First Visit to Clotilda.--The Paleness.--The Redness.--The
Race-Weeks.
"Ay, I must confess," said Victor, as on the day after Clotilda's
arrival he ran round in his chamber, "I could look with more courage
into a thunder-storm or a tempestuous sea than into that little
face,--into a radiant heaven, three noses long." He got relief,
however, by striking a detached fortissimo chord on the piano: then he
could go to see Clotilda. Only on the way he said: "Nowhere is there so
much jangling as within a man. What a devilish uproar in this five-foot
Disputatorium about the smallest trumpery, till a bill grows into an
act! A portable national convention _in nuce_,[256] that is what I am;
I cannot take a step, without the _right_ and _left_ first haranguing
on the subject, and the _enragés_ and the _noirs_,[257] and the Duke of
Orleans and Marat. The most detestable thing about this interior
Ratisbon diet of man is, that Virtue sits therein with ten seats and
one voice, but the Devil with one rump and seven votes."--
By these humorous soliloquies he sought to divert himself from the
aspect of his confused, stubborn, cold-sore spirit, which was always
lifting Joachime to the level of Clotilda. He was finally put in
perfect tune again merely by the virtuous resolution not to conceal now
his love for Joachime,--"not to be ashamed of her," he had almost
thought to himself. "If I _feign_ myself to be somewhat warmer toward
Joachime and colder towards the other than I perhaps am, then the Devil
must have his game in it, if I do not finally _become_ so."
But the Devil had his game, and in fact a true game of Ombre[258] for
_four_ persons,[259] with a dummy:[260] this croupier[261] had made the
original vault of playing out the face[262] of Clotilda with a wholly
different _color_ from what he had given her in Le Baut's palace.
Victor found her, on meeting her again at Schleunes's, infinitely more
beautiful than he had left her,--that is to say, more _pale_. As she
was no nervous patient, never avoided the cold, even on December
evenings walked out alone in the village, her cheeks were usually more
like dark rosebuds than opened and whitened rose-leaves. But now the
sun had become a moon: she had, in some sorrow or other, like the
sapphire in the fire, lost nothing but color; instead of the blood, the
soul, grown more still, lovely, and tender, seemed itself to look more
nearly through the white crape curtain. All the blood which had receded
from her cheeks flowed over into his, and rose like a magic potion into
his head; meanwhile he tried to get into the latter the thought,
"Probably it is more the quarrel with her parents, and less the
affliction of being driven hither, that has made her sick."
When one has once proposed to himself to make believe cold, one becomes
still more so when one finds reasons for _not_ being so: Victor was
made still colder by Clotilda's parents, who had come with her, and
from whose faults the mantle seemed to him to be at once removed. Upon
persons whom, for the sake of a third, one has esteemed too highly, one
avenges himself, when the third no longer exerts the constraining
influence, by a so much the greater depreciation of them. Then, too, he
said to himself: "As she now seldom sees her brother Flamin, it would
be a piece of simplicity to expose her to a minute's embarrassment by
the announcement that I know the relationship." Poor Victor!
Nevertheless, it was impossible for him even to charge his heart with
so much electrical warmth--though he might rub it with cat-skins and
beat it with fox-tails--as would be requisite in order that his pulse
should beat full for Joachime, not to say feverishly; but _this very
thing_ decided him to conduct himself exactly as if heart and pulse
were fuller. "It were ignoble," thought he, "if the good Joachime
should be made to atone for it, that I once had other hopes and wishes
than my hitherto newest ones." This sacrifice warmed him to a proper
degree of regard; this regard gave him the manly pride, which defies
with its love and its choice all the four quarters of the world; this
pride, again, gave him freedom and joy,--and now he was in a condition
to talk with Clotilda like a reasonable man.
