Difference between the 1st and 4th of May.--Rat-Battle-Pieces.--
Nocturne.--Three Regiments in future Breeches.--Couching-Needle.--
Overture and Secret Instructions of the Book.
In the house of the Court-Chaplain Eymann, in the bathing-village of
St. Luna, there were two parties: the one was glad on the 30th of April
that our hero, the young Englishman, Horion, would return from
Göttingen the 1st of May to stay at the parsonage,--the other disliked
it; they did not want him to arrive till the 4th of May.
The party of the 1st of May, or Tuesday, consisted of the Chaplain's
son, Flamin, who had been educated with the Englishman till his twelfth
year in London, and till his eighteenth in St. Luna, and whose heart
with all its venous ramifications had grown into the Briton's, and in
whose ardent breast during the long Göttingen separation there had been
_one_ heart too few; next, of the Chaplain's wife, a native
Englishwoman, who loved in my hero a countryman, because the magnetic
vortex of nationality reached her soul over land and sea; and, finally,
of their eldest daughter, Agatha, who all day long laughed out at
everything and doted on everything without knowing why, and who, with
her polypus-arms, drew every one to herself who did not live quite too
many houses off from her, as food for her heart.
The sect of the 4th of May could measure itself with its rival, for it
also made out a college of three members. Its adherents were Appel
(Apollonia, the youngest daughter), who acted as cook, and whose
culinary reputation and certificate of good bakery would suffer by it,
if the guest should come before the bread rose; she could well
conceive what a soul must feel who should stand before a guest with
her hands full of skewers and needles, beside the flat-iron of the
window-curtains, and without having even the _frisure_ of her hat, or
of the head which was to be under it, so much as half ready. The second
adherent of this sect, who ought to have had most to say against
Tuesday,--although he said least, because he could not talk and
had only recently been baptized,--was to be carried to church on
Friday for the first time; this adherent was the godchild of the
guest. The Chaplain knew, to be sure, that the moon sent round her
godfather-bidder, Father Riccioli,[11] among the _savans_ of earth, and
got them into the church-book of heaven as godfathers to her spots; but
he thought it was better for him to take a godfather within a
circumference of not more than fifty miles. The Apostles'-day of the
churching and the Festival-day of the arrival of the distinguished
godfather would then have beautifully coincided; but now the plaguy
fine weather was bringing godfather along four days too soon!
The third disciple of Friday was, at bottom, the heresiarch of this
party, the Court-Chaplain himself: the parsonage wherein Horion was to
have his temporary court residence was all full of rats,--a regular
ball-room and _plaza de armas_ of the same,--and of these the Chaplain
wanted first of all to clear his house. Few court-chaplains, with
hectic in their bodies and rats in their houses, ever made so much
stench on that account as did this one in St. Luna against the beasts.
It would have taken very few clouds of it to smoke all the court-dames
out of Europe. Did not our hectic patient burn as much of the hoof of
his nag as he had sawed off from it? Didn't he even take one of the
sharp-toothed creatures themselves prisoner, and smear him with
gudgeon-grease and train-oil, and then let the arrested subject go,
that he might as a pariah trot up and down through the holes, and
constrain by his ointment rats of higher caste to emigrate? Did he not
go to work by the wholesale, and actually take a buck to board, of
which he wanted nothing except that he should stink and displease the
tailed monks? And were not all these remedies as good as useless?...
For the deuse take rats and Jesuits! Meanwhile, I will at least offer
people here on the very third page the moral, that against both of
these pests, as against toothache, mental troubles, and fleas, there
are a thousand excellent recipes which have no effect.
