Dr. (illegible)
Minister at St. Maria-Schnee
At this christening service—though I vowed and abjured so many things in
it—I was not present. For I do not understand by the word “I” the living
corporeal form in which it is contained, but that self-consciousness
which is absent both in infancy and also at frequent intervals
throughout life: in sleep, in fainting, in narcotic stupefaction, under
the influence of drugs, and in a great many moments when one merely
breathes and does not think, look, hear; when one merely continues his
existence vegetatively until the I resumes its functions.
Prague, then, was the city where they set up my cradle, over which, as
over all cradles, so much was unprophesied. But my mother, who at my
birth was already a widow, soon moved to Brünn, and what I remember of
childhood is events that took place in the Moravian capital.
There I see myself standing by the window—five years old—and looking
down into the “great square,” where a noisy throng is in wild commotion.
A new word strikes upon my ear,—Revolution. Every one is looking out;
every one is repeating the new word and is greatly excited. What my
sensations were I no longer remember, but at any rate I too was excited,
else the picture and the word would not have impressed themselves on my
mind. But there is no more to it. The picture does not arouse any
comprehension; the word has no meaning. Thus appears my first experience
of a historical event.
But my memory reaches farther back, and shows me a scene which I was
concerned in at the age of three, and which stirred me far more
powerfully than the political overturnings of the year 1848.
I am about three years old. It is a beautiful afternoon, and my mother
and my guardian are planning to take me with them to a picnic in the
Schreibwald. The Schreibwald, a favorite place for excursions from
Brünn, shines among my memories of childhood as the sum of all natural
beauty, festive joy, woodland shade, mountain-climbing, social meals,—in
a word, as the acme of that combination of delights known as a picnic.
At that date, on the memorable afternoon, all these experiences were
doubtless not yet part of my consciousness; perhaps it was the very
first time I was to be taken to the Schreibwald; but to me the name was
forever afterwards associated with the following event.
They dressed me in a white cashmere frock trimmed with narrow red braid.
A superb thing—décolleté; I can still see before me the pattern of the
braiding, I could draw it on paper. How the onlookers would marvel when
they espied that! I felt myself beautiful in it, positively beautiful.
And then my guardian, looking out of the window (I can see him too in
his general’s uniform), remarked that it was clouding up, it would
probably rain. There followed a short session of the cabinet,—the
general, my mother, and the chambermaid Babette,—and the decision was
announced: the beautiful new frock might suffer harm.
“Put an old frock on the countess,” was my mother’s command. But the
countess declared most positively that she protested against it. I am in
the new frock: _j’y suis, j’y reste_; with this plagiarism thirty years
in advance of its original she made known her inflexible will. Perhaps,
as a matter of fact, not so much with words as with shrieks and stamping
of feet.
But consequently the next picture in this indelible picture gallery
shows me the brilliantly clad, beautiful, and energetic creature laid on
a large table, her face against the table-top, her red-embroidered frock
lifted by the obliging hand of the tall army man who stood by; and from
the maternal hand, slap, slap, the first whipping, with its burden of
despair and dishonor, came down on the object.
Yes, despair: that there could be such great woe in the world, and the
world not go to pieces under it, was most likely incomprehensible to me.
At last the wild sobbing subsided; I was stood in a corner and had to
beg for pardon—the victim of such grievous outrage, beg for pardon into
the bargain! But I did; unhappy I was, deeply unhappy, but subdued.
To-day I do not know why this occurrence made such a deep impression on
my soul; was it injured vanity on account of the ravishing frock, or
injured honor on account of the disciplinary procedure? Probably both.
Still another picture is fixed in my memory. Oh, I must have been a very
vain and pleasure-loving little ninny! My mother comes into the nursery;
she is wearing a beautiful gown, such as I have never yet seen on her,
and jewelry on her bare neck: mamma is going to the ball, and they
explain to me that this is a festivity where all are dressed so
beautifully as that and dance in rooms that are all lighted up. I want
to be taken with her, to go to the ball too. “Yes, my little roly-poly
is going to the ball too.” (I scream with delight.) “To the Feather Ball
she is going.” With that the beautiful mamma kisses me and goes. “So,”
says Babette, “now we will get ready for the Feather Ball.” And she
begins to undress me, which I permit in joyful anticipation. But when,
instead of being dressed in my best, I am put to bed and learn that this
is the Feather Ball, I break out in wild sobbing, deceived, trifled
with, humiliated.
I must delay a moment over the portrait of my guardian. It cast a
friendly radiance over all my childhood and early youth. Friedrich,
Landgrave of Fürstenberg, had been the comrade and friend of my deceased
father, and he faithfully fulfilled till his death the duties which he
had undertaken as guardian and protector and watchful friend to the
fatherless child. I simply worshiped him; I regarded him as a being of a
higher race, to whom I owed and gladly rendered unconditional obedience,
honor, and love. He was an elderly gentleman, past fifty, when I came
into the world; and, such being the way of children in judging age, he
seemed to me ever so old, but ever so dear. So smiling, so jolly, so
lordly, so indescribably kind. That confectionery that he used to bring
with him! those rich Christmas presents that he gave me! that care for
my education, my health, my future!
Lordly—he was a lord in fact. A member of the proudest Austrian
nobility, Master of the Ordnance, ultimately captain of the
_Arcièrengarde_, one of the highest positions at the court. He was never
absent at any of the great court functions, and brought me such lovely
bonbons from every imperial dinner. His lofty station inspired me with
pride rather than awe. For me he was “Fritzerl,” to whom I said _du_; on
whose knee I used to climb, as long as I was little, and pull his
mustache.
He died unmarried. His life was so methodically ordered, it ran its
course so free from cares and passions, between service and sociality,
that the wish to change it never arose in him. In Vienna he occupied
handsome bachelor quarters in the Inner City; in Moravia he had a domain
where he often spent a few weeks of the summer to see what his factors
were doing; but he preferred, instead of living in his own lonely
castle, to spend the summer months as a guest at the homes of his old
mother and his various sisters. He never took journeys. At the Austrian
boundarymonuments the world came to an end for him. Devotion, both
churchly and military, had an essential place, I will not say among the
virtues of his character, but among the virtues of his station in life.
