Public Mourning of the Knaves.--Prince of Scheerau.--
Princely Debts.
The Crown-Prince, for whose payment of his debts the Captain waited,
was still on the high-road in foreign parts, whence he drove up on to
the throne as up into a tower. Three miserable knaves made their entry
still earlier than he. The thing can be narrated: Since the death of
His Highness of most blessed memory--the Pope is the highest and most
blessedest--one church after another in Scheerau had been, not
plundered, but dismantled; the church thieves merely stripped off again
the public mourning-cloth, which was on our pulpits and altars. The
sextons and choristers found every morning the holy places scalped and
the parsons had to stand there in the morning service. Now that
money-grasping condor, the commercial agent Roeper, had lately caused
altar and pulpit in the Maussenbach Church to be rigged out in a frock
of black cloth--figured was not holy and cheap enough for him. This
sable wrappage was left on them as public mourning--old Roeper had
consequently very little sleep any longer, because he feared the
church-vultures would rob the Maussenbach altar of its festal robing
and carry off at the same time the certificate stitched to the cloth
which set forth in silken and silver letters who had presented it all.
His lawyer, Kolb, therefore, to whom thief-catching is sable-hunting
and pearl-fishery, invested the church with all kinds of falcon-eyes;
but all would have amounted to nothing had not Falkenberg's servant
Robisch on Sunday evening, so soon as the church was closed, said to
the schoolmaster, "he should leave it just as it was, he had counted
the congregation, and three had not come out with the rest." In short
they blockaded the temple till night and fortunately hauled out three
secreted cloth-corsairs from the sacred place. The next morning there
was a general astonishment; the three church-goers rode in through the
gate of Scheerau on a hangman's cart, having on, all of them, black
coats and trowsers--at night they had disappeared. For the court (if it
had not yet gone to sleep) it was a hateful prospect, that a band of
robbers should have put on court-mourning as well as itself, and have
stolen for that purpose the mourning wardrobe out of the churches.
"You ought to be hanged," said the Captain to his fellow, "to bring
poor thieves to grief, who take nothing from any man, but only from
churches." "But surely for such knaves," said I, "it is not fitting to
put on court-mourning, if only on account of the expense. In fact why
is it that one may not mourn for his personal father[27] though he may
for the father of his country? Or why does the Privy Chamber even allow
weeping to the children of the land, when, surely, that exhausts the
lachrymal glands of the State, and when tears, too, are exempt from
taxation?"
"You go too far," said the Captain, "the present administration must
keep on in the course it has thus far pursued, if it is to distinguish
itself from all its predecessors by the solicitude with which it
watches over our grounds, our pennies and our purses."
"The negro-dealers," said the Doctor, but irrelevantly enough, "are
still more watchful; for a slave-trader is more troubled by the
unfitness of such or such an article--of men or slaves, than of
his own wife. Even flexibility of limb and grace in dancing his human
live-stock must possess and he cudgels them into it."
"Agriculture," he continued, "trade, manufactures, even national wealth
and welfare, in short the _bodies_ of his subjects, the worst despot
can rear and nourish--but for their _souls_ he can do nothing, without
acting at every step against his own."
It has often occurred to me, whether mourning-regulations or
delegations have not for their object that the sly and sad citizen may
avail himself of the liberty of public mourning in order to throw in
his domestic mourning into the common mass? Might he not lay up his
individual sorrow over the mortality of his aunts, his cousins, till a
general application occurred, and so, when the country had wound the
condolatory crape round arm and sword, do up all the mourning in a lump
and grieve under the same crape for a mother of the country and a
step-mother? For courts 'twere easy. Nay, could not these, in fact, in
the public mourning mourn for their relations in advance? Might not
one, after all, let the whole nonsense drop?...
At last my new sovereign rode in his traveling carriage up on to the
throne, and exchanged the coach-canopy for the throne-canopy. The
Captain, before the coronation, held a petition in readiness, wherein
with the defiance of a saddler, he demanded his money; after the
coronation the Prince, like a diamond, had absorbed so much fiery
splendor from his crown and his sceptre, that his creditor got his
lawyer to draw up a new memorial in which he insisted merely on the
interest. As he got nothing, not so much as a resolution, he determined
to demand more. For he did not consider that our reigning providers in
Scheerau seldom have any money. When we receive or send extraordinary
embassies, when we have occasion for baptism or burial, not to mention
wars, in such cases we have little or nothing but--extra-taxes, those
metallic props and clamps of the rotten throne. In the exchequer-chest,
as in heraldry, we denote silver by vacant space.
