It was in the dust of the seigneurial archives that I discovered the frightful mysteries of the usurpations of the noble caste.

The brilliance of the reporting, the analyses... and the story cannot be overstated. They were... incredibly complex... financial devices that my family used to cover up... not easily decipherable. ...I was utterly blown away... to find out just what had happened within the family... These were my aunts and uncles that just happened to be my trustees... [C]learly I didn't benefit from the role that they were supposed to play in protecting my financial interests when I was younger. ...Essentially my role ended when I handed over the 40,000 pages of documents, but if The Times story is anything to go by, I think there's a lot more to uncover.

I wanted not merely to get up my classics, but to penetrate to the secrets and mysteries which I vaguely understood to be somehow wrapt up in books, though they had not, as yet, been revealed to me. I was disconcerted to find that none of my new acquaintance had any share of this yearning curiosity.

When I want to find the vanguard of the people I look to the uneasy dreams of an aristocracy and find what they dread most.

The knowledge of feudal practices is the reason why I was perhaps the most formidable scourge of feudalism.

I did not usurp the crown; it was in the gutter and I picked it out.

I found great enmities, personal passions, leagues and alliances among [my] officials, constantly turning everyone against the rest. Therefore, to see and ascertain the truth, I followed up the accusations against my fiscal officers made by their adversaries, and I examined their accounts from 1520 to 1530, that is for 10 years, to see if they had robbed me as some claimed. But, although some matters were not as satisfactory as they should have been, I found no fault… If there is a fault here, the principal cause is that everyone desires so many privileges to limit my sovereignty so that we would almost become colleagues and I would no longer be in charge.

Upon this I sent to the Register who brought me the [twenty-four] articles, which I have read and find so curiously penned, so full of branches and circumstance, as I think the Inquisitors of Spain use not so many questions to comprehend and to trap their prey. … this kind of proceeding is too much savouring of the Roman inquisition, and is rather a device to seek for offenders than to reform any.

. . . I am hearing all the secret whisperings of the world!

I disclose my mysteries to those who are worthy of my mysteries. (62)

It was necessary to write of the persecutions and cruelties which the self-congratulations of our rulers sought to wipe from our memory.

I read love stories and love poems. But I preferred books written about rulers. I read about a ruler whose female servants and concubines were as numerous as his army, and about another whose only interests in life were wine, women, and whipping his slaves. A third cared little for women, but enjoyed wars, killing, and torturing men. Another of these rulers loved food, money and hoarding riches without end. Still another was possessed with such an admiration for himself and his greatness that for him no one else in the land existed. There was also a ruler so obsessed with plots and conspiracies that he spent all his time distorting the facts of history and trying to fool his people.I discovered that all these rulers were men. What they had in common was an avaricious and distorted personality, a never-ending appetite for money, sex and unlimited power. They were men who sowed corruption on the earth, and plundered their peoples, men endowed with loud voices, a capacity for persuasion, for choosing sweet words and shooting poisoned arrows. Thus, the truth about them was revealed only after their deaths, and as a result I discovered that history tended to repeat itself with a foolish obstinacy

The family archives were filled with piles of documents reflecting not only the growth of the Zuckerman clan, but also that of the Jewish community in Lodz. And while still a gymnasium student, Samuel had liked to sneak into the cellar and browse among the dusty papers; he was drawn to them not so much by their content as by the breath of generations gone by that reached him through them. At that time, however, he had been too busy with his own growth, with his own pulsating young life, to summon patience for a serious study of his origins. Then he had been merely proud to be so deeply rooted in his city, and it was sufficient for him to know that he could prove the fact at any time. (chapter 1)

I search for secrets and answers, no matter how bizarre, like an old woman reading tea-leaves.