CHAPTER VII.

CHAPTER VII.THE SHOOTING-MATCH—ROSA’S AUTUMNAL CAMPAIGN—CONSIDERATIONS CONCERNING CURSES, KISSES, AND THE MILITIA.There is nothing which so much inconveniences me, or is so much to the prejudice of this story (so beautiful in itself), as the fact that I have made a resolution to restrict it within the compass of four alphabets. I have thus, by my own act, deprived myself of everything in the shape of room for digressions. I find myself, metaphorically, in a somewhat similar position to one which I once found myself in, without metaphor, on an occasion when I was measuring the diameter and circumference of the town of Hof. On that occasion I had fastened a Catel’s pedometer by a hook to the waistband of my trousers and the silken cord which runs down the thigh to a curved hook of steel at my knee, so that the three indexes on one dial (of which the first marks a hundred steps, the second a thousand, and the third up to twenty thousand) were all moving just as I moved myself. At this moment I met a young lady, whom it was incumbent on me that I should see home. I begged her to excuse me, as I had a Catel’s pedometer on, and had already made a certain number of steps towards my measurement of the diameter of Hof. “You see, in a moment,” I said, “how I am situated. The pedometer, like a species of conscience, records all the steps I take; and, with a lady, I shall be obliged to take shorter steps, besides thousands of sideway and backward steps, all of which the pedometer will put to the account of the diameter. So, you see, I am afraid it’s quite impossible that Icanhave the pleasure of——” However, this only made her the more determined that Ishould, and I was well laughed at; but I screwed myself to the spot, and wouldn’t stir. At last I said I would go home with her, pedometer and all, if she would just read off my indexes for me (seeing I couldn’t twist myself down low enough to see the dial)—read them off for me twice—firstly, then and there, and secondly, when we got to her house—so that I might deduct the steps taken by me in this young lady’s company from the size of Hof. This agreement was honestly kept; and this little account of the occurrence may be of service to me some day if ever I publish (as I have not given up all hopes of doing) my perspective sketch of the town of Hof; and townspeople who saw me walking with the said young lady, and with the pedometer trailing at my knee, might cast it in my teeth and say it was a lame affair, and that nobody could calculate as to the steps he might take in a lady’s company, far less apply them to the measurement of a town.St. Andrew’s Day was bright and fine, and not very windy. It was tolerably warm, and there wasn’t as much snow in the furrows as would have cooled a nutshell of wine, or knocked over a humming-bird. On the previous Tuesday Siebenkæs had been looking on with the other spectators, when the bird-pole had described its majestic arc in descending to impale the black golden eagle with outstretched wings, and rise again therewith on high. He felt some emotion as the thought struck him, “That bird of prey up there holds in his claws, and will dispense, the happiness or the misery of thy Lenette’s coming weeks, and our goddess of Fortune has transformed herself and dwindled into that black form, nothing left of her but herWINGS and BALL.”On St. Andrew’s morning, as he said good-bye to Lenette, with kisses, and in his abbreviated boots, over which he had a pair of goloshes, she said, “May God grant you luck, and not let you do any mischief with your rifle.” She asked several times if there was nothing he had forgotten—his eyeglass, or his handkerchief, or his purse; “And mind you don’t get into any quarrel with Mr. von Meyern,” was her parting counsel: and finally, as one or two preliminary thundrous drum-ruffles were heard from the direction of the courthouse, she added most anxiously, “For God’s sake, mind and don’t shoot yourself; my blood will run cold the whole forenoon every time I hear a gun go off!”At length the long thread of riflemen, rolled up like a ball, began to unwind itself, and the waving line, like a great serpent, moved off in surging convolutions to the sound of trumpets and drums. A banner represented the serpent’s crest, and the standard-bearer’s coat was like a second flag beneath the other. The town-soldiery, more remarkable for quality than for quantity, shot the mottled line of competitors at intervals with the white of their uniforms. The auctioneering hairdresser—the only member of the lower ten thousand who rejoiced in a powdered head—tripped along, keeping the white peak of his cap at the due degree of distance from the leather pigtails of the aristocracy, which he had that morning tied and powdered. The multitude felt what a lofty position in this world really was, when, with bent heads, they raised their eyes to Heimlicher von Blaise, the director of the competition, who accompanied the procession in his capacity of aorta of the whole arterial system, or elementary fire of all these ignes-fatui—or, in a word, as master of the shooters’ lodge. Happy was the wife who peeped out and saw her husband marching past in the procession—happy was Lenette, for her husband was there, and looked gallantly up as he passed by. His short boots looked very nice, indeed; they were made both in the old fashion and in the new, and, like man, had put on the new (short) Adam over the old one.I wish Schulrath Stiefel had given a thought or so to the St. Andrew’s shooting-match, and looked out of his window at his Orestes; however, he went on with his reviewing.Now, when these processional caterpillars had crept together again at the shooting-ground, as upon a leaf—when the eagle hung in his heavenly eyrie, like the crest of the future’s armorial bearings—when the wind instruments, which the troop of “wandering minstrels” had scarce been able to hold firmly to their lips, blared out their loudest now that the band was halted, and as the procession, with martial tramp and rattle of grounded rifles, came with a rush into the empty echoing shooting-house, everybody, strictly speaking, was more or less out of his senses, and mentally intoxicated; and that although the lots were not even drawn, far less any shot fired. Siebenkæs said to himself, “The whole thing is stuff and nonsense, yet see how it has gone to all our heads, and how a mereunbrokenfaded flower-wreath of pleasanttrifles, wound ten times about our hearts, half chokes and darkens them. Our thirsty heart is made of loose, absorptive mould; a warm shower makes it swell, and as it expands it cracks the roots of all the plants that are growing in it.”Mr. von Blaise, who smiled unceasingly upon my hero, and treated the others with the rudeness becoming authority, ordered the lots to be drawn which were to decide the order in which the competitors were to shoot. The reader cannot expect Chance to stop the wheel of Fortune, thrust in her hand, and, behind her bandage, pull out from among seventy numbers the very first for the advocate; she drew him the twelfth, however. And at length the brave Germans and imperial citizens opened fire upon the Roman eagle. At first they aimed at his crown. The eagerness and zeal of these pretenders were proportioned to the importance of the affair: was there not a royal revenue of six florins attached to this golden penthouse when the bullet brought it down—to say nothing whatever of other crown property, consisting of three pounds of tow and a pewter shaving-dish. The fellows did what they could; but the rifle placed the crown of the eagle, not, alas! on our hero’s head, but upon that of No. 11, his predecessor, the hectic Saxon. He had need of it, poor fellow! seeing that, like a Prince of Wales, he had come into possession of the crown debts sooner than of the crown itself.At a shooting contest of this kind nothing is better calculated to dissipate everything in the shape of tedium than to have arrangements made for “running shooting” (as it is called) being carried on by those who are waiting their turn at the birdpole. A man who has to wait while sixty-nine other people slowly aim and shoot before his turn comes round, may find a good deal to amuse him if, during that time, he can load and aim at something of a less lofty kind—for instance, a Capuchin general. The “running” or “swing” shooting, as carried out at Kuhschnappel, differs in no respect from that of other places. A piece of canvas is hung up, and floats to and fro; there are painted dishes of edibles upon it, as on a table-cloth, and whoever puts a bullet through one of these paintings obtains the original—just as princes choose their brides from their portraits, before bringing home the brides in person; or as witches stick pins into a man’s image in order to wound the prototype himself. The Kuhschnappelers were, on this occasion, shooting at a portrait on this canvas, which a great many persons considered to represent a Capuchin general. I know that there were some who, basing their opinion chiefly upon the red hat in the portrait, considered it to represent a cardinal, or cardinal-protector, but these have clearly, in the first place, got to settle the point with a third party, which differed from both of those above mentioned, holding that it portrayed the whore of Babylon—that is to say, a European one. From all of which we may form a pretty accurate estimate of the amount of truth contained in another rumour—which I contradicted in the first hour of its existence—namely, that the Augsburg people had taken offence at this effigy-arquebusading, and had written, in consequence, to the attorney-general representing that they felt themselves aggrieved, and that it was an injustice to one religion if, within the bounds of the holy Roman empire, a general of a religious order should be shot to shivers, without a Lutheran superintendent general being also shot to shivers at the same time. I should certainly have heard something further about this, if it had been anything but mere wind. Indeed, I have a shrewd suspicion that the whole story is no more than a false tradition, or garbled version ofanotherstory, which a gentleman of rank belonging to Vienna recentlyliedto me at table. What he said was, that in the more considerable towns of the empire, where the spirit-level of religious toleration has established a beautiful equilibrium between Papists and Lutherans, many had complained, on the part of the Lutherans, of the circumstance that although there were equal numbers of night-watchmen and censors (that is, transcendental night-watchmen), keepers of hotels, and keepers of circulating libraries of each communion, yet there were more Papists hanged than Lutherans; so that it was very clear, whether the Jesuits had to do with it or not, that a high and important post such as the gallows was not filled with the same amount of impartiality as the Council of State, but with a certain bias towards the Catholics. I thought of contradicting the story, in the most distinct terms, in the ‘Literary Gazette’ of December last, but Government declined to pay the expense of the insertion.However, although those who occupied themselves with the “swing” shootingdidonly have a Capuchin to aim at, the said swing shooting was every bit as important a business as the shooting at thestandingmark. I must point out (in this connection) that there were edible prizes attached to the divers bodily members of this said general of his order, which had their attractions for riflemen of a reflective turn of mind. An entire Bohemian porker was the prize appointed for him who should pierce the heart of the Capuchin pasha—which heart, however, was represented by a spot no bigger than a beauty-patch—so that he who should hit this little mark would have need of all his skill and nerve. The cardinal’s hat was easier of attainment, for which reason it was worth only a couple of jack. The honorarium of the oculist who should succeed in inserting new (leaden) pupils into the cardinal’s eyes consisted of an equivalent number of geese. As he was portrayed in the full fervour of prayer, it was well worth anyone’s while to send a bullet through between his hands, seeing that this would be tantamount to knocking the two fore-quarters out of a cantering, smoked pig. And each of the cardinal’s feet rested upon a fine hind-quarter or ham. I do not hesitate for a moment—whatever the imperial burgh of Kuhschnappel may say to it—to record, with the utmost distinctness, that no portion of the whole lord-protector was more poorly endowed, or had a scantier revenue and salarium allotted to it, than his navel; for there was nothing to be got out of that, with however good a bullet, but a Bologna sausage.The advocate had failed in his designs upon the crown; but fortune chucked him the cardinal’s hat to make up for it—the cardinal’s hat with two pike inside it. But some puissant necromantic spell of invulnerability turned all his bullets aside from the eagle’s head, and from the general’s too. He would fain have sent one eye, at any rate, out of the face of the harlot of Babylon, but he could not manage that either.Now the prize-lists—which are correct, seeing that they were made out by the secretary, under the eyes of the president, Herr von Blaise—state with distinctness that the head, the ring in the beak, and the little flag, fell into the hands of numbers 16, 2, and 63.The sceptre was now being aimed at; and Siebenkæs would have been very very glad, for his dear little wife’s sake (waiting for him now, as she was, with the soup), to have sent that, at least, flying out of the eagle’s talons, and to have fixed it, by way of a bayonet, on to his rifle.All the numbers who had tried their best to break off this golden oak-branch had shot in vain, except the worst—the most to be dreaded of all—his own predecessor and landlord.Heaimed, and shot—and the gilded harpoon quivered. Siebenkæs fired—and the eel-spear came tumbling down.Messrs. Meyern and Blaise smiled, and uttered congratulations; the blowers of instruments, crooked and straight, blew, in honour of the advent of this new bird-member, a blast both loud and shrill (like the Karlsbad people, when a new bath-guest arrives), looking closely and carefully at their music as they did so, though they had played their littlefanfaresfar oftener than the very night-watchmen. All the infantas—I mean all the children—began a race for the sceptre, but the buffoon dashed among them, and scattered them; and, taking up the sceptre, presented that emblem of sovereignty to the advocate with one hand, holding in the other hisownemblem of sovereignty, the whip.Siebenkæs contemplated with a smile the little twig of timber—the little branch, sticking to which the buzzing swarms of nations are so often borne away; and he veiled his satisfaction under cover of the following satirical remarks (which the reigning Heimlicher overheard, and applied to himself):—“A very pretty little frog-shooter! Itought, by rights, to be a honey-gauge; but the poor bees are crushed by it, that their honey-bags may be got out of them! The Waiwodes and the despots, child-like, put the bees of the country to death, and take the honey from theirstomachs, not from, theircombs. A truly preposterous and absurd implement! It is made of wood; very likely a piece broken off a shepherd’s crook, and gilded, pointed, and notched—one of those shepherd’s staves with which the shepherds often drag the sheep’s fat out of them while they are feeding in the meadows!”He had ceased to be conscious, now, when he emitted the bitterest satirical matter (there was never a drop of it in his heart); he often turned mere acquaintances into foes with some joke, made merely for the sake of jesting; and couldn’t imagine what made people vexed with him, and why it was thathecouldn’t have his little bit of fun with them as well as any one else.He put the sceptre into the breast of his coat and took it home, seeing that they would not shoot up to his number again before dinner-time. He held it up straight and stiff, as the king of diamonds holds his, and said to Lenette, “There’s a soup-ladle and sugar-tongs for you, all in one!” the allusion being to the two pewter prizes, which, in company with a sum of nine florins, had fallen to his share by way of sceptre-fief. It was enough for one shot. And next he gave an account of the catching of the pike. He expected that Lenette would, at the very least, go through the five dancing positions and execute Euler’s “knight’s move” on the chess-board of the room-floor, into the bargain, within the first five seconds after hearing the news. She did what shecoulddo, namely, nothing at all; and said what she knew, namely, that the landlady had been holding forth, with bitter severity, to the bookseller’s wife, on the subject of the non-payment of the rent, and further, concerning her own husband, whom she characterised as a smooth-tongued flatterer and payer of compliments—a man who didn’t half threaten people. “What I tell you,” repeated the sceptre-bearer, “is, that I have this day had the luck to shoot a couple of pikes and a sceptre, Wendeline Engelkraut!” and he banged his sceptre-knout in indignation upon the table where the crockery was all set out. She answered at last, “Well, Lucas came running a short time ago and told me all aboutthat; Iam soglad about it, but I should quite think you will shoot a good many more things yet—will you not? I said so to the bookseller’s wife.”She was slipping into her old cart-rut again, you see, but Firmian thought, “She can cry and mourn loud enough, but deuce a bit of gladness can she show when a fellow comes home with a pike or two under his arm, and a sceptre or so.” It was just the same with the wife of the gentle-hearted Racine, when he threw down a long purse of golden Louis XVI. he had got hold of, on the table.How, or whence, oh! beloved wives, cometh to you the naughty trick ye have of making a kind of parade of an insupportable frigidity and indifference, just on the very occasions when your husbands come to you laden with good news, or with presents—that at the very moment when Fate brightens the wine of your joy into “bloom,” your vats grow turbid with the lees of theoldliquor? Comes it from your custom of showing only one of your faces at a time, like your sister and prototype, the moon? or from a peevish discontent with destiny? or is its cause a sweet, delicious, overflowing happiness and gladness, making the heart too full and the tongue too hard to move?I believe it is often from all these causes combined.In men, again—sometimes, too, in women, but only in one out of a thousand—it may arise from the sad thought of the sharks which tear off the arm with which, down in the dark ocean, all breathless and anxious, we have clasped hold of four pearls of happiness. Or, perhaps, from a deeper question still. Is not our heart’s inward bliss but an olive-leaf which a dove brings to us, fluttering over the great deluge foaming and seething all round us—an olive-leaf which she has culled for us away in the far distant Paradise, high up above the flood, clear and blissful in the eternal sun? And if all we attain of that whole olive-garden is but one leaf, instead of all its flowers and its fruit, is this leaf of peace, is this dove of peace, to give to us somethingbeyondpeace—namely, hope?Firmian went back to the shooting-ground, his breast full of growing hopes. The heart of man, which, in matters of chance, makes its calculations in direct defiance of the theory of probabilities, and when heads have turned up once, expects them three times running—(although whatoughtto be anticipated is the very reverse)—or reckons upon hitting the eagle’s talon became it has knocked the sceptre out of it—this heart of man, uncontrollable alike in its fears and in its hopes, the advocate took with him to the shooters’ trench.He came not by the talons, however. And at the folded praying claws or hands of the general of the Capuchins—these algebraic exponents or heraldic devices of two forequarters of pork—aimed he alike in vain.It mattered not; more was left of the eagle, when all was done, than would be this day of Poland, if the latter, or its coat of arms—a silver eagle in a bloody field—were to be set up on a throne or a bird-pole, and shot at by a shooting-club composed of an army or two.Even the imperial globe was not yet knocked down. Number 69, a formidable foregoer, Mr. Everard Rosa von Meyern, had taken his aim—eager to cullthisforbidden fruit—a Ribstone pippin and football fit for a very prince, such as this imperial apple, was a thing of too great price to be grasped for the sake of what was to be gained along with it—’twas honour alone that fired his heart—he pulled his trigger, and he might just as well have aimed in the opposite direction. Rosa—this particular apple being too high out of his reach—went, all blushes, in among the lady spectators, dealing out apples of Paris all round, and telling each lady how lovely she was, that she might be convinced how handsome he was himself. In the eyes of a woman, her panegyrist is, firstly, a verycleverman, and, ere long, such anice-LOOKING one. Rosa knew that grains of incense are the anise which these doves fly after, as though infatuated.Our friend had no need to disquiet himself about any of the would-be fruit-gatherers—about the second, eighth, or ninth, till it came to the eleventh—and he was the Saxon, who shot like the demon in person. There were few among the seventy who didn’t wish this accursed gallows-number at the deuce, or at all events into the vegetable kingdom, where it is altogether absent.