Rouge.--Clotilda's Sickness.--The Play Of Iphigenia.--Difference
between Plebeian and Patrician[275] Love.
On the 26th of February Victor found in the morning at Joachime's--the
proud Clotilda. I know not whether it was by accident that she was
here, or from politeness, or for the purpose of meeting more nearly a
person whom Victor treated with some interest. But, O heavens! the
cheeks of this Clotilda were pallid, her eyes were as if breathed over
by an eternal tear, her voice emotional, as it were broken, and the
pale marble body seemed only the image standing on the monument of the
departed soul. Victor forgot the whole past, and his innermost soul
wept for longing to succor her and wipe out from her life all dark
winter landscapes. "I am as well as usual to-day," said she to his
professional inquiry, and he knew not what to make of this unexpected
paleness; he could not, in fact, to-day make anything, not so much as a
joke or a piece of flattery; his soul, dissolved into sympathy, would
not take any form; then, too, he was embarrassed. Clotilda soon took
leave;--and it would not have been possible for him to-day, not for all
Great Poland (that ice-floe beautifully ground down under the sledging
of emigrating nations and crowns), after she was gone, to stay half an
hour longer.
Besides, he would have been obliged to go; for the page Matthieu called
him to the Princess. The time was unusual; he could not wait to see,
nor could he guess what was the matter. The Evangelist smiled (that he
did now somewhat often when the Princess was the subject), and said:
"To Princes and Princesses weighty things were trivial and trivial
things weighty, as Leibnitz[276] said of himself. When the crown and a
hair-pin fall from their heads together, they look first of all for the
hair-pin."[277]
By the way! It would be malice on my part toward the noble Matthieu, if
I should longer suppress, the fact, that for some time he has been much
more tender and ardent towards my hero,--which on any other man than
he, I mean on a lurking villain, would be a Cain's-mark, and would have
somewhat of the same meaning as the wagging of a cat's tail.
Victor was astonished at the request of the Princess,--that he would
cure Clotilda: that is to say, not at the fact of her making a
request,--for she often did him that honor,--but at the intelligence
that Clotilda, on whose cheeks he had hitherto seen the apple-blossoms
of health at his soul's expense in the _race-weeks_, had worn only dead
blossoms,--namely, rouge, which the Princess had been obliged to
enforce upon her for the sake of having a uniformity of bloom with the
remaining red copper-flowers[278] of the court. Agnola, who, like her
rank, was quick, besought him further, when he was appointed to the
medical upper-examining-commission, to enter on his office as soon as
might be, this very day forthwith, at the play, where he would find the
candidate for examination.
And he found her. The play was a sparkling brilliant brought from
Eldorado,--Goethe's _Iphigenia_. When he saw the patient again with the
evening-red of the rouge, wherein she was to glow at another's behest
even during her going down,--when he saw this still victim (marked
red, as it were, for the altar), which he and others had driven away
from its meadows, from its solitary flowers, to the midst of the
sacrificial knives of the Court, mutely enduring, the extinction of its
wishes, and when he compared with woman's dumb patience man's raging
restlessness,--and when it seemed as if Clotilda had lent her sorrow to
Iphigenia with the prayer, "Take my heart, take my voice and mourn with
it,--mourn with it over thy separation from the fields of youth, over
thy separation from a beloved brother,"--and when he saw how she tried
to fasten her eyes more steadfastly on Iphigenia, when she pined for
her lost brother, in order to control their overflow and their
direction (towards her own brother in the Parterre, towards Flamin), O
then did such great sorrows and their signs in his eyes and looks need
a pretext like the omnipotence of genius, in order to be confounded
with pangs growing out of poetic illusion!
Never did a physician question his patient with greater sympathy and
forbearance than did he Clotilda in the next interlude: he excused
his importunity with the commands of the Princess. I must first
state that the fair patient--although he had been hitherto a falling
Peter, whom many a cock-crow had brought rather to tears than to
repentance--nevertheless remained the _second person_, whom he never
denied, ... i. e. whom, he never addressed with the frivolous,
whimsical, bold, entrapping turns of conversation now so common with
him. The _first person_--whom he esteemed too highly to write to him in
the present state of his heart--was his Emanuel.