We will now, in a body, make our way farther into the parsonage, and
concern ourselves as minutely about the family history of the Eymanns
as if we lived only three houses distant from them. Horion,--the accent
must fall on the first syllable,--or Sebastian, by abbreviation
_Bastian_, as the Eymanns called him,--or Victor, as Lord Horion, his
father, called him, (for I give him now one name and now another, just
as my prose-prosody requires,)--Horion had, through the Italian
Tostato, who was a peripatetic Auerbach's court for that whole region,
and was hurrying on to St. Luna, caused the little oral lie to be
palmed upon his dear friends at the parsonage, that he was coming on
Friday: he wanted, first, to give them a real surprise; and, secondly,
he wanted modestly to tie the hands, which on his account _would_ be
scouring, brushing up and serving up; and, thirdly, he regarded an oral
lie as at least more trivial than a written one. To his father,
however, he wrote the truth, and fixed his entrance into the parsonage
for the 1st of May, or Tuesday. His Lordship had his abode in the
residence city of Flachsenfingen, where he applied to the Prince at
once moral blinders and _eye-glasses_, and _guided_ his vision while he
_sharpened_ it; but he was himself blind, though only physically. For
that reason his son had to bring an oculist with him from Göttingen,
who should operate upon him in the Chaplain's house on Tuesday. When he
caused his Victor to be made Doctor of Medicine, many Göttingen people,
to my knowledge, wondered that so high-born a youth should put on the
Doctor's head-piece,--that _Pluto's helmet_, which makes, not, like the
mythological one, the wearer, but others indeed invisible,--and thrust
on his finger the Doctor's ring,--that _ring-of--Gyges_, which only to
others imparts invisibility: but was, then, the condition of his
father's eyes unknown or an insufficient apology to the people of
Göttingen?
His Lordship wrote to the Court-Chaplain that he and his son would
come to-morrow. The Chaplain read over the Job's-post silently three
times in succession, and thrust it back with comic resignation into
the envelope, saying: "We have now ample hope that to-morrow our
Doctor will certainly arrive with the rest;--fine tournaments and
watering-place amusements do I anticipate, wife! when to-morrow comes
in, and my rats in a body dance like children before him;--besides, we
have nothing to eat; and then, too, I have nothing to put on, for not
before Thursday can I extort from that Flachsenfingen wind-bag[12] a
hair-bag,--and you laugh at it? Is not one of us in the very middle of
April made an April-fool of?" But the Chaplain's lady fell on his
shoulder with redoubled exclamations of delight, and ran right off to
gather to this rose festival of her good soul the little brethren and
sisters of the church of the children. The whole family circle now
resolved itself into three terrified and three delighted faces.
We will seat ourselves only among the joyous ones, and listen
while they, during the afternoon, work away as portrait-painters,
drapery-painters, and gallery-inspectors, at the picture of the beloved
Briton. All remembrances are made into hopes, and Victor is to bring
nothing with him that is changed except his stature. Flamin, wild as an
English garden, but more fruitful, refreshed himself and others with
his delineation of Victor's gentle truthfulness and honesty, and of his
head, and praised even his poetic fire, which he generally did not rate
very high. Agatha called to mind his humorous knight's-leaps,--how he
once took the drum of a passing dentist and drummed the village
together for nothing before his theatre, because he had previously
bought out the whole travelling apothecary's shop of this honest and
true friend Hain,[13]--how he would often, after a child's baptism,
post himself in the pulpit, and there be-preach two or three devout
spectators in their work-day sward, till they laughed more than they
wept,--and many another piece of waggery, whereby he would make no one
ridiculous but himself, and set no one laughing but other people.
But women will never approve of it (only men can) when one, like
Victor, belongs to the British subdivision of humorists;--for with them
and courtiers wit itself is caprice;--they cannot approve that Victor
should love to _descend_ to carriers, clowns, and sailors, whereas a
Frenchman would rather _creep upward_ to people of _ton_. For women,
who always respect the citizen more than the man, do not see that the
humorist makes believe that all which these plebeians say he prompts
them to, and that he intentionally exalts the involuntarily comic to
what is artistically so,--folly to wisdom, the earth's madhouse to a
national theatre. Quite as little does an official comprehend, or a
cit, or a metropolitan, why Horion should so often make such a wretched
choice of reading from among old prefaces, programmes, advertisements
of travelling artists, all which he would peruse with indescribable
gusto,--merely because he made believe to himself that all this
intellectual sack of fodder, which belonged properly only to the
rag-picker, he had himself prepared and filled, with satirical design.
