Chapter M (2)

I have not said it myself, because I knew the reader would see it without me,--that my hero thinks Joachime regards him as the image-worshipper of her charms, and as the moon-man, or satellite attracted by her. My hero has, therefore, long since made up his mind to leave her in this error. As to removing such an error,--for _that_ a man or a woman seldom has strength enough; but Victor had, besides, several reasons for indulging her with faith in his love (that is, himself, also, with faith in hers). In the first place, he wanted to conceal the reason of his coming; secondly, he knew that in the great world, and among the Joachimes, a lover is sought for only as third man in the game,--with them there is no dying of love, one does not even live on it; thirdly, he reserved for himself in all cases the sheet-anchor of making earnest out of jest; "when the knife is at my throat," thought he, "then I will set myself down and fall truly in love with her, and then all will be well"; fourthly, a coquette makes a _coquet_.[242] ... Here I began already, as is well known, to be vexed about the 22d Post-Day, although I know as well as anybody why all mankind, even the most sincere, even the male kind, incline to little intrigues towards their beloved; that is to say, not merely because they are little and _reciprocated_, but because one thinks by his intrigues to give more than he steals. Only the highest and noblest love is without real trickery.

WEEKS OF THE 24th AND 25th POST-TRINITATIS.

On Sunday there was a ball. "Very naturally," said he, "she will not look on me. In ball-dress the fair sex are more implacable than in morning dress." Hardly had she seen him when she came to meet him, like an agitated heaven, with her fixed stars of brilliants and her pearl-planets, and in this splendor begged of him the forgiveness of her freak. She had at first made believe angry, she said, then had actually become so; and not until the next day had seen that she did wrong to appear so and had a right to be so. This prayer for forgiveness made our Medicus more humble than was necessary. She begged him sportively to beg her pardon, and made him acquainted with her percussion-gold of sudden resentment.

For a space of two days this Westphalian peace was kept.

But one quarrel with a maiden, like one fool, makes ten; and unfortunately one only likes the angry one so much the better (at least, better than the indifferent), just as people run most after _those_ Methodist preachers who damn them the most roundly. Joachime grew daily more susceptible of anger,--which he ascribed to an increasing love,--but so did he, too. Let them have spent the whole visit in the finest imperial and domestic peace, at the leave-taking all was put upon a war-footing again, ambassadors and furloughed ones (if I may be allowed these poetical expressions) recalled. Then with the angry sediments in his heart he withdrew, and could hardly wait for the moment of the next interview,--i. e. of his or her justification. Thus did they spend their hours in the writing of peace-instruments and manifestoes. The matter of dispute was as singular as the quarrel itself: it concerned their demands of friendship; each party proved that the other was the faulty one, and demanded too much. What most enraged our Medicus was, that she allowed the fine and the fragrant fools to kiss her hand, which she forbade him to do, and in truth without any reasons for the decision. "If she would only lie to me, and say, such or such is the reason,--that at least would be something," said he; but she did him not the pleasure. To my sex, refusal without reasons, even conjecturable ones, is a pit of brimstone, a threefold death; upon Joachime, reasons and cabinet-sermons had equal influence.

EXTRA-LEAF ON THE ABOVE.

I have a hundred times, with my legal burden of proof on my back, thought of women who are able, with a certain effort, to act as well as to believe without any reasons. For surely, in the end, everybody must (according to all philosophers) reconcile himself to actions and opinions for which reasons are entirely wanting; for, since every reason appeals to a new one, and this again rests upon one which refers us to one, which again must have its own reason, it follows that (unless we mean to be forever going and seeking) we must finally arrive at one which we accept without any reason whatever. Only the scholar fails in this, that precisely the most important truths--the highest principles of morals, of metaphysics, &c.--are the ones which he believes without reasons, and which, in his agony,--thinking to help himself out thereby,--he names necessary truths. Woman, on the contrary, makes lesser truths--e. g. there must be drives, invitations, washing to-morrow, &c.--the necessary truths, which must be accepted without the insurance and reinsurance of reasons;--and just this it is which gives her such an appearance of soundness. For them it is easy to distinguish themselves from the philosopher, who thinks, and into whose eyes the sun of truth flames so horizontally that he cannot see, for it, either road or landscape. The philosopher is obliged, in the weightiest actions,--the moral,--to be his own lawgiver and law-keeper, without having the reasons therefor given him by his conscience. With a woman, every inclination is a little conscience, and hates _Heteronomies_,[243] and beyond that pronounces no reasons, just as the great conscience does. And it is precisely this gift, of acting more from private sovereignty than from reasons, which makes women so very suitable for men; for the latter would rather give them ten commands than three reasons.

_End of the Extra-Leaf on the above_.

What was full as bad was, that Joachime at last, only for the sake of removing his documentary piles of complaints and imperial grievances, allowed him her fingers, without giving him the least reason for it. He could, therefore, show no title of possession, and, in case of need, would have had no one who could protect him therein.

