Chapter M (3)

He found those women daily more amusing who steal away from us people of understanding the heart out of the breast and the brain out of the head, and, to be sure, (as a certain nobleman did other stuff,) not from love for the stolen goods, but from love of robbery itself; the next morning, like the nobleman, they honestly send the goods back again to the owner. Their refinements,--his own,--his turns to escape theirs,--the attention which one had to bestow upon one's self,--the opportunity of bringing all emotions under the finest dissecting-knives, or solar and lunar microscopes,--the facility of taking away from the most sincere truths the sour taste and from the most agreeable the sickly-sweet,--all this made the toilet-tables of women, particularly of coquettes, to him _Lectisternia_[266] and tables of the gods. "By heaven," said the toilet-table-boarder or pensioner,[267] "a man is merely a Dutchman, at most a German, but a woman is a native Frenchwoman, or in fact a Parisian: man conceals his moral as he does his physical breast: thoughts and flowers, which do not fall through the racks of the four faculties, emotions which cannot be described in the acts or in a physician's report, one must really say only to a woman, and not to a man, especially one of Flachsenfingen"--or Scheerau.

By way of excusing himself for associating with coquettes on the footing of a general lover, he appealed to his motive,--that of merely wishing to become acquainted with their ways,--and to the excellent Forster, who in Antwerp _knelt down_, as well as any born Catholic, before Rubens's altar-piece of the Virgin Mary ascending to heaven, merely to examine her more nearly.

He had a still more dangerous excuse. "Man," said he, "should be everything, learn everything, try everything,--he should labor for the _union_ of the two _churches_[268] in his soul,--he should, if only for a couple of months, have been a city-musician,[269] grave-digger, gallows-_pater_,[270] an engineer, tragedy-manager, upper-court-marshal, an imperial vicar, deputy sheriff, a reviewer, a lady, in short, everything a man should have been for some days, in order that the hues of the prism might at last melt together into the perfect white."

These principles are the more dangerous with one like him, who, strung with the tense strings of the most dissimilar powers, easily gave every one's note, not from dissimulation, but because his social poetic faculty could transport itself deeply into another's soul; hence he gained, tolerated, and copied the most unlike persons, notwithstanding his sincerity. But I pity him, that he has everywhere so much to suppress, his seeing through the Prince, his state of heart toward Clotilda, his conciliatory intrigues towards Agnola, his knowledge of Flamin's relations, &c. Ah, reserve and dissimulation easily run together; and must not a constant dropping, when one stands directly under it, at last wear scars in the most solid character?

Nothing chills the noblest parts of the inner man more than intercourse with persons in whom one cannot take any interest. This hotel-life at court, this daily seeing people who never even say "I," whose relations one ignores as indifferently as their talents, unless some necessity seeks them,--this snatching only at the next moment, this racing by of the finest and most intellectual strangers and ant-swarms of visitors, who in three days are forgotten,--all this, which makes palaces like Russian ice-palaces, where even the stove full of naphtha flames is a lump of ice, and to which I need not at all add the _comic_ salt, which, besides, chills all warm blood, as that of _Glauber_ does hot water,--all this made his heart desolate, his days bald and burdensome, his nights distressful, his conduct too cold towards the good, too tolerant towards the bad.

In addition to this, his Emanuel was silent, and, like nature, shut up his flowers within himself. He whom nature nourishes and builds up, is not in so good a mood in winter as in summer. The earth had on her powder-mantle of snow, and her night-gown on all day; the trees had wrapped up their buds in fleecy hair-papers, and the twigs looked like hair-pins. Victor's soul was like nature: O may Heaven soon warm in both the flowers of spring!

As the pathological history of my Victor reminds me too painfully of the latent poisons in the human body, it shall soon come to an end. It pleased him that he became, by this fluttering round, more and more gallant and cold towards all women: the cord of love cuts less deeply into the bosom, when, plucked out into threads and floss, it flutters about everybody. He who, like his namesake, Saint Sebastian, looked like one stuck all full with (Cupid's) arrows, shot off arrows of another kind against the whole sex, though never against individuals. In this last circumstance his bitterness differed from Matthieu's, who could say of his own cousin, for example, who had lost her beauty by a late attack of small-pox: "Her beauty held out right valiantly against the small-pox, and brought off from this victory the most glorious _scars_, and all of them indeed, like those of Pompey's knights;[271] in front and in the face."

As assaf[oe]tida is used for _haut gout_, so does one season the finest _savoir vivre_ by sundry bold incivilities. Bastian in the Tarantula-season was not to be embarrassed by anything: he went and came like a Parisian, without ceremony; he sought often bold, but advantageous postures of his body; during the play he made tours through the boxes as the Prince did through the coulisses; five times he carried matters so far (though with difficulty, and always only by means of setting before himself the example of the courtiers), that he listened indifferently, or absolutely looked away, when another was, telling him a story: all which things, if not essential, are nevertheless incidental to true politeness.

