Part 34

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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