barstart
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.
rivetstart
Eye-Bandaging.—Picture behind the Bed-curtain.—Two Virtues in Danger.
In Passion-week Clotilda, released by the Princess amidst caresses, went to St. Luna. In Easter-week she is to carry her heart, full of concealed cares, to Maienthal, to more congenial souls, when she has first passed through a purgatory, namely, through a brilliant ball which the Prince gives her—or, to speak more politely, to the Princess—on the third Easter-holiday.... If this flower shall be dug out and transplanted by the melon-lever of death from my biographical beds,—I throw away my pen and cudgel back Spitz,—I have come to be as much accustomed to her as to a betrothed,—where shall I again discover at court a female character which, like hers, unites holy and fine manners, Heaven and this world, virtue and ton,—a heart which (if it is allowable to compare it with anything small) resembles the heart-shaped montre à régulateur so tormenting to our hero, that with the index-hand of the court hours combines an index-hand of the sun's hours and the magnet of love?
Now, we are still together through all the Easter-holidays; for Sebastian must go to Pastor Eymann's, to see him and the three British twins, and his dear Chaplainess, and so much else that was dear. He would gladly have followed the Regency-Councillor thither on holy Easter-eve, (and it would have been as delightful to the biographer as an Easter-pancake, for he is more than sated with cities and courts on paper,) but the genius of the tenderest friendship beckoned to him for the sake of Flamin and Clotilda, who had both so long wanted and so longingly wished each other, and were now reciprocally bringing with them to the meeting new wounds, to stay behind at least only till the first Easter-day, as if he would ask, "Surely, the first glad looks of brother and sister so long held asunder, my unhappy Sebastian will not wish to disturb?"—"No, surely!" answered his tear.
The city was now emptied of his loved ones.—Passion-week was truly one to him, not even the Princess, as it were the electrophorus of his love-flame blown back upon his own heart, had for a long time been visible to him,—for in this mood he could not go to Joachime's—when the father-confessor of the Princess, who to-day had confessed to him (on holy Easter-eve), called upon him and unfolded before him a medical bulletin of the state of her eyes, and scolded at him in a friendly manner, that the Court-Confessor, instead of bringing remission of sins to the Court-Physician, had to bring the sins themselves before his conscience. "I was on the point of making a journey to-morrow," said Victor.—"Very well!" said the Pater, "the Princess desires your help this very day."
On the way he said to himself: "Has, then, Tostato forsworn his Easter confession, that now at evening he still has not arrived? and where the devil will he be to-morrow?"—Here! answered—Tostato behind him.—Such a jolly penitent no sacristy had ever yet seen. The child of fun and deviltry and penance told the reason of his wild delight: "The Princess had to-day, as his countrywoman, bought out half his shop." Before Victor had arrayed on his face in rank and file those serious looks, with which he was going to entreat of him silence on the subject of his mercantile vicariate,—I mean, his shop-keeping,—the skipping penitent gladdened him with the news, that the Princess had inquired after his and her countrymen, his associés, and that he had not at all concealed from her, that somebody had once been of the latter without being of the former, namely, her Court-Physician himself.—"Thunder!" said the ...
The poor fool of a merchant meant it well, and there was nothing further to be done about it than to investigate, whether Agnola's questioning had not been mere accident; whether she still had the watch, or had ever opened it; whether no wind had blown away the declaration of love as a sister-wind!
After all it was a matter of grave consideration that the Pater and the Merchant, the evil eyes and the good news, should fall upon precisely the same time: this 30th of March, Easter-eve. As this visit is a very memorable one for my hero, I beg every one to settle himself down very comfortably, and split open beforehand the leaves of this narrative, stuck together with bookbinder's gilding, and to listen like a spy.
