Clotilda's Promotion.--Incognito-Journey.--Petition of the Majors of
the Chase.--Consistorial Messenger.--Caricature of the
Flachsenfingeners.
To be sure he did--carry out the joke; but still at bottom I do not
lose my bet. For it happened in this way. From the day when Doctor
Culpepper had made that pass with his coarse hand, as with an
electrical discharger, before the full-blooded nose of Zeusel, the man
with three watches pressed his company upon my hero, who carried only
one, and that, too, the clumsy one of the Bee-father. Zeusel always
thanked God, if only a court-courier got drunk at his house, or the
court-dentist over-ate himself. He always brought with him, when he
came, certain secret items of intelligence, which were to be published.
He kept nothing to himself, not though one had threatened to hang him
in the cellar of his shop. He told our hero that the Minister was
making interest in behalf of his Joachime for the place of second
maid-of-honor to the Princess, who could select only the female part of
her service for herself,--but that he could not fairly do it, because
he, or his son Matthieu, had promised the Chamberlain Le Baut to
procure the same place for Clotilda; he therefore begged my hero, who,
as he saw, he said, was Matthieu's friend, to spare him the
embarrassment, and induce the Prince (which would cost only _one_ word)
himself to intercede with the Princess in behalf of Joachime; the
Princess, who, besides, patronized the Minister, would, on more than
one ground, do it with pleasure, and then the Minister could not help
it, if the Chamberlain, the enemy of his Lordship, went away empty.
The simpleton, as one can see, had guessed out, merely from the two
accounts, which he had got hold of, of the two office-seekers, the
whole of the remaining case; and the very circumstance, which Matthieu
disclosed to him, that the Minister was vacating a quarter of a wing of
his palace, for a companion of his deceased daughter Giulia, had only
strengthened his conviction. To such a degree does malice supply the
place, not only of years, but also of information and insight!
My hero could say nothing to him except that--he did not believe a word
of it. But after three minutes of private reflection he believed it
all: for that was the reason, he saw, why the dear Clotilda had to come
back from the seminary just at the arrival of the Princess,--that was
the reason why Le Baut built around the Minister's son so many altars
of incense and thank-offerings,--that was the reason why the old
lady (in the Sixteenth Dog-Post-Day) serenaded, and so loudly,
court-life,--in fact, as he further saw, two such outlawed, captive
Court-Jews in Babylon must have the live Devil in them, until they are
reinstated in the old holy city, and if they happen to have a handsome
daughter, they will use her as the relay of their journey, and the
Montgolfier of their balloon-ascension....
"O, only come, Clotilda!" he cried, glowingly;--"the court-pool will
then be to me an Italian cellar, a flowery parterre. If thou art only
once settled at the Minister's, then I shall have spirits enough and
sparkle properly. What will my father say, when he sees us stand with
two leading-strings, with one of which thou holdest the Princess, and
I, with the other, the husband?" ... At this moment, Clotilda's recent
objections to court-life fell like ice-flakes into his boiling blood;
but he thought to himself: "Women, however, are a little mite more
pleased with the court-residence of splendor than they themselves
suspect or say, and far more than men are. Cannot he, too, bear, then,
with a like soul-edifying position? She, as step-daughter of the
Prince, is only half-miserable, compared with him,--and does she know,
then, whether she may not some time be recalled from her _field-état_
to the court-garrison by an accident?" By this _accident_ he meant a
marriage with Sebastian. Finally, he tranquillized himself with
something which I also believe,--namely, that she had at that time,
merely out of politeness, made a show of a certain coldness towards her
new separation from her parents, and therefore towards the new place
also; and then, too, pleasure at such a prospect might have been
taken for warmth toward _somebody_ or other at court, e. g. toward
her--_brother_, he thought to himself.
And now yesterday's idea, upon which I have lost my wager, came forth
again, having shot up astonishingly in _one_ night,--namely, that, if
he could persuade the Prince to make the journey and the visit to the
Chamberlain, and while they were still on the road, could plead with
him for a good word to the Princess in behalf of Clotilda,--then was
it, in the first place, impossible for the stepfather to refuse a
prayer for the most beautiful stepdaughter,--and, secondly, impossible
for the Princess, when her spouse should exercise the privilege of the
first petition, not to draw all possible advantage from the first
opportunity of laying him under obligations to her.
