The Cure.--The Prince's Palace.--Victor's Visits.--Joachime.--
Copperplate Engraving of the Court.--Cudgellings.
When I was in Breslau, I said, "I wish I were the Fetzpopel!"[191] just
as I was devouring the portrait of that personage. The Fetzpopel is a
silly woman whose face is stamped on the Breslau ginger-cookies. I say
what follows not merely on my own account, for the sake of getting my
own head on to such gingerbread paste, but also for the sake of other
literati, whom Germany honors with monuments as little as it does
me,--for instance, Lessing and Leibnitz. As one must always feel so
disagreeably in the German circles, until half a rod of stones, at
least, are got together for the monument of a Lessing or other magnate,
(the most that we have as yet is what few stones good reviewers throw
at a literary man, as the ancients did upon graves,)--accordingly, I
expressed myself freely in the Breslau market-place before I had bitten
into the Fetzpopel: "Either the temple of fame and the bed of honor for
German authors are on this gingerbread here, or else there is no fame
at all. When will it be the time, if it is not now, to expect of the
Germans that they shall take the faces of their greatest men and emboss
them upon eatables? because, certainly, the stomach is the most
important German member. If the Greek lived only among statues of great
men, and thereby became great himself, then surely would the Viennese,
if he had the greatest heads always before his eyes and on his plate,
fall into enthusiasm and an emulous desire to promote himself and his
face also on to gingerbread, and other cakes, pies, and cracknels.
Meusel's learned Germany might be copied in baker's-work,--one might
emboss great heroes upon army-biscuit, in order to set on fire the
common soldiery and make them hunger for glory,--great poets I would
sketch on bridal-cakes in inlaid sculpture, and heraldic geniuses on
oatmeal bread,--of authors for women sweet box-pictures might be
designed for sugar-work. If this were done, then would heads like
Hamann or Liskov meet more generally the German _taste_ in such dress;
and many a scholar who had not a loaf of bread to eat would at least
ornament one; and we should have, beside the paper nobility, a baked
one also." As regards myself, who up to this time never saw my face
anywhere except in the shaving-glass, they shall mould me (for I am
least known in Westphalia) on Westphalia rye-bread.
Now to the story again. A tall, curly-haired man stands in the night
before the many-colored house of the apothecary Zeusel, peeps up at the
lighted third story, which he is about to occupy, and at last opens,
instead of the wooden door, the glass one of the apothecary's shop. O
my good Sebastian! a blessing on thy entry! May a good angel give thee
his hand, to lift thee over boggy roads and man-traps; and when thou
hast fallen into a snare and been wounded, then may he fan the wound
with his wing, and a kind man cover it with his heart!
In the apothecary's shop, which blazed like a ballroom, one of the
fattest court-lackeys was begging of one of the leanest dispensers a
maniple more and a little pugillus[192] of moxa[193] for his Highness.
But the lean man took behind his scales a half-open handful of moxa,
and four finger-tipfuls more (for in fact a little pugillus amounts to
only three finger-tips), and sent it all to the feet of the Prince.
"When we have burnt all this," said he, pointing to the moxa, "his
Highness will soon have a podagra as good as can be found in the
country."
The reason why the dispenser gave more than the recipe said was that he
also wished to have his pew in the Temple of Fame; therefore he would
first think over a recipe that was handed to him until he approved it,
and then he always weighed out 1/11 or 1/17 of a scruple too much or
too little, in order to take off from the doctor's head the civic crown
of the recovery and put it on his own. "Only with such gifts can I work
my cures," said he. Victor did not begrudge him the illusion. "A
dispenser," said he, "who leads the whole column of convalescents, and
turns over to the doctor merely the rearguard of corpses, has already
laurels enough for this short life _under_ his brain-pan."
The apothecary Zeusel has good breeding enough not to bore his tenant
by forcing upon him a reception-dinner, and merely gave him _this_
newspaper article from his oral _Morning Chronicle_ of the city, that
the Prince had not so much got the gout as that he was trying to get it
and settle it. He also gave him the Italian servant whom his Lordship
had hired for him, and his chamber.
