Matthieu's Four Whitsuntide Days and Jubilee.
It is a stroke of art in me to write down true scenes of villany in the
higher classes in French first, and then interpret them into the
vernacular, as Boileau composed his insipid verses originally in
prose.--As I attach great importance to the Forty-Third
Dog-Post-Day,--because therein the noble Mat seeks to save his Flamin
even at the sacrifice of his virtue and of Lord Horion,--accordingly I
meditate to translate it so faithfully into German out of the French,
in which I have written it, that my French author himself shall bestow
on me his approbation.
Hardly had Matthieu heard that Clotilda's and Flamin's mother had come
from London, when this Reineke marched out of his fox-kennel to
Flachsenfingen, because he would not let any one take from him the
honor of releasing Flamin. He seldom, despite his fieriness,
anticipated opportunity; but he watched and only helped things on here
or there; as in a romance, so in life, a thousand light trivialities,
brought together at last, hook into each other firmly, and a good
Mat twists at last out of scattered cobweb-meshes of accident a
regular--silk noose for his fellow-man.--He boldly contrived to get
himself a secret audience with the Prince, "because he would rather go
to meet his punishment (on account of the challenge to the duel) than
let certain weighty things remain in silence any longer." _Weighty_ and
_dangerous_ had long since been kindred terms with January, but now
were absolutely identical, because the Princess entertained him every
morning with a few strophes out of the penitential psalm and owl's song
about sedition, Ankerstrœms,[181] and propagandists. She and
Schleunes blew upon _one_ horn,--at least, they blew one melody from
it.
Matthieu entered and produced the great weighty matter,--the bold
petition for Flamin's life. January pronounced an equally bold "No!"
for man is quite as indignant at him who drives him into a groundless
fear, as at him who drives him into a well-grounded one. Matthieu
coldly repeated his request: "I simply beg your Highness not to suppose
that I should ever hold mere friendship as an adequate apology for such
a bold petition,--the duty of a subject is my excuse."--January, who
was annoyed at the uncourteous retraction, broke it off: "The guilty
cannot petition for the guilty."--"Most gracious sir," said the
Evangelist, who sought to drive him into fear and fury at once, "in any
other times than ours it would be quite as punishable to guess or to
predict certain things as to decree them; but in ours, these three
things are easier. Against the day when the Regency-Councillor should
lose his life, a plan is arranged, which certain persons have formed
for the salvation of his life at the expense of their own."--The
Prince--enraged at a boldness which ordinarily resides not within the
_snow-line_[182] of courts, but only at the democratic equator--said,
with the death-sentence which Mat had long since wanted to get into his
face: "I shall have you required to tell tomorrow the names of the
wretches who propose to sacrifice their lives for the sake of turning
the course of justice." ... Here the page fell down before him, and
said quickly: "My name is the first; it is now my duty to be unhappy.
My friend has killed no one, but I did it; he is not the son of a
priest, but the first-born son of the murdered Mr. Le Baut." ...
Since pier-mirrors first existed, never was such a dumfounded,
distracted visage seen in them as to-day. January dismissed him, in
order to collect himself.
We will now in the antechamber say three words about the absent one. A
shrewd thinker once said to me, that he had once said to a great
connoisseur of the world, "The fault of the great was never to trust
themselves in anything, and hence they were led by every one"; and that
the connoisseur answered, he had hit it.--January had a grudge against
Mat, and that merely on account of his satirical and sensual face,--but
not anywise on account of his vices. I take for granted that the reader
will certainly have seen courts enough--on the stage, where the higher
classes get their notions of country people, and we ours of them--to
know what one hates there----not vicious persons, not even virtuous
ones, but both of these one really loves there (precisely as they do
violinists, mechanics, Wetzlar attorneys, intendants) whenever they
have need of them.----
The page appeared again. January had allayed the sweet paternal
ebullition at the news, since he had heretofore given up all his
children for lost. He desired now the proof that Flamin was the
(nominal) son of the Chamberlain. About the duel he gave himself not
the least concern. The proof was easy for the upright soul to produce.
The soul appealed directly to the mother, who had this very moment
arrived from London, having come to save her son, and to the sister
herself. The soul had again the antecedent proposition to prove that
both had knowledge of the matter:--Matthieu appealed to the letter of
the mother which he had some years before read to the blind lord with
the borrowed voice of Clotilda, and to the sister's exclamation during
the duel in Maienthal Park, "It is my brother,"--and finally he adduced
one more domestic witness in the case, the after-summer, which would
now soon appear, and would retouch the maternal mark of the apple,
which Le Baut's son bore on his shoulder.