[50]The hairdresser fired, struck the eagle on the leg, and the leg remained hanging aloft, with the imperial globe in the talons.His lodger (and lawyer) came up to the scratch, but the landlord stood still in the trench, to satisfy his soul with curses of his luckless star. As the former levelled the sights of his rifle upon the ball above, he made up his mind that he would not aim at the ball at all, but at the eagle’s tail, so as simply toshakethe apple down.In one second the worm-eaten world-apple fell. The Saxon cursed beyond all description.Siebenkæs all but offered up an inward prayer, not because a pewter mustard-pot, a sugar-dish, and five florins came showering along with the apple into his lap, but for the piece of good luck—for the warm burst of sunshine which thus came breaking out from among the clouds of the distant storm. “Thou wouldst prove this soul of mine, happy Fortune,” thought he, “and thou placest it, as men do watches, in all positions—perpendicular and horizontal, quiet and unquiet—to see if it will go and mark the time correctly in all, or no. Ay, truly! itshall!”He let this little, bright, miniature earth-ball roll from one hand to the other, spinning and weaving, as he did so, the following brief chain of syllogisms:—“What a genealogical tree of copies! Nothing but pictures within pictures comedies within comedies! The emperor’s globe is an emblem of this terrestrial globe of ours—the core of each is a handful of earth—and this emperor’s globe of mine, again, is a miniature emblem of a real emperor’s, with even less of earth—none at all, in fact. The mustard-pot and sugar-dish, again, are emblems of this emblem. What a long, diminishing series, ere man arrives at enjoyment!” Most of man’s pleasures are butpreparationsfor pleasure; he thinks he has attained hisends, when he has merely got hold of hismeansto those ends. The burning sun of bliss is beheld of our feeble eyes but in the seventy mirrors of our seventy years. Each of these mirrors reflects that sun’s image less brightly—more faint and pale—upon the next; and in the seventieth it shimmers upon us all frozen, and is become a moon.He ran home, but without his globe, for he did not mean to tell her of that till the evening. It was a great refreshment to him to slip, during his shooting vacations, away from the public turmoil to his quiet little chamber, give a rapid narrative of anything of importance going on, and then cast himself back into themêlée. As his number was a next-door neighbour to Rosa’s, and they had, consequently, their holidays at the same time, it surprises me that he did not come upon Herr von Meyern beneath his own window, inasmuch as that gentleman was walking up and down there, with his head elevated, like an ant. He who desires to destroy a young gentleman of this species, let him look for himunder(if notin) a lady’s window; just as an experienced gardener, when he wants to kill woodlice or earwigs, needs only lift up his flower-pots to annihilate them by the score.Siebenkæs did not hit so much as another shaving the whole of the afternoon; even the very tail, which he had attacked with such success in his bold stroke for the conquest of the globe of the holy Roman empire, resisted all his efforts to knock it off. He let himself be drummed and fifed home by the town militia towards evening. When he got to his wife’s door, he there assumed therôleof Knecht Ruprecht (the children’s “Bogie,” who, on St. Andrew’s Day, bestows upon them, for thefirsttime in their career, fruit, and fear along with the same), and, growling in a terrible manner, chucked his (wooden) apple in to her; a piece of fun which delighted her immensely. But really I ought not to record such little trifles.As Firmian laid his head on his pillow, he said to his wife, “This time to-morrow, wife, we shall know if it be two crowned heads that we are going to lay on the pillow, or not! I shall justrecallthis important minute to your memory to-morrow night, when we’re going to bed!” When he got up in the morning he said, “Very likely this is the last time that I shall rise a common, ordinary person, without a crown.”He was so anxious to have the mutilated bird (all wet with dew, a mass of gunshot wounds and compound fractures) once more before his bodily eyes, that he hardly knew how to possess himself in patience till the time came. But it was only as long as hedid notsee the eagle that his hopes of shooting himself into a king at him endured. He was, therefore, delighted to agree to a proposal made by the clever Saxon, whose bullet had throughout the proceedings always cleared the way for his number-neighbour’s; the proposal was, “we go shares in gains and in losses—in the bird and in the cardinal.” This copartnership doubled the advocate’s hopes by the process of halving them.But these companions in arms didn’t bring down a single painted splinter the whole of the afternoon. Each in his secret heart thought the other was the bird of evil omen; for in matters of chance we are prone to hang our faith upon a bit of superstition, rather than to nothing at all. The fickle Babylonish harlot went fluttering off with that amount of bashful coyness, that the hairdresser once sent a bullet within an ace of the fellow who was working her backwards and forwards.At last, however, in the afternoon, he sent his Cupid’s dart right through that black heart of hers, and, by consequence, through the pig at the same time. This almost terrified Firmian; he said that if he couldn’t hit anything himself he would accept only the head of this pig—this polypus in the heart of the Babylonianfille de joie. All that was left of the bird was itstorso, which stuck to its perch like the very Rump Parliament, which these pretenders to the crown would so fain have dissolved.A regular running musketry fusilade of eager interest, enthusiasm, emulation, now went flashing from breast to breast, fanned by every puff of powder which rose in smoke as a rifle went off. When the bird shook a little all the competitors shook also, except Herr von Meyern, who had gone off, and—seeing what a state of excitement everybody was in, especially our hero—marched away to Madame Siebenkæs, thinking that he had a better chance of becoming, inthatquarter, king of a queen than he had here of acquiring the sovereignty of the riflemen. However, my readers and I shall slip into the Siebenkæs’ chamber after him presently.Twice already had the seventy numbers loaded in vain for the decisive shot; the obstinate stump still stuck glued to its perch, and scarce so much as trembled; the poor tantalised hearts were torn and pierced by every bullet that sped on its course. Their fears waxed apace, so did their hopes, but most of all their curses (those brief ejaculatory prayers to the devil). The theologians of the seventh decade of the present century had the devil often enough in their pens—in their denials or in their assertions of him—but the Kuhschnappelers had him far oftener in their mouths, particularly the upper classes.Seneca, in his ‘Remedies for Anger,’ has omitted the simplest of all, the devil. True, the Kabbalists highly extol the therapeutic powers of the word Shemhamphorash, which is a name of a diametrically opposite character; but I have observed, for my part, that the spotted, malignant fever of wrath, so readily diagnosed by the raving delirium of the patient, is instantly relieved, dispersed, and mitigated, by invoking the name of the devil, which is perhaps, indeed, quite as efficacious a remedy as the wearing of amulets. In the absence of this name, the ancients, who were altogether without a Satan, recommended a mere repetition of the A B C, which, it is true, doescontainthe devil’s name, only too much diluted with other letters. And the word Abracadabra, spokendiminuendo, was a cure for corporeal fevers. As regards the inflammatory fever of anger, however, the greater the quantity of morbid matter which has to be ejected from the system through the secretions of the mouth, the greater is the number of devils necessary to make mention of. For a mere trifling irritation—a mild case of simple anger—“the devil,” or perhaps “hell and the devil,” will generally be found sufficient; but for the pleuritic fever of rage I should be disposed to prescribe “the devil and his infernal grandmother:” strengthening the dose, moreover, with a “donnerwetter” or two, and a few “sacraments,” as the curative powers of the electric fluid are now so generally recognised. It is unnecessary to point out to me that in cases of absolute canine fury or maniacal wrath, doses of the specific, such as the foregoing, are of little avail; I should, of course, let a patient in this condition be “taken and torn by all the devils in hell.” But what I would fain render clear is that, in all these remedies, the realspecificis the devil; for as it is his sting which is the cause of our malady, he himself has got to be employed as the remedy, just as the stings of scorpions are cured by the application of scorpions in powder.The tumult of anticipation shook up the aristocracy and the sixpenny gallery into one common whole. On occasions like this—as also in the chase and in agricultural operations—the aristocracy forget what they are, viz., something better than the citizen classes. An aristocrat should, in my opinion, never for a moment lose sight of the fact that his position with reference to the common herd is that which the actor now a days stands in with respect to the chorus. In the time of Thespis the whole of the tragedy was sung and acted by the chorus, while one single actor, called the protagonist, delivered a speech or two, unaccompanied by any music, bearing on the subject of the play. Æschylus introduced a second actor, the deuteragonist; Sophocles even a third, the tritagonist. In more recent times the actors have been retained, but the chorus omitted, unless we consider those who applaud to represent it. In a similar manner also, in this world of ours (mankind’s natural theatre), the chorus,i. e. the people, has been gradually cleared off the stage, only with more advantage than in the case of smaller theatrical ones, and promoted from taking part in the action of the drama (which the protagonists (princes), deuteragonists (ministers), and tritagonists (people of quality), are better fit to do), to the post of spectators who criticise and applaud—what was the chorus in Athens, now sitting at ease in the pit, near the orchestra, and before the stage where the great “business” is going on.By this time it was past two o’clock, and the afternoons were brief; yet the saucy bird would not stir. Everybody swore that the carpenter who had hatched it from its native block was a low scoundrel, and must have carved it out of tough branchwood. But at last, all battered, with nearly the whole of its paint broken away from it, it did appear to be somewhat disposed to topple down. The hairdresser, who, like the common herd in general, was conscientious towards individuals only, not towards an aggregation of them, now without any scruple secretly doubled his bullets (since he could not double his rifle), putting in one for himself and one for his brother in arms, in the hope that this decomposing medium might have the effect of precipitating the eagle. “The devil and his infernal grandmother!” cried he, when he had fired his shot, making use of the febrifuge or cooling draught above alluded to. He now had to place all his trust in his lodger, to whom he handed his rifle. Siebenkæs fired, and the Saxon cried, “Ten thousand devils!” doubling in vain the dose of devils, as he had the dose of bullets.They now, in despair, laid aside their rifles and also their hopes; for there were more pretenders to this crown than there were to that of Rome in the time of Galienus, when there were but thirty. This shooting septuaginta had all telescopes at their eyes (when they had not rifles there), that they might observe how there were a greater number of bullets in this heaven-suspended constellation of theirs than there are stars in the astronomical one of the eagle. The faces of all beholders were now turned towards this Keblah of a bird, like those of the Jews towards their ruined Jerusalem. Even old Sabel sat behind her table of sweetmeats customerless, and gazing up at the eagle. The earlier numbers didn’t even give themselves the trouble of shaking a pinch of powder into their pans.Firmian pitied these oppressed hearts, swimming heavily in turbid, earthy blood—for whom at this time, the setting sun, the bright array of sky tints, and the broad, fair world were all invisible—or, rather, all shrivelled up to a battered block of wood. The surest token that these hearts were all lying fettered in the eternal dungeon of need and necessity, was that none could make a single witty allusion either to the bird or the kingship. It is only concerning matters which leave our souls free and unshackled that we notice similitudes and connection.“This bird,” thought Firmian, “is the decoy of all these men, and the money is what baits the lure.” But he himself had three reasons for desiring to be king: firstly, to laugh himself to death at his own coronation; secondly, on account of his Lenette: thirdly, on account of the Saxon.The second half of the seventy gradually fired off, and the earlier numbers began to load again, if it were for nothing but the fun of the thing. Every one put in two bullets now. Our two Hanseatic confederates came once more up to the mark, and Siebenkæs borrowed a more powerful glass, screwing it on to his rifle like the finder of a telescope.No. 10 loosened the bird from its joining to the pole. Nothing but the sheer weight of it now retained it on its perch, for they had well nigh saturated and incrusted the wood of it with lead (as certain springs transform wood into iron).The Saxon had but to graze the eagle-torso—ay, or even the perch of it—nay, the very evening breeze had but to give an extra puff—to send the bird of prey swooping down. He had his rifle to his shoulder—aimed for a whole eternity (there were fifty florins hanging in the sky)—and pulled his trigger. The powder flashed in the pan. The band had all their trumpets ready at their lips—trumpets horizontal, music perpendicular—the boys stood round ready to seize the fallen skeleton; the buffoon in his excitement couldn’t think of a joke to make—his ideas were all up beside the bird; the poor, anxious, eager, excited hairdresser drew his trigger once more, and again ’twas but a flash in the pan. Great drops of perspiration bedewed him; he glowed, he trembled; loaded, aimed, fired, and sent his bullet several ells, at the least, away over the bird.He stepped back, pale and silent, in a cold perspiration; not an oath did he utter; nay, I suspect he offered up a silent prayer or two that his co-partner might, by heaven’s grace, capture the feathered game.Firmian went forward, thinking as hard as he could about something else, to keep down his thrilling excitement; aimed, not very long, at this, his anchor in his little storms, as it hung hovering in the twilight, fired; saw the old stump turn three times round in the air, like Fortune’s wheel, and, at last, break loose, and come pitching down.As, when the old French kings were crowned, a live bird always fluttered in the air; as, at the apotheoses of the Roman emperors, an eagle soared skyward from out the funeral pyre, so did one swoop downward from the heavens at the coronation of my hero.The children screamed, and the trumpets blared. One moiety of the assemblage crowded to see who the new king was, and to have a look at him; while the other moiety streamed crowding round the jester, as he advanced bearing that shattered bullet-case, the eagle’s body, holding it up above the heads of the throng. The barber ran to meet it, crying, “Vive le roi,” and adding that he was a king himself into the bargain; and Firmian moved towards the door in silence, full of happiness, but fuller of emotion.And now it is time that we should all of us hurry to the town to see how Rosa fares, what kind of throne he gainschezMadame Siebenkæs (while her husband is thus ascendinghis)—a richer throne, or only a pillory—and what number of steps he climbs towards whichever of the two it may prove to be.Rosa knocked at Lenette’s door, and straightway entered in at it, in order that she might not have a chance of coming and ascertaining who was there. “He had torn himself away from the shooting-match; her husband was coming immediately, and he would wait for him there. His rifle had once more been excessively fortunate.” It was with these truths that he came into the presence of the alarmed Lenette, bearing, however upon his countenance, an assumed aristocratic frigid zone. He walked, in an easy and unconcerned manner, up and down the room. He inquired whether this April weather affected her health at all; as for himself, it produced in him a kind of miserable prostrating low fever. Lenette, timid and nervous, stood at the window, her eyes half in the street, half in the room. He glanced, in passing, at her work-table, took up a paper bonnet shape and a pair of scissors, and put them down again, his attention being arrested by a paper of pins. “Why, these are No. 8’s,” he said; “these pins are a great deal too large, Madame; their heads would do for No. 1 shot. The lady whose hat you were putting them in ought really to be immensely grateful to me.”He then went quickly up to her, and, from a spot a trifling distance below her heart (where she had a whole quiver, or thorn-hedge of needles planted, ready for use), he plucked one out with a dauntless coolness, and held it up for her inspection, saying, “Look how badly this is plated; ’twill spoil every stitch you take with it.” He threw it out of the window, and evinced symptoms of being about to pluck out the remainder from that heart (where the fates had stuck none other than such as were “badly plated”), and stick the contents of his own needle-book into that pretty pincushion instead. But she waved him off with an icy, repellant, gesture, saying, “Don’t trouble yourself.”“I really wish your husband would come,” he said, looking at his watch. “The king’s shot must be over long ere this time.”He took up the paper cap-pattern again, and the scissors; but, as she fixed on him a gaze of deep anxiety (lest he should spoil her pattern), he took from his pocket a sheet of verses dipped in hippocrene, and, by way of passing the time, he clipped this up, by wavy lines, into a series of hearts, one within the other. This gentleman, who, like the Augurs, always strove to carry off theheartof the sacrifice—he, whose own heart (like that of a coquette) constantly grew again as often as he lost it (as a lizard’s tail does)—he had theword“heart,” which Germans and men in general seem almost to shrink from uttering, continually on his tongue, or, at all events, impressions of it in his hand.My belief that his motive for leaving behind him (as he did) his needles, and his rhymeful hearts, was that he had observed of women that they always think fondly of an absent person when they chance to see something of his which he has left behind. Rosa belonged to that class of persons (of both sexes) who never show any cleverness, delicacy of perception, or knowledge of human nature, save in matters relating to love of the opposite sex.He now catechised out of her a number of cooking and washing receipts of various kinds, and these, despite her cautious monosyllabicity, she imparted—prescription fashion—in all their fulness, both of words and of ingredients. At length he made preparations for departure, saying, he had been most anxious for her husband’s homecoming because of a certain matter of business which he could not well discuss with him on the shooting-ground, among so many people, and before Herr von Blaise. “I shall come another day,” he said; “but the most important point of the affair I can mention to yourself,” and he sat down before her, with his hat and stick in his hand. Just as he commenced his recital, however, observing that she was standing, he laid aside his hat and stick to place a chair for her, opposite to his. His propinquity was grateful to her Schneiderian membrane, at any rate; his odour was paradisaic; his pocket-handkerchief a musk-bag, his head an altar of incense, or magnified civet-ball. (Shaw has remarked that the whole viper tribe has the property of emitting a peculiar, sweet scent.)“She might readily see,” he said, “that it referred to that wretched lawsuit with the Heimlicher. The poor’s advocate did not deserve, indeed, that a man should interest himself inhisfavour; but then, you see, he had anadmirablewife, whodiddeserve it.” (He italicised the word “admirable” by means of a hurried squeeze of her hand.) “He had been fortunate enough to induce Herr von Blaise to defer his ‘no’ three separate times, though he had not as yet been able to speak to the advocate in person. But now, that a pasquinade of Mr. Leibgeber’s (whose hand was well known), had come to light near a stove-statue at the Heimlicher’s, nothing approximating to a yielding, or a payment of the trust-fund, was to be dreamt of for a moment. Now this was a state of matters for which his very heart bled, particularly as, since he had been in such poor health of late, he felt only too keen a sympathy and interest in everything; he knew perfectly well what an unhappy condition her (Lenette’s) household matters had been placed in by this lawsuit; and had often sighed, in vain, over many things. He should be delighted, therefore, to advance whatever she might require for current expenditure. As yet she did not knowhimin the slightest degree, and perhaps could scarce surmise what he did, from motives of the purest benevolence, for six charities in Kuhschnappel—though he could produce documentary evidence if she liked,” and he did produce and hand to her six receipts of the Charitable Commission. I should not be giving proof of that impartiality of character which I bear the reputation of possessing, did I not here freely admit, and clearly place on record, that the Venner had, from his youth up, always shown a certain disposition to benefit and assist the poor of both sexes, and that his consciousness that he dealt in this large-hearted manner, did (when compared with the narrow close-fistedness prevalent in Kuhschnappel) give him some warrant for bearing himself with a certain amount of proper pride towards those mean and miserly beings who sate in judgment upon his little genial breaches of the moral laws. For his conscience bore him witness that, conversely to the process whereby spiders are metamorphosed into jewels, he spun his shining webs (of gold and silver), and in their meshes, wet with the glittering dew of tears, made an occasional capture from time to time.But for a woman like Lenette (he continued) he would do things of a much grander description; as proofs of which, given already by him, he needed only to point to the fact that he had set at defiance the Heimlicher’s hostility towards her husband, and that he had more than once quietly swallowed speeches of her husband’s own, such as in his social position he had never suffered anybody to address to him before. “Name any sum of money you are in want of; by Heaven, all you have to do is to ask for it.”Lenette, bashful and trembling, glowed red with shame at this discovery of (what she had believed to be) the mystery of her poverty and her pawnings. With the view of pouring a few drops of oil on the troubled waters, he began, by way of preamble, to make some disparaging remarks concerning his fiancée at Bayreuth. “She reads too much, and doesn’t work enough. I only wish she could have the benefit of a few lessons fromyouin housekeeping. And really, a lady such as you, with so many attractions (quite unaware of them, too, herself), so much patience, such wonderful diligence and assiduity, should have a very different kind of household than this place for her sphere of action.” Her hand was by this time lying still in the stocks—the close arrest—of his; her wings and her tongue, as well as her hands, were tied and fettered by that fainthearted incapacity of self-assertion which is born of the sense of poverty. When women were in question, Mr. Everard’s longings and likings paid no heed to boundary-marks; but rather strove hard to obliterate them, and get rid of them altogether. Most men, in the wild, unreasoning whirl of their appetites, are like the jay, which tears the carnation to tatters in order to get at its seeds.Upon her downcast eyes he now riveted a long gaze of fondness, not withdrawing it, however, when she raised them up; and, by dint of keeping his eyes very wide open, and thinking with great vividness on pathetic and touching subjects, he managed to squeeze out about as much water as would have sufficed to make an end of a humming bird of the smaller sort.In him, as in a fine actor, all false emotions became for the time real and genuine; and when he flattered any one, he at once began to respect him. As soon as he felt there were tears enough in his eyes, and sighs enough in his breast, he asked her if she hadany ideawhat was causing them. She looked innocently, and with kindly alarm, into those eyes of his, and her own began to overflow. This greatly encouraged him, and he said, “It is the fact thatyouhave not such a happy lot as you deserve.”Ah! selfish pigmy! at such a moment you might have spared this poor, anxious, trembling soul, sinking, well nigh, in an ocean of tears for all the long, long past.But he knew no sorrow save of the theatrical, the transient, the petty, and the sham sort; and so he spared her not.Yet that which he had expected would prove the bridge from his heart to hers, namely, sorrow, became, on the contrary, the portcullis barrier between them. A dance, or somejoyfultumult of the senses would have brought him further with thiscommonplace, every-day, honest, and upright woman than three pailfuls of selfish tears. His hopes rose high, as he laid his flowery, sorrow-laden head upon his hands, down into her lap.But Lenette jumped up with such a suddenness that it nearly knocked him over altogether. She gazed inquiringly into his eyes. Upright women must, I think, have some instinct of their own concerning the lightnings of the eye, by means of which they can distinguish between the lurid flashes of hell and the pure coruscations of heaven. This profligate was as little aware of the flashes of his eyes as was Moses of the brightness of his countenance. Her glance shrunk before his scorching gaze; at the same time I feel it incumbent on me as an historian—seeing