--And therein Sebastian is now sitting alone on the window-seat, and
seriously considering, without glancing at the beauties of the room or
the prospect, what he properly shall have to do here to-morrow, and day
after tomorrow, and longer. "To-morrow, I blaze away at once," said he,
and twirled the tassel of the curtain-cord; "I and the gout must settle
ourselves down with the Prince. It is hard when a man has to use the
gouty matter of a Regent for water to turn his mill: a polypus in the
_heart_ or dropsy on the _brain_ would annoy me less as a courtier;
either would be respectable _means of grace_ and fins for swimming
upward. No, I will stand straight and firm, entirely upright; from the
very first I will not yield an inch, so that they shall always find me
the same. Not so much as quartering and anchoring in antechambers is to
be thought of." (Indeed, his Lordship had already stipulated to the
soliloquist an exemption from the annoyance of court etiquette.) "Ah,
ye fair spring-years! Ye are now flown away over my head, and with you
peace and mirth and studies and sincerity, and none but good, genial
hearts!" (He suddenly twirled the curtain-tassel up shorter.) "But,
thou good father, thou hast not even had such good years,--thou roamest
over the earth and givest up thy days to the welfare of men! No, thy
son shall not spoil nor embitter for thee thy sacrifices,--he shall
conduct himself here discreetly enough,--and then, when thou comest
back again and findest here at court an obedient, favored, and yet
uncorrupted son..." When the son actually thought to himself, that, if
he should thus culminate in a right ascension at court, he might win
the heart of the Chaplaincy, the heart of Le Baut, that of his father,
those of his whole kindred, and (provided he thought of _that_)
even the heart of Clotilda,--by that time he had twisted off the
curtain-tassel and held it like a tuberose in his hand, ... and so he
thought best to lay himself quietly down in his bed.
--Get up, my hero! The morning sun already reddens thy balcony,--jump
up amidst the ringing of the bells for the week-day sermon, and amidst
the din of this market-day, and look round on thy bright chamber! Thy
father, of whom thou hast been dreaming all night, has furnished it
full of musical and artistic instruments and apparatus, and thou wilt
think of him the whole morning; and yet the balcony offers thee still
more,--the sight of a green strip of fields, and, toward the west, of
the heights of Maienthal, the whole market-place, the private residence
of the senior parson of the city opposite, into all the rooms of which,
that he lets to thy Flamin, thou canst look!
Flamin, however, is not in there just now: for it was he who had
already laid hold of my hero, and accosted him in those words of mine,
"Get up!" A new situation is a spring-cure for our hearts, and takes
away from them the oppressive feeling of our transitoriness; and
beneath such a cheerful sky of life my Victor to-day dances with
everything and everybody,--with the forenoon hours,--with the
Regency-Counsellor,--with the apothecary,--out through the apothecary's
shop right before the dispenser, on his way up to the palace to make a
few passages with the gouty Januarius.
--He has hardly been at the Prince's half an hour, when Zeusel sees him
running back again into his medicinal warehouse.... "Heigh! heigh!"
thinks the apothecary.
