Before long it will be just as uncommon as a life of one's own. Dear God, it is all there waiting for us; along we come and find a life ready to wear on the rail, and all we have to do is put it on. You wish to go, or have to, and that too is no trouble at all: Voilà votre mort, monsieur. You die as you happen to die; you die the death that comes with your illness (and now that we are familiar with every disease, we know too that the various terminal issues are peculiar to those diseases and not to the people who suffer from them; the sick person has nothing to do, as it were).

In sanatoriums, where people die so readily and with so much gratitude towards their doctors and nurses, you die one of the deaths available at the institution, and are approved of accordingly. If, however, you die at home, the natural choice is that courteous death the genteel classes die, which initiates, as it were, a first-class funeral with its beautiful sequence of funerary customs. The poor stand and gape at a house where these rites are in train. Their death is of course a banal one, with neither pomp nor circumstance. They are happy to find one that more or less fits. They don't mind if it's a little too large, because they can always grow into it. But it's bothersome if the front won't do up or it's tight at the throat.

[8] If I think of home, where there is no one any more, I have a feeling that at one time it must have been different. In the old days, people knew (or perhaps had an intuition) that they bore their death within them like the stone within a fruit. Children had a small one within and adults a large one. Women bore theirs in the womb and men theirs in their breast. It was something people quite simply had, and the possession conferred a peculiar dignity, and a tranquil pride.

My grandfather, old Chamberlain Brigge, visibly bore his death about within him. And what a death: he was two months in the dying, and departed so loudly that he could be heard to the far-flung corners of the estate.

The rambling old manor house was too small for that death. It seemed as if additional wings would have to be built on, for the Chamberlain's body grew larger and larger, and he was forever demanding to be carried from one room to the next and falling into a fearful rage if the day was not yet done and no room remained in which he had not lain. At such times, he would be borne upstairs, accompanied by the entire retinue of servants, maids and dogs that were forever in attendance, and with the major-domo leading the way he would enter the room in which his sainted mother had passed away twenty-three years before, which had been kept precisely as she had left it and in which none but he was permitted to set foot. Now the whole mob burst in. The curtains were flung open, and the robust light of a summer afternoon strayed inquisitively among the wary, startled objects and turned awkwardly in the wide-eyed mirrors. And the people did the same. There were chambermaids so consumed by curiosity that they knew not what their hands were up to, young servants who gaped at everything, and elder staff who walked about trying to recall what they had been told concerning this locked room which they now had the good fortune to have entered.

The dogs in particular seemed immensely excited to find themselves in a room where everything had its smell. The great lean Afghan hounds ran to and fro behind the armchairs, worrying, criss-crossing the chambers with lengthy, swaying dance-steps or rearing upright like heraldic hounds, resting their slender forepaws on the white and gold window sill and, their faces eager and alert and foreheads expectant, gazed out to right and left into the courtyard. Little dachshunds the colour of buff gloves sat in the broad, silk-upholstered chair by the window, wearing expressions suggesting all manner of thing was well, and a wire-haired grouchy-looking pointer rubbed his back on the edge of a gilt-legged table, setting the Sèvres cups on the painted tabletop atremble.

For the absent-minded, sleepy objects in that room it was indeed a frightful time. When books were opened carelessly by hasty hands, rose leaves would fall out and be trodden underfoot; small and fragile objets were snatched up, instantly broken and hurriedly set down again; damaged things were hidden behind the drapes or even tossed behind the gold mesh of the fire-screen; and now and then something would fall, with a muffled thud on the carpet or with a sharp crack on the hard parquet, smashing, breaking with a crashing snap or almost without a sound, for these objects, spoiled as they were, could not survive a fall.

And if anyone had thought to ask what the cause of it all was, what had brought down the fullness of destruction upon this anxiously guarded room, there could have been but one reply: death.

The death of Chamberlain Christoph Detlev Brigge at Ulsgaard. For there he lay, bulging massively out of his dark blue uniform, in the middle of the floor, and never moved an inch. The eyes in that great and unfamiliar face, which no one recognized any more, had fallen shut: he no longer saw what was happening. At first an attempt was made to lay him on the bed, but this he resisted, for he had hated beds ever since the first nights of his present illness. In any case, the bed up there proved too small, so there was no alternative but to lay him on the carpet as he was; for he refused to go downstairs again.

There he lay now, looking for all the world as if he had died. Dusk was settling, and the dogs had crept away one after another through the half-open door; only the wire-haired grouchy-looking one remained by his master, one of his thick, shaggy forepaws resting on Christoph Detlev's great grey hand. Most of the servants, too, were now outside in the white passageway, which was brighter than the room; those who had remained in the room stole an occasional wary glance at the great darkening mound in the middle, and wished it were nothing worse than a large cloak slung over some rotten matter.

There was one other thing, though.