I have a hundred times, with my legal burden of proof on my back,
thought of women who are able, with a certain effort, to act as well as
to believe without any reasons. For surely, in the end, everybody must
(according to all philosophers) reconcile himself to actions and
opinions for which reasons are entirely wanting; for, since every
reason appeals to a new one, and this again rests upon one which refers
us to one, which again must have its own reason, it follows that
(unless we mean to be forever going and seeking) we must finally arrive
at one which we accept without any reason whatever. Only the scholar
fails in this, that precisely the most important truths--the highest
principles of morals, of metaphysics, &c.--are the ones which he
believes without reasons, and which, in his agony,--thinking to help
himself out thereby,--he names necessary truths. Woman, on the
contrary, makes lesser truths--e. g. there must be drives, invitations,
washing to-morrow, &c.--the necessary truths, which must be accepted
without the insurance and reinsurance of reasons;--and just this it is
which gives her such an appearance of soundness. For them it is easy to
distinguish themselves from the philosopher, who thinks, and into whose
eyes the sun of truth flames so horizontally that he cannot see, for
it, either road or landscape. The philosopher is obliged, in the
weightiest actions,--the moral,--to be his own lawgiver and law-keeper,
without having the reasons therefor given him by his conscience. With a
woman, every inclination is a little conscience, and hates
_Heteronomies_,[243] and beyond that pronounces no reasons, just as the
great conscience does. And it is precisely this gift, of acting more
from private sovereignty than from reasons, which makes women so very
suitable for men; for the latter would rather give them ten commands
than three reasons.
_End of the Extra-Leaf on the above_.
What was full as bad was, that Joachime at last, only for the sake of
removing his documentary piles of complaints and imperial grievances,
allowed him her fingers, without giving him the least reason for it. He
could, therefore, show no title of possession, and, in case of need,
would have had no one who could protect him therein.
There is, however, a well-grounded rule of right or Brocardicon[244]
for men: that everything grows firmer with women, when one builds upon
it, and that a little stolen favor legitimately belongs to us, so soon
as we sue for a greater. This rule of right bases itself upon the fact
that maidens always abate with us, as one does to Jews in trade, the
half, and give only a couple of fingers when we want the hand. But if
one has the fingers, then arises, out of the Institutions, a new title,
which adjudicates to us the hand: the hand gives a right to the arm,
and the arm to everything that is appended to it, as _accessorium_.
Thus must these things be managed, if right is to remain right. There
will, in fact, have to be a little manual written by me, or some other
honest man, wherein one shall expound and elucidate to the female sex
with the torch of legal learning the _modos_ (or ways) _acquirendi_ (of
winning) them. Otherwise many modi may go out of use. Thus, e. g.,
according to civil law, I am rightful proprietor of a movable thing, if
it was stolen thirty years ago (in fact, it should be further back, and
I should not be made to suffer for it, that one began the stealing
later); so, too, by prescription of thirty minutes (the time is
relative) everything belonging to a fair one lawfully falls to me,
which (of a movable nature--and everything about her is movable) I may
have purloined from her, and therefore one cannot begin soon enough to
steal, because before the theft the prescription cannot begin to take
effect.
Specification is a good modus. Only one must be, like me, a
Proculian,[245] and believe that a strange article belongs to him who
has imparted to it a different form; e. g. to me, the hand which I have
put into another shape by pressure.
The late Siegwart said: _Confusio_ (mingling of tears) is my modus. But
_commixtio_ (mixture of dry articles, e. g. the fingers, the hair) is
now with almost all of us the _modus acquirendi_.
I was going once to treat the whole thing according to the doctrine of
the _Servitudes_,[246] where a woman has a thousand things to suffer
(though all these servitudes are entirely extinguished by the
consolidation[247] of marriage); but I do not myself any longer rightly
retain the doctrine of the Servitudes, and would much rather examine
any one in them than be examined myself.----
I return to the Medicus. Since, then, he knew that a kissed hand is a
warrant to the cheeks,--but the cheeks the sacrificial tables of the
lips,--these of the eyes,--the eyes of the neck;--accordingly he would
have proceeded exactly according to his text-book. But with Joachime,
as with all antipodes of coquettes, _no favor paved the way for
another, not even the great one for the small one_; you passed from one
antechamber to another,--and what said my hero to this? Nothing but
"Thank God that for once there is one better than she seemed, who,
under the appearance of being our plaything, plays with us, and makes
her coquetry the veil of virtue!"
He felt now, as often as her name was mentioned, a soft warmth breathe
through his bosom.
FROM THE END OF THE ECCLESIASTICAL YEAR
(DEC. 1) TO THE END OF THE CIVIL (DEC. 31).
Flamin, whose patriotic flames found no air in the session-chamber, and
stifled himself first, grew shyer and wilder every day. It was
something new to him, that it took whole boards and commissions to do
what one person might have done,--that the limbs of the state (as is
also the case, indeed, with the limbs of the body) are moved by the
_short arm_ of the lever, so as to do less with greater power, and a
board, particularly, resembles the body, which, according to
Borellus,[248] spends 2,900 times as much strength on a leap as the
load which it has to lift requires. He hated all great people, and
never went to see any: the page Mat did not even get visits from him.
