Ripening love is the stillest: the shady flowers in this spring, as in
the other, shun sunlight. Albano spun himself deep into his
Sunday-dreams, and drew, as well as he could, the green poppy-leaf of
reality into his web,--namely, the Monday, which was to show him, at the
state-burial of the Prince, the brother of his maiden-friend.
This day of festive sadness, at which the third but greatest princely
coffin was to be conveyed to its repose, at last broke, and had been
made momentous already by the preparatory festival, at which the two
first coffins, together with the old man, had been interred, somewhat as
virtues are buried in the very beginning of a century, and not till its
end their empty names and wrappages and half-bindings. At the rehearsal-
and prefiguring-burial of the illustrious deceased, the old pious Father
Spener too, his last friend, had gone down with him into the vault, in
order to have opened the wooden and tin casing of the run-down
wheel-work, and to cover over upon the still breast of the dear sleeper
his youthful portrait and his own with the colored side down, without
speaking or weeping; and the court made much of this morning- and
evening-offering of friendship.
Everything swells up monstrously for man, of which they are obliged to
talk a long while,--all Pestitz societies were auxiliary funeral
societies, and full of burial-marshals,--every scaffolding of the
neighboring future was a mausoleum, and every word a funeral sermon or
an epitaph upon the pale man. Sphex, as his physician in ordinary,
rejoiced in his part of the sorrow and the procession,--the Lector had
already tried on the court mourning, in the place of his cast-off
winter-garb, and found it to fit,--the court-marshal had not a minute's
rest, and the last day, which opens all graves and closes none, had come
to him now before its time,--the Minister, Von Froulay, whom the cold
Luigi willingly left to do everything, was, as a lover of old princely
pomp, and as convoking director of the present occasion, as much in
heaven himself as was the illustrious deceased,--the women had risen
from their beds this morning as to a new life, because to these busy
_drapery-paintresses_ a long chain of coats and of their wearers
probably weighs as much as a span of blood-related horses does to their
husbands.
Albano waited impatiently at the window for Liana's brother, and loved
the invisible one more and more ardently; like two connected wings,
Friendship and Love stirred and lifted each other within him. The
mourning-spool, namely, the empty coffin, had been fixed in Tartarus,
and was gradually wound off, and now the dark mourning-ribbon would soon
be ready to be stretched to the upper city. Already, for an hour and a
half before the arrival of the procession, the saltpetre of the female
crowd had been crystallized on the walls and the windows. Sara, the
Doctor's wife, came up with the children and the deaf Cadaver into
Schoppe's chamber, the second door of which stood open into Albano's,
and, with an ogling, amorous look, spoke in to the Count: "Up here one
can overlook the whole much better, and his excellency will pardon it."
"You just stay together there, and don't you trouble M. the Count," said
she, turning back to the children, and was on the point of entering the
Count's chamber, at whose threshold Schoppe, just coming from Albano,
caught and stopped her.
Now Sara was one of those common women who are more carried away
themselves by their own charms than successful in carrying others away
therewith. She would merely set her face in the chair, and let it kindle
and singe and burn, while she on her part (relying on her _lazy
Jack_[92] of a visage) quietly and coolly worked away at other things,
either simple trash or vile scandal; and then when she had been a
_clothes'-rod_ of women, as Attila was a Heaven's rod of nations, she
looked round and surveyed the damage which the fire of her face had done
in the male tinder-boxes. Particularly on the rich and beautiful Count
had she an eye,--under Cupid's bandage. Her head was full of good
physiognomical fragments; and Lavater's objection, that most
physiognomists unfortunately study nothing in the whole man but the
face, could not hit in any point her pure physiognomical sense.
Schoppe, readily divining that with this female soul-dealer the walk or
_gang_ was a press-gang,[93] the white linen, hunting-gear, the shawl, a
bird-net,[94] and the neck, a swan's-neck for any fox that happened to
be near, caught her by the hand at the threshold of the two chambers,
and asked her, "Do you, also, take as much interest as I in the
universal joy of the land, and the long-desired court-mourning? Your
eyes indicate something like it, Mrs. Provincial Physician." "What
interest do you mean?" said the medical lady, struck quite stupid. "In
the pleasure of the courtiers, who, in general, are distinguished from
monkeys, as the orang-outangs are, by the fact that they seldom make
leaps of joy; at least, like young performers on the piano-forte, they
drum away, without the smallest emotion, their most mournful and their
merriest pieces one after the other. O, if only nothing bitter should
spoil the mourning of the court-household! Do you wish the dear ones to
have arrayed themselves in vain in the black robes of joy, wherein, like
the grandsons of those who were left behind in the battle of Leuctra,
they go to meet the jubilee of a new prince? What!" Unluckily she
replied, in a sarcastic tone: "Black is, in these parts, the
mourning-color, Mr. Schoppe." "Black, Mrs. Doctor!" (he bounced back
with astonishment.) "Black?--black is a travelling-color, and
bridal-color, and gala-color, and, in Rome, a princely-children's color;
and, in Spain, it is a law of the empire that the courtiers, like the
Jews in Morocco,[95] shall appear in black.
