Part 3

During dinner the Lector Augusti spoke of the lovely scenery with true taste, but with little warmth and impulse, preferring it by far to some Tempestas[8] in the Borromæan palace. Thence he passed on, in order to have occasion of mentioning the Knight as often as possible, to the personalities of the Court, and confessed that the German gentleman, M. de Bouverot, stood in especial favor,--for with courtiers and saints everything goes by grace,--and that the Prince was uncommonly afflicted in his nerves, &c. Courtiers, who, for the most part, cut their very souls according to the pattern of another's, do, however, draw up their ministerial reports of court so copiously and seriously for the uninitiated, that the reader of their gazettes must needs either laugh or go to sleep; a court-man and the book _Des Erreurs et de la Verité_ call the general of the Jesuits God, the Jesuits men, and the non-Jesuits beasts. Schoppe listened with a dreadful pucker and twist of feature; he hated courts bitterly. Young Albano thought not much better of them; nay, as he was fond of venture, and liked much better to work and fight with the arm than with the fingers of the inner man, and delighted in tackling to the snow-plough and harrow and sowing-machine of life war-horses and thunder-steeds, instead of a team of clever home-and field-horses, of course people who went carefully and considerately to work, and would rather do light, lacquered work, and delicate ladies' work, than Hercules'-labors, he did not particularly fancy. However he could not but feel a respect for the modesty of Augusti, (based as it was upon a noble self-reliance,) which never let him say a word about himself, as well as for the knowledge he had gained by travel.

Cesara,--by the way I shall continue through this Cycle to write it with a C, agreeably to the Spanish orthography; but in and after the 4th, since I am not used to that letter in my orthography, and cannot be forever misrepresenting myself through a long book, it will be written with a Z,--Cesara could not hear enough from the Lector about his father. He related to him the last act of the Knight in Rome, but with an irreligious coldness which produced in the youth a chill of a different kind. Don Gaspard, namely, had laid a wager with a German Nuncius, picture against picture, that he would take a certain German (Augusti would not name him), whose life was only one prolonged, moral filth-month in the princely stable of Epicurus, and in two days, without seeing him, would convert him for as long a time as the Nuncio should desire. The latter accepted the wager, but caused the German to be secretly watched. After two days the German locked himself up, became devout, pale, still, bed-ridden, and in conduct came near to a true Christian. The Nuncio watched the mischief for a week, then demanded the sudden retransformation, or the Circe's wand, which should bring back again the beastly shape. The Knight touched the German with the wand, and the Epicurean swine stood there perfectly sound and well. I know not which is the more inexplicable, the miracle, or the cold-bloodedness of the thing. But the Lector could not say with what menstrua Gaspard forced these rapid solutions and evaporations and precipitations.

At length the Lector, who had long been _frappé_ with the vocation and the collaboratorship of the singular Schoppe, came, by polite circumlocutions, upon the question, how the Knight had become acquainted with him. "Through the Pasquino," he replied. "He was just stepping round the corner of the Palazzo degli Ursini, when he saw some Romans and our hereditary prince standing round a man who was on his knees (they were my knees) before the statues of Pasquino and Marforio, and offering to them the following prayer: Dear Castor and Pollux! why do ye not secularize yourselves out of the ecclesiastical estate, and travel through my Germany _in partibus infidelium_, or as two diligent vicars? Could you not go round among the cities of the empire as missionary preachers and referendaries, or post yourselves as _chevaliers d'honneur_ and armorial bearers on either side of a throne? Would to God they might at least vote thee, Pasquino, royal high-chaplain and master of ceremonies in the court chapels, or let thee down from the roof by a rope at the christening as baptismal angel! Say, could not you twins, now, once come forward and speak as petition-masters-general in the halls of the Diet, or, as _magistri sententiarum_, oppugn one another within the walls of the universities on Commencement days? Pasquino, can no Delia Porta[9] restore thee, were it only so far that thou mightest, at least, at Congresses and treaty-makings of the diplomatic corps, play the _silhouetteur_ as the figure-head of the stove, or must you serve at the highest only in university libraries, as the busts of critical editors? Ah, gay pair, would that Chigi, who stands here beside me, might only model you into a portable pocket edition for ladies, I would put you by, and not take you out of my pocket till I reached Germany! I can, however, do it even here on the island," said Schoppe; whereupon he drew forth the satirical work of art; for the renowned architect and modeller, Chigi, who heard him, had really cast a copy of it. Schoppe went on to tell how Don Gaspard then seriously stepped up to him, and asked him, in Spanish, who he was. "I am (he answered also in Spanish) actual Titular librarian to the Grand Master at Malta, and a descendant of the so-called grammatical dog, the toothed humanist, Scioppius (German Schoppe); my baptismal name is Pero, Piero, Pietro (Peter). But many here call me, by mistake, Sciupio or Sciopio (extravagance)."