He was never absent at any Sunday mass, any feast of the church, or any
parade. He had an enthusiasm for Field Marshal Radetzky, whom he had
known well personally. The glory of the Austrian army was in his eyes
one of the most admirable constituents of the universe. Society (by this
name he distinguished the circle in which he was born and in which he
moved) was to him the only class of human beings whose lives and fates
interested him; and he always attended all the great functions given at
the houses of the Schwarzenbergs, the Pallavacinis, etc. In the
Adelskasino he had his regular rubbers of whist with sundry friends of
his own rank. He was fond of card-playing in general—not gambling games,
for he was in the highest degree steady, but innocent games such as
piquet, omber, tarteln. This last he used to play with my mother at his
twice-a-week morning visit to our house, and I was allowed to sit by to
mark the points of the game with my little pencil. The various marriages
in society interested him greatly; he had a troop of nephews and nieces
who made more or less successful matches. He himself, though the male
line was to become extinct with him, did not think of marrying. The
reason was that he cherished an affection for a lady who, while she was
the widow of an aristocrat, was not by birth capable of being presented
at court, so a marriage with her appeared to be simply out of the
question. He would not cause such a vexation to his family—and at bottom
it would have been a vexation to him too; for everything that was out of
the rut, outside of tradition, outside of “correctness,” went against
his grain.
This figure stands before my memory as a type of the old-fashioned
Austrian: a type of which there are doubtless some specimens still, but
which, as is the fate of all types, is dying out. Our country is now
made up of Slavs, Germans, Croats, Italians, (it would not do at all to
say Magyars, they would grievously resent it,) and a few more
nationalities, but the collective name “Austrian” cannot again become a
proudly patriotic conception until—if ever—all the different races, with
individual autonomy, form a federative state as do the Germans, French,
and Italians in Switzerland. A friend of mine—a middle-class man, but
one who is made very welcome at court—was lately telling me of an
interview that he had with the Emperor not long ago. In the course of a
political conversation the Emperor asked him to what party he belonged:
“To the one which has only a single adherent, that is myself.” “And what
party is that?” “The Austrian, your Majesty.” “Well, how about me? don’t
you count me?” rejoined Franz Joseph, smiling.
—To come back to the past and my dear Fritzerl. It is a good thing that
he did not live to see the events of 1866. The defeats in Bohemia, the
severance of Venetia,—it would have cut him to the heart. And he would
have found it simply incomprehensible, as it were a calamity violating
all the laws of nature, and especially all divine ordinance. In that
conception of the world which characterizes the type that I refer to, an
essential point is the belief that Austria is the center of the world,
and that any disaster which befalls it—especially any disaster in
war—means an unnatural neglect of duty on the part of Providence. Unless
such defeats be meant as punishment, as merited chastisement for the
spread of unbelief, the dissolution of morals,[1] the dissemination of
revolutionary ideas. Then, surely, there is no help but by introducing
strict discipline, reorganizing the army vigorously; then perhaps the
Creator can be reconciled and the history of the world corrected by
future reconquests. Fritzerl was spared these pains and these
reflections.
If I said just now that there were still living some specimens of that
type, I was probably mistaken. It is simply impossible that to-day the
world is still mirrored in any head as it was mirrored in the heads of
those who were born within the eighteenth century, who lived during the
first introduction of the railway, who held the first photograph in
their hands, who saw with some repugnance the displacement of oil lamps
by petroleum. Essential to that old Austrian type (and it is the same
with the old English and other old national types) is a certain
limitation of experience and knowledge which to-day can no longer exist
even in the most conservative circles.
That types alter from generation to generation, that outlooks, views,
feelings change, is a fact of which one can best judge by one’s self
when one looks back into the past. For every man, though in most cases
he hugs the delusion of being a uniform continuous ego with definite
qualities of character, is himself a chain of the most diverse types.
Every new experience—leaving quite out of account the bodily changes of
blooming and fading, of health and disease—modifies the mental essence.
How much one sees, whether with the bodily eye as a landscape or with
the mental as an outlook on the world, is not a matter of stronger or
weaker eyesight, but peculiarly a matter of horizon.
If I look back into my childhood and youth, I do not see myself as the
same person, as having altered, but see standing side by side the most
diverse girl forms, each with a different horizon of ideas and filled
with different hopes, interests, and sensations. And if I set beside
them the forms from my maturer womanhood, or my present age, what have I
(beyond the mere recollection, as faint as the recollection of pictures
long since seen, or books long since read) in common with those
phantoms, or they with me? Dissolving mists, flying shadows, a passing
breath, is what life is.
My first love was no meaner a person than Franz Joseph I, Emperor of
Austria. To be sure I had never seen him,—only his picture,—but I
idolized him ardently. That he would marry me did not seem to me at all
beyond the bounds of possibility; on the contrary, fate owed me
something of the sort. Of course I should have to wait five or six years
yet, for I recognized that a ten-year-old child could not be made
empress. I should have to have bloomed out into a maiden of fifteen or
sixteen, the most beautiful maiden in the land; the young sovereign
would sometime espy me, enter into a conversation with me, be ravished
with my qualities of mind, and immediately lay his august person at my
feet. That was the time when I was convinced that the world had a
fairy-tale fortune ready for me. I exerted myself sincerely to deserve
it and to be ready to show brilliantly, when it came, that I had found
my right place; learning, learning, practicing, practicing, amazing
myself with my progress and knowledge. I was a real infant prodigy—in my
own eyes. It is true that I spoke French and English well (from my
earliest childhood I had had French and English _bonnes_), I played the
piano remarkably well, I had read an enormous deal: the Abbé Fleury’s
_Histoire de France, Le Siège de la Rochelle_; Victor Hugo’s _Ruy Blas_
and _Marie Tudor_; half of Schiller, Fladung’s Physics; “Jane Eyre,”
“Uncle Tom’s Cabin,”—those were the books (not children’s books, it will
be seen) in which I reveled at that age. Besides, I loved to dip into
the cyclopedia and pluck blossoms of all branches of knowledge. From
love of learning? I will not assert it; I think those lovely blossoms
seemed to me desirable only to make a wreath of for my adornment.
As an evil chance would have it, so soon as the year 1854—consequently I
was only eleven years old—Emperor Franz Joseph espied his cousin
Elisabeth, engaged in conversation with her, and laid his august person
at _her_ feet. I was not exactly unhappy (there are plenty more fairy
princes), but thenceforth I took a lively interest in Elisabeth of
Bavaria, sought for portraits of her, thought she bore some resemblance
to me, and imitated her way of doing her hair. You see, my actual
vehement passion for my young liege had died out some time since.
_Chiodo caccia chiodo_; the Italians use this proverb to illustrate the
fact that one love expels another.
