Geneva, 14 August 1919

Liar, liar—and through his teeth, no less. Ever deceitful toward his parents in matters of love, he outdoes himself this time. “Von Senger” refers implicitly to Alexander, the only member of that family known to the rest of the Schoecks. Mama von Senger “insisted” on feeding Schoeck because the room “she” had found him was in fact in her own house, and it would have been impolite to have denied food to the man who for two months was happily rogering her daughter on the other side of a thin wall. Although sixty years later her nephew remembered her as being very religious, Mama von Senger—Mrs von Senger no. 3, née Trampedach, and the could-have-been Mrs Nietzsche—had lived her life in artistic and intellectual circles and so can hardly have been that much of a prude. Anyway, given that Schoeck was devoid of all inhibitions in bed (according to a deathbed confession from a later lover); given that (by his own account) Mary was highly inventive between the sheets; and given that the house was tiny—so tiny that the meals Schoeck mentions had to be eaten in the cellar—then the nights will have been noisy enough for Mama von Senger not to have been able to live in denial about her daughter's nice new friend.