28. CYCLE.

Contemplate the heated face of my hero, who at last is riding into the open streets, built up in his fancy of temples of the sun, where, who knows but that at every long window, on every balcony, Liana may be standing? where the lying or prophetic riddles of Isola Bella must be unravelled,—where all household gods and household fates of his nearest future lie hid,—where now the Mont Blanc of the Court and the Alps of Parnassus, both of which he has to climb, lie with their feet stretching close before him. All this would have oppressed me not a little; but in the young man, especially before the chandelier of the sun, a shower of light gushed down. O, when the morning-wind of youth blows, the inner mercury-column stands high, even though the external weather be not of the best.

Few of us, when we have gone on horseback to the academy, may have happened into such a refreshing stir as met my hero: chimney-sweeps were singing away overhead out of their pulpits and black holes to the passers below, and a building-orator,[45] on the ridgepole of a new house, was exorcising the future conflagration, and quenching one in his own breast, and slinging the glass fire-bucket far over the scaffolding; yes, when we have ridden with our hero through the laughing congregation of the roof-preacher, and through the ranks of blooming sons of the Muses,[46] who stand arm in arm, among whom Alban sent round his fiery eye to find his Roquairol,—after all this, when we reach his future residence, a new clamor salutes our ears.

It came from the Land-physicus[47] Sphex, his future landlord, who is to resign to him half his palace (for the Doctor is made wealthy by his cures), because the house lies exactly in the highest part of the upper city, or the Westminster of the Court; while in the lower town are domiciled the students and the city. The short, thick-set Dr. Sphex was standing, as our trio rode up, by the side of a tall man, who sat upon a stone bench, and held in readiness two drum-sticks upon a child's drum. At a signal from Sphex, the tall man beat a faint roll upon his drum, and the Doctor said to him, calmly, "Vagabond!" Although Sphex had turned round a little toward the loud, approaching horsemen, still he soon made him go on with his tattooing, and said, "Scoundrel!" but during the last beat he just hastily slipped in, "Scamp!"

The horsemen dismounted; the Doctor led them, without ceremony, into the house, after he had given the drummer a hint, with his hand, not to stir. He opened them their four (or twelve) walls, and said, coldly, "Step into your three cavities." Albano marched out of the warm splendor of day into the cool, purple Erebus of the red-hung chamber, as into a picture-hall of painting dreams, into a silver-hut, as it were, for the dark mine-work of his life. He recognized therein the open hand of his rich father, from the pictures of the carpet to the alabaster statues on the wall; and in the cabinet he found, among the gifts of his foster-parents, all his poetical and philosophical text-books, which had been sent after him,—fair reflections from the still land of youth, left far behind him by his journey, in whose flower-vases only concordias had hitherto bloomed, whereas now wild rockets must be planted in them. Then (not the goddess of night her mantle, but) the goddess of twilight threw her veil over his eye, and, in the clare-obscure, made the forms of youth—many of them armed, many crowned, a troop of fates and graces—beset his heart, which had hitherto been so calm, with their arms and levers, until it became soft and languid for three minutes; verily, to a youth, especially this one, the sea-storms, those favorites of the painter, the laboring volcanoes of the natural philosopher, and the comets of the astronomer, are full as precious, in the moral world, as they are to them in the physical.

Albano, now separated from Liana only by streets and days, almost feared his dreamy raptures might betray their object. "Any letters?" inquired the Lector, in his short manner, abbreviated for the sake of adaptation to citizens. "Bring it up, Van Swieten!" said Sphex, to a little son, who, with two others, named Boerhave and Galen, had hitherto been acting as a corresponding deciphering-chancery to the new guests behind a curtain. "Our old Lord," added Sphex, at once, as if it had some connection with the letter, "has done lording it at last; for five days he has been dead as a mouse, as I long ago predicted." "The old Prince?" asked Augusti, with astonishment. "But why have I not yet remarked anything of funeral bells, knockers hung with black, bottles of tears, and lamentation in the city?" inquired Schoppe.

