Hardly had Albano made known to the overseer of the madhouse, a young,
sleek, rosy little man, his name, which the little man already knew,
and his petition for Schoppe's liberty, together with his security for
him, when the overseer smiled upon him with uncommon complacency, and
said, "I have quietly watched the whole house for years. I seize
greedily the minutest traits for a future, philosophical public; and so
also did I apply myself very seriously to Mr. Schoppe. But never, Sir
Count, never have I detected in him a trait or trick which would have
promised insanity; on the contrary, he reads all my English and German
works on the subject, and converses with me upon the modes of treatment
in hospitals for the insane. A disciple of Fichte he may be (I infer it
from his 'I'), and a humorist, too; now if each of these is, of itself,
hard to distinguish from craziness, how much more their union! with
what joyful anticipation of the coincidence of our observations I give
you here the key to his chamber, conceive for yourself!" "If he
is not a fool," said his wife, "why then does he smash all the
looking-glasses?" "For that very reason," replied the overseer; "but if
he is a fool, then is thy husband a still greater."
Never did Albano open a door with heavier heart than this to Schoppe's
little chamber. "I am come to take thee away, my brother," he cried
immediately, by way of sparing himself and him the redness of shame.
But when he looked at the old lion more nearly, he found him in this
trap quite altered,--not tame, creeping, wagging, but broken in two,
and with shattered claws weighed down to the earth. The charge of
murder, which he had honestly admitted, united to Gaspard's unmerciful
sentence, had filled and eaten up his proud, free breast with poisonous
shame. "I fare well here, only I feel symptoms of ill health," said
Schoppe, with lustreless eye and toneless voice. Albano could not hide
his tears; he clung around the sick man, and said, "Magnanimous man,
thou gavest me once in my sickness, health and salvation again, and I
knew it not, and thanked thee not. Go with me; I must nurse thee in
this thy sickness, heal and comfort thee as I can; then we travel."
"Dost thou imagine, my Criton," he replied, strengthened by the balsam
of his wounded pride, "that I am not a sort of Socrates, but will
really go out of my _torre del filosopho_? A word of _honor_ is a thick
chain." "Tell me all, spare no one; but I will tell thee thereafter a
piece of news, at which thy chain shall instantly melt down!" said
Albano.
"Ha! Meanwhile, this place here, for its part, is well enough, as
aforesaid, a _torre del filosopho, quai de Voltaire_, and Shakespeare's
street, and whatever else one might, could, would, or should name.
Moreover, I always hear by night one or another man speak close by me,
and so I have no fear at all that the 'I' will come. I throw every day
five little bread-balls: if they form a cross, then it signifies (think
what thou wilt) that I do not yet appear to myself. But they always
make one. I have been, in this Anticyra here, so quieted about so many
a phantom, even by those books,--look at them, nothing but treatises on
madness,--that I, although it touches my Mordian[137] quite as little
as it does me, am glad to have been here. My intercourse is not the
safest, I own, though I talk with the keeper and wife alone (a rhyme),
both of whom cleverly understand the prison-fever that prevails here.
The man has got the fixed idea into his head, and his wife thereby into
hers, that he is our present overseer, and has to assist, oversee, and
read excellent books which fall in with his office. Those treatises are
by the fool. It is to be presumed he has let his overseeing idea peep
out too broadly in the city, and the medical college clapped him in
with his serviceable idea; because, in the end, to be sure, every
overseer must have it in order to exercise his office, whether he is
mad or not. Amongst all here in the house, we two please each other
most. He sounded me to my advantage, and I can make great use of him
for my liberty, only I must not attack his foul, fixed spot. Only I
often improvisate for them an evening blessing,--because they have no
prayer-book,--and weave in with the blessing hints which might be of
medical service to the pair, if they chose. So we two wander round in
the mazes of this labyrinth along before the patients,--behind him, the
incurable hub of the whole wheel, I walk quite tolerant. In the club,
universal polemics and scepticism reign as in no other university hall.
'It is a thing to make one become crazy,' he says to me, in a low tone.
'To make one _be_ crazy,[138] they say in this _palais d'égalité_,' I
reply. I cut him out the profiles of the patients for his manuscript.
As children still have something which appears to them childish, so
have madmen something which seems even to them madness. But I never
become any more pointed with him, and keep sharper jokes to myself. Ah,
what is man, especially a discreet one, and how thin are his sticks and
staves! Is there anything about me that moves thee, Albano? My dull,
pale face, perhaps?"
