Victor's Professional Visits.--Concerning Houses full of
Daughters.--The Two Fools.--The Carrousel.
The following remark comes not from the dog's knapsack, but from my own
head: One needs not to be a panegyrist of our times, to see with
pleasure that authors, princes, women, and others have now mostly laid
aside the unnatural _false_ masks of virtue (e. g. bigotry, pietism,
ceremonial behavior), and have entirely assumed instead the _genuine_
tasteful _show_ of virtue. This improvement of our character-masks,
whereby we hit more finely the exterior of virtue, is contemporaneous
with a similar one on the stage, where they play their antics and their
tragics no longer, as once, with _paper_ clothes and badly imitated
laces, but with the _true_ ones.--
"The Princess wanted you yesterday," said the Prince to the
Court-Physician, almost as soon as he had entered with his exhausted
face. The inflammation of Agnola's eyes had, in consequence of the
autumn weather, night-feasts, and Culpepper's bold practice and her
own--for the red capital letters of beauty (namely, painted cheeks) she
was always putting on afresh--very much increased. Properly, Victor was
too proud to let himself be sent for as a mere physician; nay, he was
too proud to let himself be in demand for anything else (and though it
were philosophy or beauty) than his character; for his father, who had
just as much delicate pride, had taught him that we must not serve any
one who does not respect us, or whom we ourselves do not respect,--nay,
that one must not accept a favor from any one to whom one can only
return outward, but not inward thanks. But this tender sense of honor,
which never came into an unequal conflict with his self-interest,
though it might well with his humanity, could never bind the hands
wherewith he might relieve an unhappy Princess--unhappy, like himself,
from a famine of love--at least of the pains of her eyes; perhaps,
also, of _younger_ pangs; for his good-heartedness suggested to him
nothing but reconciliations,--of the Prince with Le Baut, with the
Princess, with the Minister. Nothing is more dangerous than to
reconcile two persons,--unless, indeed, one is himself one of them; to
set them at variance is much safer and easier.
He found Agnola, even in the afternoon, still in her chamber, because
its green tapestries flattered (not the face, to be sure, but) the hot
eye. A thick veil over the face was her screen from daylight. When she,
like a sun, lifted her veil, he could not comprehend how in Tostato's
shop he could make, out of this Italian fire and these quick
court-eyes, the face, red with weeping, of a blonde. A part of this
fire belonged, to be sure, to her sickness. Her first word was a
decided disobedience to his first; meanwhile she flew in the face of
the Messrs. _Pringle_ and _Schmucker_, as well as himself; for the
whole triune College advised leeches round the eyes; but those were
disgusting to her. The medicus then suggested cupping-glasses at the
back of the head; but her hair was more precious to her than her eyes.
"Must, then, everything be bought with blood?" said she, with Italian
vivacity.
"Realms and religions ought not to be, but health should," said he,
with English freedom of speech.
Once more he demanded her blood. She would not give it to him, however,
until he changed the sacrificial knife, and proposed opening a vein in
the eye. Persons of rank, like learned men, are often ignorant of the
commonest things: she thought the Doctor would open the vein. And as
she thought so, he did it, with a hand trained by the couching-needle.
Meanwhile, if (according to Pliny) a kiss on the eye is one on the
soul, the opening of a vein in that organ is no joke; but one may,
while he inflicts a wound, himself get one. The poor Court-Medicus
must, with his swimming, friendly eye, from which only within a few
days the tear of love has been dried away, boldly gaze into the sun
pent up in an eye-socket, and, what is more, softly rest his finger on
the warm face, and from the fountain of tears make bright blood spurt
out.... One ought, before undertaking such an operation, to have a
similar one performed on himself, for the sake of the cooling. But, in
truth, fate had given him nothing this week but lancet-cuts into his
heart's arteries. Let one, further, represent to himself how the whole
female sex appeared to him like a magic, far-receded shape, which had
once gleamed near to him in a dream, and as a paled moon by day, which
he had worshipped in a bright night; and then will one have opened his
good innocent heart to behold therein, beside a great ever-active
sorrow, a thousand sympathetic wishes for the compassionated Princess.
