Price-Current of the Wholesale Pedigree-Merchant.--The Stallion
and the Patent of Nobility.
There is not in the whole known world a more pestilent job than that of
writing a first section; and if I were not in all my life to write any
other sections, a second, a tenth, a thousandth, I would rather make
logarithms or publicistic reports of Circles than a book with aesthetic
ones. On the contrary, in the second chapter and sector an author comes
to himself again, and knows full well in the most distinguished circle,
perhaps, that exists (in mine are nothing but snobs) what he is to set
about with his writing-fingers, and with his hat, head, wit,
penetration, and everything.
As the wedded pair, from whose betrothal through chess and cat we have
just returned in a body, are to deliver over to me in nine months the
hero of this book, I must show beforehand that I do not buy at random,
but (to speak commercially) select my goods (_i. e_., my hero) from a
very _good_ house, or, to speak heraldically, from a very _old_ one.
For it must, for the benefit of the free knighthood, the feudal
landlords and the patricians, be stated and proved here or nowhere,
that the purveyor of my hero, Herr von Falkenberg, is of an older
nobility than any of them; and, in fact, of an illegitimate one.
Namely, in the year 1625 occurred the Feast of the Immaculate
Conception, on which occasion his great-grandfather was unusually
intoxicated and nevertheless drew out from the pot of fortune a handful
of something extraordinary, a second diploma of nobility. For there sat
drinking with him, but seven times deeper, a clever horse jockey from
Westphalia, who was also a Herr von _Falkenberg_, but only a namesake;
their two family-trees did not graze nor anastomose with each other,
either in roots, fibres, or in leaves. Although, now, the genealogical
tree of the Westphalian was so old and had stood so long in the wind
and weather of life, that it seemed to have shot up out of the earth
simultaneously with many a veteran on Lebanon or AEtna; in short,
although the horse-dealer was a man of sixty-four-fold scutcheon,
whereas the great-grandfather, to his great shame and that of him who
takes him into his romance, really counted as many teeth as ancestors,
namely, thirty-two; still the thing could be brought about. That is to
say, the old Westphalian was the sole support and concluding vignette
and Hogarthian tail-piece of his whole historical picture-gallery; not
even in the two Indies, where we all have and inherit our cousins, had
he a single one. Upon this the great-grandfather planted himself, and
sought to extort from him by curses and prayers his patent of nobility,
in order to give it out as his own; "for who the devil will be the
wiser?" said he; "it is of no use to you and I can tack it on to mine."
Nay, the compiler of ancestors, the great-grandfather, offered to act
as a Christian, and to give the dealer in horses and ancestors in
exchange for the diploma an unnaturally beautiful stallion, such a
grand sultan and connubial master of a neighboring equine harem as one
had hardly seen matched. But the last of his line turned his head
slowly to and fro, and said coldly, "I would rather not," and drank his
Zerbot bottle-beer. When he had merely tried a couple of glasses of
Quedlinburg Gose (a light colored beer), he began already to storm and
curse at the very supposition, which began to look promising. When he
had put down on the top of that some Calktuff from Konigsbutter, I
think it was (for Falkenberg had a whole _Meibomium de cerevisiis_,
[Meibom or malt liquors] namely, his beers, in his cellar), then he
actually came out with some grounds for his refusal, and things grew
very hopeful.
When at last he found how finely the Breslau _Scheps_ foamed in the
glass, or in his head, then he ordered the carcass of a miserable
stallion to be led into the courtyard, and when he had seen him jump,
it may have been two or three times, he gave the great-grandfather his
hand and in it the 128 ancestors. Now, when great-grandfather
Falkenberg had taken the purchased patent, which had been almost
chewed to pieces by some ancestral generation of moths that had a
thousand-fold scutcheon each, and, as it was porous as a butterfly's
wing, had spread and stuck it with a plaster-knife on new parchment,
first of all, however, covering it with bookbinders paste; then, as may
easily be imagined, the parchment rendered his whole noble ancestry the
same service of ennoblement which the stallion in Westphalia did to the
equine posterity, and over a hundred buried men, in whom not a drop of
blood was any longer to be ennobled, acquired at least noble bones.
Therefore neither I nor any Canoness needs be ashamed of having as much
intercourse with the future young Falkenberg as will hereafter occur.
For the rest I should be glad if the anecdote went no further, and, in
fact, to a reading-public of intelligence this needs hardly to be said.
The nuptial lupercalia, with their longest day and their shortest
night, I have never undertaken to reproduce; but the introduction
thereto I should be glad to describe. Only, as I unfortunately went to
bed last night with the purpose this morning of transporting the
nuptial and chess-playing couple with three strokes of the pen from the
bridal to the marriage bed, which is nineteen leagues distant from it,
namely in the knightly seat of the Falkenbergs in Auenthal--and as I
quite naturally proposed to picture merely with three slight hints the
little amount of ceremony, the little fifing, prancing, and powder,
wherewith the good Auenthalers received their newly-married graces;
accordingly all night the dream went up and down in my head that I was
myself a home-returning Imperial Count and the Imperial Hereditary
Casperl, and that my subjects, as they had not laid eyes on me for 15
years, almost shot me dead with joy. In my country there were naturally
a thousand times more shouts of welcome and _honneurs_ sent up than in
the Falkenberg feudality; I will therefore omit the honors paid the
Cavalry Captain and present merely my own.