But Albano could not possibly confess to him, that this wreck of a
noble man, with his delusions, and even with his style, whose wings had
also wheels on them, brought the tears into his eyes, but he said
merely, "Ah, I think of many things, but now, at last, I pray, to thy
story, dear friend!" But Schoppe had already forgotten again what he
was to tell. Albano named the issue of the portrait-affair with the
Countess, and Schoppe began:--
"The Princess Julienne was just jumping into her carriage, when I led
the blind maiden up the steps, to let it be said, the Librarian Schoppe
was here from Spain. I was ushered into a darkened apartment, wherein I
walked quietly up and down waiting or watching for people, until the
Countess greeted me out of the gloom 'This darkness,' said I, 'is just
what I like for the light which I have to give, only I would rather
speak Irish or Lettonian[139] or Spanish, because I don't know who may
be eavesdropping about here.' 'Spanish!' said she, seriously. I related
to her how I had known thy mother, and painted her, and so forth, and
inserted my name indelibly into the likeness; after a long time, had
met her in the market-place of this city, and taken her for the
looking-glass image of thy mother, so like was she to her own. 'I know
not,' said she, breaking in here with heated pride upon the midst of my
narrative, 'how far your secrets can become mine.' 'You may,' said I,
seriously, 'by letting me ring for a light; for I hold here in my hand
the portrait of the Frau von Cesara and von Romeiro, two names of one
person.' She comprehended nothing of it, wanted to know nothing of it,
and I must not ring. I acknowledged to her that I saw myself
necessitated to adorn myself with the rhetorical chessman, generally
called repetition of the narrative, and proceeded to move the piece.
But as soon as in so doing I came upon thy name again, she said I had
probably in my mind relations now entirely done away. 'No,' said I, 'I
have an eternal and restored relation in my mind, and bring with me his
greeting, full of the most profound regard.' The greeting seemed to
touch her sensibilities, just as if one held her to be in need of such
an assurance, and she begged me rather to leave thee out. 'Heavens! he
is your brother, and here I have about me the portrait of your mother,
stolen from Valencia, and only no light to show it by.'
"Light was then ordered. As the flame set the tall, imposing form in
gold, I said right out to myself, she was fully as deserving as her
brother that one should make that long pilgrimage to the family tree of
both, for she is not without her charms. Albano, were I her brother, as
thou hast the honor to be, and had she a gondola, but no river of
paradise for it, my blood would have to be made navigable for her; I
would bear her up not only in my hands, but, like an æquilibrist, on my
nose and mouth, the unfortunate one! She no sooner saw the portrait
than she cried, 'Mother, mother!' and kept passing her hand over her
eyes, complaining that they were now still worse than ever. I resumed
my scraping, and at last dug out before her eyes my whole name,
_Loewenskiould_, even with the addition, which had escaped me, 'Loves
much.'
"'Was that the painter's name?' she asked. 'Are you he? You loved her
too?' 'Beauty is a cliff,' replied I, seriously, 'on which one and
another man seeks to shipwreck himself, because it lies full of pearls
and oysters.' She begged of me, in a friendly manner, the most distinct
repetition of the repetition; she wished to attend better; hearing and
thinking were as hard and heavy for her now as living. Albano, you
should have despatched me to her with more preparatory information. As
it was, I was half confused and cloudy, and when, during my picture of
the Long Lake Isle,[140] something moist sprang from her eyes, I sank
in the drops, and almost drowned therein, and not till after some time
could I rub myself to life. At the end of my discourse, she stood up,
folded her hands, and prayed, with weeping, as if she gave thanks: 'O
God, O God! thou hast spared me!'--which I, after all, do not wholly
understand."
Albano understood it well,--namely, that she thanked fate for the
accidental delay of Schoppe's arrival, which had spared her the short
but fearful transformation of Roquairol into a brother.
"Thereupon she broke out into too many thanks to the painter, robbers
and purveyors of the painted birth-certificate. He whose heart has gone
to sleep like an arm, and is feelingless and hard to move, finds a
something very droll run through and over the awaking member when he
stirs it. 'I could not do less,' said I, 'for your holy brother; the
sunny side is, then, the moon-side.' She turned suddenly to the subject
of thy father, and asked, as he was immediately coming, whether she or
I should propose to him these riddles. 'Or rather both!' I had hardly
replied, when he stepped wildly in.