Gaspard had an impartial, deep-reaching eye for every spirit, even though it were most unlike his own; and, least of all, did he seek a repetition of himself. He therefore took the librarian home with him. Since, now, the latter seemed to live solely by portrait-painting, and was besides just meaning to go back to Germany, he accordingly proposed to this rich, many-eyed, rough spirit, Albano's society, which only the present fellow-laborer, Augusti, was to share with him. But there were four things which the librarian demanded beforehand, as preliminaries,--a sitting from the Count, his profile, and--when both these had been granted--yet a third and a fourth, in the following terms: "Must I suffer myself to be _calendered_[10] by the three estates, and forced to take on gloss and smoothness by polishing-presses? I will not; whithersoever else, be it to heaven or hell, I will accompany your son, but not into the stamping-washing-roasting-melting-and-forcing-works of great houses." This was granted easiest of all; besides, the second Imperial vicegerent of the paternal supremacy, Augusti, was appointed to the business in question. But upon the fourth point they came near falling out. Schoppe, who would rather be an outlaw than a slave or a freedman, and whose ground, no less imperially free than fruitful, would not endure a hedge, could accommodate himself only to accidental, undetermined services, and felt obliged to decline the _fixum_ of a salary. "I will," said he, "deliver occasional sermons, but none of your weekly sermons; nay, it may be, oftentimes, I shall not enter the desk for a half-year together." The Knight considered it beneath him to be under obligations, and drew back, till Schoppe hit upon the diagonal road, and said he would give his society as a _don gratuit_, and should expect of the Knight, from time to time, a considerable _don gratuit_ in return. As for the rest, Schoppe was now full as dear to the Knight as the first-best Turk of the Court who had ever helped him up his carriage-steps; his trial of a man was like a post-mortem examination, and after the trial he neither loved nor hated more cordially; to him, as he looked into the show-piece of blustering life, the manager and the first and second mistresses, and the Lears and Iphigenias and heroes were no friends, nor were the Kasperls and the tyrants and supernumeraries foes, but they were simply different actors in different parts. Ah, Gaspard, standest thou, then, in the front box, and not also on the stage of life itself? And dost thou not in the great drama recognize, like Hamlet, a lesser one? Ay, does not every stage imply, after all, a twofold life,--a copying and a copied?

Either the glass or two (or more) of wine, or else his annoying contrast to the elegant, sedate Lector, set Schoppe's winnowing-mill with all its wheels in motion, though this humor of his found small scope on the enchanting island; and when Augusti expressed a wish that Schoppe might go to Germany under happier auspices than other painters, the latter drew forth a pack of gilded pictures of German patron saints, and said, shuffling them: "Many a one would here lay a papal miserere on the desk and sing it off, particularly if, like me, he had to go into winter quarters among the German ice and fog-banks in the middle of spring;--and it is with reluctance, I am free to confess, I leave the Harlequin and Pulzinella and Scapin, and the whole _comedia dell' arte_ behind. But the gentlemen saints whom I here shuffle have brought the lands under their charge into high and dry condition, and one passes through them with comfort. Mr. Architect, you laugh, but you know altogether too little of what these painted heavenly advowees hourly undertake in behalf of the German circles. Mr. Architect, show me, after all, a country anywhere, in which so many cudgels, programmes, professors, _Perukes-allongées_, learned advertisements, imperial notices, cits and surburbans, ceremonies, coronations, and Heidelberg tubs, but without indwelling Diogeneses, are to be mustered together as in the aforementioned? Or I appeal to you, Mr. Von Augusti! Point out to me, I pray, one single territory which is provided with such a _Long Parliament_, namely, a most lengthy Diet of the Empire, as it were, an extraordinarily wholesome _pillula perpetua_[11] which the patient is incessantly swallowing, and which as incessantly purges him; and who is not reminded, as well as myself, in this connection, of the _capitulatio perpetua_, and in general of the body politic of the Empire, that _perpetuum immobile_,--and on good grounds?" Here Schoppe drank. "The body of the Empire becomes thereby, like the first principle of morals, or like virgin earth, altogether insoluble; nay, supposing one of us were to take an electoral sword, and cut it in two therewith, as if it were an earwig, still the half with the teeth would, like the cloven earwig, turn round and eat the latter half clean up,--and then there would be the whole continuous earwig rejoined and well fed into the bargain. It is not by any means to be regretted as a consequence of this close _nexus_ of the Empire, that the corpus can devour and digest its own limbs, as the brook-crab does its stomach, without any real harm to itself, so that the corpus, like a Homeric god, can only be wounded, but not killed. Take this bunchy polypus-stalk, I often say, mash it to a pulp with Rösel,--turn it wrong side outward like a glove,--like Lichtenberg, cut the polypus in two dexterously with a hair,--like Trembley, stick and incorporate several severed limbs into one another, as other naturalists do imperial cities, abbeys, small provinces into greater, or the reverse,--and then examine after some days; verily, magnificent and whole and well, thy polypus will be found sitting there again, or my name is not Schoppe."

