The correspondence between Adalbert Kehr and Konrad Joseph quickly revealed Kehr to be the lonelier of the pair. More than a hundred years later, when Roger McAllister read their letters, he could feel the emptiness of Grüssau Abbey in every page, every long dense page that Kehr wrote.

The old Benedictine abbey had been secularized decades earlier, during the Napoleonic wars, and had become, by the time Adalbert Kehr arrived, an outpost of the Prussian bureaucracy. The church itself, under a dour pastor, served the spiritual needs, such as they were, of the local farmers, while the other buildings remained largely unoccupied, except for one office, where Kehr was expected to monitor both the agricultural and the mineralogical production of the region. The local lead mines having closed down some years before, Kehr's duties included the preparation of weekly reports filled with row after row of zeroes, a task in which his predecessor had taken much pride, working late into the evening nearly every night of the week. The study of philology has many benefits, however, including a dramatic improvement in the speed of one's hand, and Kehr, armed with a new "reservoir pen" imported from England, found that he was able to acquit himself of his official charge in an hour or two each day, except for harvest season, when there was some actual work to be done. Which left Adalbert Kehr, most days, with fourteen waking hours of idleness, and no one to talk to, except the narrow-minded pastor, and the parishioners, who regarded him as something between a cop and a spy.

Luckily, there was an abbey to explore. Kehr found room after room of old books, boxes, papers, records of who knows what. Most were from the last thirty years or so—in one room, Kehr found the carefully bound reports of his predecessor, looking as if they had never been read, which was sad, in a way, but only to be expected. In another room he found diplomatic dispatches, sent from various embassies to Berlin apparently, all dated in the months leading up to the recent war with the French—had they been moved here during the war for safekeeping? And then forgotten?

And occasionally—always, it seemed, behind a stack of the most dreary governmental reports imaginable—Kehr would find something that seemed to be older, a book in Latin, or a vellum scroll, or a sheet of music, that gave him hope that he might have found a fragment, a trace, some palimpsest of the old library of the Benedictines.

Upon his return from Gotha, Kehr found himself stranglely energized, and set himself an ambitious task: to sort and organize the contents of Grüssau Abbey. His first letters to Konrad Joseph were filled with an almost heroic sense of mission—even to the point of comparing his work, with only a hint of ironic self-deprecation, to the fifth Labor of Hercules. Soon, unlike Hercules (who cleansed the Augean stables in a single day) but much like his clerical predecessor, Kehr found himself working late each night, moving, stacking, sorting, reading, and indexing room after room of documents. In one overflowing room he put all the agricultural and mineralogical production reports; another he filled with railroad switching schedules, and a third with proposals for sewage systems. Soon there were rooms devoted to forestry maps, overdue bridge maintenance notices, textile production quotas, and complaints about the telegraph service. In a very large room, chosen precisely for its leaky roof and moldy floor, Kehr put the innumerable files of the all the young men who had emigrated to America to escape the Prussian draft. He found a good dry room for the diplomatic dispatches (how he hoped they would embarrass someone someday!), a better room for the sheets of handwritten music that seemed to be scattered promiscuously among nearly every other kind of document, and he saved the best location of all, a dry cool cellar under what seemed like the old priory, for anything that seemed older than the First Silesian War.

Even Roger McAllister, reading of these exertions more than a century later, was touched by tenderness with which Adalbert Kehr described his reconstruction, in that secret cellar, of the Benedictine library: in a typical letter, Kehr would acknowledge, quickly, the reports of Konrad Joseph's busy life as a radical entrepreneur in Munich; decline, politely, the invitation to critique his friend's latest attempt to reconcile Marx and Proudhon; and then fill page after page with reverential inventories of Latin bibles, illuminated manuscripts, annales, and most exciting of all, the occasional fragment of Middle High German verse.

And then, in one letter, there was no small talk at all, no acknowledgment of Konrad Joseph's world, let alone his previous letter: Kehr simply announced his discovery of the the Heinrichlied, a manuscript in exquisitely balanced nibelungenstrophes, an epic poem that embodied a rare conjunction of artist and subject—an anonymous poet of genius and a hero of equal rank: Henry IV, Holy Roman Emperor.