The Potato-form-Cutter.--Drag-chains in St. Luna.--Wax
Embossments.--Chess according to the _Regula Falsi_.--The Thistle
of Hope.--Escort to Flachsenfingen.
One would certainly want to sleep in one's clothes, like old Fritz, so
soon as ever one came to understand that in his shirt he is beset and
attacked, as Victor and I sometimes are, by the vampires of midnight
melancholy. They stay away when one sits up and has all his clothes on;
especially do boots and hat retain for us the feeling of day in the
greatest degree.--
A warm hand lifted up Victor's bedewed head from the
sleeping-board,[179] and directed it towards the whole surging flood of
morning-light. His eyes opened (as always) with indescribable mildness,
and without night-clouds, before Agatha, and beamed on her with full
radiance. But she hurried him away with his radiance out of the leafy
bedchamber; for he must look himself up a dressing-comb and a
morning-blessing, and, secondly, the table-couch was to be a tea-table
for Clotilda, who liked to take _warm_ drinks in _cool_ places.
--And so he stands out there between parsonage and palace in
mid-morning. All seemed to him to have been just built and painted
during his journey; for all that dwelt therein seemed to have changed
and made him melancholy. "The parents in there," he said to himself,
"have no son, my friend has no sweetheart, and I--no tranquil heart."
And now, when at last he entered the house, and became once more a
bright triumphal arch of the loving family-circle,--when he was
compelled to contemplate with sympathetic and yet enlightened eyes the
tender illusions of the parents, the groundless hopes of his friend,
and the coming up of stormy days,--then stood one fixed tear for the
future in his eye; and it grew not less when his adoptive mother would
justify it by tender glances.... Partly, however, this veil was wafted
over his soul merely from the preceding night, whose glimmering scenes
were separated from him only by a short interval of sleep; for a night
spent in the watches of emotion always ends with a melancholy forenoon.
The Chaplain was just making butter-vignettes; I mean, he was cutting,
with no other etching-tool than a penknife, and into no other
copperplate except potatoes, printers' tail-pieces and quadrats, which
were to be stamped on the July butter by way of ornament. One might
have supposed that Victor would have helped himself out greatly by
having wit enough to remark that the _old printed things_ were, to be
sure, quite worthy of long books upon them, and long universal German
literary reviews of the books, but of no human thought, and were ten
times more unenjoyable than these _newest_ butter-_incunabula_;[180]
for, if there could be anything wretcheder than the world's history
(i. e. the history of rulers), whose contents consisted of wars, as the
theatre-journal of _other_ puppets does of cudgellings, it could only
be the history of _littérateurs_ and printers.[181] This, too, must
have stood him in stead,--that he was, finally, philosophical, and
demanded that man should be called neither a _laughing_ nor a
_reasoning_, but a _prinking_ animal; to which remark the Chaplain's
lady added nothing, except the application of it to her daughters.
But in men of his sort, sadness, satire, and philosophy have place
beside each other. To the potato-medal-coiner and the Chaplainess, who
reckoned all women on earth among her daughters, and pronounced similar
castigatory sermons against them all, he described his journey with as
many satires and rasures as were needful for both parties; but when he
heard the wishes of the family expressed that his Lordship might have a
happy journey back with the beloved son of the Prince, and the
intelligence that the Regency-Counsellor had already everything packed
up to start for the city any hour that he might choose, then had Victor
nothing to do but to take the secretive tear-ducts in his eye-sockets
out of the way.
But whither? Into the garden! That was not well-considered. Flamin
followed, and they arrived together at the embowered closet in the
presence of the tea-drinkers. Never did its branches overshadow a more
embarrassed face, softer eyes, fuller looks, and livelier or lovelier
dreams than Victor carried with him beneath them. He thought of
Clotilda as now a wholly new being, and thought, therefore,--as he knew
not whether she loved him,--very stupidly. Man, when he has climbed
over the mountain, always regards the coming hill as nothing; Flamin
had been his mountain, and Clotilda was his hill.--In all the shallows
of conversation, where one is already half stranding or sinking, there
is no grander ship's-pump than a story which one has to tell. Give me
embarrassment, and the largest circle, and only _one_ disaster,--that
is, the anecdote of it, which no one knows but myself,--and I will soon
save myself. Victor therefore brought out his, life-preserver,--that
is, his log-book,--from which he made for the bower a practical
extract. I confess, a newspaper-writer might have falsified more, might
have been guilty of more sins of _commission_, but hardly of more sins
of _omission_.