But it was quite different from what he thought. Through an abatis of
uniforms--for the entrances to princes' apartments are almost like
lanes of tents, and rulers cause themselves to be guarded as anxiously
as if they feared they might be the _first_ or the _last_--Victor made
his way into the sick-chamber. Before a patient who lies in a
horizontal position one can keep a perpendicular one more easily. Great
folk often confound the effect of their apartment and furniture with
their own: if the _savant_ could come upon them on a common, in a wood,
in a cabbage-field, he would know how to deport himself. Victor,
however, had himself been brought up in apartments that were
embroidered, and furnished with gold corner-clips. So when he found his
father's friend in pain and with his legs packed up, he exchanged his
English composure for the professional, and, instead of awaiting
haughty princely questions, began to propose medical ones. When the
doctor's medical confessional session was at an end, he laid his hand,
instead of on the head of the penitent, on the Bible which lay by it,
and was going to swear, but gave that up because a better idea had
occurred to him, and he opened--this was what had come into his
head--the gospel of the paralytic: "For the podagra in this case is not
to be thought of," said he. He showed him that his whole complaint
was--wind (figuratively and literally speaking),--that it lodged itself
in the relaxed vessels of the system, and insinuated itself, like the
Jesuits, under every different form, through all the members,--even his
pain in the calf was nothing more than that displaced human or
intestinal ether. The physician in ordinary, Culpepper, is to be
excused for his error in regard to the Prince; for every physician must
make his selection of some universal malady, into which he resolves all
others, which he treats _con amore_, in which, as the theologue does in
Adam's sin, or the philosopher in his first principle, he detects all
the rest. It rested, therefore, with the free will of Culpepper,
whether to pick out for himself as the radical malady, to be the
nest-egg and mother-bulb of his pathology, the podagra in the case of
men, with women the flux, or not. When he has once made his choice,
then he is obliged to endeavor to fix it upon his Highness, like pastel
or quicksilver. January had never, even from his chapel, heard anything
more agreeable than Victor's assertion, which set him free from the
prostration, dosing, and starving which he had had to go through.
Victor, in his joy at the lightness of the malady, hurried away to give
his recipe for it, after he had asserted, by way of consolation, that
"an _ethereal_ body was still to be taken along with him, and would
serve the soul, not indeed for a heavenly Graham's-bed,[194] but still
for an air-bed, which made itself up. Only poor women's-souls--if one
rightly regarded their bodies--might be said to lie on thorny straw
sacks, smooth hussars'-saddles, and sharp sausage-sledges[195]; whereas
shaven and tattooed spirits (monks and savages) wrapped themselves up
with such fine bodies stuffed with whalebone shavings."[196]
Away he flew; and I have already reported that the apothecary presently
thought to himself: "Heigh! heigh!" In the apothecary's shop Victor
said to the dispenser, at whom he flew like saltpetre: "Sir colleague,
what think you about it, if we should have nothing to cure in the case
of his Highness but wind? You must advise me. For my part, I should
prescribe:--
_Pulv. Rhei Orient_.
_Sem. Anisi Stellati_
----_F[oe]niculi_
_Cort. Aurant. immat_.
_Sal. Tart. [=a][=a] dr. I_.
_Fol. Senn. Alexandr. sine Stipit. dr. II_.
_Sacchar. alb. unc. sem_.--
"If you agree with me, I have nothing more to say, except, _C. C. M. f.
p. Subt. D. ad Scatulam, S_. Colic-powders, one teaspoonful as often as
occasion requires."[197]
As the dispenser looked at him seriously, he looked at him still more
seriously; and the medicine was prepared without a change in the dose.
When he had gone, the dispenser said to his two startled pages: "You
couple of stupid epiglottises, don't you suppose he has sense enough to
ask?"
The biographer has no need whatever to justify the circumstance--since
the powder and the hero justify it--that January got upon his legs the
very same day.
As princes feel no pressure of the atmosphere, except that of the air
which is in their bodies, January's gratitude for his deliverance from
this pressure, was so unbounded that for the whole day he would not let
the Doctor go from his side. He must dine,--sup,--ride,--play with him.
In the palace it was tolerable; it was not like Nero's, a city within a
city, a Flachsenfingen in Flachsenfingen, but merely barracks and a
kitchen full of soldiers and cooks. For before every mouldy archive,
before every room where lay genuine diamonds, before every door-lock,
and before every stairway a bayonet was planted, with the protector and
patron who was attached to it. The numerous crew of kitchen-servants
lived and fired up in the palace, because his Highness was continually
eating. By this continual eating he would make his fasting easier for
him; for at the three ritual mealtimes of men he touched--because
Culpepper would so have it--desperately little, and could not wholly
contradict the courtiers who praised his strict diet. A watchmaker from
London had done the most to help him out in this moderation by
contriving for him a servant's bell, and a spring-work whose index
stood upon a great dial-plate in the servants' apartment; the margin of
the dial-plate was encircled, instead of the hours and the days of the
month, with the names of viands and wines. January had only to ring the
bell and press the spring, and the household immediately knew whether
the tongue and the victual-index pointed to pastry or to Burgundy. In
this way, by tinkling like a mill when his inner man had nothing more
to grind, he was most easily enabled to observe a stricter diet than
physicians and moralists could well demand, and he shamed more than one
grandee, whom, after eviscerating in death, they were obliged to lay
out upon the bed of state with the hungry stomach under one arm and the
thirsty liver under the other, as they give to capons also their two
viscera as a body-guard between their two wings.