My Sebastian made his visits to _him_ seldomer, because his leisure and
his calms of dissipation fell exactly upon Flamin's working hours. This
separation, and the eternal sitting at Schleunes's,--which Flamin, from
not being acquainted with Joachime's influence, was obliged at all
events to ascribe to Clotilda's, for future visits to whom Victor must
be creating a pretext by his present ones,--and even the Prince's favor
towards the latter, which in Flamin's eyes could not be any result of
his spirit of freedom and his sincerity;--all this drew the intertwined
bonds of their friendship, which had made life to them hitherto a
four-handed piece of music, further and further asunder; the faults and
the moral dust which Victor could once brush off from his darling he
hardly dared to blow off; they behaved towards each other more
delicately and attentively. But my Victor, to whose heart Fate applied
so many tongues of vampyres, and who was compelled to shut up in _one_
breast the bitterness of lost love and the woe of failing friendship,
was made by it all--really merry. O, there is a certain gayety of
stagnation and grief, which is a sign of the soul's exhaustion, a smile
like that on men who die of wounds in the diaphragm, or that on the
shrivelled, drawn-back lips of mummies! Victor plunged into the stream
of amusements, in order, under it, not to hear his own sighs. But
often, to be sure, when he had all day long been sprinkling over ruined
follies comic salt, which full as often bites the hand of the sower and
makes it ache, and when he had not been able all day long to refresh
himself with any eye, to which he would have dared to show a tear in
his own,--when, thus weary of the present, indifferent to the future,
wounded by the past, he had just passed by the last fool, the
Apothecary, and when from his bow-window he looked out into the
night hanging full of worlds, and into the tranquillizing moon, and
upon the eastern clouds over St. Luna,--then were his swollen heart
and his swollen eyeball sure to burst, and the tears which night
concealed to stream down from his balcony on the hard pavement. "O,
only _one_ soul," cried his innermost being with all the tones of
melancholy,--"give but _one_ soul, thou eternal, loving, creative
nature, to this poor, languishing heart, which seems so hard and is so
soft, which seems so joyous and yet is so sad, seems so cold and yet is
so warm!"
It was well that, on such an evening, no chamberlain, no man of the
world, stood in the balcony, just as poor Marie--on whom her former
life has been precipitated like a crushing avalanche--came to desire
his breakfast-orders; for he would get up, without wiping away a drop,
and advance kindly to meet her, and grasp her soft, but red and
hard-worked hand, which from fear she did not draw back,--although from
fear she did turn away her face, hardened into stone against hope,--and
say, as he softly stroked her eyebrows horizontally, with a voice
rising from a heart full of the deepest emotion, "Thou poor Marie, tell
me--I am sure thou hast little comfort--is it not so? There seldom
comes any longer into thy gentle eyes anything that they love to see,
unless it is thy own tears? Dear girl, why hast thou no courage before
me? why dost thou not tell me thy woe? Thou good, tortured heart,--I
will speak for thee, act for thee: tell me what weighs on thee, and if
ever of an evening thy heart is too heavy, and thou mayest not venture
to weep down below, then come up to me ... look at me now frankly ...
truly I will shed tears with thee, let them say what they will and be
hanged." Although she held it to be uncourteous to weep before so
distinguished a gentleman, nevertheless, it was impossible for her, by
a forcible bending away of her face, to thrust aside all the tears
which his voice, full of love, drew in rivers from her eyes.... Take it
not ill of his over-boiling soul, that he then pressed his hot mouth to
her cold, despised, and unresistingly trembling lips, and said to her:
"Oh, why are we mortals so unhappy, when we are too soft-hearted?"--In
his chamber she seemed to take all as jest,--but all night long she
heard the echo of the humane man;--even as jest, so much love would
have been a comfort to her; then her past flowers once more
crystallized in the window-frost of her present wintry-time; then she
felt as if she were to-day, for the first time, unhappy.--In the
morning she said nothing to any one, and towards Sebastian she was
merely more devoted, but not more courageous; only, at times, she would
concur with the dispenser down below, when he praised him, and say, but
without further explanation, "One should cut up one's own heart into
little bits, and sacrifice it for the English gentleman."
Poor Marie! my own innermost heart repeats after the Doctor, and adds
besides: Perhaps at this very moment, just such an unhappy woman, just
such an unhappy man, is reading me. And I feel as if; now that I have
struck the funeral bells of their past sad hours, I must also write
them a word of consolation. But for one who has to be ever striding
across new gaping ice-chasms of life, I know no resource but my own:
the moment things grow bad, fling all _possible hopes_ to the Devil,
and with utter renunciation fall back upon thyself, and ask, How now,
if even the worst should come, what then? Never reconcile thy fancy to
the _next_ misfortune, but to the greatest. Nothing relaxes one's
spirits more than the alternation of warm hopes with cold anguish. If
this method is too heroic for thee, then seek for thy tears an eye that
shall imitate them, and a voice that shall ask thee why thou art thus.