He gave himself, I fancy, a lift again with the Chaplainess, and
injured himself unquestionably with Clotilda,--however much, out of
good-will towards his hearers, and too strong a hatred of the court, he
offended against Clotilda's satire-embargo in her letter,--when,
without reflecting, too, that maidens love only the jest, not the
jesters, he represented the benefit-drama of the Princess, not on the
sublime side, as I did, but on the comic side. Clotilda smiled, and
Agatha laughed.
But when he named the name of Emanuel, and his house, and his mountain,
then did friendship and memory diffuse over the fairest eye above which
an eyebrow-arch, drawn by a line of beauty, ever yet flowed, a soft
glimmer which wanted, every moment, to grow to a tear of joy. But it
had to become one of another nature, when, in answer to the question
about his health which Clotilda hopefully put to him as an adept in
science, Victor was compelled to give the (faintly paraphrased) history
of his nocturnal bleeding. He could not conceal the pang of sympathy,
nor could Clotilda conquer it. O ye two good souls! what sore wounds
will your hearts yet receive from your great friend!
Whither could she now turn her loving and sorrowing eye, but to her
good brother Flamin, towards whom her demeanor, in consequence of the
double constraint which her silence and his interpretations imposed
upon her, had been hitherto so indescribably mild?--As, now, Victor saw
all this with such wholly different eyes,--as he stood before his poor
friend, who with his present happiness was perhaps accumulating the
poisonous nourishment of his future jealousy, and gazed openly and
fixedly into the firm countenance which some time bitter days might
rend with agony,--and as, generally, _past_ or _future_ sorrows of
another took a stronger hold of him than _present_ ones, because fancy
had him more in its power than the senses,--in this state of things, he
could not for a moment assert the mastery over his eyes, but they bent
their look, encircled with compassionate tears, tenderly on his friend.
Clotilda was embarrassed about the resting-place of his look; so was he
too, because man is less ashamed of the most vehement signs of hatred
than of the smallest signs of love. Clotilda understood not the
coquettish double art of throwing others into embarrassment or drawing
them out of it; and the good Agatha always confounded the latter with
the former.... "Ask him what ails him, brother!" said Agatha to
Flamin....
The latter led him out with like good intention behind the nearest
gooseberry-bushes, and asked him in his firm way, which always held an
assertion as a question,--
"Something has happened to thee?"
"Just come this way!" said Victor, and pulled him along behind some
higher Spanish walls[182] of foliage.
"Nothing has happened to me," he began, at last, with brimming
eye-sockets and smiling features,--"nothing more than that I have been
a fool for some twenty-six years" (that was his age). "I know thou art
unfortunately a jurist, and perhaps a worse oculist than I myself am,
and hast, perhaps, read very little in Herr Janin.[183]--Am I right?"
Flamin's shaking of his head meant something more than No.
"Very naturally; but if thou hadst, thou couldst have it from himself,
or from the translation by Selle, very finely shown, that not merely
the lachrymal gland secretes our tear-drops, but also the crystalline
body,[184] the Meibomian[185] glands, the lachrymal caruncle,[186]
and--our afflicted heart, I add to the rest.--Nevertheless, of these
aqueous globules, which are made for the sorrows of poor, poor mortals,
not more than (if things go rightly) four ounces are filtered in
twenty-four hours.... But, my dear one, the fact is just this,--that
things do not go rightly, especially with me; and it vexes me to-day,
not that thou hast never peeped into Herr Janin, but that thou dost not
observe my confounded, cursed, stupid way."
"What one?"
"Yes, indeed,--what one? but I mean this of to-day,--namely, that
my eyes--thou mayst boldly ascribe it merely to a too feeble
_tear-siphon_, under which head Petit comprehends all absorbing
tear-ducts--run over, when, e. g., any one does me an injustice, or
when I merely desire anything too strongly, or imagine to myself an
approaching pleasure, or only, in fact, a strong sensation, or human
life, or the mere weeping itself." ...
His good-natured eye stood full of water as he said it, and justified
all.
"Dear Flamin, I wish I had been a lady, or a Moravian, or a
player;--truly, if I wanted to make the spectators believe I was going
about it (namely, weeping), it would be actually a fact, too, on the
spot."--
And here he fell softly and fondly, with tears which had an excuse for
flowing, upon the beloved breast.... But for the viper-cure and
iron-cure of his manliness he needed nothing but a "Hm!" and a shrug of
the whole body; thereupon the youths went back as men to the arbor.
There was nothing left there: the girls had stolen away to the meadows,
where nothing was to be avoided, except high grass and bedewed shadows.