Nor will I let it be unnoticed in his praise, that he took to himself the regular _exotic_ and _satirical_ liberties of the _Gallican_ Church toward several women at once, for in the presence of a single one he had still the old veneration of a noble heart. I will give at least one example of that. Once he was among five slanderesses (the company consisted of six females and a male person); the ugliest blackened all maidens, even those in print, e. g. the deceased Clarissa, whom she charged with not having in her intercourse with Lovelace been quite able to _sauver les dehors de la vertu_.[272] One can anticipate how the Königsberg school will receive it in their reviews, that he let himself down on one knee before the calumniatress, and said with some seriousness: "_O Clarisse! voici votre Lovelace; retranchons quatre tomes, commençons comme les faiseurs d'Epopées par le reste_."[273]

To be sure, he frequently during the Tarantula-season reproached himself for the Tarantula-season; and when the Gentile-fore-court of his heart grew so full of women, while in the Holy of Holies there was nothing but mute darkness, and when his brain became an entomological cabinet of court trifles, then, of course, he often sighed in his balcony: "O come soon, good father, that thy sinking son may soar out of this unclean March fog into a clearer life, before he has utterly stained himself, so as no longer even to frame this wish." And as often as he got sight, in Joachime's chamber, of the views of Maienthal,--which Giulia had had taken by the painter of Clotilda's portrait,--then in the midst of his jestings he turned his eye away from them with a sigh.----But he was not healed, until fate said, Now! Then all at once the theatre-key struck, which bids men come and act in the players' rehearsal of life;--the play itself is not given till the next life;--and then transpired something which I shall at once report in the following chapter, when I have done relating in this one how Victor stood with all the people about him.

With many, properly speaking, badly,--in the first place, with Clotilda. She resided, to be sure, at the Minister's; as maid of honor, she would have belonged in the Paullinum, only the Prince had so contrived it for the greater facility of seeing her; but she was always about the Princess, with whom she was soon linked in intimacy by a similarity of seriousness and a similarity of reserve. Her indifference to one who had with her a common friend and teacher inspired this Victor with a still greater, especially as he knew she must feel that, in this cold mountain- and court-air, only a single, though faded, carnation slip of her fair soul bloomed, namely, himself. Then, too, the obligation of decorum, to look upon her coldly, must become a habit. The worst thing for him was that she was indifferent towards him without ill-feeling, and cold towards him with respect. Others were quite furious about the "phlegmatic virtue of this Pygmalion's statue." The noble Mat called her often the _Holy_ Virgin, or the Demoiselle Mother of God. It is made out very clearly by the Dog-documents, which I have opened, that some gentlemen of the Court, after various abortive attempts to explain to themselves a virtue irreconcilable with so much beauty, now on the ground of temperament, now of concealed love, and now of a coquettish coyness, ending at last, like the water at St. Clermont, in petrifying and becoming _its own bridge over itself_,--that these cunning gentlemen most felicitously fell upon the conjecture that Clotilda wore this mask over her face as a copy of the face of the Princess, for the sake of continuing in favor. Hence Clotilda's discreet virtue was judged by most with greater indulgence, while one could excuse it, as an intentional imitation of a similar fault in the Princess, even by the example of like imitations, as courtiers often aped the greatest external natural faults, nay, even the virtues of a prince. So thought at least the more reasonable portion of the Court.

Agnola was assiduous in testifying an ever increasing gratitude to our hero for January's visits, although, as I think, she could detect the faithless intentions of the Prince in the presence of Clotilda full as well as she might sometimes see into Victor's soul in the presence of Joachime.... In fact, I should have begged the reader long since to be on the look-out; I deliver the facts with excusable stupidity, though with historic fidelity; if, now, there are therein fine, knavish, significant, intriguing traits and hints, it is without my knowledge, and therefore I cannot point them out to the reader with an index-hand, or announce them with a fire-drum,[274] but he himself--as he understands court histories--must know what I mean by my hints,--not _I_.

With Joachime Victor would have gone on very well,--as he set down all faults which he found in other women, and not in her, to her credit as virtues, and as he grew more intimate with her personally; for the faults of maidens, like chocolate and tobacco, appear at first the more odd to the palate the better they taste to it afterward: he would have got on very well, but for two sharp corner-stones; but they were there. The first was,--for I will not reckon his slight annoyance at the short duration of her Christmas sentimentality,--that she was always finding fault with Clotilda, particularly with her "affected" virtue. The second was, that Clotilda sought her society quite as little: Victor could love no one whom Clotilda did not love. And now the race-weeks and visiting-Tarantula-dance hours of one man are at an end; but, alas! all posterity must yet cross the same hot _line_ of folly and of youth.

24. DOG-POST-DAY.

Rouge.--Clotilda's Sickness.--The Play Of Iphigenia.--Difference
between Plebeian and Patrician[275] Love.

On the 26th of February Victor found in the morning at Joachime's--the proud Clotilda. I know not whether it was by accident that she was here, or from politeness, or for the purpose of meeting more nearly a person whom Victor treated with some interest. But, O heavens! the cheeks of this Clotilda were pallid, her eyes were as if breathed over by an eternal tear, her voice emotional, as it were broken, and the pale marble body seemed only the image standing on the monument of the departed soul. Victor forgot the whole past, and his innermost soul wept for longing to succor her and wipe out from her life all dark winter landscapes. "I am as well as usual to-day," said she to his professional inquiry, and he knew not what to make of this unexpected paleness; he could not, in fact, to-day make anything, not so much as a joke or a piece of flattery; his soul, dissolved into sympathy, would not take any form; then, too, he was embarrassed. Clotilda soon took leave;--and it would not have been possible for him to-day, not for all Great Poland (that ice-floe beautifully ground down under the sledging of emigrating nations and crowns), after she was gone, to stay half an hour longer.