In fact, as the Germans seldom appreciate irony and seldom write it,
one is forced to foist fictitiously a malicious irony upon many serious
books and reviews, in order to get any of it at all. And that, indeed,
is no more nor less than what I myself aim at, when in court-session I
elevate in thought the court-house to a play-house, the advocate to a
juristic Le Cain and Casperl, and the whole assembly to an old Greek
comedy; for I never rest till I have made myself believe that I have
caused the good people just to study out the whole case as a star-part,
and am therefore really theatre poet and manager. Thus, in fact, do I
merrily carry my dumb head as a comic pocket-theatre of the Germans
through their most august institutions (e. g. the university, the
administration), and exalt, in perfect silence--behind the dropped
curtain of my face-skin--the comic of Nature to the comic of Art.
To return: the Chaplain's wife now related as much about Victor as all
knew before. But this repetition of the old story is just the fairest
charm of domestic discourse. If we can often repeat to _ourselves_
sweet thoughts without _ennui_, why shall not another be suffered to
awaken them within us still oftener? The good lady pictured to her
children how gentle and tender, how delicate and womanly, her dear son
was (for Victor always called her his mother),--how he relied upon her
in all things,--how he was always sporting without ever teasing
anybody, and always loved all human beings, even the greatest
strangers,--and how she could open before him better than to any
matron her oppressed heart, and how fondly he wept with her. A
court-apothecary, with a heart of pumice-stone,--_Zeusel_ he writes
himself,--once even regarded this melting of the warmest soul as a case
of _lachrymal fistula_, because he thought that no eyes could weep but
diseased ones.... Dear reader, do you not feel now just as the
biographer does, who can hardly wait for the entrance of this good
Victor into the parsonage and the biography? Will you not offer to him
the friendly hand, and say: "Welcome, unknown one! Lo, thy soft heart
opens ours here on the very threshold! O thou man with eyes full of
tears, dost thou, then, feel with us, that in a life whose banks are
lined with affrighted ones clinging to the _twigs_, and despairing ones
clinging to the _leaves_, that, in such a life, where not only follies,
but woes also hedge us round, man must keep a wet eye for red ones, an
aching heart for every bleeding one, and a gentle hand that shall, in
sad sympathy, hold the thick, heavy chalice of sorrow for the poor man
who must drain it, and shall slowly raise it to his lips? And if thou
art such a one, then speak and laugh as thou wilt, for no one should
laugh at men but he who right heartily loves them."
In the afternoon the Chief Chamberlain, Le Baut,--a fragrant
leaf-skeleton,--sent his page, Seebass, to the Chaplain to beg that
he would--for the palace lay near the parsonage across the way--remove
the buck for a while, only until the wind should change, because
his daughter was coming. "Esteemed Mr. Seebass!" answered the
rat-controvertist, with emotion, "carry back my submissive compliments,
and you see my distress. Tomorrow the Lord and his son and his oculist
will gladden me with their presence, and the cataract is to be couched
here. Now, at present, the whole house stinks, and the rats still carry
on composedly their night-dance in the midst of the perfume; I assure
you, Mr. Seebass, we can take assaf[oe]tida and stuff the parsonage
with it up to the ridge-pole, not a tail shall we expel thereby; nay,
it pleases them the more. I, for my part, am already preparing myself
to see them to-morrow, during the operation, spring up on the very
oculist and patient. Thus it fares with us all, please announce at the
palace, but say that I was going to-day also to try an excellent
rosewood-oil."