On my eleventh birthday I had been taken to the theater for the first
time. “The White Lady”[2] was given. Ah, but that George Brown! (“What
joy to be a soldier!”) Yes, that is the comeliest profession—next to
that of opera tenor. For anything more captivating than that singer,—I
still remember his very name, Theodor Formes, so the impression must
have been deep,—anything more chivalrous I had never dreamed of. The
prince destined for me must look like that. He would not even have to be
a prince; only, if possible, in case he was not a tenor,—I would not
have given Herr Formes the mitten,—at any rate a soldier. In telling
this I see that I was a silly girl, to be sure, but not a genuine child.
That is probably due to my not having had any playmate of my own age,
but living only in the world of books, whose heroes were themselves not
children but grown people, whose fortunes turned mostly upon love and
marriage.
The most important thing in the universe, anyhow, was my little person.
The course of the world was only the machinery whose wheels were all
geared for the purpose of preparing a radiant good fortune for me. Was I
alone such a foolish, conceited child, or is this center-of-the-world
feeling a natural feeling in general among children and creatures of
limited intelligence? Is modesty a noble fruit which ripens only on the
tree of experience and knowledge?
It is just by this that the type of a man or of a class may be
authentically gauged—by _what appears important_. Of notable importance
to me in those days of childhood, besides the all-overtopping “I,” were
the Christmas festival; the great spring house-cleaning; the Old Ladies’
Home at Brünn; chestnut-gathering in the paths of the Augarten, carpeted
with autumn leaves; Fritzerl’s visits, my mother’s beautiful singing,
this mother’s axiomatic great love for me, and my love for her, which
was so great that when she went to Vienna for two or three days I would
sob for hours as if my heart were broken.
With such a circle of importance I might frame all the various sections
of my life, and thereby most clearly realize the phases, from that first
memory of the important pattern of braid on the white cashmere frock
down to the ideal of an assured international reign of law, which to-day
appears to me a thing so important as to discount everything else.
Here it is a question of something that is yet to come into existence,
and I think that attention to such things is but rare. Most people—and
with them I in the earlier epochs of my life—take the surrounding world
and the prevailing conditions as something given, axiomatic, almost
unalterable, upon whose origin one thinks but little, and upon making
any possible change in it not at all. As the air is here for breathing,
and one is not called upon to make any change in it, so the given social
order—political and moral—is here to furnish the atmosphere, the vital
air, of our social existence. Of course one does not think that in these
words, for the conception I speak of is altogether artless; that is, it
exists rather in sensation than in consciousness, just as we also,
without becoming conscious of it, draw breath constantly and do not
think of the quantity of nitrogen and oxygen in the air.
The recollection of a visit to the country in the year 1854 has remained
vividly fixed in my memory. To this day I see before me different
pictures of the castle, garden, and forest of the domain of Matzen,
while so many other scenes which I have since looked upon have vanished
from my memory. A peculiar camera it is that one carries in his head, in
which many pictures etch themselves so deeply and clearly, while others
leave no trace. It must be that the apparatus just snaps open for a
moment in the brain, but remains closed most of the time, so that the
outer world does not get photographed.
Then was not the first time that I had been at Matzen, but of the
earlier visit I have only a very dim idea. I only see myself carried
into the drawing-room in the nurse’s arms to be caressed there by the
lady of the house, Aunt Betty Kinsky, and her two grown daughters, Rosa
and Tinka. In the year 1854, when my mother was invited to Matzen again,
Aunt Betty no longer held sway there; she had died some years
previously, and the daughters had married away,—Rosa to a Baron Hahn in
Graz, Tinka to General Count Crenneville, commandant of the fortress of
Mainz. Mainz, you know, was at that time an Austrian garrison. How
things do shift on this changeable surface of our earth—where
everything, indeed, is in a continual process of change; but more
swiftly and unexpectedly than mountains and valleys, than the forests
and cities of a country, do its political boundaries and dependencies
change.
To come back to Matzen, which still stands on the same spot, but which I
have not seen again since then,—it was at that time under the dominion
of a newly married couple. On the same day when Emperor Franz Joseph
celebrated his wedding with Elisabeth of Bavaria, Count Christian
Kinsky, the present lord of Matzen and Angern, had brought home his
bride, Countess Therese Wrbna. A handsome and happy young couple.
A merrier, wittier man than “Christl” Kinsky cannot be imagined. To this
all Vienna society bears witness. Even at an advanced age, in the
anything but merry position of provincial marshal, he was able to bring
gayety and good humor even into the party-rent provincial assembly hall.
The castle, old and towered, stands on a wooded mountain; from the
second story a door leads out to a bit of level ground on which a
decorative garden is planted, and before the garden grill lies the
forest. A pavilion stands in the garden, and on the table in it lay
colored glasses, blue, yellow, red. They had me look out upon nature
through these (this memory dates from an earlier visit at Matzen, when I
was still quite small), and to see this blue forest, this yellow garden,
this green sky, was a magical surprise to me—I screamed with happiness.
Oh, there is nothing to beat having been just lately born, and feeling
as new everything—everything—that the world offers; tasting everything
for the first time. It would be fine to keep being born over again and
keep beginning everything over again from the start, traversing again
the magic realm of surprises that dazzles us with the first colored
glass, with the first Christmas-tree candle, somewhat later with the
first kiss, and always as an undreamed-of virgin country....
II
EARLY YOUTH
Elvira · Playing “puff” · My mother’s singing · Clairvoyant Aunt Lotti ·
Roulette and trente-et-quarante · Castles in the air · My first
journey · Season in Wiesbaden · Return · Grillparzer and
Ebner-Eschenbach at Elvira’s · Radetzky’s death · A schoolgirl romance
When I was nearly twelve years old I was for the first time vouchsafed
the good fortune of getting a companion of almost my own age.
A sister of my mother, known to me as Aunt Lotti, came on a visit,
accompanied by her only daughter, Elvira. We two girls were fired with
friendship for each other. I say “fired,” for our mutual affection was
an ardent one, and Elvira in particular showed a real adoration for me.
Aunt Lotti was the widow of a Saxon named Büschel, by occupation a
gentleman of leisure and bookworm. Elvira had, so to speak, grown up in
her father’s library. Büschel’s favorite department had been philosophy,
and he conversed with his little one mainly about Hegel, Fichte, and
Kant. For refreshment from such heavy diet he handed her Shakespeare.
