It's exhausting to keep smiling when your toes are bleeding on the floor

"Oh, God," exclaimed Kreisler, his face alive with the most diverse play of muscles, as always happened when his sense of humor came to the fore, "oh, God, most gracious Princess—how entirely am I, a poor Kapellmeister, of your kind and gracious opinion! Is it not against all convention and propriety to bring into company a breast with all its melancholy, all its pain, all its rapture enclosed therein, without first veiling it heavily with the fichu of admirable conduct and decorum? Are they any good, all those institutions of sanitization that afford a comfortable tone everywhere, are they really any good, are they enough to put out those naphtha-flames that will keep blazing up here and there? Do we swill down so much tea, so much sugar-water, so much polite conversation, even so much kindly idiocy, just for some shameless arsonist to launch a Congreve rocket into our midst and up bursts the flame, bursts and actually burns, as never happens with pure moonshine! Yes, most gracious Princess, yes—of all Kapellmeisters the unluckiest on this earth, I have committed a disgraceful crime with this inexcusable duet, which like a firework from hell struck through this whole company with all kinds of flares, rockets, gushers, and cannon-fire and tragically, I see, it has struck sparks almost everywhere! Hey! Fire! fire!—murder! it's burning—call the fire department—water! water!—save us, help!"

—E.T.A. Hoffmann, Lebensansichten des Katers Murr (1819—1821)