When Victor reached the palace, the Pater encountered him, who said he would go in too. It was fortunate; for without this guide he would hardly have found his path through a labyrinth of apartments into the altered cabinet of the patient. And with him went as a pewit through all the rooms the apprehension of seeing on the face of the Princess an indictment against the encased Billet-doux; but not so much as an initial letter or the rubrum of a sentence was seen upon her face, as he came before her, and his thunder-cloud had passed aside. At least his was repelled by one which hung over the Princess herself; that is to say, she was ill, but not merely in the eyes; and a second message which was sent to fetch him had just missed him. She received him in bed,—not on account of her sickness, but of her station; for with ladies of some rank the bed is the residence,—the moss-bank,—the high-altar,—the royal palace,—in short, the princely chair and seat. Like the philosopher Descartes, the Abbot Galiani, and old Shandy, they can think and work best in this hothouse. Although she lay in bed, nevertheless she was, as we said, not well, but was attacked with pain in head and eyes. She had therefore to-day sent away all her domestics, except a chambermaid who loved her very much, and the fly on the wall who plagued her, and our Doctor who omitted one of the two things. I should have been glad to reckon in a sedentary court-dame in a picture-cabinet that stood open; but she sat so dumb and motionless, that Victor swore she was either a knee-piece, or—a German lady,—or both. It spared the scalded eyes of the Princess quite as much pain as it gave well eyes pleasure, that the green light-screen, and the green satin tapestry, and the green satin curtains in the sick-cabinet conspired to shed an undulating blue clare-obscure. A single wax taper stood on a candlestick, which was enchased by all the seasons, that is, in sculpture,—upon which custom of the great not to enjoy nature except in counters, in effigie and copy-paper, never in naturâ itself, I can here state neither my opinion nor its reasons, because it would require a whole
in order, among so many possible reasons why they everywhere—on tapestry, on the dessus des portes, des trumeaux,[26] des cheminées, on vases, on candle-sticks, on plats de menage,[27] on snuffer-stands, in their gardens, on every trifle—love to see a landscape which they never tread, a Salvator-Rosa rock which they never climb ... I say, because among so many reasons why they do this and concede to old Nature this jus imaginum, the true one could be picked out only by an Extra-Leaf, as only such could fully decide whether it arose from the fact that Nature, at the eternal parting had given them her picture, as a mistress does to her lover,—or from the fact that the artists love best to offer them, as to the old gods, precisely what they hate,—or that they resemble the Emperor Constantine, who at the selfsame time abolished the true cross, and multiplied and consecrated images of the same,—or that from a finer feeling they fancy less the enduring but mosaic pictures of Nature, in which whole mountain ridges are the mosaic-pebbles, than the more delicate, but smaller puzzle-pictures of the artists,—or that they would resemble people (if there were such) who should cause to be painted on the theatre curtain the whole opera with all the decorations, in order to spare themselves the raising of the curtain and the seeing of the acts—and yet, if the Extra-Leaf were in the very midst of deciding, every one would, from canine hunger after mere incidents, take French leave and run out after nothing but the confirmation of the incidents, and the
End of the Extra-Leaf.
The Princess had two coverings, of which he loved the one and hated the other very much. The beloved one was a veil, which was a healing-bandage to her inflamed eyes; but such a thing was to him the foil and setting of the female face, and he pledged himself to defend, as Respondent and Præses at once, the proposition, that virtue was never better rewarded with beauty than in St. Ferieux[28] at Besançon; for at the feast of morals there the best maiden gets a veil worth six livres.—The hated covering was the gloves, against which he universally threw down his glove of defiance. "Let a lady," he said in Hanover, "once dare to draw against me, that is her hand, and fight with that without the help of the Esau's hands against the Esau's hands, and say, one must not take them off except in bed.—There, at most, must she put them on, I might reply; but I will ask: Of what use then; finally, are the loveliest hands which I see, if they always lie under their wing-sheaths, as if we men were Persian kings? And is it then too severe, if one tells those persons to their faces, who wear such imitation-hands of silk or leather, that they resemble the Venus de' Medici, even to the very hands?[29] I pause for a reply!"
