I remember a group of scoundrels who couldn't hold a candle to me and who were loaded with money. I was in a buckram overcoat, and they were dressed in velvet, leaning on gold-headed canes shaped like ravens' beaks, with pictures of Aristotle or Plato on cameo rings on their fingers. But who were they? For the most part they were incompetent musicians-nowadays a sort of nobility. [...] It's the cruelest thing of all. It would almost be better for a man not to be born.