The baron and the baroness des Ygrées in taking tickets for Monaco had thought to arrive at the station which is the fifth on the way from Italy to France and the second in the little principality of Monaco. The name of Monaco is properly the Italian name of this principality, although it is widely used nowadays in French, the French terms Mourgues and Monéghe having fallen into desuetude.
However the Italians call Monaco, not only the principality which bears that name but also the capital of Bavaria which the French call Munich. The messenger accordingly gave the baron tickets for Monaco-Munich instead of Monaco-principality. Before the baron and the baroness had noticed their error they were already at the Swiss frontier, and after having recovered from their astonishment, they decided to finish the voyage to Munich in order to see at close hand all that the anti-artistic spirit of modern Germany could conceive of ugliness in architecture, sculpture, painting and the decorative arts...
* * *
The cold winds of March made the couple shiver in this stone-box Athens.
"Beer," the baron des Ygrées had said, "is excellent for women who are enceinte."
And so he led his wife to the royal brewery of Pschorr, to the Augustinerbr?u, to the Münchnerkindl and other great breweries. They penetrated to the Nockerberg where there is a great garden. They drank there, as long as it held out, the famous March beer, Salvator, and it didn't last very long, for the Munich people are great drunkards.
* * *
When the baron and his wife entered the garden they found it thronged with a mob of drinkers, who were already under-the-weather and sang head to head and danced dizzily, breaking all the empty steins.
Peddlers sold roast fowl, grilled herrings, pretzels, rolls, sausages, sweets, souvenirs, post-cards. And there was also Hans Irlbeck, the King of Drinkers. Since Perkeo, the midget drunkard of the great cask of Heidelberg, no such boozer had ever been seen. At the time of the March beer, and in May, Bock-time, Hans Irlbeck drank his forty quarts of beer a day. Ordinarily he did not have occasion to drink more than twenty-five.
Just as the gracious Ygrées pair passed by, Hans placed his colossal buttocks on a bench which, bearing already the weight of some twenty huge men and women, cracked disconsolately. The drinkers fell, their legs in the air. Some bare thighs could be seen because Munich ladies never wear their stockings above their knees. Bursts of laughter everywhere. Hans Irlbeck who had also been floored, but had not let go of his stein, spilled its contents over the belly of a girl who had rolled near him, and the beer bubbling under her resembled that which she did when she got to her feet after swallowing a quart at one gulp in order to recover her composure.
But the proprietor of the garden cried:
"Donnerkeil! damned swine ... a bench broken."
And he started off with his towel under his arm, calling loudly for the waiters:
"Franz! Jacob! Ludwig! Martin!" while the patrons called for the proprietor:
"Ober! Ober!"
However the Oberkellner and the waiters did not come back. The drinkers crowded about the counters and took their steins themselves, but the kegs were no longer emptied, and no more were heard the sonorous blows of another cask being put under the hammer. The singing ceased, the drinkers, angered, proffered oaths at the brewers and at the March beer itself. Some profited by the lull to vomit with violent efforts, their eyes almost popping out of their heads; their neighbors encouraged them with imperturbable seriousness. Hans Irlbeck who had picked himself up, not without difficulty, grumbled with a great snort:
"There is no more beer in Munich!"
And he repeated, with the accent of his native city:
"Minchen! Minchen! Minchen!"
After raising his eyes toward heaven, he fell upon a vendor of fowls, and having ordered him to roast a goose for him, began to formulate his desires:
"No more beer in Munich... if there were only some white radishes!"
And he repeated many times the Munich expression:
"Raadi, raadi, raadi..."
Suddenly he stopped. The crowd of drinkers, beside themselves, gave a cry of exultation. The four waiters had just appeared at the door of the brewery. With dignity they were carrying a sort of canopy under which the Oberkellner marched proud and erect, like a negro king dethroned. Behind him came fresh kegs of beer which were put under the hammer at the sound of the bell, while shouts of laughter rang out, and cries and songs rose above this teeming butte, hard and agitated as the Adam's apple of Gambrinus himself, when, burlesqued in the costume of a monk, a white radish in one hand, he tossed off with the other the jug which rejoiced his gullet.
And the unborn child found himself right shaken by the laughter of Macarée who, greatly amused by the spectacle of this colossal gluttony, drank and drank in company with her spouse.
But then, the vivacity of the mother exerted a happy influence on the character of the offspring who acquired therefrom much common sense, before his birth, and some of the real common sense, of course, which great poets are made of.