In fact, in this dark green cabinet, almost everything—except Agnola's beautiful Roman shoulders—is covered up; even two images of saints were so. For a painted image of Mary with a real metallic crown—it was not meant for an emblem of princes with mock-heads under genuine crowns—was hidden by the cedars of the bed-plumes, and over a very fine St. Sebastian by Titian—copied from the Barbarigo palace in Venice—(the man looked, with his arrows, like a hedgehog, and yet hung close by her pillow)—she had drawn the bed-curtain, when his namesake without the arrows arrived, who rather adored than was adored. Many have assured me since, that it was a Sebastian of Vandyk's, from the Düsseldorf gallery; but farther on I shall show why not.
Except a female eye reposing behind a veil, no finer specimen of nature's loveliness visits, methinks, us mortals (the Devil has got in here six final S's in succession) than one which is just in the act of laying it aside. The poor Doctor had to meet the out-flashing of such a lovely glow—when he was about to proceed as oculist—that he at once proceeded as Protomedicus[30] of her head, in order to take her hand and thereby save himself. For while she stripped off from her hand the glove-callus—they were, however, only half-gloves with bare fingers, or semi-wing-sheaths, i. e. hemiptera,—then was the Doctor, because she had to look down at what she was doing, in the greatest possible security, and the Greek fire shot quite by him. Hence has there been inserted with just forethought in the fire-regulations of morality a whole, almost too long article, which forbids young girls to go about with their eyes exposed, as if with an uncovered light, in a parlor of company, because there is so much inflammable stuff lodged there,—all of us in a body,—but they must bury them in a stocking, which they are knitting, or an embroidery frame, or a thick book—e. g. the Dog-Post-Days—as in a lantern.
—It is really a pity: since the public and I have been in the princely chamber, one tail—I mean one digression à la Sterne—has followed another.—
The princely pulse went at a somewhat more feverish rate than even his who here describes it. Shortly before he came, she had taken off from her eyes a warm bandage of roast apples. She desired a temporary bandage, while they should be preparing that which the doctor prescribed. But now in the darkness, in this confusion of the twilight, he could not, in all the four corners of his brain, or the eight lesser brains of the fourth central chamber, muster up a single oculist except Dr. von Rosenstein, who started up within there and advised him to advise the spreading of powdered saffron, one fifth camphor, and melted winter-apples on lint of fine linen. The chambermaid was sent to oversee or order the preparation of the recipe, after she had first bound a black taffeta ribbon with the apple poultice before two of the most beautiful eyes, which deserved a more agreeable bandage and blindness. I am lively, when I write, that the poultice seemed to be made of the apple of beauty—and the black ribbon of beauty-patches pounded apart. The Pater also went away, so soon as he got from the doctor the hope of a speedy recovery. But for the Medicus it was verily now no child's play to sit opposite an Italian rose-cheek and Madonna-face,—and that, too, so near that he could hear the breath whisper, after having been able previously to see it grow,—to keep himself opposite to a face (methinks, was no sport) on which roses are engrafted upon lilies, like sunsets upon light lunar clouds, and which a picturesque shadow, namely a black order ribbon, a priestly fillet, a true postillon d'amour, so beautifully divides and sets off,—a bandaged face which he can contemplate in one steady gaze, and which supports itself (in a picturesque half-front) turned towards him, on the pillow and on the hand....
I ought to have attempted a climax, have begun with Sebastian's soul, which to-day out of its own melancholy, out of its sorrows, out of its love for Agnola magnified by Zeusel's calumny, made nothing but lines of beauty and flowing tints in order to paint into his own face as beautiful a new one as ever a fair soul created on canvas, or on its own head or on another's.
Agnola may well have had this perception sooner than I.
It furnished, of course, to the couple slender assistance that they were (not under four eyes—for Agnola's were darkened—but) under only two eyes; for the two other eyes, of the Court-dame in the cabinet, about which Victor could not be sure, till now when the princely ones were shut, and he could without questions investigate by glances and smiles the stiff thing on the chair in there in the cabinet, were really painted, and so was the body which bore them.
