he had to be taken away moaning. They talked of grain prices and the customs union, of the old days when Napoleon's troops had been quartered in the city, and of the town's affairs. Christian, before he was sent away, imitated his schoolmaster, Herr Stengel, so perfectly that the table roared: "You said 'line', my dear child, but what you wrote was a stroke!"

In the middle of all this, the maid brought the Consul a letter. He read it, changed color slightly, and put it in his pocket. It was from Gotthold, his half-brother, old Johann's son by his first marriage, who had married a Demoiselle Stüwing, of a shop, against his father's will, and had been as good as disinherited. Now, he wrote, since the family had found the money to buy a house like this one, he must insist on his share.

Later in the evening, when the guests had gone and the candles in the landscape room were burning low, the Consul read the letter to his father. The old man flew into a rage. "Gotthold!" he cried. "A shop! A shopkeeper's daughter! No, no, and again no." The Consul, quietly, reminded him that Gotthold was his son, and that a family quarrel was a misfortune. But he also reminded him, more quietly still, that the purchase of the house had cost the firm a great deal of ready money, and that a large payment to Gotthold now would weaken it. He wrote nothing down that night. But he lay awake a long time, and knew, though he did not say so even to himself, that he had spoken as a merchant, and not as a brother.

Before going to bed, old Johann Buddenbrook went to the window and looked out over the dark, sleeping city, its gables and church towers under the October sky. Then he took up his candle and went off to bed, humming an old French tune.

(End of Episode 1 — continued in Episode 2: Children and Inheritance)