barstart
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.
shieldstart
Brotherly Love.—Friendly Love.—Maternal Love.—Love.
The Dog is here, but not his Lordship,—the noise is small, but not the joy,—all is prepared for, and yet unexpected,—vice maintains the battle-field, but virtue the Elysian fields.—In short, it is very foolish, but very fine.
I think this is the last chapter of the book. I look upon the Post-Dog—my Pomeranian messenger,[190] whose tail is his official pike—with real emotion, and it vexes me to think that he, too, has fallen in Adam, and has eaten a bone under the forbidden tree; for in Paradise the first canine parents shone like diamonds, and one could see through them, as Böhme asserts.—For this very reason, as the Mining Superintendent will soon have written himself out, let it be forgiven him that, in this chapter of love, he is more ardent and agreeable than ever, and in fact writes now as if he were possessed.
In the beginning, the heavenly chariot is still drawn by mourning steeds.... It was very early, on the 21st of October, 1793, when the court-page ran into Flamin's block-house out of his own, and announced to that brother, doing penance there, the whole budget,—his release,—his relation to Clotilda as brother and sister,—his affiliation into the princely house,—his ascending career, and at the same time the amnesty of the murderer and messenger, namely, his own. O how did joy kindle his stagnant veins at Matthieu's acquittal and intercession, and at his elevation of rank! For Flamin mounted the higher station as an eminence whence he might send out farther his benefits and plans; Victor, on the contrary, had rejoiced at his bankruptcy of rank, because he craved stillness, as Flamin did tumult. The former was more desirous to amend himself; the latter, to improve others. Flamin thrust the live crew overboard, and nailed the Bucentaur of state full of galley-slaves, in order to propel it more swiftly against the winds. But Victor allowed himself to make only one corpse by way of lightening the privateer,—namely, his own. He said to himself, "If I can only always sacredly maintain the courage to sacrifice myself, then I need no greater; for a greater sacrifices after all stolen goods.—Fate can sacrifice centuries and islands to benefit millennia and continents;[191] but man, nothing but himself."
Exultingly Flamin hastened with his savior to St. Luna, to embrace gratefully and apologetically the true sister in the untrue mistress.—Ah! as the high observatory rose upon his sight, with pain and bleeding did the covering fall from them like scales, which had hitherto obscured the innocence of his best friend, Victor! "Ah, how will he hate me! O that I had trusted him more!" he sighed, and nothing any longer gladdened him; for the grief of a good man who has been unjust, even under the notion of the fullest justice, nothing can console, nothing but many, many sacrifices. He stole, sighing, not to his new mother, but sank softly on the unoffended heart of the three true twins. The honest souls all welcomed the Evangelist as a friend in need; and this gayly-colored spider crawled round with his unclean spider-warts over all these noble growths of an open love. The spider heard everything, even the agreement that the Englishmen should take the injunction to go off to their island literally, and seclude themselves in the English island of his Lordship, until such time as Flamin and her Ladyship were ready to embark with them all for their greater island,—the workshop of freedom, the classic soil of erect men.
The same morning the Chaplain betook himself to his quarry, and lay at anchor there, because he knew as yet nothing of the latest news. There in the open air, all day long, he sat away his agony, and at night he came home again. He conversed there with no one but his own body,—as many commune with their souls, so do others with their bodies,—and looked from time to time, not at Nature, but at his water, in order—as its want of color, according to physiology, betokens sorrow—to ascertain from it whether he was pining away very much or not with grief; although his protomedicus will answer for him, that he shall not have mistaken urinam chyli or sanguinis for urinam potûs. As the physicians assert that sighs are beneficial, to quicken the pulse and lighten the lungs,—accordingly a prince can benefit whole countries at once, by compelling them to sigh,—Eymann, therefore, prescribed to himself a definite number of sighs, which he had daily to draw for the benefit of his lungs.
