Knef.--The Town of Hof.--Sorrel Horse.--Robbers.
--Sleep.--Oath.--Night Journey.--Bushes.--End.
I say only this much beforehand: in all the time that ink--like
currant-wine--has been drawn from quill-tubes,--in all the time that
quills have been cut to make instruments of peace, or carbonized to
make instruments of war (for the coal used in manufacturing gunpowder
is prepared from feathers[196]),--and still further back, in all that
time the singular occurrence has never till now happened which I am now
to report to the world. As I said, this is all I say beforehand; the
incident is a tolerable one.
Inasmuch as the Post-Dog has, since the forty-fourth chapter, withdrawn
his hand, or paw, from this learned work, my plan was to make it out
alone, and only append one more and last chapter,--but not this
one,--as capstone and swan-song, so that the _opus_ might be given at
once to the post, the press, and the world. Good reviewers (thought I)
I can let wrangle with the Post-Dog and biographical bell-wether as
long as they please over the want of a final cadence.... It was already
getting toward the end of October, and of my Robinsonade on the island
of St. John's, when the good old Friday of this Robinson, my Dr. Fenk,
returned from his long botanical Alpine tour home to Scheerau, but
immediately put out to sea again, and landed on my St. John's domain.
We sat down to two or three courses with minced-meat (or ragout) of
travelling-anecdotes. At last, I drew his attention--as all literati
do--to what I had written, to my latest _opusculum_, what stood before
us in a cursed pile as high as a conical orrery: "It has dropped from
me," said I, "in an entirely cursory manner, often in the night, just
as Voltaire or the pea-hens let fall their eggs on the straw in their
sleep. I have taken pleasure in endowing the world with this legacy of
four volumes; but the legacy still waits for its last chapter,--without
which the labor of the dog (in the noble sense) will be in the bad
sense a dog's-work." He read the whole bequest through before my
eyes,--which gives an author a foolish, oppressive sensation,--and
flung his two arms up and down often during the perusal, and would fain
make the author red with extravagant praise. But it did not take; for
an author has already bestowed every compliment upon himself beforehand
a thousand times, and is at the same time his own flesh-scales, his own
flesh-weight, and his own flesh, because, like a virtuous man, he is
satisfied with his own approbation.
"The hero of thy Post-Days," said he, "is modelled somewhat after
thyself."--"That," I replied, "is for the world and the hero to decide,
when they both become acquainted with me; but all authors do so,--their
personality is either pictured opposite the title-page, or farther on
in the midst of the work, as the painter Rubens and the designer
Ramberg in almost all their works bring on a dog."
But now let one imagine with what astonishment I clapped my hands when
the Doctor named to me the little country where the whole story
transpired: * * * is the little country's real name. "I had only to go
thither," he said, "and I could draw the forty-fifth (tail-) chapter
from the fountain-head. As he passed through Flachsenfingen, they had
only just got to the Fortieth Dog-Post-Day. If I would take my own
horses," ("That I will," said I, "I will buy me some this very day,")
"I might, perhaps, come up with a distinguished passenger, who, unless
all signs deceived him, was his Lordship incarnate." For the sake of a
few ounces of asafœtida which Fenk needed on the road, he had even
been with Zeusel in his apothecary's shop, upon whom, he said, the
number ninety-nine was as legibly imprinted as the number ninety-eight
was on the butterfly[197] (the Catalanta).
No one certainly can blame an author who was crabbing and fishing for
his forty-fifth, tail- or train-chapter, for running away as if
distracted,--packing up,--tackling up,--jumping in,--starting off, and
driving so furiously, as he shot by hotels, country-houses,
processions, stars, and nights, that not in * * days, but in * * * days
(many a one will actually think I am drawing a long bow[198]), I
sprang, bedusted but unpowdered, into the inn of the _Golden Lion_. The
said inn is situated in the town of Hof, which again on its part is
situated in something greater; namely, in Voigtland. I am careful not
to name either the days of my journey or the gate through which I shot
into Hof, in order that I may not reveal to curious knaves and
_mouchards_[199] by my route of march the real name of Flachsenfingen.