He fetched, therefore, a great sack of hops and dragged it up under the
roof, in order there, in a literal sense, to lead the rats by the nose
into the bag. Rats are notoriously as dead-set upon rosewood-oil as men
are on anointing-oil, which, so soon as only six drops fall on the
skull, makes one a king or bishop on the spot, which I see by the fact,
that in the first case a golden hoop shoots round the hair, and in the
second it actually falls off. The militia, that is, the Chaplain,
sprinkled the sack with some oil, and laid it with its mouth stretched
and fastened wide open to receive the enemy;--he himself stood in the
background, concealed behind a similarly oiled stove-screen. His plan
was, to start out when the beasts were once in the sack, and carry off
the whole crew like bees in a swarming-bag. The few chamber-hunters who
read me must have frequently used this kind of trap. But they may not
have stumbled over it as the Chaplain did, who was caught with the
fragrant stove-screen between his legs, and who lay unable to stir,
while the enemy ran off. In such a situation a man is refreshed by the
trill of a curse. So after the Chaplain had struck a few such trills
and thrills, had betaken himself to the family, and said to them, _en
passant_: If there were in the temperate zone a fellow who from his
swaddling-clothes rode a mourning-steed, who was lodged in a second
mouse-tower of Hatto, and in an Amsterdam house of correction, and in
limbo,--if there were any such correctioner, in regard to whom the only
wonder was how he continued alive,--he alone was the one, and no devil
beside him ... after he had relieved himself of this, he left the rats
in peace,--and was himself very much so.
In the night nothing memorable occurred, except that he kept awake and
listened in every direction to hear if something with a tail might not
be stirring, because he was minded to vex himself to his heart's
content. As there was no sign of the beasts to be detected, not so
much as a side-leap, he got out and sat on the floor, and pressed his
spy's-ear to that. As good luck would have it, just then the movements
of the enemy with their ballets and gallopades burst upon his ear. He
started up, armed himself with a child's drum, and woke his wife up
with the whisper: "Sweet! go to sleep again, and don't be frightened in
your sleep; I'm only drumming a little against the rats; for the
Zwickau Collection of Useful Observations for Housekeepers in Town and
Country, 1785, recommends this course."
His first thunder-stroke gave his hereditary foes the repose which it
snatched from his blood relations.... But as I have now put everybody
into a condition to imagine the Chaplain in his shirt and with the
cymbal of the soldiery, let us rather go to the bed of his son Flamin,
and see what _he_ is doing therein. Nothing,--but out of it he is at
this moment taking a ride at this late hour, and that, too, without
saddle or waistcoat. He, whose bosom was a cave of Æolus, full of
pent-up storms--(any discreet prothonotary in Wetzlar would have
scraped his fish-head or partridge's-wing cleaner or brushed his
velvet-knee cleaner than he)--could not possibly lie longer on his
pillow,--he to whom a drum came so near to-night, and to-morrow a
friend. Anybody else, of course (at least the reader and myself), in
the midst of the transparent night wherewith April was closing, the
wide stillness on which the drum-sticks fell, the longing for a loved
one with whom to-morrow would again make whole a desolate heart and a
dismembered life, would have been filled by all this with tender
emotions and dreams;--its only effect on the Chaplain's son was to
fling him on his nag and out into the night: his inward earthquakes
could only be allayed by a bodily gallop. He flew up and down the hill,
on which he would to-morrow reunite himself to his Horion, ten times.
He cursed and thundered at all his passions--to be sure _with_
passion--which had hitherto laid the bone-saw to their hands linked in
friendship. "Oh! when I once have thee again, Sebastian," he said, and
twitched his nag round, "I will be so gentle, as gentle as thou, and
never misconstrue thee; if I do, may the thunder--" Ashamed at his
self-contradictory impetuosity, he rode merely at an ambling-pace home.
His longing for his returning friend he expressed in the stable by
plucking out some hairs from the top of the horse's head, drawing the
cue-hair like the fourth string of a fiddle, and twisting off the bit
of the key to the fodder-chest. Only a man who languishes for a friend
_exactly_ as for a loved woman deserves either. But there are men who
go out of the world without ever having been troubled or concerned at
the fact that no one in it had loved them. He who knows nothing higher
than the _commercial treaty_ of self-interest, the _social contract_
of civility, or even than the _boundary_ and _barter agreement_ of
love, such a one,--but I wish he had never ordered me from the
publisher!--whose withered heart knows nothing of the _Unitas Fratrum_
of men joined in friendship, of the intertwining of their nobler
vascular system, and of their sworn confederacy in strife and
sorrow--But I see not why I should talk so long of this ninny, as he
knows not how to enter into the least feeling of Flamin's yearning, who
desired a loving, appreciative eye, because his faults and his virtues
stood out in equal relief; for with other men, either at least the
spots balance the rays, or the rays the spots.