The same morning went my Lady to the wife of the Parson to tell her that Flamin was an innocent man, but not her son; and Clotilda went with her to take the hands of the two daughters and say to them, "You have another brother"; for Victor had still concealed his extraction. "O God!" said the Parson's wife, now becoming impoverished, and clasped Flamin's mother and sister to her pining maternal bosom, which, with hot sighs, yearned for a son,—"where, then, is my child?—Bring me my true son!—Ah, I had a presentiment that the duel would certainly cost me a child! He regains all, but I lose all.—O you are a mother, and I am a mother, help me!" Clotilda looked upon her, weeping with a desire to give consolation; but the Lady said, "Your son lives, and is happy too; but more I cannot say!"
And the same morning, this son, our Victor, was not happy. It seemed to him, at the report of Flamin's discharge and of Matthieu's officiousness, as if he heard the hissing and the bullet-like whistle of the swooping hawk, that hitherto in motionless poise, as if with nailed pinion, had hung high in the blue above his prey.—Think not too hardly of the Doctor, that he mourned the lost opportunity of freeing his friend out of the narrow prison, and himself out of the wide one of life. For he has lost too much and is too lonely; men appear to him as people in the Polish rock-salt mines, who grope round with a light bound to their heads, which they call "I," encircled with the unenjoyable glitter of the salt, clad in white and with red fillets,[192] as if they were bandages.—The speech of his acquaintances, like that of the Chinese, is monosyllabic.—He must live to see the mortifying day when January and the city will set down against him the lowliness of his rank as a fraud.—Before every eye he stands in a different light, or shade rather. Matthieu regards him as coarse; January, as intriguing; the women, as trifling,—just as Emanuel regarded him as pious, and Clotilda as too ardent; for every one hears in a full-toned, harmonious man only his own echo. What heart could henceforth induce him—his own could not—to hold an oar any longer in the slave-ship of life? O, one could do it, a warm and mighty one,—his mother's! "Only once plunge out of this world," said his conscience, "then will thy mother, in the fulness of love, die after thee, and appear before thee in the next world with so many tears, with all her hot wounds, and say, 'Son, this sorrow is thy work!'"—He obeyed, and perceived that, if it is noble to die for a mistress, it is still nobler to live for a mother.
He therefore determined this very evening—in the evening, so that night might place its screen before certain weather-wasting ruins of better times, before certain gliding night-corpses of memory—to go to St. Luna, to call to his mother, and to refresh her sick and weary heart with at least one flower of joy, and say to her,—as no oath any longer bound him,—"Now for the second time thou givest me life!" How sweet was the thought to him!—A single good purpose makes up and airs the sharp sick-bed of a shattered life.
But at evening, you good, oppressed souls, in the evening—not of life, but—of the 21st of October, all will be lighter and fresher to you, and the ball of your fortune will revolve from the stormy to the sunny side.
At evening, Victor arrived at St. Luna, and ensconced himself in the arbor of the parsonage garden, where he had given Clotilda the first tears of love.—The parsonage, the hall, the observatory, the two gardens, lay around him like dilapidated knightly castles, from which all joys and inmates have long since departed!—All so autumnally still, so stationary around him,—the bees sat mute on the sill of the hive beside the executed drones,—even the moon and a little cloud stood fast beside each other,—the wax mummy stood with rigid face turned round toward the still chamber!—At last the Parson's wife came through the garden, on her way to the hall. He knew how exceedingly she must needs love him again, now that his fidelity to the jealous Flamin had come to light. O, she looked so weary and sickly, so red with weeping, and exhausted with bleeding, and prematurely old! It grieved him, that he must say first an indifferent word, in order to call her into the arbor. When she entered, he raised himself up, and bowed low, and laid himself, as if he would expire, on the dear bosom, within which was a world full of sighs and a heart full of love, and said: "O mother, I am thy son!—accept me; thy son has nothing, loves nothing more on the whole wide earth, nothing more but thee.—O dear mother, I have lost much before finding thee.—Why dost thou look on me thus?—If thou despisest me, then give me thy blessing, and let me flee.... Oh! and besides it was only for thy sake that I chose to live any longer."—She looked upon him, bending backward, with a moist eye, full of inexpressible tenderness and sorrow, and said: "Is it true, then? O God! if you were my son!—Ah, good child!—I have long loved thee as a mother.—But deceive me not, my heart is so sore!"—The son gave his oath.... and here let the curtain slowly sink on the maternal embrace, and when it has wholly covered son and mother, then let a good child look back into his own soul, and say, here dwells everything that thou canst not describe!