Clotilda answered him, that "she was as well as ever; the only thing
there was sickly about her," she said, smiling, "namely, her color, was
already under the hands of a female surgeon, who, against her
inclination, healed her only outwardly." This playful allusion to the
rouging decreed by the Princess had the double design of excusing her
painting and of diverting the Doctor from his tender-hearted
seriousness. But the first was unnecessary,--since in the theatre even
ladies who never wore rouge put it on as they entered the box and wiped
it off on going out, in order not to hang there as the only quinces on
a tree full of glowing Stettin-apples, and as, in fact, mineral cheeks
were required of the whole female court-retinue as facial court livery.
The second was vain; much more likely were the wounds of his heart to
be aggravated by two causes: by that cold, almost fanatical resignation
to fading away,--and by something inexpressibly mild and tender which,
in the female face, often betokens the breaking heart, the failing
life, as fruit by _soft_ yielding to _pressure_ announces its ripeness.
O ye good creatures, ye women, while joy already beautifies you, is the
reason why sorrow makes you still more beautiful and too touching
_this_, that it so often overtakes you, or is it because sorrow borrows
the dress of joy? Why must I here confess so passingly my pleasure at
your endurance and veiling of sorrows, when at this moment before my
fancy so many hearts full of tears sweep by with open countenances full
of smiles, and win for your sex the praise of opening its heart as
gladly to sorrow as to joy, as flowers, although they *unclose only
before the sun, yet also burst open when it is overcast by a cloudy
heaven?
Victor, without being led off his track by her answer, continued:
"Perhaps you cannot wean yourself from fair nature and from
exercise,--these late hours, which I myself feel"----She prevented his
finishing the sentence, to remind him that she had, he must remember,
brought her present complexion with her from home. One sees, however,
in this reminder more forbearance than truth; for she would not
complain of her court office before the very one who had helped her
gain it.----Victor, who saw her sickliness so clearly, and yet knew not
how to propound another question, stood there dumfounded. Their own
silence loosens reserved people's tongues: Clotilda began of herself,
"As I do not know what harms me here, except the rouge, I beg my
physician to prohibit me this dietetic fault," i. e. to persuade the
Princess into a revocation of her rouge-edict. "I should be glad," she
continued, "to gain some resemblance at least to two such good friends
as Giulia and Emanuel,"--i. e. a pale color, or else the notion of a
speedy death. Victor threw out a hasty "Yes," and turned his smarting
eye toward the rising curtain.
Never, haply, were the scenes of players and hearers more like each
other. Iphigenia was Clotilda; the wild Orestes, her brother, was her
brother Flamin; the soft, radiant Pylades was his friend Victor. And as
Flamin stood below in the pit with his cloudy face,--(he came only for
the sake of seeing his sister more conveniently,)--then did it seem to
our and his friend as if he were addressed by him, when Orestes said to
Pylades:--
"Remind me not of those enchanting days,
When a free room thy house afforded me:
Thy noble father wisely, tenderly,
Nursed the half-stiffened blossoms of my youth;
When thou, an ever-gay associate,
Even as a motley, light-winged butterfly
Plays round a dark-hued flower, day after day
Didst dance and hover round me with new life,
And win thy bliss a way into my soul."
Clotilda felt quite as painfully that they were playing her life on the
stage, and struggled against her eyes.... But when Iphigenia said to
her brother Orestes,--
"O hear me! Look on me! See how my heart
Opens at last, after so long a time,
To the sweet bliss of kissing that dear brow,
Most precious treasure earth yet holds for me, ....
