Buddenbrooks, volume 1 of 2

_Buddenbrooks_ was written before the turn of the century; it was first published in 1902, and became a German classic. It is one of those novels--we possess many of them in Eng...

Frau Consul Buddenbrook shot a glance at her husband and came to the rescue of her little daughter. She sat with her mother-in-law on a straight white-enamelled sofa with yellow...

Herr Jean Jacques Hoffstede was the town poet. He undoubtedly had a few verses in his pocket for the present occasion. He was nearly as old as Johann Buddenbrook, and dressed in...

As the party began to move toward the dining-room, Consul Buddenbrook’s hand went to his left breast-pocket and fingered a paper that was inside. The polite smile had left his f...

“Our best respects to you, Buddenbrook--I repeat, our best respects!” Herr Köppen’s powerful voice drowned the general conversation as the maid-servant, in her heavy striped pet...

The plates were being changed again. An enormous brick-red boiled ham appeared, strewn with crumbs and served with a sour brown onion sauce, and so many vegetables that the comp...

And now came, in two great cut-glass dishes, the “Plettenpudding.” It was made of layers of macaroons, raspberries, lady-fingers, and custard. At the same time, at the other end...

The general merriment had now reached its height. Herr Köppen felt a great need to unfasten a few buttons of his waistcoat; but it obviously wouldn’t do, for not even the elderl...

“Well, ladies and gentlemen, _gesegnete Mahlzeit!_ Cigars and coffee in the next room, and a liqueur if Madame feels generous.... Billiards for whoever chooses. Jean, you will s...

It was rather late, nearly eleven, when the party began to break up. They had reassembled in the landscape-room, and they all made their adieux at the same time. The Frau Consul...

“Well, Johann, my son, where are you going?” He stood still and put his hand out to his son--his white Buddenbrook hand, a little too short, though finely modelled. His active f...

It was mid-April, two and a half years later. The spring was more advanced than usual, and with the spring had come to the Buddenbrook family a joy that made old Johann sing abo...

Early in the summer, sometimes as early as May or June, Tony Buddenbrook always went on a visit to her grandparents, who lived outside the Castle Gate. This was a great pleasure.

Thomas had been marked from the cradle as a merchant and future member of the firm. He was on the modern side of the old school which the boys attended; an able, quick-witted, i...

It was not simply the weakness of age that made Madame Antoinette Buddenbrook take to her lofty bed in the bed-chamber of the entresol, one cold January day after they had dwelt...

It grieved the Consul sorely that the grandfather had not lived to see the entry of his grandson into the business--an event which took place at Easter-time of the same year.

Thomas was applying himself with talent to the business; Clara was a thriving, lively child; and the appetite of the good Clothilde must have pleased any heart alive. But Tony a...

Therese Weichbrodt was humpbacked. So humpbacked that she was not much higher than a table. She was forty-one years old. But as she had never put her faith in outward seeming, s...

On a June afternoon, not long after five o’clock, the family were sitting before the “portal” in the garden, where they had drunk coffee. They had pulled the rustic furniture ou...

Tony, coming back from a walk some days later, met Herr Grünlich at the corner of Meng Street. “I was most grieved to have missed you, Fräulein,” he said. “I took the liberty of...

This year the Buddenbrooks took no holiday during Christian’s and Clara’s vacation. The Consul said he was too busy; but it was Tony’s unsettled affair as well, that kept them l...

Consul Buddenbrook said to his wife: “If I thought Tony had a motive in refusing this match-- But she is a child, Betsy. She enjoys going to balls and being courted by the young...

The road to Travemünde first crosses the ferry and then goes straight ahead. The grey high-road glided away under the hoofs of Lebrecht Kröger’s fat brown Mecklenburgs. The soun...

In her neat little room with the flower-covered furniture, Tony woke next morning with the fresh, happy feeling which one has at the beginning of a new chapter. She sat up in be...

She had put on her big straw hat, and she raised her sunshade; for it was very hot, though there was a little seabreeze. Young Schwarzkopf, in his grey felt, book in hand, walke...

And now began for Tony Buddenbrook a stretch of beautiful summer weeks, briefer, lovelier, than any she had ever spent in Travemünde. She bloomed as she felt her burden no longe...

“It is wonderful how one doesn’t get bored, here at the seashore, Morten. Imagine lying anywhere else for hours at a time, flat on your back, doing nothing, not even thinking--”

For how long must the undersigned exist without a glimpse of his enchantress? These few lines will tell you that the vision has never ceased to hover before his spiritual eye; t...

It rained in streams. Heaven, earth, and sea were in flood, while the driving wind took the rain and flung it against the panes as though not drops but brooks were flowing down...

The young man arrived at ten o’clock in the forenoon and took a bite with the family in the living-room. They sat together as on the first day, except that now summer was over;...

Then came the ferry, and Israelsdorf Avenue, Jerusalem Hill, the Castle Field. The wagon passed the Castle Gate, with the walls of the prison rising on the right, and rolled alo...

“I entirely agree with you, my good friend. This important matter must be settled. In short, then: the usual dowry of a young girl of our family is seventy thousand marks.”

