Part 4

"Matthieu would long since have got farther on with his propositions of marriage had he had his present prospects (of--an adulterous act) nearer before him. Perhaps, too, Matthieu was further anxious about the return of her brother (Flamin, on account of her diminished inheritance), although the death of his sister (the source of the inheritance, Giulia) slightly indemnified him. Hence the Princess loved Clotilda, since the marriage of the latter with Matthieu was only a matter of interest. But if it really came to an espousal, as was probable, since Matthieu, if only by coarseness, would extort it from the Chamberlain," ... (it is a peculiar trait of the Evangelist, that towards the weak he was coarse, and often towards the same person rude and then again refined,) ... "then might Matthieu and January exercise themselves in mutual forgiveness; and the band of friendship would bind at once four persons in different knots. This fourfold concatenation no one would then any longer be able to dissolve, and all would go to the Devil. The only _Deus ex machinâ_ who could still prevent the tying of this knot was the Court-Physician. To him, perhaps, Herr Le Baut would not refuse his daughter, as he had helped her get the place of maid of honor, 'which, at that time, when I was not at liberty distinctly to explain myself to you, was precisely my true intention, which you guessed quite as well as you executed,'--and as the fate of the son (Flamin, who, according to the general opinion, was not yet visible and acknowledged) really lay in the hands of his Lordship. Nor did he doubt about gaining the Princess, as he (the Doctor) had hitherto possessed her favor, and she preferred him to Dr. Culpepper. The loss of Clotilda and Agnola would clip the Schleuneses' wings." ...

Scoundrel! was the curse which Flamin would here have vented; but Victor, who believed that only an entire life, not a single action, deserved this moral besom, and who to the greatest intolerance of vice joined a too great toleration of the vicious, simply said,--though with more heat than one will now expect,--"O thou good Princess, the _German_ scorpions sit around thy heart and wound it with their stings, and for balm pour poison into the wound, that it may never heal!--Abominable, abominable calumny!" Victor loved to praise and defend his friends too ardently,--and, in fact, from his very inclination to the opposite; for as, in the matter of his _own_ honor, he calmly and silently opposed to the libels of the world the commendatory letters of his own conscience, his inclination would, indeed, have led him to defend the honor of his friends as coldly as he did his own, but it was obedience to his conscience to do it (despite the feeling of its superfluousness) with the greatest warmth.

The polite and triumphant smile of Zeusel was a second calumny; the blockhead regarded Victor as a dial-plate-wheel or striking-wheel in the matter, and himself as the pendulum. Therefore Victor said, with a chagrin compounded of pride and melancholy: "My soul is too far exalted above your court-littlenesses, above your court-knaveries; your stuff inexpressibly disgusts me.--O thou noble spirit in Maienthal!----"

He went away with transpierced heart. The night-watchman, who always reminded him in the higher sense of time, and of eternity too, called up his teacher's form before his weeping soul,--and Clotilda came with her pallid looks and said: "Seest thou not yet why I have such pale cheeks, and hasten so to the holy vale of Emanuel?"--and Joachime danced by and said, "I laugh at you, _mon cher_!" and the Princess veiled her innocent face, and said from pride, "Defend me not!"

The reader can easily conceive that Victor held the name of Clotilda too great to be so much as suffered to pass his lips in such a neighborhood,--as the Jews only in the holy city, not in the provinces, took on their lips the name of Jehovah. His soul fastened itself now on the after-flora of his love, the Agnola besprinkled by Zeusel. It was the thing he could have wished, that precisely at this time the merchant Tostato was to arrive from Kussewitz to make his Catholic Easter-confession in the city; he could at least insist upon his silence in regard to the masquerade-part in the shop, so that he might spare the abused Princess at least the pain she would feel at a well-meant offence; namely, the declaration of love pasted into the watch.

27. DOG-POST-DAY.

Eye-Bandaging.--Picture behind the Bed-curtain.--Two Virtues in Danger.

In Passion-week Clotilda, released by the Princess amidst caresses, went to St. Luna. In Easter-week she is to carry her heart, full of concealed cares, to Maienthal, to more congenial souls, when she has first passed through a purgatory, namely, through a brilliant ball which the Prince gives her--or, to speak more politely, to the Princess--on the third Easter-holiday.... If this flower shall be dug out and transplanted by the melon-lever of death from my biographical beds,--I throw away my pen and cudgel back Spitz,--I have come to be as much accustomed to her as to a betrothed,--where shall I again discover at court a female character which, like hers, unites _holy_ and _fine_ manners, _Heaven_ and _this world_, virtue and _ton_,--a heart which (if it is allowable to compare it with anything small) resembles the heart-shaped _montre à régulateur_ so tormenting to our hero, that with the index-hand of the court hours combines an index-hand of the sun's hours and the magnet of love?

