Profile-Cutter.--Clotilda's Historic Figure.[40]--Courtiers,
and a Noble Man.
Clotilda, as Sebastian learned the next morning, had originally meant
to stay at the seminary till after St. John's; but, as her best friend
and schoolmate _Giulia_ had gone beforehand, not to her parents, but to
the long home, her distressed eyes must needs draw themselves away by a
speedier departure from the grave-mound which lay like a ruin over her
forlorn heart. Without packing up, she had fled from the flowerless
Golgotha of her wounded soul; and a second contemplation of it, and a
second departure, and a renewal of the old tears, still awaited her.
Never was a great beauty praised in a more unembarrassed manner by a
little one than Clotilda was by Agatha. Generally, the only thing
maidens appreciate about maidens is the heart; the evanescent charms of
another's face have so little worth in their eyes, that they hardly
care to mention them. Young men are justly reproached with selecting by
preference beautiful youths for their friends. In the case of girls, on
the contrary, their eulogists make much of the fact that they entirely
despise female beauty, as a too loose and base cement-and-mortar of
friendship, and that, therefore, to a beautiful woman, the _heart_ of
the very ugliest is more precious than the face of the handsomest on
the five zones and scarfs of the earth. Agatha was otherwise: she ran
over, the first thing in the morning, to the palace, to dress her
friend.
Flamin behaved still worse. He could not wait for the reality itself to
hang up Clotilda's Madonna-image in the chambers of Victor's brain: he
anticipated it with the pen-and-ink sketch of a painter, which is, at
least, not cold; for painters, in the _æsthetic_ and in the
_calligraphic sense_, seldom write well. The painter had, merely for
the sake of seeing and sketching Clotilda, stretched himself, almost
every Sunday morning, on a hill of Maienthal, where he transferred to
his note-book the glittering landscape round the seminary; and the
beautiful head which looked out of the eighth window he transferred
into his heart. Even Flamin, who generally set even the vignettes of
prose above the living oil-paintings of poetry, found, in the following
Madonna or Clotilda of the artist, something to his taste:--
"When my conscious being is a single thought, and burns; and when, with
the flames waving around me, I dip my hand into colors, to cool myself
therein;--then, when the lofty beauty[41] that forever beams within me
lets fall its image on the waves which tremulously picture heaven and
earth, and sets on fire the clear stream; and then, when an image of
Pallas, descending from heaven, rests upon the stream, a lily-casing
and cast-off wing-wrappage of an up-flown angel,--a form whose
unstained soul no body, but only the snow which lies around the throne
of God, and out of which the angels weave their fleeting vehicular
bodies,[42] encloses; and when the most delicate drapery is too coarse
and hard, and becomes a wooden frame around that divine breath on the
countenance, around that trembling flowered-velvet of flesh, around
that skin of white roses transfused with a glow of red ones; when this
reflection of my shining soul falls upon the colored surface,--then
every one will turn round, and think Clotilda is lying asleep on the
bank.... And here my art is over; for, ah! when she awakes, and when,
for the first time, the soul shall move these charms like wings; when
the fast-closed bud of the lips shall break into a smile, and the bosom
breathes in half a sigh, and, from modesty, breathes it not out again;
when the sighs, veiled in songs, steal from those lips,--which, like
two souls, hover over without touching each other--as bees steal out of
roses; when the eye stirs between gleams and tears;--then, when at
length the goddess of heavenly love approaches her daughter, and
electrically touches her still heart, and says, 'Do thou, too, love';
and now, when all charms tremble and bloom out, shrink and languish,
hope and shudder, and the dreaming heart shuts itself up more deeply
into its blossoms, and hides itself, trembling, behind a tear, from the
happy one who has divined and deserves it;--then the happy one is mute,
the happy one and the artist."
Victor saw beside him the happy one, who was his friend, looked upon
him with moist eyes, and said, "Of that thou wast worthy!" But now
twenty rowels spurred him to follow Agatha to the palace;--the
pen-and-ink drawing of the artist; the arrangement of dresses; the
relationship; the desire which every man has to see the Grace and
Infanta of his friend; the desire which _not_ every one has, but he
had, to speak with any one for the first time (rather than for the
eighth time); and, most of all, the evening of yesterday. Flamin's fire
had yesterday burned Victor's bosom to a heap of tinder, through which
nothing but sparks were running. He should have set all before him
indifferently, because the contest _against_ love differs in nothing
from the contest _for_ it, except in order of precedence. But let not
the reader by any means imagine that now (as in one of your emasculated
and emasculating romances) the Devil is to break loose in our
biography, and the hero is to march into the palace and there fall down
before Clotilda, and beg, on bended knee, "Be the heroine!" and go
about to wrangle with her, out of love, and with the former _pastor
fido_ out of hatred, and actually play nothing else than the æsthetic,
self-seeking, sensitive--scamp. If I should wish this last, I could
excuse myself only on the ground that then I might perhaps come to some
biographical murders and duels. I hope, however, I may still, without
injury to morals or honesty, in the course of these pages make out a
murder or homicide or two, at least in the last volume, where every
æsthetic reaper thins out his characters, and throws half of them into
the _oubliette_ or family-vault of the inkstand.
Victor had too many years and acquaintances to allow himself, with so
little regard to days of grace and double usance,[43] on the spot,
before supper,--_cito citissime_,--what hast thou, what canst thou?--to
fall in love. His optic nerve daily unravelled itself into finer and
more delicate fibres, and touched all points of a new form, but the
sore feelers curled back again more readily; every month the sight of a
new face, like new music, made a _stronger_ and _shorter_ impression.
He could only talk his way into love, not see it. Only words winged by
virtue and sensibility are the bees which, in such cases, carry the
pollen of love from one soul into another. But such a love, of the
better kind, is annihilated by the least immoral alloy. How could it
form and filter up in a defiled heart, filled with high-treason against
a friend?
Victor would have gone to the palace as early as half past nine, but
the Lady Chamberlain had not yet combed out her eyebrows and the King
Charles's spaniel.