MISTER MYSTERY RESPONDS

Johanna Schopenhauer is reading the palm of a woman from the petty bourgeoisie of Weimar. -You don’t have to worry about your husband, Ingrid. He will be fine. As long as you stop supplying small doses of cyanide with his meals. - He likes very spicy foods. -The cyanide is not any spice, Ingrid. It’s a powerful poison. -Don’t tell me! I thought it was like ginger or nutmeg! Then Mrs. Tieck bursts into the room; she is very nervous. The petty bourgeoisie says goodbye to Johanna, who focuses her attention on Mrs. Tieck. -Mrs. Tieck! What happens? You look so nervous… -There's not a moment to lose, Johanna. Tieck and Wieland are going to fight duel this evening! - What makes you think that?   -He asked me to heat water! - And that makes you suspect? -It's just that every time he is going to duel, he asks me the same thing. Johanna gets up quickly. -Then, we’d better hurry up. Where will the duel take place? -I don’t know. I was confident that you could ...

In our society, Chiromancy (also called Palmistry, that is to say, fortune-telling by palm reading) is as discredited as, in my home, the title of yacht pilot of my cousin. (It will be a month that, to celebrate the recent obtaining of his title, my cousin took us all to sail his tiny yacht and we were shipwrecked.) But in the romantic era things were very different. Especially in Weimar, where the chiromantic gifts of Mrs. Schopenhauer were famous. Of course, I do not mean the wife of the founder of the Philosophical pessimism, who, as everybody knows, remained single throughout his life. I mean his mother, Johanna Schopenhauer, who at the beginning of the 19th century was the hostess of a salon in the style of the French institution. (You know, those groups of selected people who had a get together at some lady’s house). There is no greater contrast of characters than those of Arthur and his vivacious and jovial mother. Imagine a strict, austere and conservative mother and his s...