And for very special sugarplums, Uhland, Körner, Hölderlin. Of course
the result of this education was a little bluestocking. Elvira had begun
writing at the age of eight,—songs, ballads, and the like,—and when I
made her acquaintance she had already composed several dramas in prose
and a few tragedies in verse. That she was to become the greatest
poetess of the century was a settled thing in her mind, in Aunt Lotti’s,
and in mine. Perhaps she would have, if an early death had not snatched
her away. She did win the recognition of great connoisseurs—I name only
Grillparzer, who read her pieces with admiring amazement and prophesied
a great future for her. In our family circle her genius was undisputed.
And she had that quality which stands for half of genius, iron-faced
industry. Every day she—the child—voluntarily spent three or four
consecutive hours at the writing-desk and wrote, wrote, wrote. Often she
had several pieces of work on the stocks,—a story, a drama, and various
poems in between. I remember the titles of some of the large pieces: one
was called “Karl the Sixth,” another “Delascar.” The name of this last
hero (I think he was a Moor) particularly pleased me, and seemed to me
to be of itself a guaranty of success. Whether these dramas were ever
completed I do not remember. I know I made their acquaintance in the
form of outlines—it was only individual scenes that were already
finished, certain especially effective monologues. Elvira was an
indefatigable user of the file. If on one day she had read to us a great
speech of Delascar’s, she often let us hear on the next day an entirely
new edition of the same speech.
To me her future renown was a tenet of faith. And she did not doubt the
fairy-tale fortune that life must bring to me; for, though she conceded
my intellectual inferiority (there was not a vestige of literary
tendency in me, the lyre was no more my instrument than the French
horn), she had unbounded admiration for my physical endowments and
social talents—I must become a great lady and take all hearts by storm.
As may be seen, we did not fail in mutual appreciation, and this was the
soil in which our friendship flourished so luxuriantly.
Elvira did not hope any social successes for herself. She was conscious
of her bashfulness and her lack of beauty. Small, with too large a head,
a Schiller head, she was certainly not a pretty girl; besides, she was
awkward in her movements, helpless in conversation,—no, as a woman she
would assuredly never please, while she was convinced (a conviction
which I shared) that I as such would achieve all sorts of triumphs. She
contented herself with the part destined to her, to become the Sappho of
the nineteenth century. A modest little pair of cousins, it must be
confessed!
So we were friends and swore lifelong fidelity to each other; we were
playmates too. But he who at this word imagines that we played together
with dolls or hoops, as would have befitted our age, is mistaken. We
played “puff.” That was a game invented by us, named so by ourselves,
with which we used to amuse ourselves, for hours at a time.
It consisted in this: we acted a comedy. Elvira took the part of the
hero, I of the heroine. The hero kept changing: now it was a French
marquis, now a Spanish student, or a rich English lord, or a young navy
officer, or a statesman who has come to rather mature years, often a
king appearing incognito; but I always represented myself, the heroine
was always Bertha Kinsky, mostly sixteen or seventeen years old, but in
many combinations already getting elderly—say twenty-two or
twenty-three. The comedy usually ended with a marriage; but there were
occasions when the hero died—then, naturally, it was a tragedy.
Before the game began, the time and place of the action were specified,
the hero’s name and description had to be settled, and a situation
prescribed. For example: In the year 1860 Bertha would be staying at a
castle near Moscow as the guest of the Russian ambassador’s wife. The
lady’s brother, Prince Alexander Alexandrovitch Rassumof, a very gloomy
and melancholy misanthrope, tall, elegant, dressed in black, with
uncannily gleaming eyes, is among the inmates of the house, but rarely
shows himself. He is understood to have been through a great misfortune
(a dark story of a false woman, of an opponent shot in a duel—the
particulars are not known) and to have withdrawn from the world. The
scene represents the garden, on the bank of a pond where a few swans are
gliding. I am sitting on a bench under a weeping willow with a book in
my hand, and from a side alley comes, buried in deep thought,—Alexander
Alexandrovitch. Now, after this was settled, the game could begin, and
we said “Puff.” By this magic word we were transformed into the dramatis
personæ—I into the seventeen-year-old Bertha, Elvira into the mysterious
Russian. And the dialogue began. If we wanted to interrupt the game for
a moment, we said “Puff,” and straightway we were again the two little
cousins, telling each other something: a scenic remark, such as “This
pencil means a pistol,” or perhaps something private that had no
connection with the game. And only when “Puff” was pronounced again was
the dialogue resumed. To indicate that the one or the other changed
color we had special signs: a quick and slight inflation of the cheeks
meant a faint blush; vigorous inflation, repeated a few times, meant
“suffused with crimson”; a swift, lightning-like drawing down of the
corners of the mouth was turning pale; a complete rolling over of the
under lip was downright ghostly pallor. The course that the piece was to
take was not sketched in advance, but was left to the spontaneous
development of the conversations and feelings, for in it we really felt
awaking interest in each other, budding affection, and usually, to end
with, glowing love that led to union for life. Such a dialogized novel
often lasted for days; for we could not go on playing without
interruption, since we were called away by other occupations,—lessons,
walks, meals, etc. The presence of our mothers did not always disturb
us: we sat down in another corner of the room, out of hearing, said
“Puff,” and the gloomy Alexander, or whatever was the name of the hero
of the day, was there again. To be sure we liked the game better when we
were alone, for then the dialogue could be accompanied with telling
gestures, and emotion could be expressed by raising our voices. When
such a comedy was played through, a new hero and a new situation must be
devised. Not always did something suggest itself; if not, we sat or
walked together in a state of sober paff, or chatted, till suddenly the
one or the other cried _Wasatem_. (Abbreviation for _Ich weiss ein
Thema_, “I know a topic.”) If the proposed topic seemed good and
interesting, then the word was “Puff,” and the transformation was
accomplished.
I remember that once, when we were playing in our corner of the room,
Aunt Lotti, busy with embroidery at the other end, called out, “There, I
don’t like your cough a bit, Elvira! So dry and so obstinate—we shall
have to ask the doctor.” Now Elvira had at that time no cough whatever,
but we had for several days been engaged in an extraordinarily touching
game of puff, in which the lover was a consumptive doomed to death.