Hof I could name right out without harm, because from there--the moment
one is past the gates--one can travel to all points of the compass; and
so, too (which is a very good thing), one can arrive there from all
places,--from Mönchberg, Kotzan, Gattendorf, Sachsen, Bamberg, Böheim,
and from America, and from the Rascally Islands, and from any part of
Büsching and Fabri.[200]
Not far from the Golden Lion (properly in Oat Lane) stood a
distinguished Englishman, looking on while his four smoking horses took
a medicine of two thirds common saltpetre and one third horse-brimstone
against foundering. The stranger--who might have been about as many
years old as this book is days was dressed in black; tall, respectable,
rich (to judge by his equipage), and of a manly build. His bright and
fixed eye lay kindling like a focus on men,--his face was fine and
cold,--on his forehead stood the perpendicular secant as the time-_bar_
denoting business, as sign of exclamation at the toil and trouble of
life,--faint, horizontal lines were ruled across this time-bar like
staves; both sorts of lines were cut into the too high forehead, as if
for signs how high the tear-water of affliction had already risen on
this brow, on this soul. "I would," thought I, "have painted Lord
Horion differently, if this face had appeared to me sooner." Perhaps
the reader thinks this was his Lordship himself.
When the Englishman had seen my tiercet of sorrels, he came straight up
to me and introduced a project of exchange, and wanted to take my
sorrel for a black. He had the fancy of Russians in the higher ranks,
of travelling with a regular cento[201] of differently-colored
horses,--as he also had the finer custom of the Neapolitans, to let a
free, loose horse prance along beside the carriage. Accordingly, for
the sake of the equine quodlibet, he wanted to bid in my miserable
sorrel, who, to tell the truth, wore nowhere any hair of his own,
except behind on the bob. I told him frankly,--to leave him no
suspicion of selfishness or design,--"My three sorrels looked like the
three Furies, and represented tolerably well the three cavities of
anatomy; only the dark sorrel which he wanted was magnificently built,
particularly about the head, and I should be sorry to lose him now,
when the head was just going to be of use to me."--"So?" said the
Briton.--"Of course," said I; "for a horse's head is the best remedy
against bed-bugs, and this one must now very soon fall off from the
nag, like a ripe plum,--the head I can then put into my bed-straw." The
Englishman did not even smile; during the whole bargain he stirred not
a finger, not a feature, not a muscle. Not until I myself had said, "If
the three Fates only keep on their legs till I have fetched away the
forty-fifth chapter on wheels," did it strike me that he had been in a
distant manner studying and sounding me more than the sorrel,--and I
fell upon the hypothesis, whether he had not misused the whole
horse-exchange as a mere cloak and blinder of his suspicious, pumping
questions.
Let the reader only just read on--The Englishman started off with my
sorrel muscle-preparation; and I followed some time after with my
black, who was as strong, black, and glossy as the old Adam in man.
But I must first tell what I was going to do in Hof,--I was going to
dedicate. At first each of these volumes was to be inscribed to a
female friend; but I had reason to fear I should rue it, because my
wont is to quarrel with a different one--never with all at once--every
month. I should like to know in what parallel of latitude the man were
to be found who does not fall out with his lady friend a thousand times
oftener than with his male one. The biographer must, therefore, of
necessity, because he is too changeable, cross the street from the
Golden Lion with his four volumes, and enter the house of the only man
towards whom he never alters, and who never does himself either, and
say to him, "Here, my dear good Christian Otto, I dedicate something to
thee again,--four volumes at once.--It were handsome, if thou again
wouldst dedicate each to one of thy family,--three are just enough, and
thou hast thine own left for thee, too.--I am riding now after the
forty-fifth chapter, and thou--cut and clear away meanwhile at the
forty-four other beds as much as thou wilt."
And here, my faithful one, must thou absolutely have the last chapter
also; and I only add further, "This _Hesperus_, which stands as
_morning-star_ over my life's fresh morning, thou mayest still look
upon when my earthly day is over; then is it a quiet _evening-star_ for
quiet men, till it also sets behind its hill."