Now, we are still together through all the Easter-holidays; for Sebastian must go to Pastor Eymann's, to see him and the three British twins, and his dear Chaplainess, and so much else that was dear. He would gladly have followed the Regency-Councillor thither on holy Easter-eve, (and it would have been as delightful to the biographer as an Easter-pancake, for he is more than sated with cities and courts on paper,) but the genius of the tenderest friendship beckoned to him for the sake of Flamin and Clotilda, who had both so long wanted and so longingly wished each other, and were now reciprocally bringing with them to the meeting new wounds, to stay behind at least only till the first Easter-day, as if he would ask, "Surely, the first glad looks of brother and sister so long held asunder, my unhappy Sebastian will not wish to disturb?"--"No, surely!" answered his tear.

The city was now emptied of his loved ones.--Passion-week was truly one to him, not even the Princess, as it were the electrophorus of his love-flame blown back upon his own heart, had for a long time been visible to him,--for in this mood he could not go to Joachime's----when the father-confessor of the Princess, who to-day had confessed to him (on holy Easter-eve), called upon him and unfolded before him a medical bulletin of the state of her eyes, and scolded at him in a friendly manner, that the Court-Confessor, instead of bringing remission of sins to the Court-Physician, had to bring the sins themselves before his conscience. "I was on the point of making a journey to-morrow," said Victor.--"Very well!" said the Pater, "the Princess desires your help this very day."

On the way he said to himself: "Has, then, Tostato forsworn his Easter confession, that now at evening he still has not arrived? and where the devil will he be to-morrow?"--Here! answered--Tostato behind him.--Such a jolly penitent no sacristy had ever yet seen. The child of fun and deviltry and penance told the reason of his wild delight: "The Princess had to-day, as his countrywoman, bought out half his shop." Before Victor had arrayed on his face in rank and file _those_ serious looks, with which he was going to entreat of him silence on the subject of his mercantile vicariate,--I mean, his shop-keeping,--the skipping penitent gladdened him with the news, that the Princess had inquired after his and her countrymen, his _associés_, and that he had not at all concealed from her, that somebody had once been of the latter without being of the former, namely, her Court-Physician himself.--"Thunder!" said the ...

The poor fool of a merchant meant it well, and there was nothing further to be done about it than to investigate, whether Agnola's questioning had not been mere accident; whether she still had the watch, or had ever opened it; whether no wind had blown away the declaration of love as a sister-wind!

After all it was a matter of grave consideration that the Pater and the Merchant, the evil eyes and the good news, should fall upon precisely the same time: this 30th of March, Easter-eve. As this visit is a very memorable one for my hero, I beg every one to settle himself down very comfortably, and split open beforehand the leaves of this narrative, stuck together with bookbinder's gilding, and to listen like a spy.

When Victor reached the palace, the Pater encountered him, who said he would go in too. It was fortunate; for without this guide he would hardly have found his path through a labyrinth of apartments into the altered cabinet of the patient. And with him went as a pewit through all the rooms the apprehension of seeing on the face of the Princess an indictment against the encased _Billet-doux_; but not so much as an initial letter or the _rubrum_ of a sentence was seen upon her face, as he came before her, and his thunder-cloud had passed aside. At least his was repelled by one which hung over the Princess herself; that is to say, she was ill, but not merely in the eyes; and a second message which was sent to fetch him had just missed him. She received him in bed,--not on account of her sickness, but of her station; for with ladies of some rank the bed is the residence,--the moss-bank,--the high-altar,--the royal palace,--in short, the princely chair and seat. Like the philosopher Descartes, the Abbot Galiani, and old Shandy, they can think and work best in this hothouse. Although she lay in bed, nevertheless she was, as we said, not well, but was attacked with pain in head and eyes. She had therefore to-day sent away all her domestics, except a chambermaid who loved her very much, and the fly on the wall who plagued her, and our Doctor who omitted one of the two things. I should have been glad to reckon in a sedentary court-dame in a picture-cabinet that stood open; but she sat so dumb and motionless, that Victor swore she was either a knee-piece, or--a German lady,--or both. It spared the scalded eyes of the Princess quite as much pain as it gave well eyes pleasure, that the green light-screen, and the green satin tapestry, and the green satin curtains in the sick-cabinet conspired to shed an undulating _blue_ clare-obscure. A single wax taper stood on a candlestick, which was enchased by all the seasons, that is, in sculpture,--upon which custom of the great not to enjoy nature except in counters, in _effigie_ and copy-paper, never _in naturâ_ itself, I can here state neither my opinion nor its reasons, because it would require a whole

