Manifestations of Honor Which Were Made to me by my County on my
Return Home from the Grand Tour.
If a Count's subjects take from him his six nonnatural things[9] I know
not how they can give him a better reception. Now mine left me not a
single non-natural thing.
First of all, they took away from me the most important unnatural
thing, sleep. Having traveled or waded, as if I were big with child,
from Chalons to Strasburg, only to thunder down from there at such a
rate that I rather hopped than sate, so furiously as to knock down my
runner--I would for the life of me have gladly flown round Floerzhuebel
(the first market town in my country) sleeping (and was not that easy
to do in dream?); but just at the boundary and bridge, as I opened my
eyes in going down hill and closed them in going up, I was fallen upon,
not murderously, but musically, by a body of militia sixteen drunken
men strong, who had been lying in wait here since seven in the morning
with their musical trumpets and ear-breaking tools, in order at the
right time to wound me and my horses in the ears with fife and drum.
Fortunately the storming-artists had drummed all day long for fun and
_ennui_ more vigorously than they did afterwards in earnest and for
love. During the whole march, while orchestra and barracks went along
beside my horses, I was scolding myself for having, seventeen years
before, qualified and graduated Floerzhuebel to a city--"I don't mean
merely" (I said to myself) "because afterward a Sovereign Rescript
stripped Floerzhuebel again of city-rights and its Gens d'Armurie of its
accoutrements, or merely because we proposed to sell the superfluous
equipments at auction in Cassel--but because they will not now let me
sleep, which is surely _the first non-natural thing_."
Eating they absolutely denied me, because that is the second unnatural
thing of a reigning lord. Did not the Restaurateur of Floerzhuebel, who
had set on the fire for me the whole boiled and roasted _widow's half_
of my country, summon me on the very carriage-step to take a bite, and
when--for we grandees do not like to excite the populace to a hungry
astonishment by despising envied fare--I begged with my own mouth only
for a beer-soup, did not the Restaurateur make a sour face and say: "He
had none in the whole hotel; and if he had, future hosts should never
have it to say of him, that among so many _jus_ and _bouillons_, he had
presented to his most gracious master nothing but a bowl of beer-soup."
The third thing, combining both _motion_ and _rest_, I came within a
hair of losing through the triumphal arch of my place of burial,
because it and the musical gallery upon it tumbled down close at the
heels of my last servant, but to the joy of the country, harmed nothing
belonging to any man, except the barber's cupping-glasses, which he had
attached to the triumphal gate, projecting in such a manner as to have
something hung upon them wherein was to be stuck the not bad
illumination. I was going to be properly mad about the satirical
cupping-vessels, which I was fain to take for satirical types and
emblems of my Countly cupping of the full veins of my tenants and
vassals, and I asked the Mayor whether he thought I was utterly devoid
of wit; but they all in a body swore that in the whole getting up of
the triumphal arch wit had not been once thought of.
_Air_, the fourth non-natural thing of an Imperial Hereditary Casperl,
I might by this time have had; for not merely on account of the short
misuse which the instruments and lungs of my vassals made of so
glorious an element, should I have shut myself up and the sector of air
around me so closely as I in fact did, into my carriage--_that_ I must
say expressly, so that the good Kelzheim Chorister may not imagine I
was displeased because his musical fire-arm, his trumpet, from the
double sound-hole of his belfry and his body, stuck out towards me to
such an extent that the melodious air-waves from the two came to meet
me four acres off, while below in the steeple his wife also milked the
bells, as if I were being buried and receiving not so much a reception
as a requiem--I say, not on account of the musical married pair would I
have shut the carriage, but it was on account of the danger of life;
for a joyous picket of peasants discharged at me out of seventeen
fowling-pieces and two or three pocket-pistols, not only salvos, but a
few ramrods into the bargain.
Now, when a Count sits there deprived of four nonnatural things, he may
not venture to think of the fifth, of evacuation. The sphincter of
every, even the greatest, pore remains closed, as well as the
coach-door; no wonder then, that, as I could not say to a single
pore--Ephphatha: be opened!--I started up crying "Deil a bit do I gain
by my sitting on the bench of Counts at Ratisbon, if here I must squat
on the coach-cushion and not be able to do anything, even."
Genuine _Passion_, which is the sixth non-natural thing of man, is
stifled by nothing so easily as by a satin dog's-pillow, on which the
parsons, schoolmasters and magistrates, whom an Imperial Hereditary
Casperl has under him, deliver to him the Carmina which they have
caused to be composed in his honor; for they can neither be laughed at
nor wept over, nor scolded at nor spoken of.
My tenants and vassals, after filching from me so much of my six
non-natural things, gave me back in the very act half of the first,
namely, _wakefulness_; but they had worked themselves into such a sweat
on my account, that I was thrown into one on theirs. When I woke up, I
thought at first I had been dreaming; but upon becoming more wide awake
I observed that, with the exception of names, it was the stolen history
of my own neighborhood. To be sure it vexes me just as much as if the
illuminations and the musical uproar had been arranged expressly on my
account, that the subjects make both merely with the malicious
intention of driving their great or little Regent from disgust and
torture to betake himself to his tour again; which they have evidently
learned from the Oriental caravans, which, in like manner, by
_drumming_ and _lighting fires_ keep off wild beasts from their bodies.