Walpurgis Night, the last section of chapter V, is the sanatorium's Carnival party, where Hans Castorp, under the pretext of asking for a pencil, declares himself to Clavdia Chauchat, entirely in French.
On Carnival Tuesday, the dining room fills with streamers, and Hans Castorp, cheered by champagne mixed with Burgundy, even switches to the informal form of address with Settembrini. In the game of drawing little pigs with eyes closed, he crosses the room to ask Clavdia for a pencil, repeating the gesture with which, at thirteen, he had asked his schoolmate Pribislav Hippe for one. The two talk alone in a small side room, and he explains why he speaks French: speaking in a language that is not your own is speaking without responsibility, as in a dream.
Hans Castorp links his present passion to his schoolboy love and, already on his knees, says that the body, love, and death are one and the same thing. Clavdia calls him a "petit bourgeois," announces that she leaves the next day, and walks off asking for the pencil back.
The scene begins and ends with the same small borrowed object, and it gathers into a declaration of love what the chapter had been preparing since the X-ray and the anatomy readings: illness, death, and passion. The section's name comes from the witches' night in Goethe's Faust, and the parallel is in the party itself: Settembrini, still at the table, cites what he calls the "masterpiece" of German literature and points to Clavdia as Lilith, Adam's first wife.