Besides, he would have been obliged to go; for the page Matthieu called him to the Princess. The time was unusual; he could not wait to see, nor could he guess what was the matter. The Evangelist smiled (that he did now somewhat often when the Princess was the subject), and said: "To Princes and Princesses weighty things were trivial and trivial things weighty, as Leibnitz[276] said of himself. When the crown and a hair-pin fall from their heads together, they look first of all for the hair-pin."[277]

By the way! It would be malice on my part toward the noble Matthieu, if I should longer suppress, the fact, that for some time he has been much more tender and ardent towards my hero,--which on any other man than he, I mean on a lurking villain, would be a Cain's-mark, and would have somewhat of the same meaning as the wagging of a cat's tail.

Victor was astonished at the request of the Princess,--that he would cure Clotilda: that is to say, not at the fact of her making a request,--for she often did him that honor,--but at the intelligence that Clotilda, on whose cheeks he had hitherto seen the apple-blossoms of health at his soul's expense in the _race-weeks_, had worn only dead blossoms,--namely, rouge, which the Princess had been obliged to enforce upon her for the sake of having a uniformity of bloom with the remaining red copper-flowers[278] of the court. Agnola, who, like her rank, was quick, besought him further, when he was appointed to the medical upper-examining-commission, to enter on his office as soon as might be, this very day forthwith, at the play, where he would find the candidate for examination.

And he found her. The play was a sparkling brilliant brought from Eldorado,--Goethe's _Iphigenia_. When he saw the patient again with the evening-red of the rouge, wherein she was to glow at another's behest even during her going down,--when he saw this still victim (marked red, as it were, for the altar), which he and others had driven away from its meadows, from its solitary flowers, to the midst of the sacrificial knives of the Court, mutely enduring, the extinction of its wishes, and when he compared with woman's dumb patience man's raging restlessness,--and when it seemed as if Clotilda had lent her sorrow to Iphigenia with the prayer, "Take my heart, take my voice and mourn with it,--mourn with it over thy separation from the fields of youth, over thy separation from a beloved brother,"--and when he saw how she tried to fasten her eyes more steadfastly on Iphigenia, when she pined for her lost brother, in order to control their overflow and their direction (towards her own brother in the Parterre, towards Flamin), O then did such great sorrows and their signs in his eyes and looks need a pretext like the omnipotence of genius, in order to be confounded with pangs growing out of poetic illusion!

Never did a physician question his patient with greater sympathy and forbearance than did he Clotilda in the next interlude: he excused his importunity with the commands of the Princess. I must first state that the fair patient--although he had been hitherto a falling Peter, whom many a cock-crow had brought rather to tears than to repentance--nevertheless remained the _second person_, whom he never denied, ... i. e. whom, he never addressed with the frivolous, whimsical, bold, entrapping turns of conversation now so common with him. The _first person_--whom he esteemed too highly to write to him in the present state of his heart--was his Emanuel.

Clotilda answered him, that "she was as well as ever; the only thing there was sickly about her," she said, smiling, "namely, her color, was already under the hands of a female surgeon, who, against her inclination, healed her only outwardly." This playful allusion to the rouging decreed by the Princess had the double design of excusing her painting and of diverting the Doctor from his tender-hearted seriousness. But the first was unnecessary,--since in the theatre even ladies who never wore rouge put it on as they entered the box and wiped it off on going out, in order not to hang there as the only quinces on a tree full of glowing Stettin-apples, and as, in fact, mineral cheeks were required of the whole female court-retinue as facial court livery. The second was vain; much more likely were the wounds of his heart to be aggravated by two causes: by that cold, almost fanatical resignation to fading away,--and by something inexpressibly mild and tender which, in the female face, often betokens the breaking heart, the failing life, as fruit by _soft_ yielding to _pressure_ announces its ripeness.

O ye good creatures, ye women, while joy already beautifies you, is the reason why sorrow makes you still more beautiful and too touching _this_, that it so often overtakes you, or is it because sorrow borrows the dress of joy? Why must I here confess so passingly my pleasure at your endurance and veiling of sorrows, when at this moment before my fancy so many hearts full of tears sweep by with open countenances full of smiles, and win for your sex the praise of opening its heart as gladly to sorrow as to joy, as flowers, although they *unclose only before the sun, yet also burst open when it is overcast by a cloudy heaven?

Victor, without being led off his track by her answer, continued: "Perhaps you cannot wean yourself from fair nature and from exercise,--these late hours, which I myself feel"----She prevented his finishing the sentence, to remind him that she had, he must remember, brought her present complexion with her from home. One sees, however, in this reminder more forbearance than truth; for she would not complain of her court office before the very one who had helped her gain it.----Victor, who saw her sickliness so clearly, and yet knew not how to propound another question, stood there dumfounded. Their own silence loosens reserved people's tongues: Clotilda began of herself, "As I do not know what harms me here, except the rouge, I beg my physician to prohibit me this dietetic fault," i. e. to persuade the Princess into a revocation of her rouge-edict. "I should be glad," she continued, "to gain some resemblance at least to two such good friends as Giulia and Emanuel,"--i. e. a pale color, or else the notion of a speedy death. Victor threw out a hasty "Yes," and turned his smarting eye toward the rising curtain.

