The Murderous Duel.--Apology for the Duel.--Prisons regarded as
Temples.--Job's-Wails of the Parson.--Legends of my Biographical
Past.--Potato-Planting.
As I am on the point of entering upon the fortieth day with the
observation, "The history of the duel is still full of regular ciphers,
and is a true unfigured thorough-bass,"-a piece of the forty-third
comes to hand and figures the bass and puts the vowel-points to the
Hebrew consonants. To this young forerunning[162] of the forty-third
chapter one is indebted for the fact that I can relate the
shooting-history with better spirits.
It will not be guessed who boiled up the most furiously at Clotilda's
engagement,--namely, the Evangelist. He was vexed with the bold
faithlessness of the Chamberlain, whose courtliness he had hitherto
managed by coarseness, and so much the more because a human mixture of
imbecility and flattery like Le Baut exasperates us unspeakably, when
it passes over from flatteries to insults. Still more was he who set on
Flamin himself set on by the widow of the Chamberlain, who stirred into
his elementary fire soft oil and some matches; she hated Clotilda
because she was loved, and our hero because he did not, like the
Evangelist, set the step-mother above the step-daughter. A woman who
has gone to the death for a man, i. e. into a short sleep (which is
death to the good), namely, into a swoon,--as this very widow did in
the Eighth Post-Day,--must be expected of course to hate this man, if
he will not let himself be loved. The Evangelist, who had hitherto
taken the love of Victor and Clotilda only for the accidental gallantry
of a moment, and who had also looked upon the flying attachment to his
sister Joachime as nothing more serious, was devilishly mad at the
mis-shot in the first case, and at the royal shot in the second; and he
determined to avenge himself and his sister, whom he loved more than
his father, on both.
Joachime was additionally and bitterly enraged with Victor, because she
believed herself and her love to have been hitherto abused as a mere
cloak for his love to Clotilda. I have stated above that Matthieu,
after the Eymann visit, made his to Flamin. When the Councillor had
disclosed to him the interview with the Parson and his decisory oath,
Mat formed his resolution and threw much upon the Chamberlain: "This
fellow was a small sharper and a great courtier,--he had perhaps had
more to do than the lover had with Clotilda's excursion to the baths of
Maienthal,--he, and not so much Victor, sought to make out of his
daughter a lark's net for the Prince's heart and a _gradus ad
Parnassum_ of the Court." Flamin was right down glad that his vengeance
had got another object besides him with whom he had sworn to his father
not to quarrel. Meanwhile he did not conceal from the Councillor (to be
impartial) that the Apothecary proclaimed everywhere, from exasperation
against Sebastian, that the latter had gotten the plan of this marriage
as a stepping-stone to promotion entirely from him, from Zeusel.
Flamin, in such bone-fractures of the breast, always resorted at once
to the chalybeate (steel-cure) of the sword, the lead-water of bullets;
and the cautery of the sabre; and as the duel with Victor, one of noble
extraction, had spoiled him, he would also in the first heat have
proposed it to the three-buttoned[163] fellow, when Mat ridiculed
the incompetent plebeian. Flamin cursed in vain fury his defect of
ancestry, which hindered him from letting himself be shot by one
ancestrally endowed; nay, he would have been capable--as he kindled
quickly and yet cooled slowly--for a mere verbal insult from a nobleman
(as one actually did on a certain occasion)--of becoming a soldier,
then an officer and a nobleman, merely for the sake of afterward
summoning the canonical and challengeable defamer before the muzzle of
his pistol.
But the faithful Matthieu,--whose spotted soul turned a different side
to every one, like the sun, which, according to Ferguson, on account of
its spots, revolves on its axis, so as to give all the planets equal
light,--he understood the business; he said, he would in his own name
challenge the Chamberlain, and in fact to a masked duel, and then
Flamin in the disguise could take his part, while he himself stood by
under the name of the third Englishman, and the two others as seconds.