O let me,--let me--for in brighter waves
Not from Parnassus leaps the eternal stream
From rock to rock down to the golden vale,
Than from my bosom joy outgushing flows
And like a sea of bliss enclasps me round";--
and when Clotilda mournfully surveyed the greater interval of sorrows
and days between herself and her brother; then gushed up the inner
fountains and filled her large eyes, so often fixed upon the heavens,
and a quick bending forward hid the sisterly tear from all eyes
untouched by emotion. But it did not escape the feeling eyes with which
her friend beside her imitated her.... And here a virtuous voice said
within Victor: "Disclose to her that thou knowest the secret of her
relationship,--lift off from this sorely oppressed heart the load of
silence: perhaps she is withering under a grief which a confidant may
cool and take away!" Ah, to listen to this voice was indeed the least
with which he could content his infinite sympathy! He said in an
extremely low tone, and which emotion rendered almost unintelligible to
her: "My father has long since disclosed to me, that Iphigenia knows
the presence of her brother and of my friend." Clotilda turned suddenly
and blushingly towards him; for a more minute explanation he let his
eyes glide down to Flamin; turning pale; she looked away and said
nothing; but during the whole play her heart seemed to be far more
compressed, and she was compelled now to stifle still more tears and
sighs than before. At last in the midst of her sadness she gave
gratitude its rights, and whispered to him for his sympathy and his
confidence, as if with a dying smile, her thanks. He laid upon the
distaff of the conversation entirely new and foreign material, because
he would fain, during the spinning, get a clearer and more certain
light upon the sad impression which his confession seemed to have
produced. He inquired after the latest letters from Emanuel. She
replied: "I only wrote to him yesterday all through the eclipse of the
moon; he cannot answer me often, because writing pains his breast."
Now, as the eclipse of the 25th of February began at twenty minutes
after ten in the evening, at eleven o'clock and forty-one minutes was
at its climax, and at one o'clock and two minutes was over: accordingly
Victor, as physician, could fall upon the medical sinner with sermons
and hammers of the law and pronounce the verdict; now, it was no
wonder. Pass it by, Doctor! These dear creatures can more easily obey a
man--the Ten Commandments,--books,--Virtue,--the Devil himself more
easily, than the Dietician. Clotilda said: "The midnight hours are
simply my only free hours,--and Maienthal, indeed, I can never forget."
"Ah, how could one?" said he.
The music before the last act, and the tragic tone, and the sorrows
inspired her, and she continued: "Did not one drink of _Lethe_, when
one trod the shores of Elysium and when one left it?" ... She paused.
"I would drink of no Lethe, not in the first case, still less in the
_last_,--no!" And never was "No" said in a lower, softer, more
slow-drawn tone. In Victor's heart a three-edged compassion passed
painfully to and fro, as he imagined to himself Clotilda mocked by
fate, writing and weeping in the midnight under a moon dismembered and
beclouded by earth's shadow; he said nothing, he stared rigidly into
the mournful scenes of the stage, and still wept on when the joyous
ones had, there, already evolved themselves in their place.
At home he made his brain-fibres Ariadne's threads to extricate himself
from the labyrinth of the causes of her trouble, and particularly of
the _new_ one which had seemed to come upon her at his disclosure. But
he remained in the labyrinth; undoubtedly grief begat the sickness, but
who begat the grief? It would be hard for these poor, tender
butterflies, if there were more than one mortal affliction; in every
lane, in every house, thou wilt find a wife or a daughter who has to go
to church or to the Tragedy to sigh, and who must go up into the upper
story to weep; but this aggregated trouble is worried away with smiles,
and years increase for a long time side by side with the tears. On the
contrary, there is a grief which breaks them off,--think of that, dear
Victor, in the joyful hours of thy general love,[279] and think of it,
all ye who with warm, loving hands draw the throbbing heart of such a
delicate creature out of its breast, to take it into your own by the
side of your own heart, and warm it forever! When you then throw
away this hot heart, which you have torn out like a butterfly's
honey-proboscis: still, like that, it continues to quiver, but then it
grows cold, and erelong beats no more.
Unhappy love, then, was the gnawing honey-dew on this flower, Sebastian
concluded. Naturally he thought of himself first; but all his nicest
observations, his now so familiar _ricochet-glances_ out of the _corner
of his eye_ had long since convinced him that he had to ascribe the
distinction, which she did not deny him, more to her impartiality than
to her inclination. Who else it could be at Court,--that was a thing
which he in vain applied one electrometer after another to draw out.
