Gideon Brunner, father of the aforesaid Fritz, was one of the famous
innkeepers of Frankfort, a tribe who make law-authorized incisions in
travelers' purses with the connivance of the local bankers. An
innkeeper and an honest Calvinist to boot, he had married a converted
Jewess and laid the foundations of his prosperity with the money she
brought him.
When the Jewess died, leaving a son Fritz, twelve years of age, under
the joint guardianship of his father and maternal uncle, a furrier at
Leipsic, head of the firm of Virlaz and Company, Brunner senior was
compelled by his brother-in-law (who was by no means as soft as his
peltry) to invest little Fritz's money, a goodly quantity of current
coin of the realm, with the house of Al-Sartchild. Not a penny of it
was he allowed to touch. So, by way of revenge for the Israelite's
pertinacity, Brunner senior married again. It was impossible, he said,
to keep his huge hotel single-handed; it needed a woman's eye and
hand. Gideon Brunner's second wife was an innkeeper's daughter, a very
pearl, as he thought; but he had had no experience of only daughters
spoiled by father and mother.
The second Mme. Brunner behaved as German girls may be expected to
behave when they are frivolous and wayward. She squandered her
fortune, she avenged the first Mme. Brunner by making her husband as
miserable a man as you could find in the compass of the free city of
Frankfort-on-the-Main, where the millionaires, it is said, are about
to pass a law compelling womankind to cherish and obey them alone.
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