CHAPTER I
“And—and—what comes next?”
“Oh, yes, yes, what the dickens does come next? C’est la question, ma très chère demoiselle!”
Frau Consul Buddenbrook shot a glance at her husband and came to the rescue of her little daughter. She sat with her mother-in-law on a straight white-enamelled sofa with yellow cushions and a gilded lion’s head at the top. The Consul was in his easy-chair beside her, and the child perched on her grandfather’s knee in the window.
“Tony,” prompted the Frau Consul, “ ‘I believe that God’—”
Dainty little eight-year-old Antonie, in her light shot-silk frock, turned her head away from her grandfather and stared aimlessly about the room with her blue-grey eyes, trying hard to remember. Once more she repeated “What comes next?” and went on slowly: “ ‘I believe that God’—” and then, her face brightening, briskly finished the sentence: “ ‘created me, together with all living creatures.’ ” She was in smooth waters now, and rattled away, beaming with joy, through the whole Article, reproducing it word for word from the Catechism just promulgated, with the approval of an omniscient Senate, in that very year of grace 1835. When you were once fairly started, she thought, it was very like going down “Mount Jerusalem” with your brothers on the little sled: you had no time to think, and you couldn’t stop even if you wanted to.
“ ‘And clothes and shoes,’ ” she said, “ ‘meat and drink, hearth and home, wife and child, acre and cow . . .’ ” But old Johann Buddenbrook could hold in no longer. He burst
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