Only in princely stables is there an earlier and louder din than there
was in the parsonage on the blessed 1st of May. I ask any female reader
at random, whether there can ever be more to polish and to boil than on
a morning when a lord with a cataract is expected, and his son, too,
and an eye-doctor? Men's resting-days always fall upon women's
rasping-days; father and son went composedly to meet the doctor and the
coucher.
The 1st of May began, like man and human history, with a mist. Spring,
the Raphael of the northern earth, stood already out of doors and
covered all apartments of our Vatican with his pictures. I love a mist
whenever it glides off like a veil from the face of a fair day, and
whenever it is created, not by the "four _faculties_," but by greater
ones. When (as this one did on the 1st of May) it webs-over summits and
streams like a drag-net,--when the clouds, pressed down by their
weight, crawl along on our lawns and through wet bushes,--when in one
quarter it soils the heavens with a pitchy vapor and lines the wood
with a heavy, unclean fog-bank, while in the other, wiped off from the
moist sapphire of the sky, it gilds with minute drops the flowers, and
when this blue splendor and that dirty night pass over close by each
other and exchange places,--who does not feel, then, as if he saw lands
and nations lying before him, on which poisonous and mephitic mists
move round in groups, now coming and now going? And when, further, this
white night encompasses my melancholy eye with flying streams of vapor,
with floating, fluttering particles of perfume-dust, then do I sadly
see in the vapor human life pictured, with its two great clouds on our
rising and setting, with its seemingly light space around us, and its
blue opening over our heads....
The Doctor may have thought so too, but not father and son, who are
going to meet him. Flamin is more powerfully affected by distant than
by near nature, by the gross than by the detail, just as he has more
feeling for the state than for the family room, and his inner man loves
best to twine upward on pyramids, tempests, Alps. The Chaplain enjoys
nothing about the whole thing except--May-butter, and from his mouth,
amidst all this moral apparatus, issues nothing but--spittle, and both,
because he is afraid of the damp's preying upon him and gnawing at his
throat and stomach.
As they strode down from the hill which was the scene of the nocturnal
gallop into a valley confused with patches of mist; there marched out
from it to meet them three garrison regiments on the double-quick. Each
regiment was four men strong and as many deep, without powder or shoes,
but provided with fine openwork high-ruffles,--that is to say, with
porous pantaloons, and with superfluous officers, because there were no
privates for them at all. When I now go on in my description to add,
that both staffs, as well the regimental as the general staff, had over
six hundred cannon in their pockets, and in fact a whole siege-train of
artillery, and that the first platoon had wholly new _yellow_
balls,[14] unusual in war, which germinated sooner than the gunpowder
sowed by the savages, and which they thrust with the tongue into the
muskets,--I should (I fear) make my readers, especially my lady
readers, a little too distressed (and the more as I have not yet hinted
whether these were soldier-parents or soldier-children) if I were to
dip my pen again, and actually append the annoying circumstance that
the troops began to fire at the befogged Court-Chaplain,--unless I
leaped forward instanter with the information beforehand that a man's
voice from behind the army cried, "Halt!"
Forth came out of the rear ranks the general field-marshal, who was
just as tall again as his lieutenant of artillery;--with a round hat,
with flying arms and hair, he rushed impetuously upon Flamin, and
attacked him with intent to destroy,--less from hatred than from love.
It was the Doctor! The two friends hung trembling in each other's arms,
face buried in face, breast pushed back from breast, with souls that
had no words, but only tears of joy: the first embrace ended in a
second,--the first utterances were their two names.
