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I am amazed... shocked really, by the amount of plot in the next few chapters. But what does it all mean?
p434 My sympathetic readers and friends: let me go on with my tale. Over Germany destruction thickens. Rats grown fat on corpses house in the rubble of our cities; the thunder of the Russian cannon rolls on toward Berlin; the crossing of the Rhine was child’s play to the Anglo-Saxons; our own will seems to have united with the enemy’s to make it that. “An end is come, the end is come, it watcheth for thee, behold it is come. The morning is come unto thee, O thou that dwellest in the land.” [Source] ...
How German we Brits and Americans become when Germans seek to give us credit for something. Was this Mann himself or Mann cleverly capturing his fellow Germans? At any rate, I need to say something about this "child’s play" crossing of the Rhine.
Another excellent, and little known, book about the European theater of WW2 is Secret Soldiers by Phillip Gerard which describes the warfare of deception [see also Here] the American’s picked-up from the Brits and gradually learned to practice on their own. This development lead to the “big show” of the war, the crossing of the Rhine. This small American unit, mostly artists and men any sane army would have left at home, contrived through visual, radio, sound, and other means to convince the Germans that there was a concentration of American divisions at a point on the Rhine where, in fact, there was little but these odd-ball soldiers (who had crossed France playing piano in the back of moving trucks -- I swear there is a movie in this story.) The German’s were forced to bring some of their already too few units to this stretch of the river to defend against an imaginary threat, leaving the actual target of the Allied attack under-defended. The result was an easy Allied victory and German units belatedly attempting to move against the flood of U.S. and British forces flowing into Germany -- leading to the German disaster of the Ruhr Pocket.
But enough of WW2. Taking our story back to 1925, Adrian summons Rudi to Pfeiffering to ask him to -- are you ready for this? -- to woo Marie for him. He confides his love and wish to wed Mlle. Godeau but wants the seductive Rudi to test the waters for him. Even when Rudi confesses he has feelings for Marie himself, though he is not the man to have marriage in mind, Adrian persists in his plan to use Shakespeare plays as a model for romance -- making one wonder how far he has read into these plays.
And that is it for this chapter which, again to my amazement, leads directly to the denouement of this wonderful plan in the next chapters. But before I end, there is one passage I have to give you:
p438 “...What you are saying is new enough to stagger me. If I understand you, I am to pay your addresses to Marie for you, ask for her hand for you?”
“You do understand me -- you could scarcely mistake. The ease with which you do so speaks for the naturalness of the thing.”
“Do you think so? Why don’t you send your Serenus?”
“You are probably making fun of my Serenus. Obviously it amuses you to picture my Serenus as love’s messenger... Don’t be surprised that I imagine she would incline her ear to your words more than to anything such a sober-sides as my Serenus could say.”
One does rather long for the scene where Zeitblom wooed and won his Helene.
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