All this inner history occupied, of course, twelve times as great a
space of time as Mohammed's journey through all the heavens,--almost
a good hour. But an accident threw itself into the midst of all
his ideas. Namely, as the Minister's lady was a true female
philosopher,--she knew that a couple of quartz crystals with some
preparations and a drowned f[oe]tus do not make a philosopher, but
nothing short of a lecture-room full of natural curiosities, and a
reading cabinet,--and as the Chamberlain Le Baut was a philosopher, for
his cabinet was quite as large,--the collection was exhibited to the
Chamberlain, which he had himself helped to enrich. One would suppose
that they must have laughed at each other in their sleeves, and taken
each other for fools; but they really held each other for philosophers;
for with great folks the fruits of the tree of knowledge grow so into
the window and into the mouth,--they have so much facility in gaining
knowledge (and therefore a second in showing it),--they so seldom seek
in the wells of truth anything else than their own knee-pieces made
with water-colors, and to wade into the depths of this fountain would
give them such a chill,--and yet, on the other hand, they converse with
so many sorts of persons of information in all departments,--that they
get a smattering of everything over the table, and by oral tradition,
like the disciples of the ancients, become through the ears living
cyclopædias. If, afterward, they actually know how to absolutely
renounce that which they have never heard, what difference is there,
then, between them and the poorest philosopher, except in
consciousness?
In the cabinet of books and natural curiosities lay the whole
New-Year's freight of buzzing chafers, with golden wing-sheaths minus
wings,--I mean the gilt Musen-Almanachs. Matthieu, that mimic of the
actual nightingales, was the sworn foe of the human ones, namely, the
poets. He said,--what would have suited better for a Review,--"He was a
great friend of verses, but only in winter,--for when he went roaming
so through the flower-beds of an Annual, he became, like one who walks
through a poppy-field, drowsy enough, and could go to sleep. And just
as the nights grew longer, and one therefore needed a longer sleep, it
was a fine thing that the Annuals should appear, exactly at the
beginning of winter, and that these flowers should bloom at the same
season of the year with the mosses; in this way one could at least be
lulled to sleep beside the brook that murmured in the verses, when
there was no more murmuring or sleeping on the frozen meadow."----
Our Victor was as satirical as the Evangelist; he had in Hanover
laughed as well as this fellow here,--e. g. he had complained that most
Annual-minstrels unfortunately labored more for _connoisseurs_ than for
dull readers, and were well contented if they only got the former to
sleep,--that a man who could not write prose should try whether he
might not make a popular bard, as only those birds can _sing_ who do
not learn to talk,--that he could get through a good Annual at the
quickest and most agreeable rate, if he only ran over the rhymes,--and
that flat heads, like flat diamonds, to which no facettes can be given,
became _hearts_, and instead of thoughts gave us tears, in which there
swam not so much as the infusorium of an idea....
But he saw still one side more than Matthieu, namely, the noble side.
It was his custom to turn this side forward precisely when another had
been showing the bad side, and _vice versâ_. His opinion was, that the
poets were nothing but intoxicated philosophers,--but whoever could not
learn philosophizing from them, would learn it quite as little from the
systematicians. That philosophy made only the _silver-wedding_ between
ideas, but poetry the first marriage; empty _words_ there might be, but
no empty _sensations_. That the poet, in order to move us, has only to
take for his lever all of noble that there is on the earth,--Nature,
Freedom, Virtue, and God; and the very magic-words, the magic-rings,
the magic-lamps wherewith he sways us, react at last upon himself.
He delivered this opinion--when Matthieu had given his and Joachime her
own, namely, that there were three or four leaves, at least, in the
Musen-Almanachs which pleased her, namely, the smooth parchment
leaves--much more briefly than we have put it;--the Minister's lady was
of his opinion (for she herself was a versifex);--the Chamberlain said,
"Every city and every prince did indeed adore the poets in appropriate
temples,--namely, in the play-houses." Clotilda ventured now to join
herself to the victors:[263] "When one reads a poet in January, it is
as lovely as when one goes to walk in June. I cannot read either
philosophers or learned men; there would, therefore, be left to me"
(she meant to say, to her sex) "quite too little, if one should take
from me the dear poets." "You would at most," said the Minister at
last, "find your disciples in them; poets, like the saints, concern
themselves little about the world and its knowledge; they can sing of
the state, but not instruct it." "O thou grinning mummy!" thought
Victor, "a precious stone which thou canst not work into the wall of
the state-building is less to thee than a block of sandstone. If thou
couldst only install every flaming soul sent into the world as a
completion of the republican antiques, in the office of under-clerk,
custom-house collector, or warden of the treasury (as the people of
Grand Cairo transform their ruins into stables and horse-troughs)!" The
noble Mat merely subjoined: "There was a painter in Rome who never
talked with any one but by singing; and I knew a great poet who not
even in common life could speak prose; but he could not do much beside,
and had little of the world, but a great many worlds in his head. When
he comes out in print, he will hardly play off more deception on
his readers than any one has already played off on him, who chose
to."--Victor saw, by Clotilda's downcast eye, that she observed, as
well as he, that the Devil meant her Dahore: but he was silent; his
soul was sad and embittered: he had, however, long since been hardened
by court life to endure those whom he must needs hate.
