Hesperus or Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days Volume I Part 5

Victor saw beside him the happy one, who was his friend, looked upon him with moist eyes, and said, "Of that thou wast worthy!" But now twenty rowels spurred him to follow Agatha to the palace;--the pen-and-ink drawing of the artist; the arrangement of dresses; the relationship; the desire which every man has to see the Grace and Infanta of his friend; the desire which _not_ every one has, but he had, to speak with any one for the first time (rather than for the eighth time); and, most of all, the evening of yesterday. Flamin's fire had yesterday burned Victor's bosom to a heap of tinder, through which nothing but sparks were running. He should have set all before him indifferently, because the contest _against_ love differs in nothing from the contest _for_ it, except in order of precedence. But let not the reader by any means imagine that now (as in one of your emasculated and emasculating romances) the Devil is to break loose in our biography, and the hero is to march into the palace and there fall down before Clotilda, and beg, on bended knee, "Be the heroine!" and go about to wrangle with her, out of love, and with the former _pastor fido_ out of hatred, and actually play nothing else than the aesthetic, self-seeking, sensitive--scamp. If I should wish this last, I could excuse myself only on the ground that then I might perhaps come to some biographical murders and duels. I hope, however, I may still, without injury to morals or honesty, in the course of these pages make out a murder or homicide or two, at least in the last volume, where every aesthetic reaper thins out his characters, and throws half of them into the _oubliette_ or family-vault of the inkstand.

Victor had too many years and acquaintances to allow himself, with so little regard to days of grace and double usance,[43] on the spot, before supper,--_cito citissime_,--what hast thou, what canst thou?--to fall in love. His optic nerve daily unravelled itself into finer and more delicate fibres, and touched all points of a new form, but the sore feelers curled back again more readily; every month the sight of a new face, like new music, made a _stronger_ and _shorter_ impression.

He could only talk his way into love, not see it. Only words winged by virtue and sensibility are the bees which, in such cases, carry the pollen of love from one soul into another. But such a love, of the better kind, is annihilated by the least immoral alloy. How could it form and filter up in a defiled heart, filled with high-treason against a friend?

Victor would have gone to the palace as early as half past nine, but the Lady Chamberlain had not yet combed out her eyebrows and the King Charles's spaniel.

Seeba.s.s brought a billet to Flamin:--

"I cannot see you, my dearest, to-day. Three Graces hold me fast, and the third you yourself have sent. Tell your British friend he must love me because I love you. Surgery may do without sympathy, but friendship cannot.

"Your Matthieu."

An absurd billet! When Victor heard that Agatha was the third Grace, there was a great hole torn in the curtain of the theatre in which Matthieu played Flamin's friend and Agatha's--first lover. Nothing is more annoying than a nest in which there sit none but brothers or none but sisters: the nest must be shaken up into a mixed and motley gradation,--that is to say, of brothers and sisters, packed in layers, so that an honest _pastor fido_ can come and ask after the brother when he is only on the look-out for the sister; and so, too, must the girl who loves a brother absolutely and by stronger necessity have a sister whose friend she is, and who may be hook and handle to the brother. Our _Turkish_ decorum required, therefore, that Matthieu should point his opera-gla.s.s at Flamin to see Agatha; and that Clotilda should visit the latter, since Flamin, as a man without ancestors, but of honor, could not possibly force his citizen's-visits upon the house of a chamberlain. Clotilda came often, and thereby involved herself in a contradiction, which I have till now been unable to solve, with the womanly refinement of her character.

Flamin dipped Matthieu's likeness into a quite different dyeing-copper from that the mother used: he was a jolly genius, and nothing worse. He personated everything in the world, and no one could personate him. He could imitate and travesty all the players of the Flachsenfingen troupe, and the boxes too. He understood more sciences than the whole court; yes, and more languages, even to the voices of the nightingale and the c.o.c.kerel, which he mimicked so perfectly that Petrarch[44] and Peter would have run away. He could do with women what he chose, and every court dame excused herself by the example of her neighbor; for it used to be part of the _ton_ in Flachsenfingen to have one's fidelity once put to the proof. They say love for him began to be knit, like a stocking, at the calf, but it is utterly false. It is therefore no wonder that, with such uninterrupted moderation in courtly pleasures, he grew stronger and _healthier_ than the whole burnt-out, evaporated court, only he was too caustic, and too philosophic, and almost too roguish.