that readers by the thousand (and I myself into the bargain) are all up in arms to such an extent against this defenceless Everard—not to conceal the fact that Lenette had had her mind’s eye firmly fixed upon certain rather rude and free-handed sketches which Schulrath Stiefel had drawn for her of the manœuvring grounds of rakes in general (and this one in particular), and, in consequence, had pricked up her ears in alarm at each move he made, whether in advance or in retreat.And yet every word I write in defence of the poor rascal will only tell against him now; indeed, there are many ladies whose acquaintance with the Salic Law (or Mr. Meiner’s work) teaches them that in former times the penalty for touching a woman’s hand was the same as for hewing off a man’s middle finger, namely, fifteen shillings, and who, being indignant with Rosa for his hand pressures, would fain have him to be duly punished therefor. I am convinced that these ladies would by no means be pacified were I to go on speaking in his extenuation, for they have doubtless learnt, out of Mallet’s ‘Introduction to the History of Denmark,’ that formerly persons who kissed without leave, and against the will, were, by the law of the land, liable to be banished. And there are very many women of the present day who are strictly governed by the ancient pandects of Germany, and, in the case of lip-thieves (since, in the eye of the law, banishment and confinement to one place are held to be tantamount and equivalent one to another), they adjudge them—not, it is true, to bebanished fromtheir chambers, but toremain inthem; similarly, they lodge debtors (to whom they have given their hearts, and who insist on retaining possession of the same) in the Marshalsea of the Matrimonial Torus.When Rosa jumped up (as before set forth), he had nothing to urge in extenuation of his false step but an aggravation or augmentation of it, and accordingly he fairly took the marble goddess in his arms—But at this point my progress is barred for a moment by an observation which has to be made ere I proceed; it is this: There are many kindly beauties who cover their retreats or make amends for their denials by concessions. By way of making themselves some amends for their hard services in the campaign of virtue, they offer no resistance at all in matters of the smaller sort, skilfully abandoning a good many intrenchments and outworks (in the shape of words, articles of dress, and so on), to enable them to deftly steal a march upon the enemy and outmanœuvre him—just as clever generals burn the suburbs that they may fight the better up in the citadel.My sole object in making this observation is to point out that it did not apply to Lenette in any respect whatever. Pure as she was in soul and in body, she might have gone straight away into heaven just as she stood, without changing so much as a stitch of her attire—have taken her eyes, heart, clothes, everything except that tongue of hers, which was uncultivated, rude, indiscreet; so that her resistance to Everard’s attempted burglary on her lips was unnecessarily grave and discourteous (considering what a trifling case of orchard-robbery it really was), much more so than it would have been had Lenette been able to drive the Schulrath’s highly-coloured prognostics concerning Rosa out of her head.Rosa had anticipated a denial of a less unpleasant kind. His obstinacy availed him nothing as against hers, which was the greater of the two. A gnat-swarm of firm and passionate resolves buzzed about his ears; but when at length (probably inspired thereto by the Schulrath) she said, “Your lordship remembers that the Tenth Commandment says, ‘Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife’”—from the crossroad between love and hatred, on which he was standing, he suddenly made a great jump—into his pocket and brought out a wreath of artificial flowers, “There!” he cried, “take them, you nasty, inexorable creature! just this one forget-me-not as a souvenir; devil fly away with me if I want anything further!” If shehadtaken it, hewouldimmediately have wanted something further; but she turned her face aside and repulsed the silken garland with both hands. At this the honeycomb of love in his heart soured into very vinegar; he grew wild with fury, and throwing the flowers right over the table, he cried, “Why, they are your own pawned flowers—I redeemed them myself—so take them youmust.” On which he took his departure, not, however, without making his bow, which Lenette, all hurt and offended as she was, ceremoniously returned.She took the envenomed wreath to the window, to have a better light to examine it by. Alas! these were indeed, and beyond all doubt, the very roses and rosebuds whose steely thorns were wet with the blood-drops from a pair of pierced hearts. Whilst she, thus weeping and bowed beneath the weight of her woe, stunned and stupid rather than observant, stood at her window, it suddenly struck her as a strange circumstance that the torturer of her soul, though he had gone rattling down the stairs in a hurry with noise enough, had never gone out at the street-door. After a long and attentive watch, during which anxiety, closely bordering upon terror, assumed therôleof comforter and spake louder than her sorrow (the future, at the same time, driving the past out of view), the becrowned hairdresser came galloping home (the crown of his hat pointing heavenwards), and shouted to her in a mere parenthetical manner as he dashed by, “Madame the queen!” for his great idea was, that before anything else he should rush home, and there on the spot, and without a moment’s delay, make proclamation of the kingship and queenship of four persons.There now devolves upon me the duty of conducting my readers to the corner where the Venner is cowering. From Lenette he haddescended(in two senses of that word) to the hairdresser’s wife, one of that common class of women who never so much as dream of an infidelity all the year round—for no horse in all the kingdom is harder worked—and commit one only when there appears on the scene some tempter, whom they neither invite nor resist, probably forgetting all about the incident by the time next baking day comes round. On the whole, the superiority which the female middle-class is disposed to arrogate to itself over that of a higher rank, is just about equally great as it is questionable. There are not a great many tempters in the middle-class, and those there are are not of a very tempting sort.Like the earthworm, which has ten hearts that extend all the way from one end of it to the other, Rosa was fitted out with as many hearts as there are species of women; for the delicate, the coarse, the religious, the immoral—every sort, in fact; he was always ready with the appropriate heart. For as Lessing and others so frequently blame the critics for narrowness and onesidedness in matters of taste, inculcating upon them a greater universality of it—a greater power of appreciation of the beautiful, to whatsoever times and nations belonging—so do men of the world also advocate a universality of taste for thelivebeautiful, on two legs, not excluding any variety of it, but deriving gratification from all. This taste the Venner possessed. There was such a marked distinction between his feelings for the wigmaker’s wife and for Lenette, that, in revenge upon the latter, he came to the determination, on the stair, to take a jump right over this distinction and slip in to pay a visit to the landlady, while her narrow-chested husband was away scheming and plotting in confederacy for a crown in another quarter. Sophia (this was her name) had been always combing at wigs in the bookbinder’s on the occasions when the Venner had been sitting there on the business of getting his novels and life romances done up and bound, and there they had communicated to one other, by looks and glances, all that which people are not in the habit of confiding to third parties. Meyern made hisentréeinto the childless abode with all the confident assurance of an epic poet, who soars superior to all prefaces. There was a certain corner partitioned off from the room by boards: it contained little or nothing—no window, no chair, a little warmth from the sitting-room, a clothes-cupboard, and the couple’s bed.When the first compliments had been exchanged, Rosa took up a position behind the door of this partitioned space, for the street passed close by the window, and at this late hour he was anxious not to give occasion to unpleasant surmises on the part of passers by. Of a sudden, however, Sophia saw her husband run by the window. The intent to commit a sin may betray itself by a superabundance of carefulness and caution; Rosa and Sophia were so startled at the sight of the runner, that she begged the young gentleman to get behind the partition until her husband should go back to the shooting-range. The Venner went stumbling into thesanctum sanctorum, while Sophia placed herself at the door of it, and, as her husband entered, made as though she were just coming out of it, closing the door after her. The moment he had stuttered out the news of his elevation in rank, he darted out of the room, crying, “She upstairs there knows nothing about it yet.” Gladness and hurried draughts of liquor had just blurred the sharp outlines of his lighter ideas with a thin haze or fog. He ran out and called “Madame Siebenkæs” up the stairs (he was anxious to be off again so as to join the procession). She hastened half way down, heard the glad news with trembling, and, either by way of masking her joy, or as a fruit of a warmer liking for her husband now that fortune seemed kinder to him (or it may have been, perhaps,anotherfruit which joy commonly bears, namely, anxiety, or shall I name it fear?), she threw down to him the question, “Is Mr. von Meyern out yet?”“What! washein my room just now?” cried he, while his wife echoed, unbidden, from the door, “Hashebeen in the house?” “He was here, upstairs,” Lenette replied, with a touch of suspicion, “and he hasn’t gone out yet.”The hairdresser’s suspicions were now awakened, for the consumptive trust no woman, and, like children, take every chimney-sweep they see for the devil himself, hoof, horns, tail and all. “Things are not all exactly as they should be here, Sophy,” said he to his wife. The passing brain-dropsy, induced by what he had drunk during the day and by his half-share in a throne and fifty florins, had the effect of screwing his courage up to such a pitch that he secretly formed the idea of treating the Venner to a good sound cudgelling in the event of his coming upon him in any illegal corner. Accordingly he started upon voyages of discovery, first exploring the entrance passage, where Rosa’s sweet-scented head served him as a trail, or lure; he followed this incense-pillar of cloud into his own room, observing that this Ariadne’s thread of his, this sweet odour, grew stronger as he went. Here among the flowers lay the serpent—as, according to Pliny, sweet-smelling forests harbour venomous snakes. Sophia wished herself in the nethermost of Dante’s hells, though in fact and reality shewasthere already. It dawned upon the hairdresser that if the Venner would only stay where he was, in the closed titmouse-trap of the partitioned corner, he should have bruin safe in his toils; consequently he reserved till the last a peep into the said corner. What is historically certain is, that he seized upon a pair of curling-tongs wherewith to probe the dark corner and gauge the cubic contents thereof. Into its dark depths he made a horizontal lunge with his tongs, but encountered nothing. He next inserted this probe, this searcher of his, into more places than one—firstly, into the bed, next, under the bed (taking this time the precaution to keep opening and shutting the tongs, which were not hot, on the chance of some stray lock of hair getting caught in them in the darkness.) However, all this trap captured was air. At this juncture he came upon a clothes-cupboard, the door of which had always stood gaping ajar for the last six years or so; the key had been lost just that time, and in this slipshod household it was a matter of necessity to keep this door open, otherwise the lock would have snapped to, and there would have been no getting in. To-day, however, this door was close shut. The Venner (in a profuse perspiration) was inside; thefriseurpressed the lock home, and then the net was fairly over the quail.The hairdresser, now master of the situation, quietly took the command of his establishment at his ease; the Venner could not get out!He despatched Sophia (as red as a furnace and loudly dissentient, though forced to obey) for the locksmith and his breaching implements; however, she quite made up her mind to come back with a lie, not with a locksmith. When she had marched off he fetched Fecht, the cobbler, up, to be at once his witness of and his assistant in that which he proposed to accomplish. The shoe-stitcher crept into the room softly at his heels; the phthisic haircurler went up to the canary-cage and addressed the bird imprisoned therein (tapping the while with his tongs on the gate of this fortress of Engelsburg) as follows: “Iknowyou are in there, honourable Sir, make a move; there’s nobody here but me, as yet (there’ll soon be more). I can break the cupboard open with my tongs and let you out.” Laying his ear close to the door of this Spandau, he heard the captive sigh.“Ah! you are puffing and panting a little, honourable gentleman,” said the wigmaker; “I am here at the door by myself now. When the locksmith comes and breaks it open, we shall all see you, and I’ll call the whole house; but all I shall ask to let you jump out now, quietly, and be off unseen, will be a mere trifle. Give me that hat of yours, and a shilling or two, and give me your custom.”At length the miserable prisoner knocked upon the door and said, “Iamin here; just let me out, will you, my man, and I’ll do all you say. I can help, from the inside, to break open the door.” The wigmaker and the cobbler applied their battering apparatus to the “parloir” of this donjon-keep, and the captive bounded forth. During the breaking open of the gates of jubilee the friseur parleyed or negotiated a little more, and amerced the anchorite in the locksmith’s fee; at last, bringing Rosa forth, like Pallas in her mail, when she issued from Jove’s cranium into the light of day, “The landlord,” said Fecht, “couldn’t have managed the job without me.”Rosa opened his eyes wide at the sight of this auxiliary deliverer from the house of bondage, took off the sweet-smelling hat (which the cobbler immediately clapped on to his own head), shed some drops of golden rain from his waistcoat-pocket upon the pair, and, in dread of them and of the locksmith’s arrival, fled home bareheaded in the dark. The friseur, whose bald pate was so near to the triple crown of the emperors of old, and the popes of the present (for the eagle gave him a crown, the Venner a hat, and his wife had nearly placed something else——),—however, the friseur, in high satisfaction of this new martyr-crown of felt, which he had been envying the Venner the possession of all the afternoon, went back with it to the shooting-ground, that he might have the gratification of marching home in company with his co-emperor, attended by their subjects and their vassals.The wigmaker took his hat off to his royal brother Siebenkæs (that hat so much more worthy of a co-king than his former one), and told him something of what had been happening.The Heimlicher von Blaise smiled his Domitian smile to-day more affectionately than ever, which made the bird emperor far from comfortable; for friendliness and smiling make the heart colder when it is cold to begin with, and warmer when it is warm—just asspiritus nitridoes water. From a friendliness of this particular kind nothing was to be expected but its opposite, as in ancient jurisprudence excessive piety in a woman was merely a proof that she had sold herself to the devil. Christ’s implements of torture became holy relics; and, conversely, relics of saints often become implements of torture.Under the twinkling gleams of the wide, starry firmament (where new constellations kept bursting into view, in the shape of banging rockets) the grand procession marched along. The competitors who had come after the king’s shot had fired their rifles in the air, by way of salute to the royal pair. The two kings walked side by side, but the one who belonged to the guild of wigmakers found some difficulty in standing (what between joy and beer), and would gladly have sat down upon a throne. However, over these seventy Brethren of the Eagle, and the two vicars of the empire, we are losing sight, and delaying to treat of something else.To wit, the town militia, who are also present, or more properly speaking, the Royal Kuhschnappel Militia. Concerning this regiment I think a good deal, and say only about half what I think. A city or county militia regiment—and particularly the Royal Kuhschnappel Militia—is a distinguished and important body of men, whoseraison d’êtreis to scorn and show contempt for the enemy, by always turning their backs upon him—showing him, in fact, nothingbutbacks, like a well-ordered library. If the enemy has anything in the nature of courage, then our said force sacrifices to Fear like the ancient Spartans; and as poets and actors ought in the first place to experience and picture to themselves in a vivid manner the emotions they are about to portray, the militia endeavours to give an illustration, in itself, of that panic terror into which it would fain throw the enemy. Now with the view of affording these men of war (or “of peace” if you prefer it) the necessary amount of practice in the mimic representation of terror, they are daily put through a process of being terrified at the city gates. It iscalled“being relieved.” When one of these men of peace is on sentry, another of them, a comrade of his, marches up to his sentry box, shouts out words of command at him in a warlike tone of voice, and makes hostile and threatening gestures in close proximity to his nose; the one who is on sentry also cries out in a similar voice, goes through certain motions with his weapon, and then lays it down and gets away as fast as he can; the conqueror in this brief winter campaign retains possession of the field, and puts on the watchcoat which he has taken from the other man by way of booty; but that they may each have an opportunity of being terrified by the others, they take the part of conqueror turn about. A warrior of this peaceful order may very often be most dangerous in actual war, when, in the act of bolting, he happens, in throwing his rifle away with the bayonet fixed, to throw it too far, and harpoon his too proximate pursuer with it. Militiamen of this sort (“precious” they are in every sense) are usually posted, for greater security’s sake, in public places where they are safe from injury, such as the gates of towns, where these harpooners are protected by the town and gate; at the same time I have often wished, in passing, that these students of the art military were provided with a good thick stick, so that they might have something to defend themselves with if anybody should try to take away their muskets.It will appear to many that I am but artfully cloaking the shortcomings of the militia in these respects; I am prepared for this—but it is not difficult to perceive that this species of praise also applies to all small standing armies of lesser principalities—forces which are recruited only that they may recruit. I shall here utter myself on this subject a little. Vuillaume recommends educators to teach children to play at soldiers, to make them drill and mount guard, in order to accustom them, by this play, to firm and active habits both of body and of mind; in short, to render them firm and upright. This soldier-game has been carried on for a considerable time already in Campe’s Institute. But is Mr. Vuillaume really ignorant that scholar-drill, such as he recommends, has been long since introduced by every good prince of the empire into his dominions? Does he suppose it is anything new when I tell him that these princes seize upon all strong young fellows (as soon as they attain the canonical height) and have them drilled, in order that they, the State’s children, may thus be taughtmores, carriage, and all that has to be acquired in the State’s school? The truth is that, even in the very smallest principalities, the soldiers often possess all the acquirements and accomplishments of real soldiers; they can present arms, stand bolt upright at portals, andsmokeat all events, if notfire—matters which a poodle learns with ease, but a country bumpkin with more difficulty.To these rehearsals of warlike business I attribute it that many otherwise clever and sensible men have allowed themselves to believe that this sham soldiery of the little States, is in fact a real soldiery; they must otherwise have seen in a moment that with so small a force neither could a small territory be defended, nor a large one attacked; neither is there indeed any need for even this small force, since in Germany the question of relative strength is merged in that of equality of religion. Hunger, cold, nakedness, and privation are the benefits which Vuillaume considers the soldier-game to hold out to his scholars, as lessons in patient endurance and fortitude; now these are the very advantages which the State schools above referred to confer upon the young men of the country—and that much more thoroughly and efficaciously than Vuillaume does—which, of course, is the entire object of the institution. I am quite aware that there are not infrequent cases in which perhaps a third part of the population escapes being made into soldiery, and consequently gets none of the valuable practice in question; at the same time there can be no doubt that if we even get the length of having two-thirds of the population with rifles on their shoulders in the place of scythes, the remaining third (inasmuch as it has considerably less to mow, to thresh, and to subsist upon) obtains the before-mentioned benefits (of cold, hunger, nakedness, &c.), almost gratis, and without having to fire so much as a single shot. Let but barracks be multiplied in a sufficient ratio in a country, in a province, parish, town, village (as the case may be), and the remainder of the houses will of themselves settle down, into suburbs, and accessory and out-buildings to the barracks, nay, become absolute conventual establishments, in which the three monastic vows (the Prince alone beingpère provincial) are, whethertakenornot, at all events most religiouslykept.We now hear the two vicars of the empire go into their homes. The friseur’s sole punishment to his wife is a narrative of the whole affair, and a sight of the hat; while the advocate rewards Lenette with the kiss which she had refused to other lips. If her story did not please him, the teller of it did, and on the whole the only thing she omitted was the flower-wreath, and the allusions made to it. She would not cloud the happiness of his evening, nor bring back upon him the pain and the reproaches of that other evening when she had pawned it. I, like many of my readers, had expected that Lenette would have received the news of the enthronisation far too coldly; she has deceived us all; she received it even too joyfully. But there were two good reasons for this; she had heard of it an hour before, and consequently the first feminine mourning over a joy had had time to give place to the joy itself. For women are like thermometers, which on a sudden application of heat sink at first a few degrees, as a preliminary to rising a good many. The second reason for her being thus indulgent and sympathetic was the humiliating consciousness she possessed of the Venner’s visit, and of the wreath in its hiding-place; for we are often severe when we are strong, and practise forbearance when we stand in need of it.I now wish the entire royal family and household a good night, and a pleasant awaking in the eighth chapter.