The empty arbor was the best absorbing tear-siphon for his eyes; nay, I
gather from reports of the epistolary Spitz that he was vexed. As the
sister came back by-and-by alone, his companion was vexed too. In fact,
if somehow or other my hero--which would be a misfortune for me and
him--should in time fall in love with Clotilda, then will the heroine
make us both warm enough,--him in acting, me in copying,--for the very
reason that she herself will _not_ be warm, because she has neither
superfluous warmth nor superfluous coldness, but always the alternating
temperature which changes with the subject of conversation, but not
with the speaker; because she takes away from a tenderly disposed
fellow-man all pleasure in praising her, as she pays out no tithe
thereof, or at least in offending her, as she issues no letters of
indulgence; and because one really, in his agony, assumes at last that
one can commit no other sins against her except such as are sins
against the Holy Ghost. Jean Paul, who has been in such cases, and has
often stood for whole years in one spot before such mountain-fortresses
with his storming-ladders and labarums and trumpeters, and, instead of
the garrisons, taken _himself_ off by an honorable retreat,--this Paul,
I say, can form a conception of what an amount of parchment, time, and
printer's ink may have to be used up in the case of Sebastian _contra_
Clotilda, before we get things even to a _war-footing_. In fact, with a
perfectly _rational_ woman a man never feels himself quite well; and
only with a merely fine, fanciful, ardent, capricious one is he truly
at home. One like Clotilda can make the best man, from mere distress
and respect, frosty, stupid, and enraptured; and in most cases there
comes in the additional misfortune, that the poor, worn-out, fond fool,
by whom such an earthly angel absolutely will not let herself be
worshipped, as the Apocalyptic one would not by the disciple John, can
still seldom muster courage to say to the angel,--somewhat as one might
to an angel of an opposite nature with the kingdoms of the world,
demanding to be worshipped,--"Take thyself out of my sight!" Paul
always in such cases takes himself away.----
Victor did not do this; he absolutely now could not get away from the
house, i. e. from the village. The summer days seemed to him to rest in
St. Luna, softly breathing, fragrant, blissful; and he was going to be
cast out of this softly straying gondola into the slave-ship of the
Court,--out of the milk-house of the Parsonage into the princely
arsenic-house,--out of the _kindergarten_ of household love into the
ice-field of court love. That was a sore thing to him here in the
arbor,--and so sweet a thing in Tostato's shop!--When man's wishes and
situations exchange places, he accuses the situations, not the wishes.
He could laugh at himself for it, he said, but he had a hundred reasons
for lingering in St. Luna from one day to another: he was so much
disgusted now with his intention of pleasing a man (the Prince) from
any other motive than love; it was still more improbable that he should
himself please than that he should be pleased; he would rather humor
his own whims than those of crownéd heads, and he knew for certain that
in the first month he should tell the Minister von Schleunes satirical
things to his very face, and in the second even the Prince; and, in
fact, now in midsummer he should just be fit to act the complete
court-knave, whereas in winter, &c.
Beside these hundred reasons, he had still weaker ones which he did not
at all mention,--for instance, some such as these: He would gladly be
about Clotilda, because he must necessarily, as it were, to justify his
conduct,--but which, then, my dear, thy past or thy future?--disclose
to her his knowledge about her consanguinity to his friend. To this
disclosure there was wanting, what in Paris is dearest, _place_,--and
then, too, the exordium. Clotilda was nowhere to be met alone.
Connoisseurs say that every secret one tells to one of the fair sex is
a sticking-plaster which attaches him to her, and often begets a second
secret: was it for some such reason that Victor was so eager to
contrive a way of showing to Clotilda his acquaintance with her
sisterly relation?--
He stayed day after day, as, besides, the butter-week[187] of the
marriage must go by first. He had already marriage-medals in his
pocket. But he never could see Clotilda except a second at a time;
and, according to Bonnet, one needs half a second for a clear
idea,--according to Hooke, a whole one, in fact. Therefore, before he
could form a complete conception of this still goddess, she was always
gone.
At last more serious arrangements were made, not for departure, but for
forming the purpose of it.... The sweetest minutes of a visit are those
which once more postpone its close; the sweetest of all, those in which
one already has cane or fan in hand, and yet does not go. Such minutes
now encircled our Fabius of love; softer eyes said to him, "Hurry not!"
warmer hands drew him back, and the mother's tear asked him, "Wilt thou
rob me of my Flamin so soon as to-morrow?"
