Tergemini.--Zeusel and his Twin-Brother.--The Ascending
Peruke.--Detection of Knaveries.
If I were in Covent Garden, and had wept over the tragedy, I would
still stay to the epilogue, although I should have to laugh over it.
Only, however, from tragedy does a cross-lane lead over to comedy, but
not from the epic; in short, man can laugh after _tender_, but not
after _exalting_ emotion. I cannot, therefore, allow a fast reader,
immediately after the twenty-fifth chapter, to begin this one. In fact,
when one sees how they read a book,--namely, even five times as
miserably, thoughtlessly, fragmentarily as it is written--(I speak
merely of attention; knowledge is, of course, out of the question
during the reading, and the author's pen cannot raise the spirits of
the reader, any more than the piston can the water, beyond a certain
level); how, at the best passages, they turn over two leaves at
once,--now grapple two unlike chapters, and now spend four weeks in
reading through a chapter which ought to have been finished in one
sitting; how such classical readers often just before a visit, or
during the twisting on or in fact the heating of the hair-roller, or
during the combing out of the hair (which absolutely powders the
sublimest chapter) how they take that moment to read one of this last
kind, or an affecting one while scolding at the whole room;--when one
considers that such readers comprise most of those in Scheerau and
Flachsenfingen, those female readers only excepted who know how to hit
the way into all books and men, and to whom it is all one what they
read or marry,--and when one actually learns by sad observation, that,
if not even the reading-penny which they have to pay for the book has
power enough to persuade them into the enjoyment of affecting and
sublime pages, this long period will still less constrain them to
it,--one must congratulate the German public, which is still nourished
by works in which, as in turkey-fowls, the best part is the _white_.
As the _Vienna Magazine_ is also such a turkey-cock, and I had a dream
last week that my dog wrote for it, this will be a fitting place to
revoke my error. The dream does not strike me as strange,--(since my
bestial correspondent is likewise named _Hofmann_,[8])--that this same
beast was the Professor swaddled and chrysalized into the body of a
dog. I certainly never should have hit upon the idea that a Professor
of "practical eloquence" would in the form of a dog give the world
printed things, had not once in Paris a fellow got himself sewed up
with _contraband_ goods in a poodle-skin, in order, thus disguised, to
make his way through the gate. I might have known well enough, from the
inequality of size between the two creatures, what was in the wind;[9]
but I went so far in my crazy dream as actually to pinch and feel of
the dog to probe him, when the Professor, whom I sought behind this
mask, himself in person entered the door. He at once removed all
confusion; I imposed on myself, however, as it were to give him
satisfaction, the penalty of making the whole thing known, and of
being, into the bargain, his fellow-laborer, i. e. his monthly pigeon,
which hatches every month.... Many are actually said, therefore, to
have looked in the Vienna Magazine (for in the first edition I forgot
to state that I had only dreamed) for articles by me: is it possible, I
ask?----
We left our Victor in suspense under a cloud of dark conjectures: now
we meet him again in the presence of an incident that confirms them
all.
Whoso knows, though only by hearsay, the Apothecary Zeusel, around whom
the whole occurrence revolves, knows that he is a hare's-foot.[10] The
said foot--a hare and the Devil, though the whole skin is stripped off,
still retain the foot--was delighted when a gentleman of the court got
a dinner out of him and--a laugh upon him; he could not keep within the
bounds of modesty, when a distinguished person made a fool of him. The
noble Mat, therefore, often took away his modesty. From him he could,
like the Flachsenfingeners, bear everything, from Victor nothing. I can
explain it only by the fact, that Victor's satires were general and
apt, and improving; but men sooner forgive lampoons than satire,
slander than admonition, jests upon orthodox and aristocrats than
reasonings about them.[11] Notwithstanding, though Zeusel was again
this time the victim of practical jokes[12] and trouncings at
Matthieu's hands, he could not fairly forgive him for it, but got the
gout on the subject.