There is, however, a well-grounded rule of right or Brocardicon[244] for men: that everything grows firmer with women, when one builds upon it, and that a little stolen favor legitimately belongs to us, so soon as we sue for a greater. This rule of right bases itself upon the fact that maidens always abate with us, as one does to Jews in trade, the half, and give only a couple of fingers when we want the hand. But if one has the fingers, then arises, out of the Institutions, a new title, which adjudicates to us the hand: the hand gives a right to the arm, and the arm to everything that is appended to it, as _accessorium_. Thus must these things be managed, if right is to remain right. There will, in fact, have to be a little manual written by me, or some other honest man, wherein one shall expound and elucidate to the female sex with the torch of legal learning the _modos_ (or ways) _acquirendi_ (of winning) them. Otherwise many modi may go out of use. Thus, e. g., according to civil law, I am rightful proprietor of a movable thing, if it was stolen thirty years ago (in fact, it should be further back, and I should not be made to suffer for it, that one began the stealing later); so, too, by prescription of thirty minutes (the time is relative) everything belonging to a fair one lawfully falls to me, which (of a movable nature--and everything about her is movable) I may have purloined from her, and therefore one cannot begin soon enough to steal, because before the theft the prescription cannot begin to take effect.

Specification is a good modus. Only one must be, like me, a Proculian,[245] and believe that a strange article belongs to him who has imparted to it a different form; e. g. to me, the hand which I have put into another shape by pressure.

The late Siegwart said: _Confusio_ (mingling of tears) is my modus. But _commixtio_ (mixture of dry articles, e. g. the fingers, the hair) is now with almost all of us the _modus acquirendi_.

I was going once to treat the whole thing according to the doctrine of the _Servitudes_,[246] where a woman has a thousand things to suffer (though all these servitudes are entirely extinguished by the consolidation[247] of marriage); but I do not myself any longer rightly retain the doctrine of the Servitudes, and would much rather examine any one in them than be examined myself.----

I return to the Medicus. Since, then, he knew that a kissed hand is a warrant to the cheeks,--but the cheeks the sacrificial tables of the lips,--these of the eyes,--the eyes of the neck;--accordingly he would have proceeded exactly according to his text-book. But with Joachime, as with all antipodes of coquettes, _no favor paved the way for another, not even the great one for the small one_; you passed from one antechamber to another,--and what said my hero to this? Nothing but "Thank God that for once there is one better than she seemed, who, under the appearance of being our plaything, plays with us, and makes her coquetry the veil of virtue!"

He felt now, as often as her name was mentioned, a soft warmth breathe through his bosom.

FROM THE END OF THE ECCLESIASTICAL YEAR
(DEC. 1) TO THE END OF THE CIVIL (DEC. 31).

Flamin, whose patriotic flames found no air in the session-chamber, and stifled himself first, grew shyer and wilder every day. It was something new to him, that it took whole boards and commissions to do what one person might have done,--that the limbs of the state (as is also the case, indeed, with the limbs of the body) are moved by the _short arm_ of the lever, so as to do less with greater power, and a board, particularly, resembles the body, which, according to Borellus,[248] spends 2,900 times as much strength on a leap as the load which it has to lift requires. He hated all great people, and never went to see any: the page Mat did not even get visits from him. My Sebastian made his visits to _him_ seldomer, because his leisure and his calms of dissipation fell exactly upon Flamin's working hours. This separation, and the eternal sitting at Schleunes's,--which Flamin, from not being acquainted with Joachime's influence, was obliged at all events to ascribe to Clotilda's, for future visits to whom Victor must be creating a pretext by his present ones,--and even the Prince's favor towards the latter, which in Flamin's eyes could not be any result of his spirit of freedom and his sincerity;--all this drew the intertwined bonds of their friendship, which had made life to them hitherto a four-handed piece of music, further and further asunder; the faults and the moral dust which Victor could once brush off from his darling he hardly dared to blow off; they behaved towards each other more delicately and attentively. But my Victor, to whose heart Fate applied so many tongues of vampyres, and who was compelled to shut up in _one_ breast the bitterness of lost love and the woe of failing friendship, was made by it all--really merry. O, there is a certain gayety of stagnation and grief, which is a sign of the soul's exhaustion, a smile like that on men who die of wounds in the diaphragm, or that on the shrivelled, drawn-back lips of mummies! Victor plunged into the stream of amusements, in order, under it, not to hear his own sighs. But often, to be sure, when he had all day long been sprinkling over ruined follies comic salt, which full as often bites the hand of the sower and makes it ache, and when he had not been able all day long to refresh himself with any eye, to which he would have dared to show a tear in his own,--when, thus weary of the present, indifferent to the future, wounded by the past, he had just passed by the last fool, the Apothecary, and when from his bow-window he looked out into the night hanging full of worlds, and into the tranquillizing moon, and upon the eastern clouds over St. Luna,--then were his swollen heart and his swollen eyeball sure to burst, and the tears which night concealed to stream down from his balcony on the hard pavement. "O, only _one_ soul," cried his innermost being with all the tones of melancholy,--"give but _one_ soul, thou eternal, loving, creative nature, to this poor, languishing heart, which seems so hard and is so soft, which seems so joyous and yet is so sad, seems so cold and yet is so warm!"