Victor and the reader and I have still, after all, only an indistinct, blurred crayon-drawing of Matthieu in our heads. My hero was somewhat pleased with him, as every eccentric man is with an eccentric one; it was a fault of his, that he pardoned too easily those of energy, even moral ones. With redoubled curiosity did he now take his way to the palace, or rather to its great garden, which joined thereto its semicircle of green beauties. He put in at the harbor of an embowered alley, and was delighted at the way in which the pierced shadow of the arbor, around whose iron skeleton tender twigs wound-like soft hair around hair-needles, glided dazzlingly over his body. Side by side with his arbor another parallel one pa.s.sed along. He followed some scattered black paper snippings as way-marks. The fluttering of the morning wind tossed down from a twig a little leaf of fine paper, which he picked up to read. He was still on the first line, "Man has two minutes and a half, one in which to smile once, ..." when he ran against an almost horizontal queue, which was a black club of Hercules, compared with mine or the reader's plaited capillary tube. The queue was projected by a head crooked downward, which, peering in a listening att.i.tude out of a niche in the arbor, was cutting a female profile, the original of which in a by-avenue was talking with Agatha. At the rustle of Victor's approach, the person, whose half-face was being stolen through the niche, turned round with surprise, and saw the proprietor of the Cyclops-queue with the profile-scissors, and also the hero of the Dog-post-days. The proprietor, without saying a word, thrust his artistic hand through the bush-work, and reached out to her her shadow or shadow-cutting.[45] Agatha took it, smiling; but the nameless one seemed to a.s.sume toward the cutter of forms and faces that seriousness which, on female faces, is nowise distinguished from contempt but in its ambiguousness, because his scissors awoke too strong a suspicion of his having been listening. Victor could perceive nothing of the nameless one yet except her stature, which, although bent forward a little, still surpa.s.sed the ordinary height. The face-cutter turned about with two flashing black eyes toward Victor, received him very politely, knew his name, told his own,--Matthieu,--and had, at his eighth pace, already had four good ideas. The fifth was, that he, unsolicited, introduced my hero to the couple in the side-arbor. The leafy nunnery-grating came to an end; a female form stepped forth, and Victor was so struck by it, that he, who knew little about embarra.s.sments, or was made only more quick-witted by them, began his introductory sermon without the exordium, and that was--Clotilda. When she had said three words, he listened so to the melody instead of the text, that he understood not a word of what she was saying....

I have here, lying beside me, on the snow-white ground of vellum, the very _silhouette_ which Matthieu had taken of her with the scissors. My correspondent will have me depict Clotilda as uncommonly beautiful.

Otherwise, he says, a hundred things in this history are incomprehensible; and therefore he sends me (because he cannot trust my fancy) at least her profile. And that is to be, even during my writing, steadily looked at all the time,--so much the more, as it might seem actually to have been cut from the very face[46] of another loveliest female angel that ever flew out of an unknown paradise down to this earth: I mean the Fraulein von * * *, at present maid-of-honor in Scheerau; I am not sure whether all my readers know her.

Victor felt as if his blood had been driven outward, and with warm touches described its circles on the external skin. At last Clotilda's cold eye, of which not the intoxicated pride of beauty, but the sober, retiring pride of innocence belonging only to the female s.e.x, was mistress, and her nose, which betrayed too much reflectiveness, brought his new Adam to his legs again, upon which the old Adam had already set himself up. He congratulated himself that he was Flamin's friend, and consequently had some claims upon her attention and her society.

Nevertheless he continued to feel all the time as if everything she did occurred now for the first time in the world; and he watched her as one does a man who has been operated on for blindness from his birth, or an Omai,[47] or a Li-Bu. He kept thinking, "How could sitting down ever become her,--or the handing of a fruit-dish, or the eating of a cherry, or stooping down to read a note?" I am a still worse ninny beside the above-mentioned court dame.

