The Minister's Lady and her Fainting-fits--and so forth.
For it was only in the forenoon that he was in that green vault which
contained Scheerau's greatest beauties--in the Bouse's apartment; in
the afternoon and later the rivers of pleasure roared through it,
poured out by the Naiads of pleasure from their chalices of joy. Half
the court drove out thither from Scheerau. The court, as is well known,
while the people have only Sabbath days, has whole Sabbatical years,
and the nearer ministers of the court are distinguished from the
ministers of the State in this, that they do no work whatever; so, too,
in ancient times, only those beasts were laid upon the altars as
offerings to the gods, which had never yet labored. I know full well,
that more than one requires of the paralytic great world a certain
labor, namely that of amusing itself and others in one continued
stretch; but this is so herculean a task and so severely strains all
the faculties, that it is enough if they collectively after a fete, on
driving off in the morning dissemble and say, as they part from one
another, or the next day on meeting each other: "After all we spent a
delicious evening, and altogether things were so brilliant!" Great
Quarto-Theologians have long since proved that Adam _before the fall_
took no pleasure in eating or other enjoyments--our grandees before
their fall are just as badly off and go through all these things in
their state of innocence without having the least fun out of them. I
wish I could help the Court.
A man who has a stated working-hour (and though it were only thirty
minutes long) regards himself as more industrious than one who has just
this day interrupted his twelve hours'-stint for thirty minutes. Oefel
reproached himself for his overstrained exertion, and said he knew not
how to excuse himself for writing one full hour every morning at the
"Grand Sultan." Not till after that were the serious occupations of the
day at an end; then _for the first time_ he had himself frizzled and
powdered, in order to flutter round as a day-butterfly before all
toilet-mirrors; on the flowery head of the _Defaillante_ (so the
Minister's Lady was called) he alighted. There he let himself a
_second_ time be frizzled and be plumed, in order as a _well-powdered_
twilight-and-night-butterfly to sweep round among the counters and
show-dishes and their counterparts. I should not have happened upon
this simile, had not his hair dressed for the evening in the shape of a
horn and drawn up together into a capsule led me to think of the
caterpillars of the night-butterflies, which have a horn or queue
attached to them on behind--the day-caterpillars have nothing on them,
just as his abbreviated stuck-up morning-hair required, in order to
bear out their mutual resemblance.
As I have named the Minister's Lady the _Defaillante_, and as one might
on the whole give her credit for the simplicity of being more faithful
to the Counsellor of Legation than he was to her, I will tell the whole
story and speak in her behalf. Vanity, which ruled over him as a
limited monarch, held over her an unlimited monarchy--she had and made
Italian verses, epigrams and all things belonging to the fine arts, and
it is town-talk that, inasmuch as she had ceased to belong to fine
_Nature_, she threw herself into the works of the fine _arts_, and from
a model exalted herself by paint into a picture, by pantomime, into an
actress by swooning into a _statue_.
This last is the cardinal-point--she died weekly and oftener, like
every true Christian woman, not for the sake of her chastity, but even
_before_ her chastity; I mean a minute or two--she and her virtue
swooned one after the other. If I am not copious on such a subject, I
am not worth cutting a pen, and the deuce may take my productions.