Never, haply, were the scenes of players and hearers more like each other. Iphigenia was Clotilda; the wild Orestes, her brother, was her brother Flamin; the soft, radiant Pylades was his friend Victor. And as Flamin stood below in the pit with his cloudy face,--(he came only for the sake of seeing his sister more conveniently,)--then did it seem to our and his friend as if he were addressed by him, when Orestes said to Pylades:--

"Remind me not of those enchanting days,
When a free room thy house afforded me:
Thy noble father wisely, tenderly,
Nursed the half-stiffened blossoms of my youth;
When thou, an ever-gay associate,
Even as a motley, light-winged butterfly
Plays round a dark-hued flower, day after day
Didst dance and hover round me with new life,
And win thy bliss a way into my soul."

Clotilda felt quite as painfully that they were playing her life on the stage, and struggled against her eyes.... But when Iphigenia said to her brother Orestes,--

"O hear me! Look on me! See how my heart
Opens at last, after so long a time,
To the sweet bliss of kissing that dear brow,
Most precious treasure earth yet holds for me, ....
O let me,--let me--for in brighter waves
Not from Parnassus leaps the eternal stream
From rock to rock down to the golden vale,
Than from my bosom joy outgushing flows
And like a sea of bliss enclasps me round";--

and when Clotilda mournfully surveyed the greater interval of sorrows and days between herself and her brother; then gushed up the inner fountains and filled her large eyes, so often fixed upon the heavens, and a quick bending forward hid the sisterly tear from all eyes untouched by emotion. But it did not escape the feeling eyes with which her friend beside her imitated her.... And here a virtuous voice said within Victor: "Disclose to her that thou knowest the secret of her relationship,--lift off from this sorely oppressed heart the load of silence: perhaps she is withering under a grief which a confidant may cool and take away!" Ah, to listen to this voice was indeed the least with which he could content his infinite sympathy! He said in an extremely low tone, and which emotion rendered almost unintelligible to her: "My father has long since disclosed to me, that Iphigenia knows the presence of her brother and of my friend." Clotilda turned suddenly and blushingly towards him; for a more minute explanation he let his eyes glide down to Flamin; turning pale; she looked away and said nothing; but during the whole play her heart seemed to be far more compressed, and she was compelled now to stifle still more tears and sighs than before. At last in the midst of her sadness she gave gratitude its rights, and whispered to him for his sympathy and his confidence, as if with a dying smile, her thanks. He laid upon the distaff of the conversation entirely new and foreign material, because he would fain, during the spinning, get a clearer and more certain light upon the sad impression which his confession seemed to have produced. He inquired after the latest letters from Emanuel. She replied: "I only wrote to him yesterday all through the eclipse of the moon; he cannot answer me often, because writing pains his breast." Now, as the eclipse of the 25th of February began at twenty minutes after ten in the evening, at eleven o'clock and forty-one minutes was at its climax, and at one o'clock and two minutes was over: accordingly Victor, as physician, could fall upon the medical sinner with sermons and hammers of the law and pronounce the verdict; now, it was no wonder. Pass it by, Doctor! These dear creatures can more easily obey a man--the Ten Commandments,--books,--Virtue,--the Devil himself more easily, than the Dietician. Clotilda said: "The midnight hours are simply my only free hours,--and Maienthal, indeed, I can never forget."

"Ah, how could one?" said he.

The music before the last act, and the tragic tone, and the sorrows inspired her, and she continued: "Did not one drink of _Lethe_, when one trod the shores of Elysium and when one left it?" ... She paused. "I would drink of no Lethe, not in the first case, still less in the _last_,--no!" And never was "No" said in a lower, softer, more slow-drawn tone. In Victor's heart a three-edged compassion passed painfully to and fro, as he imagined to himself Clotilda mocked by fate, writing and weeping in the midnight under a moon dismembered and beclouded by earth's shadow; he said nothing, he stared rigidly into the mournful scenes of the stage, and still wept on when the joyous ones had, there, already evolved themselves in their place.

At home he made his brain-fibres Ariadne's threads to extricate himself from the labyrinth of the causes of her trouble, and particularly of the _new_ one which had seemed to come upon her at his disclosure. But he remained in the labyrinth; undoubtedly grief begat the sickness, but who begat the grief? It would be hard for these poor, tender butterflies, if there were more than one mortal affliction; in every lane, in every house, thou wilt find a wife or a daughter who has to go to church or to the Tragedy to sigh, and who must go up into the upper story to weep; but this aggregated trouble is worried away with smiles, and years increase for a long time side by side with the tears. On the contrary, there is a grief which breaks them off,--think of that, dear Victor, in the joyful hours of thy general love,[279] and think of it, all ye who with warm, loving hands draw the throbbing heart of such a delicate creature out of its breast, to take it into your own by the side of your own heart, and warm it forever! When you then throw away this hot heart, which you have torn out like a butterfly's honey-proboscis: still, like that, it continues to quiver, but then it grows cold, and erelong beats no more.