It was well that, on such an evening, no chamberlain, no man of the world, stood in the balcony, just as poor Marie--on whom her former life has been precipitated like a crushing avalanche--came to desire his breakfast-orders; for he would get up, without wiping away a drop, and advance kindly to meet her, and grasp her soft, but red and hard-worked hand, which from fear she did not draw back,--although from fear she did turn away her face, hardened into stone against hope,--and say, as he softly stroked her eyebrows horizontally, with a voice rising from a heart full of the deepest emotion, "Thou poor Marie, tell me--I am sure thou hast little comfort--is it not so? There seldom comes any longer into thy gentle eyes anything that they love to see, unless it is thy own tears? Dear girl, why hast thou no courage before me? why dost thou not tell me thy woe? Thou good, tortured heart,--I will speak for thee, act for thee: tell me what weighs on thee, and if ever of an evening thy heart is too heavy, and thou mayest not venture to weep down below, then come up to me ... look at me now frankly ... truly I will shed tears with thee, let them say what they will and be hanged." Although she held it to be uncourteous to weep before so distinguished a gentleman, nevertheless, it was impossible for her, by a forcible bending away of her face, to thrust aside all the tears which his voice, full of love, drew in rivers from her eyes.... Take it not ill of his over-boiling soul, that he then pressed his hot mouth to her cold, despised, and unresistingly trembling lips, and said to her: "Oh, why are we mortals so unhappy, when we are too soft-hearted?"--In his chamber she seemed to take all as jest,--but all night long she heard the echo of the humane man;--even as jest, so much love would have been a comfort to her; then her past flowers once more crystallized in the window-frost of her present wintry-time; then she felt as if she were to-day, for the first time, unhappy.--In the morning she said nothing to any one, and towards Sebastian she was merely more devoted, but not more courageous; only, at times, she would concur with the dispenser down below, when he praised him, and say, but without further explanation, "One should cut up one's own heart into little bits, and sacrifice it for the English gentleman."

Poor Marie! my own innermost heart repeats after the Doctor, and adds besides: Perhaps at this very moment, just such an unhappy woman, just such an unhappy man, is reading me. And I feel as if; now that I have struck the funeral bells of their past sad hours, I must also write them a word of consolation. But for one who has to be ever striding across new gaping ice-chasms of life, I know no resource but my own: the moment things grow bad, fling all _possible hopes_ to the Devil, and with utter renunciation fall back upon thyself, and ask, How now, if even the worst should come, what then? Never reconcile thy fancy to the _next_ misfortune, but to the greatest. Nothing relaxes one's spirits more than the alternation of warm hopes with cold anguish. If this method is too heroic for thee, then seek for thy tears an eye that shall imitate them, and a voice that shall ask thee why thou art thus. And reflect: the echo of the next life, the voice of our modest, fairer, holier soul, is audible only in a sorrow-darkened bosom, as the nightingales warble when one veils their cage.

Often did Sebastian worry himself about this, that he could here exert so little his noble powers in behalf of humanity; that his dreams of preventing evil and accomplishing good through the Prince remained fever-dreams, because, e. g., even the best men at the helm of the state filled offices entirely according to circumstances and recommendations merely, and held offices, whether those of others or their own, never as obligations, but as mining-curacies. He was troubled about his uselessness; but he consoled himself with its necessity: "in a year, when my father comes, I set myself free and rise to something better," and his conscience added, that his own personal uselessness was serviceable to the virtue of his father, and that it was better to be, in a wheel, with all one's fitness for a pendulum, a tooth, without which the machinery would stop, than to be the pendulum of a toothless wheel.

In such cases he always asked himself afresh: "Is Joachime, perhaps, like me, better, tenderer, less coquettish than she seems? and why wilt thou condemn her on the strength of an outward appearance, which is, to be sure, the same as thine own?" Her conduct seldom confirmed these favorable suppositions, nay, it often absolutely refuted them; nevertheless, he went on to expose himself to new refutations and to desire confirmation still. The necessity of loving drives one to greater follies than love itself; every week Victor let himself abate one perfection more from the female ideal, for which, as for the unknown god, he had already for years had the altar set up in his brain. During this haggling the whole of December would have slipped away, had it not been for the first day of Christmas.

On that day, when he saw through every window laughing faces and gardens of Hesperides, he too would fain be joyful, and flew amidst the church-chorals to Joachime's toilet-chamber, in order there to make himself a Christmas pleasure. He had brought her for a present, he said, a bottle-case of liqueurs, a whole cellar of Rataffia, because he knew how ladies drank. When, at last, he drew his gantry full of bottles out of his--pocket: it was a miserable little box full of cotton-wool, in which stood imbedded neat little bottles of sweet-smelling waters, almost as long as wrens'-eggs. What is neat always pleases girls--as well as what is splendid. He delivered a long discourse to Joachime upon the temperance of her sex, who ate as little as humming-birds and drank as little as eagles: with a few show-dishes and a smelling-bottle he would feast an army of the female sex five thousand men strong, and there should still be something left. The physicians observed that they who had borne hunger longest had been women,--even in the middle classes the whole bee-flora on which these saints lived consisted of a colored ribbon, which they wore as sash or scarf, by way of a nourishing poultice and portable soup, and to which they attached nothing further, except at most a lover. Joachime, during the eulogy, drew out a bottle, because she thought it wax. Victor, by way of refuting her--or for some other reason--pressed it tightly into her hand, and fortunately crushed it. A mining-superintendent of my disposition would hardly introduce the crushing of a bottle, not big enough to cover one of Eymann's cucumbers with, into his Dog-Post-Days,--because he loves to serve up things of importance,--did not the bottle itself acquire an importance from the fact that it cut the softest hand upon which the hardest jewel ever yet threw lustre, till it ran blood. The Doctor was startled,--the patient smiled,--he kissed the wound, and these three drops fell like Jason's blood, or like a blood rectified by an alchemist, as three sparks into his inflammable veins, and the blood-coal of love assumed three glowing points;--nay, a little more, and he would have obeyed her, when she playfully commanded him (in order to spare him a greater embarrassment than he had) to revive the antiquated fashion of the Parisians, of writing to ladies with rose-colored ink, and here on the spot to despatch three lines to her in her own blood. Thus much is, at least, certain, that he told her he wished he were the Devil. To the last-named personage, as is well known, the warranty-deed or rather partition-treaty of the soul is despatched with the blood of the proprietor as fist-[249]pledge and consideration. Blood is the seed of the Church, the Catholic Church says; and here we are speaking of nothing less than the _temple_ of the fair.

