Part 22

He appeared now on the war-theatre of souls, of which one seldom catches an exact map, the court;--to his heart, filled with paradises, even the apartments seemed like glass cases of a stuffed aviary, which one strews with powder-brass, conchs, and flowers, and the live articles of the rooms like dried birds stuffed with wood or arsenic; through the snakes wire was drawn, as through the tails of great beasts, and the tree-runners on the throne stood on wire.----So very much had he become through the Whitsuntide festival the antipode of us who in colder blood easily remark what is sublime and noble about a court.--The newest news he heard there was that the Prince in company with the Princess was to take a journey to the mineral springs of St. Luna, he to cure his gouty feet, she to cure her eyes. Victor was really not quite tolerant, when he thought to himself, "If you will not fare any better, then, for all I care, go to the D----." The Paullinum was to him a slaughter-house, and every antechamber a chamber of torture; the Prince treated him not with courtly courtesy, but with coldness, which pained him so much the more as it proved that he had loved him,--the Princess more proudly,--only Matthieu, who loved best to talk with people who mortally hated him, had a face full of sunshine. From him and from his sister and some unknown persons he had to take and worry down some light snake-poison of persiflage about his duel, which the stomach indeed digests, like other snake-poison, but which injected into wounds dissolves the blood of life.----Does not even my correspondent fall into a fury and send his fury to me through his _Capsarius_,[141]--the Pomeranian dog, saying: "Let any one keep cool, if he can, who is warm, that is to say in love, and whom death has not yet made cold, let him keep cool, I say, before the stinging smiles of a court-sisterhood at his sensitive love, especially before those higher ladies who are Goddesses, and on whose Cyprian altar always (as with the Scythians) a stranger is sacrificed, and to whom (as the Gauls believed of their Gods) malefactors, _roués_, Orleanses, are the most acceptable offerings!--Or, even if he can dispose of that, let him composedly hear himself mocked for his love by an Evangelist who invents and dresses up on the subject the following maxims: _La décence ajoute aux plaisirs de l'indecence: la vertue est le sel de l'amour; mais n'en prenez pas trop.--J'aime dans les femmes les accés de colère, de douleur, de joie, de peur: il y a toujours dans leur sang bouillant quelque chose qui est favorable aux hommes.--C'est là où la finesse demeure courte, qu'il faut de l'enthousiasme.--Les femmes s'étonnent rarement d'être crues, foibles; c'est du contraire qu'elles s'étonnent un peu.--L'amour pardonne toujours à l'amour, rarement à la raison_.[142]--Blessed are the adversaries [sighs Knef] who are at liberty to cudgel one another."

The Evangelist threw a corrosive drop on the nerves of Victor's heart, when, despite his knowledge of Flamin's noble extraction, he twitted him with this, that like a modern French Equilibrist of Freedom, he could not marry indeed a citizen, but yet could--fight with one. And it went through his soul to see the friend who had been stolen from him so sorely impoverished in friends, that this Matthieu was the last scion and support of the line, who did not even before Victor take the trouble in the higher circles to assume and continue playing the part of a friend of Flamin. A good man has his sensitive heart screwed, as it were, into a flattening press, when he is obliged to stand before people (as Victor here is before so many) who hate and insult him,--in the beginning he is cheerful and cool, and is glad that he cares nothing about it,--but he unconsciously arms himself with more and more contempt, by way of opposing something to the insult,--at last the growth of the contempt announces itself by the disagreeable feeling of love going out and hatred coming in, and the bitter aqua-fortis seizes and devours its own vessel, the heart.--Then the pain becomes so great, that he lets the old human love, which was the warm element of his soul, run again in streams into his bosom. With Victor something else was added to the embittering elements,--his previous softening; one is never colder than after great warmth, just as water, after boiling, assumes a greater coldness than it had before. Love, intoxication, and sometimes the inspiration drunk from the sight of nature, make us too kind towards our favorites, and too hard upon our antipodes. Now when Victor in this bitter mood looked on at a card-table, and delivered to himself internal lectures upon the whole assembly, _lectures on heads_,[143] in which, instead of heads of pasteboard, he availed himself of thicker ones: then the recollection of the still, humane tolerance wherewith Clotilda had accommodated herself to these very people out of love to her parents, made the whole ice-panoply which had formed around his heart, as round a flower, melt down, and his warmed heart said with the first joy it had known to-day: "Why then do I hate these full as much tormented as tormenting shapes so bitterly? Are they here only on my account? Have not they also their conscious being? Must they not drag with them this defective, afflicted self through all Eternity? Is not each of them still loved by some soul or other? Why shall I then see in them only matter for detestation, and draw acid from every look, every tone? No, _I will love men merely because they are men_."--Yes, indeed! friendship may desire merits, but philanthropy only the human form. Hence it is precisely that we have all such a cold changeable love of man, because we confound the _worth_ of men with their _claim_, and will not love anything about them, but virtues.

