Here is Roquairol's letter to Albano:—
"It must once be, and be over; we must see each other as we are, and then hate each other, if it must be so. I make thy sister unhappy; thou makest mine unhappy and me too; these things just balance each other. Thou distortedst thyself out of an angel to me more and more passionately into a destroying angel. Strangle me, then, but I grapple thee too.
"Now look upon me, I draw off my mask, I have convulsive movements on my face, like people who live after drinking sweet poison. I have made myself drunk with poison, I have swallowed the poison-pill, the great poison globule, the earth-globe. Out with it freely! I exult no more, I believe nothing more, I do not even lament right valiantly. My tree is hollowed out, burnt to a coal by fantastic fire. When, occasionally, in this state, the intestinal worms of the soul, exasperation, ecstasy, love, and the like, crawl round again, and gnaw and devour each other, then do I look down from myself to them; like polypuses, I cut them in twain and turn them wrong end foremost and stick them into each other. Then I look again at my own act of looking, and as this goes onad infinitum, what then comes to one from it all? If others have an idealism of faith, so have I an idealism of the heart, and every one who has often gone through with all sensations on the stage, on paper, and on the earth, is in the same case. What boots it? If thou shouldst die at this moment, I often say to myself, then, as all radii of life run together into the minute point of a moment, all would verily be wiped out, invisible; to me, then, it is as if I had been nothing. Often I look upon the mountains and floods and the ground about me, and it seems to me as if they could at any and every moment flutter asunder and melt away in smoke, and I with them. The future life (as even the present is hardly to be called a life), and all that hangs thereupon, belongs to the ecstasies which one winks at; especially it belongs to the ecstasy of love.
"As thou so readily assumest every difference from thyself to be enervation, so do I say to thee outright: Only ascend farther, only knead thyself more thoroughly, only lift thy head higher out of the hot waves of the feelings, then wilt thou no longer lose thyself in them, but let them billow on alone. There is a cold, daring spirit in man, which nothing touches at all,—not even virtue; for it alone chooses that, and is its creator, not its creature. I once experienced at sea a storm, in which the whole element furiously and jaggedly and foamingly lashed itself into commotion, and flung its waters pell-mell through each other, while overhead the sun looked on in silence;—so be thou! The heart is the storm; self is the heaven.
"Believest thou that the romancers and tragedians, that is, the men of genius among them, who have a thousand times aped, and aped their own apings of everything, divine and human, are other than I? What keeps them and the world's people still real is the hunger after money and praise; this eating gastric-juice is the animal glue, the salient point in the soft floating and fleeting world. The apes are geniuses among beasts; and the geniuses are—not merely before higher beings, as Pope says of Newton, but even here below—apes, in aesthetic imitation, in heartlessness, malignity, malicious pleasure, sensuality, and—merriment.
"The last and last but one I reserve for myself. Against thelongueurs(lengthy passages) in life's book,—a book which no man understands,—there is no remedy except some merry passages, of which I think no more so soon as I have read them. In order only to get over this cold, hobbly life, I will surely sooner scatter below me rose-cups than thistles. Joy is of itself worth something, if only that it crowds out something worse before one lays down his heavy head and sinks into nothingness.
"Such am I; such was I; then I saw thee, and would be thyThou—but it serves not, for I cannot go back; thou, however, goest forward, thou becomest my very self one day,—and then Iwouldhave loved thy sister! May she forgive me for it! Here drink pure wine! I know best how one fares with the women,—how their love blesses and robs,—how all love, like other fire,kindlesitself with much better wood than that whichfeedsit,-and how, universally, the Devil gets all he brings.
"O, why then can no woman love but just so far as one will have her, and no further,—absolutely none? Hear me now: everywhere lazy preachers would fain hold us back from all transitory pleasure by telling us of the discomfort that comes after. Is not then the discomfort transitory too? Rabette meant well with me, on the same ground of desire upon which I meant well with her and myself. But does any one know, then, what purgatorial hours one wades through with a strange heart, which is full, without making full, and whose love one at last hates,—beforewhich, but notwithwhich, one weeps, and never about the same thing, and to which one dreads to unveil any emotion, for fear of seeing it transmuted into nourishment of love,—from whose anger one imbibes the greater wrath, and from its love the lesser! And now to have absolutely the more joyous relations screwed down forever to this state of torment, when they ought rather to exalt us above the tormenting ones, the long wished for gods'-bliss of life perverted forever into a flat show and copper-plate engraving,—the heart into a breast and mask,—the marrow of existence into sharp bones,—and yet, as to all reproaches of coldness, chained only to silence, bound innocent and dumb to the rack,—and that, too, without end!