During this disputation the noble Mat had, unobserved, cut out the
whole group in black paper. "Ah!" said Joachime, "this is not the first
time that he has given _blackened_ likenesses of companies." But as
Victor could never see silhouette-groups, without thinking of us
fleeting shadows of mortals, of this dwindling and drying-up
dwarf-life, of the night-pieces drawn upon life, and of the shadowy
companies called peoples,--and as he was reminded of this not only by
his melancholy, and not only by a wax-skeleton, by Madame Biheron,[264]
which stood there among the natural curiosities, but still more by the
pale form of Clotilda,--and as, casting a glance of comparison at the
skeleton and the profile, she said softly to Victor, "So many
resemblances might at another time make me sad,"--then was his full
heart transpierced with a sharp pang at the thought of his eternal
poverty, and at the certainty, "This great, beautiful heart will never
stir for thine, and when her friend Emanuel is dead, thou art left
forever alone"; and he stepped to the window, threw it open violently,
drank in the north-wind, pressed his fist against his two eyeballs, and
went back with his former expression of countenance to the rest of the
company.
But for to-day such agitations had torn deeply into his heart. And when
Clotilda, at a solitary second, said to him that the Parson's wife and
Agatha were angry at his staying away, then was he, to whom at these
names the whole beclouded past opened like a heaven, in no condition to
give an answer.
When he returned home, Clotilda's voice, which he could of all her
attractions least forget, kept incessantly speaking, and like the echo
of a funeral-song, in his soul.... Reader, when that which thou lovedst
has long vanished from the earth or from thy fancy, then will
nevertheless the beloved _voice_ come back and bring with it all thy
old tears, and the disconsolate heart which has shed them!... But not
merely her voice,--everything came thronging back in the darkness upon
his fancy: her modest eye, which did not in court-like style sparkle
and bid defiance and express desire, as did those of the others,--that
watchful delicacy, which since his entrance on court-life no longer
appeared to him, either in her or in his father, too great,--to this
add the image of Joachime and his chaos of inconsistencies, and the
remark that a man whom the most certain proofs have satisfied that he
is not loved, still suffers afresh at a _new_ one,--and then one can
understand the commotions which sleep, that lull on life's ocean, had
in his case to appease.--
"That was the last fever-shake," said he the next morning, relying upon
his present heart, whose eruptions, like those of volcanoes, daily
burnt out its crater more and more. He enjoined upon himself,
therefore, a weekly flight from the too dear soul, with the design that
the new resonance of his love might cease its vibrations in his heart,
and all become still again within him.
But after a week he saw her again: verily, there sat the Devil again at
the card-table, and played another color against him,--the _red_.
Clotilda looked, not pale, but, though only slightly, red. This redness
made a great blot on his inner man, and adulterated his inner coloring,
as black does every color of the painter. For when he found her well
again; it was not so much _agreeable_ to him,--for he saw how few
claims he any longer had upon her tranquillity,--how she did not so
much as distinguish him in this warehouse of human waste-paper, and how
stupid he had been in letting himself dream so secretly, so very
secretly, that her previous paleness proceeded actually from her vain
longing after such a one as he;--at the same time it was not
_disagreeable_ to him,--for he would have poured out all his heart's
blood, if he could thereby have brought a single artery in her to its
old course;--I say it was not so much either agreeable or disagreeable
to him, as it was both, as it was unexpected, as it was a hint to--give
himself to the Devil. His heart, and the image which had been too long
therein, were absolutely crushed in two. "Be it so!" said he, and bit
the convulsive lip with which he said it. For some days he cared not
even to see Joachime. "Has _she_ then an eye for nature and a heart for
eternity?" asked he, and he knew well the answer.