At last came Le Baut into the garden, after the first toilet, and his wife after the second. The Chamberlain--a short, supple, bedizened thing, that will pull off its hat before the Devil in h.e.l.l when it enters there--received the son of his hereditary enemy in an uncommonly complimentary manner, and yet with a dignity, for which, however, not his heart, but his rank, gave him strength. Victor, for the mere reason that he imagined him an injured person, cherished a predisposition of good-will towards him. Although Le Baut's tongue was almost, like his teeth, false and inserted, and consequently the words were so, too, which were made up of dentals and linguals, still his neither coa.r.s.e nor uncourteous flatteries--among which his att.i.tudes and intentions also are to be counted--pleased our honest Victor, who could not hate fine flatterers, as being weak persons. The Chamberlain's lady--who was already in the years which a coquette seeks to conceal, although she had still more reason to conceal the preceding ones--received our well-disposed hero with the sincerest voice that ever yet issued from a false Judas's bosom, and with the most artful face, on which it seemed impossible that the deceptions of love could ever have found room for a glance.

The new company took away Victor's embarra.s.sment at once. He soon remarked, indeed, the peculiar fighting- and dancing-positions of the circle towards each other. Clotilda seemed reserved and indifferent towards all, except her father. The step-mother was refined towards the Chamberlain, haughty towards her step-daughter, obliging towards Victor, and bore herself with an easy and subservient coquetry towards Matthieu, who, on his part, was, toward the wedded pair, alternately complimentary and ironical; towards Clotilda, cold as ice; and towards my hero, as courteous as Le Baut was to all. Nevertheless Victor was more joyous and free than any of them, not merely because he was under the free heavens,--for a room always lay upon him like a blockhouse, and a chair was like the stocks,--but because he was among _fine_ people, who, despite the most angular relations, give to conversation four b.u.t.terflies'-wings, that it may--in contrast to the clinging caterpillar, who impales himself on every thorn--fly without noise and in little curves over all p.r.i.c.kles, and alight only on blossoms. He was the greatest friend of fine people and fine turns of expression; hence it was that he took so much pleasure in the society of a Fontenelle, a Crebillon, a Marivaux,--of the entire female s.e.x, and particularly of the decently coquettish portion of it. Do not mistake me. Ah! upon his Flamin, upon his Dah.o.r.e, on all great men who were exalted above the refined, cowardly, vacant microcosmologists of the great world, his whole soul hung glowing; but for that very reason did he seek out, with a view to greater completeness, the smaller men, as fringe and corner-tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs, with so much zeal.

Four persons had at this moment four telescopes pointed at once at his soul: for himself, he took nothing of the kind into his hand, because he was too good-natured and too happy to be the spy of a heart; and only after the lapse of some days did he observe the image which any one with whom he had been in company left behind in his brain. He did not conceal himself, and yet he was seen in a false light: good men can more easily see into bad ones than the latter can into the former. He guessed others better than they guessed him. Only Clotilda deserves a word of defence for having, even until after dinner,--during which Le Baut, the greatest story-teller of this story-telling century, carried through his part,--regarded him as too malicious and satirical. But she could hardly do otherwise: a woman easily discerns the human, but hardly the divine (or devilish), nature in a man, with difficulty his worth, but easily his intentions, and his inner complexion more so than his contour. Matthieu gave occasion for her error, but also (as I shall presently report) for its retraction. This Evangelist,[48] who was a much greater satirist than his namesake in the New Testament, placed almost all Flachsenfingen on his private pillory, from Prince and Court down to Zeusel;[49] only the Minister (his father) and his many sisters he was compelled, unfortunately, to leave out, and likewise those persons with whom he happened at the moment to be talking. What was called calumny in him was at bottom an exaggerated Moravianism. For, as St. Macarius commands that one shall, out of humility, add twenty ounces of evil when one has five, but with regard to good, the reverse,--accordingly ingenuous, courtly souls, seeing that no one will use this modest language, endeavor to speak it in every one's name, and always ascribe to him whose humility they wish to represent fifteen ounces more of evil and less of good than he really has. On the contrary, in the case of present company, they find this mediatorial system of satisfaction unnecessary: hence the life of such court-n.o.bles is wholly dramatic; for as, according to Aristotle, comedy paints men as worse, and tragedy as better, than they are, so do the n.o.bles referred to bring forward in the former only _absent_, in the latter only _present_ persons. I do not know whether this perfection will go to the length of atoning for a real fault of the Evangelist,--namely, that, like the Romans on the Lupercalia, he--too often made thrusts at the female s.e.x. Thus, for instance, he said to-day, maidens and raspberries were wormy before they were ripe; female virtue was the red-hot iron which a woman (as was also the case in the old ordeals) had to carry from the font (the baptismal-day) to the altar (the wedding-day), in order to maintain her innocence, &c. Nothing fell upon Clotilda--and the same I have always found the case with the best of her s.e.x--more keenly than satire upon her whole s.e.x; but Victor was astonished at her art--very peculiar to her s.e.x and to worldly experience at once--of concealing the fact, that she both--endured and despised.