"No, sooner give me the frenzy which one draws from the temple of love as well as from that of the Eumenides! Better burn up in a real flame of misery, without hope, without utterance, even to paleness and madness, than be so loving and not loved! He who has once burned in this hell, Albano, continues to frequent it forevermore: that is the last misery. Can I not worry down life and death, and wounds and stings beforehand?—and certainly I am not weak. Nevertheless, I am not the man to put restraints upon a sentimental discourse, or harpsichord fantasy, or reading or singing, not though sorrow in person should hold before me a menace, undersigned by all the gods, that a female listener whom I cannot endure would immediately thereupon become my lover, and from that my mistress and my hell.
"The Greeks gave Love and Death the same form, beauty, and torch; for me it is a murderous torch; but I love Death, and therefore Cupid. Long has life been to me a tragic muse; willingly to the dagger of a muse do I offer my breast; a wound is almost half a heart.
"Hear further! Rabette has a fine nature, and follows it; but mine is for her a cloud of empty, transitory form and structure; she does not understand me. Could she, then would she be the first to forgive me. O, I have indeed treated her hardly, as if I were a destiny, and she I. Resent, but hear![31]On the night of the Illumination her longing and my emptiness brought us in the fiery rain of joy more warmly together; among the shiningly mailed and smoothly polished court-faces her ingenuous one bloomed lovely and living as a fresh child on the stage or at court; we happened into Tartarus,—we sat down in the place where thou didst swear to me thy resignation of Linda; in my senses wine glowed, in hers the heart. O, why is it that, when one speaks and streams, she has no other words than kisses, and makes one sensual from ennui, and forces one to speak her speech? My mad boldness, which fancy and intoxication breathe into me, and which I see coming on and yet await, seized me and drove me like a night-walker. But always is there in me something clear-seeing, which itself weaves the drag-net of delusion, throws it over me, and carries me away entangled in its meshes. So behold me on that night with the burning net-work about my head; the rivulet of death murmurs to me, the skeleton sweeps across the harp-strings,—but, enveloped, imprisoned, darkened, dazzled with the fiery hurdle-work of pleasure, I heed neither annihilation nor heaven, nor thyself andthatevening, but I drag all together and into the hurdle,—and so sank thy sister's innocence into the grave, and I stood upright on the royal coffin, and went down with it.
"I lost nothing,—in me there is no innocence; I gained nothing,—I hate sensual pleasure. The black shadow, which some call remorse, swept broadly along after the vanished motley-colored pleasure-images of the magic-lantern; but is the black less optical than the motley?
"Condemn not thy poor sister; she is now more miserable than I, for she was happier; but her soul remains innocent. Her innocence lay treasured up in her heart as a kernel in the stony peach; the kernel itself burst its mail-coat in the warm, nourishing earth, and forced a way for its green leaves to the light.
"I visited her afterward. All her soul's pangs passed over into me; for all actions and sacrifices on her account, I felt myself ready; but for no feelings. Do what you will, thou and my father, I will positively, in this stupid stubble-field of life, where one reaps so little in freedom, not banish myself into the narrow thirty-years' hedge of marriage. By Heaven! for the miserable, forced intoxication of the senses, and under it, I have already endured more than it is worth.
"Not that which I yesterday read in thy presence gives me this resolution,—as to that, ask Rabette about it,—and my frankness toward thee is a voluntary offering, since the mystery between two might, but for me, have remained a mystery still: but I will not be misapprehended by thee,—by thee, the very one who, with so little reflection upon thy inner being, so easily makest unfavorable comparisons, and dost not perceive that thou didst sacrifice my sister in Lilar precisely so, only with more spiritual arms, and didst cast her eyes and joys into Orcus. I blame thee not; fate makes man a sub-fate to woman. The passions are poetic liberties, which the moral liberty takes to itself. Thou didst not, I assure thee, have too good an opinion of me; I am all for which thou tookest me, only, however, stillmore too; and themore toois still wanting to thyself.
"O, how much swifter my life flies since I know thatshe[32]is coming! Fate, which so oft plays weight and wheels, and swings the pendulum of life with its own hand, heaves off mine, and all wheels roll unrestrainedly to meet the blissful hour.Sheis my first love; beforeherI tore up all my blooming years, and flung them to her on her path as flowers; forherI sacrifice, I dare, I do all, when she comes. O, whoso fears nothing in the empty froth-and-sham-love, what should he dread or decline in the real, living sun-love? Thou angel, thou destroying angel, thou camest flying down into my stale, flat life, thou fleest and appearest, now here, now there, on all my paths and pastures: O tarry only long enough for me to dig my grave at thy feet, while thou lookest down upon me!
"Albano, I behold the future and anticipate it; I see full clearly the long net stretched over the whole stream which is to catch, entangle, and strangle thee; thy father and others, too, are drawing you both toward one another therein, God knows for what. It is for thatshecomes now, and thy tour is only show. My poor sister is soon conquered, that is, murdered; particularly, as one needs for the purpose, with her belief in spirits, no other voice than that incorporeal one, which over the old Prince's heart pointed out to thine its limits!