So it was--and so it stood--when the Court of the Princess was announced for to-day. This was, in the first place, plaguily awkward for him, because this evening was spoiled; and, secondly, it was agreeable to him, because Joachime was obliged to-day to put away the hat which he and she so loved. Since, as is customary, ladies had the robes and frisures prescribed to them by the Princess, in which they must celebrate in her presence the court-day, i. e. the incendiary Sunday of their freedom: accordingly, she could not to-day keep on the crape-hat which she so loved, and Victor too, but not on her; for it was just the mate of that which Clotilda had worn when, during the concert, she covered her moist eyes with the black-lace veil, which from that time always hung down over his bereaved eyes.

I will describe the Court-day.

The main object of the Court in setting forth at six o'clock in the evening was, to drive home again at ten o'clock in a right sulky mood. I can, however, deliver this ten times as copiously:--

At six o'clock Victor, with the rest of the communion of brethren and sisters under orders, drove to the Paullinum. He envied, or rather blessed, the weaver, the boot-polisher, the wood-cutter, who had at evening his jug of beer, his prayers, his Johnny-[250]cakes and his trumpeting children; likewise their wives, who already had foretaste of the morrow, namely, of the marbled, speckled dresses which were to array them for the second holiday. In the May-colored atmosphere and zodiac stood the Princess as a sun, full as unhappy as her unhappy planets; _only dream_ (thought he) _can make a king happy or a poor man unhappy_. When he saw how they all, after a scanty frog-rain of words; and after refreshments, i. e. beatings and exhaustions, were harnessed, one post-team after another, according to the Court almanac and directory, to the card-tables,--to every board came the same motley set of old faces,--he wondered first of all at the universal patience; on a negro of the gold coast of the court (he swore to himself) if one only considers what he has to _hear_ and to _endure_, the _ears_ and the _skin_ are certainly, as in the case of roasted sucking-pigs, the best parts. Here the lion must beg _that_ animal to let him have his skin for a domino, which has usually borrowed his of him. Here among these forms bent up by small souls (as leaves also crook up when leaf-lice live on them) no great, no bold thought can be carried: like wheat which is _beaten down_, they can yield only _empty_ grains.

Before the sitting down at table, that part or segment of the--halo[251] encircling the Italian _sun_, which was not invited, drove home, disgusted at the tediousness of play, and still more disgusted that certain persons in particular were honored with the tediousness of a seat at the table.

Joachime, in whom the retiring Agnola found little satisfaction, went away with them, but not the Doctor, nor her brother Mat either, who had the honor of making, behind the chair of the Princess, in the column of march formed by herself, her chamberlain, a page, and a court lackey, exactly the central point; he stood, as every one knows, immediately behind the chamberlain, and was the only one who looked like a legible lampoon upon the _tout ensemble_. About the table, during[252] which there was little said, at most in a very low tone by two neighbors, here also there shall be nothing said.

After dinner the Prince came and disturbed the stiff ceremonial, which he hated from love of comfort, just as Victor despised it on philosophical grounds. "Verily, an archangel," Victor would often say, "who should remark the wisdom and virtue observed by mortals in all trifles at their session-tables, altars, receptions, must needs bet his heaven and his wings that we are worth a farthing--or at least something--in greater things; but we all know where the conclusion limps; and this very disgust at the stiff, pedantic, decent micrology and machinery of men is the humor of the satirist. Moral deterioration comes about, it is true, through trifles, but not improvement: Satan creeps into us through Venetian blinds and _sphincters_[253]; the good angel enters through the front door."--Agnola rewarded our hero to-day for his previous so well meant assiduity with a warmer attention, which was made more beautiful in his eyes by her ornaments--she wore those of the former princess, her own, and those of her mother before her--and by her whole state-attire; for he loved finery on women and hated it on men. His esteem borrowed a tender warmth from the painful fact that she confounded January's selfish intentions in his visits (with reference to the future Clotilda) with fairer ones, and that nevertheless one could not say so to her. How came it that Agnola reminded him then of Joachime; that the latter was the _conductor_ of regard for the former; and that all loving emotions with which the Princess inspired him turned out wishes that Joachime might deserve and receive them?

