Examinatorium and Dehortatorium of Conscience.–The Studious Honeymoon of a Scholar.–The Cabinet of Natural History.–Answer from Emanuel.–The Packed-up Chin.–Arrival of the Prince.–First Intercalary Day.

I wish the story were done, so that I might get it printed; for I have already too many subscribers to it among the common folk. An author in our days accepts advance payment for his book from the lowest fellow,–the tailor makes his pre-payment in clothes, the hair-dresser in powder, the landlord in rooms.

Every morning Victor gave himself a curtain lecture under the bed-quilt for the evening previous; the bed is a good confessional and audience-hall of conscience. He wished that yesterday's garden-club would take him for a veritable fool instead of a lover. "Ah, if Flamin himself should torment himself with jealousy, and if our hearts, once so long parted, should already come to be so again!" Here the bed-box, from a confessional, grew to be a fiery oven. But an angel laid himself in beside him, and blew away the blaze. "But what, then, have I done? Have I not with a thousand-fold pleasure spoken, acted, kept silence for his sake? Not a look, not a word, can be charged against me,–what else then?" The angel of light or fire had now to blow terribly against the shooting flame. "What else? Thoughts, perhaps, which however, like field-mice of the soul, leap under the feet, and stick like adders. But could the disciples of Kant impute to me then, that I took the little image of the loveliest and best form, which I hitherto vainly summoned up in the lands of three lords, and threw such a Raphael's head, such an antique of Paradise, out of the window of the villa of my brain, like apple-parings and plum-stones? I should wonder at the Kantians, if they did. And if it must stay there, am I to be an ox, ye Catechists, and coldly glower^[85] at it? Not I. Nay, I will trust myself, and demand of the fairest heart even friendship, and yet leave to it its love!" Dear reader, during this whole summary process before the judicial commission of conscience, I have said to myself, over thirty times, "Neither of you, you nor the reader, is a hair more honest with your conscience!"

He drew himself slowly by the bed-cord out of the bed, which he used to quit with a spring; some wheel of his ideas stuck within him. He read his yesterday's letter, and found it too stormy. "That is just our insignificance," said he, "that everything which man holds to be eternal freezes over night; not across our face do the most vehement gales pass more swift and traceless than across our heart. Why then am I not to-day what I was yesterday, and perhaps shall be to-morrow? What does man gain by this boiling up and down? And what has he then within himself to build upon?"

Meanwhile, the fire-wheel of our earthly time, the sun, had whirled up its revolving streams, and burned on the shore of the earth. He flung. up the window, and was fain to bathe his naked breast in the fresh morning wind, and his hot eye in the Red Sea of Aurora; but something within him interposed itself like an after-taste between him and the enjoyment of the morning-land. The remorse of conscience for future actions spoils a good man utterly for enjoyment.

There rose slowly within him an overmastering emotion,–the former night passed by again before him with its flashing rain, and brought back to him his passionate heart and Emanuel's shadow,–he ran more and more vehemently, and in fact transversely, through the chamber,–tied his night-gown tighter, shook something from his eye, gave a perpendicular jump, jerked out a "No!" and said, with an inexpressibly serene smile, "No! I will not cheat my Flamin! I will neither seek nor shun her, nor will I desire her friendship till the time of his highest happiness. As I look upon thee^[86] yonder, so will I upon her glorious, heavenly bust, without desiring that it take on warmth, and turn on me its cold plaster eye. But thou, my friend, be happy and all blessed, and never mayst thou once remark my conflict!"

Now, for the first time, did the church-attire of morning gladden him, and the morning air flowed like a cool necklace over his hot bosom, and threw back the playing hair and shirt-frill. He felt that now he was worthy to have written to Emanuel, and to have looked up at the heavens....

Flamin entered with some coldness, which was increased by the sight of the letter. Victor was not to be made cold; only when, down below, no one reminded him by a word of his yesterday's Dithyrambics, then did he, from fear of being betrayed, make an angry, covert oath, if she came, not to come,–which could be kept, too, for she did not come. She had still to bring away luggage from Maienthal, to besprinkle her friendships, and once more to set foot in the magic circle of her beloved teacher; and had, therefore, gone off.

The following weeks danced now like just so many hours in Anglaises and Cotillons before Sebastian. His forenoons hung full of fruits, his afternoons full of flowers; for in the morning his soul with its exertions lived in his head, towards evening in his heart. In the evening one loves cards, poems, confidential talk, woman, music, very much; in the morning, very little; in the spirit-hour is that love at its highest strength.

Except two other doubts that troubled him,–the first was, whether his Emanuel would write to him soon enough to enable him to visit him before he should be harnessed to the pole of the court and state-carriage; the second was the fear of being so too soon,–now he had hardly anything to do except to be happy or to make others so; for precisely in these weeks fell his holy or Sabbatical weeks...

I know not whether the reader is yet acquainted with them; they are not found in the improved almanac; but they occur regularly (with some men) either immediately after the vernal equinox or in the after-summer.

With Victor the first alternative was the one,–exactly in the middle of spring. I need not inquire whether it is the body, the weather, or who or what, that rings in this truce of God in our breast; but I must describe how they look, the Sabbatical weeks. Their form is precisely this: in a holy or Sabbatical week, many–e. g. I–are put off with mere Sabbatical days or hours. At first, one slumbers lightly, as on balanced clouds,–one awakes like a serene day. At evening one had made a firm resolve beforehand, and had therefore written it down in ciphers on the door, to grow better, and to apply the weeding-knife every day to one bed of weeds at least,–on awaking one is still so minded, and in fact carries it out. The gall, that excitable spirit, which usually, when it is poured, instead of into the duodenum, into the heart or heart's blood, sends up boiling and hissing clouds, is now in a few seconds absorbed or precipitated, and the exalted mind feels calmly the bodily effervescence without any of its own. In this lull of the wings of our lungs, one utters only soft, low words, one clasps lovingly the hand of every one with whom he speaks, and one thinks, with melting heart, "Ah! I could not begrudge it to one of you, if you were still happier than I." On the clean, healthy, tranquil heart, as on the Homeric gods, light wounds immediately close. "No!" thou keepest saying in the Sabbatical week, "I must for some days to come maintain this tranquillity." Thou requirest, as material for joy, hardly anything but existence; nay, the sun-sting of a rapture would condense this cool, magical, transparent morning haze into a tempest. Thou lookest up steadily into the blue, as if thou wouldst fain give thanks and weep, and around upon the earth as if thou wouldst say, "Wherever I might be to-day, there I should be happy!" and a heart full of sleeping storms thou carriest, as a mother does her child sunk into slumber, shyly and watchfully over the soft flowers of joy.... But the storms start up, nevertheless, and assail the heart!...

