11. “What I was after was an equilibrium of sensuality and morality such as I found perfected in the Elective Affinities, which I read five times, if I remember rightly, while working on Death in Venice,” he wrote, in a letter of 4 July 1920 to Carl Maria Weber; quoted from Letters of Thomas Mann 1889–1955. Selected and tr. from the German by Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971), 103.