It was, namely, just before the first of April--many have three hundred
and sixty-five first of April's every year--when the page made the
apothecary an April fool.[13] In St. Luna three bathing and drinking
visitors had already arrived, three wild young Englishmen, who
announced themselves as _tergemini_, but were probably only brothers
born in succession, not at once. Only their souls seemed three twins of
the spirit of freedom and fraternity; they were so republican, that
they did not even appear at court, and, like every Englishman,
accounted us all, me and the reader and the Professor of Eloquence, as
Christian slaves, and the enfranchised as turnkeys' assistants. The
magic influence of a congenial heart soon drew the Regency-Councillor
Flamin into their Cartesian vortex; they had hardly been there eight
days, when they had held with him a club at the Chaplain's. He promised
them for Easter a sight of their countryman Sebastian; and the noble
Matthieu he had at the very beginning brought with him. Mat's
liberty-tree was merely a satirical thorn-bush; his satires supplied
the place of principles. Only a single one of the three twins,
whom the very evil one with horns and buck's feet,--namely, the
Satyr[14]--rode, could properly like the biting _Evangelist_ and false
_Apostle_ of liberty; for in a clear, bright head every word of wit and
lightning from another, assumes a greater lustre, as glowworms gleam
brighter in dephlogisticated gas.
When Matthieu saw the parsonage coachman and the hired lackey of the
Englishmen, the bellows-blower Zeusel,--the twin-brother of the
Apothecary,--he devised something which I will presently relate. The
Apothecary was notoriously obliged to be ashamed of his veritable
brother, because he was a mere bellows-blower, and raised no other wind
than musical,--and because, furthermore, he had bad inner ears, and, as
to outer ones, none at all. Nevertheless, as respects the latter he had
protected himself with a judicial certificate which stated, to his
credit, that he had lost his acoustic volutes in an honorable way by a
surgeon who undertook to help his difficulty of hearing. But his head
was his ear. If he held a staff in contact with the speaker or his
seat, or if one preached directly over his head, he heard very well.
Haller relates similar examples, e. g. of a deaf person who always
thrust a long stick against the pulpit as conductor and bridge of
devotion. His deafness, which called him rather to the post of a
highest state servant than to that of a hired servant, was the very
thing which secured him the victory over the competitors, because Cato
the elder--so the jolly Englishman styled himself--was pleased with the
fellow's droll posture.
The noble Matthieu, whose heart had full as dark a hue as his hair and
eyes, hung the three twins as bait-worms on his line, to draw the
Apothecary between his arm and Flamin's to St. Luna. Zeusel went
gladly, never dreaming of the misfortune that awaited him, namely, his
brother, with whom he had years ago agreed, for a certain
consideration, that they would absolutely not know each other in
company. Besides, the bellows-blower, in his simplicity, could not at
all comprehend how such a distinguished man as Zeusel could be his
brother, and adored him in silence afar off; only one thing he could
not endure, despite his stupid patience, namely, that the Apothecary
should pretend to be the first-born. "Am not I," said he, "a quarter of
an ell longer, and a quarter of an hour older than he?" He swore it was
forbidden in the Bible to sell one's birthright,--and then, like all in
whom a stupid patience gives out, he was no longer controllable.
The Apothecary, after his first terror at the presence of his brother,
saw with pleasure that no one knew his fraternity; he proposed,
therefore, to imitate the rest, and demanded of his servant-brother, as
coldly as any one, something to drink. The bellows-blower, as he bowed
down his head that his brother _overhead_ might give his commands,
surveyed with astonishment and real reverence the silver trellised-gates
and shackles on the feet of his kinsman, and his hip-pendant of steel
garlands of watches. Zeusel would gladly--if the page could have
been trusted--have made believe to the Britons that he was deceived,
and took the bending-down of the deaf man for overdone cringing before
courtiers; he would then have been able to add, that _Opisthotonos_
towards inferiors is a cramp of the same kind with _Emprosthotonos_[15]
towards superiors;--but, as was said, the Devil may trust court pages!
Meanwhile the Britons hardly noticed the fool with his money-purse on
his posterior, and merely wondered what he wanted there. Their
republican flames blazed up together with Flamin's, and in fact in such
a manner that the page would have taken them for Frenchmen and for
travelling agents and circular-messengers of the French Propaganda, had
he not been of the opinion that only a fool could have anything
to do with or believe in that. Matthieu had acuteness, but no
principles,--truths, but no love of truth,--sharpness of perception
without feeling,--wit without purpose. What he was after to-day was, by
letting fly grazing shot, to fix the Apothecary in the agonizing fear
that some connection of ideas or other would lead him every moment to
the subject of his present brother. Thus he incidentally with great
success laid the poor hare's-foot on the rack of the "larded hare,"
when he contended ironically--for nepotism.