Ah, what must we not all already have lost, if the pictures of blissful days win from us nothing but sighs! O tranquillity, tranquillity, thou evening of the soul, thou still Hesper of the weary heart, which always abides beside the sun of virtue, if at thy very name our inner being is dissolved into tears, ah, is not that a sign that we seek thee, but have thee not?

Victor owed the siesta of his heart to the sciences,^[87] particularly Poetry and Philosophy, which two move, as do comets and planets, around the same sun (that of Truth), and differ only in the shape of their orbits, as comets and poets have the greater ellipse. His training and talents had accustomed him to the vital air and oxygen of the study, which is also the only dormitory of our passions, and that only cloister and haven of bliss for men who would escape the broad whirlpool of the senses and fashions. The sciences are, more than virtue, their own reward, and they make one a partaker of happiness,–she only makes him worthy of it; and the prize-medals, pensions, and positive rewards, and the patent which many scholars would fain get for their studying, belong at most to the literary apprentice-brethren, who make it a penance and a torture, but not to the masters of the chair, who make it a pleasure and a delight. A scholar has no ennui; only a throne-incumbent has to prescribe for himself, against this nervous consumption, a hundred court-festivals, cavaliers of honor, whole countries, and human blood!

Good heavens! a reader who, in Victor's Sabbatical weeks, should have taken a ladder and climbed up to his window,–would he have espied anything there but a jubilant thing, that went gliding about over the fields of learning as among islands of the blest?–a thing which, in its ecstasy, knew not whether it should think or compose or read, and particularly what or whom, out of the whole high nobility of books ranged before it. In this bridal chamber of the mind (such are our study-chambers), in this concert-hall of the finest voices gathered from all times and places, the Æsthetic and philosophical enjoyments almost overpowered his faculty of choice. Reading hurried him into writing, writing to reading, thinking to sentiment, and the latter to the former.

I could go on with more satisfaction in this description, if I had previously written how he studied; namely, that he never wrote without having read himself full^[88] on the subject, and the reverse, that he never read without having first thought himself hungry. One should, he said, without an intense occasion and impulse from without, i. e. from within, not only not make verses, but even a philosophical paragraph; nor should any one set himself down and say: "Now, at three o'clock on this Bartholomew's day, I will go at it, and cleverly prove the following proposition." I can now proceed.

Now when, in this mental laboratory, which served less for analytic chemistry than for synthetic science, he ascended from the turmaline which attracts grains of ashes to the sun which attracts worlds, and even to the unknown sun toward which solar systems fly; or when the anatomical charts were to him the perspective sketch of a divine architecture, and the dissecting-knife became the gnomon of his favorite truth: that, in order to believe in a God, there was need of nothing more than two men, of whom the one might be dead, too, that the living one could study him, and turn over his leaves^[89]; or when Poetry, as a second nature, as a second music, wafted him upward softly on her invisible ether, and he chose undecidedly between the pen and the keys, when he wanted to communicate aloft; ... when, in short, in his heavenly sphere, supported on a human cervical-vertebra, the nebula of ideas gradually resolved itself into bright and dark parts, and beneath an unseen sun filled itself more and more with ether,–when one cloud became conductor to another,–when at last the gleaming mass of cloud came together,–then did the inner heaven (as the outer one often does), by eleven o'clock in the forenoon, grow from all the flashes into one sun, from all the drops into one flood, and the whole heaven of the upper faculties came down to the earth of the lower ones, and ... some blue patches of the second world were for a flying moment open.

We cannot delineate our inner states more philosophically and clearly than by metaphors, i. e. by the colors of related states. The narrow defamers of metaphors, who, instead of the brush, would rather give us the black-lead, ascribe to the coloring the unrecognizableness of the drawing; but they ought to charge it merely on their non-acquaintance with the original subject. Verily, nonsense plays hide-and-seek more easily in the roomy, abstract, artificial words of the philosophers–since words, like Chinese shadows, increase with their circumference at once the obscurity and the emptiness of their contents–than in the narrow green hulls of the poets. From the Stoa and the Portico of thought one must have an outlook into the Epicurean gardens of poetry.

In three minutes I shall come back to my story. Victor said, he must have mountain-, garden-, and swamp-meadows, because he possessed three different whimsical souls, which he must drive to pasture on three sorts of grounds. He meant by that, not, as the scholastics do, the vegetative, animal, and intellectual souls, nor, as the fanatics do, the three parts of man, but something very like,–his humorous, sentimental, and philosophical souls. Whoever should take away from him one of these, he said, might as well strip him of the remaining ones. Nay, sometimes, when the humorous soul happened at the moment to be sitting uppermost on the revolving cross-bench, he carried his levity so far as to express the wish that a joke might be made even in Abraham's bosom, and that he might with his three souls sit down at once on the twelve thrones.

His afternoons he gave up now to a streaming humor which did not even find its proper hearers,–now to the people of the parsonage,–now to all the school-going youth of St. Luna, whose stomachs (to the vexation of every good schoolmaster) he provisioned more than their heads, because he thought that, in the short years when the bib expands to a napkin, enjoyment must find its way over the children's serviette, and had no other entrance than the mouth. He never went out without a whole military-chest full of small change in his waistcoat pocket. "I scatter it without thinking," said he; "but if from this metallic seed sowed broadcast whole evenings of joy spring up for the poor devils, and if just the innocent ones so seldom have them, why shall not one do something for the saved virtue and for pleasure at once?"

He said he had heard moral lectures, and desired for his extra-judicial donations and merciful endowments nothing but forgiveness. His Flamin, who pronounced him a careless sowing-machine on rocks, spent his little holidays before approaching the session-table in ardent hopes of being serviceable there, and in preparations for being able to be so; often, when the higher patriotism, with saintly halo and Moses'-glory, broke out on the beloved Flamin's face, tears of friendly gladness stood in Victor's eyes, and in the moment of a lyric philanthropy both swore on their hearts for the future a mutual support in well-doing and joint sacrifices for mankind. The difference between them was merely reciprocal exaggeration,–Flamin treated vice too intolerantly, Victor too tolerantly; the former, as administrative counsellor, rejected, like the Anabaptists, all festivals, and, like the first Christians, all flowers (in every sense); the latter, like the Greeks, loved both too much;–the former would have sacrificed to honor human victims; the latter knew no robber of honor but his own heart: he overleaped at the tea-table the paper half-nobility of our miserable points of honor, and, mocking at mockery, submitted himself only to the high nobility of virtue....