And reflect: the echo of the next life, the voice of our modest,
fairer, holier soul, is audible only in a sorrow-darkened bosom, as the
nightingales warble when one veils their cage.
Often did Sebastian worry himself about this, that he could here exert
so little his noble powers in behalf of humanity; that his dreams of
preventing evil and accomplishing good through the Prince remained
fever-dreams, because, e. g., even the best men at the helm of the
state filled offices entirely according to circumstances and
recommendations merely, and held offices, whether those of others or
their own, never as obligations, but as mining-curacies. He was
troubled about his uselessness; but he consoled himself with its
necessity: "in a year, when my father comes, I set myself free and rise
to something better," and his conscience added, that his own personal
uselessness was serviceable to the virtue of his father, and that it
was better to be, in a wheel, with all one's fitness for a pendulum, a
tooth, without which the machinery would stop, than to be the pendulum
of a toothless wheel.
In such cases he always asked himself afresh: "Is Joachime, perhaps,
like me, better, tenderer, less coquettish than she seems? and why wilt
thou condemn her on the strength of an outward appearance, which is, to
be sure, the same as thine own?" Her conduct seldom confirmed these
favorable suppositions, nay, it often absolutely refuted them;
nevertheless, he went on to expose himself to new refutations and to
desire confirmation still. The necessity of loving drives one to
greater follies than love itself; every week Victor let himself abate
one perfection more from the female ideal, for which, as for the
unknown god, he had already for years had the altar set up in his
brain. During this haggling the whole of December would have slipped
away, had it not been for the first day of Christmas.
On that day, when he saw through every window laughing faces and
gardens of Hesperides, he too would fain be joyful, and flew amidst the
church-chorals to Joachime's toilet-chamber, in order there to make
himself a Christmas pleasure. He had brought her for a present, he
said, a bottle-case of liqueurs, a whole cellar of Rataffia, because he
knew how ladies drank. When, at last, he drew his gantry full of
bottles out of his--pocket: it was a miserable little box full
of cotton-wool, in which stood imbedded neat little bottles of
sweet-smelling waters, almost as long as wrens'-eggs. What is neat
always pleases girls--as well as what is splendid. He delivered a long
discourse to Joachime upon the temperance of her sex, who ate as little
as humming-birds and drank as little as eagles: with a few show-dishes
and a smelling-bottle he would feast an army of the female sex five
thousand men strong, and there should still be something left. The
physicians observed that they who had borne hunger longest had been
women,--even in the middle classes the whole bee-flora on which these
saints lived consisted of a colored ribbon, which they wore as sash or
scarf, by way of a nourishing poultice and portable soup, and to which
they attached nothing further, except at most a lover. Joachime, during
the eulogy, drew out a bottle, because she thought it wax. Victor, by
way of refuting her--or for some other reason--pressed it tightly
into her hand, and fortunately crushed it. A mining-superintendent
of my disposition would hardly introduce the crushing of a bottle,
not big enough to cover one of Eymann's cucumbers with, into his
Dog-Post-Days,--because he loves to serve up things of importance,--did
not the bottle itself acquire an importance from the fact that it cut
the softest hand upon which the hardest jewel ever yet threw lustre,
till it ran blood. The Doctor was startled,--the patient smiled,--he
kissed the wound, and these three drops fell like Jason's blood, or
like a blood rectified by an alchemist, as three sparks into his
inflammable veins, and the blood-coal of love assumed three glowing
points;--nay, a little more, and he would have obeyed her, when she
playfully commanded him (in order to spare him a greater embarrassment
than he had) to revive the antiquated fashion of the Parisians, of
writing to ladies with rose-colored ink, and here on the spot to
despatch three lines to her in her own blood. Thus much is, at least,
certain, that he told her he wished he were the Devil. To the
last-named personage, as is well known, the warranty-deed or rather
partition-treaty of the soul is despatched with the blood of the
proprietor as fist-[249]pledge and consideration. Blood is the seed of
the Church, the Catholic Church says; and here we are speaking of
nothing less than the _temple_ of the fair.
So it was--and so it stood--when the Court of the Princess was
announced for to-day. This was, in the first place, plaguily awkward
for him, because this evening was spoiled; and, secondly, it was
agreeable to him, because Joachime was obliged to-day to put away the
hat which he and she so loved. Since, as is customary, ladies had the
robes and frisures prescribed to them by the Princess, in which they
must celebrate in her presence the court-day, i. e. the incendiary
Sunday of their freedom: accordingly, she could not to-day keep on the
crape-hat which she so loved, and Victor too, but not on her; for it
was just the mate of that which Clotilda had worn when, during the
concert, she covered her moist eyes with the black-lace veil, which
from that time always hung down over his bereaved eyes.