"Popes and ministers," said he, "give important places, not to the
first chance-comer, but to a man whom they have narrowly proved,
because they have been almost brought up with him, namely, a friend by
blood. They have too moral a way of thinking to let them, after their
elevation, no longer know their kindred, nor do they hold the court to
be a heaven where one never inquires about his fellow-trenchermen
condemned to hell. Inasmuch as a minister can digest like an ostrich,
one wonders that he does not also, like the ostrich, toss his eggs,
full of relatives into the sand under the burning sun, and trust the
hatching to accident. But nothing accords less with genuine nepotism
than this; nay, the very ostrich, by night and in colder places, broods
in person, and only omits it where the sun broods better; so, too, the
man of influence provides for his cousins only in those cases where
great want of merit requires it. I confess, morality can as little
command nepotism as friendships; but the merit is so much the greater,
when without any moral obligation one covers, as it were, with his
family-tree, half the steps of the throne." This smelting-fume and
vapor of satire prepossessed the Britons in his favor, especially as
the fume implied noble metals, that is to say, the highest impartiality
on the part of a son whose father was minister.
While the Apothecary carved the _souper_,--Mat had begged him to act as
_grand écuyer tranchant_, his friend watched the moment when he had a
great turkey-cock on the fork, to carve him in the air, as herons do
fishes, and that, too, in Italian fashion; then the noble page took his
way over the partitioned turkey-cock, and Poland, through the
Electorates, till he arrived at the hereditary kingdoms, where he
stopped to make the remark, that very naturally the first great
Dictator will have raised up his own son to sit on his throne after
him: "So had he often, at the Flachsenfingen shooting-matches, enjoyed
seeing the children dance about with the crowns and sceptres which
their fathers had shot down, and toss and play with them." The deaf man
maintained by his gauging-rod and linstock, which he pressed against
the table, the freest intimacy with the whole club, and watched his
laboring brother, to see how he sawed and balanced. Matthieu, who loved
the chief-carver, but the truth still more,[16] could not for his sake
suppress his reflections upon crowned first-borns, but freely remarked,
that "One should at least among the reigning family, if not among the
people, have a free choice."
We do not now think even as the Jews do, with whom, to be sure, a
half-bestial abortion has still the rights of primogeniture, but not,
however, an entirely bestial one.[17]--The bellows-blower was
impregnated through the fallopian tube[18] of the staff with new ideas
of primogeniture,--his brother was more dismembered with agony than the
turkey-cock in the air. The Evangelist went on: "With the Jews, too,
the bestial first-born, because it can never offer a sacrifice, has the
best food, and is holy and inviolable,--the rest of the cattle belong
to the class of _younger sons_." ...
--Thereupon he suddenly and smilingly pronounced the compliment: "Only
my friend here with the turkey-cock makes the happiest exception to my
assertion, and his respected brother with the staff there the
wretchedest; they are, however, twins, and he is only a quarter of an
hour older than the deaf one." He turned composedly to him of the
staff, who had already mobilized[19] his face for war, "Am I not right,
a quarter of an hour older?"
"Yes, may God punish me," said he, "if I am not. What says my brother?"
The Apothecary, fainting, had to let fall the dividend on the fork,
though it had already been lightened by the cutting off of successive
quotients. The bellows-blower took a flying survey of all faces, and
detected on all a silent scepticism, which the page by his cold
assurances made still more legible. "There is nothing in the whole
joke," said Zeusel in a low tone, "that can possibly interest any one."
As the bellows-blower could not get hold, through his long auricular
organ, of the low murmured exception,--but he did not see how even then
he was going to maintain his case and his right of primogeniture,--he
entered upon his proof, and fetched out four long curses, as answering
to just so many syllogistic figures, and bent his head before his
brother, that he might hand in over it his replication. The Apothecary,
who wanted to invalidate, not the primogeniture, but only the claim to
be his brother, and who, on account of doubt as to his title, did not
care to address him, said imploringly to Matthieu, "Concede the point
to him, for he does not know at all what we have hitherto been talking
of."
