Hannah was sleeping soundly and her breathing was regular. The fever had visibly abated, and Franziska, knowing that this sleep was a sign of recovery, left the alcove as quietly as she had come and went to sit by the fireplace in her living room.

The fire in the hearth was half burned down, but above the fireplace was a stove whose heat came from outside the room and which radiated a comfortable temperature even at this hour. This was no surprise: the man in charge of the heating department, a mustachioed Slovak who had only appeared when the rains started, habitually did too much rather than too little.

It was not yet late, and Franziska took a random book down from the shelf. It was a volume of Rousseau, the Confessions, and as she leafed through it, she could see that the first fifty pages at least had a multitude of thin pencil strokes in the margins. The reader, very probably the count's mother, had apparently grown more inimical toward the author as she progressed, for the thin strokes, which clearly expressed agreement, became fewer, and question marks more numerous. In the middle of the book was a white, gold-edged sheet with a maxim on it, and the maxim read: “Before each man stands a picture of what he is to become. As long as he is not that, his peace is not complete.” Franziska stopped short. “How simple,” she said, “and plain, almost! And yet it moves me. And why? Because I see ‘the picture of what I am to become’ before me, like a premonition? Or is it, on the contrary,—is it because I don't see it? How strange.”