And he knew beforehand that he should experiment in vain, since
Clotilda would baffle all auscultation of her inner state, if she had
an unreciprocated inclination; reason was with her the wax, which they
stick to one end of the magnetic needle, in order to obviate or conceal
the sinking (_inclination_) of the other. Nevertheless, he made up his
mind the next time to hold some divining-rods to her soul.----
I must here utter a thought, which may discover some sense and my
general speculation in the matter. My Dog-Post-Master Knef did not
probably foresee that I should calculate the year and the duration of
this whole story merely from the lunar eclipse of the 25th of February,
which he announced, just as, in fact, great astronomers, by means of
the moon's phases, found out so much about the earth's geographical
longitude. 1793 was the year in which what is related in this chapter
occurred: I am good for that; for as, at all events, the whole story,
as is well known, takes place in the ninth decade of the eighteenth
century, and as no lunar eclipse of a 25th of February is to be found
there at all, except in the year 1793, i. e. the present year, my
proposition is made out. To make assurance doubly sure, I have compared
all the changes of moon and weather occurring in this book with those
of 1792 and 1793; and all fitted together beautifully;--the reader
should also reckon it after me. It is uncommonly gratifying to me,
that, consequently, as I write in July, the history follows in a
half-year from my description.--
Victor delayed not his visit to the Princess's, that he might there
announce the reserved Clotilda as a complete nervous patient. He
himself laughed inwardly at the expression,--and at the Doctors,--and
at their nervous cures,--and said, that, as formerly the French kings
in their treatment of the goitre had to say, "The King touches thee,
but God heals thee," so should physicians say, The city and country
physician feels thy pulse, but God works the cure. Here, however, he
had three good intentions in giving out that she was a nervous
sufferer: first, that of gaining for her the abolition of her
Court-vassalage,--at least her deliverance from the precise office of
maid of honor, because the splinter of the reproach was continually
festering in his heart, "It is my fault that she is obliged to be
here"; further, of securing for her in advance permission to take the
spring and country air, in case she should by and by sue for it;
finally, of releasing her from her compulsory resemblance to those
ladies on whose lead-colored faces, as on the leaden soldiers of
children, the red daily wears off and is daily renewed. But as Agnola
herself painted, he was obliged, out of courtesy, as physician, to
forbid it to both at once. The Princess countersigned all his petitions
very graciously: only as to the rouge-article she gave, in regard to
herself, no resolution at all, and in regard to Clotilda the following:
she had nothing to say against her appearing in her presence, except on
court days and at the play, without rouge; and she would willingly
grant her a dispensation from both, unless her health was restored.
He could hardly wait for the moment of taking leave, so impatient was
he to carry this imperial-recess or resolution to the beloved patient.
He himself wondered at this complaisance of the Princess, with whom,
generally, petitions were sins, and who refused nothing--except what
was asked. His perplexity was now only this,--how to communicate to
Clotilda the indulgences of the Princess, without the offensive
confession of having made a plea of her illness. But out of this slight
evil a great one extricated him: when he came into her presence, she
looked ten times as sick as she had day before yesterday, at the
disclosure of her relationship: her blossoms, heavy with cold dew,
drooped to the earth.
Gait and posture were unchanged; there was the same external
joyousness, but the glance was often too fluttering, often too fixed;
across the lily-cheeks darted often a hectic flush, through the lower
lip at one moment a subdued convulsion.... At this point sympathy
frightened her friend out of the bounds of courtesy, and he told her
outright the consent of the Princess. He summoned to the aid of his
burdened heart his previous court-boldness, and commanded her to make
the coming spring her apothecary's shop, and the flowers her medicinal
herbs, and her--fancy her pharmacy. "You seem," said she, smiling, "to
count me among the larks, who must always have _green turf_ in their
cage. However, that my Princess and you may not have had your kindness
for nothing, I will, finally, do it. I confess to you, I am at least a
_valide imaginaire_.[280] I feel myself well." ... She interrupted
herself to question him, with the frankness of virtue and with an eye
swimming in sisterly love, about her brother, whether he was happy and
contented, how he worked, how he filled his position? She told him how
sad a burden these questions, hitherto locked up so deeply in her soul,
had been to her and she thanked him for the gift of his confidence with
a warmth which he took as a delicate reproof of his previous silence.