Matthieu had too much veneration for his Prince and master to call the
sovereign of the son the son's father. He now closed by saying, "He
knew not for what reasons Lord Horion had hitherto concealed Flamin's
extraction; but whatever they might have been, all excuses his Lordship
had were also his own excuses for having himself kept silence so
long,--and so much the more, as the proof of this descent must be more
difficult for him than for his Lordship.--Only now, by the arrival of
the mother, the _facility_ of the proof was made as great as the
_necessity_ of it. All that he could do as a family friend of the
Chamberlain had been to become Flamin's confidant in order to be his
protector."
Thereby the Prince was necessarily brought back to the subject of the
duel, which he in the beginning, after a few hints, had let drop. It
was his way of business to break off soon from an affair of importance
to him, to talk quite as long about other things, then to bring that
matter forward again, and so pack the important matter away under quite
as big layers of unimportant matters, as the booksellers slip
contraband books in sheets under white or other paper. Then, too,
Flamin's innocence of the murder was now of more consequence to
January; he therefore naturally inquired why he had exposed his friend
as a victim even to the show of a duel.
Matthieu said it would be a long story, and it was a bold step to
entreat so much attention on the part of his Highness. He began with
reporting what--the Dog-Post-Days have hitherto reported. He lied very
little. He intimated that, in order to _break off_ Flamin's love for
his unknown sister Clotilda,--at least he wanted to _increase_ it,--he
had tried to make him jealous, but had not been able to set him at
variance with any one except the lover; nay, it had not even helped
matters at all that he had let him be himself an ear-witness of the
very pardonable infidelity of Clotilda, but that his friend had at the
very last manifested a rage at his sister's betrothal, which he had
been able to appease in no other way than by the illusion of a
disguised duel with the father. For in order to prevent a second fight
between father and son; he had himself undertaken it, but unhappily
with too disastrous an effect.
So far the noble Mat. The true circumstances, which are familiar to us,
I suppress. January, who was now favorably inclined toward the
Evangelist for the removal of a fear into which he himself had thrown
him, put to him the natural question, why Flamin took upon himself the
murder.--Matthieu: "I fled at once, and it was not in my power to
prevent his untruth, which I could not have looked for; but it was in
my power to refute it."--January: "Go on in your frankness; it is your
vindication; do not evade!"--Matthieu, with a freer mien: "What I had
to say I have already said in the beginning, for the sake of saving
him; and now he is saved." January went back in thought, could not
comprehend, and begged, "Make yourself a little more clear."--Matthieu,
with the designed look of a man who prepares silverings-over of his
story: "From magnanimity he would have died for him (Mat) who had
sinned for him, did not his friends come to the rescue." January shook
his head incredulously. "For," the other continued, "as he knows not
his high rank, he more readily adopted certain French principles, which
would have _alleviated_ for him his death quite as much as certain
Englishmen would have made use of them with the people to prevent it."
As a proof, by the way, he adduced the blowing-up of the powder-house.
January saw with astonishment a light glide into a dark cavern, and saw
far into the cavern.
One wrongs the excellent Evangelist, if one thinks it satisfies him
merely to have saved his friend. His good heart was also bent upon
setting up for his Lordship a monumental column, and of laying him
under the column as its corner-stone. He gladly (as in "Hamlet")
quartered in the play another play, and raised two theatre-curtains. We
will seat ourselves in the first box. His previous conduct toward the
Regency-Councillor shows plainly enough how far he was capable of
carrying a true friendship without offending other friends, e. g. the
Princess; for to the latter the finding again of the lost son of the
Prince was no remarkable disadvantage, since the son was presented at
once as master of a Jacobin lodge and rebel against his step-father and
father both, and since his Lordship was so terrible a loser in the
matter besides. But inasmuch as Matthieu had nothing to reproach
himself with in the case, except his excess of philanthropy, he sought
to counteract this extreme by an opposite one, of malice, because Bacon
writes: "Exaggerations are best cured by their opposites." Neither,
according to his too ardent notions of friendship, could he be a
genuine friend of his Lordship's, since, according to Montaigne, one
can have only _one_ true friend, as well as only one lover; and his
Lordship already exhibited one such in the person of January.