The Chaplain had volunteered as a private along with the army, and
stood with tried feelings on his insulating-stool, with a bare neck,
around which nothing clung. "Just hug each other a moment longer," said
he, and turned half-way round: "I must station myself only just a
minute or two at the hazel-bush yonder, but I will be back again
directly, and then I, in my turn, will embrace Mr. Doctor with a
thousand pleasures." But Horion understood the natural recoil of love;
he flew from the son's arms into those of the father, and lingered long
therein, and made all good again.
With appeased love, with dancing hearts, with overflowing eyes, under
the full bloom of heaven and over the garniture of earth,--for Spring
had opened her casket of brilliants, and flung blooming jewels into all
the vales, and over all the hills, and even far up the mountains,--the
two friends sauntered blissfully along, the British hand clasping the
German. Sebastian Horion could not say anything to Flamin, but he
talked with the father, and every indifferent sound made his bosom,
laden with blood and love, breathe more freely.
The three regiments had gone out of every one's head; but they had
themselves marched obediently after the general field-marshal.
Sebastian, too humane to forget any one, turned round toward the escort
of little Sansculottes, who came, however, not from Paris, but from
Flachsenfingen, and had attended him as begging soldier-children. "My
children," said he, and looked at nothing but his standing army,
"to-day is for your generalissimo and you, the memorable day on which
he does three things. In the first place, I discharge you; but my
retrenchment shall not hinder you any more than a prince's would from
begging; secondly, I pay each of you arrearage for three years; namely,
to each officer an allowance of three seventeen-kreutzer-pieces,
because we have in these days raised the wages; thirdly, run back again
to-morrow, and I will have all the regiments measured for breeches."
He turned toward the Chaplain, and said: "It is much better to make
presents in articles than in money, because gratitude for the latter is
spent as soon as that is; but in a pair of presented pantaloons,
gratitude lasts as long as the overhauls themselves."
The only bad thing about it will be, that the Prince of Flachsenfingen
and his war-ministry will at last interfere in the matter of the
trousers, since neither can possibly allow regular troops to have more
_on_ their bodies than _in_ them, namely, anything at all. In our
days it should at last enter the heads of the stupidest commissary
of equipment and provisioning,--but in fact there are discreet
ones,--first, that, of two soldiers, the hungry is always to be
preferred to the well-fed one, because it is already known, by the case
of whole peoples, that the less they have, so much the braver they are;
secondly, that just as, in Blotzheim,[15] of two equally virtuous
youths, the poorer is crowned, even so the poor subject is preferred to
the rich, though they may be equally courageous, and is alone enlisted,
because the poor devil is better acquainted with hunger and frost; and,
thirdly, that now, when on all the steps of the throne, as on walls,
cannon are placed (as the sun receives its brilliancy from thousands of
vomiting volcanoes), and, as in a well-conditioned state, the rod of
up-shooting manhood is forced into ramrods,--the people advantageously
fall into two classes of paupers,--the protected and their protectors;
and, fourthly, the Devil take him who grumbles!
When my three beloved _personæ_ at length arrived in front of the
parsonage, the whole disbanded army had secretly marched after them and
demanded the breeches. But something still greater had travelled after
them from Flachsenfingen,--the blind lord. Hardly had the Britoness
smiled-in her young guest, not politely, but delightedly, hardly had
Agatha, for the first time, seriously, hid herself behind her mother,
and old Appel behind the pots and kettles, when Eymann, who was in the
midst of his cleaning, made a long leap from the window at which four
Englanders--not foreigners, but horses--came trotting up. Now for the
first time the question occurred to every one, where the oculist was;
and Sebastian had hardly time to reply, that there was no one else to
come, for he himself was to operate on his father. Into the short
interval which the father occupied in passing from the carriage-door to
the room-door the son had to squeeze in the fib, or rather the entreaty
_for_ the fib, which the family was to put upon his Lordship, that his
son had not yet arrived, but only the oculist, whom a recent apoplectic
attack had deprived of his speech.
I and the reader stand amidst such a throng of people, that I have not
yet been able even to tell him that Dr. Culpepper had as good as
punched out the lord's left eye with the blunt couching-needle; in
order, therefore, to save the right eye of his beloved father,
Sebastian had applied himself to the cure of those impoverished beings,
who, as regards their sight, already grope round in Orcus, and only
with four of their senses stand any longer outside the grave.