And now, at evening, the Chaplain was stealing home from the field and through the garden, and cried out, as he came to meet his new son: "Ah! Herr Hofmedicus, I am falling away abominably. I look really and manifestly like an Ecce Homo and feverish patient. I am doomed.—I am destined to make a soiffre-douleur, a persona miserabilis, a Patripassian."[193]—When Victor had reported to him, "It is all over, the Regency-Councillor is liberated and innocent," Eymann looked steadfastly up at the observatory, and said, "Verily there sits the Councillor up there, peeping over," and was on the point of going up to him; but Victor gently held him back, and said tenderly, "I am your son," and disclosed to him all.—"What?—you?—thou?—the son of such an eminent Lord, my son?—I to have begotten my Herr Godfather?—That is unheard of, one brother to be another's godson.—I have two Sebastians in my house at once."—He got sight of the Parsoness, and began a quarrel,—which was always with him a sign of joy.—"So, wife! thou hast known this all day, and let me sit out there in the quarry, on the anxious seat, in the midst of grief, tolling away till night at the poor-sinners'-bell? Couldst thou not have let the bellows-blower come out to notify me? That was very ill done,—the wife sits at home and drinks bitters, into which are thrown whole casks of sugar and dishes of comfits,—and the man keeps himself in stone-quarries, and swills down steadily his bitter extracts out of an emetic-cup."—She never answered a word.
Now, for the first time, Victor learned from his mother that it was only for his friend (Matthieu), and for his country, Flamin had meant to die; that he repented his unjust jealousy, and bewailed the friendship he had trifled away; and that she had sent for him for the very reason that she might conduct him to the arms of his true mother, and before the face of an afflicted sister. It had been this morning a human weakness, that the frozen limb of friendship, his heart, had been a little more cold and unfeeling towards Flamin, when he heard of his deliverance from imprisonment,—but it was now, at evening, the part of human kindness, that Flamin's great resolve to die restored, like a chilblain ointment, to his stiff heart warmth and motion. His inner being stirred itself mightily, welled up, overflowed his crushed resentment, and the image of the youthful friend rose up and said: "Victor, give thy hand again to thy school-friend,—O, he has suffered so much, and acted so nobly!" Tears shot from his quivering eyes, as he resolved to ascend the observatory, and say to his old favorite, "Let it be forgotten,—come, we will go together to thy sister." He went alone up to the tower,—intending to present him to the lady afterward. The Parson's wife flew off some minutes before Victor started, to inform and bring his two sisters, and send for the blind Julius to be conducted from the city, that no link might be missing in the golden necklace of love.
What a Jacob's ladder, on which every minute is a higher round, is set up this night on the swinging earth, whereon good beings climb up one after another!—
Down on the lowest step of the throne of reconciliation was Victor's heart laboring mightily in the hot blood through which it struggled. Flamin saw him slowly coming up, but he came not to meet him; because he was uncertain whether Victor came angry or forgiving. When the latter at last reached the top, Flamin, ashamed, supported his averted face in the branches; for he could not look his so sorely abused darling in the eye, till he knew that he had forgiven him. They maintained an awful silence beside each other, under the rippling linden-top,—they could not wholly guess each other's feelings, and that made the silence more gloomy, and the reconciliation doubtful. At last, Flamin, breathing intensely, and with his face buried in the foliage, reached out to him a trembling hand. When Victor saw the trembling of this dumb hand imploring reconciliation, boiling tears dropped through his heart and dissolved it asunder, and only from sadness and loving forbearance he delayed taking the lowly hand; but at this moment Flamin turned round (under the influence of a false suspicion), proud, blushing, full of tears and full of love, and said: "I beg thy forgiveness with all my heart for having been a devil to thee, an angel; but then if thou dost not grant it to me, I hurl myself down, that only the devil may get me!"—Singular! this extortion of forgiveness contracted a little Victor's open soul; but still he embraced the friendly wildling, and said with the mild voice of tranquil love: "From the bottom of my soul have I to-day forgiven thee; but loved thee I ever and always have, and in a few weeks would have died for thee, to save thy life."—Now their souls approached each other without reserve, and disclosed their lives,—and when both had told all, and Victor had unfolded to him, that he had been substituted in his place, and was the son of the bereaved mother, then would Flamin have died for remorse, and only pressed his face more closely for shame into Victor's bosom,—and their newly wedded souls celebrated their silver wedding on the nuptial altar of the watchtower, under the bridal torch of the moon; and their bliss was equalled by nothing but their friendship.
