The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann

Mynheer Peeperkorn, an elderly Dutchman, spent some time at House Berghof, that establishment which, in its prospectus, so correctly described itself as "international. " Pieter Peeperkorn -- such was his name, so he called himself, as for instance, "Pieter Peeperkorn will now take unto himself a Hollands gin" -- was a colonial Dutchman, a man from Java, a coffee-planter. His slightly faded nationality is scarcely sufficient ground for introducing him at this late day into our story. God knows we have had racial mixtures aplenty in the famous cure conducted with such many-tongued efficiency by Herr Hofrat Behrens! There was the Egyptian princess who had given the Hofrat the extraordinary coffee-machine and sphinx cigarettes, a sensational person with cropped hair and beringed fingers yellow with nicotine, who went about -- except at the main meal of the day, for which she made full Parisian toilet -- in a sack coat and well-pressed trousers; and who scorned the world of men, to lay hot and heavy, though fitful siege to an insignificant little Romanian Jewess called plain Frau Landauer, while Lawyer Paravant for her royal highness's beaux yeux neglected his mathematics and altogether played the fool for love. This princess, in addition to her own colourful personality, had among her little suite a Moorish eunuch, a weak and sickly man, who yet, despite his basic and constitutional lack -- upon which Caroline Stönr loved to dwell -- clung to life more desperately than most, and was quite inconsolable over the conclusions Hofrat Behrens drew from the transparency they made of his dusky inside.

Mynheer Peeperkorn, then, compared with such phenomena, might seem well-nigh colourless. And it is true that this part of our story might, like an earlier chapter, bear the caption "A Newcomer. " But the reader need not fear that in him another occasion for pedagogic strife has arrived upon the scene. No, Mynheer Peeperkorn was not the man to be the bearer of logical confusion. He was quite a different man, as we shall see. Yet he brought sore dismay and perplexity upon the hero of our tale, as will shortly be very evident.