Victor's Professional Visits.–Concerning Houses full of Daughters.–The Two Fools.–The Carrousel.

The following remark comes not from the dog's knapsack, but from my own head: One needs not to be a panegyrist of our times, to see with pleasure that authors, princes, women, and others have now mostly laid aside the unnatural false masks of virtue (e. g. bigotry, pietism, ceremonial behavior), and have entirely assumed instead the genuine tasteful show of virtue. This improvement of our character-masks, whereby we hit more finely the exterior of virtue, is contemporaneous with a similar one on the stage, where they play their antics and their tragics no longer, as once, with paper clothes and badly imitated laces, but with the true ones.–

"The Princess wanted you yesterday," said the Prince to the Court-Physician, almost as soon as he had entered with his exhausted face. The inflammation of Agnola's eyes had, in consequence of the autumn weather, night-feasts, and Culpepper's bold practice and her own–for the red capital letters of beauty (namely, painted cheeks) she was always putting on afresh–very much increased. Properly, Victor was too proud to let himself be sent for as a mere physician; nay, he was too proud to let himself be in demand for anything else (and though it were philosophy or beauty) than his character; for his father, who had just as much delicate pride, had taught him that we must not serve any one who does not respect us, or whom we ourselves do not respect,–nay, that one must not accept a favor from any one to whom one can only return outward, but not inward thanks. But this tender sense of honor, which never came into an unequal conflict with his self-interest, though it might well with his humanity, could never bind the hands wherewith he might relieve an unhappy Princess–unhappy, like himself, from a famine of love–at least of the pains of her eyes; perhaps, also, of younger pangs; for his good-heartedness suggested to him nothing but reconciliations,–of the Prince with Le Baut, with the Princess, with the Minister. Nothing is more dangerous than to reconcile two persons,–unless, indeed, one is himself one of them; to set them at variance is much safer and easier.

He found Agnola, even in the afternoon, still in her chamber, because its green tapestries flattered (not the face, to be sure, but) the hot eye. A thick veil over the face was her screen from daylight. When she, like a sun, lifted her veil, he could not comprehend how in Tostato's shop he could make, out of this Italian fire and these quick court-eyes, the face, red with weeping, of a blonde. A part of this fire belonged, to be sure, to her sickness. Her first word was a decided disobedience to his first; meanwhile she flew in the face of the Messrs. Pringle and Schmucker, as well as himself; for the whole triune College advised leeches round the eyes; but those were disgusting to her. The medicus then suggested cupping-glasses at the back of the head; but her hair was more precious to her than her eyes.

"Must, then, everything be bought with blood?" said she, with Italian vivacity.

"Realms and religions ought not to be, but health should," said he, with English freedom of speech.

Once more he demanded her blood. She would not give it to him, however, until he changed the sacrificial knife, and proposed opening a vein in the eye. Persons of rank, like learned men, are often ignorant of the commonest things: she thought the Doctor would open the vein. And as she thought so, he did it, with a hand trained by the couching-needle.

Meanwhile, if (according to Pliny) a kiss on the eye is one on the soul, the opening of a vein in that organ is no joke; but one may, while he inflicts a wound, himself get one. The poor Court-Medicus must, with his swimming, friendly eye, from which only within a few days the tear of love has been dried away, boldly gaze into the sun pent up in an eye-socket, and, what is more, softly rest his finger on the warm face, and from the fountain of tears make bright blood spurt out.... One ought, before undertaking such an operation, to have a similar one performed on himself, for the sake of the cooling. But, in truth, fate had given him nothing this week but lancet-cuts into his heart's arteries. Let one, further, represent to himself how the whole female sex appeared to him like a magic, far-receded shape, which had once gleamed near to him in a dream, and as a paled moon by day, which he had worshipped in a bright night; and then will one have opened his good innocent heart to behold therein, beside a great ever-active sorrow, a thousand sympathetic wishes for the compassionated Princess. Despite her singular mixture of pride, liveliness, and refinement, he still thought he discovered a change in her, which he could explain partly by his to-day's assiduity and partly by his influence on the Prince, which had been thus far so favorable to her,–a change which would have given him greater courage, had he not insisted upon being threatened with special drafts upon his courage by the billet above the imperator of the compass-watch. At the former and first visit his courage was lamed, because he thought himself avoided, as the son of a father who seemed to fortify his influence by his care for natural children; for a man full of love beside one full of hatred is dumb and stupid.