Victor sucked, with the feet of a green-frog, on every flower-leaf of joy,–at children, animals, village-Lupercalia, lessons; but dearest of all to him was Saturday. Then he made excursions through the glad unrest of the village, along by servant-men, hammering at their scythes, not to magnetize, but to sharpen them, and before the shop-door of the schoolmaster, at which his eye, like a Swiss, often stood for half an hour. For he could very well study the state of St. Luna's commerce in the little great-adventure-trade of the schoolmaster, who knew no smaller merchants' exchange than the one in his breeches' pocket. From this East India House he saw at a late hour people procuring the cheap pleasures of Sunday,–the wholesale dealer (the schoolmaster is meant), supported by his negro slaves, made the Sunday morning of St. Luna sweet with his syrup and hot with his coffee; and as well by the tobacco-culture of Germany was this tradesman enabled with spiral cables of pigtail to furnish the heads of the pipes, as through the silk culture the daughter's heads with Sabbath-streamers out of his Auerbach's court.... Our hero all knew. From every kennel a dog came wagging his tail to meet him to whom he had thrown in bread; from every window children screamed after him, whom he had bantered; and many boys, whom he passed, counted themselves happy if they had a cap on,–for then they could take it off before their master. For his first growing up in St. Luna was the history of St. Luna, which must have been drawn from the oral blue-books of the historic persons, and from the Imperial Postilion, the Parson's wife. This last, as a Mrs. Plutarch, always held up two characters, like pieces of cloth, side by side; and her husband read to him according to the best of his science and conscience upon the Church- and Reformation-history of his diocese. Victor devoted himself to this microcosmic world-history from two motives: first, in order–which is the object of professional students with the larger history–to dismiss it again clean from memory; secondly, in order to be as much at home in the village as the constable or the midwife, whence he hoped to derive the advantage of being grieved if a St. Lunite should die, and glad if he had previously married.

Now the story strides forward again, from one day to another, as if on the stones of the stream of time.

So sweetly then had the spring passed along before him with Sabbatical weeks, with Whitsuntides, with white blossoms, which fell gradually, like butterflies' wings, from the flying season. Victor had postponed the visit to Le Baut, thinking, "I shall have, at all events, to budge soon enough down out of the soft lap of Nature, and up to the court wire-bench and the object-holder (the throne) of the court-microscope";–he had, to be sure, daily exhorted himself, now, soon, before Clotilda's arrival, to start so as not to draw any suspicion upon his intentions, but always in vain, ... when suddenly (for the day before it was the 13th of July) the 14th appeared, and with it Clotilda's luggage without her. Now he actually (according to the official dog-reports) crossed on the 15th the Brook of St. Luna,^[90] passed the Alps of the Chamberlain's steps, and pitched his CÆsar's tent on Le Baut's sofa. He knew that to-day no one was there, not even Mat.

"Heaven keep our politeness safe and sound," said he; "without it there were not only no holding out among a set of knaves, but it pays also minute-tributes of pleasure, whereas benevolence pays only quarterly assessments and exchequer-instalments, and charitable contributions." Mr. and Mrs. Le Baut were as courteous as never before (I could swear, they had nosed out something of Victor's court-doctor's hat and Doctor's crown); only they knew not what sort of a mouth-piece they should screw on to such a whimsically twisted instrument as Victor was. Like all study-inhabiting crustacea, he would rather talk of things than of persons; Flamin, however, the reverse. For the married pair, there was nothing in any Messiad more sublime than that now, on St. John's day, the Italian Princess would be coming: of that no mortal could talk enough, especially in the village. I know not to what slip of Victor's it was owing, that he led most women into the notion that he loved them. Suffice it, the Chamberlain's wife, who at her years demanded no longer love, but the show of love, thought, "Perhaps!" Let no one mistake her, she, to be sure, always spent the first hour with a man on the watch-tower of observation; but the second, then, only on the hunting-screen, if the first had been fortunate, and she was cool enough not to hope more than she saw: she even made a jest of every one who, in view of her vanity–a womanly vanity, however–of too easily presuming upon conquests, should think to flatter her otherwise than openly. Suffice it, she judged our Victor to-day too favorably, in her sense, or too unfavorably in ours; as, in general, mere courtiers can see through only mere courtiers. Of Clotilda not a word was said, not even of the time of her return.

In fact, the Le Baut had a monstrous pride in herself to contend with towards her step-daughter,–of which my correspondent should have informed me what it rested upon, whether on relations or on merits; for of both there was an ample supply, inasmuch as the Chamberlain's wife had been the w—, that is, the mistress, of the present Prince's deceased father. I and a clever man have considered the question pro and con, whether she resembled CÆsar in love or in ambition. The clever man says, "In love," because a woman never forgets love, when a prince has been her teacher therein. The illustrious deceased father's heart had adored two beauties in her particularly, which aforetime the Scots^[91] used to be so fond of eating, namely, the bosom and the rump. The great have their peculiar grossiÈretÉs, which the little dream not of. I would not print it, but it was known to the whole court, and therefore to many of my readers also. Well, the Devil brought along Time, who whetted his scythe and mowed away all of each of these charms which hung over in his territory. Now with women at courts–or in the courtyard^[92] of a school, or a warehouse, or in a cow-yard–vanity, so soon as old Saturn (i. e. Time) attacks it with his scythe-chariot and with the small shot from his hour-glass, makes one of the most skilful retreats that I know of. Vanity lets itself be driven from one work or member after another; but at last it throws itself out of the weak parts into strongholds, e. g. into finger-nails, foreheads, feet, &c., and from there the Devil himself cannot dislodge it. The Chamberlain's wife had first to make herself such a part, namely, a gorge de Paris and a cul de Paris; these four boundary hills of her kingdom had daily to be restored, and raised, out of respect for property, against the shifting of boundaries produced by years. From this, now, my clever man concludes that her soul is always writing letters of marque to her body.

I am precisely the antipode of the clever man, and contend that Cupid is only her serving-brother, not the master of the lodge,–her adjutant, not her generalissimo; and this for the reason that she is still always applying either her own or Le Baut's hand to the restoration of the Solomon's Temple wherein she used to be adored as a goddess, side by side with the god,–because in marrying him she married nothing but the Chamberlain's key and his assemblÉes and his hopes of future influence,–because her hostility to Clotilda relates not to the face, but to the brain,–because her love is now without jealousy. That is to say, she stood in a certain amatory relation with the Evangelist Matthieu, which (according to our feeling as common citizens) differs from hatred in nothing but–duration. Persiflages of love were their declarations of love; their glances were epigrams; his hours of assignation he seasoned with comic accounts of his corresponding hours in other places; and at the time of day when a holy man usually prays off his psalm,^[93] both were ironical. Such an erotic connection is nothing but the subdivision of a political.... But to return to the story.