Of old she always loved to stand in a flower-garland of children;
but in Flachsenfingen she had gathered still more of these little
nebulous stars about her brightness, and indeed for a peculiar reason,
namely, to cover the fact, that she drew to herself Giulia, a little
five-years-old grandchild of the city Senior, with whom her brother
resided, as his unwitting biographer and news-carrier. More than three
times he felt as if he must fall at the feet of this lily-white angel,
borne higher and higher by her cloud, and say with outspread arms:
"Clotilda, be my friend, before thy death,--my old love for thee is
long since crushed out, for thou art too good for me and for all of us;
but I will be thy friend; my heart will I conquer for thee; for thee
will I resign my heaven. O, thou wilt, besides, not live to see the
evening dew of age, thou wilt soon close thy eyes, and the morning dew
still hangs therein!" For he held her soul to be a pearl, whose
mussel-body lies open in the dissolving sun, that the pearl may the
earlier be dislodged. On leaving, he could with the frankness of the
friend, which had taken the place of the lover's reserve, offer a
repetition of his visits. Altogether he treated her now more warmly and
unconstrainedly; first, because he had so utterly renounced her noble
heart, that he wondered at his former bold claims to it; secondly,
because the feeling of his disinterested, self-sacrificing honesty
towards her poured balm on his previous stings of remorse.
To this sickness was added an evening or an event, which the reader, I
think, will not know how to understand. Victor was to take Joachime to
the play, and her brother, was to come and fetch him first. I have
already twice set it down, that for some weeks Matthieu had no longer
been so repulsive to him as a mouse is to an elephant: he had, after
all, found out a single good side, dug out some moral yellow mica
attaching to him,--namely, the greatest attachment to his sister
Joachime, who alone had the key to his whole heart, closed to his
parents, the sole claim on his secrets and his services; secondly, he
loved in Matthieu what the Minister condemned,--the spirit-of-salt of
freedom; thirdly, it is so with us all: when he have heated our
heart for some female one out of a family, we afterwards extend the
stove-warmth to the whole kin and trenchership,--brothers, nephews,
fathers; fourthly, Matthieu was continually praised and excused by his
sister. When Victor arrived at Joachime's, she had with her headache
and dressing-maids,--finery and pain were increasing; at last she sent
off the live fitting-machines, and so soon as she was hardened into a
Venus out of the foam of powder and jewel boxes, rouge-rags and
_mouchoirs de Vénus_, _poudres d'odeur_ and lip-pomades, then she sat
down and said she should stay at home on account of headache. Victor
stayed too, and very gladly. Whoso knows not the framework and cellular
work of the human heart will wonder that Victor's friendship for
Clotilda brought a whole honey-comb of love for Joachime into his
cells; it was delightful to him when they visited and embraced each
other; he sought not in the blessing-fingers of the Pope so much
healing virtue as in Clotilda's; her friendship seemed to him an excuse
for his, and to set Joachime on the pedestal of esteem, to which with
all his windlasses he had not been able to raise her. Even the sense of
his increasing worth gave him new right to love; and to-day even
Clotilda's crape and princely hat would have asserted its helmet
ornaments on Joachime's aching and more than commonly patient head. To
her continued flirtation with the pair of fools he had long since
adapted himself, because he knew very well _which one_ among the three
wise men from the East she had not for a fool, but for an adorer. But
to return!
Matthieu, who also stayed at home to please his sister,--he and Victor
and she made the entire band of this _concert spirituel_. Joachime on
the sofa leaned back her delicate, sick head against the wall and
looked at the inlaid floor, and her drooping eyelids made her more
beautiful. The Evangelist went out and came in. Victor, as he always
did, dashed round the chamber. It was a very fine evening, and I wish
this of mine were so. The conversation turned upon love; and Victor
asserted the existence of two kinds,--the citizenly, and the
_distingué_ or French. He loved the French in books and as a general
love, but he hated it the moment it was to be the only love; he
described it to-day thus: "Take a little ice,--a little heart,--a
little wit,--a little paper,--a little time,--a little incense; pour
together and put into two persons of rank; in that way you have a good,
true French Fontenellian love." "You forgot," added Mat, "one
ingredient,--a small amount of senses, at least a _fifth_ or _sixth_
part, which must be added to the medicine as _adjuvans_ or
_constituens_.[281] Meanwhile, it has at least the merit of shortness;
love, like a tragedy, should be restricted to unity of time, namely, to
the space of one day, that it may not take still more resemblance to
the tragic. But describe now common love!"
_Victor_: "That I prefer."