"Now, Gaspard is, to be sure and decidedly, thy own and thy sister's
natural father, and filial love toward him is never to be set down
against _thee_ as a fault; but if I chose to tell thee he was no bear,
no rhinoceros, no werewolf or other kind of wolf, I should do it more
from singular politeness than from any other cause. He snorted to me a
good evening; so did I to him. Many men resemble glass,--smooth and
slippery and flat so long as one does not break them, but _then_
cursedly cutting, and every splinter stings. The matter was laid before
him with the accompanying frontispiece of the portrait. Wert thou more
distantly related to him, I would let myself out on this subject; for
his face was overspread with the northern light of grim fury; out of
his eyes yellow wasps flew at me; straight lines shot up on his
tempestuous brow like electrical lances, particularly two perpendicular
lines of discomfort. But, as was said, thou art, to my knowledge, his
son. 'My friend,' he thundered away, 'with what _right_ do you steal
pictures, then?' 'That ought to be a hard question for me to answer,'
replied I, gently; 'but I have an _inability_ to look at an unrighteous
deception; I march right in.' 'Countess,' said he, gasping, 'in three
minutes you shall know this _gentleman_ well enough.' O no, no! he used
another word than _gentleman_, but I will one day clasp him to my
breast for it, and though we stood on the highest steps of God's
throne, and wrestled in the glory." "Schoppe!" said Albano. "Don't
excite me!" replied Schoppe, and went on.
"He rang; a servant flew in with a card; we all were silent.
'Indulgence, Countess,' said he, 'only for the space of one minute.' He
thereupon gave her some miserable court-news, but she looked silently
on the ground. Then came thy tall uncle, nodded sixteen times with his
little head, for that he takes to be an obeisance, and stepped far off
from me. 'Brother, simply say, what has this gentleman here done back
of Valencia?' 'Murdered, murdered!' said he, rapidly. 'Under what
circumstances?' asked thy father. Here he began to depose the minutest
particulars of my shot of distress at the Baldhead with such an
incomprehensible sharpness that I said, 'That is true!' and went on
myself, and kept asking, 'Is it not so?' and he hurriedly nodded, till
I had come to the end. Then I asked, 'But, Spaniard, tell me, by
Heaven! whence have _you_, then, derived this knowledge?' 'From me!'
answered a strange, hollow voice, exactly like the Baldhead's.
"My heart grew cold as a dog's nose, and my tongue full of stone.
'As _convictus_ and _confessus_,' began thy father, 'you can now
prophesy your fate.' 'To be sure,' murmured the uncle, pulling out and
putting back his handkerchief, taking the picture up and laying it
away,--'prophesy, prophesy!' 'Meanwhile,' thy father continued, 'it is
freely left with you whether you will, until a nearer investigation,
choose, instead of the prison, which belongs to you in consideration of
the murder and theft, a milder place, the madhouse, which befits you in
consideration of your journey; if you do not choose, then I choose for
you.' 'To the madhouse, to the madhouse!' cried I, 'for the sake of
true sociability, on my honor. But I make no questions about anything;
on the washing-bill of my conscience stands no murder. Do you only burn
yourselves white and clean. Your chariot of the sun and triumphal car
goes up to the very hub in dung. Countess, let, I pray, everything be
cleared up by you in the best manner, and think unceasingly of me, in
order to get a father, like the students' father of his country, to be
sure, who consists in a hole through the hat.'[141] 'Step farther
back!' said thy father to thy uncle, 'the madness is broken out.' Upon
that the hare made eighteen springs down over thresholds and steps. I
executed my own orders of march and halt. Thy father still crawled
after me with a licking, flamy look. I charged my eye with poison, and
saw him, down below at the door, fall headlong at the stroke."
Albano shuddered, and inquired about the how. Then Schoppe was silent,
buried in thought, for a long time, and said, in a troubled tone,
"That, to be sure, was only a dream of mine; but so do I now confound
dream with reality, and the reverse. I ought to be more moved about
Schoppe; he is, after all, an old man, and old men weep like the
jester, when it goes down hill." "I will comfort thee now, my friend,"
said Albano, with distracted breast; "I will remove an error from thy
faithful heart, and then thou wilt certainly go with me. This Baldhead,
our mocker and juggler, is, according to the holy word of my sister,
one and the same person with my uncle, and is a ventriloquist."
Schoppe stood for a long time like one dead, as if he had not heard a
word. Suddenly, with radiant face and sparkling eye, he threw himself
on his knee, and stammered, "Heaven, Heaven! make me mad! The rest I
will do." Here he made a wicked neck-wringing motion with his hands,
and said, in a tone of restored strength, "I can follow thee." He
really could now, but before he had hardly been able to stand. And so
Albano led the unhappy, excited friend with heavy heart to his own
lodgings.