The Evangelist's example brought it about that Victor, too, began to phosph.o.r.esce at all points of his soul; the spark of wit ran round the whole circle of his ideas, which, like Graces, clasped each other by the hand, and his electrical chime of bells outdid the Page's discharges, which were lightnings, and stank of brimstone. Clotilda, who was very observing, mistrusted Sebastian's lips and heart.

The young n.o.bleman held him to be one of his feather, and in love with Clotilda; and that, on the ground that "the gayer or more earnest tone into which a man fell in company was a sign that a female electrical-eel had struck at his bosom." I must confess it,--Victor's effervescent soul never allowed him to hit that expression of respect for women which does not run into untimely tenderness, and for which he often envied cultivated people of the world; his regard unfortunately always looked like a declaration of love. The Chamberlain's lady accounted him as false as her Cicisbeo.[50] People like her cannot comprehend any other kind attentions than polite or artful ones.

They kept our hero over there all day and half the evening.

Not once in the whole day was he able,--although the invisible eyes of his inner man stood full of tears at Clotilda's n.o.ble figure, at her secret grief for her cold, buried friend, at her thrilling voice when she merely spoke to Agatha,--for all that, he never found himself able to say so much as an earnest word: toward strangers his nature always impelled him in the beginning to make sundry satirical leaps and other caprioles. But in the evening, when they were in the festal garden, where his usual shudder at the emptiness of life was made more intense by merriment, as it always was,--whereas serious, sad, pa.s.sionate conversations diminished it,--and when Clotilda granted him only a very cold civility, as if shown to him at a father's dictation, and did not divine in its full extent the difference between him and Matthieu, who a.s.sumed no second world, nor any inner man organically adapted to it: then was there a stifled feeling about his yearning heart; too many tears seemed to fill his whole breast and press for a pa.s.sage; and as often as he looked up to the great, deep heavens, something whispered in his soul: Take not the least thought for the fine circle, but speak out!

But there was only _one_ soul for him, to which Nature had attached those treadles, as to pedal-harps, which impart to every thought a higher tone of the spheres, to life a holy worth, and to the heart an echo from Eden: that soul was not his once so-loved Flamin, but his teacher, Dah.o.r.e, in England, whom he had long ago lost from sight, but never from his dreams. The shadow of this great man stood, as it were, projected upon the night, hovering and erect before him, and saying, "Dear one, I see thy inward weeping, thy sacred longing, thy desolate heart, and thy outstretched, trembling arms; but all is in vain; thou wilt never find me, nor I thee." He gazed at the stars, whose exalting science his teacher had even then instilled into his youthful soul; he said to Clotilda: "The topography of the heavens should be a piece of our religion; a woman ought to learn the catechism and Fontenelle by heart." And then he described the astronomical lessons of his Dah.o.r.e and the teacher himself.