It struck him as singular now, that, against all Court-order, he was suffered to be alone with the Princess; but, he said to himself, she is an Italian,—a patient,—a lovely little child of fancy—(this last was perceptible even in the unusual winter negligé and Sicilian fire). He could not possibly, therefore, (even to-day before the bandaging of the eyes,) hit the right tone with her; for as she was too fine for a German,—not tender enough for an Englishwoman,—too lively for a Spaniard, he would certainly have written on her p. p. p. (passé par Paris, which is inscribed on letters that come via Paris), he would have done it, I say, had she not again been too impassioned for a Parisienne. There was the rub.—But as two persons converse more courageously and freely when one or both sit in the dark—and that was Agnola's case:—Victor was, after all, to-day not absolutely as simple as a sheep. Add to this that he took heart from the jewel-cupboard, in which to his joy—she could not see him look round so impolitely—he discovered among twenty watches no montre à régulateur. She asked him whether she should be so far restored by the third holiday, that she might contribute something to the Prince's pleasure at the ball. He answered affirmatively, though he knew that she would contribute still more to it by staying away, and although she knew it, too. Here he began to pity her, and he would fain make a clean heart. He would not exactly say plumply: "In Gross-Kussewitz I let the Devil so abuse my good nature as to prevail on me to smuggle into your Highness's watch a declaration of love"; but he would, in the finest outpouring of soul, fall down with his beating bosom and say: "Not from fear of punishment, but from fear lest the confession of my fault may contract some similarity to a repetition of the offence, I have hitherto concealed the fact that I once expressed, not so much too strongly as too boldly, a profoundness of esteem in which I am permitted to imitate only your Court, and not its sovereign; but the strength of feelings is easily confounded with their lawfulness."
He still delayed this falling down, because he perceived behind the curtain a gold strip which seemed to be the beginning of a picture-frame. This border-work must surely run round something,—round a picture, I fancy: and this was what he would like to know.
The cursed Court-Apothecary with his calumny had it to answer for, that he had this wish; not as if he supposed that Mat's face hung in a gilded frame behind the bed, but because to-day all sorts of things had startled him. He could do it very easily, as the arras-door and nunnery-grating of her eye was hung with black; he needed only to support his left hand softly on the edge of the bed, and thus, bending forward and hovering over her with suspended breath, reach across with his right over the bed (it was narrow, and he tall) and pull the curtain a little,—and then he would know what hung behind there. I repeat, but for the Apothecary it would never have entered his head. A slanderer causes one to demand of every action at least its passport,—one does it merely to effect a most patent refutation of the slanderer,—and as, often, the most innocent act has no certificate of health, one shakes one's head and says, It is a real calumny, but then I will still be on the watch.
He had made several attempts to reach over, but as she always had something to say and he to answer, it would not do, unless he chose to betray his nearness to her ears. The conversation related to the ball,—the presence and illness of her maid of honor, Clotilda,—the substitute of the latter, Joachime, upon whose appointment Victor expressed himself with decided coldness; he could never, with Agnola, get beyond court-news; all that was abstract and metaphysical she seemed to hate or to ignore; and as to talking of emotions with her,—which he generally loved best to do with women, and for which the husband's would have given him ample occasion and material,—that seemed to him not much better than actually to have them.
When he had given his cold answer about the promotion of Joachime,—a coldness which formed a flattering contrast to his present enthusiastic warmth and fulness of feeling for the Princess,—he would fain insert in the half-bar-rest which followed, and which Agnola filled out with thinking, the raising of the curtain. He rested on his hand, held his breath, drew the curtain,—but the St. Sebastian was behind it, which I have already mentioned above, and which was most certainly by Titian, and not by Vandyk, because he looked so like our Victor,[31] that it was credible to him that the Pater had copied it from his wax-statue at St. Luna. The Saint appeared to him still worse than the Evangelist,—not because he thought the portrait was his namesake, but because it occurred to him why the women in Italy sometimes veil the pictures of saints. Tho reason can, notoriously, form the subject of a wood-cut for the ten commandments—(Göschen and Unger ought to edit the catechism with more tasteful cuts to the prohibitions than the old ones are). Even the Mary over the bed was veiled with plumes and everything.... Zeusel! Zeusel! hadst thou not calumniated, this whole biography (so far as I can foresee) might well have had a different course!