"By no means," he answered, and kept his seat. Did not, I ask, the
Chaplainess thrust for his sake her lingual executioner's sword into
its sheath, because there was nothing he so hated as loud or silent
defamations of a sex which, more unhappy than ours, sees itself
maltreated by two sexes at once? For he often took maidens by the hand,
and said: "Woman's faults, particularly _evil_ reports, moodiness, and
sensitiveness, are _knot-holes_, which in the _green_ tree please us
even into the honeymoon[188] as fine marble-veined _circles_, but
which, in the _dry_, in the marriage-furniture, when the plug has
shrunk and fallen out, gape open as ugly holes." Agatha now screwed her
sewing-cushion to his writing-table and kissed him, whether he chose to
look pleasant or sullen; Even the Chaplain sought to sweeten for him,
if not the last days, which he dreamed away at his house, yet at least
the last _nights_, for which purpose he needed nothing but a drum and a
foot. The most fiery nocturnal witch-dances of the mice the Chaplain
interdicted with his heel, that they might not wake up his guest; that
is to say, he kept up against the foot-board of the bed from time to
time a moderate cannonading, which knelled into the ear-trumpets of the
dancers the more in proportion as it startled the ears of humanity.
Against the Euler's knight's-moves of the rats he took the field with
only a mallet, wherewith, breaking in like a day of judgment on their
pleasure-parties and hunting-parties, he merely thumped once or twice
on a drum, extemporized out of the bed-quilt.
Matthieu was invisible, and, as courtiers mimic princes in everything,
was parodying the nuptial days of his prince at least by little nuptial
_hours_ of his own. The powder which issued out of cannons and the
cornucopias of the firework-makers, the _vivat_ which was prayed from
pulpits and shouted from taverns, and the expenses one incurred for all
this, were, I think, so considerable, that the greatest prince need not
have been ashamed to illustrate therewith his marriage and his--ennui.
Coldness has forever a _speaking-trumpet_, and sensitiveness an
_ear-trumpet_. The arrival of an unloved princely corpse or bride is
heard of at the polar circles; on the contrary, when we inferiors fill
our graves or our arms with loved beings, there fall only a few,
unheard tears, disconsolate or blissful.
Flamin pined for the session-table, whose labors were now soon to
begin, and he could not comprehend this delay.... At last, for once,
and with all seriousness, the day of departure was fixed, the 10th of
August; and I am sure Victor would not have been on the 14th still in
St. Luna, had not the Devil on the 8th brought along a Tyrolese.
It is the same fellow who day before yesterday made his entry among us
at Scheerau, with a wax retinue which he had got together, half from
the imperial states and half from among the literati, and with the wax
hands of these twin brothers of man took money from our purse. It is
stupid, that Spitz did not bring me the present dog's-day the day
before yesterday; I could myself have asked the churl, who embossed, in
St. Luna, Victor and the Chaplain in wax, what was the real name of
Victor, and of Eymann, and of St. Luna itself. The result is, that I am
still, with an allowable and biographical curiosity about this
carpenter of men, who surrounds us with awful reflections of our little
being, following on his heels.
Victor must, therefore, again tarry; for he had himself and the
Chaplain baked in wax, in order to give, in the first place, to the
latter, who had a childish fondness for all casts, dolls, and puppets,
and, secondly, to the family, who longed to quarter the waxen
mock-Victor in his vacated chamber, a greater pleasure than to himself.
For he had a horror of these flesh-colored shadows of himself. Even in
childhood, among all ghost-stories, those of people who had seen
themselves crept with the coldest hand over his heart. Often at
evening, before going to bed, he surveyed his trembling body so long,
that at last he detached it from himself, and saw it standing thus
alone beside his self and gesticulating as a strange form; then he
would lay himself down, quaking, with this strange form, in the grave
of sleep, and the darkling soul felt itself like a Hamadryad, grown
over by the pliant fleshy bark. Hence he felt deeply the difference and
the long interval between his self and its bark, when he looked for
some time on another's body, and still more deeply when he contemplated
his own.
He sat opposite the embossing-stool and the embossing-tools, but fixed
his eyes on a book again, so as not to see the corporeal form, in which
he carried himself round, distant and duplicated. The reason why he
nevertheless could endure the reduplication of his face in the glass
can only be, that he regarded the supernumerary in the glass either
merely as a superficial portrait without cubic contents, or as the only
archetype with which we compare other duplicates of our person.... Upon
these points I can never speak, myself, without a certain tremor....