What put him most in heart to-day, next to the quarrels in which he was defeated (as the one about leeches, &c.), was the last and following, in which he conquered (one grows more courageous and prosperous when one contradicts a proud woman than when one flatters her): He saw a mask lying there; now, as he knew that in Italy ladies wore them in bed, as ours do gloves, using them as a sort of glove to the face, he straightly forbade her the mask, as being tinder to the inflammation of her eyes. It was no flattery when he said to her that the mask might take from her more than it gave. In short, he insisted upon it.–

He was, perhaps, too tolerant towards the doubt which only a woman could make endurable and enduring,–the doubt which one she mistook for the other, the Court-Physician or the favorite; for at last–though not without a fear of saying too much, which, with people of his fiery temperament, is a sign that the thing has already happened–he told her, what he had in the beginning kept back, that the sympathy (empressement) of the Prince had sent him to her; and he extolled the latter at his own expense, and so much the more, as he had nothing further of an extraordinary nature to adduce with regard to him, but only that he had–sent him to her.

Then he went. With the Prince he bestowed on her as many beatifications and as many canonizations (two contrarieties on this earth) as decorum and his humor (two still greater contrarieties) would allow. Singular! she had, for all her fire, no humor. He knew January succumbed, not merely to the slanderer, but also to the flatterer. The crowned theatre-managers of the earth have determinations put into their hearts, and decrees into their mouths; they know what they mean and what they say two or three days later than their throne-prompter. A favorite is a Shakespeare and poet, who, from behind the persons he makes act and speak, never peeps or coughs out himself, but is a ventriloquist, and gives his voice the sound of another's.

When he visited his patient the next day, the eye-sockets were cooled down, though not the eyes. Agnola sat convalescent in a cabinet full of images of the saints. With the indisposition of her eyes had been taken away, at the same time, a source of conversation; and her pride blocked up the way at once to his sensibility and to his humor. Although he said to her a hundred times in his innermost heart, "Torment not thyself, proud soul; I am no favorite; I will not rob thee of anything, least of all of thy pride or another's love,–oh, I know what it is to win none,"–nevertheless he remained (in his opinion) cold before her, and retired with the annoying prospect that his successful cure had cut off his return; for the other court visits were, after all, no confidential visits to the sick. Of the plaguy compass-watch he stood daily less and less in terror, except just when he was happier than usual.

–Many people would sooner live without houses than without building-schemes; Victor, sooner without air to breathe than without castles in the air. He must always have on hand the lottery-chance and stocks of some plan or other for the future; and a woman was, in most cases, the partner in this grand-adventure trade. This time he was keenly bent upon the reconciliation of January and Agnola. He reasoned thus:–"It is easy on both sides. January will now always seek Agnola's society, though merely out of cunning, for the sake of getting with more decency into that of her future maid-of-honor, Clotilda, whom, in her condition of singleness, he can, according to his vow, still love with impunity. As he can neither withstand a long praise nor a long intercourse, this will imperceptibly accustom him to Agnola. She, who is now left alone on the side of the Minister Schleunes, will not reject the united regards of Victor and January," &c.... But whether only the beauty of the action, and not also the beauty of the Princess, incited him to this mediatorial office, that is what the Twenty-First Chapter cannot yet know; meanwhile, so far as I am concerned, let the following stand: his cold inner man, exhausted by bleeding, from which the harpsichord and the name of Clotilda and the awaking at morning still draw bloodless daggers, needs so much indeed the din of the world and everything that may benumb its wounds!

With the design of such preliminaries to a peace, he excused his future disobedience to his father, who had counselled him against frequenting the house of Schleunes; for as the Princess always went there, it was the fittest neutral place for the peace-congress. Oh for only half an—

EXTRA-LEAF ON HOUSES FULL OF DAUGHTERS!