Quickly and abruptly, then, but with an incredulous look, the page said
to him, "You shall be right, my friend," and added, under pretence of
wishing to divert him, "You look right fresh and young."
"By heaven!" replied he, flaming up, "_he there is younger_; but he
came behind me, as a fellow-traveller, into the world in the form of a
tobacco-pouch: he is woven and twisted together out of the little
beggar-men[20] that fell off from me."
The bellows-blower now fired off all the cannons on the wall of his
head, exasperated by the vinegar-glances and poisonous looks and
inaudibleness of his blood-friend: he therefore stretched out his thumb
and his little finger, and set them like the feet of a pair of
compasses on his own face by way of measuring it; then he set out to
apply the two as a long-measure to the face of his blood-friend: he
would then, as man is ten faces long, have held his own and the other
face opposite each other, and then from their difference in measurement
have easily inferred their respective statures; but the Apothecary
wabbled, and the bellows-blower quite incorrectly planted his thumb
above the jawbone. Here the thumb, which sought to press itself into
the soft cheek, was stopped by something hard and round, and the
servant of the bellows, by the slipping down of the thumb upon the jaw,
propelled out of the mouth a ball of wax with which the Apothecary had
stuffed out as with a padding his sunken cheeks, in order to swell up
the inlaid sculpture of his visage into relievo. The emerging ball
knocked over, like a nine-pin ball, the Apothecary, i. e. upset his
equanimity, and with flashing eyes he said to the deaf one, who was now
on the point of absolutely striding on to a history of his bald head,
only this much: "You, man, have no bringing up, and your elder brother
must plane you down first."
But as the Calcant[21] had already made some headway in the natural
history of the baldhead, Zeusel hurried off with the excuse that the
Court-Physician Horion was awaiting him this evening. The most serious
of the Englishmen stepped up very near to him and said: "Commend me to
the Doctor, and as he makes such good cures, tell him, in my name, you
are a great fool."
Hardly had he got out of the village, when the Calcant took pity on the
Emigrant, and would fain have done with his history of the bald head.
The Evangelist, therefore, despatched him after the enraged twin, to
catch him now in the dark; and took up himself in his place the
historic thread. On an evening--so the story ran--when the court was
not at the play, the Court Apothecary--Heaven knows how--poked out his
nut-cracker-face from one of the first boxes. Matthieu, who was then
still page, posted the bellows-blower in the zenith of his peruke,
namely, in the gallery exactly above him. The Calcant let down from
above by an invisible horsehair a little hook, which hung like a bird
of prey over the out-looking peruke, which I hold to be an ideal of
hair. For it seemed to have grown out from the head (from which locks
and vergette[22] had long since fallen off) as an indigene and shoot,
and no one took it for an adopted for. The bellows-blower let the hook
swing and sway like a pendulum above the peruke, till such time as
there was a certainty of its having fastened into the vergette.
Forthwith he made use of his hands as a drayman's windlass, and lifted
up (as the frost does other growths) the whole frisure by the roots,
and slowly drew the pig-tail wig like an ascending hair-balloon up into
the air. The pit and the chief-lover and the lamplighter were turned by
astonishment into lumps of ice, as they saw the tailed comet go up in
right ascension to the gallery. Upon the Apothecary, who felt his head
uncovered and blown upon by a cold wind, the few natural hairs lifted
themselves up with terror, like the artificial ones, and when he turned
round with his bald skull to look after the lifting of his head of hair
on the cross, his twin-brother (in order not to be discovered) let the
whole hairy meteor, which wanted to go after the hair of Berenice[23]
in heaven, actually fall down before his face among the people, and
looked composedly down at its culmination in the nadir, like the rest
of the gallery.