Allow me in three words to be short and agreeable. If the Arabs have
two hundred names for the snake, they should certainly add the two
hundred and first,--that of Courtier. Indulge me further in saying,
that a man of influence and tone, by a capital crime,--a so-called
_debt of blood_,[183]--flourishes full as well as a whole state does
upon more pitiful ones in the matter of money.--
January was now prepared to believe anything that explained the
foregoing singular things. A lie which unties a knot is more credible
to us than one which ties one. Matthieu went on: "He had attended all
the republican _concerts spirituels_, in order to take measures against
Flamin's catching the contagion; and he did not carry to an extreme
friendship for the three Englishmen and the Lord's son (Victor), if he
looked upon them and him more as tools of some other concealed hand,
than as themselves workers on a plan.--This was confirmed by the misuse
hitherto made of the innocent Flamin."--By way of excusing Victor, he
said,--in doing which, he all along named him the Court-Physician, so
that January, in his present mood, was more likely to think of a
court-poisoner than anything else,--by way, then, of setting him in a
favorable light, he said that individual was a mere lover of pleasure,
and only carried out obediently what his father had sketched out for
him,--that Victor had disguised himself as an Italian to watch the
Princess, and afterward to report to the Lord, at whose behest he
probably did it, in a secret interview on an island.--As Italian, he
had handed the Princess a watch, in which he had covertly pasted a slip
of paper, wherein he had forgotten the higher rank to flatter his own.
The Prince, who loved his spouse with greater jealousy than his
betrothed, swept the floor with heavy strokes of the turkey-cock's
wing, and pulled out the point of his nose to an unusual length, and
proudly inquired how he knew that.--Matthieu replied calmly, "From
Victor himself; for the Princess herself knew nothing of it." ...
The reader owes it to me, that he knows better about a thousand
things.--Agnola certainly knew the contents of the watch very well;
nay, I even imagine, that, when the enraged Joachime informed her of
Victor's direct confession of his _concepit_, she had allowed Mat or
Joachime to trace the present recipe, according to which the bridegroom
here has to swallow Sebastian's _billet-doux_.
--"On the contrary," he continued, "she had long after presented his
sister the watch, together with the billet.--Joachime had taken it out
in Victor's presence, and he had thought fit to confess to her freely
that very thing, which neither she nor he himself had, out of respect,
yet disclosed to the Princess.--Meanwhile his sister had _thereupon_
given him the slip,--_whereupon_ he had made advances to Clotilda,
perhaps according to a paternal instruction to bring the brother into
nearer relations.--But in every instance he mixed up with the paternal
schemes of ambition his own of pleasure, and was well disposed, just as
the Englishmen were, whom he held to be Frenchmen in disguise."
The Prince, during the whole exhibition of these pretty snake-preparations,
concealed his fear behind anger; Matthieu, who saw both _mask_ and _face_,
had hitherto cut all according to the former, and made the apparent want
of fear the cloak of his boldness in exciting it.--And so he went from
the Prince into a sort of indefinite, mock arrest for the murder; but
January began to examine _persons_ and _papers_.
Before reporting the result, let me gladly confess that Mat, the noble,
knows how to lie well enough, and all the more, that he puts in truth
as lath-work to his mortar of falsehood. As in the Polish rock-salt
mines, the good liar always, in the undermining, leaves so many truths
standing for pillars as may be necessary to prevent the breaking-in of
the arch. In fact, every lie is a happy sign that there is still truth
in the world; for, without this, no lie would be believed, and
therefore none attempted. Bankruptcies give pleasure to the honest man,
as new evidences of the unexhausted religious fund of other men's
honesty, which must be extant, if it is to be deceived. So long as
treaties of war and peace are disgracefully broken, so long is there
still hope enough left, and so long courts will not want for genuine
honesty; for every breach of a contract presupposes that one has been
made,--and that is what no one could be any longer, if not one were any
longer observed. It is with lies as with false teeth, which the gold
thread cannot fasten, except to a couple of genuine ones still
remaining.
January began the mint-probation days of Matthew's Gospel.
1. The Parson was summoned to confess, in the presence of the supreme
authority of the state, what meetings he had suffered in the priestly
house. The poor man turned over the leaves of Œmler's Pastoral
Theology, to find out how a parson has to behave who is going to be
hanged, Without a murmur he now laid his neck upon the block and under
the axe for lesser and moderate mishaps, for the Rat-King, who went
like a whirlwind through his dwelling, for the garter which, while he
walked, gradually slipped down over his knee-pan, and exchanged the
_anxiety_ of the happy for the _agony_ of the unhappy. At the audience
he said, he had, at church and elsewhere, inveighed against the clubs
as much as any one, and had bought Girtanner[184] for the purpose. To
the question, whether Flamin was his son, he replied sadly, he hoped
his wife had never violated his and her marriage vows.--When he got
back to his house, in order not to be in agony for fear of arrest, he
took a bundle of old manuscript sermons with him into a quarry, and
learned them there by heart for three or four Sundays to come.