With a soul full of such longing, he drove back this very day without ceremony to that Joachime on whose hand, as we know, he had left a slight wound. He said to her, "He must, as murderer and Medicus, look once more to-day after the wound"; but a charming new trouble on Joachime's face fell like sunshine with a warming influence into his soul. He was impatient to go out with her on the balcony, to talk about it. Out there, he in a few minutes made the gash and the December chill a pretext for taking the hand and the gash into his own to warm it. "Cold is bad for wounds," he said; but the fine fool would here have had his own comment on the subject. The vacant evening, the remembrances of the childish joys of Christmas, the starry heaven, looking down from overhead, which magically illuminates all dark wishes of man, like flowers in the night,--these and the silence surcharged and burdened his forlorn soul, and he pressed the only hand which human kind at this moment extended to him. He put the question to her directly about her trouble. Joachime answered more softly than usual, "I was going to ask you the same; but with me it is natural." For she had, she related, on her return found the luggage of Clotilda and the news of her arrival, and--which is the precise point--the clothes of her sister Giulia, which Clotilda had hitherto given a place among her own. This Giulia, it will be remembered, had expired on Clotilda's heart, a day before the latter removed from Maienthal to St. Luna.

A chaos shot through his heart; but out of the chaos only the faded Giulia took shape,--for Clotilda daily receded into a duskier sanctuary of his soul; her pale Luna-like image caressed with rays of another world his sore nerves, and he willingly suffered himself to believe that Joachime had her form. In his poetic exaltation, so seldom intelligible to women, the dead threw the halo which Clotilda diffused over her back again upon her sister. Joachime had to-day read over again the letter which Giulia had dictated to her in her last hour through Clotilda, and she still had it with her. Probably a heart full of unrequited love had borne the fair enthusiast down under the earth. Victor with gleaming eyes begged her for the letter; he opened it in the moonlight, and when he saw the beloved handwriting of his lost Clotilda, his whole heart wept.

"Good sister!--

"Forever farewell! Let me say that first, because I know not what moment may close my lips. The tempests of my life are going home.[254] I speak this farewell and my heartiest wish for thy welfare through my friend Clotilda's pen. Give the enclosed to my dear parents, and join thy prayer to mine, that they will leave me in my beautiful Maienthal, when I am gone. I see now through the window the rose-bush which stands by the sexton's little garden in the churchyard: there a place is given me, which like a scar shall testify that I once existed, and a black cross with the six white letters _Giulia_,--no more. Dear sister, do not, I beseech thee, allow them to confine my dust in a tomb!--O no! it shall flutter in the shape of Maienthal's roses, which I once so loved to sprinkle!--Let this heart, when it shall have dissolved into the pollen of a new eternal heart, play and hover in the beams of the moon, which has so often in my lifetime made my heart sad and soft. If thou ever drivest, dear sister, along by Maienthal, then will the cross peep out upon the road through the roses; and if it does not make thee too sad, then look over to me.

"It seemed to me just now, for some minutes, as if I drew breath in ether,--in little thin draughts. It will soon be over. But tell my playmates, if they ask for me, that I was glad to go, though I was young. Very glad. Our teacher says, the dying are flying clouds, the living stationary ones, beneath which the former glide away, but verily at evening both are gone. Ah, I thought I should have to yearn for death a long time yet, from one year of sorrow to another; ah! I feared these pale cheeks, these eyes sunk with weeping, would not prevail upon death, that he would let me grow superannuated, and not take away my withered heart until it had throbbed itself to exhaustion: but, lo! he comes sooner. In a few days, perhaps in a few hours, an angel will appear before me and smile, and I shall see that it is death, and I, too, shall smile and say most joyfully, Take my beating heart into thy hand, thou ambassador of eternity, and care for my soul.

"'But art thou not young?' the angel will say; 'hast thou not just stept upon this earth? Shall I recall thee so soon, even before it has its spring?'

"But I shall answer: Look on these sunken cheeks, and these exhausted eyes, and only shut them to. O, lay the snake-stone[255] on my bosom, that it may suck out all the wounds, and not fall off till they are healed. Ah! I have haply done no good in the world, but also no evil.

"Then will the angel say: 'If I touch thee, thou becomest stiff,--spring and mankind and the whole earth vanish, and I alone stand beside thee. Is, then, thy young soul already so weary and so sore? What sorrows, then, can there be thus early in thy breast?'

"Only touch me, good angel!--Now he says, 'If I touch thee, thou crumblest to dust, and all thy loved ones see nothing more of thee--'

"O, touch me!..."

Death touched the bleeding heart, and a human being had passed on....

While Victor read the sorrowful sheet, the sister of the dead one had several times wiped her eyes, because she imagined to herself what he was reading, and when he looked up at her, there glimmered therein the seed-pearls of a tender soul. But he wished now that his face could be invisible, or that he could be in the balcony of his chamber, so as to give way to all sighs and emotions unseen. Had he been in a citizen's house, he might now have gone without being derided to the unpacked clothes, and into the future apartments of Clotilda; and he might have seen again, as it were, the green lawns of Maienthal, if he had seen the romantic dresses, wherein Giulia had roamed through them, locked up amidst the last kisses of a sister. But in such a house it was an impossibility.