Our Victor felt as light as after a tempest; the bitterest thing which insults can do to us is, that they compel us to hate. On the other hand, he felt now how impure our resistance to evil, which we give out for virtue, is, sand how disagreeable it is even to a noble soul to combat enemies without bearing malice against them; for this is still harder than blessing and protecting them without loving them.

Thus some weeks elapsed during his enforced landings at the hostile court,--for the request of his father ruled his heart,--and vain hopes of Clotilda's decision, and tearful retrospective yearnings toward the suspended days of love and the _desolated_ days of friendship. Clotilda's silence, however, was precisely an assent to his coming; still he superfluously announced to her by a second letter the day of the same. For the rest, to him, thus bound to the throne as to a whipping-post, thus hurled out from all the objects of his love, thus fixed upon nothing but a far-off thundering future, in which his Emanuel after fourteen days sinks into the earth and his Clotilda into a thousand sorrows, the present grew close and sultry. Around him whirled an unripe tempest, and, as at the equinoxes, the clouds hung immovably about him as a great thick mass, and the secret laboring in the high element had not yet decided whether it was to run together in tear-drops or break up into blue.

At last he went to St. Luna ... in sooth only sadly blest! O could he glance at the Luna footpath or at the Parsonage, which covered the stages of buried friendship, without turning away his overflowing eye, without thinking how much vainer is the loving than the life of men, how fate employs precisely the warmest hearts for the destruction of the best (just as one uses only _burning-lenses_ for the calcining of _precious stones_), and how many a silent breast is nothing but the sunken coffin of a beloved and faded image?--It is a nameless feeling to wish to love a friend for memory's sake, and be obliged to shun him from honor. Victor _wished_ he _could_ forgive his infatuated darling; but in vain: the arsenical word which pains me in his name remained still, in spite of all sweetening juices with which he swathed it, lying undissolved and corroding and deadly in his soul. Good Flamin! a stranger could love thee, I, for example; but the friend of thy youth, no more.

Victor strode along tremblingly before the picture-gallery and music-hall of his mirrored and echoed childhood, the parsonage, likewise before the scouring Apollonia, to whom he gladly gave a deeper greeting than his rank allowed, and before old Mops, who mixed himself up in no family feuds, but cordially invited him with his tail.--Not his pride kept him back from visiting the (assumed) parents of his adversary, but the anxious apprehension that the good people would perhaps worry themselves to death before him in an embarrassing conflict between politeness, between old love and new resentment. But he resolved by a letter to the noble-souled Parson's wife to satisfy his love and her sensibility.

Then he came into the presence of his beloved!--I remarked day-before-day-before-yesterday, while reading the German-French history, where, as is well known, the crowned name Clotilda also reigns, by the redoubled beatings of my heart, how I should feel then, when I came actually to see this Clotilda, whom for three quarters of a year I have praised; for that Knef, and the dog too, are no knaves, and that the whole history has not merely transpired, but is still transpiring, I see by a hundred traits which no fancy can well invent. If the biographer should get sight of the heroine, there would arise nothing but a new volume and a new--hero, who would be--myself.

She was sick; that evening had pounced like a vulture upon her heart, and had not yet drawn out its bloody claws. Her soul seemed only the angel that guards the earthly casing of a saint, from which the soul has fled. The Chamberlain met the Court Physician, as if he knew nothing of any duelling. What mothers generally do, that the father did; he forgave every one who was in high station and who wanted his daughter. The proposal which Victor at last made to him surprised him only because he had hitherto thought the latter postponed it merely on account of uncertainty respecting Clotilda's inheritance and relations in life. His answer consisted in infinite pleasure, infinite honor, &c., and other infinities; for with him all was one; hence, too, Platner asserts with justice that it is in fact only the finite of which man cannot conceive.[144] Le Baut would have handed over his daughter, even if he had not wished to; he could not refuse anything to one's face, not even a daughter. Moreover, no one could come and sue for Clotilda who would not have fitted into some one of his projects (the four chambers of his brain were full of them up to the ceiling). Naturally, therefore, a son-in-law was what he now most wished, since his daughter might actually die without his having yet used her for a leaping-pole and lever of his body,--and because, secondly, the duel-talk preyed upon his heart; not as if he had not by healthy _vermiform_[145] motions digested the _hardest_ things, but because, like cultivated men without honor, he loved to appear on occasion of slight insults with alarm-cannon and fire-drums, in order to steal the right, in the case of complete but productive cases of dishonor, pierced with veins of silver, to lie there still as a mouse. The only thing which looked unpleasant to the Chamberlain, but which he immediately got over by the fact of giving his word (regarding his daughter) to the Court Physician, was, that he had previously given the selfsame word (secretly) to our Mat. As his Lordship, who was soon to return, could harm him and help him more than the minister could, he gladly broke his old word, for the sake of keeping his newest; for not only his _last will_, but _every_ will, man can change as he will, and if he is a man of his word, he will be fond of making entirely opposite promises, in order to oblige himself to keep one of them. If the lying conduct of the Chamberlain, after such excuses, still needs one, he has this in his favor, that he certainly hoped Clotilda, when _he_ had given his Yes, would answer No, and dare and--suffer instead of him. At least he held out this hope before his angry wife, and referred her to Clotilda's former No, which had laid upon our Victor such heavy hours, and to her unchangeableness. I wish one could have afterward petrified or cast his face in plaster in the state into which it fell upon being informed of Clotilda's Yes. What could the stepmother, the Chamberlain's lady, who was always the esquire and ally of the Evangelist, do in the matter further than to make a friendly face and the remark, that "no one was harder to manage than a spouse whom everybody managed"?