"What lights burn in the future, between dark situations and bushes, in murderous corners! Be it as it may, I march forward into the caverns; I thank God, that this impotentcold-sweatinglife gains again a pulsation of the heart, a passion; and then or now do to me, whocouldact safely and secretly and dishonestly, what thou choosest. Fight with me to-day or to-morrow. It shall rejoice me, if thou layest me on my back in the last, long sleep. O the opium of life makes one in the beginning lively, then drowsy, how drowsy! Willingly will I love no more, if I can die. And so without a word further, hate or love me, but farewell!
"Thy Friend, Or Thy Foe."
"My foe!" cried Albano. The second hot pain darted from Heaven into his life, and the lightning-flash blazed up fiercely again. As a heartless carcass of the former friendship, Roquairol had been thrown at his feet; and he felt the first hatred. That poison-mixing of sensual and spiritual debauchery, that fermenting-vat of the dregs of the senses and the scum and froth of the heart,—that conspiracy of lust and bloodthirstiness, and against the same guiltless heart,—that spiritual suicide of the affections, which left behind only an airy, roaming spectre, ever changing its forms of incarnation, upon which there no longer remains any dependence, and which a brave man already begins to hate for the very reason that he cannot lay hold of this yielding poison-cloud and give it battle,—all this seemed to the Count, who, without the transitions and mezzotintos of habit and fancy, had been ushered over out of the former light of friendship into this evening-twilight, still blacker than it was. Beside the superficial wound which his family pride received in the maltreatment of his sister, came the deep, poisonous one that Roquairol should compare him with himself, and Liana's ruin with Rabette's. "Villain!" said he, gnashing his teeth; even the least shadow of resemblance seemed to him a calumny.
Most assuredly Roquairol had miscalculated upon him, and set out his poetic self-condemnation too much on the reckoned strength of a poetic sentence from the judge. As in an uproar one unconsciously speaks louder, so he, when fancy with her cataracts thundered around him, did not justly know what he cried and how strongly. As he often, to be sure, found less that was black in himself than he depicted, so he presumed that another must find even still less than he himself. He had, too, in his poetic and sinful intoxication, made for himself at last the moral dial-plate itself movable, so that it went with the index; in this confusion it was never indicated to him where innocence was.
Had he foreseen that his epistolary confessions would bound and rebound in more hostile corners than his oral ones did aforetime, he would have prepared them otherwise.
For agitation Albano could not directly write the short parting-letter—not a challenge—to the abandoned one, but delayed, in the certainty that the Captain would not come himself,—when all at once he came. For procrastination he could not bear; bodily and spiritual wounds he received as theatrical ones; too much accustomed to win men, he too easily brought himself to lose men. A terrible apparition for Albano; it was but the long coffin of his murdered favorite set upright!—that now over that powerfully-angular face, once the stronghold of their souls, furrows of weeds should wind, that this mouth, which friendship had so often laid upon his, should have become a plague-cancer, a concealing rose to the tongue-scorpion for the good Rabette when she approached so trustingly,—to see and think ofthatwas clear anguish.
Hardly audible were greeting and thanks; silently they walked up and down, not beside but against each other. Albano sought to get the mastery over his wrath, so as to say nothing but the words: "Begone from me, and let me forget thee!" He meant to spare Liana in her brother, who had reproached him with being sacrificial-knife to her; unjust suspicions keep us better in the time immediately following, because we are not willing to let them grow into just ones. "I am candid, thou seest," Roquairol began, with moderation, because his ebullitions had been half distilled and dropped away from the point of his pen; "be thou so, too, and answer the letter." "I was thy friend,—now, no more," said Albano, choking. "I have not surely done anything tothee," was the reply.
"Heavens! Let me not say much," said Albano. "My miserable sister,—my innocence of the coming of the Countess,-my wretched, abandoned sister! O God! drive me not to frenzy,—I respect thee no more, and so go!"
"Then fight!" said the Captain, half drunk with emotion and half with wine. "No," said Albano, drawing in a long breath, as if for a sigh of indignation; "to thee nothing is sacred, not so much as a life!" This pupil of death so easily threw after his own life-days and joys and plans all those of another into the tomb with them; that was what Albano meant, and thought of the sick Liana, so easily dying of others' wounds; love (instead of friendship) had passed along like a soothing woman before his provoked soul; but the foe misunderstood him.
"Thou must," said the Captain, wildly mocking; "thine shall be precious to me!"
"Heaven and Hell! I meant a better one," said he; "slanderer, toward thy sister I havenotacted as thou hast against mine,—I have not wished to make her miserable,I am not as thou!—and I shall not fight; I spareher, not thee." But the hell-flood of wrath, which he through Liana had wished to turn off into a flat land, and make more shallow, swelled up thereby as if under an enchanter's hand, because Roquairol's lie about her being sacrificed came so near home in that connection.
"Thou art afraid," said the exasperated Roquairol, and still took down two swords from the wall. "I respect thee not, and will not fight," said Albano, only stimulating him and himself the more, while he meant to control himself.
