The main object of the Court in setting forth at six o'clock in the
evening was, to drive home again at ten o'clock in a right sulky mood.
I can, however, deliver this ten times as copiously:--
At six o'clock Victor, with the rest of the communion of brethren and
sisters under orders, drove to the Paullinum. He envied, or rather
blessed, the weaver, the boot-polisher, the wood-cutter, who had at
evening his jug of beer, his prayers, his Johnny-[250]cakes and his
trumpeting children; likewise their wives, who already had foretaste of
the morrow, namely, of the marbled, speckled dresses which were to
array them for the second holiday. In the May-colored atmosphere and
zodiac stood the Princess as a sun, full as unhappy as her unhappy
planets; _only dream_ (thought he) _can make a king happy or a poor man
unhappy_. When he saw how they all, after a scanty frog-rain of words;
and after refreshments, i. e. beatings and exhaustions, were harnessed,
one post-team after another, according to the Court almanac and
directory, to the card-tables,--to every board came the same motley set
of old faces,--he wondered first of all at the universal patience; on a
negro of the gold coast of the court (he swore to himself) if one only
considers what he has to _hear_ and to _endure_, the _ears_ and the
_skin_ are certainly, as in the case of roasted sucking-pigs, the best
parts. Here the lion must beg _that_ animal to let him have his skin
for a domino, which has usually borrowed his of him. Here among these
forms bent up by small souls (as leaves also crook up when leaf-lice
live on them) no great, no bold thought can be carried: like wheat
which is _beaten down_, they can yield only _empty_ grains.
Before the sitting down at table, that part or segment of
the--halo[251] encircling the Italian _sun_, which was not invited,
drove home, disgusted at the tediousness of play, and still more
disgusted that certain persons in particular were honored with the
tediousness of a seat at the table.
Joachime, in whom the retiring Agnola found little satisfaction, went
away with them, but not the Doctor, nor her brother Mat either, who had
the honor of making, behind the chair of the Princess, in the column of
march formed by herself, her chamberlain, a page, and a court lackey,
exactly the central point; he stood, as every one knows, immediately
behind the chamberlain, and was the only one who looked like a legible
lampoon upon the _tout ensemble_. About the table, during[252] which
there was little said, at most in a very low tone by two neighbors,
here also there shall be nothing said.
After dinner the Prince came and disturbed the stiff ceremonial, which
he hated from love of comfort, just as Victor despised it on
philosophical grounds. "Verily, an archangel," Victor would often say,
"who should remark the wisdom and virtue observed by mortals in all
trifles at their session-tables, altars, receptions, must needs bet his
heaven and his wings that we are worth a farthing--or at least
something--in greater things; but we all know where the conclusion
limps; and this very disgust at the stiff, pedantic, decent micrology
and machinery of men is the humor of the satirist. Moral deterioration
comes about, it is true, through trifles, but not improvement: Satan
creeps into us through Venetian blinds and _sphincters_[253]; the good
angel enters through the front door."--Agnola rewarded our hero to-day
for his previous so well meant assiduity with a warmer attention, which
was made more beautiful in his eyes by her ornaments--she wore those of
the former princess, her own, and those of her mother before her--and
by her whole state-attire; for he loved finery on women and hated it on
men. His esteem borrowed a tender warmth from the painful fact that she
confounded January's selfish intentions in his visits (with reference
to the future Clotilda) with fairer ones, and that nevertheless one
could not say so to her. How came it that Agnola reminded him then of
Joachime; that the latter was the _conductor_ of regard for the former;
and that all loving emotions with which the Princess inspired him
turned out wishes that Joachime might deserve and receive them?
With a soul full of such longing, he drove back this very day without
ceremony to that Joachime on whose hand, as we know, he had left a
slight wound. He said to her, "He must, as murderer and Medicus, look
once more to-day after the wound"; but a charming new trouble on
Joachime's face fell like sunshine with a warming influence into his
soul. He was impatient to go out with her on the balcony, to talk about
it. Out there, he in a few minutes made the gash and the December chill
a pretext for taking the hand and the gash into his own to warm it.
"Cold is bad for wounds," he said; but the fine fool would here have
had his own comment on the subject. The vacant evening, the
remembrances of the childish joys of Christmas, the starry heaven,
looking down from overhead, which magically illuminates all dark wishes
of man, like flowers in the night,--these and the silence surcharged
and burdened his forlorn soul, and he pressed the only hand which human
kind at this moment extended to him. He put the question to her
directly about her trouble. Joachime answered more softly than usual,
"I was going to ask you the same; but with me it is natural." For she
had, she related, on her return found the luggage of Clotilda and the
news of her arrival, and--which is the precise point--the clothes of
her sister Giulia, which Clotilda had hitherto given a place among her
own. This Giulia, it will be remembered, had expired on Clotilda's
heart, a day before the latter removed from Maienthal to St. Luna.
A chaos shot through his heart; but out of the chaos only the faded
Giulia took shape,--for Clotilda daily receded into a duskier sanctuary
of his soul; her pale Luna-like image caressed with rays of another
world his sore nerves, and he willingly suffered himself to believe
that Joachime had her form. In his poetic exaltation, so seldom
intelligible to women, the dead threw the halo which Clotilda diffused
over her back again upon her sister. Joachime had to-day read over
again the letter which Giulia had dictated to her in her last hour
through Clotilda, and she still had it with her. Probably a heart full
of unrequited love had borne the fair enthusiast down under the earth.