Victor was as much at home in the palace as in the parsonage; for the
court proper, the proper courtly worms'-nest and frog-spawn, was
resident merely in the palace of the actual minister, Von Schleunes,
because he had to do the _honneurs_ of the throne, to invite
ambassadors, strangers, &c. The Princess resided in the large old
palace, which was called the Paullinum. Thus, then, did January spend
his days without pomp, but with comfort and convenience, in the true
solitude of a philosopher, and passed them away in eating, drinking,
and sleeping; hence could the Flachsenfingen Prorector compare him,
without flattery, to the greatest of the old Romans, in whom we admire
a similar hatred of show and state. January had, in fact, no court, but
went himself to the court of his actual minister; with extreme
reluctance, however: he could not love anything there,--neither the
Princess, who was always there, nor Schleunes's unmarried daughters,
which would have been against his London vow.
About twelve o'clock at night Zeusel would have been glad to find out
how all was going on, and brought to the physician in ordinary his
niece _Marie_, whom he offered to him as a female lackey. The
physician, who could not play the fool with any fool in the world,
especially under four eyes, thrust before the slender pike a crateful
of the food of truth, which the latter greedily devoured as if it were
pine-apple. Marie was a relative and a Catholic, impoverished by a
lawsuit, and disappointed in love, who, in the cold, hollow family of
the apothecary, received and expected nothing but thrust-wounds of
words and shot-wounds of looks; her broken and crushed soul resembled
the marsh-willow, of which one can strip down backward all the twigs
with the mere hand. She felt no longer pained at any humiliation; she
seemed before others to crawl, but in truth she lay continually
prostrate on the ground. When the gentle Victor saw this meek, averted
form, over which so many tears had flowed, and this once beautiful
face, on which, not the sorrows of fancy had laid their charming
painter's-touches, but physical pangs had emptied their poison-bags,
then did the fate of mortals bring sadness to his heart, and, with the
softest of courtesy towards Marie's station, sex, and sorrow, he
declined her services. The apothecary would have despised himself if he
had taken this politeness for anything else than fine raillery and good
breeding. But Victor threw her off once more; and the poor girl
withdrew in silence, and, like a maidservant, without spirit enough for
courtesy.
Nevertheless, in the morning the rejected one brought him his breakfast
with downcast eyes and painfully smiling lips; he had heard in his bed
how the apothecary and his hard sprouts of daughters had twitted Marie
with her "doleful whining air," and therefrom inferred a "_refusal_
from the jesting gentleman" overhead. His soul bled within him, and at
last he accepted Marie;--he made his eye and his voice so soft and
sympathetic that he could have lent either to the most tender maiden;
but Marie took nothing of it to herself.
January could hardly wait for him to come again.
The third day also it was just so.
And so, too, the next week.
--But I could wish my readers had all ridden in a body, at this time,
through the Flachsenfingen gate, and that this learned company had
scattered itself through the city in order to institute inquiries
about our hero. The reading scouts sent by me to the coffee-houses
would learn that the new English doctor had already unseated the
old one,--helped the parson's son at St. Luna to the post of
Regency-Counsellor,--and that great changes in all departments were at
hand. The division which I distributed among the butlers, butchers,
fishery-masters, castellans, and valets of the court, would bring me
word that the Prince had patted the Doctor, not on the fingers, but on
the shoulder,--that he had day before yesterday showed him with his own
hand his picture-cabinet, and sent him the best piece out of it,--that
in the theatre he had looked out with him from the stage-box,--that he
had presented to him a snuff-box rich with jewels (the usual civic
crown of rulers, and their calumet, as if we were Greenlanders, who
never love to receive any other present so much as snuff),--and that
they would travel together. Two of the very finest and most dignified
readers whom I had detached from these columns, and of whom I had
despatched the one to the Paullinum to the Princess, the other to the
actual Minister, would at least report to me the news that Prince and
Doctor had called together upon both, and that both had looked upon my
hero as a singular, shy, taciturn Englishman, who owed everything to
his father.