Just then Schoppe stepped in. "He is afraid," repeated Roquairol, weapon in hand. Albano, reddening, gave, in three burning words, the history. "You must fight a little before me!" cried the Librarian, full of his old hatred for Roquairol's dazzling and juggling heart. Albano, thirsting for cold steel, grasped at it involuntarily. The fight began. Albano did not attack, but parried more and more furiously; and as, while so doing, he beheld the angry ape of his former friend with the dagger in his hand, which had been ploughed up out of the blooming garden-beds of the loveliest days, and upon which he had trodden with his wounds: and as the Captain with increasing storminess flashed away at him like lightning, unavailingly: then did he see on the grim face that dark hell-shadow standing again, which had stood and played thereon, when he had strangled Rabette struggling in his grasp;—the drawbridge of countenances, whereupon once the two souls met, stood, suddenly raised high in the air. More fiery grew Albano's glance; more drunk with indignation, he set upon the were-wolf of devoured friendship;—suddenly he severed his weapon from him like a claw: when Schoppe, indignant at the unequal forbearing and fighting, would fain invoke vengeance with Rabette's name, and cried, "The sister, Albano!"
But Albano understood by that Charles's sister, and hurled one sword after the other, and fiery drops stood in his eye, and hideously distorted the face of the foe before him. "Albano!" said Roquairol, his wrath exhausted, relying on the tear-built rainbow of peace,—"Albano?" he asked, and gave him his hand. "Farewell; live happily, but go; I am still innocent,—go!" replied Albano, who felt bitterly the tempest of the first wrath overhead, which having settled down, between his mountains, continued to beat upon him. "In the Devil's name, go! I too shall be roused at last," said Schoppe, interfering. "In such a name one goes willingly!" said the Captain, whose tongue-muscles always stiffened in Schoppe's presence, and silently departed; but Albano had for some time ceased to look upon him, because he could never endure another's humiliation, but, like every strong soul, felt himself bowed down at the same time with any abasement of humanity, just as great thrones tolerate no distinguishing marks of servility in their neighborhood.[33]
Schoppe began now to remind him of his own earliest predictions about Roquairol, and to name himself the Great Prophet-Quartette,—to denounce the fellow's incurable scurvy of mouth and heart,—to compare his theatrical firmness with the Roman marble and porphyry, which has on the outside a stone rind, but inwardly only wood,[34]—to remark how his internal possession might be said to be, like that of the German Order, only atongue,—and in general to declare himself so vehemently against self-decomposition through fancy, against all poetical contempt of the world, that any other but Albano might well have taken his zeal for a defence of himself against the slight feeling of a similarity.
Schoppe had strong hopes Albano would listen to him believingly, and would grow angry, laugh and answer; but he became more grave and silent;—he looked at the honest Librarian—and fell passionately and silently on his neck—and speedily dried his heavy eye. O, it is the gloomy day of mourning, the burial-day of friendship, when the outcast, orphan heart goes home alone, and it sees the death-owl fly screaming from the death-bed of old feeling over the whole creation.
Albano had, in the beginning, inclined to go this very day to Blumenbühl and lead his forsaken sister to the mausoleum of truth; but now his heart was not strong enough to sustain his own words to his sister or her immeasurable and inconsolable tears.
Since the extinction of the engagement, and since Gaspard's letters, Albano's eye had been directed toward the fairest ruins of time,—unless one excepts the earth itself,—to Italy; and his injured vision held fast to this new portal of his life, which was to usher him into the presence of the fairest and greatest which nature and man can create. How did the fire-mountains, and Rome's ruins, and her warm, golden-blue heavens, already unfold to him their splendor, when in fancy he led the suffering Liana before them, and her holy eyes refreshed themselves with measuring the heights! A man who travels with his beloved to Italy has in the very fact that he might do without one of the two, both double. And Albano hoped for this felicity, since all testimonies which he met with of Liana's restoration to health promised as much. As to Dr. Sphex,—the only one who opened a pit for her, and in it cast a death-bell, and swore to everybody, she would fall with the leaves of autumn,—him he saw no more. He wished, however,—he said to himself,—in this whole joint-tour, only her happiness, not at all her love. So did he see himself always in his self-mirror, namely, only veiled; so did he regard himself often as too stern, although he was so little of that; so did he take himself to be conqueror of his own heart, when his fair countenance already wore pale, sickly hues.
The present stood as yet dark above him, but its neighboring times, the future and the past, lay full of light. What a journey, in which a beloved, a father, a friend, a female friend, are of themselves, on the very road, the curiosities which others find only when they reach the end!