The formalities of the betrothal itself awaited the return of the Lord, and other circumstances. Let me not say anything of the love of this couple, exalted as it had been by so many sorrows. When, to love, the love of man also is actually wedded (a thing which many a one will not understand at all);--when in the breath of love all other charms of the heart become more beautiful, all fine feelings still finer, every flame for the sublime still higher, as in oxygen gas every spark becomes a lightning-flash, and every glowworm a flame;--when the eyes of the two lovers seldom meet, but their thoughts often;--when Victor almost dreads to retain a heart to which he has cost so much, so many dark days, so many anxieties and almost a brother;--and when Clotilda divines this delicate shrinking and rewards _him_ for _her_ sufferings;--then is it impossible to convey to many persons a sketch of such an ethereal flame, to say nothing of its colors; for the _few_ it is unnecessary.

In every new relation into which a beloved object enters, love begins again at the beginning and with new flames; e. g. when we meet her in a strange house,--or among new persons,--or as a traveller,--or as a hostess,--or as a flower-gardener,--or as a dancer,--or (which has the greatest effect) as a betrothed. This was Victor's case; for from the hour when the wish of inclination is exalted into the command of duty, and when the dear soul delivers herself and all her hopes, and the reins of her whole future, into the beloved hands, there must in every good man's heart be a voice calling: "Now she has no longer any one on earth but thee,--now let her be holy to thee; O, now spare and guard and reward the dear soul who believes in thee!"--Victor was inexpressibly moved by this relation through the incidental circumstance that this very Clotilda, this firm, proud ball-queen and queen of heaven, who with so many energies and so much independence went her way over the snares of men and under their laurel-wreaths, was now by the betrothal giving her Declaration of Independence with a gentle smile into Victor's hands, and wished now nothing more than to love and to be loved; for this sweet condescension of so lofty a form Victor knew no sacrifice, no wound, no gift, which would have seemed to him great enough to repay her.--Thus should one love; and every new right and sacrifice which chills the common man, makes the good one warmer and more tender.

Although Victor by the rights of his new relationship found a more domestic and comfortable life with his parents-in-law; nevertheless it pained him that he was daily obliged to see the ever-memorable parsonage-people in their garden, and yet that the iron fence of the previous duel and the present betrothal shut him off from their hearts. For the same reason must he also renounce the Britons and their standing club. Le Baut however thought it an act of prudence: "for it was known on good authority, that they were Jacobins, and Frenchmen in disguise."--

But Clotilda's soul could no longer bear the deep sorrow which she felt to be weighing on her friend, the Parson's wife; she invited her by a note to a friendly walk. They met on the observatory; and Victor saw, with the deepest emotion, how Clotilda immediately took the hand of her oldest friend, and never, for the whole way, let it go from hers.

Clotilda came back with a countenance illumined with joy, and with eyes which had wept much, and with heavenly features in which shone an unnamable, not so much more ardent as more tender, love. Not for some time could she sufficiently command her emotions to communicate to Victor _something_ of the interview: for I think I can detect that it was not _all_. The Parson's wife--Clotilda related--received her with a look full of crushing sorrows, but neither with coldness nor suspicion. At first neither could do anything but weep, and they spoke not a word; Clotilda was still more overcome, and her tears still continued to flow, when she began to relate her betrothal. She laid the hand of her friend upon her heart, and said: "Now is our friendship severely tried. I still believe in yours,--believe in mine!--O only this once, dear friend, stand firm! Heavy secrets, over which I have no right and to which I have only in a small degree the key, bring us all so near to these dreadful misunderstandings. Only this time rely upon it firmly, that you and I are changing _our relation_ to each other as little as our characters."--Here the Parson's wife beheld her with a great look in which the old love for Victor still gleamed on, and then embraced her all at once with dry eyes and said: "Yes, I rely upon you, do you what you will, and though I should at last be the only soul left."--The last addition would at another time have offended Clotilda; ah, it could not do so now; O, she was glad to have something to forgive!