THE SHOOTING-MATCH—ROSA’S AUTUMNAL CAMPAIGN—CONSIDERATIONS CONCERNING CURSES, KISSES, AND THE MILITIA.

There is nothing which so much inconveniences me, or is so much to the prejudice of this story (so beautiful in itself), as the fact that I have made a resolution to restrict it within the compass of four alphabets. I have thus, by my own act, deprived myself of everything in the shape of room for digressions. I find myself, metaphorically, in a somewhat similar position to one which I once found myself in, without metaphor, on an occasion when I was measuring the diameter and circumference of the town of Hof. On that occasion I had fastened a Catel’s pedometer by a hook to the waistband of my trousers and the silken cord which runs down the thigh to a curved hook of steel at my knee, so that the three indexes on one dial (of which the first marks a hundred steps, the second a thousand, and the third up to twenty thousand) were all moving just as I moved myself. At this moment I met a young lady, whom it was incumbent on me that I should see home. I begged her to excuse me, as I had a Catel’s pedometer on, and had already made a certain number of steps towards my measurement of the diameter of Hof. “You see, in a moment,” I said, “how I am situated. The pedometer, like a species of conscience, records all the steps I take; and, with a lady, I shall be obliged to take shorter steps, besides thousands of sideway and backward steps, all of which the pedometer will put to the account of the diameter. So, you see, I am afraid it’s quite impossible that Icanhave the pleasure of——” However, this only made her the more determined that Ishould, and I was well laughed at; but I screwed myself to the spot, and wouldn’t stir. At last I said I would go home with her, pedometer and all, if she would just read off my indexes for me (seeing I couldn’t twist myself down low enough to see the dial)—read them off for me twice—firstly, then and there, and secondly, when we got to her house—so that I might deduct the steps taken by me in this young lady’s company from the size of Hof. This agreement was honestly kept; and this little account of the occurrence may be of service to me some day if ever I publish (as I have not given up all hopes of doing) my perspective sketch of the town of Hof; and townspeople who saw me walking with the said young lady, and with the pedometer trailing at my knee, might cast it in my teeth and say it was a lame affair, and that nobody could calculate as to the steps he might take in a lady’s company, far less apply them to the measurement of a town.

