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Vienna, January 17, 1875
Querido Berganza!
I make so bold as to protest vigorously about the unnaturally chivalrous sentiments and emotions your New Year's Eve letter imputes to me. Infinitely more elegant though your construction may be than the sober truth, it has the obvious disadvantage of wronging all those concerned. I am neither in possession of a jewel with the remarkable
properties you mention—and if I were I would make it over to Prince Bismarck,1 who seems to be in greater need of it than I am—nor have I ever heard that frog ponds are inhabited by creatures other than frogs and toads. While my chivalry is thus reduced to hollow illusions, you must still strip its image of several falsehoods intended to elevate it to a position beyond anything it might wish for itself or one you could defend before God or your conscience. Strip it of its lures, its artifices, its serpentine wiles, and its charms; it is still far from being an Armida.2
I find it very arrogant of you to suppose it is in Leipzig ballrooms alone that you may behold feminine creatures “whose innocence shines forth from their eyes,” and to allow young girls elsewhere to degenerate into reptiles with venomous fangs, scaly armor, and Mephistophelean ideas.
About New Year's Eve, incidentally, a postscript for your peace of mind: authoritative sources have remarked, and told my family, that I was merrier than normal. But then, a man cannot aspire to everything, and if I am going to continue feeling awkward in the company of ladies, I am all the more glad that you should feel at your ease with them.
Your account of the ballroom events reads like a veritable idyll, albeit a modern French, not a classical one. The classical idyll invariably demands a blue sky, green forest, grazing cattle and sheep, whereas the modern contents itself with black coats, kid gloves, and the pleased expressions of young men and girls. All in all, I have abstracted a prescription for my small psychological medicine chest from i