But the last piece of news which the readers have related to me they
cannot, I am sure, possibly know; and I will myself tell it to them.
--Before I deliver this, let me first simply explain in three words how
it was that Victor rose so rapidly. There may be Evangelist-Matthieus
among my readers who take this sudden rise, like that of the barometer,
as the sign of a speedy fall,--who will say that laurels and salad,
which have been forced to ripen in twenty-four hours by spirit on a
cloth, wither again just as soon,--nay, who will even joke about the
matter, and give out that the Prince's intestines, with their ether,
are a fish's swimming-bladder to my hero, who only by its inflation
mounts upward. Mining-superintendents laugh at such readers, and inform
them that men, particularly the occupants of thrones, look upon a new
physician as a new specific,--that they are always most ready to obey a
new one,--that Sebastian always deported himself towards every one the
first time in the finest manner, whereas with old acquaintances he
never said unnecessarily anything witty,--that January loved every one
whom he could see through, and that he fortunately recognized in my
hero merely a gay fellow fond of life, and did not remark around his
head any of Bose's Beatifications,[198] which smell of phosphorus and
emit painful sparks,--that Victor was not, like Le Baut, a _pot-plant_
in a crown, but a hyacinth hanging in the open air high above it,--that
he was cheery, and made every one else so,--and that another
mining-superintendent would not have made so much ceremony with his
readers as I: _he_ would merely have told them the main circumstance,
that in Victor, in his waggery and behavior generally, the Prince had
found and fallen in love with an enchanting resemblance to his fifth
son, the _Monsieur_ (lost on the Seven Islands), and that he had made
this observation even in London, although Victor was five years younger
than the latter.
January chose, himself, to present his favorite to everybody, and
so to the Princess too. The philosophers have it to explain why
Sebastian never once remembered, until he sat beside the princely
bridegroom on the coach-cushion, the mad, enamored little strip of
paper which, in Kussewitz, he had pasted above the Imperator of the
_montre-à-regulateur_, and thrown into the Princess's bargain. He
started, and held it to be impossible that he should have been such a
fool. But such a thing is easy for a man. His fancy flung back upon
every scene, upon every idea, so many focus-lights from a thousand
mirrors, and spread around the future, which stretched out beyond, so
many colored shadows and so much blue mist, that he was really
frightened when a foolish action came into his head; for he knew, that,
when he should have rejected it ten times and then thought it over
thirty times more, then, after all, he should go and do it.--When the
two appeared before the Princess, Victor was in that agreeable frame,
which is nothing new to tutors and young scholars, which stiffens the
limbs to bone, and sends the heart up into the mouth, and petrifies the
tongue;--it was not the certainty that _Agnola_ (that was the name of
the Princess) had read the aforesaid advertisement on the watch, which
so disconcerted him, but the uncertainty whether she had or not. In his
agony he never thought of _this_,--that she, of course, did not even
know his handwriting or the authorship of the little slip; and even if
one does think of that in his agony, still it does not leave him.
--But all was, at once, above, below, and contrary to his expectation.
