Viscera Without Body.--Scheerau.
Not merely liars and L'Hombre players, but romance readers also, must
have a good memory to learn by heart the first ten or twelve sections,
as if they were declensions and conjugations, because without these
they cannot get on in the exposition. With me no stroke is in vain; in
my book and in my body there hang bits of spleen; but the use of this
inward part will very soon be brought out. Since a romance writer, like
a courtier, aims at one sole object, namely, to ruin his friend and
hero and lead him into heavily charged tempests, accordingly, I, too,
have been for the last quarter building up, here a gray cloud that
vanishes, there one that melts away; but when at last I have
irresistibly charged with electricity all cells of the horizon, then I
compress the whole devil into a thunder-storm--after fourteen sheets
have been struck off, the compositor can already hear and set up the
crash.... At bottom, to be sure, there is not a word of truth in it
all; but as other authors are fond of giving out their romances for
biographies, the privilege will be granted me of sometimes divesting my
biography of the appearance of a romance.
The child, instead of his history, gave mere lamentations over his
history. He seemed over seven years old, spoke German with an Italian
accent, and his sickly, delicate, and pale-red body enwrapped his soul
as a pale rose-leaf does the worm within it. His father was named
Doctor Zoppo, came from Pavia, botanized himself from Italy to Germany,
and let the little ones tear yellow flowers along the way. The blind
Amandus wanted to pluck in this wood herbs also, but the devilish
she-oculist happened upon him, helped him find yellow flowers and lured
him with them so far into the woods that she could rob him of his
clothes and his eyes.
Gustavus kept asking him every minute whether he could not see yet,
gave him his luncheon that he might leave off weeping, and could not,
as _his_ eyes were so widely open, comprehend his blindness. In the
next country town Falkenberg got himself shaved and Amandus bandaged.
I once saw at the last station before Leipsic such a charming
traverse-band over the eye and forehead of a maiden, that I wished my
wife might from time to time have a slight cut in that region, because
it has a very neat effect; contrariwise the bandage over Amandus's two
eyes made him look a child of woe.
When Amandus, in better clothing and with the sad bandage, sat in the
carriage, Gustavus could not possibly cease weeping, and would fain get
out his starling and present it to him; for sympathy is determined not
by the size but by the shape of suffering.
Few persons who journey to Scheerau, will have the absurd fortune to
meet suddenly, two leagues before arriving, a solitary carriage without
the occupant appertaining to it; Falkenberg and his people and horses
had this luck. This carriage was bearing the stomach, the thick and
thin intestines, the liver, wherein princes seethe their gall, the
lungs, whose air-bladders are the princely gall-bladders, as the
wind-pipe is the gall-passage to the same, and the heart; but no corpse
came with them; for the corpse, which was the reigning Lord of
Scheerau, already lay in the hereditary vault. This stomach digested as
much as his conscience did, namely, whole hides of land; and better
than his thin head, to which truths and grievances (gravamina) were a
heavy food; the Papinian stomach-machine remained even in advanced age
still fiery, as indeed all else about him was childish. He used to
ride for hours, a short time before his death, on a chamberlain, to
whom he took a considerable liking; nevertheless, as a thoroughly
sensible man, he thrust aside platter and glass, when the old and right
contents no longer remained in either. Behind the sarcophagus of the
intestines--the relic casket of the abdomen--rode the chief steward of
the kitchen, several assistant cooks, the adjunct of the waiting
service, and still greater members of the court establishment, _e. g_.,
the Medical Counsellor _Fenk_. He and Falkenberg did not observe each
other. The latter was engrossed to-day with mere vanities: the Doctor,
whom he sought in Italy, and the Prince, whom he still expected to find
on the earth. The insolvent crowned entrails, which, in this way, could
not pay money, involved him now in a financial litigation with the heir
to the crown.
The funeral procession of the princely intestines went to the Abbey of
_Hopf_, where occurred the interment of their princely members;
which--if a word of Plato is to be believed--are true beasts, and
with which man, be he enlaced with order-ribbons or harnessed with
drawing-bands, always has his infernal tussle. I will follow the box of
viscera just three steps, because the Medical Counsellor--according to
his habit of amusing himself in all places, in theatre boxes and church
pews and taverns, only not in his study, by writing--here in the burial
church of the intestines untied his writing-tablets and wrote down
things which literally read as follows: "As princes have themselves
interred, just as they also reside, in several places at once, so would
I, too--but only in this way, and no other: my stomach must be
deposited in the Episcopal Church--my liver, with its bitter bladder,
in a Court Church--the thick intestines in a Jewish oratory--the lungs
in a mixed,[20] or, at least, a University Church--the heart in the
church triumphant, and the spleen in a Dissenting Chapel. But if I were
first funeral preacher of a crowned abdomen, I should take another
course; I should take the gullet for entrance or exordium of the
funeral sermon and the blind gut for the close! And could I not in the
three parts of my discourse run through the three concavities, touching
lightly therein the nobler parts of the body, and, finally on its last
passages, deliver myself in tears and eulogies out of the dust? For so
one jests here below." There is a poetic frenzy--"fine frenzy"--but
also a humorous, which Sterne had; but only readers of finished taste
do not account the highest stretch of the faculty as overstraining.
The Falkenberg traveling train reached Scheerau at evening--the finest
time to arrive anywhere, hence so many arrive at evening in the other
world. It seemed to Gustavus as if he had been there before during his
abduction. But as the fewest possible of my readers can have been
abducted on account of their beauty, and therefore they do not know the
city, it shall be shown up to them in the tenth section.