Victor with gleaming eyes begged her for the letter; he opened it in
the moonlight, and when he saw the beloved handwriting of his lost
Clotilda, his whole heart wept.
"Good sister!--
"Forever farewell! Let me say that first, because I know not what
moment may close my lips. The tempests of my life are going home.[254]
I speak this farewell and my heartiest wish for thy welfare through my
friend Clotilda's pen. Give the enclosed to my dear parents, and join
thy prayer to mine, that they will leave me in my beautiful Maienthal,
when I am gone. I see now through the window the rose-bush which stands
by the sexton's little garden in the churchyard: there a place is given
me, which like a scar shall testify that I once existed, and a black
cross with the six white letters _Giulia_,--no more. Dear sister, do
not, I beseech thee, allow them to confine my dust in a tomb!--O no! it
shall flutter in the shape of Maienthal's roses, which I once so loved
to sprinkle!--Let this heart, when it shall have dissolved into the
pollen of a new eternal heart, play and hover in the beams of the moon,
which has so often in my lifetime made my heart sad and soft. If thou
ever drivest, dear sister, along by Maienthal, then will the cross peep
out upon the road through the roses; and if it does not make thee too
sad, then look over to me.
"It seemed to me just now, for some minutes, as if I drew breath in
ether,--in little thin draughts. It will soon be over. But tell my
playmates, if they ask for me, that I was glad to go, though I was
young. Very glad. Our teacher says, the dying are flying clouds, the
living stationary ones, beneath which the former glide away, but verily
at evening both are gone. Ah, I thought I should have to yearn for
death a long time yet, from one year of sorrow to another; ah! I feared
these pale cheeks, these eyes sunk with weeping, would not prevail upon
death, that he would let me grow superannuated, and not take away my
withered heart until it had throbbed itself to exhaustion: but, lo! he
comes sooner. In a few days, perhaps in a few hours, an angel will
appear before me and smile, and I shall see that it is death, and I,
too, shall smile and say most joyfully, Take my beating heart into thy
hand, thou ambassador of eternity, and care for my soul.
"'But art thou not young?' the angel will say; 'hast thou not just
stept upon this earth? Shall I recall thee so soon, even before it has
its spring?'
"But I shall answer: Look on these sunken cheeks, and these exhausted
eyes, and only shut them to. O, lay the snake-stone[255] on my bosom,
that it may suck out all the wounds, and not fall off till they are
healed. Ah! I have haply done no good in the world, but also no evil.
"Then will the angel say: 'If I touch thee, thou becomest
stiff,--spring and mankind and the whole earth vanish, and I alone
stand beside thee. Is, then, thy young soul already so weary and so
sore? What sorrows, then, can there be thus early in thy breast?'
"Only touch me, good angel!--Now he says, 'If I touch thee, thou
crumblest to dust, and all thy loved ones see nothing more of thee--'
"O, touch me!..."
Death touched the bleeding heart, and a human being had passed on....
While Victor read the sorrowful sheet, the sister of the dead one had
several times wiped her eyes, because she imagined to herself what he
was reading, and when he looked up at her, there glimmered therein the
seed-pearls of a tender soul. But he wished now that his face could be
invisible, or that he could be in the balcony of his chamber, so as to
give way to all sighs and emotions unseen. Had he been in a citizen's
house, he might now have gone without being derided to the unpacked
clothes, and into the future apartments of Clotilda; and he might have
seen again, as it were, the green lawns of Maienthal, if he had seen
the romantic dresses, wherein Giulia had roamed through them, locked up
amidst the last kisses of a sister. But in such a house it was an
impossibility.
He could now, as he seldomer had the enjoyment of another's
sensibility, easily pardon its even being carried to excess. That it
shatters the body was to him the wretchedest objection, because,
indeed, everything of a nobler sort, every effort, all thinking, wears
it out; in fact, the body and life were only means, but not an end.
"Giulia's heart in Giulia's body," said he, "is a pure dew-drop in a
tender flower-cup, which everything crushes, chokes, dries up, and
which yet has escaped the noonday sun; such souls, too pliable for a
world full of storm, which have too many nerves and too few muscles,
deserve for their sensibility's sake not the corroding salt of satire,
which gnaws them like snails. Earth and we can give them few joys; why
will we take from them the rest?"
But the lines of sorrow which sympathy now drew through Joachime's
smiles imprinted themselves distinctly in Victor's heart, and that
which she would here conceal made her more charming than all that she
had ever sought to show.
Nothing is more dangerous than--as he had done some weeks before--to
make believe he was in love: one becomes so forthwith in reality. Thus,
the voluptuary _Baron_, when he had played one of Corneille's heroes,
himself was one for some days. Thus Moliere died of a _malade
imaginaire_, and Charles V. of a rehearsal-burial. Thus the paper crown
which Cromwell had worn in a school-drama made him covet a harder
one.--The second lesson which is to be learned from this (this,
however, to be sure, presupposes Joachime's being a coquette) is, that
a hero may scent coquetry, and yet run into the trap; a poet, like the
nightingale (which he resembles in plumage, throat, and simplicity)
sits up on the tree, and sees the snare set, and skips down and--into
it.
After some days,--while the question about Joachime's worth and his own
love was rising and falling like a wave in Victor's mind,--while he
stood on bad terms with Flamin, good ones with the Princess, and
better with the Prince, who kept asking every day when Clotilda was
coming,--she came.