The Princess had laid aside the face of sensibility with her
travelling-dress, and had put on instead a fine, firm gala-face. The
crowned bridegroom January was received by her with as much warm
decorum as if he were his own ambassador of the first rank. For
January, the disk of whose heart charged itself full of sparks on the
electrizing-cushion of a fair cheek or a bosom-handkerchief, had for
that very reason towards Agnola, with whom merely from policy he had
concluded the concordats of marriage, all the warmth of the month after
which he was named. Towards Victor, the son of her hereditary foe, the
successor to the house-thief of princely favor, she cherished, as is
easy to guess, true tenderness. Our poor hero, surprised at January's
coldness, which seemed to promise on the part of the wife no special
warmth toward himself, demeaned himself as gravely as the elder and
younger Cato at once. He thanked God (and so do I) that he came away.
But all the way back he kept thinking: "If I could only have got my
missive out of the watch-case! Ah, then I would have done everything,
poor Agnola, to reconcile thee to thy fate and thy husband!--Ah, St.
Luna," he added, as they passed along before the city parson's house,
"thou peaceful spot, full of flowers and of love! The masters of the
hunt send thy Bastian from one baiting-house to another!"
For he must also, for politeness' sake, go at least to the actual
Minister's, and January took him along with him. Thither he went with
gusto, as if into a sea-fight, or into a quarantine hospital, or into
the Russian ice-palace.
Furniture and persons in the house of Schleunes were in the finest
taste. Victor found there, from the wabble-headed figures[199] and
court-people, even to the basaltic busts of old philosophers, and to
the dolls in the shape of Schleunes's daughters, from the polished
floor to the polished faces, from the powdering cabinet to the reading
cabinet,--both of which painted the head in the mere passage through
them,--in short, everywhere he found all that the sumptuary laws have
ever forbidden. His first embarrassment with the Princess gave him the
pitch for a second. It was no longer the old Victor at all. I see
beforehand that the worthy schoolmasters at the Marianum in Scheerau
will be hard upon him for it,--especially the rector,--that he should
have so little knowledge of the world as to be, while in this company,
witty without vivacity, constrainedly free without complaisance, too
constantly in motion with his eyes, too immovable in his other members.
But one must suggest to these courtly and scholarly people, that he
could not help it. The rector himself would have been embarrassed as
well as Victor before the _bel-esprit_ of a minister's lady, whom,
though, to be sure, Meusel has not introduced her into his, the court
has into _its_ Learned Germany,--before her quizzing daughters,
especially the handsomest, who was named Joachime,--before a number of
strangers,--before so many people who hated him on his father's
account, and who watched him in order to explain and verify his
relations with the Prince,--before the Princess herself, whom the Devil
had also brought hither,--before Matthieu, who here was in his element,
and in his leading character and bravura air,--and before the
Minister,--especially before this last. Victor found in him a man full
of dignity, from whom business did not take away politeness, nor
thinking wit; and whom a little irony and coldness only the more
exalted, but who seemed to despise feeling, scholars, and mankind.
Victor generally imagined to himself a minister--e. g. Pitt--as a Swiss
glacier, on which the clouds and dew that nourish it freeze overhead,
which oppresses the low places, and, in its alternation between melting
and congealing, sends out great torrents down below, and out of whose
clefts corpses are drifted.
January himself was not quite comfortable among them: what availed him
the finest dishes, if they were embittered by the finest conceits? The
card-table was, therefore, especially upon the peaceful arrival of his
spouse, his quiet place of anchorage; and his Victor was for this once
also glad to anchor beside him. My correspondent thinks that the
tuning-key to this over-fine, demi-semi-_tone_ was turned by the
Minister's lady merely, who had all sciences in her head, and to
be sure at-her tongue's end, and for that reason held a weekly
_bureau-d'esprit_. In this ridiculous position, Sebastian played away
his evening and gobbled down his _souper_; he could tell a good story,
but he had no story to tell,--in the few _contes_ which stayed by him
all was anonymous, and to the circle about him the names were precisely
the things of the first importance; nor could he make use of his humor
either, because a humor like his places the possessor himself in a mild
comic light, and because, therefore, only among good friends whose
respect one cannot lose, but not among bad friends whose respect
one must hold by defiance, can it venture out in its sock and
harlequin's-collar,--he did not even enjoy the happiness of inwardly
laughing at them all, because he had no time for it, and because he
never found people ridiculous till their backs were turned.