From Clotilda's face there broke forth a great transfiguration, and she depicted with words and looks her own astronomical teacher at the Seminary,--how he was just as n.o.ble and just as quiet,--that he called himself _Emanuel_, and bore no surname, because he said, "With transitory man, with one whose genealogical tree so speedily sank into nothingness, the difference between family names and baptismal names was too slight";--that, unhappily, his n.o.ble soul inhabited a shattered body, which already bent low toward the grave,--that he was, according to the a.s.surance of her Abbess, the gentlest and greatest man who had yet come from the East Indies (his native country), although there were some singularities of his way of life in Maienthal, which one had to overlook....

Matthieu, whose wit borrowed from the snake his line of beauty, his poisonous tooth, his leap, and his coldness, said, softly and composedly: "It is well for his withered body that he was not made astronomer and night-watchman here at once; he applied, several years ago, for a telescope and a horn."

Clotilda was, for the first time, suffused with a flush of angry redness, like the morning before the rain: "If," said she, quickly, "you know him merely from my portraiture, you cannot possibly seek this characteristic among his." But the Chamberlain came to the Page's a.s.sistance, and said that Emanuel had actually, five years before, been refused that application. Clotilda looked, as if for help, to the only one whose attentiveness was not ironical,--our Victor, on whom the reflection of her transfiguration threw its beauty,--and asked, more in the tone of hope than of a.s.sertion, "Should one expect anything like that of such a mind?" "Of mine sooner," he replied, by way of evasion; for he, who could have contradicted the Pope to his face, found it often impossible to gainsay fair lips, especially when they propounded a question with so much reliance on his negative. "As often as I walk through towns by night, I listen to the bodily night-watch with more pleasure than to the spiritual. In the silent, listening night, under the outspread starry heaven, there is something so sublime in the homiletic owl's-song or hoot of the night-watch, that I have a hundred times wished me a horn and six verses."

The Chamberlain and his _a.s.socie_ took this for clumsy persiflage; the latter--perhaps for the sake of displeasing Clotilda, to the advantage of his heart's czarina, armed with false bosom and false rump--went on unshamed with his, and a.s.serted that the best method of making the aforenamed anonymous person sad was a very merry one, a comedy;--to be sure, a farce moved him still more strongly, as he himself witnessed in him at Goethe's moral puppet-play or fair.

Then flashed upon the surprised Victor a new face and a new relation; for he was exactly like Emanuel. A fair, with its human streams running up and down,--with its flitting of figures to and fro, as in a clock with images,--with its perpetually buzzing air, in which fiddle-squeak and human janglings and lowing of cattle conspire in one deafening roar,--and with the booths, crammed with commodities, offering a mosaic picture of our little life, patched up of varied necessities.... a village-fair, by all these reminiscences of the great, frosty _New-Year's fair_ of Life, made Victor's n.o.ble bosom at once heavy and full; he sank away, sweetly overpowered, into the din, and the human ranks around him absorbed his soul into its stiller fantasies. That was the reason why Goethe's Hogarthian _tail-piece_ of a village-fair (like Shakespeare) always left him melancholy; just as he was most fond, indeed, of finding in the low-comic the highest earnest (women are capable only of a reverse discovery), and a comic book, without any n.o.bler trait or hint (e. g. Blumauer's aeneid), he could endure as little as La Mettrie's[51] disgustingly laughing face, or the faces on the frontispieces of the Vade Mec.u.m.

Like a true youth, he forgot himself and all around him, half-stretched out his arms, and said, with an eye in which one saw a soul longingly laboring at a portrait of Emanuel: "Now I know thee, thou nameless one!

thou art the lofty man, who is so rare.... I a.s.sure you, Herr Von Schleunes, this Mr. Emanuel has something in him ... No, amidst this life on the wing, a thing which darts so _prestissimo_ out of one rain-shower into another,[52] and from cloud to cloud, should not keep its bill open on the stretch for one continued peal of laughter.... I have read today somewhere: Man has only two and a half minutes, and only one for a smile...." He had quite lost himself in the thicket of his feelings, else he would have kept back more than he did, especially the last line of the leaf found in the garden. Clotilda was startled at something or other. He would now gladly have read the leaf through. She related to him now those characteristics of her teacher into which she knew better how to enter; that he was a Pythagorean, went only in white robes, had himself put to sleep and waked with flute-music, ate no leguminous fruits or animal food, and often walked half the night under the stars.