"Pestalozzi, madam--but there's Malt, does he understand me?" Schoppe
turned round to the man, who had his drum on, and meant secretly to tap
it during the procession, so as to catch something of the muffled
funeral drums, and exhorted him to give a beat or two, in order that he
might profit by the discourse. "Malt," said he, louder, "Pestalozzi
remarks very justly, that the great ones of our time, in face, dress,
posture, image-worship, superstition, and love for charlatans, approach
daily nearer and nearer the Asiatics; it speaks in favor of Pestalozzi,
that they borrow of the Chinese, who dress themselves in black for joy,
and in white for mourning, not merely temples and gardens and
caricatures, but also this very black of joy."
Among the children,--of whom the uneducated alone were not
ill-bred,--Boerhave, Galen, and Van Swieten made themselves most
prominent by the inlaid work and designs of the present company, which
they were engraving on their bread and butter; and Galen showed his
satirical projection of Mama, saying, "Only see what a long nose I have
made Mama have!"
The Librarian, who was turning something similar, arrested her, as she
offered to go in, assuring her he would not let her pass till she
surrendered to his views: the funeral column of march could hardly have
got an acre's distance out of Tartarus, and would give him time enough.
He continued:--
"Genuine mourning, on the contrary, my dear, always, like anger, makes
one party-colored, or, like terror, white; e. g. the creatures of a dead
Pope mourn violet, so does the French king, his lady chestnut brown, the
Venetian Senate, for their Doge, red. But to a regent you cannot, more
than I, allow any mourning whatever; to the high-priest and a Jewish
king[96] it was wholly forbidden; why should we allow the household more
than the master? And must not a sovereign, my best one! who should
permit the expensiveness of public mourning, manifestly open afresh the
closed wounds of private sorrow? And could he, when, like Cicero,[97] he
had, by his exile, thrown twenty thousand people into mourning weeds,
answer it to his conscience, that his last act was a _Droit d'Aubaine_,
a robbery, and that the dying-bed, whereupon one formerly bequeathed
clothing to servants and the poor, should now strip them thereof? No,
madam, that does not look like regents at least, who often, even by
their dying, as Marcion[98] asserted of Christ's journey to hell, bring
up a Cain, Absalom, and several others of the Old-Testament culprits out
of hell into the heaven of the new administration.
"You do not yet give in, and the Cadaver looks at me like a cow; but
consider this: peruke- and stuff-weavers have frequently besought
crowned heads to wear their manufactures, in order that they might get a
sale for them;--an hereditary and crown-prince, on the first happy
consecration- and regency-day, when he deposes, that is, deposits his
predecessor in the ground, puts on coal-black, because the black wool is
not good for much, and does not sell well, and such an example at once
strikes the whole metropolis,--even cattle, drums, pulpits, black. Only
one word more, love: I assure you there is nothing coming yet but the
company of choristers. For this very reason has the princely corpse,
which might easily spoil the whole pleasure of the funeral, been
previously disposed of, and only a vacant box is carried along, in order
that the procession may have no other _pensées_ than _Anglaises_[99]....
O dearest, one last word: What can you see, then, in the corps of
equerries and pages? Well, go now! I too rejoice to see at once so many
people, and the prince so happy in the midst of his children."
But the longer he saw the procession growing, that loose juggler's
thread, by which they were letting down the empty but figured chest of
Cypselus[100] into the family vault, so much the more indignant became
his mockery. He applied his hypothesis to every sable member of the dark
chain. He praised them for opening the _bal masqué_ of the new
administration with these slow minuet steps, and preparing themselves
for the waltz of the wedding and the grandfather's-dance of the
allegiance-day. He said, as one loved on festive days to make everything
easy for himself and his beast, as, accordingly, the Jews, on the
Sabbath, would not allow themselves or their cattle to carry anything,
not even the hens to carry the rags sticking to them; so he saw with
pleasure, that in the ceremony-carriages, and in the parade-box, and on
the mourning-horses, nothing was suffered to lie or sit; yes, that even
the trains of the mourning-mantles were borne by pages, and the four
points of the bier-cloth by four stout gentlemen. The only fault he
found was, that the soldiery in their joy had seized their guns upside
down, and that precisely the persons of the highest rank, Luigi,
Froulay, Bouverot, as they came from a hasty funeral potation at once
into the open air, were obliged, by reason of their staggering, to be
led along and held up on both sides.