THE PRIS ·ON
185
planned for
him.
All right . . we took him away. Luckily we had
run into a friend of Overbeck's, a . . . dentist, who was used to
handling cases of
insanity....
I didn't have much money available,
so we had to take third class tickets. What could we do! It was a
long trip, in those days, from Turin to Basle. The train was almost
filled up with poor people, Italian laborers. We knew from Friedrich's
fellow-lodgers that he was subject to violent attacks. Finally, we
found three seats. I stood in the corridor. Overbeck sat on Friedrich's
left; Miescher, the dentist, on his right; next to them was a peasant
woman. She looked like Overbeck, the same grandmotherly face....
In her basket there was a chicken that kept sticking its head out
incessantly; the woman shoved it back in. It was enough to drive
you into a fury,-! say: a fury! What must it have been for a ...
sick man! I was expecting some terrible incident.
"The train entered the Saint Gothard tunnel, which had just
been finished. It took thirty-five minutes then to go through it–
thirty-five minutes-and there was no light
in
the cars, at .least in
third class. The rocking in the dark, the smell of soot, the feeling that
the trip would never end.... In spite of the clanking of the train,
I could hear the chicken's beak pecking at the basket, and I was
waiting. How could we deal with a crisis in that darkness?"
Except for his hardly moving lips,
his
whole face was still
motionless in the theatrical light; but beneath
his
voice, punctuated
by the drops falling from the tiles, there rumbled all the revenge
that goes with certain kinds of compassion.
"And suddenly-you ... are aware that a number of Friedrich's
writings were still unpublished-a voice began to rise in the dark,
above the clatter of the cars. Friedrich was singing-with perfect
articulation, he who stammered in conversation-he was singing a
poem we had never heard before; and it was his last poem,
Venice.
"I do not like Friedrich's music. It is mediocre. But that song
was ... well, really: sublime.
"He had finished well before we left the tunnel. When we came
out of the dark everything was the same as before.
As
before. . . .
The same wretched carriage. The same peasant woman, the chicken,
the laborers, the dentist. And we,-and he, besotted. The mystery
you have been talking about, I never felt it so strongly. All that was
so . . . fortuitous. . . . And Friedrich much more troubling than a
corpse. It was life-I say simply: life.... A very ... curious event
had occurred: the song was as strong as life. I had just made a
discovery. An important one. In the prison that Pascal speaks of,
