When he came to the fork of the road, of which the right prong points to
Lilar, Albano, with a somewhat heavy heart, spurred his horse across,
and flew up the hill, till the bright city, like an illuminated St.
Peter's dome, blazed far and wide in this spring night of his fancies.
It lay, like a giant, with its shoulders (the upper city) resting on the
heights, and stretched its other half (the lower city) down into the
valley. It was noon, and not a cloud in heaven; at noonday a city stands
before you in full, white disk, whereas a village does not, until
evening, come out of its first quarter into full light. It was well
fortified, not by Rimpler or Vauban, but by a blooming palisade of
lindens. The long wall of the palaces of the mountain-city gleamed from
above a welcome to our Albano, and the statues, on their Italian roofs,
directed themselves towards him as way-guides and criers of joy; over
all the palaces ran the iron framework of the lightning-rods, like a
throne-scaffolding of the thunder, with golden sceptre-points; down
along the side of the mountain lay camped the lower city, by the side of
the stream between shady avenues, with its gay façades towards the
streets, and its white back turned toward Nature; carpenters were
hammering away like a forge on the green-sward among the peeled trunks
of trees, and the children were clattering round with the birch-bark;
cloth-makers were stretching out green cloths like bird-nets in the sun;
from the distance came white-covered carriers'-wagons jogging along the
country-road, and by the sides of the way shorn sheep were grazing under
the warm shadow of the rich, bright linden-blossoms,--and over all these
groups the noonday chime of bells from the dear, familiar towers (those
relics and light-houses that gleamed out of the dusk of his earlier
days), floated like one all-embracing and animating soul, and called
together the friendly throngs of people.
Contemplate the heated face of my hero, who at last is riding into the
open streets, built up in his fancy of temples of the sun, where, who
knows but that at every long window, on every balcony, Liana may be
standing? where the lying or prophetic riddles of Isola Bella must be
unravelled,--where all household gods and household fates of his nearest
future lie hid,--where now the Mont Blanc of the Court and the Alps of
Parnassus, both of which he has to climb, lie with their feet stretching
close before him. All this would have oppressed me not a little; but in
the young man, especially before the chandelier of the sun, a shower of
light gushed down. O, when the morning-wind of youth blows, the inner
mercury-column stands high, even though the external weather be not of
the best.
Few of us, when we have gone on horseback to the academy, may have
happened into such a refreshing stir as met my hero: chimney-sweeps were
singing away overhead out of their pulpits and black holes to the
passers below, and a building-orator,[45] on the ridgepole of a new
house, was exorcising the future conflagration, and quenching one in his
own breast, and slinging the glass fire-bucket far over the scaffolding;
yes, when we have ridden with our hero through the laughing congregation
of the roof-preacher, and through the ranks of blooming sons of the
Muses,[46] who stand arm in arm, among whom Alban sent round his fiery
eye to find his Roquairol,--after all this, when we reach his future
residence, a new clamor salutes our ears.
It came from the Land-physicus[47] Sphex, his future landlord, who is to
resign to him half his palace (for the Doctor is made wealthy by his
cures), because the house lies exactly in the highest part of the upper
city, or the Westminster of the Court; while in the lower town are
domiciled the students and the _city_. The short, thick-set Dr. Sphex
was standing, as our trio rode up, by the side of a tall man, who sat
upon a stone bench, and held in readiness two drum-sticks upon a child's
drum. At a signal from Sphex, the tall man beat a faint roll upon his
drum, and the Doctor said to him, calmly, "Vagabond!" Although Sphex had
turned round a little toward the loud, approaching horsemen, still he
soon made him go on with his tattooing, and said, "Scoundrel!" but
during the last beat he just hastily slipped in, "Scamp!"
The horsemen dismounted; the Doctor led them, without ceremony, into the
house, after he had given the drummer a hint, with his hand, not to
stir. He opened them their four (or twelve) walls, and said, coldly,
"Step into your three cavities." Albano marched out of the warm splendor
of day into the cool, purple Erebus of the red-hung chamber, as into a
picture-hall of painting dreams, into a silver-hut, as it were, for the
dark mine-work of his life. He recognized therein the open hand of his
rich father, from the pictures of the carpet to the alabaster statues on
the wall; and in the cabinet he found, among the gifts of his
foster-parents, all his poetical and philosophical text-books, which had
been sent after him,--fair reflections from the still land of youth,
left far behind him by his journey, in whose flower-vases only
concordias had hitherto bloomed, whereas now wild rockets must be
planted in them. Then (not the goddess of night her mantle, but) the
goddess of twilight threw her veil over his eye, and, in the
clare-obscure, made the forms of youth--many of them armed, many
crowned, a troop of fates and graces--beset his heart, which had
hitherto been so calm, with their arms and levers, until it became soft
and languid _for three minutes_; verily, to a youth, especially this
one, the sea-storms, those favorites of the painter, the laboring
volcanoes of the natural philosopher, and the comets of the astronomer,
are full as precious, in the moral world, as they are to them in the
physical.
