Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann

Consul Buddenbrook crossed his spacious ground floor in haste. Coming out into Bakers' Alley, he heard steps behind him and saw Gosch the broker, a picturesque figure in his long cloak and Jesuit hat, also climbing the narrow street to the meeting. He lifted his hat with one thin long hand, and with the other made a deferential gesture, as he said, "Well, Herr Consul -- how are you? " His voice sounded sinister.

This broker, Siegismund Gosch, a bachelor of some forty years, was, despite his demeanour, the best and most honest soul in the world; but he was a wit and an oddity. His smooth-shaven face was distinguished by a Roman nose, a protruding pointed chin, sharp features, and a wide mouth drooping at the corners, whose narrow lips he was in the habit of pressing together in the most taciturn and forbidding manner. His grey hair fell thick and sombre over his brow, and he actually regretted not being humpbacked. It was his whim to assume the role of a wild, witty, and reckless intrigant -- a cross between Mephistopheles and Napoleon, something very malevolent and yet fascinating too; and he was not entirely unsuccessful in his pose. He was a strange yet attractive figure among the citizens of the old city; still, he belonged among them, for he carried on a small brokerage business in the most modest, respectable sort of way. In his narrow, dark little office, however, he had a large bookcase filled with poetry in every language, and there was a story that he had been engaged since his twentieth year on a translation of Lope de Vega's collected dramas. Once he had played the role of Domingo in an amateur performance of Schiller's Don Carlos -- this was the culmination of his career. A common word never crossed his lips; and the most ordinary business expressions he would hiss between his clenched teeth, as if he were saying "Curses on you, villain," instead of some commonplace about stocks and commissions. He was, in many ways, the heir and successor to Jean Jacques Hoffstede of blessed memory, except that his character had certain elements of the sombre and pathetic, with none of the playful liveliness of that old 18th century friend of Johann Buddenbrook. One day he lost at a single blow, on the Bourse, six and a half thaler on two or three papers which he had bought as a speculation. This was enough. He sank upon a bench; he struck an attitude which looked as though he had lost the Battle of Waterloo; he struck his clenched fist against his forehead and repeated several times, with a blasphemous roll of the eyes: "Ha, accursed, accursed! " He must have been, at bottom, cruelly bored by the small, safe business he did and the petty transfer of this or that bit of property; for this loss, this tragic blow with which Heaven had stricken him down -- him, the schemer Gosch -- delighted his inmost soul. He fed on it for weeks. Someone would say, "So you've had a loss, Herr Gosch, I'm sorry to hear. " To which he would answer: "Oh, my good friend, ‘uomo non educato dal dolore riman sempre bambino'! " Probably nobody understood that. Was it, possibly, Lope da Vega? Anyhow, there was no doubt that this Siegismund Gosch was a remarkable and learned man.