_Matthieu_: "Not I. It is merely a longer madness than anger. _On y
pleure, on y crie, on y soupire, on y ment, on y enrage, on y tue, on y
meurt,--enfin, on se donne à tous les diables, pour avoir son
ange_.[282] Our talks are to-day for once full of arabesques and _à la
grecque_: I will make you a cookery-book receipt for a good citizenly
love: take two young and large hearts,--wash them clean in baptismal
water or printer's ink of German romances,--pour on them warm blood and
tears,--set them on the fire and under the full moon, and let them
boil,--stir them briskly with a dagger,--take them out and garnish
them, like crabs, with forget-me-not or other wild-flowers, and serve
them up warm: in that way you have a savory citizenly heart-soup."[283]
Matthieu further added, that "in the ardent commonalty-love there was
more agony than amusement; in it, as in Dante's poem, the Hell was
worked out best, and the Heaven worst. The older a maiden or a pickled
herring was, so much the darker was the eye in both, and the eye was
made dark by love. Every lady in one of the higher circles ought to be
glad that she needs to retain nothing of the man's to whom she is
chained but his portrait in the ring, as Prometheus, when Jupiter had
once sworn to leave him soldered for thirty thousand years to Caucasus,
wore during the whole period only a small bit of this Bastille on his
hand in the shape of a finger-ring." Whereupon Matthieu darted out, as
he always did after witty explosions. Victor loved the bitterest and
most unjust satire in another's mouth, as a work of art; he forgave
all, and continued cheerful.
Joachime then said, jestingly: "If, then, no style of love is good for
anything, as you two have proved, there is nothing left for us but to
hate."
"Surely not," said he, "your respected brother has simply not said a
true word. Imagine to yourself, that I were the poor people's
catechist[284] and in love. I am in love with the second daughter of
the _pastor primarius_; her part is that of a listening-sister;[285]
for maidens in citizenly life know not how to talk, at least they can
do it better in hatred than in love. The poor's catechist has little
_bel esprit_, but much _saint esprit_, much honesty, much truth, too
much soft-heartedness, and infinite love. The catechist cannot spin out
any gallant intrigue for several weeks or months, still less can he
dispute the Pastor's second daughter into love, like a _roué_;--he
holds his peace to keep up his hope, but with a heart full of eternal
love, full of devoted wishes, trembling and silent, he follows every
step of the loved and--loving one; but she guesses not his feelings,
nor he hers. And then she dies.... But before she dies, comes the pale
catechist disconsolate to the side of her dying bed, and presses her
trembling hand ere it relaxes, and gives the cold eye one more tear of
joy ere it stiffens, and breaks in even upon the pangs of the wrestling
soul with the soft spring sound, 'I love thee.' When he has said it,
she dies of the last joy, and then he loves no one on earth any more."
...
The past had come over his soul. Tears hung in his eyes, and confounded
in a singular obscurity the image of the sick Clotilda with that of
Joachime;--he saw and conceived a form which was not present;--he
pressed the hand of the one that looked on him, and thought not that
she might refer all to herself.
Suddenly Matthieu entered, smiling, and his sister smiled with him, in
order to explain everything, and said, "The court-physician has been
taking the trouble to refute thee."
Victor, suddenly chilled, replied ambiguously and bitterly: "You will
comprehend, Herr von Schleunes, that it is easiest for me to put you to
flight when you are not in the field."
Mat transfixed him with his eyes; but Victor cast his down and repented
his bitterness. The sister continued indifferently: "I think my brother
is often in the condition of changing with the fashion." He received it
with a sunny smile, and thought, as did Victor, that she alluded to his
gallant adventures and sham-fights with women of all ranks that sit at
the Diet. But when she had sent him off to inquire of her mother who
was coming to the _cercle_ this evening, she said to the Medicus: "You
do not know what I meant. We have at court a sick lady, who is the very
incarnation of _your_ Pastor's daughter,--and my brother has not so
much nor so little spirit as to act the poor's catechist." Victor
started back, broke off and took his leave.
Why? How so? On what account? But does not the reader perceive, then,
that the sick lady must be Clotilda, who seeks to escape Mat's fine
approaches within ear-shot and bow-shot of her heart? In fact, Victor
had seen well enough that the Evangelist had been hitherto playing a
more devoted part towards Clotilda than before her entrance into his
Escurial and robber's castle he could carry on; but Victor had ascribed
this politeness simply to the fact of her having there her quarters.