I have spoken of my mother’s beautiful singing. This singing played a
great and influential part in my childhood and later life. My mother
always regarded it as a tragical missing of her vocation that she had
not become an opera singer. In her early youth a famous Italian maestro
had tested her voice and given her the assurance that no such soprano
had been heard since Grisi, Pasta, and Malibran, and to this was to be
added her dazzling presence; in short, the loftiest triumphs, the
richest harvests of gold, would have lain open to the beautiful girl if
she had adopted the theatrical career. Such was the opinion of the
maestro, who also undertook to give her singing lessons after the old
Italian method, and had, among other things, brought it to pass that she
gave Norma’s entrance recitative with full-toned and tragic power, again
putting to shame all the Grisis, Pastas, and Malibrans. But neither my
grandparents nor “Aunt Claudius,” who had taken charge of my mother and
brought her up, would hear a word of the theater, which in those days
was still regarded as a sink of iniquity; and mamma’s Norma recitative
never rang out on the boards, but very often thereafter in my nursery
(where our piano stood), and imprinted itself on my soul as the ne plus
ultra of womanly heroism and of operatic art. Druid priestess and
mistletoe bough, passion, sublimity,—thus stood in my imagination the
gleaming picture of Norma, enveloped in sweetest magic of melody, in
unearthly potency of voice.
To her old age my mother felt it as an affront, as a deprivation of all
the treasures that nature by her wonderous gifts had destined for her,
that she had not been allowed to take a course of training for the
theater. Indeed, if I should prove to have inherited this voice, she
might perhaps then be able to experience in her daughter the same
triumphs that she had missed; but of course the theatrical career would
be still more out of place for a Countess Kinsky than it would have been
for Fräulein von Körner, and it would not have done even to tell of such
an idea to Fritzerl. Nor did any wish for it awake in me myself. I saw
my future plainly before me, it was marked out for me in our daily games
of puff: to be grown up and introduced into the world, to have hearts
and offers of marriage flying to me, to meet the one, the only one, to
whom my heart too would fly, because he was the most aristocratic, the
most beautiful, the wisest, richest, and noblest of all. What he would
offer to me, and I richly pay back to him, would be perfect and lifelong
happiness.
It was soon manifest, too, that I had not a phenomenal voice; and only
in such a case could my mother have contemplated the project of an
artistic career for me, so there was no more talk of that possibility.
Whether my mother really possessed such a splendid voice as that maestro
had persuaded her, and talent with it, of course I could not judge, but
I took it on trust as a part of my creed; her singing pleased me very
much, but what does a child understand? When I now go back to that time
in thought, doubts come up in my mind, for her repertory was very
dilettantish. Besides that Norma recitative and the immediately
following adagio, _Casta diva_, she sang only the very easiest songs,
making such a selection as—in my present judgment—does not itself give
reason for inferring an artistic taste. To be sure, at that time there
were no songs by Wolff and Brahms, not to say Richard Strauss; but even
in those days pieces like _Du hast Diamanten und Perlen_, “Spanish
Serenade,” _Blau Äugelein, Gute Nacht du mein herziges Kind_, “Oh, tell
me, will she come to pray upon my grave,” and the like, belonged in the
category of street songs and sentimental trash. She was not a pianist,
so she could not accompany herself. Three times a week she sang for an
hour accompanied by my piano teacher. If he brought a new song she had
him play the voice part with the accompaniment, and the learning was a
prolonged and toilsome task for her. From all this I now conclude that
she was by no means a musical genius; and it takes that, aside from the
strength, volume, and tunefulness of the voice, to be a Pasta, Grisi,
Malibran, or a Henriette Sontag. My mother told many stories of the
fortunes and victories of these celebrated stars; then with the story
there sounded the undertone that she had been deprived of enjoying the
like successes, and the feeling fastened itself upon me that a great
singer was a marvelous sort of being at whose feet all contemporaries
knelt in adoration.
My dear mother’s was altogether a rather enthusiastic, high-keyed
temperament. Often she gave expression to her feelings in poems; but she
had no ambition or vanity connected with this branch of her talents. She
did not think herself a gifted poet; but she never lost the conviction
that she _could_ have been in music a star of the first magnitude.
Soon we had still more leisure to carry on our games of puff, Elvira and
I. Our two mothers took a trip to the baths in the summer of the year
1855, and we two stayed at home under the charge of a governess. Their
destination was Wiesbaden. The two ladies liked it so well there that in
the early summer of the next year they went there again, and this
time,—oh indescribable ecstasy—they took us with them. The first
considerable journey in my life! Up to that time I had only been taken a
few times to Vienna for two or three days, and that had been to me each
time a festal occasion; but now a real journey to foreign parts, a
prospective stay of weeks or perhaps months in a famous resort—it was
too heavenly!
Besides, utility was to be combined with pleasure there. For nothing
less was intended than to carry off one or two millions from the
gaming-table. Aunt Lotti regarded herself as a clairvoyant. She was
always having to do with presentiments, dreams, magnetic sleep, and such
things. During the epidemic of table-tipping she had also been an
extraordinary medium. Under her fingers the tables danced and leaped,
and then even cupboards that weighed hundreds of pounds, etc. I often
saw it myself; and when I helped form the chain there was such a
coruscating “fluid” coming into my finger-tips too, that everything that
I touched—the tables, the piano teacher’s tall hat, and the piano
itself—began to run around. I remember it clearly, and could therefore
come out as a palmary witness for table-tipping if I were not
distrustful of the testimony of a child’s perception. It may have been
imagination. But Aunt Lotti would not let any doubts be raised as to the
whole sphere of the occult in general. Nothing could offend her more
than not to acknowledge her gift of second sight.
In other respects she was a very sensible woman, and, as the widow of a
scholar who had made her a participant in his intellectual concerns, she
was many-sided in her culture and free-thinking in her tendencies; so
her vein of occultism could not be taken as childish superstition. There
was something else too. She often suffered from convulsions, and readily
fell into hypnotic sleep, which in those days was not yet called by that
name but by that of magnetic sleep, and the visions of which were rated
as clairvoyance. The result was that she regarded these phenomena, which
lay beyond the range of her normal waking life, as an especially
mysterious power of her own, a power of vision reaching into the future.
During her stay at Wiesbaden the preceding year she had learned that
when she went into the roulette room a number came into her mind, and
then this number won. She did not play, she only noticed this in
silence. My mother preferred to look on at the playing in the
trente-et-quarante room, and she thought she perceived in herself too
the gift of foreseeing when black won. She too did not play; but when
they were back from the journey neither of the two sisters could get rid
of the idea that it would really be an easy thing for them to get a
colossal fortune out of the German banks.