Flamin was overmastered by rapidity; but now again there was a want of
something, which is still more indispensable than nobility to a game of
fighting,--namely, of a good, legitimate offence. Matthieu, to be sure,
was ready with pleasure to offer one to the man which should adequately
justify a duel; but the man with the Chamberlain's master-key was one
who, there was every reason to fear, would forgive it,--and there would
be nobody to shoot.--Most fortunately the Evangelist remembered, that
he himself had already received one from him, which he knew how
profitably and honestly to bring to bear upon the case: "Le Baut had,
indeed, _three_ years before, as good as promised him his daughter; and
however indifferent this perjury was in itself, still, as a pretext for
the chastisement of a greater fault, it retained its full value." ...
Thus on a smutty tongue does truth take the form of a lie, provided the
lie cannot dress itself in that of truth. And Flamin did not dream that
his alleged groomsman was no other than the veritable Sabine robber of
his bride.
I am concerned lest it should be thought that Matthieu imputes to a
Chamberlain, especially one with whom making and keeping a promise
were the most distant cousins, less full-power of lying than to a
Court-Page, and that he forgets how, in general, one gets over the
stream of the court and of life as over any natural one, not in a
direct line, but in a diagonal and oblique manner. But the rascal
_despises_ the rascal still more than he _hates_ the good man. Besides,
he acted thus not merely from passion, but from calculation: if Flamin
were killed, then he must needs receive from Agnola, who now was
becoming more and more the Princess of the Prince, and for whom
naturally an after-bloom of January's and his Lordship's former sowings
was a hedge of thorns, the honest man's fee and fairing, and a higher
place on the merit-roll of the court;--furthermore, his Lordship in
that case could no longer trundle through the gate and bring word,
"Your Grace's son is to be had and is alive."--If the Chamberlain fell,
then, too, the result was not to be despised; this former boarder and
_protégé_[164] of the princely crown was, after all, gone to the Devil,
and his Lordship would have at least to be ashamed to think that by his
silence he had entangled the Regency-Councillor in a deadly relation
with a man to whom he had, at all events, publicly to pay the
veneration of a son. Matthieu could not lose,--besides, he could
disguise or disclose his knowledge of Flamin's extraction, as the case
might require.
As there was nothing to prevent the Englishmen's being seconds, Flamin
said, Yes; but Le Baut said, No, when he received Mat's manifesto
and war-articles; he was frightened to death almost at the very
death-prescription without the ingredient of the bullet. I shall never
so belittle a courtier, as to allege that he declines such a potato-war
from virtue or from faint-heartedness,--such men tremble certainly not
at death, but merely at a disgrace,--but this latter, which Le Baut
feared at the hands of the Prince and Minister, was precisely what
deterred him. He therefore, on fine paper and with fine turns of
expression, which outsparkled the black sand, represented to Mat their
former friendship, and dehortations from this glaring "ordeal,"[165]
and declared himself besides entirely willing to do everything which
his honor--would be offended at, in case he only were not obliged by
this sham-fight to violate the laws of the duel. But he was,--Matthieu
wrote back, he would pledge himself for the secrecy as well as for the
silence of the seconds, and he made the additional proposal to him,
that they should insinuate into each other dragon-[166] and pitch-balls
in the night and in masks; "for the rest he remained in future his
friend as ever, and would visit him, for only honor demanded of him
this step." ... And of the Chamberlain too;--for these men swallow only
great offences, but no little ones, just as those bitten by mad dogs
can get down solids, but no liquids,--and herewith in my eyes is a
courtier like Le Baut sufficiently excused, if he makes believe he were
an honest man, or as if he were very different from those who pawn
their honor for the whole year, and--as in the case of imperial pledges
or living pledges of love--never redeem the pawn.
All was fixed for the very evening when Victor sorrowfully entered into
Maienthal,--the theatre of war was between St. Luna and the city.