Inasmuch as all letters to me are notoriously delivered in the busy and
somewhat surly city of Hof, and as in fact many travellers pass this
way, one will readily indulge me with the small space for two
observations, which the town itself makes upon the town. The Hofites,
namely, all remark and complain that they cannot exactly become
accustomed to each other. "We ought all to be able," they say, "to bear
with each other very well, and, if only thereby, refute the observation
of the great Montesquieu, that trade knits together nations and sunders
individuals." Secondly, they all reproach each other, that from year to
year they barter for in quantity, and accumulate and store away in
green-houses, great cornucopias full of balsam, rose, clover, and
lily-seed, and tall boxes full of splendid apple-seeds (particularly of
princes' apples, violet apples, Adam's- and virgin-apples, and Dutch
ketterlings),----but that they sow or set out of this seed little or
nothing. "In old age," they say, "good fruits and flowers will come
apropos to us, if we save a good quantity of seed out of the present
ones, and then plant it."--A certain candidate (an academical chum of
mine) took occasion from these two observations to make two very good
points in an afternoon sermon. In the first part, he showed his Hofites
out of the Epistle that they should not torment, but heartily love,
each other in this fleeting vapor of life, without reference to the
numbers of their houses; and in the second _pars_, he made it plain
that they ought in this brief, waning light of life to make from time
to time one and another joke....
I had hardly travelled a few hours--days--weeks (for I do not state the
truth), and had gone to sleep towards midnight in my carriage as I
mounted a hill in a thick forest, when suddenly two hands, which had
worked their way in behind through the back window, jammed down a
bee-cap[202] over my head, fastened it hastily round my neck with a
padlock, covered and blinded my eyes, and ten or twelve other hands
seized, held, and bound my body. The worst thing in such a case is,
that one expects to be killed and robbed of his jewel-caskets; but
nothing can vex and annoy more an author who has not yet finished his
book than to take away his life. No man wishes to die in the midst of a
plan; and yet every one at every hour of the day bears about with him
at once budding, green, half-ripe, and wholly ripe plans. I sought,
therefore, to defend my life with such valor--since the forty-fifth
chapter and its critics weighed upon my mind--that I--although I say
it--could easily have mastered four or five prince-stealers, had
there not been half a dozen. I laid down my arms, but occupied the
battle-field (namely, the coach-cushion),--and observed, in fact, that
they did not want so much to kill the Mining-Superintendent as to blind
him. The adventure grew still more romantic,--my own fellow was not
tumbled from the throne of his box,--my carriage continued on the road
to Flachsenfingen,--two gentlemen seated themselves in beside me, who,
to judge by their feminine hands, were persons of rank,--and, strangest
of all, a dog began to bark, who, by his barking, must have labored as
mass-assistant and fellow-master on this learned work.
We supped and lunched in the open air. Here a surgical order-ribbon was
drawn around my naked body, because I had unfortunately, during
the quarter-wheelings and manual evolutions of my defence, run my
shoulder-blade upon the point of a sword. I could eat very well,
inasmuch as the tin canary-cage door of my bee-cap was turned wide
open. Good heavens! if the public had seen the author of the
Dog-Post-Days shove in his eatables through the open leaves of the
leaden gate, he would have died with shame!--During the meal, I called
the dog to me by the name, Hofmann! He actually came; I felt all over
him, if haply any forty-fifth chapter might be hanging on his neck,--it
was bare.
After a long alternation of journeying,--eating,--saying
nothing,--sleeping,--days,--nights,--I was at last set down in a sea,
and there carried about (or did it come from a narcotic?) till I slept
like a rat. What followed--strange as it is--I shall not make known
till I have first written out the observation, that, to be sure, great
_joy_ and great _sorrow_ enliven and gratify the nobler propensities
within us; but that _hope_, and far more _anxiety_, hatch the whole
worm's nest of miserable hankerings, the infusorial spawn of petty
ideas, and unravel them and set them to gnawing,--so that in this way
the _Devil_ and the _Angel_ within us contrive to maintain a worse
_parity_ of their two religions than holds even in Augsburg with two
others,[203] and that each of the two religious parties in man has in
pay its own night-watch, censor, innkeeper, gazetteer, just as much as
the aforesaid ones in Augsburg....