--Eight days after, just at dusk,--in the autumn days night comes
sooner,--the Court--Chaplain Eymann was standing on the observatory and
peering at the sun, not for its own sake, but in reference to the
evening-redness and the weather, because he wanted to sow the next
morning,--when suddenly and with alarm he sprang down from the
watch-tower into his house, and delivered the Job's tidings, that the
Consistorial Messenger would be there in a moment, together with a
French emigrant, and for the one there was not a farthing, and for the
other not a bed in the house....
No soul came.
I can easily comprehend it; for the Consistorial Messenger reconnoitred
around the parsonage, and so soon as he saw the court-physician,
Victor, in wax, sitting up at the window, he marched instanter out of
the village, straight back to Flachsenfingen. The emigrant had turned
in at his professional cousin's, Le Baut's.
The two travellers were named January and Victor, and were returning
this very day from their facetious flying tour.
That is to say, seven days ago, the Prince, who loved mask-dances and
incognito-journeys and the ways of the commonalty, and who wished only
the Minister's mental masks and incognito _further_, had started off on
foot, with Victor, behind a fellow who had sallied forth in advance on
horseback with the masquerade dresses and masquerade refreshments.
January carried a sword in his hand, which was contained, not in any
sheath, but in a walking-cane,--an emblem of court-weapons! He gave
himself out in the market-town for the new Regency-Counsellor, Flamin.
My hero, who at the outset had passed himself through the mint, and
come out stamped as a travelling dentist, recoined himself in the third
village into a Consistorial Messenger, simply because the couple met
the true Messenger. This financial collector of the Consistory was made
to hand over to the physician for this week--it cost the Prince only a
princely resolution and an indulgence--his receipt-book and his
ecclesiastical robe of office, together with the tin-plate sewed
thereto. These plates are attached to Messengers, and the silver stars
to coats of distinction, as the leaden ones are to bales of cloth, that
one may know what the trumpery is worth.
For Büsching such a Rekahn's journey would be a windfall,--to me it is
a true torment; for my manuscript is, besides, so large already, that
my sister sits on it when she plays the piano-forte, because the seat
is not high enough without the addition of the Dog-Post-Days.
What did January see, and what Victor? The Regency-Counsellor, January,
saw among the public servants nothing but crooked backs, crooked ways,
crooked fingers, crooked souls. "But a bow is crooked, and the bow is a
sector of the circle, that emblem of all perfection," said the
Consistorial Messenger, Victor. But what vexed January most was, that
the officials respected him so exceedingly, when after all he gave
himself out only for a regency-counsellor, and not for a regent. Victor
replied: "Man knows only two neighbors: the neighbor at his head is his
master, the one at his feet is his slave; what lies out beyond either
of these two is to him God or beast."
What did January see still further? Untaxed knaves he saw, who enriched
themselves at the expense of taxed poor men,--honest advocates he
heard, who did not, like his courtiers or the English highwaymen, steal
under the mask of virtue, but without any mask, and to whom a certain
remoteness from enlightenment and philosophy and taste will not after
death be prejudicial, because they can then in their own defence set up
against God the exception of their ignorance, and represent to Him,
"that no other laws but those of their own sovereign and of Rome can
bind them, and that neither is God Justinian, nor is Kant
Tribonian."[209] He saw hanging from the heads of his country-justices
bread-baskets, and from those of their subjects muzzle-baskets; he saw,
that, if (according to Howard) it takes two men to support one
prisoner, here there must be given twenty incarcerated ones, that one
city-magistrate may live.
He saw cursed stuff. But, on the other hand, as an offset, he saw on
pleasant nights the cattle in fair groups feeding in the fields,--I
mean the republican ones, namely, stags and wild boars. The
Consistorial Messenger, Victor, said to him, that he had to thank the
masters of the chase for this romantic spectacle, whose tender hearts
had been as little able to execute the princely order of shooting wild
game as were the Egyptian midwives to execute that of slaughtering the
Jewish male children. Nay, the Financial Messenger at an alehouse had
some yellow ink and black paper brought to him, and there,--while the
slater drummed away on the roof to get some more slates brought to him,
and the guests knocked on the pitchers to get them replenished, and the
tavern-boy _tooted_ in at the window through a beer-siphon,--amidst
this Babylonian din the Consistorial Tithingman drew up one of the best
petitions that the noble gentlemen of the chase ever yet despatched to
the Prince.