But such a thing was not to be lightly undertaken; it was essential to
test the phenomenon. So Aunt Lotti got a little bag with thirty-six
numbers and a zero, my mother six packs of cards, and now a systematic
test was carried out. Aunt Lotti threw herself into a sort of trance by
fixed staring and concentrated thinking, till a number flashed through
her brain; then Elvira put her hand in the bag and drew out a number. To
be sure, it was not invariably the foreseen one, but very often an
adjoining or similar one. For instance, the seer’s number was 5 and the
drawn one was 6 (adjoining) or 25 (similar); so the method was
determined to be that the transversals of the number thought of should
be bet on. Only those who know roulette will understand me; I consider
it superfluous to make myself clearer to others, as I have not the least
intention of starting a propaganda for Aunt Lotti’s system of play.
Regular accounts were kept of the losses and winnings, and the result
was uniformly a large amount of net winnings. Was there self-deception
about it? I do not know; but the imaginary ledger always showed immense
accumulations of profit. For the start was made with small stakes, and
as the capital grew the stake was increased till it reached the maximum,
and in this way there was no limit to the gains. Poor gambling-houses!
Would we content ourselves with relieving them of one or two millions,
or would we ruin them entirely? That was left for further consideration.
The latter would certainly be a moral deed, for gaming is an evil
passion by which so many are seduced and ruined or at least injured, for
it is a vice which—Aunt Lotti despised gaming; it was hateful to her;
but when one was furnished with such a miraculous gift would it not have
been a downright _sin_ not to lift the treasures to which one needed
only to put out a hand?
Aunt Lotti took no stock in my mother’s similar plans, for she was no
clairvoyant, no natural wonder, only a sort of imitator. It would soon
be seen that nothing was to be realized. But my mother’s tests came out
just as brilliantly. I myself dealt the cards and entered the winnings
and losses in a little book. The winnings were always so much the
greater that the first million was reached in a few weeks. “Chance,”
opined Aunt Lotti. Self-deception? I now ask myself in this case also.
The figures were there, and now plan-making and air-castle building
broke out among us in great style. In the neighborhood of Brünn there is
a Liechtenstein domain, Eisgrub, with a marvelous castle and park; we
had seen it once when we were on a picnic. We would buy Eisgrub. Perhaps
Prince Liechtenstein would not part with it—well, one can have anything
if one only pays a price well above the market value. The castle was
most beautifully furnished, but yet a good many things would have to be
changed; for instance, I was to have a chamber with porcelain walls and
porcelain furniture. This porcelain room afforded me such anticipatory
joys of possession as few things ever did. The pink diamonds in my
future jewel case were a delight to me too. All people have white
diamonds—the pink stones would be something special. But our wishes did
not turn merely toward ornament and show; we meant also to practice
beneficence on a large scale, i. e. build asylums for the blind,
hospitals, etc.; and surprise with adequate properties all our kinsfolk
and acquaintances who were suffering from any sort of lack. This whole
array of dreams of the future, which had consolidated into an assured
expectation, represented “the important thing” to me at that time.
Elvira kept aloof from all this plan-making. She set no store by earthly
possessions; the only harvest she wanted to reap was poetic fame; her
fancy was too thoroughly busied with its own creations to occupy itself
with idle air-castle-building into the bargain. Our games of puff had
undergone some modifications now: at present the hero no longer needed
to be furnished with wealth, but other combinations were devised. A poor
but proud lieutenant rejecting the adored millionairess who absolutely
throws herself at his head, but moved to relent by the sight of her
despair threatening to pass into consumption.
Thus the summer of 1856 came on, and the journey to Wiesbaden was
undertaken. Each of the million-huntresses carried in her cartridge box
(i. e. portemonnaie) a capital of a few hundred florins set apart for
this use; and the game bags too, i. e. two big portfolios with
combination locks, were in readiness for the noble quarry.
My guardian Fürstenberg was not taken into confidence: he was the
personification of propriety and sober sense; anything queer was hateful
to him. He did not approve of the journey itself to begin with. If he
had known what crazy ideas (for he would certainly have thought them
crazy) were connected with it, he would perhaps have put in a veto. He
did try to talk them out of the trip to the foreign watering-place; he
was particularly not suited with the fact that I was to be taken along.
I ought not to be interrupted in my studies; besides, it struck him that
my education in the most important things was very backward. Thus, e.
g., I was not at all skillful with the needle. To be sure I regaled him
every Christmas, and on the day of his patron saint, with embroidered
pillows and slippers that teemed with roses and lilies, if it was not
cat-heads or lion-heads for variety; but I was not capable of knitting
an honest stocking, he knew, and he disapproved. I did not seem to him
pious enough either: I knew the catechism by heart, no doubt, and had
taken my first communion, but yet it did not seem to him that I had the
right zeal for the faith, took the right pleasure in going to church.
As a counterpart to my guardian, Landgrave Fürstenberg, my cousin had
her godfather General Count Huyn. He too had been on terms of close
friendship with her father, and continued always anxious about his
godchild’s welfare. He was more than conventionally pious, he was
exaggeratedly pious. He had carried on long discussions with Elvira’s
father; the Protestant scholar’s philosophy accorded but ill with the
Catholic aristocrat’s religiousness verging on bigotry, but this
divergence had been no detriment to their friendship—it was in the
sphere of the most profound speculation that they conducted their
theologico-philosophical debates, for Count Huyn’s piety was not that of
simplicity but of Scriptural learning, so both of them found
intellectual stimulus in these disquisitions.
Elvira had to write to her godfather every week, and usually received
answers—friendly admonitions, little sermons. He knew of her poetic
activity, but did not approve of it. Literature seemed to him most
unbecoming to women. Virtuous and pious, modest and gentle, industrious,
submissive, unassuming,—these were to be the qualities that it was for
his little goddaughter Karoline (he never called her Elvira) to acquire.
My cousin respected her godfather highly, but did not lay his sermons to
heart. She, who had already read—I will not say understood—Hegel and
Fichte and Kant, was not to be reached by the precepts of the primer. As
a philosopher’s daughter and pupil she had come to take a view of the
world which went beyond the line of creeds and represented deism on a
basis of natural science.
I too, despite my youth, had fed my mind on Kant and Descartes, had
studied Plato’s _Phaedo_ and Humboldt’s _Kosmos_, and along with these
the history of the wars of the Inquisition and of religion; and to the
question “What religion do you profess?” I should have replied with
Schiller, at that time my favorite poet, “None—I am too religious to.”
The first long journey—that brings on an indescribably sweet fever.