The house of Schleunes was an open bookstore, whose works (the daughters) one could read there, but not carry home. Although the five other daughters stood in five private libraries as wives, and one, under the earth at Maienthal, was sleeping away the child's plays of life, there were, nevertheless, in this warehouse of daughters, three free copies left for sale to good friends. The Minister, at the drawings of the lottery of offices, loved to give his daughters as premiums for great winnings and prizes. To whom God gives an office, to him he gives, if not understanding, yet a wife. In a house rich in daughters, as in St. Peter's Church, there must be confession-pews for all nations, for all characters, for all faults, that the daughters may sit therein as mother-confessors, and absolve from everything, celibacy alone excepted. I have, as naturalist, often admired the wise arrangement of Nature for the propagation as well of daughters as of vegetables. Is it not a wise provision, I said to the natural historian Goetze, that Nature gives precisely to those maidens who need for their life a rich mineral fountain something attaching, by which they may fasten on to miserable nuptial finches, who shall carry them to fat places? Thus LinnÆus^[236] observes, as you know, that those kinds of seeds which only thrive in rich earth have little hooks on them, in order to hang the more easily on the cattle which carry them to the stable and manure-heap. Wonderfully does Nature scatter about by the wind–father and mother must make it–daughters and pine-seeds into the arable places of the forests. Who does not observe the final cause why many daughters receive from Nature certain charms in designated numbers, that some canon or other, a German Herr, a cardinal-deacon, an appanaged prince, or a mere country squire, may come along and take the aforesaid charmer, and, as groomsman or English bride's-father, hand her over, ready finished, to some blockhead or other, in a distant place, as a ready-made wife on sale? And do we find in the case of bilberries any less precaution on the part of Nature? Does not the same LinnÆus observe, in the same treatise, that they are enveloped in a nutritious juice, that they may attract the fox to eat them, whereupon the knave–he cannot digest the berries–becomes, for all he knows, the sower of them?–

Oh, my innermost spirit is more serious than you think. I am vexed with those parents who are traders in souls; I pity the daughters who are negro slaves. Ah! is it any wonder, then, if the daughters who were obliged to dance, laugh, talk, and sing at the West Indian market, in order to be carried home by the master of a plantation, if they, I say, are treated just as much like slaves as if they were sold and bought? Ye poor lambs!–and yet ye are quite as hard as your sheep mothers and fathers. What shall one do with his enthusiasm for your sex, when one travels through German cities, where every richest or most distinguished man, and though he were a distant relation of the Devil himself, can point with his finger to thirty houses, and say: "I don't know,–shall I pick out and marry one from the pearl-colored, or from the nut-colored, or perhaps from the steel-green house? The shops are all open for purchasers."–What, ye maidens! is, then your heart so little worth that you can cut it down, like old clothes, to suit any fashion, any breast? and is it, then, like a Chinese ball, now great, now tiny, in order to fit into the ball-form and wedding-ring case of a man's heart?–"It must indeed be so, unless one will continue to sit alone, like the Holy Virgin over yonder," is the reply of those to whom I make no reply, because I turn away from them with contempt, in order to say to the so-called Holy Virgin: "Forlorn, but patient one! Unappreciated and withered one! remember not the times when thou still didst hope for better ones than the present, and never repent the noble pride of thy heart! It is not always a duty to marry, but it is always a duty not to forgive one's self anything, never to be happy at the expense of honor, and not to avoid celibacy by infamy. Unadmired, solitary heroine! In thy last hour, when the whole of life and the former goods and scaffoldings of life, crushed into ruins, sink beforehand,–at that hour thou wilt look out over thy emptied life; thou wilt see there, it is true, no children, no husband, no wet eyes; but in the vast, void twilight a great, saintly form; angelically smiling, radiant, godlike, and soaring to the divine ones, will hover, and beckon to thee to ascend with her. Oh, ascend with her; that form is thy virtue."

End of the Extra-Leaf.