Unhappy love, then, was the gnawing honey-dew on this flower, Sebastian concluded. Naturally he thought of himself first; but all his nicest observations, his now so familiar _ricochet-glances_ out of the _corner of his eye_ had long since convinced him that he had to ascribe the distinction, which she did not deny him, more to her impartiality than to her inclination. Who else it could be at Court,--that was a thing which he in vain applied one electrometer after another to draw out. And he knew beforehand that he should experiment in vain, since Clotilda would baffle all auscultation of her inner state, if she had an unreciprocated inclination; reason was with her the wax, which they stick to one end of the magnetic needle, in order to obviate or conceal the sinking (_inclination_) of the other. Nevertheless, he made up his mind the next time to hold some divining-rods to her soul.----

I must here utter a thought, which may discover some sense and my general speculation in the matter. My Dog-Post-Master Knef did not probably foresee that I should calculate the year and the duration of this whole story merely from the lunar eclipse of the 25th of February, which he announced, just as, in fact, great astronomers, by means of the moon's phases, found out so much about the earth's geographical longitude. 1793 was the year in which what is related in this chapter occurred: I am good for that; for as, at all events, the whole story, as is well known, takes place in the ninth decade of the eighteenth century, and as no lunar eclipse of a 25th of February is to be found there at all, except in the year 1793, i. e. the present year, my proposition is made out. To make assurance doubly sure, I have compared all the changes of moon and weather occurring in this book with those of 1792 and 1793; and all fitted together beautifully;--the reader should also reckon it after me. It is uncommonly gratifying to me, that, consequently, as I write in July, the history follows in a half-year from my description.--

Victor delayed not his visit to the Princess's, that he might there announce the reserved Clotilda as a complete nervous patient. He himself laughed inwardly at the expression,--and at the Doctors,--and at their nervous cures,--and said, that, as formerly the French kings in their treatment of the goitre had to say, "The King touches thee, but God heals thee," so should physicians say, The city and country physician feels thy pulse, but God works the cure. Here, however, he had three good intentions in giving out that she was a nervous sufferer: first, that of gaining for her the abolition of her Court-vassalage,--at least her deliverance from the precise office of maid of honor, because the splinter of the reproach was continually festering in his heart, "It is my fault that she is obliged to be here"; further, of securing for her in advance permission to take the spring and country air, in case she should by and by sue for it; finally, of releasing her from her compulsory resemblance to those ladies on whose lead-colored faces, as on the leaden soldiers of children, the red daily wears off and is daily renewed. But as Agnola herself painted, he was obliged, out of courtesy, as physician, to forbid it to both at once. The Princess countersigned all his petitions very graciously: only as to the rouge-article she gave, in regard to herself, no resolution at all, and in regard to Clotilda the following: she had nothing to say against her appearing in her presence, except on court days and at the play, without rouge; and she would willingly grant her a dispensation from both, unless her health was restored.

He could hardly wait for the moment of taking leave, so impatient was he to carry this imperial-recess or resolution to the beloved patient. He himself wondered at this complaisance of the Princess, with whom, generally, petitions were sins, and who refused nothing--except what was asked. His perplexity was now only this,--how to communicate to Clotilda the indulgences of the Princess, without the offensive confession of having made a plea of her illness. But out of this slight evil a great one extricated him: when he came into her presence, she looked ten times as sick as she had day before yesterday, at the disclosure of her relationship: her blossoms, heavy with cold dew, drooped to the earth.

Gait and posture were unchanged; there was the same external joyousness, but the glance was often too fluttering, often too fixed; across the lily-cheeks darted often a hectic flush, through the lower lip at one moment a subdued convulsion.... At this point sympathy frightened her friend out of the bounds of courtesy, and he told her outright the consent of the Princess. He summoned to the aid of his burdened heart his previous court-boldness, and commanded her to make the coming spring her apothecary's shop, and the flowers her medicinal herbs, and her--fancy her pharmacy. "You seem," said she, smiling, "to count me among the larks, who must always have _green turf_ in their cage. However, that my Princess and you may not have had your kindness for nothing, I will, finally, do it. I confess to you, I am at least a _valide imaginaire_.[280] I feel myself well." ... She interrupted herself to question him, with the frankness of virtue and with an eye swimming in sisterly love, about her brother, whether he was happy and contented, how he worked, how he filled his position? She told him how sad a burden these questions, hitherto locked up so deeply in her soul, had been to her and she thanked him for the gift of his confidence with a warmth which he took as a delicate reproof of his previous silence. Of old she always loved to stand in a flower-garland of children; but in Flachsenfingen she had gathered still more of these little nebulous stars about her brightness, and indeed for a peculiar reason, namely, to cover the fact, that she drew to herself Giulia, a little five-years-old grandchild of the city Senior, with whom her brother resided, as his unwitting biographer and news-carrier. More than three times he felt as if he must fall at the feet of this lily-white angel, borne higher and higher by her cloud, and say with outspread arms: "Clotilda, be my friend, before thy death,--my old love for thee is long since crushed out, for thou art too good for me and for all of us; but I will be thy friend; my heart will I conquer for thee; for thee will I resign my heaven. O, thou wilt, besides, not live to see the evening dew of age, thou wilt soon close thy eyes, and the morning dew still hangs therein!" For he held her soul to be a pearl, whose mussel-body lies open in the dissolving sun, that the pearl may the earlier be dislodged. On leaving, he could with the frankness of the friend, which had taken the place of the lover's reserve, offer a repetition of his visits. Altogether he treated her now more warmly and unconstrainedly; first, because he had so utterly renounced her noble heart, that he wondered at his former bold claims to it; secondly, because the feeling of his disinterested, self-sacrificing honesty towards her poured balm on his previous stings of remorse.