Now came on a time for him, which was the precise opposite of the
Sabbatical weeks,[265]--one may call them the _race-weeks_ or the
_Tarantula-dancing-hours_ of visiting. It is a cursed time; man knows
not where he stands. With Victor it fell just upon the winter-months,
when, besides, the honeymoons of city and court occur. I will now
portray them regularly.
Victor sought, namely, to drown deeper his unhappy, discordant
heart,--not with the drum-roll of amusements; under this it would only
bleed the more, just as wounds flow more strongly under the sound of
drumming; but with--people; these were the blood-stanching screws
which he applied to his soul. His body was now, like the Catholic
reliquiary body of an Apostle, in all places; he spent the whole day in
running to and fro, now with the Prince and now without him.
At last there was not a lady left in Flachsenfingen whose hand he had
not kissed,--nor a toilet-table where he would have been satisfied.
He made in the _racing-weeks_ double-knots, French _pas_,--dotted
sketches of patterns,--little plays,--charades,--receipts for
canary-birds,--verses for fans,--a thousand visits,--and still more,
morning notes....
These last, which he received and sent, were written in French and
folded French-wise,--namely, crushed into the shape of hair-rollers.
"They are," said he, "the hair-rollers of the fibres of the female
brain,--the cartridges full of Cupid's powder,--the cocoons of loving
butterflies": he spoke of the rise and fall of these female notes, and
called them still further the proof-sheets of the female heart, and the
outer-title-pages of the coquettish Edicts of Nantes. "I assert this,"
he added, "to distinguish myself from the page Matthieu, who denies it,
because he actually contends, that at first one presses letters upon
the fair sex, then things of more cubic contents, e. g. fans, jewels,
hands, then finally one's self; just as the mails at first only took
letters, then packages, finally passengers."--
He found those women daily more amusing who steal away from us people
of understanding the heart out of the breast and the brain out of the
head, and, to be sure, (as a certain nobleman did other stuff,) not
from love for the stolen goods, but from love of robbery itself; the
next morning, like the nobleman, they honestly send the goods back
again to the owner. Their refinements,--his own,--his turns to
escape theirs,--the attention which one had to bestow upon one's
self,--the opportunity of bringing all emotions under the finest
dissecting-knives, or solar and lunar microscopes,--the facility of
taking away from the most sincere truths the sour taste and from the
most agreeable the sickly-sweet,--all this made the toilet-tables of
women, particularly of coquettes, to him _Lectisternia_[266] and tables
of the gods. "By heaven," said the toilet-table-boarder or
pensioner,[267] "a man is merely a Dutchman, at most a German, but a
woman is a native Frenchwoman, or in fact a Parisian: man conceals his
moral as he does his physical breast: thoughts and flowers, which do
not fall through the racks of the four faculties, emotions which cannot
be described in the acts or in a physician's report, one must really
say only to a woman, and not to a man, especially one of
Flachsenfingen"--or Scheerau.
By way of excusing himself for associating with coquettes on the
footing of a general lover, he appealed to his motive,--that of merely
wishing to become acquainted with their ways,--and to the excellent
Forster, who in Antwerp _knelt down_, as well as any born Catholic,
before Rubens's altar-piece of the Virgin Mary ascending to heaven,
merely to examine her more nearly.
He had a still more dangerous excuse. "Man," said he, "should be
everything, learn everything, try everything,--he should labor for the
_union_ of the two _churches_[268] in his soul,--he should, if
only for a couple of months, have been a city-musician,[269]
grave-digger, gallows-_pater_,[270] an engineer, tragedy-manager,
upper-court-marshal, an imperial vicar, deputy sheriff, a reviewer, a
lady, in short, everything a man should have been for some days, in
order that the hues of the prism might at last melt together into the
perfect white."
