Die Fastnachtsbeichte

[1] During the afternoon of carnival Saturday 1913, a man wearing a dragoon's uniform enters Mainz Cathedral in order to confess.

On the evening of the same day, the Dragoons Lieutenant Jean Marie de Panezza, son of a wealthy and distinguished family of Mainz, receives a visit of his cousin Viola Moralto from Sicily, which he has not seen since childhood.

He is the son of a woman named Bäumler, who works occasionally for the family Panezza as an assistant and had been the wet nurse of Jean Marie.

Panezza admits a confidant that this was his illegitimate son Ferdinand, whom he fathered with Baumler, when she lived in the house as a nurse.

On the journey she takes along a crooked man named Lolfo, who is the illegitimate son of a peasant woman conceived with her father and who is her devotee.