The wax-copy of Victor, to express his majority, was arrayed in a _toga
virilis_, an overcoat which the original had cast off; likewise the
chamber which the living one vacated was cleared out. The Chaplain
proposed to himself to place this cheap edition of Horion in the window
when the better one was gone, in such a manner that all the school
youth, who learned from the chorister manners and _mores_, should doff
their hats to it when they came tearing out of the school-house.
Now at last!--For Mat came. The wrung-out cheeks of the latter, and his
whole body, which had been under the lemon-squeezers of night-feasts,
gave evidence that he did not lie when he said the princely bridegroom
looked even eight times wretcheder, and was prostrate with the gout. He
added in his bitter way, which Victor little liked, that these pale
great people had in fact no blood except the little they cupped from
their subjects or what stuck to their hands, as insects carry no red
blood about with them, save what they have sucked from other creatures.
This reminded Victor of his medical duties to this prince. Either Mat's
wasted form,--for immoral night-life makes features and complexion
still more repulsive than the longest confinement to the sick-bed,--or
the recollection of his Lordship's warnings, or both, made him
quite as odious to our court-physician as the latter through his
court-doctorship had become to him: this secret poison of Matthieu's,
however, manifested itself, not by an abated, but by an increased,
almost ironical courteousness. On the contrary, Mat and Flamin seemed
to be more familiar with one another than ever.
In the forenoon, after shaving, Victor jumped up without washing
himself again, and immediately packed up his boot-jack, and burst the
suspenders of his pantaloons, and bespoke additional hands to discharge
his life-ballast, (on account of his miserable packing,) and then stow
it again. For he always gave over the whole trusteeship of the lumber
of our petty life's furniture to strange hands, and that with such a
contempt for the trumpery and such a recklessness of expenditure,--I
never mean, indeed, to calumniate my hero, but, notwithstanding,
it is proved by Spitz that he never collated the current money of a
gold-piece when he changed it into silver, nor ever beat down in trade
a Jew, Roman, or Moravian,--to such a degree, I say, did he carry this,
that the whole female Hanse in St. Luna cried, "What a fool!" and that
the Chaplainess always in the market-square slipped herself into his
place. But he was incorrigible, because he made the journey of life,
and therefore the luggage of the journey, look so diminutive through
his philosophic eyes, and because nothing made him blush like the least
appearance of self-interest: he ran off from all arrangements,
outriders, and stage-rehearsals, when they appeared on his account; he
was ashamed of every pleasure which was not to be divided, at least
into two bites, one for a fellow-eater; he said, the forehead of a
Hospodar[189] must have assumed the hardness of his crown, for
otherwise such a man could not possibly endure what often, merely on
his behalf, was done by a whole county,--the music, the triumphal
arches, the odes, the cries of joy in prose, and the frightful
cannonades.
He had now nothing more to discharge in St. Luna than a mere flat
civility; for thus much may I well assert without vanity, that
a hero whom I have chosen for mine will have, I trust, sufficient
good-breeding to go to the Chamberlain Le Baut and say, "_Au revoir!_"
Besides, to such state visits he must now accustom himself.
Mat, too, was over there, that image of a Cupid with bristly, plucked,
drooping wings, tossed to the Chamberlain's lady: the latter joked with
him about those vacant looks, which betrayed the intermittent pulse of
his love. Le Baut was playing chess with Mat,--Clotilda sat at her
little work-table full of silk-flowers, in the midst of this noble
trio.... Ye poor daughters! what people have you not often to welcome
and hear through! To Clotilda, however, this family friend was nothing
but a stuffed-out mummy, and she knew not whether he came or went.
Sebastian, as adoptive son of Fortune, as heir of the paternal post of
favorite, was to-day received at the Chamberlain's with uncommon
civility. Verily, if the courtier shuns unfortunates because sympathy
for their sufferings comes over him too heavily, so does he gladly seek
the society of the fortunate, because he loves to participate in their
joy. The Chamberlain, who even continued to bow before one who, in his
fall from a throne, hung midway in the air, naturally bent himself
still lower before one who was in the act of making the opposite
passage.