When the son beheld the dear form veiled in such a long night, for whom
there was no longer child or sunlight, he slid his hand, whose pulse
trembled with pity, joy, and hope, under Eymann's, and hurriedly
extended it, and pressed the father's under a strange name. But he had
to go out of the house door again, till the trembling of his hand under
the weight of the salvation it was bringing should subside, and he
restrained out there his heart beating with hope by the thought that
the operation might be unsuccessful; he looked with a smile up and down
along the twelve-horse-team of the corps of cadets, that the emotion
and yearning might pass from his excited breast. In-doors, meanwhile,
the Chaplain's wife had made the blind man a still blinder one, and
lied to him _quantum satis_; whenever a lie, a pious fraud, a _dolum
bonum_, a poetic and legal fiction is to be gotten up, women offer
themselves readily as business secretaries and court-printers, and help
out their honest man. "I very much wish," said the father, as the son
entered, "that the operation might at once proceed before my son
arrives." The Chaplain's wife brought back the anxious son and
disclosed to him the paternal wish. He stepped lightly forward amidst
the embarrassed company. The room was shaded, the couching-lancet
brought forth, and the diseased eye steadied. All stood with anxious
attention around the composed patient. The Chaplain peered with a
ludicrous anxiety and agony at the sleeping infant, prepared, at the
least cry, to run with it immediately out of the couching-chamber.
Agatha and Flamin kept themselves far from the patient, and both were
equally serious. Flamin's noble mother drew near with her heart seized
at once by joy and anxiety and love, and with her overflowing eyes,
which obeyed her agitated heart. Victor wept for fear and for joy
beside his dumb father, but he passionately smothered every drop that
might disturb him. Thus does every operation, by the climax of
preparation, communicate to the spectator heart-beating and trembling.
Only the veiled Briton,--a man who lifted his head coldly and serenely,
like a high mountain over a torrid zone,--he offered to the filial hand
a face silent and motionless; he kept composed and mute before the fate
which was now to decide whether his dreary night should reach even to
the grave or no farther than this minute....
Fate said, Let there be light, and there was. The invisible destiny
took a son's anxious hand and opened therewith an eye, which was worthy
of a finer night than this starless one. Victor pressed the mature lens
of the cataract--that smoke-ball[16] and cloud cast over creation--down
into the bottom of the pupil; and so, when an atom had been sunk three
lines deep, a man possessed immensity again, and a father his son.
Oppressed mortal! thou that art at once a _son_ and a _slave_ of the
dust, how slight is the thought, the moment, the drop of blood or
tear-drop, that is required to overflow thy wide brain, thy wide heart!
And if a couple of blood-globules can become, now thy Montgolfier's
globes and now thy Belidor's percussion-balls,[17] ah, how little earth
it takes to exalt or to crush thee!
"Victor! thou? Is it thou who hast cured me, my son?" said the
delivered man, taking the hand that was still armed with the surgical
instrument. "Lay it aside and bandage me again! I rejoice that I saw
thee first of all." The son could not stir for emotion. "Bandage me,
the light is painful! _Was_ it thou? speak!" He bandaged in silence the
open eye amidst the glad tears of his own. But when the bandage hid
from that noble stoical soul everything, his blushing and his weeping,
then was it impossible for the happy son to contain himself any
longer;--he gave himself up to his heart, and clung with his tears upon
the veiled countenance to which he had given back brighter days; and
when he felt on his trembling breast the _quicker_ beatings of his
father's heart, and the _tighter_ embrace of his gratitude,--then was
the best child the happiest,--and all rejoiced at his joy, and
congratulated the son more than the father....
Twelve cannon went off from that number of door-keys. They shot this
History dead.
For now it is actually gone,--not a word, not a syllable of it do I
know any longer. In fact I have never in my life seen or heard or
dreamed of, or romantically invented, any Horion or any St. Luna;--the
Devil and I know how it is; and I, on my part, have, besides, better
things to do and to lay open now, namely,