The Count had heard him again and again on this subject, and could therefore more easily and properly smile; the Lector, however, was learning all this for the first time, and even the comic actor is not such to his new hearers. But amidst all these diversions there still sounded on in Albano's soul a confused tumult, like the murmuring of the waterfall of the coming times. He peered longingly through the wavering seams of the laurel-foliage, out toward the shining hills, when Dian said, in his painter's-language: "Is it not as if all the gods stood, with thousands of cornucopias, on the mountains around Lago Maggiore, and poured down wine and cascades, till the lake, like a goblet of joy, foams over and gushes down with the brimming juice?" Schoppe replied: "Pleasures of exceeding flavor, like pineapples, have the misfortune, that, like pineapples, they make the gums bleed." "I think," said Augusti, "that one ought not to reflect much upon the pleasures of life, any more than upon the beauties of a good poem; one enjoys both better without counting or dissecting them." "And I," said Cesara, "would calculate and dissect from very pride; whatever came of it I would abide, and I should be ashamed to be unhappy about it. If life, like the olive, is a bitter fruit, then grasp both with the press, and they will afford the sweetest oil." Here he rose to remain alone on the island till evening; he asked indulgence, but gave no excuse. His lofty, ambitious soul was incapable of descending to the smallest lie, even towards an animal. In Blumenbühl he used daily to entice the tame pigeons near him by holding out food; and his foster-sister often begged him to catch one; but he always said, "No," for he would not betray the confidence even of a brute creature.

While they followed him with their eyes, as he slowly retired through the laurel shades, with the shadows dancing after him and stray sunbeams gliding down over him, and, as in a dream, gently bent the branches apart with his hands extended before him, Dian broke forth: "What a statue of Jupiter!" "And the ancients," said Schoppe, joining in, "believed, moreover, that every god dwelt in his own statue." "A magnificent, threefold breadth of brow, nasal bridge, and breast!" continued Dian. "A Hercules planting olive-trees on Olympus!" "It struck me very much," said the Lector, "that, after considerable study, I could read in his countenance what I wished and what was mutually contradictory,--coldness, warmth, innocence and gentleness, most readily defiance and force." Schoppe added: "It may be still harder for himself to compel such a congress of warring powers within him to become a peace-congress." "How beautifully," said the humanly feeling Dian, "must love sit upon so mighty a form, and how sublimely must anger!" "Those are two poetic beauties," replied Schoppe, "out of which two Pedagogiarchs and Zenophons, like us, can make little with their Cyrus in their Cyropædia."

4. CYCLE.

Zesara had tasted only three glasses of wine; but the must of his thick, hot blood fermented under it mightily. The day grew more and more into a Daphnian and Delphic grove, in whose whispering and steamy thicket he lost himself deeper and deeper,--the sun hung in the blue like a white glistening snow-ball,--the glaciers cast their silvery glances down into the green,--from distant clouds it thundered occasionally,[12] as if spring were rolling along in his triumphal chariot far away towards us at the north,--the living glow of the climate and the hour, and the holy fire of two raptures, the remembered and the expected, warmed to life all his powers. And now that fever of young health seized upon him, in which it always seemed to him as if a particular heart beat in every limb,--the lungs and the heart are heavy and full of blood,--the breath is hot as a Harmattan wind,--and the eye dark in its own blaze,--and the limbs are weary with energy. In this overcharge of the electrical cloud he had a peculiar passion for destroying. When younger, he often relieved himself by rolling fragments of rock to a summit and letting them roll down, or by running on the full gallop till his breath grew _longer_, or most surely by hurting himself with a penknife (as he had heard of Cardan's doing), and even bleeding himself a little occasionally. Seldom do ordinary, and still seldomer extraordinary, men attain full-blooming youth of body and spirit, but when it does happen, so much the more luxuriantly does one root bear a whole flower-garden.

With such emotions Albano now stood alone behind the palace towards the south, when a sport of his boyish years occurred to him.