Victor joined the women, but with an eye that strayed away to the
chess-board, in order, if he should be embarrassed, immediately to have
at hand a pretext for changing his attention or taking his leave. It
was ingenious: for every word which he or the women said was a move at
chess; he was obliged to conceal his coldness toward the Le Baut, that
is, toward the stepmother,--how much did she know that nothing graces a
mother more than a perfect daughter?--and his _warmth_ toward the
stepdaughter. The reader must not ask: "What warmth, then, could the
old stepmother desire?" For in the higher ranks claims are not altered
by blood-relationship or age; merely in the lower is this the case;
hence I always fear that what I address to the daughter may weary the
mother, and I always cast about, and rightly, when she comes, for a
better thread of discourse. Victor easily concealed his _coldness_ by
virtue of humanity, which, with him, so often degenerated into a
good-natured flattery of immoral hopes; and when a woman wanted to have
him fall in love with her, he would say: "I cannot really tell the good
little lamb, 'I would rather not.'" His _warmth_ toward Clotilda he
concealed--badly, not because it was too strong, but precisely because
it was not yet enough so. It is natural: a young man of education can,
if he will, conceal and bury in silence his _reciprocated_ love,
without making a pulpit announcement, but an _unreturned_ love, one
which he himself calls nothing more than mere regard, he lets blaze out
from him without cover. For the rest, I beg the world to sit down and
consider, that my hero has not the Devil in his skin or sixteen years
over his head, but that he cannot possibly feel a love for a person who
hangs a Moses' veil over her sentiments and over her charms. Love
begins and rises, throughout, only on reciprocal love, and with the
lovers' mutual finding-out of each other. He has merely regard, but a
very great, a growing and anxious regard; in short, his regard is that
cold pulsating point in the yolk of the heart--the metaphor is drawn
from an egg--to which the least outward warmth, often after years,
imparts growing life and Cupid's wings.
He now at the work-table investigated Clotilda's warmth with the
pyrometer; but I cannot go beside myself for joy, that he found, on a
scale subdivided into the minutest parts, her warmth to have risen
1/111 of a line. For he is off the track: I would sooner rely on
Lavater's forehead-measurer than on the heart- and warmth-measurer of a
love-seeking man, who confounds his interpretations with his
observations, and accidents with intentions. His pyrometer may,
however, be right; for towards good men one is, when bad ones are by,
(consider only Mat,) warmer than usual.
Let no one blame Herr Le Baut and Frau Le Baut for congratulating my
hero on the good fortune of going to such a court, to see such a
prince,--the greatest in Germany, said _he_,--to such a princess,--the
loveliest in Germany, said _she_. Mat smiled between Yes and No. The
old man went on with his chess, the old woman with her praise. Victor
saw with contempt how little possible it would be, in the case of two
such souls, who held the steps of the throne for a scale of being, and
the glacier of the throne for an Olympus and an Empyræum, and knew not
where, except on this eminence, to find their happiness,--to give them
better ideas of happiness, and worse ones of the eminence.
Nevertheless, he was obliged to confess to Clotilda, who had on her
face more than a No to the _eulogy_, that he negatived the whole of it
as nobly as she. He therefore kneaded praise and blame together,
according to an Horatian mixture, in order to make neither satirical
nor flattering allusions to two dismissed court-people.
"It is painful to me," said he, "that there are only pleasures there,
and no occupations,--mere baskets of confectionery, and not a single
work-bag, not to say no work-table like this one."
"Do you think," asked Clotilda, with striking earnestness, "that all
court-feasts pay for a single court-service?"
"No," said he, "for one ought to be paid for the feasts themselves. I
maintain there is nothing but drudgery there, and no enjoyment: all
their amusements are only the illumination, the interlude, and the
decorations, which please the player, who is thinking of his part, less
than the spectator."
"It is, at all events, good _to have been there_," said the old woman.
"Certainly," said he; "for it is good not always to stay there."
"But there are persons," said Clotilda, "who cannot make themselves
happy there, simply because they do not love to be there."
That was very fine and forbearing, but intelligible only to Victor's
heart.
"I would advise a fine enthusiast" (said he, and made no account, as
usual, of the apparent contradiction between Victor's _life_ and
Victor's _opinions_) "or a fiery poet to stay at home,--the _flights_
of either, instead of _pas_, would be in court-life what an hexameter
is in prose, which the critics cannot bear,--and to the soul with the
softest sensibilities I would say, Be off with them! the _heart_ is
there treated as a superfluous member, as in the six-fingered family in
Anjou the sixth _finger_ is." ...
The old woman shook her head quickly to the left.
"And yet," he continued, "I would take all three for a month to court
and make them unhappy, in order to make them wise."
The Chamberlain's family could not accommodate themselves to Victor's
style so well as my reader, who to my exceeding delight so cleverly
distinguishes humor and the talent of looking at all sides of a thing
from flattery and skepticism. Clotilda had slowly shaken her head at
the last proposition. In fact, all battled to-day _for_ and _against_
him, in that partial tone which women and relatives always assume
towards a stranger, when an hour before they had carried on the same
suit, but with a practical application, with their own kin.
