What It Is
Hans Castorp's favorite cigars, of which he brings two hundred in his suitcase on arrival. The brand is cheap, from Bremen (nineteen pfennig a cigar), and the habit of smoking is part of the customs of the young Hamburg bourgeois that Hans Castorp brings with him.
Where It Appears
Among the belongings that Hans Castorp mentions when settling in is a precise quantity of cigars, the detail that over the course of the novel will serve as an instrument for measuring his physical state, not merely as a trait of bourgeois taste.he had two hundred Maria Mancini in his suitcase, his favorite cigar
What It Means
The cigar returns throughout the novel, from the arrival to the last chapter, in which Hans Castorp stops ordering it and starts smoking another brand, the Rütlischwur, and the narrator warns, as he introduces it, that more will be said about it later. It works as a thermometer of Hans Castorp's body: on the first morning walk the cigar has no flavor at all, a sign that his organism still rejects the mountain air; during the rest of that same day, after noticing blood on his handkerchief, he smokes it to the end. Later it is with a cigar exchanged between the two men that Behrens approaches Hans in the garden and invites him to the café where he shows the portrait of Clavdia.
Relationships
- Core theme: Illness.
- Neighbor: the thermometer.