Despite her singular mixture of pride, liveliness, and refinement, he
still thought he discovered a change in her, which he could explain
partly by his to-day's assiduity and partly by his influence on the
Prince, which had been thus far so favorable to her,--a change which
would have given him greater courage, had he not insisted upon being
threatened with special drafts upon his courage by the billet above the
imperator of the compass-watch. At the former and first visit his
courage was lamed, because he thought himself avoided, as the son of a
father who seemed to fortify his influence by his care for natural
children; for a man full of love beside one full of hatred is dumb and
stupid.
What put him most in heart to-day, next to the quarrels in which he was
defeated (as the one about leeches, &c.), was the last and following,
in which he conquered (one grows more courageous and prosperous when
one contradicts a proud woman than when one flatters her): He saw a
mask lying there; now, as he knew that in Italy ladies wore them in
bed, as ours do gloves, using them as a sort of glove to the face, he
straightly forbade her the mask, as being tinder to the inflammation of
her eyes. It was no flattery when he said to her that the mask might
take from her more than it gave. In short, he insisted upon it.--
He was, perhaps, too tolerant towards the doubt which only a woman
could make _endurable_ and _enduring_,--the doubt which one she mistook
for the other, the Court-Physician or the favorite; for at last--though
not without a fear of saying too much, which, with people of his fiery
temperament, is a sign that the thing has already happened--he told
her, what he had in the beginning kept back, that the sympathy
(_empressement_) of the Prince had sent him to her; and he extolled the
latter at his own expense, and so much the more, as he had nothing
further of an extraordinary nature to adduce with regard to him, but
only that he had--sent him to her.
Then he went. With the Prince he bestowed on her as many
_beatifications_ and as many _canonizations_ (two contrarieties on this
earth) as decorum and his humor (two still greater contrarieties) would
allow. Singular! she had, for all her fire, no humor. He knew January
succumbed, not merely to the slanderer, but also to the flatterer. The
crowned theatre-managers of the earth have determinations put into
their hearts, and decrees into their mouths; they know what they mean
and what they say two or three days later than their throne-prompter. A
favorite is a Shakespeare and poet, who, from behind the persons he
makes act and speak, never peeps or coughs out himself, but is a
ventriloquist, and gives _his_ voice the sound of another's.
When he visited his patient the next day, the eye-sockets were cooled
down, though not the eyes. Agnola sat convalescent in a cabinet full of
images of the saints. With the indisposition of her eyes had been taken
away, at the same time, a source of conversation; and her pride blocked
up the way at once to his sensibility and to his humor. Although he
said to her a hundred times in his innermost heart, "Torment not
thyself, proud soul; I am no favorite; I will not rob thee of anything,
least of all of thy pride or another's love,--oh, I know what it is to
win none,"--nevertheless he remained (in _his_ opinion) cold before
her, and retired with the annoying prospect that his successful cure
had cut off his return; for the other court visits were, after all, no
confidential visits to the sick. Of the plaguy compass-watch he stood
daily less and less in terror, except just when he was happier than
usual.
--Many people would sooner live without houses than without
building-schemes; Victor, sooner without air to breathe than without
castles in the air. He must always have on hand the lottery-chance and
stocks of some plan or other for the future; and a woman was, in most
cases, the partner in this grand-adventure trade. This time he was
keenly bent upon the reconciliation of January and Agnola. He reasoned
thus:--"It is easy on both sides. January will now always seek Agnola's
society, though merely out of cunning, for the sake of getting with
more decency into that of her future maid-of-honor, Clotilda, whom, in
her condition of singleness, he can, according to his _vow_, still love
with impunity. As he can neither withstand a long praise nor a long
intercourse, this will imperceptibly accustom him to Agnola. She, who
is now left alone on the side of the Minister Schleunes, will not
reject the united regards of Victor and January," &c.... But whether
only the beauty of the action, and not also the beauty of the Princess,
incited him to this mediatorial office, that is what the Twenty-First
Chapter cannot yet know; meanwhile, so far as I am concerned, let the
following stand: his cold inner man, exhausted by bleeding, from which
the harpsichord and the name of Clotilda and the awaking at morning
still draw bloodless daggers, needs so much indeed the din of the world
and everything that may benumb its wounds!
With the design of such preliminaries to a peace, he excused his future
disobedience to his father, who had counselled him against frequenting
the house of Schleunes; for as the Princess always went there, it was
the fittest neutral place for the peace-congress. Oh for only half
an----