Victor, who had long been fearing: that he should become disconcerted,
went off at last to where he had been so often looking,--to the
chess-table, where they were playing with the greatest desire to--lose.
The Chamberlain,--we all know how it was with him; he wrote nothing but
commendatory letters for the whole world, and the sacramental cup would
have been more to his taste, could he have drunk from it a _toast_ to
some important man's health,--that personage only promoted as well as
he could with the dry chess-statues another's success at the expense of
his own; he was glad to lose, provided only Matthieu won. And then,
too, he resembled those shamefaced souls who love to bestow their
benefits secretly, and he could not find it in his heart to tell his
adversary that he was securing him the victory; he took almost greater
pains to conceal himself as a courtier than to _conquer himself_ as a
Christian. Such a love ought, it would seem, to have been more warmly
requited than by open malice; but Mat had the same object in view, and
declined the victory which the other threw into his hands, like a real
sharper. In vain did Le Baut devise the best moves for checkmating
one's self. Mat matched him with still better ones, and threatened
every minute to be checkmated too. And every one pities the poor
Chamberlain, hunted about on the chess-board, and fearing, like a
coquette, that he shall _not_ be conquered. It became at length, for a
soft-souled eye, which certainly forgives the weak one sooner than the
wicked one, no longer endurable; Victor, with a thousand excuses to the
weak one and full of malice toward the malicious one, entered into the
steeple-chase, and obliged the Page to accept his advice and his
charitable subsidies, and to lay hold of military operations which he
proposed of such worth, that the man with the office of Chamberlain's
key, at last, in spite of his fears and in spite of the worst
prospects,--lost the game. All present saw through all present, as
princes do through each other in their public--playbills.
He got at last his farewell audience, but very small solace. The fair
form, beneath which all his ideals of beauty stood only as heraldic
bearers and caryatides, was even colder than at the reception, and
persisted in being only the echo of the parental courtesy. The only
thing which still kept him up was a--thistle: namely, an optical one
which had been sowed on the mosaic floor. That is to say, he took
notice that Clotilda during the farewell avoided with her foot this
flower-piece (which she certainly must have known) as if it were the
original. In the evening he drew his chains of inferences, as they are
taught in the universities; he engrafted upon this mock-thistle all the
roses of his destiny. "She was certainly _distrait_, and why? I ask,"
he said, speaking into his pillow; "for, besides, they have not yet
detected my feelings over yonder," he asserted, as he laid himself on
the second pillow. "O thou sweet eye that went down on the thistle,
rise again in my sleep, and be the moon of my dreams!" said he, when he
was already half-way into both. It was merely out of modesty that he
thought he was not discovered, because he did not look on himself as
remarkable enough to be observed.
The 20th of August, 179-, was the great day when he took up his march
to Flachsenfingen. Flamin had already trotted off at four o'clock in
the afternoon, in order to avoid a leave-taking which he hated. But our
Victor loved to bid farewell, and loved to tremble in the last silences
of parting. "O ye poor, egoistic mortals!" he said,--"besides; this
polar life is but so bald and cold; besides, we stand weeks and years
near each other without stirring with the heart anything better than
our blood,--only two or three glowing moments hiss and go out on the
glaciers of life,--why do you still avoid everything that draws you out
of your commonplace, and that reminds you how man loves? No! and if I
went to the bottom, and if I could thenceforward no longer console
myself, I would still, with bare heart and with all my wounds bleeding,
dissolved and sinking, I would still press to my bosom the beloved
being who must leave me, and would still say, It does me good!" Cold,
self-seeking, comfortable persons avoid leave-taking, just as unpoetic
ones of too intense sensibilities do; women, on the contrary, who
alleviate all their sorrows by talking, and people of poetic
temperament, who relieve all theirs by fantasying, court it.