A PLAIN RELATION, FROM THE PETITION OF THE
CHIEF MASTERS OF THE CHASE.
"That, as the wild game could neither read nor write, it was the
bounden duty of the masters of the chase, who could, to write for them,
and on conscience report that all the wild game of Flachsenfingen was
pining under the tyranny of the peasant, as well the red game as the
black.[210] That it made a chief-forester's heart bleed, to stand out
of doors at night and see how the country-folk, out of an incredible
ill-will to the deer, all night long, in the coldest weather, kept up
on the borders of the fields a noise and fire, whistling, singing,
shooting, so that the poor game might not be able to eat. To such hard
hearts it was not given to reflect, that, if one should station around
their potato-tables, as they do around their potato-fields, just such
shooters and pipers, who should shoot away every potatoe from their
mouths, that then they would necessarily grow lean. From just this
cause the game was so haggard, because it could but slowly accustom
itself to such treatment, as cavalry-horses learn to eat their oats
from a beaten drum. The deer had often to go miles away, like one who,
in Paris, picks up his breakfast at the inns,--in order, at last, to
dash into a cabbage-field, which was beset by no such coast-guards
and adversaries of the wild game, and there get a good bellyful. The
dog-boys, therefore, said justly, that they trampled down in _one_
stag-hunt more grain than the game got to eat the whole week. These,
and none other, were the reasons which had moved the chief masters of
the chase to appear before his Highness with the humble prayer--
"That your Highness would be pleased to enjoin it upon the
country-people to stay at night in their warm beds, as thousands of
good Christians do, and as the game itself does by day.
"Thereby--the majors of the chase were emboldened to promise--a lift
would be given at once to the country-folk and the stags, the latter
could then graze the fields in peace, like the day-cattle, and would
certainly leave the countryman the gleanings, while they contented
themselves with the first-fruits. The country-folk would be happily
freed from the ailments which come of night-vigils, from chills and
exhaustions. But the greatest advantage would be this,--that, whereas
hitherto peasants had grumbled at the hunting-socages (and not wholly
without justice), because they delayed the time of the harvest, that
then the deer in their place would undertake the harvest in the night,
as the young men in Switzerland took upon themselves to cut the grain
over night in the place of their sweethearts, so that the latter, when
they came to their work in the morning, should find none there,--and
thus would the hunting-socages no longer disturb any one in the matter
of the harvest, except at most--the game," &c.
But what have we to tell of the Consistorial Fee-Messenger, Victor?
That ecclesiastical collecting-servant astonished all parsons by his
drollery, and all parsons' wives by his readiness, and nothing but his
tin and his papers could adequately certify the genuineness of such a
specimen of a Messenger. He collected all that the Consistorial
Secretary had liquidated, and excused himself by the plea that it
became neither him nor the Secretary in this case to be conscientious.
In his brief administration, he bagged without shame all back-standing
marriage-pledges of the smallest value, ("We in the College," said he,
"are greedy for a half-bats,"[211])--moneys, when parties were
divorced,--moneys, when marriages were concluded by councils, whether
by indulgences for mourning-time, for blood-relationship, or for want
of parental consent,--moneys, when the moneys were only once (_or
twice_) paid, but not yet for the second (or third) time, although the
Consistory always required this after-ring or resonance of the money in
the single case where people had lost the receipt,--moneys which the
parsons had to pay down merely for decrees wherein they were _exempted_
from payment.----
Thereupon he emptied his bag before the Prince, and flattened down the
billow of money, and began:--
"Your Highness!
"The Devil is in the Consistory: it might be a Lutheran _Penitentiaria_
for all the Commandments, and is so only for the sixth. What an honest
Consistorial administration has been able to scrape together lies there
on the table. The pile might be as broad again, if the Consistory had
sense enough to say, 'Who buys? fresh, new letters of indulgence for
everything!'--It has shown, that, beyond certain degrees of
relationship, it can grant bulls of dispensation as well as the Pope:
why will it not, then, apply its indulgence to any nearer degrees? It
would be able to dispense from great as well as from small, if it
really set about it, and just as well from fast-day penances as from
mourning, and thrice publishing, that erotic fast-time. By Heaven!
if a single man, like the Pope, can be the spiritual washing-machine
of whole continents, and can clean souls in bundles in the year
of jubilee, then surely we all in the College may serve for the
washing-machine of a single country. If that is not done, then we
take--for we mean to live--sin-money and perquisites for the few things
which we have graciously to wink at; and if in Sparta the _judges_
worshipped the goddess of Fear, so with us the _parties_ revere this
fair _ens_.[212]--Had we only, at least, power to absolve from five or
six great sins,--only, e. g., from a murder,--then could we allow
divorces and expeditings of marriages, (these wholly opposite
operations we perform successfully, just as the Karlsbad water at the
same time dissolves the stone in the bladder and petrifies what is
dipped into the well,) and do it for half the money."