The Princess was the female friend. Since Gaspard's letters to her and to him, since the hope of a longer and nearer enjoyment of his society, she found more and more pleasure in subduing all clouds round about her, so as to smile and shine upon her friend only out of a blue heaven. She alone at court seemed to take mildly and rightly the blunt youth, whose proud frankness so often ran against the disguised pride of the Count, and particularly against the open pride of the Prince; she alone seemed—as nothing is seldomer guessed in and bycirclesthan fair sensibility, especially by courtly ones and especially manly sensibility—softly to spy out his, and to increase its warmth by her sympathy. She alone honored him with that strict, significant attention which mankind so seldom give, as well as can so seldom appreciate, because they never have occasion but for love and passion, in order to—render justice, incapable, otherwise than by comet-light, by warm-flames and fires of joy, to read the best hand. All that he was, she simply presupposed in him; his pre-eminent qualities were only her demands and his passports; she made his individuality neither her model nor her reflection; both were painters, no pictures. He heard often, indeed, that she had a masculine severity, especially in her dictatorial capacity, but not, however, that she was womanishly inhuman. To the customary vermin of courtlings, which gives itself elevation on its worm-rings only by crawling, she was repulsive and torturing; although, as a new-comer, she should, it would seem, have been a new-born child, that brings with it raisins to the older children. On Sunday, when at courts, as on the stage in Berlin, spiritual popular pieces are always brought out, she was (among the Sunday-born-children, who see more spirits than they have) a Monday's child, which wishes to find for itself one, who, whether he has ever been dubbed noble or not, at all events knows how to distinguish an original from the copy, as well in his own self as in a picture-gallery. On that account many lords, and still more ladies, thanked God, if they had occasion to say nothing more to her than "God bless you!"
In this way she appeared to the Count every day more worthy of his father. As into a warm spring sunshine did he enter for the first time into the flattering magic circle of female friendship, which even here cast and moulded two wings for love out of the wax-cells of the enjoyed honey; it was, however, with him love for Liana, to whom the friend could most easily give wings for Italy. He felt that soon an hour of overflowing esteem would strike, when he could confidingly open the high-walled cloister-garden of his former love. For she made room for him to be near her as often as the narrow compass of a throne and the all-betraying height of its location would admit. But something disturbed, watched, beset both,—a rival neighbor, as it seemed. It was the singular Julienne, who always, when things were getting on, stepped out of her box on to the stage of the Princess, and confounded the play. Frequently she came after him; sometimes he had gotten invitations from her just the moment before others from the Princess followed, which hers, therefore, as it seemed, must have anticipated. What did she mean? Would she possibly win from a youth whom she had so often provoked by her contempt of men, and by the lightning-like dartings of her indignation, his love, merely, perhaps, because he had always so warmly reciprocated her friendly glances, as those of so dear a—friend of his beloved? Or did she want of him only hatred for the honored Princess, and that indeed out of envy and the usual resemblance of women to ivory, whosewhitehue so readily becomesyellow, and which only by a thorough warming gets the fair color again?
These questions were rather repeated than answered by an evening which he and Julienne spent at the Princess's. A good reading was to give the picture-exhibition of Goethe's Tasso. Fine art, and nothing but art, was with the Princess the art of Passau[35]against court- and life-wounds; and, in general, the world-system was to her only a complete picture-gallery and Pembroke cabinet and gallery of antiques. The reading parts were so distributed by the manager, the Princess, that she herself got the Princess, Julienne theconfidenteLeonore, Albano the Poet Tasso, a youthful-cheeked Chamberlain the Duke, and Froulay Alphonso. This latter, who had learned to prefer works of artifice to works of art, and the princely cabinet to any cabinet of art, in spite of his heart stood ready there for a journey to the mountain of the muses, arrayed for that purpose by the Princess in a mountain-habit. Thus forced more and more every day into the poetical fashion, he looked, of course, like any other abortion, which has come into the world with pantaloons, queue, and the like all born on him, on purpose to condemn the modish way of the world, just like a street-sweeper in Cassel.
Albano read with outward and inward glow, not toward the reading Princess, but toward the Princess she personated, from a habit of his heart which life always set a-glow; and the Princess read therôleof herrôlevery well, of course. Her artistic feeling told her, even without the prompting of tender sensibility, that in Goethe's Tasso,—which, for the most part, is related to the Italian Tasso, as the heavenly Jerusalem to the Jerusalem delivered,—the Princess is almost Princess of Princesses. Never did the god of the muses and of the sun pass more beautifully through the constellation Virgo than here. Never was veiled love more radiantly unveiled.
The Minister read off the powerful proser Alphonso, as he scolds at Tasso and Albano, as well as a trumpeter of cavalry reads the notes which are affixed to his sleeve; in fact, he found the man quite sensible.
The younger[36]Princess might, in the general poetic concert, have done her share of the talking some quarter of an hour, more or less, when she suddenly threw down, in a lively manner, the beautiful volume of Goethe's works, of which there were three copies there, and said, with her impetuosity, "A stupid part! I cannot abide it!" All the world was silent. The senior[37]Princess looked at her significantly; the junior Princess looked atherstill more significantly, and went out, without coming back again. A court dame took up the reading, and went calmly on.