Virtue then, fared as badly with the Minister's Lady as a favorite
young cat with a child. I will not speak of seasons of the day--but
only of days of the week: I will suppose that on each day a different
antichrist and arch-enemy of her virtue had, for visiting-card, sent
his person: in that case it might have run somewhat thus: On Monday her
virtue was in the beaming new moon for Herrn von A.,--on Tuesday, in
full-moon for Herrn von B., who said: Between her and a _Devote_ the
only difference was age,--on Wednesday, in the last quarter for Herrn
von C., who says: "_je la touche de'ja_," namely her arm,--on Thursday
in the first quarter for Herrn von D., who says: "_peutetre que_"--and
so on with the remaining enemies throughout the week; for each
adversary saw on her, as his own rainbow, his own virtue. Honor and
virtue were with her no empty words, but signified (quite in opposition
to the school of Kant) _the interval of time between her No and her
Yes_,--often merely _the interval of space_. I said above, she always
had a swoon, when it was the _Monday_ of her virtue. But this admits an
explanation: her body and her virtue were born on the same day and of
the same mother, and are true twins, like the brothers Castor and
Pollux. Now the first, like Castor, is human and mortal, and the other,
like Pollux, divine and immortal, and as that mythological brotherhood
by a cunning device _went halves_ in mortality and immortality, so as
to share each other's society for a while, dead, and again for a while,
living this cunning trick is repeated by her body and her virtue: both
always die simultaneously, in order afterward to come to life again
together. The artistic dying of such ladies may be regarded, on still
another side: Such a woman can experience a _joy_ over the strength and
the proofs of her virtue, which may reach even the point of a swoon;
moreover, a _grief_ at the sufferings and defeats of the same, which
may also amount to a swoon. Now one can imagine, whether under the
combined attacks of two emotions, each of which alone may be mortal, a
woman can still remain erect. Notoriously the honor of women of the
world dies as little as the King of France, and that is a well-known
fiction; at least the death of that honor is, like that of the Saints,
a sleep which does not last over 12 hours. I know at one Court a kind
of honor or virtue, which, like a polypus, nothing can kill: like the
ancient Gods, it may be wounded, but not annihilated--like the
horn-beetle it continues to writhe and wriggle on the needle and
without any nourishment. Naturalists of rank often inflict upon such a
virtue, as Fontana did to the infusoria, a thousand torments, under
which citizenly female virtue would instantly give up the ghost,--not a
bit! no thought of dying. It is a beneficent arrangement of Nature that
precisely in the higher class of ladies virtue has such an Achillean
power of life or of regeneration, that it may, in the first place, the
more easily endure the simple and compound fractures, bone-shatterings
and amputations, and generally the battlefield of that rank. Secondly,
that those ladies (in reliance upon the immortality and long line of
life belonging to their virtue) may need to set to their pleasures,
whose physical limits are, besides, so narrow, at least no moral ones.
I come back to the virtuous swoons or erotic dying of the Minister's
Lady; I will not, however, confine myself to remarking that as the
ancient philosophy was the art of learning how to die, so also is the
French Court philosophy, only of a more agreeable sort--nor will I
merely say in a witty way: _qui_ (_quae_) _scit mori, cogi nequit_--nor
will I merely apply Seneca's expression about Cato to the Minister's
Lady: _majori animo repetitur mora quam initur_; but I simply state the
reason why she is universally called in Scheerau the _Defaillante_ [or
Fainting Lady]--and it is this: that a certain gentleman, on being
asked how she had gained a certain weighty case despite the
postponement of the term of closure, replied: _en defaillante_.
I return.... But I were a lucky man, if Time would sit down and let me
come up with him; but as it is, I still follow him at a distance of
several months, my freight of venture grows daily heavier; I must have
paper enough for a double history--that which is already written and
that which is all the time occurring. I worry myself to death and at
last people have hard work to read me! But is there any help for
it?----
Amandus, meanwhile, lay on the hardest bed in the world--the thorny and
stony mattresses of the old monks feel like eider-down in the
comparison--namely, on the sick bed: his desolate eve rested often on
the door of his chamber, to see whether no Gustavus would open it,
whether death might not enter in the form of a joy, a reconciliation,
and with a love-pressure softly crush the flower of his life; but
Gustavus, on his part, lay upon a magic bed to which a better God than
Vulcan fastened him down with invisible fetters; he could hardly stir
under his wiry coverlet.
On the morning when he was making ready to take the portrait and pay
the visit to the Resident Lady, Oefel let off all around him a
multitude of rockets of wit, and confessed to him, with the contentment
with which a Belletrist always bears poverty in bodily goods and the
sorer poverty in spiritual ones, in intellect and the like, so much as
this,--that he had himself detected in Gustavus his penchant for
the--Resident Lady, sooner perhaps than either of the two interested
parties themselves. Every denial on the part of Gustavus was a new leaf
in his laurel crown. "I will be more honest," he said; "I will be my
own traitor, since I have no one outside of me. In the apartment where
_you_ have an altar, stands one for me; it is a Pantheon;[70] you kneel
more before a God than a Goddess--but I find there my Venus (Beata).
She wants nothing to make her a Venus de Medici than--position; but I
know not _which_ hand, in that position, I should kiss to her." ...