But both debtor and creditor soon found relief. The latter, the
Captain, was marching, as cicerone, with his Gustavus through the cadet
quarters and showing him everything for the sake of praising
everything, because he was one day to put his head into a gorget--when
the young Prince came in also and inspected all the apartments, not in
order to forget all on the next saddle, but in order to observe nothing
at all. I was sorry--for I had come in at the same time--that every
professor relied upon it the Regent would number, if not every hair on
his head, yet every lock in his peruke; for he did not so much as
notice me and my dignity; very naturally, however, since such a
dignity had already become an old story with him, as seen in the finest
salons of all lands. He wore--for how long had he been back from his
travels?--the princely hat with the nonchalance of a lady's hat; no
long administration had yet pressed in the crown to make a dark line
around his brow, and the _erect_ persons around him had not yet been
refracted by the media and moisture and membranes of his eye into
_crooked_ prison-laborers. His words he handed round with the
munificence of a man of the world, as he would so much snuff; at last
Falkenberg also got a pinch. I see my two principals still standing
vis-a-vis--my noble and lending principal with the firm but respectful
decorum of a soldier, compressed into embonpoint and swelling muscles,
and with the confiding kindliness which good-natured persons cherish
towards every one who is at the moment talking with them--the crowned
and insolvent principal, however, with the picturesque dignity, in
which every limb bends inward respectfully to the others, and in which
the very attitude is a prolonged flattery, with a drapery of many folds
in his pain-racked face, with a complaisance which neither refuses nor
consents. My god-father regarded the stereotype complacency of the
crowned head as exclusively directed to him; he thought the latter put
his questions for the sake of getting an answer; and particularly when
my most gracious prince and sovereign had actually expressed himself to
the effect that "the little Gustavus was in his place _here_," that "he
excited a stronger interest by his _air de reveur_, than one could
explain to himself," and that "so soon as he should be old enough for
this institution, one would buy him off from his father for 13,000 Rix
dollars cash down:" then was the Captain thrown out of his wits, or
rather out of his petition; his petitionary paper was turned into a
thanksgiving address; his wish was, that I had already been tutor in
his home for eight years; his hope was, the money would follow; and the
real advantage was, that his son would get into the best German
military academy.
It will be doing me no favor if any one ridicules him. To be sure he
swore at his castle: "He wouldn't trust courtiers a hand's breath, and
the whole _nation_ was an offence to his nostrils;" on the other hand,
he trusted such court-people as he had, at the moment, to do with him,
somewhat more, only--military _ignorantia legum_ must bear much of the
blame in his case; how is he, as a soldier, to know that a prince is
not bound to pay any debt?--Perhaps it is not even known to all readers
so well as they may assume to themselves. For three reasons a regent
need not pay a farthing which he has borrowed of his subjects (if his
royal father was the borrower, it is understood, of course). First: an
ambassador, be he of the first or third rank, would fly into the face
of the oldest publicists, if he should discharge his debts; now he who
is the mere representative and brimstone printed copy of the regent,
cannot possibly have rights which are denied the original, consequently
is not paid. Secondly: The prince is--or else we can no longer believe
another word of our academical afternoon lessons--the true summary,
abstract and representative of the State (as the envoy, again, is a
representative of the representative or a _portable state_ in small),
and consequently so stands for each member of the body politic that
lends him a kreutzer, as if he himself were that member; accordingly he
in reality lends to himself, when such a part and parcel of his
representative self makes him a loan. Very well! that is granted; but
then one must also grant that a prince would make himself as ridiculous
if he should pay back to his own subjects, as the father of General
Sobouroff did when he honorably refunded to himself the capital which
he had advanced to himself, with the legal interest of the country, and
paid the penalty to himself according to the statutes of exchange;
whence could it come then, except from their relationship to the throne
and its privileges, that even great ones, great in reference to rank
and amount of debts, were allowed to become bankrupt? Or why is a legal
consensus book or register of mortgages the most exact Court Blue-book
or _Almanac royal_? Thirdly: The most botched subject can secure from
his prince letters of respite or _moratoria_; but who shall give them
to the prince, unless he does it to himself? And if he does not do it
for conscience sake, he can at least every five years grant a renewed
quinquennial.
But there is no fourth reason that I know of.