During our recital the twins have been pommelling each other. The
aspirant for primogeniture called out there, on the Flachsenfingen
road, which was covered with the darkness of night, in one continued
yell, "Mr. Court Apothecary!" and as he could not, of course, hear any
answer, he was obliged to knock his ear-trumpet against every object,
to hear whether it said anything. At last his probing-rod came in
contact with the firstborn, and he marched up to him to beg his
forgiveness and return. But the Apothecary was in such a boiling and
overflowing state, that, when the bellows-blower ducked his head to
take in his answer, he made up his hand into a ball and let it fall
like a bell-hammer on the sagittal suture of the bended head, whereupon
the diving-bell gave out a regular tone. The Apothecary, if one had
rightly understood him and given him time, would by this trip-hammer
have made the sutures on the deaf-head considerably more prominent; but
in this he was disturbed by his own brother, who bent his head down
like a bush,--for the bellows-blower would have inserted his fingers
like ornamental pins into the artificial hair and dragged him by that,
if the peruke had been made fast on his head,--so that he could lay his
hearing-tube as a second backbone so stoutly and yet so carefully along
the twin's first, that no one came off with compound fractures, except
the hearing-tube.--Thereupon he said good night, and recommended him to
keep to the left, in order not to lose his way....
--Had I known that this history would overshadow so many leaves, I
would sooner have thrown it away.--The next morning the impudent
Matthieu paid a visit to the cross-bearer, on whose hands the chiragra,
warmed into maturity by wrath, was burning; he was going now--for he
answered every reproach against his shamelessness with a greater--to
make the gouty hands cat's-paws again to take fresh chestnuts of fun
out of the fire. But the Apothecary, whose heart was only small, but
not black, felt himself too sorely injured, and when Matthieu, laughing
at his complaints, departed from him in silence, without even giving
himself the trouble of an excuse, then the chiragrist swore--and there
we have the fool again--to upset him.
Come forth again, my Victor! I yearn for fairer souls than these
foolish brothers have! None of us lives and reads on so carelessly
as not to know in what biographical period of time we are living;
it is, namely, eight days before Easter, when Zeusel is on the way to
St. Luna.--Flamin disclosed to our Victor the joke upon the sick
Zeusel. It displeased him altogether, just as writings like the
_Anti-hypochondriac_, the _Vade-Mecum_,[24] or the oral retailers of
printed jokes,--the stalest of all companions,--disgusted him. He could
never set on a bearbaiting between two fools: only the sketch of such a
battle-piece tickled his humor, but not the execution, just as he loved
to read and imagine cudgelling-scenes in Smollett (the master in that
line), but never cared to see them. Even of the incarnate bon-mots and
hand-pointings at another's body he thought too disparagingly, which I,
indeed, should be disposed to call dumb wit (just as there are dumb
sins), and which are the true attic salt of small towns; for true wit,
methinks, must, like Christianity, show itself, not in words, but in
works. He looked upon our follies with a forgiving eye, with humoristic
fantasies, and with the ever-recurring thought of the universal lunacy
of man, and with melancholy conclusions. When he had once deducted the
bad point, that Zeusel came bending before every nobleman as his hired
beast, till the latter cudgelled him back, as in Paris one can hire
lapdogs to go to walk with,--then the vanity of the man, especially as,
in other cases, it was good-natured, indulgent, and often even witty,
was something he had little to object to. No one tolerated vanity and
pride more affectionately than he. "What does a man get by it, then,"
said he, much too spiritedly, "unless he is a fool, or where then shall
he leave off being lowly? We must either think too well of ourselves,
or not at all."
Victor, therefore, with his sympathetic soul, paid at once a friendly
and a professional visit to his landlord. This mood of his fell in
grandly with the Apothecary's plan of securing the Doctor's influence
against Mat.
"For this I need nothing," said Zeusel to Zeusel, "except to let him
see the intrigues which the Schleunes family is playing against him;
for without me he is not _raffiné_ enough for that."
For, in fact, he holds the hero of the Dog-Post-Days--who very
willingly lets him--to be a little too stupid, merely because the
latter was good-natured, humoristic, and confidential towards all men.
In fact, life in the great world gave him, it is true, mental and
bodily flexibility and freedom, at least greater than he would
otherwise have had; but a certain external dignity, which he perceived
in his father, in the Minister, and often even in Matthieu, he could
never properly or long imitate; he was content to have a higher dignity
within, and felt it almost ludicrous to be serious on the earth, and
too small a thing to look proud. Perhaps it was for this very reason
that Victor and Schleunes could not like each other; a _man_ of talents
and a _citizen_ of talents hate each other reciprocally.