EXTRA-LEAF

in order, among so many possible reasons why they everywhere--on tapestry, on the _dessus des portes, des trumeaux_,[26] _des cheminées_, on vases, on candle-sticks, on _plats de menage_,[27] on snuffer-stands, in their gardens, on every trifle--love to see a landscape which they never tread, a Salvator-Rosa rock which they never climb ... I say, because among so many reasons why they do this and concede to old Nature this _jus imaginum_, the true one could be picked out only by an Extra-Leaf, as only such could fully decide whether it arose from the fact that Nature, at the eternal parting had given them her picture, as a mistress does to her lover,--or from the fact that the artists love best to offer them, as to the old gods, precisely what they hate,--or that they resemble the Emperor Constantine, who at the selfsame time abolished the true cross, and multiplied and consecrated images of the same,--or that from a finer feeling they fancy less the enduring but mosaic pictures of Nature, in which whole mountain ridges are the mosaic-pebbles, than the more delicate, but smaller puzzle-pictures of the artists,--or that they would resemble people (if there were such) who should cause to be painted on the theatre curtain the whole opera with all the decorations, in order to spare themselves the raising of the curtain and the seeing of the acts----and yet, if the Extra-Leaf were in the very midst of deciding, every one would, from canine hunger after mere incidents, take French leave and run out after nothing but the confirmation of the incidents, and the

_End of the Extra-Leaf_.

The Princess had two coverings, of which he loved the one and hated the other very much. The beloved one was a veil, which was a healing-bandage to her inflamed eyes; but such a thing was to him the foil and setting of the female face, and he pledged himself to defend, as Respondent and Præses at once, the proposition, that virtue was never better rewarded with beauty than in St. Ferieux[28] at Besançon; for at the feast of morals there the best maiden gets a veil worth six livres.--The hated covering was the gloves, against which he universally threw down his glove of defiance. "Let a lady," he said in Hanover, "once dare to draw against me, that is her hand, and fight with that without the help of the Esau's hands against the Esau's hands, and say, one must not take them off except in bed.--There, at most, must she put them on, I might reply; but I will ask: Of what use then; finally, are the loveliest hands which I see, if they always lie under their wing-sheaths, as if we men were Persian kings? And is it then too severe, if one tells those persons to their faces, who wear such imitation-hands of silk or leather, that they resemble the Venus de' Medici, even to the very hands?[29] I pause for a reply!"

In fact, in this dark green cabinet, almost everything--except Agnola's beautiful Roman shoulders--is covered up; even two images of saints were so. For a painted image of Mary with a real metallic crown--it was not meant for an emblem of princes with mock-heads under genuine crowns--was hidden by the cedars of the bed-plumes, and over a very fine St. Sebastian by Titian--copied from the Barbarigo palace in Venice--(the man looked, with his arrows, like a hedgehog, and yet hung close by her pillow)--she had drawn the bed-curtain, when his namesake without the arrows arrived, who rather adored than was adored. Many have assured me since, that it was a Sebastian of Vandyk's, from the Düsseldorf gallery; but farther on I shall show why not.

Except a female eye reposing behind a veil, no finer specimen of nature's loveliness visits, methinks, us mortals (the Devil has got in here six final _S's_ in succession) than one which is just in the act of laying it aside. The poor Doctor had to meet the out-flashing of such a lovely glow--when he was about to proceed as oculist--that he at once proceeded as Protomedicus[30] of her head, in order to take her hand and thereby save himself. For while she stripped off from her hand the glove-callus--they were, however, only half-gloves with bare fingers, or semi-wing-sheaths, i. e. _hemiptera_,--then was the Doctor, because she had to look down at what she was doing, in the greatest possible security, and the Greek fire shot quite by him. Hence has there been inserted with just forethought in the fire-regulations of morality a whole, almost too long article, which forbids young girls to go about with their eyes exposed, as if with an uncovered light, in a parlor of company, because there is so much inflammable stuff lodged there,--all of _us_ in a body,--but they must bury them in a stocking, which they are knitting, or an embroidery frame, or a thick book--e. g. the Dog-Post-Days--as in a lantern.

--It is really a pity: since the public and I have been in the princely chamber, one tail--I mean one digression _à la Sterne_--has followed another.--