Some days after the Princess gave the Prince an eye en mÉdaillon with the fine conceit: she gave this votive-tablet to the saint (this was so much the more apropos as the Prince was named Januarius) who had sent her his wonder-worker, and who now received that which he had caused to be healed. January said to Victor, to whom he showed the eye, "She confounds St. Januarius with you, with St. Ottilia,"–who, as is well known, is the patroness of eyes.

Victor was glad that Matthieu came to him to go with him to St. Luna; for the latter begged him, because this was done without him, to go with him to his mother's, "because to-day at the Princess's there was a great souper, but at his mother's not a soul,"–that is, hardly more than nine persons. Victor therefore–it mattered not to-day that the distinguished and interesting eye-sufferer was absent–gladly followed into Schleunes's Nuremberg Exchange Library of daughters behind the tender Jonathan-Orestes-Mat, whom he, in fact, out of forbearance towards their mutual friend Flamin, treated now with more toleration. Men, like ideas, are associated together quite as often on the principle of simultaneousness as on that of similarity; and as little can be inferred from the choice of acquaintances as to the character of a youth, as in regard to that of a woman from her choice of a husband. Matthieu introduced him to his mother in the reading cabinet, just as she was hearing an English author read, with the words, "I bring you here a real live Englishman." Joachime was reading in a catalogue,–it was not a catalogue of books, but of stock-gillyflowers,–in order to select some gillyflowers for herself, not for the purpose of planting, but of imitating them–in silk. She hated flowers that grew. Her brother said, ironically, "She hated changeableness, even in a flower." For the truth was, she loved it even in lovers, and was quite different from April, which, like women, is in our climate far more steady than is pretended. In the cabinet there were also two fools, whom my correspondent does not so much as name to me, because he thinks they would be adequately designated and distinguished, if I should call the one the fragrant fool, and the other the fine one.

Both fools were buzzing round the beauty. In fact, whenever I have wanted to study fools at great parties, I have always looked round regularly for a great beauty; they gather round such a one like wasps around a fruit-woman. And if I had no other reason–I have, however–for marrying the handsomest woman, I would do it for this reason, if for no other, that I might always have the queen-bee sitting in the hollow of my hand, after whom the whole foolish bee-swarm would come buzzing. I and my wife would then be like the fellows in Lisbon, who, having in their hands a pole of parrots strung together, and at their feet a leash of monkeys skipping after them, trudge through the streets, and offer their crazy personÆ for sale.

The fragrant fool, who was to-day on the sunny side of Joachime, was reading to the mother; the fine one, who was on the weather-side, stood near Joachime, and seemed not to trouble himself about her cooling of the temperature. Victor stood there as transition from the torrid zone to the frigid, and represented the temperate; Joachime played three parts with one face. The fragrant fool shot, with his left hand, the swivel-gun of a silver joujou. This hanging seal of a fool he kept in motion, either, as the Greenlander does a block with his feet, for the sake of keeping himself warm,–or he did it, as the grand sultan for similar reasons must always be whittling with a jackknife, in order not to be always having somebody killed out of love,–or in order, as the stork always holds a stone in his claws, to have all the time an Ixion's-wheel in his hands, as a rowel on his heels,–or for the sake of health, in order to counteract the globulus hystericus^[237] by the motion of an external one,–or as rosary bead,–or because he didn't know why.

Each was satisfied with himself. When the mother begged our Englishman to read to her with his native accent, the fine fool said, "The English, like certain sentiments, is easier to understand than to pronounce." That is to say, this fine sheep had universally the habit of being metaphorical. If a maiden said to him, "I cannot keep myself from feeling cold to-day," he made out of it coldness of the heart. One could not say, "It is cloudy, warm, the needle has pricked me," &c., without his taking this as a ball-drawer, to extract his heart from the fire-arm of his breast, and exhibit it. It was impossible in his hearing not to be fine, and from your good-morning he twisted a bon-mot. Had he read the Old Testament, he would not have been able to admire sufficiently the fine turns that occur there. On the other hand, the fragrant fool limited his whole wit to a lively face. He unfolded before you this bill of invoice and insurance-policy of a thousand bright conceits, and held it up to you, but nothing came. You could have sworn by the advertising-poster of wit in his fiery eye, "Now he is going to blaze out,"–but not in the least! He used the weapon of satire, as the grenadiers do hand-grenades, which they no longer throw, but only wear imitated on their caps.