Then, after a long pause,--"Your Excellency, it is, after all,
impracticable, because the Devil has the secular counsellors mixed in
among the ghostly; a half-_profane session-table_ cannot by any
cabinet-making process be made over into a _holy chair_; there is,
therefore, nothing to be wished--except a good digestion[213]--but a
spirit of concord, that clerical and secular counsellors may properly
feed upon the parties around which they sit, saving a couple of bones,
that shall fall to us scribes and messengers. So have I often seen on
the carcass of a dead horse starlings and ravens at once, in a motley
row, sitting amicably together, and pecking away and devouring."----
My correspondent assures me that by these addresses the Court-Physician
effected more with January than the Court-Chaplain by his. Many parties
got their money, and some judges a most gracious letter, from the
Prince's own hand.
Before I arrive with our disguised span in the suburbs of St. Luna,
one or two things are still to be mentioned. To January's soul more
knee-pedals were attached than to a pianoforte, which the favorite's
knee, while it seemed to bend itself, moved at its pleasure. He was
always the son of the present moment, and the reflection of his
company. If he read in Sully, then he did not neglect for a week at a
time the Regency-College, and sent for the President of Finance. If he
read in Frederick II., then he was for furnishing the imperial
contingent and himself commanding it, and went forenoons to the parade.
He contemplated with pleasure the ideal of a good government, whether
in print or in a speech, and often attempted approximations to it,
reformations, investigations, and compensations, for whole weeks,--with
the exception of _retrenchments_, which, after all, are the only merit
a prince can earn without the help of others. During the whole crusade
he was a true Philosopher Antoninus, and stood ready everywhere to
reward and to punish and to enact; he felt, too, that he could make it
practicable, if one only did not absolutely require him to _labor_ and
to _abstain_; under _that_ the other part also went to the Devil.
In the beginning, he was pleased with the sentimental journey; when it
was over, he was so again; but in the midst of it, all that was pressed
out after the first runnings grew more and more bitter, and he wished
for himself, instead of the country bill-of-fare, his dietetic
dial-plate. Then, too, he had accustomed himself so much to valor,
that, for want of it,--i. e. of his body-guard,--he was, so to speak,
timid; hence, on one occasion, in the dark, at the tavern, he was while
in bed, about to run through a young weaver with his cane-sword,
because the weaver had confounded at night the princely bed with one of
more peaceful contents. For the rest, all the rays of his favor now
converged to a focus upon the single man of rank, the only courageous
and confidential friend whom he had,--his Victor.
But my hero had everywhere something to enjoy,--at least, the thought
of St. Luna; everywhere something to eat,--at least, when they came to
a fruit-tree; everywhere something to read,--and though it were only
charms against fires on the house-doors, old calendars on the walls,
exhortations to charity on the alms-boxes; everywhere something to
think of,--of the travelling pair, of the four acts of Nature's
seasons, which are annually given over again, of the thousand acts in
man, which never return; and everywhere something to love and to dream
of,--for this was the very road which Clotilda had so often gone over
on her journeys between Maienthal and St. Luna, and the friend of her
rich heart found on this classic avenue nothing but great remembrances,
magic passages, and a long, quiet, homelike bliss....
"St. Luna!" cried January, delighted at the mere thought of seeing once
more a man of the world,--Le Baut. The mask of an emigrant was a
thought he had himself hit upon, the better to draw out the
Chamberlain, with whom he meant finally to give himself out as an
hereditary foe of the Prince. Had there been in Le Baut's soul a higher
nobility than the heraldic, or had Victor but known that the
Chamberlain would recognize the Prince at the first glance, and that he
would be able to do so for the very reason that the genuine suspended
Consistorial Messenger had probably before this whispered the whole
secret in the ear of the city of Flachsenfingen, he would have
dissuaded him from the _noble masque_.