St. Andrew’s Day was bright and fine, and not very windy. It was tolerably warm, and there wasn’t as much snow in the furrows as would have cooled a nutshell of wine, or knocked over a humming-bird. On the previous Tuesday Siebenkæs had been looking on with the other spectators, when the bird-pole had described its majestic arc in descending to impale the black golden eagle with outstretched wings, and rise again therewith on high. He felt some emotion as the thought struck him, “That bird of prey up there holds in his claws, and will dispense, the happiness or the misery of thy Lenette’s coming weeks, and our goddess of Fortune has transformed herself and dwindled into that black form, nothing left of her but herWINGS and BALL.”

On St. Andrew’s morning, as he said good-bye to Lenette, with kisses, and in his abbreviated boots, over which he had a pair of goloshes, she said, “May God grant you luck, and not let you do any mischief with your rifle.” She asked several times if there was nothing he had forgotten—his eyeglass, or his handkerchief, or his purse; “And mind you don’t get into any quarrel with Mr. von Meyern,” was her parting counsel: and finally, as one or two preliminary thundrous drum-ruffles were heard from the direction of the courthouse, she added most anxiously, “For God’s sake, mind and don’t shoot yourself; my blood will run cold the whole forenoon every time I hear a gun go off!”

At length the long thread of riflemen, rolled up like a ball, began to unwind itself, and the waving line, like a great serpent, moved off in surging convolutions to the sound of trumpets and drums. A banner represented the serpent’s crest, and the standard-bearer’s coat was like a second flag beneath the other. The town-soldiery, more remarkable for quality than for quantity, shot the mottled line of competitors at intervals with the white of their uniforms. The auctioneering hairdresser—the only member of the lower ten thousand who rejoiced in a powdered head—tripped along, keeping the white peak of his cap at the due degree of distance from the leather pigtails of the aristocracy, which he had that morning tied and powdered. The multitude felt what a lofty position in this world really was, when, with bent heads, they raised their eyes to Heimlicher von Blaise, the director of the competition, who accompanied the procession in his capacity of aorta of the whole arterial system, or elementary fire of all these ignes-fatui—or, in a word, as master of the shooters’ lodge. Happy was the wife who peeped out and saw her husband marching past in the procession—happy was Lenette, for her husband was there, and looked gallantly up as he passed by. His short boots looked very nice, indeed; they were made both in the old fashion and in the new, and, like man, had put on the new (short) Adam over the old one.

I wish Schulrath Stiefel had given a thought or so to the St. Andrew’s shooting-match, and looked out of his window at his Orestes; however, he went on with his reviewing.

Now, when these processional caterpillars had crept together again at the shooting-ground, as upon a leaf—when the eagle hung in his heavenly eyrie, like the crest of the future’s armorial bearings—when the wind instruments, which the troop of “wandering minstrels” had scarce been able to hold firmly to their lips, blared out their loudest now that the band was halted, and as the procession, with martial tramp and rattle of grounded rifles, came with a rush into the empty echoing shooting-house, everybody, strictly speaking, was more or less out of his senses, and mentally intoxicated; and that although the lots were not even drawn, far less any shot fired. Siebenkæs said to himself, “The whole thing is stuff and nonsense, yet see how it has gone to all our heads, and how a mereunbrokenfaded flower-wreath of pleasanttrifles, wound ten times about our hearts, half chokes and darkens them. Our thirsty heart is made of loose, absorptive mould; a warm shower makes it swell, and as it expands it cracks the roots of all the plants that are growing in it.”

Mr. von Blaise, who smiled unceasingly upon my hero, and treated the others with the rudeness becoming authority, ordered the lots to be drawn which were to decide the order in which the competitors were to shoot. The reader cannot expect Chance to stop the wheel of Fortune, thrust in her hand, and, behind her bandage, pull out from among seventy numbers the very first for the advocate; she drew him the twelfth, however. And at length the brave Germans and imperial citizens opened fire upon the Roman eagle. At first they aimed at his crown. The eagerness and zeal of these pretenders were proportioned to the importance of the affair: was there not a royal revenue of six florins attached to this golden penthouse when the bullet brought it down—to say nothing whatever of other crown property, consisting of three pounds of tow and a pewter shaving-dish. The fellows did what they could; but the rifle placed the crown of the eagle, not, alas! on our hero’s head, but upon that of No. 11, his predecessor, the hectic Saxon. He had need of it, poor fellow! seeing that, like a Prince of Wales, he had come into possession of the crown debts sooner than of the crown itself.

At a shooting contest of this kind nothing is better calculated to dissipate everything in the shape of tedium than to have arrangements made for “running shooting” (as it is called) being carried on by those who are waiting their turn at the birdpole. A man who has to wait while sixty-nine other people slowly aim and shoot before his turn comes round, may find a good deal to amuse him if, during that time, he can load and aim at something of a less lofty kind—for instance, a Capuchin general. The “running” or “swing” shooting, as carried out at Kuhschnappel, differs in no respect from that of other places. A piece of canvas is hung up, and floats to and fro; there are painted dishes of edibles upon it, as on a table-cloth, and whoever puts a bullet through one of these paintings obtains the original—just as princes choose their brides from their portraits, before bringing home the brides in person; or as witches stick pins into a man’s image in order to wound the prototype himself. The Kuhschnappelers were, on this occasion, shooting at a portrait on this canvas, which a great many persons considered to represent a Capuchin general. I know that there were some who, basing their opinion chiefly upon the red hat in the portrait, considered it to represent a cardinal, or cardinal-protector, but these have clearly, in the first place, got to settle the point with a third party, which differed from both of those above mentioned, holding that it portrayed the whore of Babylon—that is to say, a European one. From all of which we may form a pretty accurate estimate of the amount of truth contained in another rumour—which I contradicted in the first hour of its existence—namely, that the Augsburg people had taken offence at this effigy-arquebusading, and had written, in consequence, to the attorney-general representing that they felt themselves aggrieved, and that it was an injustice to one religion if, within the bounds of the holy Roman empire, a general of a religious order should be shot to shivers, without a Lutheran superintendent general being also shot to shivers at the same time. I should certainly have heard something further about this, if it had been anything but mere wind. Indeed, I have a shrewd suspicion that the whole story is no more than a false tradition, or garbled version ofanotherstory, which a gentleman of rank belonging to Vienna recentlyliedto me at table. What he said was, that in the more considerable towns of the empire, where the spirit-level of religious toleration has established a beautiful equilibrium between Papists and Lutherans, many had complained, on the part of the Lutherans, of the circumstance that although there were equal numbers of night-watchmen and censors (that is, transcendental night-watchmen), keepers of hotels, and keepers of circulating libraries of each communion, yet there were more Papists hanged than Lutherans; so that it was very clear, whether the Jesuits had to do with it or not, that a high and important post such as the gallows was not filled with the same amount of impartiality as the Council of State, but with a certain bias towards the Catholics. I thought of contradicting the story, in the most distinct terms, in the ‘Literary Gazette’ of December last, but Government declined to pay the expense of the insertion.

However, although those who occupied themselves with the “swing” shootingdidonly have a Capuchin to aim at, the said swing shooting was every bit as important a business as the shooting at thestandingmark. I must point out (in this connection) that there were edible prizes attached to the divers bodily members of this said general of his order, which had their attractions for riflemen of a reflective turn of mind. An entire Bohemian porker was the prize appointed for him who should pierce the heart of the Capuchin pasha—which heart, however, was represented by a spot no bigger than a beauty-patch—so that he who should hit this little mark would have need of all his skill and nerve. The cardinal’s hat was easier of attainment, for which reason it was worth only a couple of jack. The honorarium of the oculist who should succeed in inserting new (leaden) pupils into the cardinal’s eyes consisted of an equivalent number of geese. As he was portrayed in the full fervour of prayer, it was well worth anyone’s while to send a bullet through between his hands, seeing that this would be tantamount to knocking the two fore-quarters out of a cantering, smoked pig. And each of the cardinal’s feet rested upon a fine hind-quarter or ham. I do not hesitate for a moment—whatever the imperial burgh of Kuhschnappel may say to it—to record, with the utmost distinctness, that no portion of the whole lord-protector was more poorly endowed, or had a scantier revenue and salarium allotted to it, than his navel; for there was nothing to be got out of that, with however good a bullet, but a Bologna sausage.

The advocate had failed in his designs upon the crown; but fortune chucked him the cardinal’s hat to make up for it—the cardinal’s hat with two pike inside it. But some puissant necromantic spell of invulnerability turned all his bullets aside from the eagle’s head, and from the general’s too. He would fain have sent one eye, at any rate, out of the face of the harlot of Babylon, but he could not manage that either.

Now the prize-lists—which are correct, seeing that they were made out by the secretary, under the eyes of the president, Herr von Blaise—state with distinctness that the head, the ring in the beak, and the little flag, fell into the hands of numbers 16, 2, and 63.

The sceptre was now being aimed at; and Siebenkæs would have been very very glad, for his dear little wife’s sake (waiting for him now, as she was, with the soup), to have sent that, at least, flying out of the eagle’s talons, and to have fixed it, by way of a bayonet, on to his rifle.

All the numbers who had tried their best to break off this golden oak-branch had shot in vain, except the worst—the most to be dreaded of all—his own predecessor and landlord.Heaimed, and shot—and the gilded harpoon quivered. Siebenkæs fired—and the eel-spear came tumbling down.

Messrs. Meyern and Blaise smiled, and uttered congratulations; the blowers of instruments, crooked and straight, blew, in honour of the advent of this new bird-member, a blast both loud and shrill (like the Karlsbad people, when a new bath-guest arrives), looking closely and carefully at their music as they did so, though they had played their littlefanfaresfar oftener than the very night-watchmen. All the infantas—I mean all the children—began a race for the sceptre, but the buffoon dashed among them, and scattered them; and, taking up the sceptre, presented that emblem of sovereignty to the advocate with one hand, holding in the other hisownemblem of sovereignty, the whip.

Siebenkæs contemplated with a smile the little twig of timber—the little branch, sticking to which the buzzing swarms of nations are so often borne away; and he veiled his satisfaction under cover of the following satirical remarks (which the reigning Heimlicher overheard, and applied to himself):—

“A very pretty little frog-shooter! Itought, by rights, to be a honey-gauge; but the poor bees are crushed by it, that their honey-bags may be got out of them! The Waiwodes and the despots, child-like, put the bees of the country to death, and take the honey from theirstomachs, not from, theircombs. A truly preposterous and absurd implement! It is made of wood; very likely a piece broken off a shepherd’s crook, and gilded, pointed, and notched—one of those shepherd’s staves with which the shepherds often drag the sheep’s fat out of them while they are feeding in the meadows!”

He had ceased to be conscious, now, when he emitted the bitterest satirical matter (there was never a drop of it in his heart); he often turned mere acquaintances into foes with some joke, made merely for the sake of jesting; and couldn’t imagine what made people vexed with him, and why it was thathecouldn’t have his little bit of fun with them as well as any one else.

He put the sceptre into the breast of his coat and took it home, seeing that they would not shoot up to his number again before dinner-time. He held it up straight and stiff, as the king of diamonds holds his, and said to Lenette, “There’s a soup-ladle and sugar-tongs for you, all in one!” the allusion being to the two pewter prizes, which, in company with a sum of nine florins, had fallen to his share by way of sceptre-fief. It was enough for one shot. And next he gave an account of the catching of the pike. He expected that Lenette would, at the very least, go through the five dancing positions and execute Euler’s “knight’s move” on the chess-board of the room-floor, into the bargain, within the first five seconds after hearing the news. She did what shecoulddo, namely, nothing at all; and said what she knew, namely, that the landlady had been holding forth, with bitter severity, to the bookseller’s wife, on the subject of the non-payment of the rent, and further, concerning her own husband, whom she characterised as a smooth-tongued flatterer and payer of compliments—a man who didn’t half threaten people. “What I tell you,” repeated the sceptre-bearer, “is, that I have this day had the luck to shoot a couple of pikes and a sceptre, Wendeline Engelkraut!” and he banged his sceptre-knout in indignation upon the table where the crockery was all set out. She answered at last, “Well, Lucas came running a short time ago and told me all aboutthat; Iam soglad about it, but I should quite think you will shoot a good many more things yet—will you not? I said so to the bookseller’s wife.”

She was slipping into her old cart-rut again, you see, but Firmian thought, “She can cry and mourn loud enough, but deuce a bit of gladness can she show when a fellow comes home with a pike or two under his arm, and a sceptre or so.” It was just the same with the wife of the gentle-hearted Racine, when he threw down a long purse of golden Louis XVI. he had got hold of, on the table.