--I had my eyes still closed, when a whispering, swelled and multiplied
into a great murmur by a thousand tree-tops, floated round me; the
rushing aerial sea swept through narrow Æolian harps, and raised waves
thereon, and the waves rippled over me with melodies,--a high mountain
air, flung down from a cloud shooting by overhead, fell like a cooling
stream of water on my breast.--I opened my eyes, and thought I was
dreaming, because I was without the iron mask.--I was leaning against
the fifth column on the upper step of a Grecian temple, whose white
floor was encircled by the _summits_ of tossing poplars,--and the tops
of oaks and chestnuts ran waving only as fruit-hedges and espaliers
round the lofty temple, and reached only up to the heart of a man
standing within.
"I must surely be acquainted with this luxuriant harvest of tree-tops,"
said I.--"Lo, weeping birches hang their arms yonder,--out there stems
kneel before the thunder which blasted them,--do not nine crape veils
and sprayey fountains, in many-colored twigs, flutter through each
other?--and the tempests have planted here their conductors as five
iron sceptres in the earth.---This is most certainly a dream of the
_Island of Reunion_, which has hitherto so often darted rays across the
mist of sleep, and with heavenly and winning radiance beamed upon my
soul."----
But it was no dream. I rose from the step, and was about to enter the
illuminated Grecian temple, which consisted only of a Grecian roof, of
five columns, and the whole earth encamped around it, when eight arms
embraced me, and four voices accosted me: "Brother!--we are thy
brothers." Before looking upon them, before addressing them, I fell
gladly with outspread arms into the midst of three hearts which I knew
not, and shed tears upon a fourth, which I knew not, and at last lifted
my eyes, not inquiringly, but blissfully, from the unknown hearts to
their faces; and while I looked upon them, I heard behind me my beloved
Dr. Fenk say: "Thou art the brother of Flamin, and these three
Englishmen are thy incarnate brothers." ... Joy darted through me
convulsively like a pang.--I pressed my lips mutely to those of the
four embraced and embracing ones,--but I fell then upon my elder
friend, and stammered, "Dear, good Fenk! tell me all! I am distracted
and enchanted with things which I still do not comprehend."
Fenk went back with me smiling to the four brothers, and said to them:
"See, this is the _monsieur_, your fifth and lost brother of the seven
islands,-and your biographer into the bargain.--Now at last he has
caught his forty-fifth chapter."--Then turning to me: "Thou seest, of
course," said he, "that this is the Isle of Union,--that the three
twins here are the sons of the Prince, whom our Lord wanted to bring
back.--For thy sake, because thou hast this long time been absent from
the seven islands, he has travelled through all market towns, and
around all islands of Europe. At last I wrote to him." ...
"Thou hast certainly, also," I interrupted him, "been my correspondent
through the dog."--
"Just go on," said he.
"And _Knef_ is _Fenk_ spelt backward,--and thou gavest thyself out with
Victor for an Italian, who could speak no German,--copiedst off all day
his own list of rules for deportment, for his Lordship, and for me too,
in fact, in order to be his and my spy."--
"It is so,--and therefore I also wrote to his Lordship," said he, "that
thy French name, _Jean Paul_, brought thee under suspicion; and as
thou, besides, didst not thyself know thy origin, and, in addition to
that, thy foolish bit of life-road, which, as in an English garden,
would not reach a mile in a straight direction"----
"The biographer," said I, "should, in fact, be his own."[204]--
"It is incomprehensible to me now how it was that I did not happen upon
this in the first instance; for thy resemblance to Sebastian, which the
fifth son of the Prince should also have, thou hast thyself long since
remarked,--and thy Stettin box-picture on the shoulder-blade, which
these gentlemen here all have about them, and which his Lordship
himself beheld day before yesterday, during the bandaging."