These principles are the more dangerous with one like him, who, strung
with the tense strings of the most dissimilar powers, easily gave every
one's note, not from dissimulation, but because his social poetic
faculty could transport itself deeply into another's soul; hence he
gained, tolerated, and copied the most unlike persons, notwithstanding
his sincerity. But I pity him, that he has everywhere so much to
suppress, his seeing through the Prince, his state of heart toward
Clotilda, his conciliatory intrigues towards Agnola, his knowledge of
Flamin's relations, &c. Ah, reserve and dissimulation easily run
together; and must not a constant dropping, when one stands directly
under it, at last wear scars in the most solid character?
Nothing chills the noblest parts of the inner man more than intercourse
with persons in whom one cannot take any interest. This hotel-life at
court, this daily seeing people who never even say "I," whose relations
one ignores as indifferently as their talents, unless some necessity
seeks them,--this snatching only at the next moment, this racing by of
the finest and most intellectual strangers and ant-swarms of visitors,
who in three days are forgotten,--all this, which makes palaces like
Russian ice-palaces, where even the stove full of naphtha flames is a
lump of ice, and to which I need not at all add the _comic_ salt,
which, besides, chills all warm blood, as that of _Glauber_ does hot
water,--all this made his heart desolate, his days bald and burdensome,
his nights distressful, his conduct too cold towards the good, too
tolerant towards the bad.
In addition to this, his Emanuel was silent, and, like nature, shut up
his flowers within himself. He whom nature nourishes and builds up, is
not in so good a mood in winter as in summer. The earth had on her
powder-mantle of snow, and her night-gown on all day; the trees had
wrapped up their buds in fleecy hair-papers, and the twigs looked like
hair-pins. Victor's soul was like nature: O may Heaven soon warm in
both the flowers of spring!
As the pathological history of my Victor reminds me too painfully of
the latent poisons in the human body, it shall soon come to an end. It
pleased him that he became, by this fluttering round, more and more
gallant and cold towards all women: the cord of love cuts less deeply
into the bosom, when, plucked out into threads and floss, it flutters
about everybody. He who, like his namesake, Saint Sebastian, looked
like one stuck all full with (Cupid's) arrows, shot off arrows of
another kind against the whole sex, though never against individuals.
In this last circumstance his bitterness differed from Matthieu's, who
could say of his own cousin, for example, who had lost her beauty by a
late attack of small-pox: "Her beauty held out right valiantly against
the small-pox, and brought off from this victory the most glorious
_scars_, and all of them indeed, like those of Pompey's knights;[271]
in front and in the face."
As assaf[oe]tida is used for _haut gout_, so does one season the
finest _savoir vivre_ by sundry bold incivilities. Bastian in the
Tarantula-season was not to be embarrassed by anything: he went and
came like a Parisian, without ceremony; he sought often bold, but
advantageous postures of his body; during the play he made tours
through the boxes as the Prince did through the coulisses; five times
he carried matters so far (though with difficulty, and always only by
means of setting before himself the example of the courtiers), that he
listened indifferently, or absolutely looked away, when another was,
telling him a story: all which things, if not essential, are
nevertheless incidental to true politeness.
Nor will I let it be unnoticed in his praise, that he took to himself
the regular _exotic_ and _satirical_ liberties of the _Gallican_ Church
toward several women at once, for in the presence of a single one he
had still the old veneration of a noble heart. I will give at least one
example of that. Once he was among five slanderesses (the company
consisted of six females and a male person); the ugliest blackened all
maidens, even those in print, e. g. the deceased Clarissa, whom she
charged with not having in her intercourse with Lovelace been quite
able to _sauver les dehors de la vertu_.[272] One can anticipate how
the Königsberg school will receive it in their reviews, that he let
himself down on one knee before the calumniatress, and said with some
seriousness: "_O Clarisse! voici votre Lovelace; retranchons quatre
tomes, commençons comme les faiseurs d'Epopées par le reste_."[273]
To be sure, he frequently during the Tarantula-season reproached
himself for the Tarantula-season; and when the Gentile-fore-court of
his heart grew so full of women, while in the Holy of Holies there was
nothing but mute darkness, and when his brain became an entomological
cabinet of court trifles, then, of course, he often sighed in his
balcony: "O come soon, good father, that thy sinking son may soar out
of this unclean March fog into a clearer life, before he has utterly
stained himself, so as no longer even to frame this wish." And
as often as he got sight, in Joachime's chamber, of the views of
Maienthal,--which Giulia had had taken by the painter of Clotilda's
portrait,--then in the midst of his jestings he turned his eye away
from them with a sigh.----But he was not healed, until fate said, Now!