How, or whence, oh! beloved wives, cometh to you the naughty trick ye have of making a kind of parade of an insupportable frigidity and indifference, just on the very occasions when your husbands come to you laden with good news, or with presents—that at the very moment when Fate brightens the wine of your joy into “bloom,” your vats grow turbid with the lees of theoldliquor? Comes it from your custom of showing only one of your faces at a time, like your sister and prototype, the moon? or from a peevish discontent with destiny? or is its cause a sweet, delicious, overflowing happiness and gladness, making the heart too full and the tongue too hard to move?

I believe it is often from all these causes combined.

In men, again—sometimes, too, in women, but only in one out of a thousand—it may arise from the sad thought of the sharks which tear off the arm with which, down in the dark ocean, all breathless and anxious, we have clasped hold of four pearls of happiness. Or, perhaps, from a deeper question still. Is not our heart’s inward bliss but an olive-leaf which a dove brings to us, fluttering over the great deluge foaming and seething all round us—an olive-leaf which she has culled for us away in the far distant Paradise, high up above the flood, clear and blissful in the eternal sun? And if all we attain of that whole olive-garden is but one leaf, instead of all its flowers and its fruit, is this leaf of peace, is this dove of peace, to give to us somethingbeyondpeace—namely, hope?

Firmian went back to the shooting-ground, his breast full of growing hopes. The heart of man, which, in matters of chance, makes its calculations in direct defiance of the theory of probabilities, and when heads have turned up once, expects them three times running—(although whatoughtto be anticipated is the very reverse)—or reckons upon hitting the eagle’s talon became it has knocked the sceptre out of it—this heart of man, uncontrollable alike in its fears and in its hopes, the advocate took with him to the shooters’ trench.

He came not by the talons, however. And at the folded praying claws or hands of the general of the Capuchins—these algebraic exponents or heraldic devices of two forequarters of pork—aimed he alike in vain.

It mattered not; more was left of the eagle, when all was done, than would be this day of Poland, if the latter, or its coat of arms—a silver eagle in a bloody field—were to be set up on a throne or a bird-pole, and shot at by a shooting-club composed of an army or two.

Even the imperial globe was not yet knocked down. Number 69, a formidable foregoer, Mr. Everard Rosa von Meyern, had taken his aim—eager to cullthisforbidden fruit—a Ribstone pippin and football fit for a very prince, such as this imperial apple, was a thing of too great price to be grasped for the sake of what was to be gained along with it—’twas honour alone that fired his heart—he pulled his trigger, and he might just as well have aimed in the opposite direction. Rosa—this particular apple being too high out of his reach—went, all blushes, in among the lady spectators, dealing out apples of Paris all round, and telling each lady how lovely she was, that she might be convinced how handsome he was himself. In the eyes of a woman, her panegyrist is, firstly, a verycleverman, and, ere long, such anice-LOOKING one. Rosa knew that grains of incense are the anise which these doves fly after, as though infatuated.

Our friend had no need to disquiet himself about any of the would-be fruit-gatherers—about the second, eighth, or ninth, till it came to the eleventh—and he was the Saxon, who shot like the demon in person. There were few among the seventy who didn’t wish this accursed gallows-number at the deuce, or at all events into the vegetable kingdom, where it is altogether absent.[50]The hairdresser fired, struck the eagle on the leg, and the leg remained hanging aloft, with the imperial globe in the talons.

His lodger (and lawyer) came up to the scratch, but the landlord stood still in the trench, to satisfy his soul with curses of his luckless star. As the former levelled the sights of his rifle upon the ball above, he made up his mind that he would not aim at the ball at all, but at the eagle’s tail, so as simply toshakethe apple down.

In one second the worm-eaten world-apple fell. The Saxon cursed beyond all description.

Siebenkæs all but offered up an inward prayer, not because a pewter mustard-pot, a sugar-dish, and five florins came showering along with the apple into his lap, but for the piece of good luck—for the warm burst of sunshine which thus came breaking out from among the clouds of the distant storm. “Thou wouldst prove this soul of mine, happy Fortune,” thought he, “and thou placest it, as men do watches, in all positions—perpendicular and horizontal, quiet and unquiet—to see if it will go and mark the time correctly in all, or no. Ay, truly! itshall!”

He let this little, bright, miniature earth-ball roll from one hand to the other, spinning and weaving, as he did so, the following brief chain of syllogisms:—“What a genealogical tree of copies! Nothing but pictures within pictures comedies within comedies! The emperor’s globe is an emblem of this terrestrial globe of ours—the core of each is a handful of earth—and this emperor’s globe of mine, again, is a miniature emblem of a real emperor’s, with even less of earth—none at all, in fact. The mustard-pot and sugar-dish, again, are emblems of this emblem. What a long, diminishing series, ere man arrives at enjoyment!” Most of man’s pleasures are butpreparationsfor pleasure; he thinks he has attained hisends, when he has merely got hold of hismeansto those ends. The burning sun of bliss is beheld of our feeble eyes but in the seventy mirrors of our seventy years. Each of these mirrors reflects that sun’s image less brightly—more faint and pale—upon the next; and in the seventieth it shimmers upon us all frozen, and is become a moon.

He ran home, but without his globe, for he did not mean to tell her of that till the evening. It was a great refreshment to him to slip, during his shooting vacations, away from the public turmoil to his quiet little chamber, give a rapid narrative of anything of importance going on, and then cast himself back into themêlée. As his number was a next-door neighbour to Rosa’s, and they had, consequently, their holidays at the same time, it surprises me that he did not come upon Herr von Meyern beneath his own window, inasmuch as that gentleman was walking up and down there, with his head elevated, like an ant. He who desires to destroy a young gentleman of this species, let him look for himunder(if notin) a lady’s window; just as an experienced gardener, when he wants to kill woodlice or earwigs, needs only lift up his flower-pots to annihilate them by the score.

Siebenkæs did not hit so much as another shaving the whole of the afternoon; even the very tail, which he had attacked with such success in his bold stroke for the conquest of the globe of the holy Roman empire, resisted all his efforts to knock it off. He let himself be drummed and fifed home by the town militia towards evening. When he got to his wife’s door, he there assumed therôleof Knecht Ruprecht (the children’s “Bogie,” who, on St. Andrew’s Day, bestows upon them, for thefirsttime in their career, fruit, and fear along with the same), and, growling in a terrible manner, chucked his (wooden) apple in to her; a piece of fun which delighted her immensely. But really I ought not to record such little trifles.

As Firmian laid his head on his pillow, he said to his wife, “This time to-morrow, wife, we shall know if it be two crowned heads that we are going to lay on the pillow, or not! I shall justrecallthis important minute to your memory to-morrow night, when we’re going to bed!” When he got up in the morning he said, “Very likely this is the last time that I shall rise a common, ordinary person, without a crown.”

He was so anxious to have the mutilated bird (all wet with dew, a mass of gunshot wounds and compound fractures) once more before his bodily eyes, that he hardly knew how to possess himself in patience till the time came. But it was only as long as hedid notsee the eagle that his hopes of shooting himself into a king at him endured. He was, therefore, delighted to agree to a proposal made by the clever Saxon, whose bullet had throughout the proceedings always cleared the way for his number-neighbour’s; the proposal was, “we go shares in gains and in losses—in the bird and in the cardinal.” This copartnership doubled the advocate’s hopes by the process of halving them.

But these companions in arms didn’t bring down a single painted splinter the whole of the afternoon. Each in his secret heart thought the other was the bird of evil omen; for in matters of chance we are prone to hang our faith upon a bit of superstition, rather than to nothing at all. The fickle Babylonish harlot went fluttering off with that amount of bashful coyness, that the hairdresser once sent a bullet within an ace of the fellow who was working her backwards and forwards.

At last, however, in the afternoon, he sent his Cupid’s dart right through that black heart of hers, and, by consequence, through the pig at the same time. This almost terrified Firmian; he said that if he couldn’t hit anything himself he would accept only the head of this pig—this polypus in the heart of the Babylonianfille de joie. All that was left of the bird was itstorso, which stuck to its perch like the very Rump Parliament, which these pretenders to the crown would so fain have dissolved.

A regular running musketry fusilade of eager interest, enthusiasm, emulation, now went flashing from breast to breast, fanned by every puff of powder which rose in smoke as a rifle went off. When the bird shook a little all the competitors shook also, except Herr von Meyern, who had gone off, and—seeing what a state of excitement everybody was in, especially our hero—marched away to Madame Siebenkæs, thinking that he had a better chance of becoming, inthatquarter, king of a queen than he had here of acquiring the sovereignty of the riflemen. However, my readers and I shall slip into the Siebenkæs’ chamber after him presently.

Twice already had the seventy numbers loaded in vain for the decisive shot; the obstinate stump still stuck glued to its perch, and scarce so much as trembled; the poor tantalised hearts were torn and pierced by every bullet that sped on its course. Their fears waxed apace, so did their hopes, but most of all their curses (those brief ejaculatory prayers to the devil). The theologians of the seventh decade of the present century had the devil often enough in their pens—in their denials or in their assertions of him—but the Kuhschnappelers had him far oftener in their mouths, particularly the upper classes.

Seneca, in his ‘Remedies for Anger,’ has omitted the simplest of all, the devil. True, the Kabbalists highly extol the therapeutic powers of the word Shemhamphorash, which is a name of a diametrically opposite character; but I have observed, for my part, that the spotted, malignant fever of wrath, so readily diagnosed by the raving delirium of the patient, is instantly relieved, dispersed, and mitigated, by invoking the name of the devil, which is perhaps, indeed, quite as efficacious a remedy as the wearing of amulets. In the absence of this name, the ancients, who were altogether without a Satan, recommended a mere repetition of the A B C, which, it is true, doescontainthe devil’s name, only too much diluted with other letters. And the word Abracadabra, spokendiminuendo, was a cure for corporeal fevers. As regards the inflammatory fever of anger, however, the greater the quantity of morbid matter which has to be ejected from the system through the secretions of the mouth, the greater is the number of devils necessary to make mention of. For a mere trifling irritation—a mild case of simple anger—“the devil,” or perhaps “hell and the devil,” will generally be found sufficient; but for the pleuritic fever of rage I should be disposed to prescribe “the devil and his infernal grandmother:” strengthening the dose, moreover, with a “donnerwetter” or two, and a few “sacraments,” as the curative powers of the electric fluid are now so generally recognised. It is unnecessary to point out to me that in cases of absolute canine fury or maniacal wrath, doses of the specific, such as the foregoing, are of little avail; I should, of course, let a patient in this condition be “taken and torn by all the devils in hell.” But what I would fain render clear is that, in all these remedies, the realspecificis the devil; for as it is his sting which is the cause of our malady, he himself has got to be employed as the remedy, just as the stings of scorpions are cured by the application of scorpions in powder.

The tumult of anticipation shook up the aristocracy and the sixpenny gallery into one common whole. On occasions like this—as also in the chase and in agricultural operations—the aristocracy forget what they are, viz., something better than the citizen classes. An aristocrat should, in my opinion, never for a moment lose sight of the fact that his position with reference to the common herd is that which the actor now a days stands in with respect to the chorus. In the time of Thespis the whole of the tragedy was sung and acted by the chorus, while one single actor, called the protagonist, delivered a speech or two, unaccompanied by any music, bearing on the subject of the play. Æschylus introduced a second actor, the deuteragonist; Sophocles even a third, the tritagonist. In more recent times the actors have been retained, but the chorus omitted, unless we consider those who applaud to represent it. In a similar manner also, in this world of ours (mankind’s natural theatre), the chorus,i. e. the people, has been gradually cleared off the stage, only with more advantage than in the case of smaller theatrical ones, and promoted from taking part in the action of the drama (which the protagonists (princes), deuteragonists (ministers), and tritagonists (people of quality), are better fit to do), to the post of spectators who criticise and applaud—what was the chorus in Athens, now sitting at ease in the pit, near the orchestra, and before the stage where the great “business” is going on.

By this time it was past two o’clock, and the afternoons were brief; yet the saucy bird would not stir. Everybody swore that the carpenter who had hatched it from its native block was a low scoundrel, and must have carved it out of tough branchwood. But at last, all battered, with nearly the whole of its paint broken away from it, it did appear to be somewhat disposed to topple down. The hairdresser, who, like the common herd in general, was conscientious towards individuals only, not towards an aggregation of them, now without any scruple secretly doubled his bullets (since he could not double his rifle), putting in one for himself and one for his brother in arms, in the hope that this decomposing medium might have the effect of precipitating the eagle. “The devil and his infernal grandmother!” cried he, when he had fired his shot, making use of the febrifuge or cooling draught above alluded to. He now had to place all his trust in his lodger, to whom he handed his rifle. Siebenkæs fired, and the Saxon cried, “Ten thousand devils!” doubling in vain the dose of devils, as he had the dose of bullets.

They now, in despair, laid aside their rifles and also their hopes; for there were more pretenders to this crown than there were to that of Rome in the time of Galienus, when there were but thirty. This shooting septuaginta had all telescopes at their eyes (when they had not rifles there), that they might observe how there were a greater number of bullets in this heaven-suspended constellation of theirs than there are stars in the astronomical one of the eagle. The faces of all beholders were now turned towards this Keblah of a bird, like those of the Jews towards their ruined Jerusalem. Even old Sabel sat behind her table of sweetmeats customerless, and gazing up at the eagle. The earlier numbers didn’t even give themselves the trouble of shaking a pinch of powder into their pans.

Firmian pitied these oppressed hearts, swimming heavily in turbid, earthy blood—for whom at this time, the setting sun, the bright array of sky tints, and the broad, fair world were all invisible—or, rather, all shrivelled up to a battered block of wood. The surest token that these hearts were all lying fettered in the eternal dungeon of need and necessity, was that none could make a single witty allusion either to the bird or the kingship. It is only concerning matters which leave our souls free and unshackled that we notice similitudes and connection.

“This bird,” thought Firmian, “is the decoy of all these men, and the money is what baits the lure.” But he himself had three reasons for desiring to be king: firstly, to laugh himself to death at his own coronation; secondly, on account of his Lenette: thirdly, on account of the Saxon.

The second half of the seventy gradually fired off, and the earlier numbers began to load again, if it were for nothing but the fun of the thing. Every one put in two bullets now. Our two Hanseatic confederates came once more up to the mark, and Siebenkæs borrowed a more powerful glass, screwing it on to his rifle like the finder of a telescope.

No. 10 loosened the bird from its joining to the pole. Nothing but the sheer weight of it now retained it on its perch, for they had well nigh saturated and incrusted the wood of it with lead (as certain springs transform wood into iron).