When the fine one had said his erotic bon-mot, Joachime looked at our hero, and said, with an ironical glance at the fine one, "J'aime les sages À la folie."

The pride of the fragrant one in his to-day's superiority, and the apparent indifference of the fine fool to his own neglect, proved that neither was often in to-day's ease, and that Joachime coquetted in a peculiar style. She always made fun of us stately male persons, when two were with her at once,–of one alone less so; her eyes left it to our self-love to ascribe the fire in them more to love than to wit; she seemed to blab out what came into her head, but many things seemed not to come into her head; she was full of contradictions and follies, but her intentions and her inclination nevertheless remained doubtful to every one; her answers were quick, but her questions still quicker. To-day, in the presence of the three gentlemen,–at other times she did it in the presence of the whole bureau d'esprit,–she stepped up to the looking-glass, took out her paint-box, and retouched the gay box-piece of her cheeks. One could not possibly think how she would look if she were embarrassed or ashamed.

The virtue of many a lady is a thunder-house, which the electric spark of love shatters to pieces, and which they put together again for new experiments; to our hero, spoiled by the highest female perfection, it appeared as if Joachime must be classed among those thunder-houses. Coquetry is always answered with coquetry. Either this latter it was, or too feeble a respect for Joachime, which led Victor to make the two adorers ridiculous in the eyes of the goddess. His victory was as easy as it was great; he encamped on the foe's position,–in other words, Joachime took an increased liking to him. For women cannot bear him who, before their eyes, succumbs to another sex than their own. They love everything that they admire; and one would not have made such satirical explanations of their predilection for physical courage, if one had considered that they feel this predilection for everything that is distinguished,–for men distinguished by wealth, renown, learning. The dry and wrinkled Voltaire had so much fame and wit, that few Parisian hearts would have rejected his satirical one. Add to this, that my hero expressed his regard for the whole sex with a warmth which the individual appropriated to herself; then, too, his favorite universal-love, furthermore his eye swimming in sorrow over a lost heart, and finally his infectious human tenderness, secured him an attention from Joachime which excited his to the degree, that he proposed to himself the next time to investigate what it might signify.—

The next time soon came. So soon as the advent of the Princess was predicted by the Apothecary,–for he was for the little future of the court his witch of Endor and of CumÆ, and his Delphic cave,–he went thither; for he did not drive. "So long as there is still a shoe-black and a pavement," said he, "I do not drive. But as to the more distinguished gentry, I wonder that they even travel on foot from one wing of the palace to the other. Could not one, just as they have a penny-post for a city, introduce a conveyance for the interior of the palace? Might not every chair be a sedan-chair, if a lady were less afraid of an Alpine tour from one apartment to another? And various circumnavigatresses of the world would even venture to make a pleasure-tour through a large garden in a close litter."–Victor's own journey lay straight through one,–namely, that of Schleunes. It was too bright and pleasant as yet to let him screw himself like a sewing-cushion to the card-table. He saw in the garden a gay little party strolling about, and Joachime among them. He joined them. Joachime expressed an artist's pleasure at the groupings of the clouds, and it was becoming to her beautiful eyes when she lifted them in that direction. As they had nothing clever to say, they sought to do something clever, so soon as they came to the carrousel.^[238] They seated themselves in it, and caused it to be set agoing. Many of the ladies had absolutely not the courage to climb this potter's-wheel; some ventured into the seats; only Joachime, who was full as daring as she was timid, mounted the wooden tourney-steed, and took the lance in hand, to spear away the ring, with a grace which was worthy of finer rings. But in order not to expose herself to being thrown by the whirling Rosinante, Joachime had set my hero beside her as a banister, that she might hold on to him in time of need. The revolution of the axle grew more rapid, and her fear greater; she clung to him more and more firmly, and he clasped her more firmly in order to anticipate her effort. Victor, who understood very well the legerdemain and hocuspocus of women, easily saw through Joachime's Wiegleb's-natural-magic and "Trunkus Plempsum Schallalei";^[239] besides, the reciprocal pressure had passed to and fro so rapidly, that one could not tell whether it had an originator or an originatress....