The Chamberlain proposed now to show his guest something of more interest to a doctor and a scholar. To the chamber wherein the something was, they passed through the Chamberlain's wife's, and through Clotilda's. As they made a day of rest^[94] in the former, Victor's eyes were fixed dreamily on Clotilda's profile, which Matthieu had lately cut out of nothing, and which the Chamberlain's wife, out of flattery to the profile-cutter, had hung up here under glass. Singularly–i. e. accidentally–the glass at this moment flew to pieces over the fair face, and Victor and the father were startled; for the latter was, like most great folk, for want of time, at once superstitious and sceptical; and it is well known that superstition regards the flying to pieces of a portrait-glass as a forerunner of the death of the original. The distressed father reproached himself with the permission he had given Clotilda to stay so long in Maienthal, since she would certainly injure her health there by unprofitable, youthful enthusiasms. He meant her mourning for her buried Giulia; for it was merely from sorrow for her, that, on the first of May, she had hurried hither without any baggage; and even the clothes of the beloved friend she had to-day sent among her own. He broke off in a cheerful tone, for Matthieu came, the brother of this Giulia, who only wanted to show and excuse himself, because, like several of the court church of half-brothers, he was going to meet the Princess.

Victor grew stiller and sadder; his bosom became at once a swelling flood of invisible tears, whose source he could not trace to his heart. And when next they had to pass through Clotilda's still and vacant chamber, where order and simplicity too intensely reminded him of the fair soul of the proprietor, his sudden and touching dumbness struck others also. He tore his eyes hurriedly away from some flower-drawings by her own hand, from her white inkstand, and from the beautiful landscape of the oil-tapestry, and stepped up hastily to that which Le Baut was unlocking. It was not any noble heart which the latter, with his golden key, although bored like a cannon, could fasten,^[95]–the Titular Chamberlains in Vienna apply only an hermetically sealed one,–but what he opened was his Cabinet d'histoire naturelle. The cabinet contained rare copies and some curiosa;–a calculus taken from the bladder of a child, two seventeenths of an inch long and two seventeenths of an inch broad, or the reverse; the hardened vena cava of an old Minister; a pair of American feather-trousers; tolerable Fungites, and better specimens of Strombi (e. g. a staircase-shell, not genuine); the model of a midwife's chair and of a sowing-machine; species of gray marble from Hof in Voigtland; and a petrified bird's-nest,–duplicates not included.... Meanwhile I and the reader prefer to all this dead trumpery the living ape who was the cabinet's sole ornament and–owner. Camper should cut off from this living specimen the Chamberlain's head, and dissect it, if only to see how near the monkey borders upon man.

A great person has always some branch or other of science which he cares nothing about, and to which, therefore, he particularly devotes himself. To Le Baut's soul, hungering for knowledge, it was all one whether it were set in a cabinet of seals or of gems or of pistoles. Were I a great person, I would with the greatest zeal make buttons–or deliveries–or books–or Nuremberg wares–or wars–or right good institutions, merely from cursed ennui, that mother of vinegar to all vices and virtues which peep forth under ermine and stars of orders. Nothing is a greater proof of the general growth of refinement than the general growth of ennui. Even the ladies, out of mere flat ennui, a hundred times contrive pastimes for themselves; and the cleverest man utters his greatest number of platitudes, and the best his greatest number of slanders, merely to a circle that knows how to adequately bore him.

The court-page was the cicerone of the cabinet, perhaps for the sake of going about. Victor wronged him by the medical supposition that he affected a certain loose, unsteady, slouchy gait common to debauchees in high life; for he really had it, and for the reason that he, on quite other grounds than Victor's fine ones, never loved to–sit. But to proceed: Unless the Chamberlain's wife meant to tear aside the curtain from before Victor's soul, and spy out therein his sentiments toward herself and Clotilda by the fright which I am about to relate, then it can have been nothing but a very bad spirit which led the hand of the said Chamberlain's wife to a silver ingot. Behind the ingot lay, perhaps killed by crumbs of arsenic, a mouse. A female reader, who in similar dangers has suffered as a patient, can imagine how the Chamberlain's wife felt when she grasped, with the hard substance, something soft, and drew it forth, and then saw what it was. A real fainting-fit was inevitable. I confess I should myself hold her swoon merely as a feint, were the occasion less; e. g. had it been, not her senses, but her honor, that was assailed: but a mouse is a very different matter. In fact, before such malicious spectators as her husband and her Cicisbeo, she must long since have banished from her stage, as the French from theirs, this Fifth Act Murder; nay, I do not believe she could in any way have rendered herself so ridiculous in the eyes of a triumphant enemy of her virtue (except by a real swoon) as by a fictitious one. Terror at the trance^[96] deprived the Evangelist of the use of his reason, and left him only the use of his wickedness and his hands, with which he instantly tore open the whole blind- and fence-work of her bosom, in short, the whole optical breast, to get air enough for the true one, on whose board he had a piece,^[97] namely, her heart. But Victor pushed him away, and, sprinkling her with a few drops of ice-water, out of tender respect for her charms and her life, soon raised her up again. However, she forgave the page all that she guessed, and thanked the court-physician for all in which she was mistaken....

... Let me look away a moment from this black cobweb, and refresh myself with surveying the fairer world around me on my island, where there is no enemy,–and the flashing play of fishes and children on the shore,–and the playing mother who flings to them flowers and watchful glances,–and the great maple-trees which, softly murmuring with a thousand leaves and flies, bend downward to meet the foliage that glimmers in mimic dance under the waves,–and how the warm earth and the warm sky rest on each other in slumbering love, and bear one century after another....

Victor, before the end of his rural day, went sadly home. Saturday (the 16th of June^[98]) sped softly by, and in its flight shook out a whole flower-head of winged seed for new flowers of joy.

The stars glided lightly over its night. A friendly, blue Sunday morning hung floating over the village in its finery, and held its breath lest it should snatch off a ripe, linden-blossom, or the down of a marsh-marigold. Victor could hear the forte-pianissimo sounding down from the palace over the reposing village, and must needs sigh with the asthma of blissful longing, "Ah, when shall I have to cease swimming upon this still, shining sea, over this fair anchorage of life?" ... When Fate answered, "To-day!" For this very day, on Sunday, there came from the residence-city of Flachsenfingen a light-headed fool (in fact, two) in a no less light-bodied Berlin, and took out of his package a letter to him from his Lordship.