The Saxon had but to graze the eagle-torso—ay, or even the perch of it—nay, the very evening breeze had but to give an extra puff—to send the bird of prey swooping down. He had his rifle to his shoulder—aimed for a whole eternity (there were fifty florins hanging in the sky)—and pulled his trigger. The powder flashed in the pan. The band had all their trumpets ready at their lips—trumpets horizontal, music perpendicular—the boys stood round ready to seize the fallen skeleton; the buffoon in his excitement couldn’t think of a joke to make—his ideas were all up beside the bird; the poor, anxious, eager, excited hairdresser drew his trigger once more, and again ’twas but a flash in the pan. Great drops of perspiration bedewed him; he glowed, he trembled; loaded, aimed, fired, and sent his bullet several ells, at the least, away over the bird.

He stepped back, pale and silent, in a cold perspiration; not an oath did he utter; nay, I suspect he offered up a silent prayer or two that his co-partner might, by heaven’s grace, capture the feathered game.

Firmian went forward, thinking as hard as he could about something else, to keep down his thrilling excitement; aimed, not very long, at this, his anchor in his little storms, as it hung hovering in the twilight, fired; saw the old stump turn three times round in the air, like Fortune’s wheel, and, at last, break loose, and come pitching down.

As, when the old French kings were crowned, a live bird always fluttered in the air; as, at the apotheoses of the Roman emperors, an eagle soared skyward from out the funeral pyre, so did one swoop downward from the heavens at the coronation of my hero.

The children screamed, and the trumpets blared. One moiety of the assemblage crowded to see who the new king was, and to have a look at him; while the other moiety streamed crowding round the jester, as he advanced bearing that shattered bullet-case, the eagle’s body, holding it up above the heads of the throng. The barber ran to meet it, crying, “Vive le roi,” and adding that he was a king himself into the bargain; and Firmian moved towards the door in silence, full of happiness, but fuller of emotion.

And now it is time that we should all of us hurry to the town to see how Rosa fares, what kind of throne he gainschezMadame Siebenkæs (while her husband is thus ascendinghis)—a richer throne, or only a pillory—and what number of steps he climbs towards whichever of the two it may prove to be.

Rosa knocked at Lenette’s door, and straightway entered in at it, in order that she might not have a chance of coming and ascertaining who was there. “He had torn himself away from the shooting-match; her husband was coming immediately, and he would wait for him there. His rifle had once more been excessively fortunate.” It was with these truths that he came into the presence of the alarmed Lenette, bearing, however upon his countenance, an assumed aristocratic frigid zone. He walked, in an easy and unconcerned manner, up and down the room. He inquired whether this April weather affected her health at all; as for himself, it produced in him a kind of miserable prostrating low fever. Lenette, timid and nervous, stood at the window, her eyes half in the street, half in the room. He glanced, in passing, at her work-table, took up a paper bonnet shape and a pair of scissors, and put them down again, his attention being arrested by a paper of pins. “Why, these are No. 8’s,” he said; “these pins are a great deal too large, Madame; their heads would do for No. 1 shot. The lady whose hat you were putting them in ought really to be immensely grateful to me.”

He then went quickly up to her, and, from a spot a trifling distance below her heart (where she had a whole quiver, or thorn-hedge of needles planted, ready for use), he plucked one out with a dauntless coolness, and held it up for her inspection, saying, “Look how badly this is plated; ’twill spoil every stitch you take with it.” He threw it out of the window, and evinced symptoms of being about to pluck out the remainder from that heart (where the fates had stuck none other than such as were “badly plated”), and stick the contents of his own needle-book into that pretty pincushion instead. But she waved him off with an icy, repellant, gesture, saying, “Don’t trouble yourself.”

“I really wish your husband would come,” he said, looking at his watch. “The king’s shot must be over long ere this time.”

He took up the paper cap-pattern again, and the scissors; but, as she fixed on him a gaze of deep anxiety (lest he should spoil her pattern), he took from his pocket a sheet of verses dipped in hippocrene, and, by way of passing the time, he clipped this up, by wavy lines, into a series of hearts, one within the other. This gentleman, who, like the Augurs, always strove to carry off theheartof the sacrifice—he, whose own heart (like that of a coquette) constantly grew again as often as he lost it (as a lizard’s tail does)—he had theword“heart,” which Germans and men in general seem almost to shrink from uttering, continually on his tongue, or, at all events, impressions of it in his hand.

My belief that his motive for leaving behind him (as he did) his needles, and his rhymeful hearts, was that he had observed of women that they always think fondly of an absent person when they chance to see something of his which he has left behind. Rosa belonged to that class of persons (of both sexes) who never show any cleverness, delicacy of perception, or knowledge of human nature, save in matters relating to love of the opposite sex.

He now catechised out of her a number of cooking and washing receipts of various kinds, and these, despite her cautious monosyllabicity, she imparted—prescription fashion—in all their fulness, both of words and of ingredients. At length he made preparations for departure, saying, he had been most anxious for her husband’s homecoming because of a certain matter of business which he could not well discuss with him on the shooting-ground, among so many people, and before Herr von Blaise. “I shall come another day,” he said; “but the most important point of the affair I can mention to yourself,” and he sat down before her, with his hat and stick in his hand. Just as he commenced his recital, however, observing that she was standing, he laid aside his hat and stick to place a chair for her, opposite to his. His propinquity was grateful to her Schneiderian membrane, at any rate; his odour was paradisaic; his pocket-handkerchief a musk-bag, his head an altar of incense, or magnified civet-ball. (Shaw has remarked that the whole viper tribe has the property of emitting a peculiar, sweet scent.)

“She might readily see,” he said, “that it referred to that wretched lawsuit with the Heimlicher. The poor’s advocate did not deserve, indeed, that a man should interest himself inhisfavour; but then, you see, he had anadmirablewife, whodiddeserve it.” (He italicised the word “admirable” by means of a hurried squeeze of her hand.) “He had been fortunate enough to induce Herr von Blaise to defer his ‘no’ three separate times, though he had not as yet been able to speak to the advocate in person. But now, that a pasquinade of Mr. Leibgeber’s (whose hand was well known), had come to light near a stove-statue at the Heimlicher’s, nothing approximating to a yielding, or a payment of the trust-fund, was to be dreamt of for a moment. Now this was a state of matters for which his very heart bled, particularly as, since he had been in such poor health of late, he felt only too keen a sympathy and interest in everything; he knew perfectly well what an unhappy condition her (Lenette’s) household matters had been placed in by this lawsuit; and had often sighed, in vain, over many things. He should be delighted, therefore, to advance whatever she might require for current expenditure. As yet she did not knowhimin the slightest degree, and perhaps could scarce surmise what he did, from motives of the purest benevolence, for six charities in Kuhschnappel—though he could produce documentary evidence if she liked,” and he did produce and hand to her six receipts of the Charitable Commission. I should not be giving proof of that impartiality of character which I bear the reputation of possessing, did I not here freely admit, and clearly place on record, that the Venner had, from his youth up, always shown a certain disposition to benefit and assist the poor of both sexes, and that his consciousness that he dealt in this large-hearted manner, did (when compared with the narrow close-fistedness prevalent in Kuhschnappel) give him some warrant for bearing himself with a certain amount of proper pride towards those mean and miserly beings who sate in judgment upon his little genial breaches of the moral laws. For his conscience bore him witness that, conversely to the process whereby spiders are metamorphosed into jewels, he spun his shining webs (of gold and silver), and in their meshes, wet with the glittering dew of tears, made an occasional capture from time to time.

But for a woman like Lenette (he continued) he would do things of a much grander description; as proofs of which, given already by him, he needed only to point to the fact that he had set at defiance the Heimlicher’s hostility towards her husband, and that he had more than once quietly swallowed speeches of her husband’s own, such as in his social position he had never suffered anybody to address to him before. “Name any sum of money you are in want of; by Heaven, all you have to do is to ask for it.”

Lenette, bashful and trembling, glowed red with shame at this discovery of (what she had believed to be) the mystery of her poverty and her pawnings. With the view of pouring a few drops of oil on the troubled waters, he began, by way of preamble, to make some disparaging remarks concerning his fiancée at Bayreuth. “She reads too much, and doesn’t work enough. I only wish she could have the benefit of a few lessons fromyouin housekeeping. And really, a lady such as you, with so many attractions (quite unaware of them, too, herself), so much patience, such wonderful diligence and assiduity, should have a very different kind of household than this place for her sphere of action.” Her hand was by this time lying still in the stocks—the close arrest—of his; her wings and her tongue, as well as her hands, were tied and fettered by that fainthearted incapacity of self-assertion which is born of the sense of poverty. When women were in question, Mr. Everard’s longings and likings paid no heed to boundary-marks; but rather strove hard to obliterate them, and get rid of them altogether. Most men, in the wild, unreasoning whirl of their appetites, are like the jay, which tears the carnation to tatters in order to get at its seeds.

Upon her downcast eyes he now riveted a long gaze of fondness, not withdrawing it, however, when she raised them up; and, by dint of keeping his eyes very wide open, and thinking with great vividness on pathetic and touching subjects, he managed to squeeze out about as much water as would have sufficed to make an end of a humming bird of the smaller sort.

In him, as in a fine actor, all false emotions became for the time real and genuine; and when he flattered any one, he at once began to respect him. As soon as he felt there were tears enough in his eyes, and sighs enough in his breast, he asked her if she hadany ideawhat was causing them. She looked innocently, and with kindly alarm, into those eyes of his, and her own began to overflow. This greatly encouraged him, and he said, “It is the fact thatyouhave not such a happy lot as you deserve.”

Ah! selfish pigmy! at such a moment you might have spared this poor, anxious, trembling soul, sinking, well nigh, in an ocean of tears for all the long, long past.

But he knew no sorrow save of the theatrical, the transient, the petty, and the sham sort; and so he spared her not.

Yet that which he had expected would prove the bridge from his heart to hers, namely, sorrow, became, on the contrary, the portcullis barrier between them. A dance, or somejoyfultumult of the senses would have brought him further with thiscommonplace, every-day, honest, and upright woman than three pailfuls of selfish tears. His hopes rose high, as he laid his flowery, sorrow-laden head upon his hands, down into her lap.

But Lenette jumped up with such a suddenness that it nearly knocked him over altogether. She gazed inquiringly into his eyes. Upright women must, I think, have some instinct of their own concerning the lightnings of the eye, by means of which they can distinguish between the lurid flashes of hell and the pure coruscations of heaven. This profligate was as little aware of the flashes of his eyes as was Moses of the brightness of his countenance. Her glance shrunk before his scorching gaze; at the same time I feel it incumbent on me as an historian—seeing that readers by the thousand (and I myself into the bargain) are all up in arms to such an extent against this defenceless Everard—not to conceal the fact that Lenette had had her mind’s eye firmly fixed upon certain rather rude and free-handed sketches which Schulrath Stiefel had drawn for her of the manœuvring grounds of rakes in general (and this one in particular), and, in consequence, had pricked up her ears in alarm at each move he made, whether in advance or in retreat.

And yet every word I write in defence of the poor rascal will only tell against him now; indeed, there are many ladies whose acquaintance with the Salic Law (or Mr. Meiner’s work) teaches them that in former times the penalty for touching a woman’s hand was the same as for hewing off a man’s middle finger, namely, fifteen shillings, and who, being indignant with Rosa for his hand pressures, would fain have him to be duly punished therefor. I am convinced that these ladies would by no means be pacified were I to go on speaking in his extenuation, for they have doubtless learnt, out of Mallet’s ‘Introduction to the History of Denmark,’ that formerly persons who kissed without leave, and against the will, were, by the law of the land, liable to be banished. And there are very many women of the present day who are strictly governed by the ancient pandects of Germany, and, in the case of lip-thieves (since, in the eye of the law, banishment and confinement to one place are held to be tantamount and equivalent one to another), they adjudge them—not, it is true, to bebanished fromtheir chambers, but toremain inthem; similarly, they lodge debtors (to whom they have given their hearts, and who insist on retaining possession of the same) in the Marshalsea of the Matrimonial Torus.

When Rosa jumped up (as before set forth), he had nothing to urge in extenuation of his false step but an aggravation or augmentation of it, and accordingly he fairly took the marble goddess in his arms—But at this point my progress is barred for a moment by an observation which has to be made ere I proceed; it is this: There are many kindly beauties who cover their retreats or make amends for their denials by concessions. By way of making themselves some amends for their hard services in the campaign of virtue, they offer no resistance at all in matters of the smaller sort, skilfully abandoning a good many intrenchments and outworks (in the shape of words, articles of dress, and so on), to enable them to deftly steal a march upon the enemy and outmanœuvre him—just as clever generals burn the suburbs that they may fight the better up in the citadel.

My sole object in making this observation is to point out that it did not apply to Lenette in any respect whatever. Pure as she was in soul and in body, she might have gone straight away into heaven just as she stood, without changing so much as a stitch of her attire—have taken her eyes, heart, clothes, everything except that tongue of hers, which was uncultivated, rude, indiscreet; so that her resistance to Everard’s attempted burglary on her lips was unnecessarily grave and discourteous (considering what a trifling case of orchard-robbery it really was), much more so than it would have been had Lenette been able to drive the Schulrath’s highly-coloured prognostics concerning Rosa out of her head.

Rosa had anticipated a denial of a less unpleasant kind. His obstinacy availed him nothing as against hers, which was the greater of the two. A gnat-swarm of firm and passionate resolves buzzed about his ears; but when at length (probably inspired thereto by the Schulrath) she said, “Your lordship remembers that the Tenth Commandment says, ‘Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife’”—from the crossroad between love and hatred, on which he was standing, he suddenly made a great jump—into his pocket and brought out a wreath of artificial flowers, “There!” he cried, “take them, you nasty, inexorable creature! just this one forget-me-not as a souvenir; devil fly away with me if I want anything further!” If shehadtaken it, hewouldimmediately have wanted something further; but she turned her face aside and repulsed the silken garland with both hands. At this the honeycomb of love in his heart soured into very vinegar; he grew wild with fury, and throwing the flowers right over the table, he cried, “Why, they are your own pawned flowers—I redeemed them myself—so take them youmust.” On which he took his departure, not, however, without making his bow, which Lenette, all hurt and offended as she was, ceremoniously returned.

She took the envenomed wreath to the window, to have a better light to examine it by. Alas! these were indeed, and beyond all doubt, the very roses and rosebuds whose steely thorns were wet with the blood-drops from a pair of pierced hearts. Whilst she, thus weeping and bowed beneath the weight of her woe, stunned and stupid rather than observant, stood at her window, it suddenly struck her as a strange circumstance that the torturer of her soul, though he had gone rattling down the stairs in a hurry with noise enough, had never gone out at the street-door. After a long and attentive watch, during which anxiety, closely bordering upon terror, assumed therôleof comforter and spake louder than her sorrow (the future, at the same time, driving the past out of view), the becrowned hairdresser came galloping home (the crown of his hat pointing heavenwards), and shouted to her in a mere parenthetical manner as he dashed by, “Madame the queen!” for his great idea was, that before anything else he should rush home, and there on the spot, and without a moment’s delay, make proclamation of the kingship and queenship of four persons.