The princely pulse went at a somewhat more feverish rate than even his who here describes it. Shortly before he came, she had taken off from her eyes a warm bandage of roast apples. She desired a temporary bandage, while they should be preparing that which the doctor prescribed. But now in the darkness, in this confusion of the twilight, he could not, in all the four corners of his brain, or the eight lesser brains of the fourth central chamber, muster up a single oculist except Dr. von Rosenstein, who started up within there and advised him to advise the spreading of powdered saffron, one fifth camphor, and melted winter-apples on lint of fine linen. The chambermaid was sent to oversee or order the preparation of the recipe, after she had first bound a black taffeta ribbon with the apple poultice before two of the most beautiful eyes, which deserved a more agreeable bandage and blindness. I am lively, when I write, that the poultice seemed to be made of the apple of beauty--and the black ribbon of beauty-patches pounded apart. The Pater also went away, so soon as he got from the doctor the hope of a speedy recovery. But for the Medicus it was verily now no child's play to sit opposite an Italian rose-cheek and Madonna-face,--and that, too, so near that he could hear the breath whisper, after having been able previously to see it grow,--to keep himself opposite to a face (methinks, was no sport) on which roses are engrafted upon lilies, like sunsets upon light lunar clouds, and which a picturesque shadow, namely a black order ribbon, a priestly fillet, a true _postillon d'amour_, so beautifully divides and sets off,--a bandaged face which he can contemplate in one steady gaze, and which supports itself (in a picturesque half-front) turned towards him, on the pillow and on the hand....

I ought to have attempted a climax, have begun with Sebastian's soul, which to-day out of its own melancholy, out of its sorrows, out of its love for Agnola magnified by Zeusel's calumny, made nothing but lines of beauty and flowing tints in order to paint into his own face as beautiful a new one as ever a fair soul created on canvas, or on its own head or on another's.

Agnola may well have had this perception sooner than I.

It furnished, of course, to the couple slender assistance that they were (not under four eyes--for Agnola's were darkened--but) under only two eyes; for the two other eyes, of the Court-dame in the cabinet, about which Victor could not be sure, till now when the princely ones were shut, and he could without questions investigate by glances and smiles the stiff thing on the chair in there in the cabinet, were really _painted_, and so was the body which bore them.

It struck him as singular now, that, against all Court-order, he was suffered to be alone with the Princess; but, he said to himself, she is an Italian,--a patient,--a lovely little child of fancy--(this last was perceptible even in the unusual winter _negligé_ and Sicilian fire). He could not possibly, therefore, (even to-day before the bandaging of the eyes,) hit the right tone with her; for as she was too fine for a German,--not tender enough for an Englishwoman,--too lively for a Spaniard, he would certainly have written on her _p. p. p_. (_passé par Paris_, which is inscribed on letters that come via Paris), he would have done it, I say, had she not again been too impassioned for a Parisienne. There was the rub.--But as two persons converse more courageously and freely when one or both sit in the dark--and that was Agnola's case:--Victor was, after all, to-day not absolutely as simple as a sheep. Add to this that he took heart from the jewel-cupboard, in which to his joy--she could not see him look round so impolitely--he discovered among twenty watches no _montre à régulateur_. She asked him whether she should be so far restored by the third holiday, that she might contribute something to the Prince's pleasure at the ball. He answered affirmatively, though he knew that she would contribute still more to it by staying away, and although she knew it, too. Here he began to pity her, and he would fain make a clean heart. He would not exactly say plumply: "In Gross-Kussewitz I let the Devil so abuse my good nature as to prevail on me to smuggle into your Highness's watch a declaration of love"; but he would, in the finest outpouring of soul, fall down with his beating bosom and say: "Not from fear of punishment, but from fear lest the confession of my fault may contract some similarity to a repetition of the offence, I have hitherto concealed the fact that I once expressed, not so much too strongly as too boldly, a profoundness of esteem in which I am permitted to imitate only your Court, and not its sovereign; but the strength of feelings is easily confounded with their lawfulness."

He still delayed this falling down, because he perceived behind the curtain a gold strip which seemed to be the beginning of a picture-frame. This border-work must surely run round something,--round a picture, I fancy: and this was what he would like to know.

The cursed Court-Apothecary with his calumny had it to answer for, that he had this wish; not as if he supposed that Mat's face hung in a gilded frame behind the bed, but because to-day all sorts of things had startled him. He could do it very easily, as the arras-door and nunnery-grating of her eye was hung with black; he needed only to support his left hand softly on the edge of the bed, and thus, bending forward and hovering over her with suspended breath, reach across with his right over the bed (it was narrow, and he tall) and pull the curtain a little,--and then he would know what hung behind there. I repeat, but for the Apothecary it would never have entered his head. A slanderer causes one to demand of every action at least its passport,--one does it merely to effect a most patent refutation of the slanderer,--and as, often, the most innocent act has no certificate of health, one shakes one's head and says, It is a real calumny, but then I will still be on the watch.

He had made several attempts to reach over, but as she always had something to say and he to answer, it would not do, unless he chose to betray his nearness to her ears. The conversation related to the ball,--the presence and illness of her maid of honor, Clotilda,--the substitute of the latter, Joachime, upon whose appointment Victor expressed himself with decided coldness; he could never, with Agnola, get beyond court-news; all that was abstract and metaphysical she seemed to hate or to ignore; and as to _talking_ of emotions with her,--which he generally loved best to do with women, and for which the husband's would have given him ample occasion and material,--that seemed to him not much better than actually to _have_ them.