"On the 21st of June (Thursday), the Italian Princess makes her entry into Kussewitz. On Wednesday, I leave here, and present thee in St. Luna to the Prince, who accompanies me to that place. I pray thee, however, to repair on the Saturday following to the Island of Union,^[99] because the little which, for want of opportunity, I cannot say to thee in St. Luna, I shall reserve for the island. Thou wilt find me there. The bearer of this is our respected court-apothecary Zeusel, in whose house thou wilt, as court-physician, have thy future residence. Farewell!" H.

"Zeusel?" asks the reader, and ponders the matter. "I know not the Zeusels." No more do I; but I say to myself, Is not this carrying things too far? And is it not a regular imposition, that the correspondent of this work cannot, by all the representations made to him by me through the dog, be induced even to arrange things in this history in as orderly a manner as they are, indeed, in every wretched romance, and even in–a house of correction, where every new correctioner rehearses neatly to the old ones, in the very first hour, his total Fata, even to the introductory cudgelling on entering, from which the historian has freshly arrived. By Heaven! people actually rush and leap into my work, as into a passengers' room, and neither reader nor Devil knows who their dogs and cats are.

"I wish..." said Victor, and made six circumflexes upon it as apostrophes of the same number of omitted curses. For he was now to pass over from the Idyl of country life into the travestied Æneid of city life, and no road is surely more wretchedly paved than that from the study into the court smelting-houses and chambres ardentes,^[100] from peace to turmoil. Besides, Emanuel had not yet written. Clotilda, the Hesper of those two fair evenings, was like the Hesperus in the sky, not to be seen over St. Luna. As we said, it was a wretched state for him. And now, in addition to all this, that Zeusel, his future landlord, the Court Apothecary, was, so to speak, a fool, full as light as his Berlin, or as the court-fourier, with whom he came, but fifty-three years older than the carriage, that is to say, fifty-four years old, and, taken for all in all, a human diminutive and vinegar-eel in body and soul, peaked in all respects, in chin, nose, wit, head, lips, and shoulder. This fine vinegar-eel–for the eel contends that he understands a certain refinement, which never could belong to any Roturier,^[101] and he does not deny that his great ancestors wrote themselves, not Zeusels, but Von Swobodas–was travelling with the court-fourier, who administered the quartermastership in Kussewitz for the princely bride, toward that place, in order to remain there just so long as he was not wanted. Zeusel meant absolutely to have influence on the Flachsenfingen court by something beside his clyster-hydraulics, and to work upon the court household with something more than senna-leaves; therefore he bought up at a high price all private intelligence (he improved it forthwith into public) which he could collect of new meteorological phenomena in the court-atmosphere, and then, when certain people turned somersets down from the steps of the throne, he smiled finely enough, and remarked that he hoped such persons had regarded him as their friend, and not noticed the leg which he had thrust out of his shop-door by way of giving them a sly lift. He was, in spite of some good-heartedness, a liar from the beginning, not because he wanted to be malicious, but refined; and he evaporated his sound understanding, that it might drop in wit.

Towards Victor, as future courtier and patron, he knew not, for all that, how to assume the upright court-dignity which respects at once itself and others; but towards the people of the parsonage he amply observed the regular courtly contempt, and showed them well enough how little, without designs upon the Lord's son, he should have thought of even looking over their garden-wall or window-sill, to say nothing of coming over. Victor never hated anything else in his neighbor but hatred of other neighbors; and his respect for all classes, his contempt for all eminent fools, his disgust at ceremonies, and his inclination as a humorist for the little theatres of life, formed the greatest contrast to the pharmaceutic infusorium, and to its disgust with men and deference for grandees.

Victor gave his landlord thirty greetings to carry with him to the Italian Tostato in Kussewitz, who had travelled with him, laughing and dancing, a day and a half out of GÖttingen. The Apothecary, at his departure, left behind in Victor an annoying, sour sediment; even at the organ-blower, who brought up the coffee every Sunday, he could not laugh as usual. I will explain why he used to laugh at him.

On that day the coachman was shaved, and, in fact, at first hand,–namely, by his own. Now the chin of this lazy box-incumbent had thrown up more mole-hills–so I euphoniously name warts–than are necessary for shaving and mowing. Among these the old man hacked and planed on Sunday morning,–for then it is that the common people put off at once the old Adam and the old shirt, and leave sins and beard to grow only on working-days,–boldly slipping his knife up and down among the warty chagrin and cutting away. Now the man would have looked pitifully, with his ploughed-up facial foreground,–so that one must needs have wept blood at that which ran in red lines down over the chin of this stone river-god,–if the Prosector, like a Roman, had, out of stupidity, exhibited his wounds. But he showed nothing,–he had more sense than that; he picked tobacco-spunk into small caps, and put the headpieces upon the sore warts, and so made his appearance.

"Let a Spener, a Cato the younger," said Victor, "just come into my study, and not laugh when a bellows-blower follows with coffee-cups, and with sixteen scalped warts and his chin bound up in spunk, looking like a garden-rockery overgrown with beautifully distributed moss,–let a Spener, I say, help laughing, if he can."

To-day he could help it himself. Weary of the day, he went out into the peaceful evening, and laid himself on his back on the summit of a steep hill; and when the sun, dissolved into a cloud of gold, tremulously flowed away over the liquid gloss of the flowers, and swam down on the grassy sea of the mountains, and as he lay nearer to the warm, throbbing heart of Nature, sunk down upon the soft earth as if in the repose of death, drawing down the clouds into him with sighs, fanned by winds coming from afar, lulled by bees and larks,–then did remembrance, that after-summer of human joy, steal into his soul, and a tear into his eye, and longing into his breast, and he wished that Emanuel might not reject him.–Suddenly slight steps drew nigh to his reclining ears; he started up, alarmed and causing alarm. A heavy travelling carriage came staggering lazily up the hill; behind, instead of servants, three pale foot-soldiers had thrust their hands into the footmen's straps, who had only a single leg among them which was of flesh, while they footed it on five wooden stilt-legs or boot-makers' signs, which, with something still longer, made of wood,–namely, three well-wrought beggar's staffs,–they had taken from the enemy; a coachman walked beside the carriage, and a gentlewoman, and close by Victor, as he sprang up, stood–Clotilda.