Before I allow the Apothecary to point out all the threads of the
Schleunes spider-web, I will merely explain why Zeusel was so
all-knowing on this subject, and yet Victor so blind. The latter was
so, because in the midst of his enjoyments he never set himself at all
to the guessing out of indifferent or bad people; in fact, like a bird
of paradise, he floated always in the air of heaven, far removed from
the dirty ground, and, as all birds of paradise do on account of the
looseness of their plumage, always flew _against_ the wind; hence, from
a want of communication, he did not get _oral_ court news till all the
Heyducs,[25] lackeys of pages, and stove-heaters had already read them
black,--often did not get them at all.--The Apothecary is in the
opposite case, because he has the bad eyes, it is true, but then the
good ears of a mole, and because in the _camera-obscura_ of his
congenial heart the forms of kindred tricks more readily image
themselves; add to this, that he applies two long ear-trumpets--two
daughters--to cabinets, or rather to their lovers, when they come out
therefrom, and overhears by the tubes many a thing, of which I can
avail myself grandly in the Third Part of this biography. There are
men--he was one--who will hunt up intelligence without the least
interest in its contents, and _personalia_ without _realia_, and
who, with no curiosity about learning, seek to become acquainted
with all learned men,--without any care for politics, to know all
great statesmen,--and without the least love for war, to know all
generals,--personally and by letter.
It may be that many a reader of fine sense has already, from the
foregoing, got wind of that which Zeusel will now disclose. I give the
Apothecary's _exposé_ in the following abridgment:--
"The Minister had never been able formerly to draw the Prince into his
interest, seldom to get him to his house; to be sure, he had sometimes
not omitted to give in marriage a daughter who might please him; but
either the diverse interest of the daughter's husband was always
unpropitious to his own, or else the influence of his Lordship was.
Hence he was more to be excused than condemned for espousing the cause
of the _weaker_ party, namely, that of the Princess, who at least, in
all events, was something, and who perhaps was only concealing still
her Italian arts. On the whole, then, it was not unjust, that one
should endeavor through Matthieu to attach the Princess, who has much
_frailty_, to the house of Schleunes, wherein they constrained
themselves to walk after her external grandioseness of virtue, while
they could make up to her by the court page for the coldness of her
spouse." ...
If the reader imagines to himself the worst, he will comprehend
Victor's incredulous staring and cursing; but he will let Zeusel have
his say out first.
"Fortunately the Court-Physician had done the family the honor of often
visiting them; and the Schleuneses probably had encouraged him in
_every_ way to a more frequent bestowal of his visits, especially as he
thereby made the Prince also a familiar guest. Deponent had a variety
of information on this subject from good authority." ...
Victor guessed, what Zeusel from politeness concealed, the allusion to
Joachime. "Singular,--is it not?" thought he, "that my father writes me
almost the same thing! But here is a fine complication of purposes! I
make the Minister my cloak of concealment in my designs upon the
Princess, and he makes me his in his designs upon the Prince." That is
what he ought to have known without me, that bad men never seek good
ones out of love, and that Joachime's heart is nothing but a bait in
the hands of the Minister; but poetic men, who keep the wings of fancy
forever on the stretch, are caught, like larks, by means of their
_outspread_ wings, even in nets which have the _widest_ meshes, through
which the smooth body of a bird might easily slip. Only one word more:
why did Victor demean himself toward the best persons--towards
Clotilda, his father, &c.--more finely, handsomely, and properly than
the best man of the world; and yet towards mediocre and bad people
conduct himself so clumsily; why?--Because he did everything from
inclination and regard, and nothing from selfishness and imitation;
worldlings, on the contrary, maintain always a uniform demeanor,
because they never shape it after other people's merits, but according
to their own designs. Hence his father, on the island, among those
rules of life which, taken together, were a fine covert prophecy of his
faults and fortunes, gave him this one: _One commits the most follies
among people whom one does not respect_.