To most of those present this interlude was properly the most interesting; and they willingly continued to think of it during the reading of the latter part. The Princess, who had long believed the Princess loved the Count, was delighted with the inconsiderateness of her adversary. Albano, although her warm eye had struck him of old, explained to himself the absconding on the ground of chagrin at the subordinateness of her part in the reading, and the general incompatibility of the two women; for while Julienne, at her own expense, slighted the Princess, and took little pains to conceal her opinion, so also did that of the Princess appear involuntarily. So soon as one party manifests its hatred, the second can hardly conceal its from the third.
When Albano came home, he found the following leaf on his table:—
"The P—— decoys thee; she loves thee. Withéclatshe will send in the next place the M—— back, in order to give bold relief to her virtue, and produce an imposing effect upon thee. Shun her! I love thee, but differently and eternally.
"Nous nous verrons un jour, mon frère."
Who wrote it? Not even as to the admission-ticket of this cartel could the servant make any deposition. Who wrote it? Julienne; to this point, at least, all roads of probability converged; only in that case mysteries lay round about him. Significant was the French subscription, which stood in like manner exactly under the picture of his sister, which his father had given him on Isola Bella;[38]but that might be a coincidence. He investigated now these new silver-veins of his Diana-[39]and family-tree by the touchstone of his whole history. His mother and Julienne's had gone to Italy with his father in one and the same year; both had been uncommon women and mutual friends, and his father the friend of both. There was the possibility of a false step on the part of his father, which had been concealed. Quite as easily might the traces of this error have been shown to Julienne. Then, further, the hypothesis of her sisterly love would throw light on her whole previous winding course; her affectionate interest in Albano; her love-race with the Princess; her correspondence with his father; her enlisting of the Count's affection for Romeiro, which, as it seemed, heated her quite as much against the Princess as it chilled her toward Liana; above all, the singularity of her love for him, which never unfolded itself further and more openly;—all this gave ground to suspect that it might be only a sister's kindred blood which blazed so often on her round cheeks, when she had unconsciously gazed at him too long. After this step he made forthwith the leap; he now suspected, also, that she alone had sought to dazzle and delude him into the love of her Linda with the magic mirror of spiritual existences.
As respects the relation of the Princess to the Minister, every word upon that subject was to him a lie. He was quite as reluctant to let himself part with a good opinion of others as a bad one. Ordinary men readily give the good opinion away and hold the bad one fast; weaker ones are easily reconciled, and hardly parted. He was unlike either. Hitherto he had so easily ascribed in his own mind the Princess's friendship for the Minister, her visitation journeys with him through the land, and the like, to her manly prudence and foresight, which would fain at once keep watch over the future hereditary land of her brother and hold the key to it; and to this probability, as the Minister accommodated himself equally well to the related parts of a cicerone and an overseer, he still adhered.
The following week brought along a circumstance, which seemed to throw a greater light into the dark billet.
The promised circumstance has its root again in older circumstances which occurred between the Princess and the Minister; these I here premise.
The Minister had been very soon furnished by his friend Bouverot—whose clammy woodpecker's tongue licked off unseen the vermin of all mysteries out of all musty cracks in the throne—with a description of all that the Princess concealed in herself in the shape of Phoenix ashes and rubbish: he had instructed him that she, cold as a piece of ice ground into a convex lens, never would melt herself, but only others; that she was one of those more rare coquettes who, like sweet wines, become sour through warmth, and only sweeter by cold; and that she therefore had about her one of the worst habits,—which made the most grievous jobs for every one. It was, namely, the following: She had a heart, and would never suffer it to lie in her bosom as dead capital; but it must pay interest, and circulate. So the lover became, in the beginning, more wide awake and gay from day to day, then from hour to hour; he knew all by-ways through wood and hollow, all thieves' paths and shorter cuts in this love-garden regularly by heart, and would foretell the critical[40]quarter of an hour on his repeating watch when he should arrive at the summer-house. It was not by any means unknown to him (but comical) what it signified, that the said lover would pass with her from sentences to glances, from these to kissing of the hand, then to kissing of the mouth, whereupon he would find himself caught, entrapped, and imprisoned in the Whistonian comet's-train of her ell-long (or mile-long) hair as in a bird-net (in which, however, the noose was also the berry-bait), and bent up in his prison to such a degree as to know what o'clock it had struck on his repeater. But just then, when all clouds seemed fallen from heaven, he himself would fall out of both into a basket from her;—that was the bad point. In fact, German princes of the oldest houses, who had made all other experiments, saw themselves made immoral, ay, ridiculous, and knew not at all what to think about it; for the Princess openly wondered at such monsters, gave all the world a copy of her challenge, showed all the world the redness and the loftiness of her turkey-hen's-neck, and suffered such an old tempter of a Prince, or whoever it was, never more in her haughty presence.