Lost in mute rapture over the teacher, he hung with enthusiastic eyes upon the friendly lips of the pupil, who was enn.o.bled by her interest in a sublime and singular genius. She found here the first man whom she had ever put into an unfeigned enthusiasm for her Pythagorean favorite; and all her chasms turned themselves, blooming, towards Emanuel's image, like flowers toward the sun. Two fair souls discover their affinity first of all by the like love which binds them to a third. The full, inspired heart loves to hush and hide itself in a finery-room, which holds only heterogeneous persons, but when it finds therein its second, then in its joy at that its silence and secrecy and the finery-room are all forgotten.

The quicksilver of Victor's morning gayety had fallen ten degrees. In the twilight of his soul nothing peered forth but the paper which he wanted to read, and in fact presently read out in the avenue; and so he took an early leave.

The leaf had blown out of Clotilda's loose Alb.u.m, and was written by--Emanuel.

"Man has here two and a half minutes,--one to smile, one to sigh, and half a one to love; for in the midst of this minute he dies.

"But the grave is not deep, it is the gleaming footmark of an angel who seeks us. When the unknown hand sends the last arrow at the head of man, he bends his head in antic.i.p.ation, and the arrow merely takes off the crown of thorns from his wounds.[53]

"And with this hope, go forth from Maienthal, n.o.ble soul! but neither continents nor graves nor the second world can sunder or bind together two human beings: but only thoughts part or marry hearts.

"O, may thy life hang full of blossoms! From thy first Paradise may a second, as from the midst of one rose a second, be destined to bloom!

May the Earth glow in thy sight, as if thou stoodest above it, and followedst with thine eye its path in heaven! And as Moses died because G.o.d kissed him, so be thy life a long kiss of the Eternal! And may thy death be mine!... EMANUEL."

"O thou good, good soul!" cried Victor, "I can now no more forget thee.

Thou must--thou wilt--take an interest in my weak heart!" From his inner strings the drops of vapor that choked their music had now fallen off. His brain became a radiant landscape, in which there stood nothing but Emanuel's shining form. He arrived late at the parsonage, with a face expressive of blissful emotion; and in this glow he arrayed before his spectators the image of Clotilda, to whom he gave everything an angel has, even the wings that threatened a short stay. His friendship raised him so far above the suspicion of a suspicion, that he thought he could give his friend no warmer or tenderer proof of the same, than by the strongest sympathetic praise of Clotilda; Flamin's love for her pa.s.sed over through this friendship into his soul. The feeling for the beloved of a friend carries with it an unspeakable sweetness and moral tenderness. For Victor I answer, in this matter, that he understood, indeed, how a friend can sacrifice his love to another, but not how the other can accept the offering; but for Flamin I cannot stand security that he is cool enough, and a sufficient connoisseur of men, to regard the prize-medals which Victor stamps upon Clotilda, and upon which he sets her beautiful face and his coat of arms, as only just so many coins _de confiance_, and as pledges of brotherly fidelity. He was too impetuous and too ambitious to see, or even to listen to, the truth; for his open-hearted friend had to suppress many a tender reproach, which would have tried him too much, because he had too much love of praise and fieriness of spirit, and too little self-confidence. Hence a flatterer like Matthieu fastened himself so much the more firmly with his ivy-hooks into the fissures of this rock. When he a little harshly called the nameless Emanuel an enthusiast, Victor said little more about him that day. Flamin--either because he was a Jurist, or because he was a Hotspur, or both--could endure anything better than poets, philosophers, courtiers, and enthusiasts,--one excepted, who was all these at once, namely, his Sebastian Victor.

5. DOG-POST-DAY.

The Third of May.--The Nightingale.--The Abbate Sitting on Music.

