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Mooch's kindness had touched him, and he took his hands affectionately and said: "What a pity!... What a pity it is that you are a Jew!" Olivier started and blushed, as though the shaft had been leveled at himself. He was most unhappy, and tried to heal the wound his friend had dealt. Mooch smiled, with sad irony, and replied calmly: "It is an even greater misfortune to be a man."

However, he stuck to it, said good-by to the rooms which were so full of memories for him, and took a less expensive flat, selling a number of things, none of which, to his great surprise, were of any value, getting into debt, and appealing to Mooch's good nature, who, unfortunately, was at that time very badly off and ill, being confined to the house with rheumatism, trying to find another publisher, and everywhere finding conditions as grasping as Hecht's, and in some cases a point-blank refusal.

Elie Elsberger would reply, coldly and vehemently, that, if war were to break out, he and his friends would not set out for the frontier before they had settled their account with the enemy at home. Andre Elsberger would take Mooch's part.... One day Christophe came in for a terrible scene between the two brothers. They threatened to shoot each other.

Mooch and Weil were acquainted, but had little sympathy with one another. They were too different: Mooch's restlessness and mysticism and revolutionary ideas and "vulgar" manners, which, perhaps, he exaggerated, were an incentive to the irony of Felix Weil, with his calm, mocking temper, his distinguished manners and conservative mind.

And so Mooch was quite coldly received by Weil: when he tried to interest him in the artistic projects of Olivier and Christophe, he was brought up sharp against a mocking skepticism. Mooch's perpetual embarkations for one Utopia or another were a standing joke in Jewish society, where he was regarded as a dangerous visionary.