"Now, as Clotilda pleased the Prince, this Matthieu, who had been a
suitor for her some years before, would seek to make her one of his
conquests, in order, through her, to achieve much more important ones."
Fie! cried Victor's whole soul, now I see for the first time all the
prickles of the crown of thorns which they are pressing upon thy heart,
thou poor Clotilda!
"Matthieu would long since have got farther on with his propositions of
marriage had he had his present prospects (of--an adulterous act)
nearer before him. Perhaps, too, Matthieu was further anxious about the
return of her brother (Flamin, on account of her diminished
inheritance), although the death of his sister (the source of the
inheritance, Giulia) slightly indemnified him. Hence the Princess loved
Clotilda, since the marriage of the latter with Matthieu was only a
matter of interest. But if it really came to an espousal, as was
probable, since Matthieu, if only by coarseness, would extort it from
the Chamberlain," ... (it is a peculiar trait of the Evangelist, that
towards the weak he was coarse, and often towards the same person rude
and then again refined,) ... "then might Matthieu and January exercise
themselves in mutual forgiveness; and the band of friendship would bind
at once four persons in different knots. This fourfold concatenation no
one would then any longer be able to dissolve, and all would go to the
Devil. The only _Deus ex machinâ_ who could still prevent the tying of
this knot was the Court-Physician. To him, perhaps, Herr Le Baut would
not refuse his daughter, as he had helped her get the place of maid of
honor, 'which, at that time, when I was not at liberty distinctly to
explain myself to you, was precisely my true intention, which you
guessed quite as well as you executed,'--and as the fate of the son
(Flamin, who, according to the general opinion, was not yet visible and
acknowledged) really lay in the hands of his Lordship. Nor did he doubt
about gaining the Princess, as he (the Doctor) had hitherto possessed
her favor, and she preferred him to Dr. Culpepper. The loss of Clotilda
and Agnola would clip the Schleuneses' wings." ...
Scoundrel! was the curse which Flamin would here have vented; but
Victor, who believed that only an entire life, not a single action,
deserved this moral besom, and who to the greatest intolerance of vice
joined a too great toleration of the vicious, simply said,--though with
more heat than one will now expect,--"O thou good Princess, the
_German_ scorpions sit around thy heart and wound it with their
stings, and for balm pour poison into the wound, that it may never
heal!--Abominable, abominable calumny!" Victor loved to praise and
defend his friends too ardently,--and, in fact, from his very
inclination to the opposite; for as, in the matter of his _own_ honor,
he calmly and silently opposed to the libels of the world the
commendatory letters of his own conscience, his inclination would,
indeed, have led him to defend the honor of his friends as coldly as he
did his own, but it was obedience to his conscience to do it (despite
the feeling of its superfluousness) with the greatest warmth.
The polite and triumphant smile of Zeusel was a second calumny; the
blockhead regarded Victor as a dial-plate-wheel or striking-wheel in
the matter, and himself as the pendulum. Therefore Victor said, with a
chagrin compounded of pride and melancholy: "My soul is too far exalted
above your court-littlenesses, above your court-knaveries; your stuff
inexpressibly disgusts me.--O thou noble spirit in Maienthal!----"
He went away with transpierced heart. The night-watchman, who always
reminded him in the higher sense of time, and of eternity too, called
up his teacher's form before his weeping soul,--and Clotilda came with
her pallid looks and said: "Seest thou not yet why I have such pale
cheeks, and hasten so to the holy vale of Emanuel?"--and Joachime
danced by and said, "I laugh at you, _mon cher_!" and the Princess
veiled her innocent face, and said from pride, "Defend me not!"
The reader can easily conceive that Victor held the name of Clotilda
too great to be so much as suffered to pass his lips in such a
neighborhood,--as the Jews only in the holy city, not in the provinces,
took on their lips the name of Jehovah. His soul fastened itself now on
the after-flora of his love, the Agnola besprinkled by Zeusel. It was
the thing he could have wished, that precisely at this time the
merchant Tostato was to arrive from Kussewitz to make his Catholic
Easter-confession in the city; he could at least insist upon his
silence in regard to the masquerade-part in the shop, so that he might
spare the abused Princess at least the pain she would feel at a
well-meant offence; namely, the declaration of love pasted into the
watch.