2. On the same day the Minister Von Schleunes (out of complacency to
the Princess) paid a visit at Le Baut's house, and communicated to the
lady and Clotilda the current rumors about Flamin's birth. Both ladies
had to believe that Victor must have disclosed the secret to the
Prince, in order to save his unhappy friend. How could they have helped
imitating him, when the iron pear[185] of the oath was taken from the
tongue and out of the mouth, and since one may violate a vow of secrecy
when one would otherwise have to violate truth, and the tender souls
rejoiced now so heartily at the opening of the door of the year of
Jubilee into the prison of their darling?--In one word, the Minister
brought back nothing but confirmations of the hypotheses of his son.
3. On the same day, the merchant Tostato was examined by Count O.
respecting his shop-partner, and Victor by the confessor respecting the
author of the pastoral or bucolic letter in the watch, and then heard.
Here, too, Matthieu, as was to be expected, had the truth entirely on
his side. Victor was now too proud, too good, too resigned, to conceal
anything.
4. All the tallies of sins in Kussewitz and everywhere fitted into each
other; even from Victor's former mediatorial office, which he once
discharged with the Prince for Agnola, from his little indiscretions,
from his satires, from his dressing up the juvenile soldiery in
breeches, from his journey with the Prince, there was now spelled out
nothing but draughts and ground-strokes of a sketched plan of battle
against the throne. In fact it was necessary, January was obliged, the
more spy-glasses he directed at this meteorological phenomenon of lies,
to behold it only so much the greater.
I have forgotten the Princess, who made believe that she was very
much offended and wholly ignorant in the matter of the billet, and
could hardly be contented with the punishment, that the hero of the
Dog-Post-Days should be forbidden the court. The court! _thee_, good
Victor! thee,--who wilt soon forbid thyself the _earth_!
January easily overlooked past offences, but he strictly punished
_future_ ones. And since, moreover, Mat, like a rattlesnake, rattled so
terribly, not to give warning, but, as more recent naturalists have
found in the case of the real rattlesnake, for the sake of making the
victim stiff and fearful: accordingly his Lordship was tumbled down so
out of January's heart over all the steps of the throne, that it could
not have helped him at all, even if he had immediately stept forth out
of the air. Flamin was found without his help.--To the house of the
three Englishmen permission was sent to take passage for their island,
when they pleased. They sent back word, they needed only _one_ day to
reach their island, and waited only for their travelling companion. By
the island, however, they meant the _Isle of Union_,--and by the
travelling companion the fettered Flamin, whom they wanted to persuade
to go along with them.
I am pleased that my Victor was forbidden the court. Dismissal from
court is generally a favor,--(now a deliverance from court-services may
well deserve that name,)--which is not always bestowed on the
worthiest, but often on a devil like Louvois,[186] as well as on an
apostle like Tessin.[187] But does it not amount to taking away from an
eminent favor, an order _pour le mérite_, all its value, when one
tosses it to knaves, whereas it ought to be laid up as the greatest and
last reward, as a premium and pike-bearer's reward,[188] as an ovation,
for the most honest, candid, and oldest man at court?
In the next chapter one may hold himself prepared for an uproar, the
like of which is heard in few German chapters; the alarm-cannons of the
court-party, the knocking down of scaffoldings and upsetting of chairs,
in getting from the criminal court, I shall be able to hear even over
on my island. The black-haired and black-hearted court-page, when he is
discharged from arrest, with his ironical mien and his peculiar _low_
voice,--the ripieno-voice of his most malicious scorn, as it is with
others that of the most exalted enthusiasm,--will stalk round
everywhere and say, he wishes his Lordship would appear, he has
hitherto labored in his matters to the best of his ability. At court
one sometimes becomes sublime by an eminent wickedness,[189] as,
according to Burke, no smell is sublime except the most stinking of
all, and no taste except the bitterest. And just so every one easily
conceals there his compassionate interest in the falling favorite, like
the wise father, who, at the _fall_ of a child, disguises his
compassionate face under a comic one.
On the 21st of October, Matthieu is set at large, and is at liberty to
go to Flamin,--he has begged the favor for himself--to announce to him
his freedom and promotion at once.... In a few days the incidents, and
my protocol of them, might run out of the hour-glass of one and the
same time, if the dog should come regularly; but he comes when he will.