He could now, as he seldomer had the enjoyment of another's sensibility, easily pardon its even being carried to excess. That it shatters the body was to him the wretchedest objection, because, indeed, everything of a nobler sort, every effort, all thinking, wears it out; in fact, the body and life were only means, but not an end. "Giulia's heart in Giulia's body," said he, "is a pure dew-drop in a tender flower-cup, which everything crushes, chokes, dries up, and which yet has escaped the noonday sun; such souls, too pliable for a world full of storm, which have too many nerves and too few muscles, deserve for their sensibility's sake not the corroding salt of satire, which gnaws them like snails. Earth and we can give them few joys; why will we take from them the rest?"

But the lines of sorrow which sympathy now drew through Joachime's smiles imprinted themselves distinctly in Victor's heart, and that which she would here conceal made her more charming than all that she had ever sought to show.

Nothing is more dangerous than--as he had done some weeks before--to make believe he was in love: one becomes so forthwith in reality. Thus, the voluptuary _Baron_, when he had played one of Corneille's heroes, himself was one for some days. Thus Moliere died of a _malade imaginaire_, and Charles V. of a rehearsal-burial. Thus the paper crown which Cromwell had worn in a school-drama made him covet a harder one.--The second lesson which is to be learned from this (this, however, to be sure, presupposes Joachime's being a coquette) is, that a hero may scent coquetry, and yet run into the trap; a poet, like the nightingale (which he resembles in plumage, throat, and simplicity) sits up on the tree, and sees the snare set, and skips down and--into it.

After some days,--while the question about Joachime's worth and his own love was rising and falling like a wave in Victor's mind,--while he stood on bad terms with Flamin, good ones with the Princess, and better with the Prince, who kept asking every day when Clotilda was coming,--she came.

23. DOG-POST-DAY.

First Visit to Clotilda.--The Paleness.--The Redness.--The
Race-Weeks.

"Ay, I must confess," said Victor, as on the day after Clotilda's arrival he ran round in his chamber, "I could look with more courage into a thunder-storm or a tempestuous sea than into that little face,--into a radiant heaven, three noses long." He got relief, however, by striking a detached fortissimo chord on the piano: then he could go to see Clotilda. Only on the way he said: "Nowhere is there so much jangling as within a man. What a devilish uproar in this five-foot Disputatorium about the smallest trumpery, till a bill grows into an act! A portable national convention _in nuce_,[256] that is what I am; I cannot take a step, without the _right_ and _left_ first haranguing on the subject, and the _enragés_ and the _noirs_,[257] and the Duke of Orleans and Marat. The most detestable thing about this interior Ratisbon diet of man is, that Virtue sits therein with ten seats and one voice, but the Devil with one rump and seven votes."--

By these humorous soliloquies he sought to divert himself from the aspect of his confused, stubborn, cold-sore spirit, which was always lifting Joachime to the level of Clotilda. He was finally put in perfect tune again merely by the virtuous resolution not to conceal now his love for Joachime,--"not to be ashamed of her," he had almost thought to himself. "If I _feign_ myself to be somewhat warmer toward Joachime and colder towards the other than I perhaps am, then the Devil must have his game in it, if I do not finally _become_ so."

But the Devil had his game, and in fact a true game of Ombre[258] for _four_ persons,[259] with a dummy:[260] this croupier[261] had made the original vault of playing out the face[262] of Clotilda with a wholly different _color_ from what he had given her in Le Baut's palace. Victor found her, on meeting her again at Schleunes's, infinitely more beautiful than he had left her,--that is to say, more _pale_. As she was no nervous patient, never avoided the cold, even on December evenings walked out alone in the village, her cheeks were usually more like dark rosebuds than opened and whitened rose-leaves. But now the sun had become a moon: she had, in some sorrow or other, like the sapphire in the fire, lost nothing but color; instead of the blood, the soul, grown more still, lovely, and tender, seemed itself to look more nearly through the white crape curtain. All the blood which had receded from her cheeks flowed over into his, and rose like a magic potion into his head; meanwhile he tried to get into the latter the thought, "Probably it is more the quarrel with her parents, and less the affliction of being driven hither, that has made her sick."

When one has once proposed to himself to make believe cold, one becomes still more so when one finds reasons for _not_ being so: Victor was made still colder by Clotilda's parents, who had come with her, and from whose faults the mantle seemed to him to be at once removed. Upon persons whom, for the sake of a third, one has esteemed too highly, one avenges himself, when the third no longer exerts the constraining influence, by a so much the greater depreciation of them. Then, too, he said to himself: "As she now seldom sees her brother Flamin, it would be a piece of simplicity to expose her to a minute's embarrassment by the announcement that I know the relationship." Poor Victor! Nevertheless, it was impossible for him even to charge his heart with so much electrical warmth--though he might rub it with cat-skins and beat it with fox-tails--as would be requisite in order that his pulse should beat full for Joachime, not to say feverishly; but _this very thing_ decided him to conduct himself exactly as if heart and pulse were fuller. "It were ignoble," thought he, "if the good Joachime should be made to atone for it, that I once had other hopes and wishes than my hitherto newest ones." This sacrifice warmed him to a proper degree of regard; this regard gave him the manly pride, which defies with its love and its choice all the four quarters of the world; this pride, again, gave him freedom and joy,--and now he was in a condition to talk with Clotilda like a reasonable man.