He supported himself by resting his right hand against the wall, in a hovering posture above the blind fair one, because a little world-globe attracted his centripetal force and drew him out of his returning orbit.—For as the patient rested on her right side, one cloud after another of dishevelled hair had flowed down over the heart and over the lily hill which is lifted by sighs, and the locks falling towards the other hill had not been able there to cover up so much as they had here disclosed. The lace-veil sank slowly after the tresses, and the heart-leaves and the ripe blossoms fell away from the protruding apple-fruit.... Dear æsthetic hero of these Post-days, wilt thou remain a moral one, hanging, as thou art, unseen over this veritable Belidor's globe de compression,[32]—over this waxing moon-globe, whereof one never sees the other half,—near this commanding eminence, which, like other eminences, one should not suffer round a fortification,—and that too at a court where generally the dress-regulations suppress everything elevated?
When he is once away from the bed and the Paullinum, I will have a good quarrel with the reader about the whole occurrence,—but now it must first be related continuously and with a good deal of fire.
He was, as it were, fastened in the air. But at last it was time to withdraw from a position which was the torrid zone of all the feelings. Besides, a new circumstance enhanced at once the danger and the charm. A long sigh seemed to surcharge and heave her whole bosom, and to undulate like a zephyr through a bed of lilies, and the superincumbent snow-hill seemed to tremble with the swelling heart that glowed beneath it, and with the swelling sigh. The hand of the veiled goddess moved mechanically toward the imprisoned eye, as if it would press away a tear behind the bandage. Victor, in his fear that she would push aside the bandage, withdraws his right hand from the wall, and the left from the bed, in order, on tiptoe, to bend back, without grazing anything, out of this enchanted heaven.
Too late!—The ribbon is down from her eyes,—perhaps his sigh had been too near, or his silence too long.
And the unveiled eyes find above them an inspired youth, dissolved into love, hovering in the beginning of an embrace.... Stiff as a statue he hung in the petrified posture,—her eyes, inflamed with pain, suddenly overflowed with the milder light of love,—ardently and softly she said, Comment? And too lame for apology, trembling, sinking, glowing, dying, he falls upon the hot lips and the beating bosom. He closed his eyes for rapture and confusion, and blind and love-intoxicated, bold and fearful, he grew to her lips with his thirsty ones ... when suddenly his ear, on the stretch for every approaching sound, heard the night-watchman calling the hour of twelve, and Agnola, as with a strange, intruding hand repelled him from her, to throw aside a bloody chemise-pin.
Like a doomsday in the night-clouds the watchman's homely admonition to think of death and of the twelfth spirit-hour of this midnight of life, pealed into his ears, before which the blood-streams of the heart rushed by. The call in the street seemed to come from Emanuel, and to say: "Horion! Stain not thy soul, and fall not away from thy Emanuel and from thyself! Look at the linen over her diseased eye, as if death veiled it, and sink not!"
"I sink not!" said his whole heart; he unwound himself with respectful forbearance out of the throbbing arms, and stiffening at the possibility of an imitation of the wretched Matthieu, whom he had so despised, he sank down outside of the bed on her hand, which he had drawn out with him, and said with streaming tears: "Forgive a youth,—forgive his overmastered heart,—his dazzled eyes,—I deserve all punishments, any one would be to me a pardon,—but I have forgotten no one except myself."—"Mais c'est moi, que j'oublie en vous pardonnant,"[33] said she with an ambiguous look, and he rose, and as her answer gave him the choice between the most agreeable and the most humbling interpretation, he gladly punished himself with the latter. Agnola's eye flashed with love,—then with anger,—then with love,—then it closed;—he stepped back to the most respectful distance,—she opened it again and turned her face coldly to the wall; and by a secret pressure against the wall which, I suppose, commanded a private bell in the apartment of the Chambermaid, gave the latter the order to make haste,—and in a few minutes she came in with the eye-band. Naturally (as in human life) they played out the fifth act, just as if there had been no third and fourth.—Then he politely withdrew.