She came from Maienthal. This sudden illumination eclipsed all the tables of the law hung up in his soul, and he could not at once read the tables. She looked upon him with softer rays than ever, and the sun lent some too. With a smile, as if she anticipated his first questions, she gave him a–letter from Emanuel. A shrinking "Ah!" was his answer; and before he could accommodate himself to two ecstasies,^[102] the carriage was already at the top of the hill, and she in it, and all had gone off.

He hesitated with trembling to gaze, absorbed, into the still, blue paradise of the fairest soul that ever overflowed. At last he looked upon the traces of a beloved human hand which he had not as yet touched, and read:–

"Horion!

"Man climbs a mountain, as the child does a chair, in order to stand nearer the face of the infinite Mother, and to reach her with his puny embrace. Around my height the earth lies sleeping, with all its eyes of flowers under the soft mist; but the heavens already lift themselves up with the sun under the eyelid; under the paled Arcturus mists begin to glow, and colors extricate themselves from colors; the globe of earth rolls, vast and full, to rapture, of blossoms and living creatures, into the burning lap of morning.

"So soon as the sun comes, I look into it, and my heart lifts itself up and swears to thee that it loves thee, Horion!... Glow, Aurora, through the human heart as through thy field of cloud, illuminate the human eye like thy dew-drops, and send up into the dark breast, as into thy heaven, a sun!...

"I have now sworn to thee, I give thee my whole soul and my little life, and the sun is the seal on the bond betwixt me and thee.

"I know thee, beloved; but knowest thou whose hand thou hast taken into thine? Lo, this hand has closed in Asia eight noble eyes,–no friend survives me,–in Europe I veil myself,–my sad history lies near the ashes of my parents, in the waters of the Ganges, and on the 24th of June of the coming year I go out of the world.... O Eternal One, I go; on the longest day the happy spirit wings its way out of this temple of the sun, and the green earth opens and closes with its flowers over my sinking chrysalis, and covers the heart that is gone with roses....

"Waft greater waves upon me, morning-air! Draw me into thy broad floods that stand over our lawns and woods, and bear me in clouds of blossoms over sparkling gardens and over glimmering streams; and dizzied between flying blossoms and butterflies, melting away under the sun with outspread arms, faintly floating over the earth, let me die, and let the bloody garment, dissolved into a red morning-vapor, like the ichor of the butterfly^[103] just released, fall into the flowers, and let a hot sunbeam absorb the azure-bright spirit out of the rose-chalice of the heart up into the next world.... Ah, ye beloved, ye departed, are ye indeed departed? are ye, then, moving along as dark waves^[104] in the quivering blue of heaven? even, now, in that abyss, full of veiled worlds, do your ethereal garments billow around the hidden suns? Ah, come back, sweep hitherward; in a year I melt and flow into your heart!

"–And thou, my friend, seek me soon! No one on earth can love thee so truly as a man who must soon die. Thou good heart, which these mild days press into my hands, even at this last moment, for a farewell, I will love and warm thee inexpressibly. During this year in which I am not yet taken away, I will stay with thee entirely; and when Death comes and demands my heart, he shall find it only on thy breast.

"I know my friend, his life and his future. In thy coming years stand open dark chambers of martyrdom; and when I die, and thou art with me, I shall sigh, Why can I not take him with me, before he sheds his tears?

"Ah, Horion! there lies in man a black Dead Sea, out of which only when it is agitated the blessed island of the next world lifts itself up with its clouds. But my lips will already lie under the earthly clod when the cold hour comes to thee in which thou wilt no longer see any God,–in which Death shall lie on his throne, and mow around him, and fling even to the domain of nothingness his frosty shadows and the lightnings of his scythe. O beloved, my grave-mound will then be already standing when thy inner midnight comes on; with anguish thou wilt mount upon it, and look sternly into the soft wreaths of the constellations, and cry:^[105] 'Where is he whose heart crumbles beneath me? Where is eternity, the mask of time? Where is the Infinite One? The veiled self grasps after itself on all sides, and strikes against its cold form.... Gleam not upon me, broad starry field; thou art only the conglomerate picture, formed of colored earths, on an infinite churchyard-gate, that stands before the desert of a life buried under space.... Laugh me not to scorn, ye shapes on higher stars, for, if I melt away, ye melt away also. One, one thing, which man cannot name, glows forever in the immeasurable smoke, and a centre without limit calcines a circumference without limit.–Still I exist; the Vesuvius of death yet smokes above me, and its ashes envelop me; its flying rocks bore through suns, its lava-torrents move dissolved worlds, and in its crater the former world lies stretched out, and it sends up nothing but graves.... O Hope, where abidest thou?' ...

"Float enraptured around me, animated gold-dust, with thy thin wings,–I will not crush thy short flower-life; swell upward, giddy zephyr, and waft me down into thy blossom-cups. O thou immeasurable flood of radiance, fall from the sun over this narrow earth, and bear up on thy waves of splendor the heavy heart before the highest throne, that the eternal and infinite Heart may take the little ones which are nigh to ashes, and heal and warm them!

"Is, then, a poor son of this earth so unhappy that he can quail in the midst of the splendor of morning, so near to God on the hot steps of his throne?

"Fly not from me, my dear one, because a shadow always encompasses me, which daily grows darker, until at last it shall wall me in as a little night. I see the heavens and thee through the shadow, in the midnight I smile, and in the night-wind my breath goes forth full and warm. For, O man, my soul has stood erect toward the stars; man is an asthmatic, who suffocates if he lies down and does not lift up his breast.–But darest thou despise the earth, that forecourt of heaven, which the Eternal has thought worthy to move along as one in the bright host of his worlds? The great, the godlike, which thou hast in thy soul and lovest in another's,–seek it not in any sun-crater, on any planet-floor; the whole next world, the whole of Elysium, God himself, appear to thee in no other place than in the midst of thee. Be great enough to despise the earth; be greater, so as to respect it. To the mouth which is bent down to it, it seems a rich, flowery plain; to man in his perigee, a dark world; to man in his apogee, a glimmering moon. Then, and not till then, will the holy element, which from unknown heights is sent down into man, flow from the soul, mix itself with the earthly life, and quicken all that surrounds thee. So must the water, shed from heaven and its clouds, first run under the earth, and well up from it again, before it is purified into a fresh, clear draught. The whole earth is trembling now for rapture, till all rings and sings and shouts, as bells sound of themselves during an earthquake. And the soul of man is made greater and greater by its nearness to the Invisible....

"I love thee exceedingly!

"Emanuel."