All this inner history occupied, of course, twelve times as great a space of time as Mohammed's journey through all the heavens,--almost a good hour. But an accident threw itself into the midst of all his ideas. Namely, as the Minister's lady was a true female philosopher,--she knew that a couple of quartz crystals with some preparations and a drowned f[oe]tus do not make a philosopher, but nothing short of a lecture-room full of natural curiosities, and a reading cabinet,--and as the Chamberlain Le Baut was a philosopher, for his cabinet was quite as large,--the collection was exhibited to the Chamberlain, which he had himself helped to enrich. One would suppose that they must have laughed at each other in their sleeves, and taken each other for fools; but they really held each other for philosophers; for with great folks the fruits of the tree of knowledge grow so into the window and into the mouth,--they have so much facility in gaining knowledge (and therefore a second in showing it),--they so seldom seek in the wells of truth anything else than their own knee-pieces made with water-colors, and to wade into the depths of this fountain would give them such a chill,--and yet, on the other hand, they converse with so many sorts of persons of information in all departments,--that they get a smattering of everything over the table, and by oral tradition, like the disciples of the ancients, become through the ears living cyclopædias. If, afterward, they actually know how to absolutely renounce that which they have never heard, what difference is there, then, between them and the poorest philosopher, except in consciousness?

In the cabinet of books and natural curiosities lay the whole New-Year's freight of buzzing chafers, with golden wing-sheaths minus wings,--I mean the gilt Musen-Almanachs. Matthieu, that mimic of the actual nightingales, was the sworn foe of the human ones, namely, the poets. He said,--what would have suited better for a Review,--"He was a great friend of verses, but only in winter,--for when he went roaming so through the flower-beds of an Annual, he became, like one who walks through a poppy-field, drowsy enough, and could go to sleep. And just as the nights grew longer, and one therefore needed a longer sleep, it was a fine thing that the Annuals should appear, exactly at the beginning of winter, and that these flowers should bloom at the same season of the year with the mosses; in this way one could at least be lulled to sleep beside the brook that murmured in the verses, when there was no more murmuring or sleeping on the frozen meadow."----

Our Victor was as satirical as the Evangelist; he had in Hanover laughed as well as this fellow here,--e. g. he had complained that most Annual-minstrels unfortunately labored more for _connoisseurs_ than for dull readers, and were well contented if they only got the former to sleep,--that a man who could not write prose should try whether he might not make a popular bard, as only those birds can _sing_ who do not learn to talk,--that he could get through a good Annual at the quickest and most agreeable rate, if he only ran over the rhymes,--and that flat heads, like flat diamonds, to which no facettes can be given, became _hearts_, and instead of thoughts gave us tears, in which there swam not so much as the infusorium of an idea....

But he saw still one side more than Matthieu, namely, the noble side. It was his custom to turn this side forward precisely when another had been showing the bad side, and _vice versâ_. His opinion was, that the poets were nothing but intoxicated philosophers,--but whoever could not learn philosophizing from them, would learn it quite as little from the systematicians. That philosophy made only the _silver-wedding_ between ideas, but poetry the first marriage; empty _words_ there might be, but no empty _sensations_. That the poet, in order to move us, has only to take for his lever all of noble that there is on the earth,--Nature, Freedom, Virtue, and God; and the very magic-words, the magic-rings, the magic-lamps wherewith he sways us, react at last upon himself.

He delivered this opinion--when Matthieu had given his and Joachime her own, namely, that there were three or four leaves, at least, in the Musen-Almanachs which pleased her, namely, the smooth parchment leaves--much more briefly than we have put it;--the Minister's lady was of his opinion (for she herself was a versifex);--the Chamberlain said, "Every city and every prince did indeed adore the poets in appropriate temples,--namely, in the play-houses." Clotilda ventured now to join herself to the victors:[263] "When one reads a poet in January, it is as lovely as when one goes to walk in June. I cannot read either philosophers or learned men; there would, therefore, be left to me" (she meant to say, to her sex) "quite too little, if one should take from me the dear poets." "You would at most," said the Minister at last, "find your disciples in them; poets, like the saints, concern themselves little about the world and its knowledge; they can sing of the state, but not instruct it." "O thou grinning mummy!" thought Victor, "a precious stone which thou canst not work into the wall of the state-building is less to thee than a block of sandstone. If thou couldst only install every flaming soul sent into the world as a completion of the republican antiques, in the office of under-clerk, custom-house collector, or warden of the treasury (as the people of Grand Cairo transform their ruins into stables and horse-troughs)!" The noble Mat merely subjoined: "There was a painter in Rome who never talked with any one but by singing; and I knew a great poet who not even in common life could speak prose; but he could not do much beside, and had little of the world, but a great many worlds in his head. When he comes out in print, he will hardly play off more deception on his readers than any one has already played off on him, who chose to."--Victor saw, by Clotilda's downcast eye, that she observed, as well as he, that the Devil meant her Dahore: but he was silent; his soul was sad and embittered: he had, however, long since been hardened by court life to endure those whom he must needs hate.