Then all at once the theatre-key struck, which bids men come and act in
the players' rehearsal of life;--the play itself is not given till the
next life;--and then transpired something which I shall at once report
in the following chapter, when I have done relating in this one how
Victor stood with all the people about him.
With many, properly speaking, badly,--in the first place, with
Clotilda. She resided, to be sure, at the Minister's; as maid of honor,
she would have belonged in the Paullinum, only the Prince had so
contrived it for the greater facility of seeing her; but she was always
about the Princess, with whom she was soon linked in intimacy by a
similarity of seriousness and a similarity of reserve. Her indifference
to one who had with her a common friend and teacher inspired this
Victor with a still greater, especially as he knew she must feel that,
in this cold mountain- and court-air, only a single, though faded,
carnation slip of her fair soul bloomed, namely, himself. Then, too,
the obligation of decorum, to look upon her coldly, must become a
habit. The worst thing for him was that she was indifferent towards him
without ill-feeling, and cold towards him with respect. Others were
quite furious about the "phlegmatic virtue of this Pygmalion's statue."
The noble Mat called her often the _Holy_ Virgin, or the Demoiselle
Mother of God. It is made out very clearly by the Dog-documents, which
I have opened, that some gentlemen of the Court, after various abortive
attempts to explain to themselves a virtue irreconcilable with so much
beauty, now on the ground of temperament, now of concealed love,
and now of a coquettish coyness, ending at last, like the water
at St. Clermont, in petrifying and becoming _its own bridge over
itself_,--that these cunning gentlemen most felicitously fell upon the
conjecture that Clotilda wore this mask over her face as a copy of the
face of the Princess, for the sake of continuing in favor. Hence
Clotilda's discreet virtue was judged by most with greater indulgence,
while one could excuse it, as an intentional imitation of a similar
fault in the Princess, even by the example of like imitations, as
courtiers often aped the greatest external natural faults, nay, even
the virtues of a prince. So thought at least the more reasonable
portion of the Court.
Agnola was assiduous in testifying an ever increasing gratitude to our
hero for January's visits, although, as I think, she could detect the
faithless intentions of the Prince in the presence of Clotilda full as
well as she might sometimes see into Victor's soul in the presence of
Joachime.... In fact, I should have begged the reader long since to be
on the look-out; I deliver the facts with excusable stupidity, though
with historic fidelity; if, now, there are therein fine, knavish,
significant, intriguing traits and hints, it is without my knowledge,
and therefore I cannot point them out to the reader with an index-hand,
or announce them with a fire-drum,[274] but he himself--as he
understands court histories--must know what I mean by my hints,--not
_I_.
With Joachime Victor would have gone on very well,--as he set down all
faults which he found in other women, and not in her, to her credit as
virtues, and as he grew more intimate with her personally; for the
faults of maidens, like chocolate and tobacco, appear at first the more
odd to the palate the better they taste to it afterward: he would have
got on very well, but for two sharp corner-stones; but they were there.
The first was,--for I will not reckon his slight annoyance at the short
duration of her Christmas sentimentality,--that she was always finding
fault with Clotilda, particularly with her "affected" virtue. The
second was, that Clotilda sought her society quite as little: Victor
could love no one whom Clotilda did not love. And now the race-weeks
and visiting-Tarantula-dance hours of one man are at an end; but, alas!
all posterity must yet cross the same hot _line_ of folly and of youth.