As they are now all within doors, and I stand alone in the garden by the horse-mill, I will reflect ingeniously on the subject, and remark that great people, like women and the French and the Greeks, are great–children. All great philosophers are the same, and, when they have almost destroyed themselves with thinking, revive themselves by child's fooleries, as, e. g., Malebranche did; even so do great people refresh themselves for their more serious, noble diversions by true childish ones; hence the hobby-horse chivalry, the swing, the card-houses (in Hamilton's mÉmoires), the cutting out of pictures, the joujou. With this passion for amusing themselves, they are in part infected by the custom of amusing their superiors, because the latter resemble the ancient gods, who, according to Moritz, were appeased, not by atonement, but by joyous festivals.

As he was acquainted with the whole theatre-company of the Minister, and, secondly, as he was no longer a lover,–for such a one has a thousand eyes for one person, and a thousand eyelids for the rest,–he was not embarrassed at the Minister's, but actually enjoyed himself. For he had, to be sure, his plan to carry through there; and a plot makes a life entertaining, whether one reads or executes it.

He was successful to-day in having a tolerably long talk with the Princess, and, to be sure, not about the Prince,–she avoided that subject,–but about her trouble of the eyes. That was all. He felt it was easier to play off an exaggerated regard than to express a real. The apprehension of appearing false makes one appear so. Hence a sincere man has the look, with a suspicious one, of being half false. Meanwhile, with Agnola, who, in spite of her temperament, was coy,–hence a peculiar, lowered tone reigned in her presence at Schleunes's,–every step sufficed which he did not take backward.

But toward the sprightly Joachime he took half a step forward. Not so much she, as the house, seemed to him to be coquettish; and the daughters therein–they constitute the house–he found to resemble the old Litones,^[240] or people of the Saxons, who were one third free and two thirds serf, and who therefore could mortgage a third of their estate. Each had still a third, a ninth, a segment, of her heart left to her own free disposal. In fact, whoso has ever seen codfishing can learn the thing here from metaphor,–the three daughters hold long fishing-rods over the water (father and mother splash, and drive the codfish along), and have their hooks baited with state-uniforms or their own faces,–with hearts,–with whole men (as luring rivals),–with hearts which have already been once taken out of the stomach of another captured codfish;–from this, I say, one can see in some sort how they catch the other cod in the sea, precisely as they do the stock-fish on land,–namely, besides what has been mentioned (now let one read back again), with bits of red rag, with glass-pearls, with birds' hearts, with salted herrings and bleeding fishes, with little cods themselves, with fishes which one has taken out, half digested, from stock-fish formerly caught.—Victor thought to himself, "Joachime may be only lively or coquettish for all me; I can easily skip over marten-traps which I can see set right before my nose." Well, run, Victor; the visible steel shall lead thee precisely upon that which is concealed. One may observe in the same person coquetry towards every other, and yet overlook it toward himself, as the fair one believes the flatterer whom she sets down as a consummate flatterer of all others.–He observed that Joachime had somewhat oftenish looked up at the new ceiling this evening, and he could not rightly tell why it pleased her. At last he saw that she was only pleased with herself, and that raising her eyes was more becoming to them than looking down. He undertook presumptuously to investigate this, and said to her, "It is a pity the painter of the Vatican had not made it, that you might look up at it oftener."–"Oh," said she, in a tone of levity, "I never would look up with others; I do not love admiration." By and by she said, "Men dissemble, when they wish to, better than we; but I tell you just as few truths as I hear from you." She confessed outright that coquetry was the best remedy against love; and with the observation that his frankness pleased her, but hers must please him too, she ended the visit and the Post-Day.

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