trustworthiness. I am moved by the hope that what I write down here may meet the eyes of those who know more than I do, and who may enlighten and instruct me, if they can and dare do so, concerning the whole sequence of unsolvable riddles that have followed the course of my life.
If, contrary to all reasonable expectation, this mémoire should come to the knowledge of the twc friends of my late second master—Magister Peter Wirtzigh (deceased and buried at Wernstein on the Inn in the year of the Great War, 1914)—that is to say, to the knowledge of the two honourable gentlemen and doctors Chrysophron Zagreus and Sacrobosco Haselmayer, called also 'the red Tanjur'—these reverend gentlemen may be just enough to remember that it cannot be simply garrulity or curiosity which induces me to publish a matter which the two gentlemen have kept secret for a whole generation. An old man of seventy years like myself should have outgrown all such childish folly. May they rather credit me with pressing motives of a spiritual nature, among them certainly not least the anxious fear of my heart to become after the death of my body an 'engine' (these two gentlemen will certainly understand what I mean by this).
But now to my story.
The first words addressed to me by Count du Chazal, when he engaged me were: "Has ever a woman in any way come into thy life?" As I could say 'No' with a good conscience he seemed visibly satisfied.
These words I feel now burning me as fire; I don't know why. The same question, every syllable of it repeated, was asked me thirty-five years later by my second employer, Magister Peter Wirtzigh, when