Horion read through swimming eyes. "Ah," he wished, "were I only, this very day, near thee, with my disordered heart, thou glorified one!" and now, for the first time, occurred to him the nearness of St. John's day, and he proposed to himself on that day to see him. The sun had already vanished; the evening red fell like a ripe apple-blossom; he felt not the hot drops on his face, nor the icy dew of twilight on his hands; and with a bosom illuminated by dreams, and a heart tranquillized and reconciled to earth, he wandered back....

–By the way! is it, then, necessary that I should elaborate an apology for Emanuel as stylist and as stylite (in the higher sense)? And if such is necessary, need I therein bring forward anything more than this,–that his soul is still the echo of his Indian palms and the River Ganges; that the walk of the better sort of unfettered men, just as in dream, is always a flight; that he does not manure his life, like Europeans, with the blood of other animals, nor hatch it out of dead flesh, and this abstinence in eating (quite another effect than that of excess in drinking) makes the wings of fancy lighter and broader; that a few ideas, to which he guides with partial hand all the mental sap and nutriment (and this distinguishes not only madmen, but also extraordinary men; from ordinary ones), must in him obtain a disproportionate weight, because the fruits of a tree become so much thicker and sweeter when the rest have been plucked; and more of the same sort? For, to speak candidly, those readers who desire an apology, themselves need one, and Emanuel deserves something better than a–criminal defence.–

At this moment the consolation leaped up within my hero like a fountain, that he was to begin on Thursday his metempsychosis through nature,–his journey. "Deuse take it!" said he, skipping up; "what needs a Christian to coin money for the present distress,^[106] and put on mourning-cloaks, when he can journey on Thursday to Kussewitz to see the handing-over of the Italian Princess, and on Saturday to the Isle of Union, and, what is more, on the same day, which is one day before St. John's, to Maienthal, to his dear one, his angel?"

O Heavens! I would that he and I were already about the journey,–really it may perhaps, unless all hopes deceive me, be quite tolerable!–

During the week-day prayer-hour of Wednesday, two carriages rolled along. Out of the full one stepped his Lordship and the Prince; out of the empty one, nobody. Old Appel had dressed herself up splendidly, and locked herself into the pantry. The Chaplain was happier,–he taught in the Temple. Seldom does one make a clever face when one is presented, or a stupid one when one presents. His Lordship led his son to the Prince's hand and heart, as a collateral security for his future loyalty, but with a dignity which won as much reverence as it showed. My good hero behaved himself like a–fool; he had far more wit than our deference for higher persons, or theirs towards us, allows. A talent which expresses itself outside the limits of feudal service may be regarded as high-treason.

His wit was only a covered embarrassment, into which he was thrown by two faces and a third cause. First, the Prince's....

–If the reading world complains that so gradually, as they observe, one new name and actor after another steals into this star Venus, and makes it so full, that, at last, the historical picture-gallery becomes a regular gallery of vocables, in which they must wander round with a directory in their hands, they have really only too much ground for the complaint, and I have myself already complained the most bitterly of the same thing; for, after all, the greatest load remains on my shoulders, inasmuch as every fresh ninny is a new organ-stop drawn out, which I have to take into my performance, and which makes the pressing down upon the keys more disagreeable to me; but my correspondent forwards to me in the gourd-flask, without leave asked, all these people to be quartered on me, and the rogue actually writes me I have only to tell the world, There are still more people coming.–

The Prince's face threw our hero into embarrassment, not from anything imposing about it, but because everything of that kind was discharged from it. It was a week-day and current face, that belonged on coins, but not on prize-medals,–with arabesque lines, which mean neither good nor evil,–tinged with a little dead gold of court-life,–anointed with a soft oil, which might stifle the strongest waves,–a sort of sweet wine, more drinkable for women than men. Of the finest turns, which Victor had intended to reciprocate, there was nothing to be heard or seen; but of apt and easy ones so much the more. Victor was embarrassed by the conflict and interchange of politeness and truth. Social embarrassments arise not from the uncertainty and impracticableness of the path, but from the crossways of choice and the perplexity of the scholastic ass between his two bundles of hay. Victor, whose politeness always sprang from philanthropy, must to-day let it spring from self-interest; but this was precisely what he could not get into him. Beside the paternal face, before which, with most children, the whole wheelwork of a free behavior grates and sticks, a third cause made him disconcerted and witty,–namely, that he was after something. I can tell by the look of every one,–except a courtier, whose life, like a Christian's, is a constant prayer for something,–the moment he enters the door, whether he calls as an alms-beggar and saint-by-works, or as merely a member of the joy-club.

Long before the people left the church, Victor already conceived a hearty love for the Prince,–the reason was, he was determined to love him, though the Devil himself stood before him there incarnate. He often said, Give me two days, or one night, and I will fall in love with whomsoever you propose. He was delighted to find on January's face no second-hands, no minute-hands, of those assignation-hours with which a good CÆsar generally seeks gladly to interleave, as with honeymoons, the tedious years of wedlock; but on his face nothing was displayed but continence, and Victor would rather swear by the face than by the reputation. He misses the mark; for on the male face–although it is made of mere printed characters of physiognomy, as certain pictures are of written letters–Nature has, nevertheless, written the matres lectionis^[107] and signs of sensuality very small, but upon the female larger, which is really lucky for the former and stronger and less chaste sex. In fact, adultery is, with princes of the January stamp, nothing but a milder sort of ruling and conquering. And yet honest regents always return–with pleasure the wives, so soon as they have conquered them, to their former lords. This, however, is only the same greatness which led the Romans to deprive the greatest kings of their realms, in order afterward to present them with them again.

As princes are not, like jurists, bad Christians, but prefer to be none at all, January prepossessed our Victor by sundry sparks of religion, and by some hatred of the French Encyclopedists; although he saw that for a prince religion has indeed its good, but also its bad side, since only a crowned Atheist, but no Theist, possesses the invaluable privilegium de non appellando, which consists in this, that the accused party is not permitted (per saltus or by a salto mortale) to appeal to the highest jurisdiction beyond the pale of earth.

The conversation was indifferent and empty, as in such cases it always is. In fact, men deserve, for their conversation, to be dumb; their thoughts are always better than their talk; and it is a pity that one could not apply to good heads some barometrograph, or compositor's harpsichord, which should write off outwardly what is thought within. I would bet that every great head goes to the grave with a whole library of unprinted thoughts, and lets only some few book-shelves of printed ones go out to the world.