Sebastian, as we have mentioned, stayed back and in the open air,
probably out of shame at his part, and evidently from a longing to look
upon Clotilda's sunny face, which for so long a time had not risen upon
him, in a scene more convenient and congenial to his heart. "And the
parents will be glad to see me again," he thought beside, "when they
have something to thank me for,"--namely, Clotilda's place at court.
More than once did he start, as he stood watching there behind the
blanket of the dark, to hear his name called out of the Parsonage, and,
in fact, with such love and such longings for his answer that he could
almost have given one. But it was only the people of the Parsonage
talking with his little godson, and saying to him, "Dearest good
Sebastian! Just see here: what have I got for you?" How the veiled
paradise of to-day's spring lay in old relics around him! How he envied
the shadowy heads in the palace, which he saw moving about the lights,
and the old Parson's pug-dog, who would fain wag him in to the
Parsonage-inmates, and who continued in there to perform his part on
the stage of so sweet a past! But when some thistles round the palace
reminded him of the mosaic ones on the floor within-doors, then was the
envier to be envied, and, with the fairest dreams that were ever traced
over the ground of his dark life, he went back to the Apothecary's.
The next day January followed, delighted with the parents, enraptured
with the daughter, because they were so fine and she so fair. It cost
my hero nothing but a word to move the step-father to the intercession
for the appointment of the step-daughter, which our hero and the father
had so often longed to see; and it cost the step-father, too, only a
word with the Princess to get his and their petition granted....
Clotilda became maid-of-honor.
Immediately upon that, the Minister von Schleunes, in a congratulatory
letter, pressed upon Clotilda's parents the quarter-wing of his house,
and was happy, in the epistle, "that a higher petition had _repeated_
his own with such effect." I set up this nobleman as a model to all
people of the world; although, at present, all writes itself _noble_ in
the _moral_, as the Viennese do in the _heraldic_ sense.
Victor, who with his soul's eyes was peeping all day long into the
Chamberlain's window, could hardly wait to see Clotilda, first in St.
Luna, and next at court. He put off the visit from day to day, and
night after night made it in dream. Not even his visiting-card--his
letter to the Parson--had he sent off; he wanted, not only to carry it,
but actually to supersede it, himself. But this, last thought--of
suppressing the letter, for fear Clotilda might possibly get hold of
this malicious conduct-list of courts, and therefrom contract a
repugnance to the new office--he hurled forthwith out of his soul, as
Paul did the viper from his hand. Woe to the heart that is not sincere
towards a sincere one, is not great towards a great one, and warm
towards a warm one, when it should be all this even towards one that is
nothing of it all!
For the rest, he needed such a visit, and such a reciprocal visit,
every day more and more; for he was not happy; and for this there were,
besides himself, to blame, first, the Prince, secondly, Flamin,
thirdly, nine thousand and thirty-seven persons. The Prince could not
well help it; he poured out the whole cornucopia of his love on the
Doctor, and took away from him all the freedom which the latter had
been minded in the beginning so sacredly to maintain. Victor shook his
head as often as he wrote in his journal, or log-book of his voyage of
life, (at his father's behest,) and saw by his chart that he had passed
over quite other seas and degrees of latitude and longitude than he or
his father had desired. "However, I shall land right, at least," said
he.--
But his Flamin brought still more sadness to his soul, which everywhere
at once sought and bestowed love. He wanted to impart to the
Counsellor, with the news of Clotilda's appointment, a joy like
his own; but his friend received it as coldly as he did its bearer.
The dust of law-papers lay thick on the organ-pipes of his
spirits.--Chained to the session- and writing-tables, he was now, like
chained dogs, wilder than he had been before when unfettered.--The
efforts of his colleagues to dislocate the body politic into an anagram
did not get from him the approbation which they deserved.--Then, too,
there lodged itself in his soul the leaven of the jealousy of
friendship, which could not feel it right that his Victor should see
him seldomer and others oftener.[214]--But most was he affronted by
Victor's refusal, when he besought his company to St. Luna.... In a
word, he was vexed.
The nine thousand and thirty-seven men who were to my hero nine
thousand and thirty-seven tormenting spirits are the gentlemen of
Flachsenfingen jointly and severally, by means of their absurd
character, which deserves not to be sketched here, but in an extra
flyleaf.