After the narration she told her friend, that, in case the invisibleness and the silence of his Lordship lasted much longer, she should perhaps, rather than wait, undertake the toilsome journey to London to her and Flamin's mother, in order to persuade the latter, as the solution of all these dangerous riddles, to come to Germany.--Ah, could Victor's self-sacrificing heart make an objection to the sacrifices of others?--No! his woe was redoubled, but also his respect and love.

In this situation of things there came to Clotilda a short letter from Emanuel.

* * * * *

Last evening my Julius came to me with a basket full of garden-earth and begged me for flower-pots and for hyacinths, because, he said, he was bringing earth for both. He had fetched the soil for his flowers from the hill of thy Giulia.----I drew his white- and red-blooming face, which resembles the pink with the red point, to my breast and said, 'Ah, who tends the flowers of man, when he has passed away?' And I meant _him_ too with his tender bloom, into which may sorrow never fling its heavy rain-drops!--O Victor and Clotilda, when the lilies of the earth benumb me and put me into the last slumber, then adopt ye my blind Julius, and let this soul full of love be guarded by your loving souls!

"Clotilda! I now beg or wish something of you, which you perhaps can hardly grant. Ah, come on the _longest day_ to Maienthal, thou fair soul! Cannot thy heart bear it? Didst thou not accompany thy Giulia even to the _blind gate_ of the grave and there see her soul soar up and her body fall to the earth? O, if thou and thy friend, in the last hour, when life folds up its flashing peacock-mirrors and lets them sink heavy and colorless into the grave, could stay by me, as the two first angels of the future world!--For at the moment when the whole earth like a shell breaks off from the heart, the naked heart clings faster to hearts and would fain warm itself against death, and when all bonds of earth tear away, the flower-chains of love bloom on. O Clotilda! how heavenly to close my life in the presence of thy Elysian form! I should already be hovering around thee unfettered on the wings of eternity, to look upon thee, and if I could not wipe away thy tears with the ethereal hand, I would console thy heavy heart with a strange rapture! Ay, if man were blinded in the forecourt of the second world, still thy form would remain as an after-shining sun-image before my closed eyes!--O Clotilda, if thou shouldst come! Ah, probably thou wilt not come; and only the Eternal, who numbers the hours of the second life, knows when I shall see thee again, on the second earth, and how great are there the pains of longing. And so then farewell, and move on, lofty soul, in thy path beneath the clouds,--when I behold thy friend, thou wilt touchingly stand before me,--and when I die on his heart, I shall pray for thee, and say to God: Give her to me again, when on her head the flower-wreath of earth is great enough--or the crown of thorns too great!--Clotilda, never change, and then I shall not ask Destiny: How long will she smile down below there, how long will she weep there? Never change!

"EMANUEL."

The two fell softly on each other's hearts and were silent over their thoughts; Emanuel's love glorified theirs, and Victor had too great a respect for his friend and his beloved to console the latter. He did not once ask her, how she answered Emanuel's prayer; he knew that she must refuse it, because otherwise her heart would break beside the loved one.

When at last he parted from her and from St. Luna, and she was compelled to reflect that in a few days he would go to Maienthal,--and when in his eyes and hers tears stood which indicated more than _one_ sorrow, and which not, man dries away but death or God,--then Victor during the farewell looked upon her with the mute question, "Shall I say nothing to our beloved?"--Clotilda's soul remained most erect under burdens, and she never appeared greater than through tears, as the stars in a heaven full of rain come out brighter and larger; she looked up to heaven as if asking, "Couldst thou, all-gracious One, crush us so deeply?" then she weighed with oppressed heart the heavy grief,--then she found it too great for utterance--and too great for endurance,--and she no longer believed it, and said ambiguously, with wet eyes and with ambiguous smile, "No, Victor, we shall surely all meet again!"

Victor went off not long before the two crowned bathing-guests arrived with a considerable retinue.--I remark it with quite as little resentment as Victor felt on the occasion, that Agatha, notwithstanding the maternal example, broke off entirely, first with Victor, i. e. with the Antipode and Anti-Christ of her beloved brother; secondly and still more with Clotilda.

It may be stated, that I suppressed the foregoing letter of Emanuel in the first edition, for the simple reason--for I had it in my hands early enough, as well as many other documents of this history, which nevertheless (for reasons) will never be published--that I feared it would be affecting; a susceptible soul finds, as it is, too many sorrows in this volume!--But for that very reason we will not leave out what there was, in the first edition, of the comic, and accordingly I proceed.