I must here--premise, once for all, that I should be very stupid if I did not notice the mult.i.tude of improbabilities in this history: I am well aware of them all; nay, I have observed some of them--e. g. in Clotilda's behavior, or those in my hero's medical doctorship--even sooner than the reader, because I have--read everything before he has.

I therefore delayed no longer, but entreated my correspondent by to-day's Hofmann-mail to write me by the dog the next time, in his portrait-box, what we were all about. I told him flatly, that the devil a bit did he know, though I did, however, of the readers and their tyranny. I must tell him (I said) that they were people of sense, whom a Biographer, nay, even a Romance-architect, dared not approach with poetic deception, but they would say, like the Areopagus, "Give us the naked historical fact here, without any superfluous poetic dressing up." And in fact it was a marvel to me, I went on to say, that he should not yet know that they had so much, partly understanding and partly four-leaved clover[54] in them, that, if the greatest authors and tragic poets should undertake to be fine, and by aesthetic juggleries to excite in them fear, like cuppers, or pity, like beggars, they would cold-bloodedly let these men work till they were tired, and say, "We are not to be caught." That the Reviewers, however, were still more crazy and clever, and were perhaps the best _Skotometers_ (measurers of darkness), at the same time that they were the wretchedest _Photometers_ (light measurers) going. And finally, I said right out to my historical adjutant, that it was no injury to him, but very much to me, that I should be translated into several languages, and therein, for every improbability in the text, be dragged down into the scourging-cellar of a note, and there sorely lashed, without daring to open my mouth, if the interpreting scoundrel who translated (or transported) my gourd-bottle-case like a cask of wine, from one country to another, should, on the way, as all carriers do, outwardly besprinkle and inwardly fill up the wine with water.--He must, at least, (I entreated him) give me an answer, that I might show it to the readers, as an evidence that I had written to him.

By the next Dog-post-day, therefore, at all events, great things may be expected.--

Besides, the 4th of May comes into that also, with what should seem its two important Thanksgiving festivals for the arrival of the two Sebastians,--the little one into the world, the elder at the bathing-town.--Even Clotilda is to be there to-morrow, and Victor is very eager (and so am I) to see her in the sunshine of love beside Flamin; for over yonder all her charms seemed to bloom round a heart not yet smitten and ripened by love's ray, as flower-leaves hide the _white heart-leaves_ from the sun.... Matthieu came to-day to take leave, because he was going back to-morrow to the city. Our hero was less and less pleased with him, and a Page's history, which he related of himself, renewed Victor's resolve to fulfil soon the entreaty of the Parson's wife by ridding himself of such a fellow.

Matthieu, as Page, rendered service to the chief Tutor's lady, I believe both the greater and the lesser service. Nevertheless, he had once to smuggle an Abbate and conscience-keeper into one of her cabinets, which was destined to be the confessional and holy place to a degree of which, to be sure, her stupid, jealous husband had no notion.

Now there was in the next room a musical armchair, upon which, in fact, one played with no other instrument than the rump; so soon as one sat down in it, it began its overtures, and I myself once sat in such a one at Prince Esterhazy's. Our Mat,[55] as all the citizens of Flachsenfingen called him,--some government people called him even the Evangelist,--appointed the Abbate two hours too soon; but, lest the man with the shorn peruke should be tired of waiting, he first carried in the music-making chair as resting-bench and anchoring-ground for weary expectants. Toward three of the night, when the company was gone, except the chief Tutor, the counsellor of conscience, weary of standing, let his rump sink at last into the easy-chair stuffed out with favorite arias, and woke up with his breeches the whole wailing music therein with its thrilling pa.s.sages, without the least possibility of stilling the cabinet-serenade of this alarmer. At last the husband darted like a herring at the final cadences (or falls), and dragged from his organ-stool the sedentary conscience-man in the midst of counterpoint and shakes, and spoiled his quail-call for him, I believe, by an administered cudgelling. The chief Tutor's lady easily guessed the master of the chair, Mat; but so very much a matter of course is pardon at court,--not merely _past_ offences, but _future_ ones being forgiven there by good, easy female souls,--that the chief Tutor's lady did not avenge herself upon Mat, although he _served_ her two weeks and a half longer, till after just two weeks and a half....