During this disputation the noble Mat had, unobserved, cut out the whole group in black paper. "Ah!" said Joachime, "this is not the first time that he has given _blackened_ likenesses of companies." But as Victor could never see silhouette-groups, without thinking of us fleeting shadows of mortals, of this dwindling and drying-up dwarf-life, of the night-pieces drawn upon life, and of the shadowy companies called peoples,--and as he was reminded of this not only by his melancholy, and not only by a wax-skeleton, by Madame Biheron,[264] which stood there among the natural curiosities, but still more by the pale form of Clotilda,--and as, casting a glance of comparison at the skeleton and the profile, she said softly to Victor, "So many resemblances might at another time make me sad,"--then was his full heart transpierced with a sharp pang at the thought of his eternal poverty, and at the certainty, "This great, beautiful heart will never stir for thine, and when her friend Emanuel is dead, thou art left forever alone"; and he stepped to the window, threw it open violently, drank in the north-wind, pressed his fist against his two eyeballs, and went back with his former expression of countenance to the rest of the company.

But for to-day such agitations had torn deeply into his heart. And when Clotilda, at a solitary second, said to him that the Parson's wife and Agatha were angry at his staying away, then was he, to whom at these names the whole beclouded past opened like a heaven, in no condition to give an answer.

When he returned home, Clotilda's voice, which he could of all her attractions least forget, kept incessantly speaking, and like the echo of a funeral-song, in his soul.... Reader, when that which thou lovedst has long vanished from the earth or from thy fancy, then will nevertheless the beloved _voice_ come back and bring with it all thy old tears, and the disconsolate heart which has shed them!... But not merely her voice,--everything came thronging back in the darkness upon his fancy: her modest eye, which did not in court-like style sparkle and bid defiance and express desire, as did those of the others,--that watchful delicacy, which since his entrance on court-life no longer appeared to him, either in her or in his father, too great,--to this add the image of Joachime and his chaos of inconsistencies, and the remark that a man whom the most certain proofs have satisfied that he is not loved, still suffers afresh at a _new_ one,--and then one can understand the commotions which sleep, that lull on life's ocean, had in his case to appease.--

"That was the last fever-shake," said he the next morning, relying upon his present heart, whose eruptions, like those of volcanoes, daily burnt out its crater more and more. He enjoined upon himself, therefore, a weekly flight from the too dear soul, with the design that the new resonance of his love might cease its vibrations in his heart, and all become still again within him.

But after a week he saw her again: verily, there sat the Devil again at the card-table, and played another color against him,--the _red_. Clotilda looked, not pale, but, though only slightly, red. This redness made a great blot on his inner man, and adulterated his inner coloring, as black does every color of the painter. For when he found her well again; it was not so much _agreeable_ to him,--for he saw how few claims he any longer had upon her tranquillity,--how she did not so much as distinguish him in this warehouse of human waste-paper, and how stupid he had been in letting himself dream so secretly, so very secretly, that her previous paleness proceeded actually from her vain longing after such a one as he;--at the same time it was not _disagreeable_ to him,--for he would have poured out all his heart's blood, if he could thereby have brought a single artery in her to its old course;--I say it was not so much either agreeable or disagreeable to him, as it was both, as it was unexpected, as it was a hint to--give himself to the Devil. His heart, and the image which had been too long therein, were absolutely crushed in two. "Be it so!" said he, and bit the convulsive lip with which he said it. For some days he cared not even to see Joachime. "Has _she_ then an eye for nature and a heart for eternity?" asked he, and he knew well the answer.

Now came on a time for him, which was the precise opposite of the Sabbatical weeks,[265]--one may call them the _race-weeks_ or the _Tarantula-dancing-hours_ of visiting. It is a cursed time; man knows not where he stands. With Victor it fell just upon the winter-months, when, besides, the honeymoons of city and court occur. I will now portray them regularly.

Victor sought, namely, to drown deeper his unhappy, discordant heart,--not with the drum-roll of amusements; under this it would only bleed the more, just as wounds flow more strongly under the sound of drumming; but with--people; these were the blood-stanching screws which he applied to his soul. His body was now, like the Catholic reliquiary body of an Apostle, in all places; he spent the whole day in running to and fro, now with the Prince and now without him.

At last there was not a lady left in Flachsenfingen whose hand he had not kissed,--nor a toilet-table where he would have been satisfied. He made in the _racing-weeks_ double-knots, French _pas_,--dotted sketches of patterns,--little plays,--charades,--receipts for canary-birds,--verses for fans,--a thousand visits,--and still more, morning notes....

These last, which he received and sent, were written in French and folded French-wise,--namely, crushed into the shape of hair-rollers. "They are," said he, "the hair-rollers of the fibres of the female brain,--the cartridges full of Cupid's powder,--the cocoons of loving butterflies": he spoke of the rise and fall of these female notes, and called them still further the proof-sheets of the female heart, and the outer-title-pages of the coquettish Edicts of Nantes. "I assert this," he added, "to distinguish myself from the page Matthieu, who denies it, because he actually contends, that at first one presses letters upon the fair sex, then things of more cubic contents, e. g. fans, jewels, hands, then finally one's self; just as the mails at first only took letters, then packages, finally passengers."--