To this sickness was added an evening or an event, which the reader, I think, will not know how to understand. Victor was to take Joachime to the play, and her brother, was to come and fetch him first. I have already twice set it down, that for some weeks Matthieu had no longer been so repulsive to him as a mouse is to an elephant: he had, after all, found out a single good side, dug out some moral yellow mica attaching to him,--namely, the greatest attachment to his sister Joachime, who alone had the key to his whole heart, closed to his parents, the sole claim on his secrets and his services; secondly, he loved in Matthieu what the Minister condemned,--the spirit-of-salt of freedom; thirdly, it is so with us all: when he have heated our heart for some female one out of a family, we afterwards extend the stove-warmth to the whole kin and trenchership,--brothers, nephews, fathers; fourthly, Matthieu was continually praised and excused by his sister. When Victor arrived at Joachime's, she had with her headache and dressing-maids,--finery and pain were increasing; at last she sent off the live fitting-machines, and so soon as she was hardened into a Venus out of the foam of powder and jewel boxes, rouge-rags and _mouchoirs de Vénus_, _poudres d'odeur_ and lip-pomades, then she sat down and said she should stay at home on account of headache. Victor stayed too, and very gladly. Whoso knows not the framework and cellular work of the human heart will wonder that Victor's friendship for Clotilda brought a whole honey-comb of love for Joachime into his cells; it was delightful to him when they visited and embraced each other; he sought not in the blessing-fingers of the Pope so much healing virtue as in Clotilda's; her friendship seemed to him an excuse for his, and to set Joachime on the pedestal of esteem, to which with all his windlasses he had not been able to raise her. Even the sense of his increasing worth gave him new right to love; and to-day even Clotilda's crape and princely hat would have asserted its helmet ornaments on Joachime's aching and more than commonly patient head. To her continued flirtation with the pair of fools he had long since adapted himself, because he knew very well _which one_ among the three wise men from the East she had not for a fool, but for an adorer. But to return!

Matthieu, who also stayed at home to please his sister,--he and Victor and she made the entire band of this _concert spirituel_. Joachime on the sofa leaned back her delicate, sick head against the wall and looked at the inlaid floor, and her drooping eyelids made her more beautiful. The Evangelist went out and came in. Victor, as he always did, dashed round the chamber. It was a very fine evening, and I wish this of mine were so. The conversation turned upon love; and Victor asserted the existence of two kinds,--the citizenly, and the _distingué_ or French. He loved the French in books and as a general love, but he hated it the moment it was to be the only love; he described it to-day thus: "Take a little ice,--a little heart,--a little wit,--a little paper,--a little time,--a little incense; pour together and put into two persons of rank; in that way you have a good, true French Fontenellian love." "You forgot," added Mat, "one ingredient,--a small amount of senses, at least a _fifth_ or _sixth_ part, which must be added to the medicine as _adjuvans_ or _constituens_.[281] Meanwhile, it has at least the merit of shortness; love, like a tragedy, should be restricted to unity of time, namely, to the space of one day, that it may not take still more resemblance to the tragic. But describe now common love!"

_Victor_: "That I prefer."

_Matthieu_: "Not I. It is merely a longer madness than anger. _On y pleure, on y crie, on y soupire, on y ment, on y enrage, on y tue, on y meurt,--enfin, on se donne à tous les diables, pour avoir son ange_.[282] Our talks are to-day for once full of arabesques and _à la grecque_: I will make you a cookery-book receipt for a good citizenly love: take two young and large hearts,--wash them clean in baptismal water or printer's ink of German romances,--pour on them warm blood and tears,--set them on the fire and under the full moon, and let them boil,--stir them briskly with a dagger,--take them out and garnish them, like crabs, with forget-me-not or other wild-flowers, and serve them up warm: in that way you have a savory citizenly heart-soup."[283]

Matthieu further added, that "in the ardent commonalty-love there was more agony than amusement; in it, as in Dante's poem, the Hell was worked out best, and the Heaven worst. The older a maiden or a pickled herring was, so much the darker was the eye in both, and the eye was made dark by love. Every lady in one of the higher circles ought to be glad that she needs to retain nothing of the man's to whom she is chained but his portrait in the ring, as Prometheus, when Jupiter had once sworn to leave him soldered for thirty thousand years to Caucasus, wore during the whole period only a small bit of this Bastille on his hand in the shape of a finger-ring." Whereupon Matthieu darted out, as he always did after witty explosions. Victor loved the bitterest and most unjust satire in another's mouth, as a work of art; he forgave all, and continued cheerful.

Joachime then said, jestingly: "If, then, no style of love is good for anything, as you two have proved, there is nothing left for us but to hate."

"Surely not," said he, "your respected brother has simply not said a true word. Imagine to yourself, that I were the poor people's catechist[284] and in love. I am in love with the second daughter of the _pastor primarius_; her part is that of a listening-sister;[285] for maidens in citizenly life know not how to talk, at least they can do it better in hatred than in love. The poor's catechist has little _bel esprit_, but much _saint esprit_, much honesty, much truth, too much soft-heartedness, and infinite love. The catechist cannot spin out any gallant intrigue for several weeks or months, still less can he dispute the Pastor's second daughter into love, like a _roué_;--he holds his peace to keep up his hope, but with a heart full of eternal love, full of devoted wishes, trembling and silent, he follows every step of the loved and--loving one; but she guesses not his feelings, nor he hers. And then she dies.... But before she dies, comes the pale catechist disconsolate to the side of her dying bed, and presses her trembling hand ere it relaxes, and gives the cold eye one more tear of joy ere it stiffens, and breaks in even upon the pangs of the wrestling soul with the soft spring sound, 'I love thee.' When he has said it, she dies of the last joy, and then he loves no one on earth any more." ...