As princes (in such cases) know what they want, so of course they spread it about that she knew not whatshewould have; and often not till long after an hereditary prince came the apanaged brother of the same court, and later the legitimated one. However, the thing remained the same; namely, she remained like the spherical concave mirror, which indeed images behind itself what stands close before it, as large and upright, but so soon as it comes into its focus, makes it invisible, and then out beyond that point hangs it quite diminished and topsy-turvy in the air. Her love was a fever of debility, in which Darwin, Weikard, and other Brownists, bystimulatingmeans—wine, for instance—produce aslowerpulse, and even promise therefrom a cure. So far Bouverot to the Minister!
But to the Minister came thereby an inexpressible favor. For princes' sins jumped not at all with his professional studies and trade. When, therefore, she had decided upon having his understanding and powerful physiognomy near her, and had named him Minister of her most intimate relations in Haarhaar, then was it solemnly laid down and sworn to within him, never, though she were kindness itself, to be the robber of her honor to her straw-widower. In the beginning, like all his predecessors, he got on easily with mere pure feelings and discourses; as yet there was nothing desired of him, except that he should sometimes unexpectedly dart at her a sly look full of loving tenderness; and he must also have a longing. He darted the look; he also got up longings; and so he felt himself comfortably enough insured for such a successful love affair.
But it stopped not here. Hardly had her Albano appeared, when the thorn-girdle and hair-shirt of the pure Minister was made disproportionately more rough and thorny, and the strongest requirements, namely, gifts, redoubled, in order that the poor Joseph might the more speedily assail her honor and therefore run into his ruin, which should be bait for the Count. By this time he had been already brought along so far that he wove and knotted in her flying hair (to him poisonous snake-hair),—he must needs blow out soap-bubbles of sighs from his pipe,—he must needs quite often be beside himself; yes, he must even (if he would not see himself chased away as a hypocritical rascal) be half-sensual, although still decent enough. Meanwhile he was not to be tempted into a temptation by the Devil himself. Whenever he even thought of the subject, shuddering, how the least misstep might hurl him from his ministerial post, then he would as soon have let himself be impaled and quartered as bewitched. For a third party, not for these two,—they were the sufferers,—it would perhaps have been a feast, to have seen how they (if I may use a too low comparison) resembled a pair of silk stockings drawn over each other, which for and by each other, when one keeps them distended[41]at a certain distance, ethereally blow themselves and fill, but immediately collapse, flat and flabby, when they touch each other.
Of course, in the long run, it fell heavily upon the old statesman to have to leap along before the dancing pageantry of love-gods as their arch-master, tackled into the triumphal car of the Cyprian,—a flower-garland on his state-peruke, in his eyes two Vauclusa fountains, the cavity of his breast a choked-up Dido's cave, wearing in his button-hole an arrow in a heart, or a heart on an arrow, and faring toward the capitol, in order there, after the Roman fashion, not so much to sacrifice as to be sacrificed. Nothing except the tin boxes which the government officers and exchequer messengers stowed away for him at home could fan fresh and cool again the stalemated man, who would fain be a checkmated one.
He read with her Catullus, she with him the better pictures out of the Prince's cabinet; it was allowed him to reward her by his Latinity for her artistic favors: but he remained, nevertheless, as he was.
When women wish to carry a point, and find hindrances constantly recurring, they grow at last blind and wild, and dare anything and everything. The tour to Italy approached so fast; still the Minister was no nearer to letting go his high consideration for his beloved,—although from just her own motive, that of the tour, with the nearness of which he animated himself to a cheerful endurance of so short a flame. Her passion for the Count increased with the Count's tranquillity, because coldness strengthens strong love, just as physical coldness makes strong people more vigorous and weak ones more puny. Froulay, as an old man, was, as it seemed, capable of creeping along so for a whole age to his object, without making one unnecessary leap, since old people, like ships, always move slower the longer they have been going, and on similar grounds, namely, that both, by the adhesion of filth, weeds, barnacles, and the like, have become unwieldy. In short, the Princess at last ceased to ask for anything, but matters went thus:—
The Prince had gone a journey, the Princess had been invited as god-mother out into the country. The castellain on one of her country castles, who had already the year before invited the Minister, had not been restrained by bashfulness from making his way still farther up on this rope-ladder, with his descendant under his arm, and up there on the throne laying his child of the land in the arms of her, the Princess herself. Princes love to let themselves down—on thin silk-worm threads—(as well as up); they value the good-natured, stupid people, and would fain in this way raise somewhat the poor creeping dwarf-beans,—for they well know how little it matters,—and, so to speak, pole them and boot them by means of the leg of the princely chair. Beside this, the Minister had been invited as grand-god-father (so called). The autumn day was only a brighter, more perfect spring, and the autumnal night stood under a brilliant full moon. Courts always long so exceedingly to be away in the country, among the idyls of murmuring rivulets, sighing branches, and tree-tops, and bleating Swisseries, and farmers; Courts—that is, courtiers, court-dames and official chamberlains'-staves, and others—yearn so for the society of human beings; as beasts are driven by the December hunger, so does a noble hunger drive them down from the throne-mountains into the flat plains; not that they would fly fromennui, but they desire only a different kind, as their very pastime consists in the abbreviation and alternation of theirennui.