Traveling was not indeed so comfortable at that time as to-day (though
the comfort of to-day does still leave a great deal to be desired);
there were then neither dining-cars nor toilet-rooms nor sleeping-cars;
there was much of martyrdom connected with the ride; yet this journey
seemed to me the sum of all enjoyment—nay, more, of all happiness.
When we arrived, our mothers were totally used up; we two schoolgirls
felt nothing but sheer bliss. First a day of rest in the hotel, then
house-hunting; then moving to a villa on the street that runs along the
Kurort to the Dietenmühle; from our balcony one could hear the tones of
the music at the Kur. Visit to the Kursaal. Entrance by a vestibule;
then through a great ballroom with marble pillars, then to the right
into the suite of gaming-rooms. Children were not admitted there; but we
two, Elvira with her fourteen years, I with my thirteen and tall of my
age, were regarded as young girls, and the liveried porters made no
objections. All four of us wandered through the two roulette parlors,
the two trente-et-quarante parlors, and the adjoining reception-rooms.
All this was not at that time so gorgeously furnished as are now the
gaming-rooms of the Casino at Monte Carlo, but was more like the
interior of a castle. After we had seen the halls we went back through
the ballroom and out on the other side of the building, to the terrace
and the park. In the middle of the park lies a large pond, out of which
rises a fountain, and on which dazzlingly white swans float. The
music—an Austrian military band from Mainz—is playing on the terrace;
and below the terrace stand chairs and tables, and there one sees a
numerous and elegant assemblage sitting, standing, walking up and down.
Many uniforms among them. The Prussian and Austrian garrisons from the
fort, and also the Nassau army, are numerously represented there. Our
mothers had a few last year’s acquaintances here; among others, a Nassau
court dignitary with his wife; and by chance these were present on that
first day, so social life was immediately started. That did not at all
suit our mothers though: they had come for a far too serious piece of
work to give themselves up to sociality. But in the forenoons they would
be free, for the patrons of the place did not assemble till the time of
the afternoon music; and perhaps it was even better to take the mind off
now and then from the harassing exertion of the efforts to foresee.
A very tall youth in cadet uniform came up to our group. He was a nephew
of the Court Marshal of Nassau, and begged to be introduced; Baron
Friedrich von Hadeln. The young man saluted respectfully first the older
ladies, then, with equal respect, us two. We thanked him graciously: we
really were, then, already veritable young ladies.
Friedrich von Hadeln—he may have been eighteen years old—had strikingly
noble features, a sort of Roman head. He talked very vivaciously,
addressing especially us two. Elvira could not overcome her bashfulness,
and remained reticent. I reaped the benefit of the conversational
practice in our games of puff, and engaged in a lively dialogue.
The main action of the plot began at once on the next day. Aunt Lotti
betook herself to the roulette table and won. While she was in the
gaming-room we two girls stayed out on the terrace under my mother’s
protection. And when my mother then went about her serious task—likewise
winning on the first days—Aunt Lotti took up the business of watching
over us. My youth fell in a time when a girl of good family must not
stay a quarter of an hour unwatched. Ten steps across the street
alone—that must not happen; by that one would have been, if not lost,
yet irremediably compromised. The chaperon system, from which the young
womanhood of to-day has made its escape by the bicycle, by the
tennis-racket, and by the total change of standpoint in general, was
then in its fullest vogue.
The thriving business of the millions (each had already doubled her
working capital) was carried on only in the forenoon; the afternoon was
filled out at the Kur music, or in walks to the Dietenmühle or the Greek
chapel, and very frequently young Hadeln joined us. In the villa next
door to us there lived an English family, Sir and Lady Tancred, with a
seventeen-year-old daughter named Lucy. My cousin became violently
infatuated with Lucy, but the little Englishwoman preferred me. I
remember a call that the Tancred family made upon us, when the mother
(who, be it said, was expecting very soon to be again a mother) sat down
to the piano and sang an English ballad. The lady, who may have been
thirty-four to thirty-five, seemed to us inordinately old, and the
recollection of her performance remained in our memory for years as a
fearfully comical episode. To be sure, she also sang without any voice,
and with that English exaggeration of accented syllables which in itself
is so unmusical. To choke down our laughter cost us an unspeakable
effort at the time, and for years it continued to be a favorite comic
performance in our circle when I sat down to the piano and sang as Lady
Tancred “Oh—remembrance will come and remembrance will go—oh!”
Every Wednesday there was a ball in the great ballroom of the Kurhaus,
but it was a very mixed company that attended. Every Saturday, on the
other hand, there was held in the small halls a “_réunion dansante_” to
which one had to procure cards of invitation, and in which there came
together only the élite of the outsiders and the leaders of local
society. Lady Tancred meant to take her daughter to one of these. Our
mothers were urged to come too, and to bring us. “Ridiculous!” said
they; “such children at a grown people’s ball! It’s out of the
question.” But the Tancreds kept soliciting them, and we plied them with
the most urgent entreaties, till the scruples gave way. Why, were we
being treated as children here at all? Were we not taken to the Kursaal,
to the music in the park? did not all the people, especially the young
gentlemen, behave toward us as if we were grown up? Oh well, then, so be
it; these little _réunions_ are not formal balls anyhow, and if it gives
the children such very great pleasure....
Meanwhile the great undertaking had fallen off somewhat. The winnings
were gone again. Some blunder had been made, against which they would be
on their guard in the future—you see it is different here from what it
is at home—one gets carried away and plays without regard to the system;
such a thing must not happen again. The thing to do now was, first rest
a few days, and then begin at the beginning again and adhere strictly to
the rules.
The preparations for the _réunion_ were made. We were to wear misty
white dresses, and for ornaments—the idea originated with us children—a
wreath of cornflowers in our hair, a garland of cornflowers outlining
the top of the corsage, and the overskirt caught up with little bunches
of cornflowers. In the villa next door lived a florist; the order was
given to him. I can still remember how I felt in the greenhouse where
the florist took our order: how damp and warm it smelt there, how the
red and white and yellow blossoms flamed round about—but loveliest among
all the gay flower-mosaic the blue of a mass of cornflowers. Would we
not look like elves of the field, so fresh and unassuming and
poetic?—And that in the brightly lighted ballroom! We should make a
sensation, and we were blissful—blissful as ever silly girls can be
before their first ball, which they really have not yet any proper right
to attend. But were we not exceptional creatures altogether, born to
exceptional fates? If the million-factory did go wrong, what of it? The
cornflowers would be a more original adornment than diamonds, and
happiness did not lie in the external world and its treasures; it lay in
us, in our buoyant sense of youth, in our—let me say it—immeasurable
conceit. The one the greatest female dramatist of the future; the other,
if nothing else, at any rate a beauty thronged with adorers—Oh, the
silly, silly girls!
