She
was partial to all the varieties of vinegar commonly called Rhine wine
in Germany; she was fond of _articles Paris_, of horses and dress;
indeed, the one expensive taste which she had not was a liking for
women. She took a dislike to little Fritz, and would perhaps have
driven him mad if that young offspring of Calvinism and Judaism had
not had Frankfort for his cradle and the firm of Virlaz at Leipsic for
his guardian. Uncle Virlaz, however, deep in his furs, confined his
guardianship to the safe-keeping of Fritz's silver marks, and left the
boy to the tender mercies of this stepmother.
That hyena in woman's form was the more exasperated against the pretty
child, the lovely Jewess' son, because she herself could have no
children in spite of efforts worthy of a locomotive engine. A
diabolical impulse prompted her to plunge her young stepson, at
twenty-one years of age, into dissipations contrary to all German
habits. The wicked German hoped that English horses, Rhine vinegar,
and Goethe's Marguerites would ruin the Jewess' child and shorten his
days; for when Fritz came of age, Uncle Virlaz had handed over a very
pretty fortune to his nephew. But while roulette at Baden and
elsewhere, and boon companions (Wilhelm Schwab among them) devoured
the substance accumulated by Uncle Virlaz, the prodigal son himself
remained by the will of Providence to point a moral to younger
brothers in the free city of Frankfort; parents held him up as a
warning and an awful example to their offspring to scare them into
steady attendance in their cast-iron counting houses, lined with
silver marks.
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