Before Gustavus's pure soul, this lump of _boue de Paris_, happily flew
by, into which at courts even good men step without reflection; even
authors of this zone have something of this mud still sticking to them.
What pleased him about Beata (and in every maiden) was simply this,
that he, as he thought, pleased her; of all the five hundred million
women on the earth he would have loved every one if he had pleased them
all; on the contrary not one of them, if not one of them liked him. He
now related to Gustavus, through what window in the greenhouse of
Beata's heart he had seen her love to him bloom out. Except a certain
blockhead whom I knew in Leipsic, and a cat, who has nine lives, no man
had more lives than this man; did he forfeit one--forthwith he had a
fresh one; I mean he had more swoons than another had fancies. Such a
mock suicide he could perpetrate at will, and whenever he needed it in
his dramas, as an affecting theatre poet; oftenest, however, he and the
Leipsic blockhead inflicted this death upon themselves in effigy, when
among a lot of ladies they had singled out to visit that one who was
most in love with them. For the whole body were distinguished from each
other, the two blockheads said, not in the existence but simply in the
degree of their love for both of the two fainting subjects. The highest
degree of terror at the pantomimic apoplexy, said the swooning couple,
is the notary's seal of the highest love. When, therefore, Oefel three
weeks ago acted his masquerade death before Beata, under all the
neckerchiefs present there beat no heart so tender and sympathetic as
hers, which knew neither hardness of its own nor deception on the part
of another. Indifferently Oefel put himself to the optical death; in
love he rose again and with his pretended swoon had almost effected a
real one. "Since then I have not been able so much as to speak to her
on the subject," he said. Gustavus struggled with a great sigh, not at
Oefel's unfeeling vanity, but over himself and Oefel's good fortune. "O
Beata, in this bosom"--(his inner being addressed her)--"wouldst thou
have found a more reserved and sincere heart, than is this which thou
preferrest to it--it would have concealed its happiness, and now it
does its sighs--it would have remained forever true to thee--ah, it
will remain true to thee still!" Nevertheless he did not quite feel the
disgusting element in Oefel's vanity, because a friend inoculates
himself into our personality and grows into it to such an extent that
we overlook his vanity as easily as our own and on like grounds.
As it may fare with Gustavus in my book as in real life, I ought to
have made even before this the following observation: No one was easier
to be misunderstood than he; all rays of his soul were broken by the
cloudy veil of mild humility; nay, since Oefel had reproached him with
wearing pride upon his countenance he had sought to appear just as
humble as he was--his exterior was quiet, simple, full of love,
without assumption, but also without any outburst of wit or humor.
Fancy and understanding wrought in him, as in a solitary temple,
altar-pieces in great masses, and consequently did not, like others,
let snuff-box-pictures and medallions drop from the tongue--he was, as
Descartes supposes the earth, an incrusted sun, but under the
phosphorescing lights of the Court a dark earthly body--he was the
extreme opposite of Ottomar, whose sun had burnt through his crust, and
now stood before the people glistening, crackling, rending, calcining
and hatching, Gustavus's soul was a temperate clime without storms,
full of sunshine without solar heat, all overspread with green and
blossoms, a magic Italy in Autumn; but Ottomar's was a polar land
through which there passed in succession long scorching days, long
frozen nights, hurricanes, ice-mountains, and luxuriant vales of Tempe.
To Gustavus's modesty, therefore, nothing appeared more natural than
that Beata should place one who knew so well how to show off his mind
and person, above him who could do neither, and who besides, had once
vexed her father almost to death. Accordingly his blood crept slowly
and sadly as he stole to the Resident Lady's. It seemed to him as if he
could, to-day, look upon her as his friend--which he actually half did,
when she, too, came to meet him with so mournful an air and face, like
that in which a woman, a week after the loss of her beloved, with
vacant eyes and cold cheeks, touches us most deeply. It was, she said,
the anniversary day of her youngest brother's death, whom she most
loved, and who loved her the most of all. She had herself painted in
her mourning dross. Nothing has a greater effect than a gay person who
for once falls into the semitones of sorrow. Gustavus had, indeed, too
much predilection for persons in whose ears vibrated the knell of some
bereavement; an unhappy person was to him a virtuous one. The Resident
Lady told him she hoped he would paint away to-day's grief from her
actual face and charm it into the pictured one--she had on that account
assigned to-day for this distraction; to-morrow she would certainly be
the better--she played carelessly, and merely with her right hand, a
few dances, but only one or two measures, and with a vain struggle
against her sadness. He must tell her some story before beginning, that
he might not give to a face which she wore only one or two days in a
year, an eternal life in his colors. But he had not yet acquired at
Court either matter or manner for story-telling--at last she came upon
the subject of his subterranean education. Only to her _to-day's_ face
was he capable, in the cloud-burst of heart-effusion, which since
Amandus's grudge had been denied him, of such a narration. When he had
ended, she said: "Now paint away; you should have told me something
different."