Victor was indignant at Flamin's laughter; he loved drollery, but not bantering. His sweetened blood began gradually with this _mother of vinegar_ to grow sour towards this Mat, whose cold, ironical gallantry toward the honest Agatha of itself exasperated him, though her phlegmatic, and, as it were, married pulse, beat in his absence and in his presence at the same rate. Still more heart-burning matter and acid collected in Victor's bosom, from the fact that he, who tolerated everything,--vain men, proud ones, atheists, enthusiasts,--could nevertheless not endure men who regard virtue as a kind of refined provision-bakery, wantonness as allowed, the spirit as an almsgatherer for the flesh, the heart as a blood-syringe, and our soul as a new shoot of the body. But this was what Matthieu did, who besides had a pa.s.sion for philosophizing, and threatened to infect Victor's friend, who, in fact, was as cold toward the whole world of poets and spirits as a statesman, with his philosophical cancer-poison.

In the evening he endeavored to sound, a little nearer to Flamin's ear, a blast upon a second Trumpet of Fame against the departed pseudo-Evangelist. It was in the garden that he blew it. He took the hand of which Matthieu's was not worthy into his better one, and began, with the finest and heartiest forbearance.--which one must grant even to true friendship for a hollow friend,--his iconoclastic attack. For while he charged it upon the lady of the Chamberlain, that she threw down at Agatha from her high post looks nowise cleaner than what monkeys used to throw down from their high roosts at pa.s.sers-by; and while he blamed the young Page, that, like many of the n.o.bility, only among the n.o.bility could he scent best (perhaps by the help of contrast) the heretical odor of one belonging to the burgher-cla.s.s, and that his words and looks at the palace flew like icicles at the good, warm heart of Agatha; at the same time the reproach of this May-frost toward the sister was only a pretext behind which he veiled the observation, that the Page would not be Flamin's friend, if he were not Agatha's lover.

Flamin's silence (the sign of his indignation) gave the stream of his eloquence a new and swifter descent; in addition to this a nightingale, poetizing in Le Baut's garden, woke up all the echoes of love in his soul.--He therefore grasped, of course, both of Flamin's hands in that effervescence which always transformed his steps toward an object into springs, and thereby overshot the mark. Many plans miscarry, because the heart toils after the head, and because at the end of the execution one applies less caution than at its beginning. He looked upon his beloved, the fluting throat of the nightingale set the text of his love to music, and with indescribable emotion he said: "Best one, thy heart is too good not to be outwitted by those who cannot reach thee. O if, some day, the sharp edge of court _ton_ should pa.s.s bloodily across the veins of thy breast (Flamin's looks seemed to ask, Art thou not then even satirical?)--O if he, who has no faith in virtue and disinterestedness, should one day himself cease to show any; if he should sorely betray thee; should the hand, which court-life had hardened, like a lemon-squeezer, wring blood and tears from thy heart, then, I beseech thee, despair not, only not of friendship,--for thy mother and I love thee far otherwise. O verily, at the time when thou art forced to say, Why did I not hearken to my friend who so warned me, and to my mother who so loved me?--then mayest thou come to me, to one who never changes, and who prizes thy error higher than self-interested vigilance; then would I lead thee weeping to thy mother, and say to her, take him wholly, thou only art worthy to love him." To all this Flamin said not a word. "Art thou sad, my Flamin?" "Tired! "I am sad; the plaints of the nightingale strike upon my soul like echoes of _future_ ones," said Victor. "Are you pleased with this nightingale, Victor?" "Indescribably, as if she were a friend of my innermost soul."

"Thus are people imposed on; it is _Matthieu singing_," Flamin quickly answered. For the Evangelist differed from a nightingale in nothing except size. And then Flamin, somewhat irritated, and yet with a pressure of his friend's hand, took his departure.