Hardly had the Court appeased its first longing for the people with whom it stood for half a quarter of an hour on a confidential, conversational footing, when it came to itself again, and dispersed itself through the princely garden, in order to consume full as long a time in satisfying its longing after nature. A sponsoress of the sponsoress promised Christianity in the stead of Princess and child. The Princess herself attached the Minister to her as a chamberlain. The grand-god-father looked out into the prospect of a d—d long evening, in which he should be obliged to parade round her procession-banner. For the enjoyment of the evening there was a concert, and for the enjoyment of the concert card playing had been arranged; and for the enjoyment of the latter, the Princess had seated herself alone with Froulay, in order, during the general playing of cards and instruments, to have some inaudible conversation with him. Suddenly the two pounds which were hung up in his breast—for no heart, according to the anatomists, weighs more than that—became two hundred-weight heavier, when she asked him whether he was steadfast and could confide in her and dare for her. He swore that, if only as Princess, she might expect of his two-pounder any and every sacrifice and mark of veneration. She went on: she had some weighty things to intrust him with to-day about herself and the Prince; she wished, when theFoulewas gone, to speak with him alone; he need only go up the little stairway from the side of the garden to the door of the library-chamber; this was open; in the poetical bookcase on the left side was a spring in the wall, the pressure of which would open to him the tapestry door of the apartment, where he was to await her.
Immediately she rose, presuming upon an affirmative. How it fared now with the two pounds of his sixty-four-ounce-heart can gratify none but his deadly enemy to realize. So much lay written before him with long, thick, stony letters, as on an epitaphium, namely, that after a few hours, when the other lords, in other respects still greater sinners than he, could snore away quietly in the pleasant ministerial houses which formed the court of the Palace, that then for him, innocent knave, the wolf-hour, that is to say, the shepherd's hour,[42]would so soon strike, when he on the most flowery meadow must kneel beneath the butcher's knife. But he—angry that his faith in female and princely impudence should prove a soothsayer—made silently all kinds of oaths to himself, that, even if as much were imposed upon him as on the greatest saints and universal philosophers, he would nevertheless behave like both, for instance, like old Zeno and Franz.
The Princess sought him all the evening less than usual. At last he took his respectful leave of the whole court, but with the prospect of creeping, not, like them, under silk quilts, but under cold bowers. He even marched—sure of himself—up the stairway, opened the library-chamber, found the spring, touched it, and stepped through the tapestry door into the princely—bedchamber. "It is certain, then," said he, and cursed about him inwardly to his heart's content, lying prostrate and crushed quite flat beneath the love-letter weight. In the side chamber on the left hand he already heard her and a chambermaid, who was undressing her. On the right the door of a second but lighted chamber stood ajar. He stood long in doubt whether he should step into that, or stay where he was under the light-screen of a dark corner. At last he laid hold of the protection of night. During his suspense and her disrobing, he had time to rehearse or read over his part; now he came to an agreement with himself, in case of necessity,—and if he should find himself pushed too hard—and all the more, as the place would speak more againstherthan againsthim, inasmuch as every one must needs ask, whether he could otherwise have possibly gained admission,—in such a case of necessity, where only the choice between a satire and a satyr was left him, he determined to transform himself on the spot into a respectful—Faun.
Directly the Princess strode in, but in the direction of the illuminated chamber. "I have no further occasion for thee," she called back to the chambermaid. "Diable!" screamed she, in the bedchamber, spying out the tall Minister; "who stands there? Hanna, a light!Ciel!" she continued, recognizing him, but continuing to speak French, because Hanna understood nothing of that. "Mais, Monsieur! Me voila donc compromise! Quelle méprise! Vous vous etes trompé de chambres! Pardonnéz, Monsieur, que je sauve les déhors de mon sexe et de mon rang. Comment avez-vous-pu—" She uttered all this, perhaps, by way of blinding the German witness, with an angry accent. The grand-godfather—who, after all previous gratifications, felt like a cock, who has gulped down many live chafers, and is now threatened with his life by their sticking in his distressed crop—kept not silence, but replied in German, opening the tapestry door, meanwhile, that he had, even as she commanded, laid the books out of the library in the lighted chamber, and had been caughtin transitu. He went immediately through the tapestry; but she could hardly contain herself for terror, had the physician called in the morning, and sent back her retinue. Froulay—however much like the Spanish he found his romances, among which, according to Fisher's assertion, the thieves' literature is the best—at last did not know, himself, what to make of it.
The chambermaid had to make profession with the vow of silence, which she kept as strictly as she could, but not more so. Next morning very few alighted before their own doors, most before the doors of others, in order to land the news together with the injunction of the Princess not to make the thingéclatant, because in that case the Prince would hear of it.
If ever the nobility of Pestitz was happyen masse, it was this very morning. Nothing was wanting to universal joy but a chambermaid who should have only understood as much French as a hunting-dog.