Confessions of Felix Krull

I shall never forget the disgusting sight that met my boyish eyes. Muller-Rose was seated at a grubby dressing-table in front of a dusty, speckled mirror. He had nothing on but a pair of gray cotton drawers, and a man in shirt sleeves was massaging his back, the sweat running down his own face. Meanwhile the actor was busy wiping face and neck with a towel already stiff with rouge and greasepaint. Half of his countenance still had the rosy coating that had made him radiant on the stage but now looked merely pink and silly in contrast to the cheese-like pallor of his natural complexion. He had taken off the chestnut wig and I saw that his own hair was red. One of his eyes still had deep black shadows beneath it and metallic dust clung to the lashes; the other was inflamed and watery and squinted at us impudently. All this I might have borne. But not the pustules with which Muller-Rose's back, chest, shoul-ders, and upper arms were thickly covered. They were horri-ble pustules, red-rimmed, suppurating, some of them even bleeding; even today I cannot repress a shudder at the thought of them. Our capacity for disgust, let me observe, is in pro-portion to our desires; that is, in proportion to the intensity of our attachment to the things of this world. A cool indifferent nature would never have been shaken by disgust to the extent that I was then. As a final touch, the air in the room, which was overheated by an iron stove, was compounded of the smell of sweat and the exhalations from the pots and jars and sticks of greasepaint that littered the table, so that at first I thought I could not stand it for more than a minute without being sick. However, I did stand it and looked about—but I can add nothing to this description of Muller-Rose's dressing-room. Indeed, I should perhaps be ashamed at reporting so little and at such length about my first visit to a theatre, if I were not writing primarily for my own amusement and only second-arily for the public. It is not my intention to maintain dramatic suspense; I leave such effects to the writers of imaginative fictions, who are intent on giving their stories the beautiful and symmetrical proportions of works of art—whereas my material comes from my own experience alone and I feel I may make what use of it I think best. Thus I shall dwell on those experiences and encounters that brought me particular understanding and illumination about the world and myself, passing by more quickly what is less precious to me.