He had, namely, often in May, during a heavy wind, climbed up into a thick-limbed apple-tree, which supported a whole green hanging cabinet, and had laid himself down in the arms of its branches. And when, in this situation, the wavering pleasure-grove swung him about amidst the juggling play of the lily-butterflies and the hum of bees and insects and the clouds of blossoms, and when the flaunting top now buried him in rich green, now launched him into deep blue, and now into the sunshine, then did his fancy stretch the tree to gigantic dimensions: it grew alone in the Universe, as if it were the tree of endless life, its root pierced far down into the abyss, the white-red clouds hung upon it as blossoms, the moon as a fruit, the little stars glistened like dew, and Albano reposed in its infinite summit, and a storm swayed the summit from day into night and from night into day.

And now he stood looking up to a tall cypress. A southeast breeze had arisen from its siesta in Rome, and flying along had cooled itself by the way in the tops of the lemon-trees and in a thousand brooks and shadows, and now lay cradled in the arms of the cypress. Then he climbed up the tree, in order at least to tire himself. But how did the world stretch out before him, with its woods, its islands, and its mountains, when he saw the thunder-cloud lying over Rome's seven hills, just as if that old spirit were speaking from the gloom which once wrought in the seven hills as in seven Vesuviuses, that had stood before the face of the earth so many centuries with fiery columns, with erect tempests, and had overspread it with clouds and ashes and fertility, till they at last burst themselves asunder! The mirror-wall of the glaciers stood, like his father, unmelted before the warm rays of heaven, and only glistened and remained cold and hard,--from the broad expanse of the lake the sunny hills seemed on every hand to rise as from their bath, and the little ships of men seemed to lie fast stranded in the distance,--and, floating far and wide around him, the great spirits of the past went by, and under their invisible tread only the woods bowed themselves, the flower-beds scarcely at all. Then did the outward past become in Albano his own future,--no melancholy, but a thirst after all greatness that inhabits and uplifts the spirit, and a shrinking from the unclean baits of the future painfully compressed his eyelids, and heavy drops fell from them. He came down, because his internal dizziness grew at last to a physical. His rural education and the influence of Dian, who reverenced the modest course of nature, had preserved the budding garden of his faculties from the untimely morning sun and hasty growth; but the expectation of the evening and the journey he had taken had conspired to make the day of his life now too warm and stimulating.

Roaming and dreaming, he lost himself among orange-blossoms. Suddenly it was to him as if a sweet stirring in his inmost heart made it enlarge painfully, and grow void, and then full again. Ah, he knew not that it was the fragrances which he had here in childhood so often drunk into his bosom, and which now darkly but powerfully called back every fantasy and remembrance of the past, for the very reason that fragrances, unlike the worn-out objects of the eye and ear, seldomer present themselves, and therefore the more easily and intensely renew the faded sensations. But when he happened into an arcade of the palace, which was colored mosaically with variegated stones and shells, and when he saw the waves playing and dancing on the threshold of the grotto, then did a moss-grown past all at once reveal itself: he sounded his recollections,--the colored stones of the grotto lay as it were full of inscriptions of a former time before his memory. Ah, here had he been a thousand times with his mother! She had showed him the shells and forbidden him to approach the waves; and once, as the sun was rising and the rippled lake and all the pebbles glistened, he had waked up on her bosom, in the midst of the blaze of lights.

O, was not, then, the place sacred, and was not here the overpowering desire pardonable, which he had so long felt to-day, to open a wound in his arm for the relief of the restless and tormenting blood?

He scratched himself, but accidentally too deep, and with a cool and pleasant exaltation of his more lightly-breathing nature he watched the red fountain of his arm in the setting sun, and became, as if a burden had fallen off from him, calm, sober, still, and tender. He thought of his departed mother, whose love remained now forever unrequited. Ah, gladly would he have poured out this blood for her,--and now, too, love for his sickly father gushed up more warmly than ever in his bosom. O come soon, said his heart, I will love thee so inexpressibly, thou dear Father!

The sun grew cold on the damp earth,--and now only the indented mural crown formed by the gold wedges of the glacier-peaks glowed above the spent clouds,--and the magic-lantern of nature threw its images longer and fainter every moment, when a tall form, in an open red mantle, came slowly along towards him round the cedar-trees, pressed with the right hand the region of its heart, where little sparks glimmered, and with the half-raised left crushed a waxen mask into a lump, and looked down into its own breast. Suddenly it stiffened against the wall of the palace in a petrified posture. Albano placed his hand upon his light wound, and drew near to the petrified one. What a form! From a dry, haggard face projected between eyes which gleamed on, half hid beneath their sockets, a contemptuous nose with a proud curl,--there stood a cherub with the germ of the fall, a scornful, imperious spirit, who could not love aught, not even his own heart, hardly a higher,--one of those terrible beings who exalt themselves above men, above misfortune, above the earth, and above conscience, and to whom it is all the same whatever human blood they shed, whether another's or their own.

It was Don Gaspard.