"So! so!" said I, "it was for this, then, that your biographer got the
falcon's hood, the wound in the back, the fine black steed, and the
stranger in Hof was his Lordship?"--
In short, by all this his Lordship had fully convinced himself that I
was the one whom he had so long sought; for he had previously long
since received Fenk's communication through fifteen hands, inasmuch as
it travelled from Hamburg, or rather from the land of the Hadeln, to
Ziegenhain in Lower Hesse, then into the Principality of Schwabeck,
then into the Duchy of Holzapfel, to Schweinfurt, to Scheer-Scheer, and
still back again to * * and to * * *, and finally to Flachsenfingen,
where he at last received it; there, in the Isle of Union, he had been
concealed a long time, until the communication, the ending of October,
which as it were underscored the maternal marls with red ink, and, most
of all, the banishing from St. Luna of the three brothers who landed
on the island, constrained him to travel off to Scheerau, or rather to
Hof in Voigtland. Here, naturally, I was obliged to meet him, according
to a concert with the Italian servant (i. e. with Dr. Fenk), on account
of which he sent me from my island after the forty-fifth chapter, and
whose repetition came to hand in the billet intercepted by the blind
one, and now deciphered; and my old face, which he forthwith compared
with a younger engraving of the fifth princely son, threw at once in
the "Oat-lane" the most ample light upon everything.
So soon as he knew this, he left me to travel on alone, under my tin
bee-cap and Moses's veil, and hurried forward to the Prince just one
minute before it was too late. For Matthieu had betrayed all; and they
were just on the point of sending to arrest the three twins, on the
island where they had taken refuge, and our Victor at his mother's
house, wherein he had already forgotten court and nobility for patients
and sciences and bride, when his Lordship sent in his name to the
Prince. The Prince was afraid of being persuaded by him, as Cæsar was
of Cicero. His Lordship--whose soul, indeed, was a _petrographic_[205]
chart of sublime ideas--confounded the measures of the Prince by a more
daring and defiant boldness than these measures had reckoned on. He
began with the intelligence, that he brought not merely _one_ son to
the Prince, but all; which last thing he had not promised, for the
reason that he could not know how far fate would perhaps leave or lead
him.--He forced the Prince to listen to a long and cold discourse,
wherein he laid before him the plan of study for the five sons, and
their development, history, and destiny; while he seemed to presuppose
the proofs of their extraction, he however wove them elaborately into
the inferences he drew from it. Thus, e. g., he said, no one had known
about the important secret but her Ladyship and Clotilda and Emanuel,
whose sacred documents, sealing all with death, he here presented him,
together with others for the children; only a certain court-page had,
during his blindness, stolen and abused one of five secrets. His
Lordship did not pluck to pieces this snare of a soul, because, as he
said, it was too insignificant for satisfaction, too black-dyed for
punishment, and because he himself besides would soon depart out of
these regions forever. In short, with his omnipotence he took such a
hold of the Prince, and drew all veils so clean off from the past, that
he almost compelled him, instead of condemning or acquitting, merely to
deprecate and to exchange accusation and mistrust for gratitude. The
single good thing, Lord Horion said in conclusion, which the Page had
done, was, that, by his weed-sowing-machines, he had ripened and
expedited the great and fair recognition precisely for a monthly
period, when the festoon of the five shoulders (the maternal moles)
were in full bloom. The Prince, in spite of the other party's iciness,
was melted, for his paternal love was enriched with new treasures.
Nevertheless, he mixed in with his thanks this delicate reproach
against Victor's pretended nobility: "I am full of gratitude for you,
although you deprive me too soon of the opportunity of showing it.
Hitherto I have rejoiced that I could at least prove to the son how
very much indebted, if not grateful, I was to the father. But you know
my error." His Lordship--now made more pliant by victory--replied: "I
know not whether good intentions and bad circumstances excuse me; but I
could regard him only as worthy to be your body physician, whom I--
acknowledged worthy to be my son."--The Prince embraced him cordially;
his Lordship reciprocated it quite as warmly, and said: "On the 31st of
October," (that is to-day, and he said it yesterday,) "he would seal
his honest sentiments toward the Prince in a manner more decisive than
words."----
Noble man! Thou consumest nothing on the earth beyond thyself, and art
a storm-bird, through whose fat a wick of the lamp is threaded, and
which is now burned out and carbonized by its own light,--I have a
presentiment, as if thy fair soul would soon be on another, _higher
Isle of Reunion_ than this earthly one!
I write this on the' forenoon of the 31st of October, at ten o'clock,
on the island.
* * * * *