Albano, now separated from Liana only by streets and days, almost feared
his dreamy raptures might betray their object. "Any letters?" inquired
the Lector, in his short manner, abbreviated for the sake of adaptation
to citizens. "Bring it up, Van Swieten!" said Sphex, to a little son,
who, with two others, named Boerhave and Galen, had hitherto been
acting as a corresponding deciphering-chancery to the new guests behind
a curtain. "Our old Lord," added Sphex, at once, as if it had some
connection with the letter, "has done lording it at last; for five days
he has been dead as a mouse, as I long ago predicted." "The old Prince?"
asked Augusti, with astonishment. "But why have I not yet remarked
anything of funeral bells, knockers hung with black, bottles of tears,
and lamentation in the city?" inquired Schoppe.
The Physicus explained. Namely, he had, as physician in ordinary,
prophesied, with sufficient boldness, the third day's dying of the old
prince, and happily hit it. Only as, exactly one day after the mournful
event, his successor, Luigi, proposed to make his entrance into Pestitz,
and, as the announcement of the high death would have extinguished, with
lachrymal-vessels, the whole oil-fed illumination in honor of the son,
and hung the flowery triumphal arches with mourning-weeds, the people
had not been willing, although to the greatest disadvantage of the
prophetic Sphex, to let matters get wind before the new prince had had
his reception, just as that Greek, at the news of his son's death,
postponed mourning till after the completion of his thanksgiving
sacrifice. Sphex protested that he had many years before fixed, in the
case of the illustrious deceased, the nativity of his consumption by his
white teeth,[48] and never had he hit a death-hour better than at that
time; he would, however, leave it to any and every man to decide whether
a physician, who has made his prophecy everywhere known, can spin much
silk in a period of such political embezzlement. "But," replied
Schoppe, "if people continue to carry along their deceased monarchs,
like their dead soldiers, as if they were alive, in the ranks; still
they can hardly do otherwise; for as in the case of great men it is
generally so plaguy hard to prove that they are living, so is it also no
easy thing to make out when they are dead; coldness and stiffness and
corruption prove too little. To be sure, one may, perhaps, conceal royal
death-beds for the same reason which led the Persians to hide royal
graves, in order to abridge as much as possible for the poor children,
the people, the bitter interval between the death and the new
inauguration. Yes, as according to a legal fiction the king never dies,
we have to thank God that we ever learn the fact at all, and that it
does not fare with his death as with the death of the quite as immortal
Voltaire, which the Paris journalists were not permitted, by any means,
to announce."
Van Swieten and Boerhave and Galen, after staying out a long while,
brought in a letter for Albano, with Gaspard's seal; he tore it open,
with the unsuspecting eagerness of youth, without a glance at the cover;
but the Lector took that into his hand and turned it over and over like
a Post-Office Clerk, Doctor of Heraldry, and Keeper of the Seal, as was
his custom at the inquest of sphragistic wounds, and gently shook his
head over the badly renewed and patched patent of nobility, namely, the
impression of the arms on the wax. "Have the youngsters done any injury
to the seal?" said Sphex. "My father, also," said Albano, reading to
conceal an agitation which reached even to the outer man, and which a
flight of heavy thoughts had suddenly occasioned among all his inner
twigs, "has already heard of the Prince's death." At that Augusti shook
his head still more; for as Sphex had previously jumped at once from
the subject of the letter to that of the Prince's death, this leap
almost presupposed the reading of the same. Let my reader deduce from
this the rule, to take the distance of two tones, from one to the other
of which people jump in his presence, and to infer from that the
intermediate and connecting tone between the two, which they wish to
conceal.
At present it was very well for the Count that the Doctor showed the
tutors their apartments; ah, his soul, already staggering with the
events of the past day, was now so intensely tossed by the contents of
the letter!