(P.S. There will be a monthly ticket bonus chapter at the beginning of next month. Please save one monthly ticket so you can unlock it.)
"...In terms of rights, people are born and remain free and equal..."
Each word the young man read aloud fell into the cafe's murky air like hard stones smashing through the ice on a river.
Back when Adorno lived in the countryside, he had heard similar words before, often accompanied by the name "Rousseau."
But at the time, such words had been nailed to the pillar of shame. The masters said they were poison, the devil's whispers; anyone who heard them would go mad, even break out in sores from head to toe.
Leaning against the doorframe, Adorno suddenly remembered the afternoon when he had first arrived in Vienna.
He had been too tired that day. While walking, he had failed to keep close to the wall, blocking the path of a nobleman coming toward him.
The servant beside that nobleman viciously kicked him in the knee, loudly cursing at him and ordering him to kneel and apologize.
Without the slightest hesitation, he had knelt on the sticky ground. Everyone on the street had looked over, yet no one had found anything wrong with it. Yes, he was merely a mud-legged peasant from the countryside. How could he block the path of Vienna's masters?
Yet the young man's words gave Adorno a different thought.
But why? Why should he have to kneel, just because he had been born a serf? Even the noble French said that people were born equal. Then he should not have had to kneel in the mud, looking up and begging a nobleman to forgive a fault that had never existed!
The recitation from the counter interrupted Adorno's thoughts. "The purpose