Part 35

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

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

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

24. DOG-POST-DAY.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Ah, how could one?" said he.

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

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

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

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

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

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