The past had come over his soul. Tears hung in his eyes, and confounded in a singular obscurity the image of the sick Clotilda with that of Joachime;--he saw and conceived a form which was not present;--he pressed the hand of the one that looked on him, and thought not that she might refer all to herself.

Suddenly Matthieu entered, smiling, and his sister smiled with him, in order to explain everything, and said, "The court-physician has been taking the trouble to refute thee."

Victor, suddenly chilled, replied ambiguously and bitterly: "You will comprehend, Herr von Schleunes, that it is easiest for me to put you to flight when you are not in the field."

Mat transfixed him with his eyes; but Victor cast his down and repented his bitterness. The sister continued indifferently: "I think my brother is often in the condition of changing with the fashion." He received it with a sunny smile, and thought, as did Victor, that she alluded to his gallant adventures and sham-fights with women of all ranks that sit at the Diet. But when she had sent him off to inquire of her mother who was coming to the _cercle_ this evening, she said to the Medicus: "You do not know what I meant. We have at court a sick lady, who is the very incarnation of _your_ Pastor's daughter,--and my brother has not so much nor so little spirit as to act the poor's catechist." Victor started back, broke off and took his leave.

Why? How so? On what account? But does not the reader perceive, then, that the sick lady must be Clotilda, who seeks to escape Mat's fine approaches within ear-shot and bow-shot of her heart? In fact, Victor had seen well enough that the Evangelist had been hitherto playing a more devoted part towards Clotilda than before her entrance into his Escurial and robber's castle he could carry on; but Victor had ascribed this politeness simply to the fact of her having there her quarters. But now the map of his plan lay open there: he had intentionally met a person who was indifferent towards him with the show of contempt (which, however, he finely directed more at her future small income than at her personal attractions), in order thereby to win her attention,--that next-door neighbor of love,--and afterward, by a sudden change to complaisance, to win something more than attention. "O, thou canst win nothing!" every sigh in Victor exclaimed. And yet it gave him pain, that this noble woman, this angel, must strike such an adversary with her wings. Now there were thirty things at once suspicious to him. Joachime's disclosure and coldness, Matthieu's smile, and--everything.

So far this chapter, to which I have nothing more to append than some mature thoughts. Of course, one sees plainly, that poor Victor mutilates his soul to the size of every female one, as that tyrant did the bedfellows to the length of their bed.[286] To be sure, respect is the mother of love; but the daughter is often some years older than the mother. He takes back one hope of female worth after another. Latest of all, indeed, did he give up his demand or expectation of that sublime _Indian_ sense of eternity, which imparts to us, shadowy figures hanging in the magic smoke of life, an inextinguishable luminous point for self-consciousness, and which lifts us above more than _one_ earth; but as he saw that women, among all resemblances to Clotilda, acquired this last, and as he bethought himself that a worldly life grinds down all the greatness in man, as the weather gnaws away from statues and gravestones precisely the _relieved parts_, there wanted nothing to his handing over to Joachime the declaration of love which had long been fairly written out, nothing except, on her part, a misfortune,--a wet eye, a storm of the soul, a buskin. In more perspicuous words, he said to himself: "I wish she were a sentimental ninny and absolutely intolerable. Then when, some time or other, she had her eyes right full, and her heart too, and then, when I could not tell, for emotion, where my head was standing,--then I could advance and take out my heart and reach it to her and say, It is poor Bastian's, only keep it." It seems to me as if I heard him in thought softly add, "To whom else could I give it?"

That he really had the first thought, we see from the fact that he inserted it in his diary, from which my correspondent draws everything, and which he, with the sincerity of the freest soul, made for his father, in order as it were to atone for his faults by protocolling them. His Italian lackey did hardly anything but engross it.---Did it not depend on the dog and his news-box, his declaration of love should take place this very day: I would break an arm of Joachime's,--or lay her in the sick-bed,--or blow out the Minister's lamp of life, or bring on some disaster or other in her house,----and then I would conduct my hero to the suffering heroine, and say: "When I have gone, kneel down and hand her thy heart." But in this way the chemical process of his love-making may last full as long as a process at law, and I am prepared for three quires.

But here I will confess something which the reader's pride conceals: that he and I, at the entrance of every lady in these Dog-Post-Days, have made a _mis-shot_ of _salute_,--every one of them we have taken for the heroine of the hero,--at first Agatha,--then Clotilda,--then, when he enclosed his declaration of love in the watch of the Princess, said, "I see now beforehand through the whole business." Then we both said, "After all, we were right about Clotilda." Then in distress I laid hold on Marie, and said, "I shall not reveal anything further." At last it turns out to be one whom none of us had thought of (at least not I),--Joachime.--So it may fare with myself, when I marry....

Before passing from the Post-Day to the intercalary day, the following additional minutes are to be passed: Clotilda put off her illegitimate cheeks, her _joues_[287] _de Paris_, her rouge, and seldomer exposed now her withering heart to the shaping of the court napkin-press. The Prince, who for her sake had attended as a transient hearer in the lecture-hall of his consort, stayed away somewhat often, and then called at Schleunes's: nevertheless, the Princess had magnanimity enough not to make our Victor atone, by the taking back of her gratitude, for the withdrawal of January's favor.--In Victor there was a long war, whether he should impart to Clotilda's brother the new proofs of her sisterly love:--at last,--moved by Flamin's suffering, impoverished heart, stung by reports and rascals and suspicion, and by the thought that he had been able hitherto to give so little pleasure to this ingenuous friend,--he told him almost everything (_except_ the relationship).