They wandered in the tender intoxication slowly into Le Baut's garden, and the stream of rapture grew deeper and deeper; but suddenly ice-cold waves, as from the river Styx, terrified the softly warmed Victor, when he came to the mournful bower, where, exactly a year ago to-day, on the 21st of October,—to-day then is Clotilda's birth-day,—he had torn her image out of his distracted heart, and where he now arrived again, perhaps again to tear it out from the old scars. For the lowering of his rank had made him a little—prouder, and his love for Clotilda more shy. To tell the truth, he could not himself fully believe that his inferior extraction had been unknown to her; he rather inferred the opposite, from the interest which his Lordship had let her take in his letters, and all secrets,—from her struggle in the beginning against her germinating love, and from the slight haughtiness towards him on the first day,—from her praise of misalliances,—from her favoring of Giulia's love for Julius, whom she knew to be his Lordship's son,—from her ready assent to the betrothal, which certainly otherwise her father, after the recognition, would no longer have granted,—and from other signs which one will more easily gather up for himself on the second reading of this work. As was said, this hope, that she had all along known who he was, refuted certain objections of his delicacy and of his spirit of renunciation, and bloomed out still higher to-day, among so many joys and pleasant incidents.—Ah! if he had been devoid of all hope, then he would certainly, in the midst of the circle of so many blessed ones, have been obliged to fall as the last victim!—But that something in man, which always prefigures to him a great loss as so probable, and a great gain as so improbable, united with melancholy remembrances, now tormented his soul.
He therefore begged Flamin to leave him alone for a while in the bower, and to hasten alone (as the Parson's wife was already in the garden) to the friendly arms of the newly-found sister and mother, and added that he would presently follow him. When Flamin was gone, Victor began to tremble more and more at the thought of the agitation of Clotilda, which would perhaps get the mastery of her at the intelligence of his pedigree; and it oppressed him sorely when he thought that for all in the garden sorrow had been removed from the black-hung mourning-chamber of earth, only for him haply not.—
But at that moment came his mother, beaming with the reflection of new raptures, and before questioning him first wiped his eyes. Her new raptures proceeded from this, that Clotilda, when she had related his descent, had fallen on her neck and begged her forgiveness for so long a concealment of the so long continued robbery of a child,—and that she had reminded the mother of a promise which had been given during the walk after the betrothal and was now redeemed. Much had escaped the mother,—and, I fear, the reader,—and Clotilda only glided hastily and blushingly over the matter; but had she not there said to her, "We change not our relation"? namely, that of a sister by marriage.—The Parson's wife concluded her report with the entreaty of her Ladyship, that she would bring her new son to her as speedily as possible. Victor could say nothing, for tearful rapture, except, "Have not then my good Agatha and the blind one yet arrived?"—And both stood—behind him; and he concealed the overmeasure of his bliss under the caressings of the sister and the friend; his capacious cup of sorrow was truly poured full of tears of joy.
As, in the accompanying circle of three loving souls, he entered upon the fair road to the dear united ones, they all came to meet him with radiant features,—with swimming glances,—with remembrances from which the sting had been extracted, or rather which had been turned into joys; for from the crushed flowers of gladness on the road of life a sweet perfume is wafted over to the present hour, as marching armies often send out from heaths the fragrance of trampled plants. Her Ladyship was conducted by her two children, and said, with an obliging smile: "I present to you here my beloved children; continue towards them the friendship which you have hitherto shown them."—Her son Flamin, heedless of decorum, flew to him and flung himself upon his neck. Clotilda bowed lower than she would have done before a Prince, and in her eye swam the question of melancholy love, "Art thou still unhappy? Have I still thy heart? Why is thy eye moistened? why is thy voice broken?"—Victor replied with quite as much tenderness as dignity, as he turned to the Lady, "You could not on a fairer day find again your son than on the birthday of your daughter." ...