There now devolves upon me the duty of conducting my readers to the corner where the Venner is cowering. From Lenette he haddescended(in two senses of that word) to the hairdresser’s wife, one of that common class of women who never so much as dream of an infidelity all the year round—for no horse in all the kingdom is harder worked—and commit one only when there appears on the scene some tempter, whom they neither invite nor resist, probably forgetting all about the incident by the time next baking day comes round. On the whole, the superiority which the female middle-class is disposed to arrogate to itself over that of a higher rank, is just about equally great as it is questionable. There are not a great many tempters in the middle-class, and those there are are not of a very tempting sort.

Like the earthworm, which has ten hearts that extend all the way from one end of it to the other, Rosa was fitted out with as many hearts as there are species of women; for the delicate, the coarse, the religious, the immoral—every sort, in fact; he was always ready with the appropriate heart. For as Lessing and others so frequently blame the critics for narrowness and onesidedness in matters of taste, inculcating upon them a greater universality of it—a greater power of appreciation of the beautiful, to whatsoever times and nations belonging—so do men of the world also advocate a universality of taste for thelivebeautiful, on two legs, not excluding any variety of it, but deriving gratification from all. This taste the Venner possessed. There was such a marked distinction between his feelings for the wigmaker’s wife and for Lenette, that, in revenge upon the latter, he came to the determination, on the stair, to take a jump right over this distinction and slip in to pay a visit to the landlady, while her narrow-chested husband was away scheming and plotting in confederacy for a crown in another quarter. Sophia (this was her name) had been always combing at wigs in the bookbinder’s on the occasions when the Venner had been sitting there on the business of getting his novels and life romances done up and bound, and there they had communicated to one other, by looks and glances, all that which people are not in the habit of confiding to third parties. Meyern made hisentréeinto the childless abode with all the confident assurance of an epic poet, who soars superior to all prefaces. There was a certain corner partitioned off from the room by boards: it contained little or nothing—no window, no chair, a little warmth from the sitting-room, a clothes-cupboard, and the couple’s bed.

When the first compliments had been exchanged, Rosa took up a position behind the door of this partitioned space, for the street passed close by the window, and at this late hour he was anxious not to give occasion to unpleasant surmises on the part of passers by. Of a sudden, however, Sophia saw her husband run by the window. The intent to commit a sin may betray itself by a superabundance of carefulness and caution; Rosa and Sophia were so startled at the sight of the runner, that she begged the young gentleman to get behind the partition until her husband should go back to the shooting-range. The Venner went stumbling into thesanctum sanctorum, while Sophia placed herself at the door of it, and, as her husband entered, made as though she were just coming out of it, closing the door after her. The moment he had stuttered out the news of his elevation in rank, he darted out of the room, crying, “She upstairs there knows nothing about it yet.” Gladness and hurried draughts of liquor had just blurred the sharp outlines of his lighter ideas with a thin haze or fog. He ran out and called “Madame Siebenkæs” up the stairs (he was anxious to be off again so as to join the procession). She hastened half way down, heard the glad news with trembling, and, either by way of masking her joy, or as a fruit of a warmer liking for her husband now that fortune seemed kinder to him (or it may have been, perhaps,anotherfruit which joy commonly bears, namely, anxiety, or shall I name it fear?), she threw down to him the question, “Is Mr. von Meyern out yet?”

“What! washein my room just now?” cried he, while his wife echoed, unbidden, from the door, “Hashebeen in the house?” “He was here, upstairs,” Lenette replied, with a touch of suspicion, “and he hasn’t gone out yet.”

The hairdresser’s suspicions were now awakened, for the consumptive trust no woman, and, like children, take every chimney-sweep they see for the devil himself, hoof, horns, tail and all. “Things are not all exactly as they should be here, Sophy,” said he to his wife. The passing brain-dropsy, induced by what he had drunk during the day and by his half-share in a throne and fifty florins, had the effect of screwing his courage up to such a pitch that he secretly formed the idea of treating the Venner to a good sound cudgelling in the event of his coming upon him in any illegal corner. Accordingly he started upon voyages of discovery, first exploring the entrance passage, where Rosa’s sweet-scented head served him as a trail, or lure; he followed this incense-pillar of cloud into his own room, observing that this Ariadne’s thread of his, this sweet odour, grew stronger as he went. Here among the flowers lay the serpent—as, according to Pliny, sweet-smelling forests harbour venomous snakes. Sophia wished herself in the nethermost of Dante’s hells, though in fact and reality shewasthere already. It dawned upon the hairdresser that if the Venner would only stay where he was, in the closed titmouse-trap of the partitioned corner, he should have bruin safe in his toils; consequently he reserved till the last a peep into the said corner. What is historically certain is, that he seized upon a pair of curling-tongs wherewith to probe the dark corner and gauge the cubic contents thereof. Into its dark depths he made a horizontal lunge with his tongs, but encountered nothing. He next inserted this probe, this searcher of his, into more places than one—firstly, into the bed, next, under the bed (taking this time the precaution to keep opening and shutting the tongs, which were not hot, on the chance of some stray lock of hair getting caught in them in the darkness.) However, all this trap captured was air. At this juncture he came upon a clothes-cupboard, the door of which had always stood gaping ajar for the last six years or so; the key had been lost just that time, and in this slipshod household it was a matter of necessity to keep this door open, otherwise the lock would have snapped to, and there would have been no getting in. To-day, however, this door was close shut. The Venner (in a profuse perspiration) was inside; thefriseurpressed the lock home, and then the net was fairly over the quail.

The hairdresser, now master of the situation, quietly took the command of his establishment at his ease; the Venner could not get out!

He despatched Sophia (as red as a furnace and loudly dissentient, though forced to obey) for the locksmith and his breaching implements; however, she quite made up her mind to come back with a lie, not with a locksmith. When she had marched off he fetched Fecht, the cobbler, up, to be at once his witness of and his assistant in that which he proposed to accomplish. The shoe-stitcher crept into the room softly at his heels; the phthisic haircurler went up to the canary-cage and addressed the bird imprisoned therein (tapping the while with his tongs on the gate of this fortress of Engelsburg) as follows: “Iknowyou are in there, honourable Sir, make a move; there’s nobody here but me, as yet (there’ll soon be more). I can break the cupboard open with my tongs and let you out.” Laying his ear close to the door of this Spandau, he heard the captive sigh.

“Ah! you are puffing and panting a little, honourable gentleman,” said the wigmaker; “I am here at the door by myself now. When the locksmith comes and breaks it open, we shall all see you, and I’ll call the whole house; but all I shall ask to let you jump out now, quietly, and be off unseen, will be a mere trifle. Give me that hat of yours, and a shilling or two, and give me your custom.”

At length the miserable prisoner knocked upon the door and said, “Iamin here; just let me out, will you, my man, and I’ll do all you say. I can help, from the inside, to break open the door.” The wigmaker and the cobbler applied their battering apparatus to the “parloir” of this donjon-keep, and the captive bounded forth. During the breaking open of the gates of jubilee the friseur parleyed or negotiated a little more, and amerced the anchorite in the locksmith’s fee; at last, bringing Rosa forth, like Pallas in her mail, when she issued from Jove’s cranium into the light of day, “The landlord,” said Fecht, “couldn’t have managed the job without me.”

Rosa opened his eyes wide at the sight of this auxiliary deliverer from the house of bondage, took off the sweet-smelling hat (which the cobbler immediately clapped on to his own head), shed some drops of golden rain from his waistcoat-pocket upon the pair, and, in dread of them and of the locksmith’s arrival, fled home bareheaded in the dark. The friseur, whose bald pate was so near to the triple crown of the emperors of old, and the popes of the present (for the eagle gave him a crown, the Venner a hat, and his wife had nearly placed something else——),—however, the friseur, in high satisfaction of this new martyr-crown of felt, which he had been envying the Venner the possession of all the afternoon, went back with it to the shooting-ground, that he might have the gratification of marching home in company with his co-emperor, attended by their subjects and their vassals.

The wigmaker took his hat off to his royal brother Siebenkæs (that hat so much more worthy of a co-king than his former one), and told him something of what had been happening.

The Heimlicher von Blaise smiled his Domitian smile to-day more affectionately than ever, which made the bird emperor far from comfortable; for friendliness and smiling make the heart colder when it is cold to begin with, and warmer when it is warm—just asspiritus nitridoes water. From a friendliness of this particular kind nothing was to be expected but its opposite, as in ancient jurisprudence excessive piety in a woman was merely a proof that she had sold herself to the devil. Christ’s implements of torture became holy relics; and, conversely, relics of saints often become implements of torture.

Under the twinkling gleams of the wide, starry firmament (where new constellations kept bursting into view, in the shape of banging rockets) the grand procession marched along. The competitors who had come after the king’s shot had fired their rifles in the air, by way of salute to the royal pair. The two kings walked side by side, but the one who belonged to the guild of wigmakers found some difficulty in standing (what between joy and beer), and would gladly have sat down upon a throne. However, over these seventy Brethren of the Eagle, and the two vicars of the empire, we are losing sight, and delaying to treat of something else.

To wit, the town militia, who are also present, or more properly speaking, the Royal Kuhschnappel Militia. Concerning this regiment I think a good deal, and say only about half what I think. A city or county militia regiment—and particularly the Royal Kuhschnappel Militia—is a distinguished and important body of men, whoseraison d’êtreis to scorn and show contempt for the enemy, by always turning their backs upon him—showing him, in fact, nothingbutbacks, like a well-ordered library. If the enemy has anything in the nature of courage, then our said force sacrifices to Fear like the ancient Spartans; and as poets and actors ought in the first place to experience and picture to themselves in a vivid manner the emotions they are about to portray, the militia endeavours to give an illustration, in itself, of that panic terror into which it would fain throw the enemy. Now with the view of affording these men of war (or “of peace” if you prefer it) the necessary amount of practice in the mimic representation of terror, they are daily put through a process of being terrified at the city gates. It iscalled“being relieved.” When one of these men of peace is on sentry, another of them, a comrade of his, marches up to his sentry box, shouts out words of command at him in a warlike tone of voice, and makes hostile and threatening gestures in close proximity to his nose; the one who is on sentry also cries out in a similar voice, goes through certain motions with his weapon, and then lays it down and gets away as fast as he can; the conqueror in this brief winter campaign retains possession of the field, and puts on the watchcoat which he has taken from the other man by way of booty; but that they may each have an opportunity of being terrified by the others, they take the part of conqueror turn about. A warrior of this peaceful order may very often be most dangerous in actual war, when, in the act of bolting, he happens, in throwing his rifle away with the bayonet fixed, to throw it too far, and harpoon his too proximate pursuer with it. Militiamen of this sort (“precious” they are in every sense) are usually posted, for greater security’s sake, in public places where they are safe from injury, such as the gates of towns, where these harpooners are protected by the town and gate; at the same time I have often wished, in passing, that these students of the art military were provided with a good thick stick, so that they might have something to defend themselves with if anybody should try to take away their muskets.

It will appear to many that I am but artfully cloaking the shortcomings of the militia in these respects; I am prepared for this—but it is not difficult to perceive that this species of praise also applies to all small standing armies of lesser principalities—forces which are recruited only that they may recruit. I shall here utter myself on this subject a little. Vuillaume recommends educators to teach children to play at soldiers, to make them drill and mount guard, in order to accustom them, by this play, to firm and active habits both of body and of mind; in short, to render them firm and upright. This soldier-game has been carried on for a considerable time already in Campe’s Institute. But is Mr. Vuillaume really ignorant that scholar-drill, such as he recommends, has been long since introduced by every good prince of the empire into his dominions? Does he suppose it is anything new when I tell him that these princes seize upon all strong young fellows (as soon as they attain the canonical height) and have them drilled, in order that they, the State’s children, may thus be taughtmores, carriage, and all that has to be acquired in the State’s school? The truth is that, even in the very smallest principalities, the soldiers often possess all the acquirements and accomplishments of real soldiers; they can present arms, stand bolt upright at portals, andsmokeat all events, if notfire—matters which a poodle learns with ease, but a country bumpkin with more difficulty.

To these rehearsals of warlike business I attribute it that many otherwise clever and sensible men have allowed themselves to believe that this sham soldiery of the little States, is in fact a real soldiery; they must otherwise have seen in a moment that with so small a force neither could a small territory be defended, nor a large one attacked; neither is there indeed any need for even this small force, since in Germany the question of relative strength is merged in that of equality of religion. Hunger, cold, nakedness, and privation are the benefits which Vuillaume considers the soldier-game to hold out to his scholars, as lessons in patient endurance and fortitude; now these are the very advantages which the State schools above referred to confer upon the young men of the country—and that much more thoroughly and efficaciously than Vuillaume does—which, of course, is the entire object of the institution. I am quite aware that there are not infrequent cases in which perhaps a third part of the population escapes being made into soldiery, and consequently gets none of the valuable practice in question; at the same time there can be no doubt that if we even get the length of having two-thirds of the population with rifles on their shoulders in the place of scythes, the remaining third (inasmuch as it has considerably less to mow, to thresh, and to subsist upon) obtains the before-mentioned benefits (of cold, hunger, nakedness, &c.), almost gratis, and without having to fire so much as a single shot. Let but barracks be multiplied in a sufficient ratio in a country, in a province, parish, town, village (as the case may be), and the remainder of the houses will of themselves settle down, into suburbs, and accessory and out-buildings to the barracks, nay, become absolute conventual establishments, in which the three monastic vows (the Prince alone beingpère provincial) are, whethertakenornot, at all events most religiouslykept.

We now hear the two vicars of the empire go into their homes. The friseur’s sole punishment to his wife is a narrative of the whole affair, and a sight of the hat; while the advocate rewards Lenette with the kiss which she had refused to other lips. If her story did not please him, the teller of it did, and on the whole the only thing she omitted was the flower-wreath, and the allusions made to it. She would not cloud the happiness of his evening, nor bring back upon him the pain and the reproaches of that other evening when she had pawned it. I, like many of my readers, had expected that Lenette would have received the news of the enthronisation far too coldly; she has deceived us all; she received it even too joyfully. But there were two good reasons for this; she had heard of it an hour before, and consequently the first feminine mourning over a joy had had time to give place to the joy itself. For women are like thermometers, which on a sudden application of heat sink at first a few degrees, as a preliminary to rising a good many. The second reason for her being thus indulgent and sympathetic was the humiliating consciousness she possessed of the Venner’s visit, and of the wreath in its hiding-place; for we are often severe when we are strong, and practise forbearance when we stand in need of it.

I now wish the entire royal family and household a good night, and a pleasant awaking in the eighth chapter.

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