He was confoundedly badly off. "You'll not catch me here again very
soon," he thought to himself; and when, through the two tall glass
doors of the balcony, which looked out upon the garden, the moon stole
in with its dreamy light, which out there fell upon stiller dwellings,
fairer prospects, and calmer hearts,--then he stole out upon the
balcony (as his partnership at the card-table was broken up by the
Prince after supper), and the night that glistened on the earth and in
the heavens exalted his bosom with greater scenes. With what love
thought he then of his father, whose philosophic coldness was like the
January snow, which covers the seed from the frost, whereas that of the
court resembles the snow of March, which devours the buds! How sorely
did he reproach himself for every discontented thought about his honest
Flamin's slight want of refinement! O, how his inner man erected itself
like a fallen and forgiven angel, when he imagined to himself Emanuel
leading Clotilda by the hand, and rapturously asking him, "Where hast
thou found to-day an image of this my friend?" At this moment he
yearned inexpressibly to be back again in his St. Luna....
His quickening heart-beats were all at once checked by _Joachime_, who
came out with a burst of laughter directed toward the parlor. As it was
a burden to her to sit for a single hour, (I wonder how she could lie
in bed a whole night,) she extricated herself as often as she could
from the curb-bit of the card-table. The Princess released her this
time, who suspended this _night-work_ of great people on account of the
weakness of her eyes. Joachime was no Clotilda, but still she had two
eyes polished like two rose-diamonds, two lips like painted ones, two
hands like casts, and, in fact, all the duplicate members were very
pretty.... And with these a court-physician can keep house well enough,
though the single ones (heart, head, nose, forehead) are not those of a
Clotilda. As now under the open heaven he recovered his spirits, and
on the balcony, which for him was always a parlor, the use of his
tongue,--as Joachime's tone attuned him again to his own,--as she
assailed the taciturnity of the English, and he defended the
exceptions,--as he could now run, like a spider, up and down along the
thread of the conversation, and was no more to be disturbed by the
Princess, who had followed after to cool off in the night-air her
inflamed eyes,--and as one complains of feeling ennui only when one
himself inflicts it,--and as I transcribe all this, I do enough (I
think) for a reviewer, who stands up behind the coach-body of the
Prince, and reflects and wonders what he shall have to hold on to
(except the footmen's straps), in case Victor, sitting before him in
the carriage, does not during the ride home wish the Minister's house
at the Devil, but thinks more contentedly,--Well, it's tolerable
enough![200]
Victor's society agreed so well with the Prince, that he fancied he
could as little do without him as a canoness out of the house can think
of taking the badge of her order off her person. He always plunged into
the sacred cup and welcome of the warm spring of a new friendship as
immoderately as a guest at Carlsbad does into his. When he felt ennui,
the Medicus was besought to come and drive it away; when he experienced
an inward jubilee, that person was again entreated to appear, that he
might participate in the jubilation. Only those times at which January
felt neither ennui nor the contrary were left to his friend to spend
entirely at his own pleasure. Victor had sworn beforehand to make an
easy matter of refusing, and had broken out upon people of easy
consent; now, however, he said, "The Devil may say, No! Just let a man
find _himself_ in the same situation first!" ... And so must our poor
Victor describe nothing but empty, dizzying gyres in the court-circle
of the throne, among people for whose tone he could more easily have an
_ear_ than a _tongue_, and whom he could read, but could not win.
A youth in whose breast hang the night-pieces of Maienthal and St.
Luna,--or one who has just arrived from a watering-village,--or one who
has it in mind to fall in love,--or one who, in great cities or in
their great circles, must be an _idle_ spectator,--every such one is
also, for that very reason, a _dissatisfied_ spectator therein, and
blows into his critical pipe against the trifling company, till he
himself is drawn in. But when all these causes actually meet in one and
the same man, then can he find no relief against his gall-bladder nor
any biliary duct, except to take some fine paper and send off to the
Eymanns in St. Luna a confounded satirical letter upon what he has
seen.