The great day came on. The florist punctually delivered his garlands:
they were fastened to our clothes and into our hair; it really did look
pretty, even if not so celestial as in our eyes. There was still
daylight—for the month was June and the hour for the assembly was
eight—when we, each with her mamma, got into two carriages (in one our
toilets would have been crumpled up too much) and arrived at the Kursaal
with beating hearts. On entering the brilliantly lighted parlors we saw
our image in the ceiling-high mirrors, and observed the fact that the
cornflowers appeared no longer blue but lilac. However, this did not
impair the originality of the floral ornaments.
We met many acquaintances, and new ones had themselves introduced.
Friedrich von Hadeln asked me for the first quadrille. I thought I
noticed that a shade of annoyance flew over Elvira’s face. My vis-à-vis
in this first quadrille of my life was Hadeln’s older sister Franziska.
When her brother told me Franziska was twenty-three years old, I was
amazed that so elderly a young lady still cared to dance, and I felt
pity for her.
Among the Nassau officers who had themselves introduced to my mother and
me there was a Prince Philipp Wittgenstein, who, as far as I can
remember, paid noticeable attentions to me. Was a living game of puff to
begin on this very first evening? Nay, for the young lieutenant did not
especially please me, and I did have sense enough to see that I was
still rather too young to marry. But it is a fact that a week later, on
occasion of the second _réunion_, Prince Philipp Wittgenstein formally
asked my mother for my hand.
My mother laughed: “The child is thirteen years old—under these
circumstances you will not take offense at my declining your offer.”
Thereupon the suitor withdrew. The affair was to me a pleasant little
triumph, but I did not take it to heart.
Our stay in Wiesbaden was prolonged into the autumn, and ended with
recognition of the fact that it is not so easy to break the bank—easier
to break one’s self. After alternations of good and bad luck the capital
that we brought with us was expended, a supplementary remittance was
likewise lost, and the castle of Eisgrub at Brünn and the pink diamonds
went up in smoke.
The two ladies did not on that account doubt their miraculous
endowments; they only conceded that the excitement of real gambling
paralyzes this gift—that one may be clairvoyant enough at home, but at
the green table, where real gold is paid out or is drawn in by the
pitiless rake, this magnetic force ceases to work. It was painful to
renounce the beautiful dream, but against the fact of the fiasco nothing
could be said, so the affair was given up; we went back to our home
somewhat poorer in money, richer in experience. The two mothers were
very much cast down, but the daughters were enraptured with the journey
and with their taste of the pastimes of watering-place life. These
memories would be something to live on for a long time.
Now we moved from Brünn to Vienna. Social life was over. We were
relegated to the schoolroom again, as befitted our age. I devoted myself
with redoubled industry to my studies in languages and the piano, and
made excerpts from Brockhaus’s _Konversationslexikon_. The games of puff
grew somewhat rare, for Elvira lived in a distant quarter of the city
with her mother, and we came together only once or twice a week. She
continued writing poetry. “Delascar,” which had been interrupted by the
journey to Wiesbaden, was now polished and finished. Then came a comedy,
_Der Briefträger_ (“The Letter-Carrier”), and a sequence of ballads
whose collective title I do not now remember.
The young poetess wanted to get the verdict of experts, and sent her
manuscripts to Joseph von Weilen, whose dramas were at that time having
much success in the Burgtheater, and to Feldmann, the writer of
comedies. And she ventured higher yet: she addressed herself to
Grillparzer, who was at the height of his renown, and to Marie von
Ebner-Eschenbach, whose star was then beginning to rise.
These two came to call on Elvira, and it was at our apartments. I can
still see in my mind the old and somewhat morose Grillparzer as he came
into our room, fatigued with stair-climbing. He had a lively
conversation with Elvira, and urged her to keep on writing
diligently—she might come to produce notable work. And young Marie
Ebner—she was twenty-eight at the time—came likewise to return Elvira’s
visit and give her verdict. This too, I believe, was favorable.
Unhappily I cannot recall the details of these interesting visits. I
have retained merely the impression that on that occasion Frau Ebner was
especially pleased with _me_, though I was only a secondary person
there. Later too, when she corresponded with Elvira or met her, she
always inquired with interest for the beautiful (she said “beautiful,” I
cannot help it, and after nearly half a century it is permissible to
claim the long-lost epithet) Countess Kinsky.
Shall I here interpolate a personal description and tell how I looked at
fifteen? Why not? Well, then,—an incredible abundance of hair, dazzling
white little teeth,—Enough, I would rather stop. This self-flattery,
even if it does date back to gray antiquity, has too silly a sound for
me.
One day—it was in the beginning of the year 1858—my guardian came in
looking quite pale.
“Do you know the news?”
“What has happened?” cried my mother. “Why, you are all upset!”
“Radetzky is dead!”
I remember that the news made on me the impression that one of the
world’s darkest catastrophes had come upon it—the great Field Marshal no
more! I knew what adoration Fritzerl felt for him and how painfully this
loss must affect him. To be sure, Radetzky was already ninety-two; but
for that very reason it seemed as if he were not to die at all, or at
least as if he were predestined to come to be a hundred. At any rate the
world, particularly Austria, was the poorer by a treasure. Such a hero!
Such a demigod! My admiration for soldierly fame was devotional. There
was nothing more piously loyal to the military than I. If any one had at
that time had the idea of writing a book with such a nefarious title as
_Die Waffen nieder_ I should have deeply despised the author. Elvira was
just the same. Radetzky’s death put her muse in a painful commotion at
once. That same day a long poem was produced: a poetic wreath of all
plants and flowers to lay on the grave of the victor of Custozza—roses,
immortelles, pansies, but chiefly laurel, a stanza for each species.
With pride and emotion she gave us the hearing of this poem. She wept; I
wept; Aunt Lotti decided, “To-morrow you must send that to your
godfather Huyn and ask his judgment.”
Next day the manuscript went off to Galicia, where General Huyn was in
garrison at the time. The answer arrived after a while,—in verse too.
The yellowed sheet is in my possession, and I will copy it here; not
that it has intrinsic literary value, but it offers an illustration of
the pious spirit that so strikingly characterized the writer.