Victor submitted to the Prince the usual medical interrogatories, not merely as physician-in-ordinary, but also as a man, for the sake of loving him. Although people from the great world and the greatest have, like the sub-man, the orang-outang, lived out and died out in their twenty-fifth year,–for which reason, perhaps, in many countries kings are placed under guardianship as early as their fourteenth,–nevertheless January had not ante-dated his life so far, and was really older than many a youth. The Prince won the good, warm heart of Sebastian most by the unpretending simplicity which served neither vanity nor pride, and whose ingenuousness differed from the usual sort only in refinement. Victor had seen vassals stand in such a manner beside the mouth^[108] of their liege-lord; that the latter looked like a shark carrying a man crosswise in his jaws; but January resembled a Peter-fish, which holds forth in its jaws a fine stater.

The Court-Chaplain, when he arrived, in his astonishment at a crowned guest, found it impossible to stir lip or foot; he remained immovable in the broad water-spout of the priestly frock, which was thrown around him like a sheet of royal paper round marchpane. The only thing in which he indulged, and on which he ventured, was–not to put away the Bible (the mouse-trap), but–to send his eyes secretly round the room, to spy out whether it had been properly stitched, folded, and superscribed by the registresses of rooms.

The Prince proceeded at once on his journey with his Lordship, who had to reserve his leave-taking of his son and his farewell sermons till the solitary day they were to spend on the Isle of Union. The son contracted a liking for the company of the Prince, when he thought over his demeanor towards his father; he had a double joy, a filial and a human, as that father transformed his own happiness into the happiness of the poor country, and only for the sake of doing good made foot-tracks for himself in the rock of the throne, as in Italy the footsteps of angels who have appeared and left a blessing are shown in the rocks. Other favorites resemble the executioner who hollows out for himself foot-holes in the sand, so as to stand steadier when he–beheads.

When the room was emptied, the first of Eymann's members to wake up–he still stood in the sentry-box of the priest's frock–was the index-finger, which stretched itself out, and pointed out to the family-circle the bed. "It would have been more satisfactory and serviceable to me," said he, "to have been strangled to death with that rag, than to have had his Serenissimus spy it out." He meant, however, his own soiled cravat, which he himself had thrown upon the nuptial bed,–that art-chamber and wareroom of his linen. Whenever one contradicted any tormenting notion of his, he argued it so long that at last he believed it himself; but if one admitted it, then he conjured up certain scruples, and adopted a different opinion. "His Highness must inevitably have seen the tattered thing through the bed-curtains," he replied. Finally he travelled over all the places where January had stood, and took observations at the torn neck-tie, and investigated its parallax. "We must adhere to the blinding of the windows, if we want to have any peace," he concluded, and–

So do I.

P. S. I shall always remark after an eighth chapter (because I get ready exactly two Dog-post-days in a week), that I have again worked for the space of a month. I therefore report that to-morrow June comes on.

FIRST INTERCALARY DAY.

Must Treaties be kept, or is it enough that they are made?

The latter.–To-day the mining-superintendent exercises, for the first time, on the reader's ground and soil the right (servitus oneris ferendi, or I may say servitus projiciendi) which, according to the contract of May 4, he actually possesses. The main question now is, whether a dog-contract between two such great powers–inasmuch as the reader has all the quarters of the world, and I, in turn, have the reader–must, after being concluded, also be kept.

Frederick, the Antimachiavellist, answers us, and backs himself by Machiavelli: Certainly every one of us must keep his word so long as it–is for his advantage. So true is this, that such treaties would never be broken, if they were not once–concluded; and the Swiss, who, as late as 1715, swore one with France, might quite as well in all the Cantons have lifted their fingers and taken an oath they would every day regularly–make water.

But so soon as the advantage of contracts ceases, then is a regent entitled to break them in two cases,–those which he makes with other regents, and those he makes with his own step-children of the country,–his subjects.

While I was already at work in the cabinet, (not later than six o'clock, with the goose-wing, dusting the session-table, not with the pen,) I had under the latter a clever fugitive paper, wherein I proposed to show that the ouverture of treaties (au nom de la Sainte TrinitÉ or in nomine SanctissimÆ et individuÆ Trinitatis) was the cipher which ambassadors sometimes place over their reports, meaning that the opposite is to be understood. Nothing, however, came of the fugitive paper but a–manuscript. In this I was simple enough, and proposed first to advise princes, that, in regard to lies of necessity and truths of necessity, they must have, for every latitude and hour, declinations and inclinations. I proposed to whistle the state-chanceries to myself into a corner, and whisper in their ears, I would never suffer it, and, though I had only nine regiments in pay and starvation, that my hands and feet should be glued together with the sealing-wax of contracts, and my wings clogged with ink. That would I for the first time introduce into state-praxis; but the state-chanceries laughed at me, afar off in my foolish corner, and said, The whistler may believe, himself,–we do the thing otherwise.

In the works of Herr Herkommen^[109]–the best German publicist, who, however, writes no acta sanctorum it is proved that a reigning prince need not observe at all any treaties, privileges, and concessions granted by his predecessor to his subjects; hence it follows that he is far less bound to keep his own covenants with them, since the enjoyment of the benefit of these covenants, which consists in nothing but the keeping or breaking, manifestly vests in him as proprietor. Mr. Herkommen says the same on every page, and absolutely swears to it. Nay, can there be a dean or rector magnificus who exercises so little reason–considering that, according to a general assumption, a king never dies, and consequently predecessors and successors grow together into one man–as not to draw from this the conclusion that the successor may regard his own covenants as those of his predecessor, and accordingly, since the two make only one man, may break them just as much as if they were transmitted ones?

Whoso chose to discourse philosophically about this might prove that, in fact, no man whatever needs keep his word, not merely no prince. According to physiology, the old body of a king (a reader, a superintendent of mines) in three years makes way for a new one. Hume carries it still farther with the soul, inasmuch as he considers that as a fleeting (not frozen) stream of phenomena. How much soever, then, the king (reader, author) may, at the moment of making a promise, be bound to keep it, still he cannot possibly be held thereto the next minute after, when he has already become his own successor and heir; so that, in fact, of us two contracting parties of the 4th of May, nothing more is extant than our mere posthumi and successors,–namely, ourselves. As now, fortunately, promising and fulfilling never enter into one and the same moment, herefrom may follow the conclusion, pleasant to all of us, that, in fact, no one at all is bound to keep his word, whether he is the top of a throne or only a chip thereof. Nor will courtiers (the corner-clips of the throne) oppose this proposition.

The public is requested to consider the Preface as the Second Intercalary Day, for the sake of symmetry.

barstart