P. S.--The undersigned testifies, by request, that the undersigned has completed his 24th Post-Day in due order on the last day of July, or Messidor. On the island of St. John's, 1793.

JEAN PAUL,

_Mining-Superintendent of Scheerau_.

SIXTH INTERCALARY DAY.

Concerning the Wilderness and the Promised Land of Humanity.

There are vegetable men, animal men, and divine men.--

When we were to be dreamed, an angel grew drowsy and fell asleep and dreamed. Then came _Phantasus_,[288] and swept broken meteorological, phenomena, things like nights, fragments of chaos, conglomerated plants, before him, and disappeared with them.

Then came _Phobetor_, who drove herds of beasts along before him, that murdered and grazed as they passed, and disappeared with them.

Then came _Morpheus_ and played before him with happy children, with crowned mothers, with shapes that kissed each other, and with fleeting mortals, and when the angel awoke with ecstasy, Morpheus and the human race and the world's history had disappeared....

--At present the angel still sleeps and dreams,--we are still in his dream,--only _Phobetor_ is with him, and Morpheus still waits for Phobetor with his beasts to disappear....

But let us, instead of dreaming, think and hope; and for the present ask: will _vegetable_ men, _animal_ men, at last be succeeded by _divine_ men? Does the _going_ of the world-clock betray as much design as the building of it, and has it a _dial-plate_ wheel and an _index hand_?

One cannot (with a well-known philosopher) reason directly from final causes in _Physics_ to final causes in _History_, any more than I, in the individual, can deduce from the teleological (intentional) structure of a man a teleological biography of the same, or any more than, from the ingenious structure of animals, I call infer a continuous plan in their universal history. Nature is iron, always the same, and the wisdom shown in her framework is never obscured; the human race is free, and, like the infusorial animal, the multiform Vorticelle, assumes every moment, now regular, now anomalous shapes. Every physical disorder is only the hull of an order, every foul spring is the hull of a fair autumn; but are, then, our vices the buds of our virtues, and is the earthly fall of a continually sinking villain nothing but a disguised ascension of his to heaven?--And is there an object in the life of a Nero? Then I could just as well take back and reverse all and make out virtues to be the heart-leaves of disguised vices. But if, as many a one does, we carry the abuse of language so far as to reverse _moral_ height and depth, like _geometrical_, according to the _point of view_, as _positive_ and _negative_ magnitudes; if, therefore, all gouty knobs, spotted fevers, and _lead_-[289] or _silver_-colics of the human race are nothing but a different kind of healthiness: then we certainly need not ask whether man will ever get well; in that case he could never in any possible maladies be anything but well.

If a monk of the tenth century had shut himself up in a fit of melancholy, and meditated on the earth, not however on its end, but on its future: would not, in his dreams, the thirteenth century have been already a brighter one, and the eighteenth merely a glorified tenth?

Our weather-prophesyings from _present_ temperature are logically correct and historically false, because new casualties, an earthquake, a comet, reverse the currents of the whole atmosphere. Can the above-imagined monk correctly calculate, if he does not assume such future magnitudes as America, Gunpowder, and Printer's ink?--A new religion, a new Alexander, a new disease, a new Franklin, can break, swallow up, dam, turn back the forest stream whose course and contents we propose to reduce on our parchment. There lie still four quarters of the globe full of enchained savage races;--their chain daily grows thinner,--time unlooses it;--what desolation, at least what changes, must they not bring about on the little _bowling-green_ of our cultivated countries? Nevertheless, all nations of the earth must one day be fused together and be purified in a common fermentation, if ever this atmosphere of life is to be cleared up.

Can we draw from some miniature earthquakes and volcanoes, which we ourselves have produced with iron-filings and aquafortis, (in this case, types and printer's ink,) conclusions as to the Ætna eruptions, i. e. from the revolutions of the few cultivated peoples as to those of the uncultivated? Since we may assume that the human race lives as many thousands of years as the individual does years, may we venture from the sixth year to set the horoscope of youth and manhood? Add to this that the biography of this childish period is precisely the most meagre, and that awakened nations--almost all quarters of the globe are as yet full of sleeping ones--in _one_ year produce more historical material, and _consequently_ more historians, than a sleep-buried Africa in a century. We shall, therefore, _then_ be best able to prophesy from universal history, when the awaking nations shall have appended to it their million or two supplementary volumes.--All savage nations seem to have been under _one_ stamp; on the contrary, the mint of culture coins each one differently. The North American and the old German resemble each other more strongly than Germans do Germans of neighboring centuries. Neither the Golden Bull, nor the _Magna Charta_, nor the _Code Noir_, could Aristotle inlay into his forms of government and obedience; else he would have extended them; but are we then confident of foreseeing any better the future national convention in Mongolia, or the Decretal Letters and Extravagants of the enlightened Dalai-Lama, or the Recesses of the Arab Imperial Bench of Knights? Since Nature coins no people with _one_ mint-stamp or one hand alone, but with thousands at once,--hence on the German race is there a greater multitude of impressions than on the shield of Achilles,--how do we, who cannot even calculate the past, but simpler, revolutions of the globe, expect to look into the moral ones of its inhabitants?