At six o'clock in the evening,--for it was only a skip to
Flachsenfingen,--when the cattle came home, he sallied forth,
accompanied by the whole family. On his more fortunate arm--mine has to
bestir itself only for the good of science--hung the Britoness, and on
his left Agatha; to the sister the poor house-poodle (Apollonia) had
buckled herself, who thought, nevertheless, she might touch and enjoy,
despite the sisterly interpolation and mediating spirit, the dear
Doctor. So do the sparks of love, like the electric and magnetic
element, dart through a medium of twenty interposed bodies. A
philosopher, who sits down and considers that our fingers come not, in
fact, a thumb nearer to the beloved soul, whether only the globe of the
brain or that of the earth lie between them and it, will of course say,
"All very natural!" Hence this sedentary philosopher explains why
maidens half-love at the same time the male acquaintances of their
beloved,--why the cane-chair of Shakspeare, the clothes-drawer
of Frederick II., the bob-wig of Rousseau, content our yearning
hearts.----
But no one, except the queen-bee of this streaming swarm, wanted to go
back again. "Only just as far as the six trees," said Agatha. When they
had arrived at these frontier posts and boundary-trees of to-day's
pleasure, there were seven of them, and there was a general agreement
that _they_ were not meant, and they must go farther. The one who is
escorted grows generally more and more nervous, and the escort more and
more delighted, the longer it lasts. "Do let us go as far as that
ploughman!" said the sharp-sighted Britoness. But at last our hero
observed, that this Pillar of Hercules of their journey was itself a
moving column, and that the ploughman was only a wayfarer. "The best
thing is," said he, and turned about, "for me to go back, and not start
till to-morrow." The Chaplain said: "As far as the old palace" (i. e.
there was still _one_ wall of it remaining); "besides, I usually go
there evenings!" But beyond this frontier fort of the loveliest of
evenings the chattering column deceptively extended its march, and the
eyes were forgotten for the ears. As, consequently, in these boundary
disputes, one main article after another was broken by separate
articles, there was really nothing further to be done, except to make
the following attempt. "Only so far did I mean to have you go," said
Victor;--"now you must keep on with me and spend the night at the
apothecary's." "In fact," said the Chaplain's wife, coolly, "we'll go
along together till sundown; we surely are not going to turn our backs
upon this lovely sun." And certainly the evening had kindled nothing
but _feux-de-joie_ in the sun, in the clouds, on the earth, and on the
water.
On the hill they saw already the spires of the city; the sun, that
chosen turnstile of the escort, poured out of his deep hiding-place his
gold-trailing purple streams over the beds of shadow. There, on the
hill, as the sun vanished, Victor folded his arms round the married
couple, and said, "O, make yourselves as happy as you do me, and return
to your home in gladness!"--and then he took the sisters to his
enraptured heart, and said, "Good, good night! I love you!"--and then
he saw them all going back with their hidden sighs and tears; and then
he called out, "Truly, I shall soon come back; it is really only a jump
from one place to the other"; and then he cried after them, "I shall be
a poor devil, if we are separated!"--and then his heavy eye followed
them through all branches and hollows, and only when the loving company
had sunk into the last valley, as into a grave, did he close his eyes
and think on the ceaseless separations of man....
At last he opened his eyes toward the outspread, obscured city, and
thought: "Amidst that raised-work, in which men nestle with their
little life, thy little days, too, are shut in,--this is the veiled
birthplace of thy future tears, thy future raptures;--ah! with what
eyes shall I look down again, years hence, over this misty
environment,--and ... I am a fool! are, then, 2,300 houses standing
only on my account?"
_Postscript_. This sixteenth post-day the Mining-Superintendent has
concluded in regular order at the end of June.
FOURTH INTERCALARY DAY,
AND
PREFACE TO THE SECOND PART.
I am going to weld Intercalary Day and Preface together. Therefore,
unless there is to be mere trifling with the matter of the Preface, the
Second Part must be here, in some measure at least, touched upon. It
deserves to be noticed by critics, that an author who in the beginning
has before him for his domain eight pages of white paper--just as,
according to Strabo, the territory of Rome was eight leagues
broad--gets on by degrees so far, and peoples the scribbled paper
with so many Greek colonists,--for such our German characters
are,[190]--that at last he has often marched through and settled a
whole alphabet. This puts him into a condition to begin the Second
Part. My second is, as I know for certain, much better than the first,
although it is, to be sure, ten times worse than the third. I shall be
amply rewarded, if my work is the occasion of one review more being
made in the world; nor can I conceive of anything, unless it be this
very thought, that books must be written, so that the learned notices
of them may go on, which could keep an author up to the unspeakable
labor of standing all day at the inkstand, and dyeing whole pounds
of paper-rags _Berlin-blue_.... And now let this cool, serious,
_hocus-pocus_ of a Preface--an expression which Tillotson maintains to
be an abridgment of the Catholic formula, _hoc est corpus_--suffice for
good reviewers and universities.
I return to that which I properly meant by this whole episode. I have
conceived the idea, namely, of not only announcing my intention to give
the extra leaflets and side-shoots wherewith the Intercalary Days are
to be filled up, in alphabetical order,--for disorder is the death of
me,--but also to make a beginning here on the spot, and continue as far
as the letter I.