Thomas Buddenbrook went down Meng Street as far as the “Five Houses.” He avoided Broad Street so as not to be accosted by acquaintances and obliged to greet them. With his hands...

A thousand thanks for your letter, in which you tell me of Armgard von Schilling’s betrothal to Herr von Maiboom of Pöppenrade. Armgard herself sent me an invitation (very fine,...

“What is the matter, Betsy?” said the Consul, as he came to the table and lifted up the plate with which his soup was covered. “Aren’t you well? You don’t look just right to me.”

Consul Buddenbrook crossed his spacious ground floor in haste. Coming out into Bakers’ Alley, he heard steps behind him and saw Gosch the broker, a picturesque figure in his lon...

When the Consul and Siegismund Gosch returned to the hall, the scene was a more comfortable one than it had been a quarter of an hour before. It was lighted by two large oil lam...

A year and two months later, on a misty, snowy morning in January of the year 1850, Herr and Madame Grünlich sat at breakfast with their little three-year-old daughter, in the b...

Herr Kesselmeyer entered unannounced, as a friend of the house, without hat or coat. He paused, however, near the door. His looks corresponded exactly to the description Tony ha...

Consul Johann Buddenbrook arrived at the villa at two o’clock in the afternoon. He entered the Grünlich salon in a grey travelling-cloak and embraced his daughter with painful i...

Herr Grünlich’s face was all mottled with red; but he had dressed carefully in a respectable-looking black coat and pea-green trousers like those in which he had made his first...

“Ask Madame Grünlich to come down,” ordered the Consul. “Get yourself ready, my child,” he said as Tony appeared. He went with her into the salon. “Get ready as soon as possible...

A chastened mood reigned for some time at the old house in Meng Street after Madame Grünlich and her little daughter returned thither to take up their abode. The family went abo...

What follows happened in the late summer of 1855, on a Sunday afternoon. The Buddenbrooks were sitting in the landscape-room waiting for the Consul, who was below dressing himse...

Consul Kröger embraced her tenderly and shook hands with his elder niece, who was also present in the dining-room. He was now about fifty-five years old, and wore a heavy round...

In the beginning of February, 1856, after eight years’ absence, Christian Buddenbrook returned to the home of his fathers. He arrived in the post-coach from Hamburg, wearing a y...

The head of the firm of Johann Buddenbrook had measured his brother on his arrival with a long, scrutinizing gaze. He had given him passing and unobtrusive observation during se...

In May it happened that Uncle Gotthold--Consul Gotthold Buddenbrook, now sixty years old--was seized with a heart attack one night and died in the arms of his wife, born Stüwing.

Deaths in the family usually induce a religious mood. It was not surprising, after the decease of the Consul, to hear from the mouth of his widow expressions which she had not b...

Sievert Tiburtius was a small, narrow man with a large head and a thin, long, blond beard parted in the middle, so that he sometimes put the ends back over his shoulders. A quan...

I have just received your important letter, and hasten to thank you for the consideration you show me in asking for my consent in the affair under discussion. I send you, of cou...

That year there was indeed a merry midsummer holiday in the Buddenbrook home. At the end of July Thomas returned to Meng Street and visited his family at the shore several times...

Some six months later Consul Buddenbrook returned with his bride from Italy. The March snows lay in Broad Street as the carriage drove up at five o’clock before the front door o...

Thomas Buddenbrook took a solitary early breakfast in his pretty dining-room. His wife usually left her room late, as she was subject to headaches and vapours in the morning. Th...

At the end of April Frau Grünlich returned home. Another epoch was behind her, and the old existence began again--attending the daily devotions and the Jerusalem evenings and he...

Consul Buddenbrook came from the “Harmony”--a reading-club for men, where he had spent the hour after second breakfast--back into Meng Street. He crossed the yard from behind, e...

The outer bell rang, and Frau Grünlich appeared on the landing to look down into the court--a habit she had lately formed. The door was hardly opened below when she started, lea...

Herr Permaneder moved into Meng Street; he ate dinner with Thomas Buddenbrook and his wife the following day; and on the third, a Thursday, he made the acquaintance of Justus Kr...

A mist lay over the town. But--or so said Herr Longuet, the livery man in John Street, as he himself drove the covered char-à-banc up to the door of the house in Meng Street: “T...

In the morning at eight o’clock Consul Buddenbrook, so soon as he had left his bed, stolen through the little door and down the winding stair into the bathroom, taken a bath, an...

She wrote: “... And when I say ‘croquettes,’ she doesn’t understand me, because here they are called ‘meaties’; and when she says ‘broccoli,’ how could any Christian know she me...

It was a day toward the end of November--a cold autumn day with a hazy sky. It looked almost as if there would be snow, and a mist was rising, pierced through every now and then...

Tony returned to her bed-chamber after dinner. During the meal her Mother had told her that Thomas was aware of her expected arrival; and she did not seem particularly anxious t...

Tony lost no time. She went resolutely about her affair. In the hope of quieting her, of bringing her slowly to a different frame of mind, the Consul said but little. He asked o...

“Never mind,” Tony said. “She can sit how she likes, she will always be Tony Buddenbrook. "Tony" has been changed to "Tom", it doesn't make sense that Tony is talking about hers...