Of that, in the previous whirlwinds, no one had thought. What a chaos of gladness! What a hearty, loving confusion of tongues on the part of congratulating improvisators! What affecting eye-thanks from Clotilda for such an obliging remembrance!
They went in ecstasy through the cool garden to the hall. O, when sisterly love, filial love, maternal love, love of lovers, and friendship burn side by side on the altars, then does it make a good man feel glad that the human heart is so noble, and preserves the material for so many flames, and that we feel love and warmth only when we dispense them out of ourselves, just as our blood never appears to us warm, until it flows, outside of our veins, in the open air.—O love! how happy are we that thou, when contemplated by a second soul, regeneratest and redoublest thyself,—that warm hearts attract and create warm ones, as suns do planets, the greater the lesser, and God, all,—and that even the dark planet is only a lesser, veiled, monœcian[194] sun!... All these souls stood today high on their Alp, and saw—as on a natural one—the rainbow of human fortune hanging as a great completed magic circle between the earth and the sun.—In the hall the Lady begged her daughter to go alone into the dark Jew's-harp chamber; she wanted to give her her birthday present. Clotilda's eye bade her friend, as she left him, with a second expression of thanks for his soul, a tender farewell.
After her departure, the Lady gave him a sign to stay with her behind the rest,—then he gladly fell on his knee before Clotilda's mother, who had not yet been asked her consent to his love, with the words, "If you do not guess my prayer, I have not the courage to begin it." She raised him up and said, "Prayers that are made so silently are quite as silently fulfilled; but rather come now and see what present I make to my daughter."—He must first, however, for a long time, moisten and kiss the hand which is about to offer him the lime-blossom honey of a whole life.
The two proceeded now, in this evening sent over out of the millennial kingdom, to the dark chamber of the daughter. Why did tears flow from Clotilda's eyes for rapture, even before her mother spoke?—Because she could already guess everything. The mother conducted the lover to his beloved, and said to the bride: "Take here thy birthday present. Few mothers are rich enough to give such a one; but then few daughters good enough to receive such a one."—The bridal pair were brought to their knees before her by the weight of overwhelming bliss and great, dumb gratitude, and took respectively the two beneficent hands of the mother; but she gently drew them out of theirs, and laid those of the loving ones in each other, and slipped away with the whisper, "I will bring our guests hither!"—
—O ye two good souls, kneeling beside each, blest at last! how unhappy must a man be who, without a tear of joy, or how happy one who, without a tear of longing, can see you now fall speechless and weeping into each other's arms,—after so many painful partings, at last linked together,—after so many exhaustive bleedings, at last healed,—after thousands and thousands of sighs, yet at last blest,—and inexpressibly blest by innocence of heart and peace of soul and God!—No, I cannot to-day take my wet eyes away from you,—I cannot to-day behold and sketch the other good souls,—but I lay my eyes, with the two tears which belong to the happy and the unhappy man, softly and steadfastly on my two still lovers in the dusky chamber, where once the breath of the harmonica tones wafted their two souls together like gold- and silver-leaves.—O, as my book now ends, and my beloved vanish from me,—withdraw thyself, dim Holy of Holies, with thy two angels,—send back a long echo, when thou fliest upward with thy melodious souls, as swans in the night glide with flute-tones through the heavens.—But, alas! does not the Holy of Holies already stand far away and high above me, and hang as a little silver cloud on the horizon of dream?—O these good souls, this good Victor, this good Emanuel, this good Clotilda, all these vernal dreams have gone up, and my heart looks up sorrowfully and calls after them without hope, "Dreams of spring, when will ye return?"
O why should I do it, were it not that the friends whom we firmly grasp by the hand are also dreams that soar upward? But the convulsive, prostrate, moaning heart on the gravestone does not call after these, "Dreams of spring-time, when will ye return?"—