But now the map of his plan lay open there: he had intentionally met a
person who was indifferent towards him with the show of contempt
(which, however, he finely directed more at her future small income
than at her personal attractions), in order thereby to win her
attention,--that next-door neighbor of love,--and afterward, by a
sudden change to complaisance, to win something more than attention.
"O, thou canst win nothing!" every sigh in Victor exclaimed. And yet it
gave him pain, that this noble woman, this angel, must strike such an
adversary with her wings. Now there were thirty things at once
suspicious to him. Joachime's disclosure and coldness, Matthieu's
smile, and--everything.
So far this chapter, to which I have nothing more to append than some
mature thoughts. Of course, one sees plainly, that poor Victor
mutilates his soul to the size of every female one, as that tyrant did
the bedfellows to the length of their bed.[286] To be sure, respect is
the mother of love; but the daughter is often some years older than the
mother. He takes back one hope of female worth after another. Latest of
all, indeed, did he give up his demand or expectation of that sublime
_Indian_ sense of eternity, which imparts to us, shadowy figures
hanging in the magic smoke of life, an inextinguishable luminous point
for self-consciousness, and which lifts us above more than _one_ earth;
but as he saw that women, among all resemblances to Clotilda, acquired
this last, and as he bethought himself that a worldly life grinds down
all the greatness in man, as the weather gnaws away from statues and
gravestones precisely the _relieved parts_, there wanted nothing to his
handing over to Joachime the declaration of love which had long been
fairly written out, nothing except, on her part, a misfortune,--a wet
eye, a storm of the soul, a buskin. In more perspicuous words, he said
to himself: "I wish she were a sentimental ninny and absolutely
intolerable. Then when, some time or other, she had her eyes right
full, and her heart too, and then, when I could not tell, for emotion,
where my head was standing,--then I could advance and take out my heart
and reach it to her and say, It is poor Bastian's, only keep it." It
seems to me as if I heard him in thought softly add, "To whom else
could I give it?"
That he really had the first thought, we see from the fact that he
inserted it in his diary, from which my correspondent draws everything,
and which he, with the sincerity of the freest soul, made for his
father, in order as it were to atone for his faults by protocolling
them. His Italian lackey did hardly anything but engross it.---Did it
not depend on the dog and his news-box, his declaration of love should
take place this very day: I would break an arm of Joachime's,--or lay
her in the sick-bed,--or blow out the Minister's lamp of life, or bring
on some disaster or other in her house,----and then I would conduct my
hero to the suffering heroine, and say: "When I have gone, kneel down
and hand her thy heart." But in this way the chemical process of his
love-making may last full as long as a process at law, and I am
prepared for three quires.
But here I will confess something which the reader's pride conceals:
that he and I, at the entrance of every lady in these Dog-Post-Days,
have made a _mis-shot_ of _salute_,--every one of them we have taken for
the heroine of the hero,--at first Agatha,--then Clotilda,--then, when
he enclosed his declaration of love in the watch of the Princess, said,
"I see now beforehand through the whole business." Then we both said,
"After all, we were right about Clotilda." Then in distress I laid hold
on Marie, and said, "I shall not reveal anything further." At last
it turns out to be one whom none of us had thought of (at least not
I),--Joachime.--So it may fare with myself, when I marry....
Before passing from the Post-Day to the intercalary day, the following
additional minutes are to be passed: Clotilda put off her illegitimate
cheeks, her _joues_[287] _de Paris_, her rouge, and seldomer exposed
now her withering heart to the shaping of the court napkin-press. The
Prince, who for her sake had attended as a transient hearer in the
lecture-hall of his consort, stayed away somewhat often, and then
called at Schleunes's: nevertheless, the Princess had magnanimity
enough not to make our Victor atone, by the taking back of her
gratitude, for the withdrawal of January's favor.--In Victor there was
a long war, whether he should impart to Clotilda's brother the new
proofs of her sisterly love:--at last,--moved by Flamin's suffering,
impoverished heart, stung by reports and rascals and suspicion, and by
the thought that he had been able hitherto to give so little pleasure
to this ingenuous friend,--he told him almost everything (_except_ the
relationship).
P. S.--The undersigned testifies, by request, that the undersigned has
completed his 24th Post-Day in due order on the last day of July, or
Messidor. On the island of St. John's, 1793.