She took her little Laura in her lap. To the Prince, who is an
enthusiastic animal-painter, she must sit with a silk-haired poodle
instead of the little girl. But what a group now falls upon his eye,
his heart and his brush, to distract all three! At least they all
tremble, while the mother arranges the little hands of Laura into a
picturesque and child-like embrace--while she, silently and sadly,
contending with the waves of the lips against the sorrow of the eye,
looks pensively into his, and with the nearest hand playfully curls the
hair of the little one--verily, he thought, ten times over! if an angel
would fain put on a body, the human were not too poor for the purpose,
and he might in this _traveling-uniform_ make his appearance on any
sun!
This sketch was so striking, that to the Resident Lady one or two
unlikenesses would perhaps have been more agreeable--they would have
announced a greater resemblance to her second image in him. She now
passed on by gentle, not, as usual, sudden and sportive, transitions
from his professional compensation and from the disadvantages of his
training to his role in the legation--she disclosed to him, but with
slow and confidential hand, his want of knowledge of the world--she
offered him admission to her society and invited him to _souper_ for
to-morrow. But in the forenoon, she added smiling, you must not come;
Beata absolutely refuses to be painted.
----The reader has not yet, in the whole book, been allowed to speak or
write three words: I will now let him come up to the grating or into
the _parloir_ and will write down his questions. "What, then,"--he
asks--"is in the Resident Lady's mind? Will she cut out of Gustavus a
toothed cog-wheel, which she may put into some unknown machine or
other?--Or is she constructing the hunter's screen and twisting the
elastic net, to pounce upon and catch him? Is she, as does every
coquette, becoming like him, who will not be like her, as, according to
Plattner man becomes to such a degree that which he feels, that he
bends down with the flower and lifts himself with the rocks?"
Let the reader observe, that the reader himself has wit, and proceed!
"Or," he therefore continues, "does the Resident Lady not go so far,
but will she, from magnanimity, for the sake of which one often pardons
the optical tricks of her coquetry, seek out and train up the most
beautiful and disinterested youth on the most beautiful and
disinterested grounds?--Or may not all be mere accidents--(and nothing
is so obvious to me)--to which she, as racer through pleasure-groves,
fastens, as she flies, the fluttering lasso of a half-formed plan,
without taking the least look, the next day after the strangled prey of
her snare?--Or am I wholly wrong, dear Author, and is perhaps not one
of all these possibilities true?"--Or come, dear Reader, come, are they
all true at once, and was this the cause of thy not guessing a
capricious woman, that thou givest her credit for fewer contradictions
than charms?--The reader confirms me in my observation, that persons
who could never have the opportunity to give the great world lessons on
the piano-forte (for example, unfortunately, the otherwise excellent
reader) are capable, indeed, of pre-calculating all _possible_ cases of
any given character, but not of singling out the _real_ one. For the
rest, let the reader rely on me (one who would hardly without reason
extenuate distinctions which attach to himself)--for the rest, he has
far less cause to mourn his poverty in certain conventional graces, in
certain light, fashionable and poisonous charms, which a court never
denies, than other courtiers--the author could wish he were not
reckoned among them--have really to bewail their wealth of the like
species of poison; for in this way he remains an honest and healthy
man, the respected reader; but whoever knows him would have stood
security for it, that, in case all bands and bridles of the great world
had tugged and pulled at him, he would, besides his honesty, have
retained also his unlikeness to the fashionable gentry, who atone for
the maltreatment of the fairest sex with loss of _voice_ and loss of
_calves_, as (according to the oldest theologians) that woman-tempter,
the serpent, who could previously _speak_ and _walk_, by his seductive
industry played away speech and legs....