There!—Now the reader and I begin to quarrel about the matter, and Victor to think about it. His embrace was not right,—nor were his voyage of discovery to the wall and his picture-exhibition,—but it was discreet; for he could not, of course, really throw a backward somerset, and say, "I thought Mat was hanging behind the bed."—To this, to be sure, people of experience reply, "We do not quarrel with him here for preferring discretion to virtue, but rather for this, that he did not do so again after the kiss. That kiss is too small a fault for Agnola to be able to forgive." I observe, these people of experience are adherents of the sect who, in my book, reckon the Princess, on account of so many half-proofs, among those women who, too proud and hard for the love of the heart, only let the love of the senses alternate flyingly with the love of domination, and who do it only for the sake of making out of Cupid's bandage a rein, and out of his arrows spurs and stirrups. I am very well acquainted, too, with the half-proofs with which this sect backs itself,—the bigotry of the Princess,—her confession-eve,—her previous attentions to my hero,—the covering of the painted Mary, and the exposure of the more living one,—and all the circumstances of my narration. But I cannot possibly believe such a thing of a friend of Clotilda (unless the latter, for this very reason, had taken leave of her, or from goodness of soul had not at all comprehended those couriers of the temperament more common with the male sex), until in the sequel manifest traces of a more exasperated than afflicted woman compel me to it.
I am getting quite away from my promise, to present some considerations, which would certainly, with impartial persons, if not justify, yet excuse my hero, for becoming, after the kiss, virtuous again, so to speak, and not full of the live Devil. I boldly set down among the grounds of mitigation his want of acquaintance with those women who, like the Spartans, bravely ask not about the number of the foes of their virtue, but about their position; he was often with them, indeed, and in their camp, but his virtue hindered them from showing him theirs. He is less excused by the influence of the night-watchman, and the remembrance of death; for this needs itself to be excused;—but then, on the other hand, it is only too certain, that certain men of a philosophical or even a poetic organization, precisely then, and in fact always, regard, instead of their own position, general ideas, when others can understand nothing at all, and be nothing at all but self: namely, in the greatest dangers, in the greatest sufferings, in the greatest joys.
A fair man will throw all upon the Apothecary, who was Victor's moral and mechanical bed-cord, or helper out-of-bed; for as he had prefigured to him the noble Mat in a similar situation (but without the bed-cord), of course the abhorrence which Victor, some days before, had felt of the Evangelist's conduct, became in him a laming incapacity of copying it in the least a few days after.—O if we could only, a couple of days beforehand, see every sin, to which we are tempted by ourselves or others, actually committed by a true scamp, whom we spit upon! Could we then eagerly imitate the scamp?
Finally, one needs only to cast a glance at Victor in his balcony, where he now sits in a singular barometrical condition, if one would pass judgment on his previous state. His present state, namely, is a mixture of emptiness, discontent (with himself and everybody), of increased love for Agnola, justification of this Agnola, and yet the impossibility of imagining her a near friend, of Clotilda's.
For myself, I shall never repent the little which I have hastily brought together, if I have shown up therein by a few happy hints how well my hero, in regard to his conduct after the kiss, which must strike strict people of the world as singular, can plead a disagreeable combination of constraining circumstances, and if I shall, therefore, have succeeded in restoring to him, at the end of the twenty-seventh chapter, the respect which he had forfeited, by not wrapping round the princely ring; too large for his finger, the long silken threads of love, so as to make it fit....