of moneylust are over, I go to chew my memories and dream my dreams and listen to my arteries hardening.
By taxicab down the wide Briennerstrasse, past the Luitpold and the Odéon, to the Ludwigstrasse, gay with its after-the-opera crowds, and then to the left into the Residenzstrasse, past the Hoftheatre and its café (ah, Sophie, thou angel!), and so to the Maximilianstrasse, to the Neuthurmstrasse, and at last, with a sharp turn, into the Platzl.
The Hofbräuhaus! One hears it from afar; a loud buzzing, the rattle of mass lids, the sputter of the released dunkle, the sharp cries of pretzel and radish sellers, the scratching of matches, the shuffling of feet, the eternal gurgling of the plain people. No palace this, for all its towering battlements and the frescos by Ferdinand Wagner in the great hall upstairs, but drinking butts for them that labour and are heavy laden: station porter, teamsters, servant