The Physicus explained. Namely, he had, as physician in ordinary, prophesied, with sufficient boldness, the third day's dying of the old prince, and happily hit it. Only as, exactly one day after the mournful event, his successor, Luigi, proposed to make his entrance into Pestitz, and, as the announcement of the high death would have extinguished, with lachrymal-vessels, the whole oil-fed illumination in honor of the son, and hung the flowery triumphal arches with mourning-weeds, the people had not been willing, although to the greatest disadvantage of the prophetic Sphex, to let matters get wind before the new prince had had his reception, just as that Greek, at the news of his son's death, postponed mourning till after the completion of his thanksgiving sacrifice. Sphex protested that he had many years before fixed, in the case of the illustrious deceased, the nativity of his consumption by his white teeth,[48] and never had he hit a death-hour better than at that time; he would, however, leave it to any and every man to decide whether a physician, who has made his prophecy everywhere known, can spin much silk in a period of such political embezzlement. "But," replied Schoppe, "if people continue to carry along their deceased monarchs, like their dead soldiers, as if they were alive, in the ranks; still they can hardly do otherwise; for as in the case of great men it is generally so plaguy hard to prove that they are living, so is it also no easy thing to make out when they are dead; coldness and stiffness and corruption prove too little. To be sure, one may, perhaps, conceal royal death-beds for the same reason which led the Persians to hide royal graves, in order to abridge as much as possible for the poor children, the people, the bitter interval between the death and the new inauguration. Yes, as according to a legal fiction the king never dies, we have to thank God that we ever learn the fact at all, and that it does not fare with his death as with the death of the quite as immortal Voltaire, which the Paris journalists were not permitted, by any means, to announce."

Van Swieten and Boerhave and Galen, after staying out a long while, brought in a letter for Albano, with Gaspard's seal; he tore it open, with the unsuspecting eagerness of youth, without a glance at the cover; but the Lector took that into his hand and turned it over and over like a Post-Office Clerk, Doctor of Heraldry, and Keeper of the Seal, as was his custom at the inquest of sphragistic wounds, and gently shook his head over the badly renewed and patched patent of nobility, namely, the impression of the arms on the wax. "Have the youngsters done any injury to the seal?" said Sphex. "My father, also," said Albano, reading to conceal an agitation which reached even to the outer man, and which a flight of heavy thoughts had suddenly occasioned among all his inner twigs, "has already heard of the Prince's death." At that Augusti shook his head still more; for as Sphex had previously jumped at once from the subject of the letter to that of the Prince's death, this leap almost presupposed the reading of the same. Let my reader deduce from this the rule, to take the distance of two tones, from one to the other of which people jump in his presence, and to infer from that the intermediate and connecting tone between the two, which they wish to conceal.

At present it was very well for the Count that the Doctor showed the tutors their apartments; ah, his soul, already staggering with the events of the past day, was now so intensely tossed by the contents of the letter!

29. CYCLE.

When Sphex opened the Librarian's room for him, the said room was already occupied with a box of vipers (also arrived from Italy), with three-quarters of a hundred weight of flax, a white hoop-petticoat, and three silk shoes, with the holes punched, belonging to the doctoress, and a supply of camomile. The medical married couple had thought the pedagogical couple nested together; but Schoppe replied admirably well, and almost with some irony toward the more politely treated Augusti: "The more powerful and intellectual and great two men are, so much the less can they bear each other under one ceiling, as great insects, which live on fruits, are unsocial (for example, in every hazel-nut there sits only one chafer), whereas the little ones, which only live on leaves,—for instance, the leaf-lice,—cleave together nest-wise." Zesara would by all means have been glad to hold to his insatiable heart the friend whom fate had placed thereupon, constantly in every situation and season as a brother-in-arms; but Schoppe has the right of it. Friends, lovers, and married people must have everything else in common, but not a chamber. The gross requisitions and trifling incidents of bodily presence gather as lamp-smoke around the pure, white flame of love. As the echo is always of more syllables the farther off our call starts, so must the soul from which we desire a fairer echo not be too near ours; and hence the nearness of souls increases with the distance of bodies.

The Doctor caused his noisy children to run like a cleansing stream through the Augean stable; but he went down again to the drummer, with whom, according to his own story, his connection stood thus: Sphex had already, several years before, ventured certain peculiar conjectures upon the secretion of fat and the diameter of the fat-cells, in a treatise which he would not publish till he could append to it the anatomical drawings thereunto appertaining, for which he was awaiting the dissection and injection of the drummer that sat there. This sickly, simple, flabby man, named Malt, he had a year since, when certain symptoms of the fat-eye attached to him, taken to board gratis, on condition that he should let himself be dissected when he was dead. Unfortunately Sphex has found, for a considerable time, that the corpse daily falls away and dries up from the likeness of an eel to a horned-snake; and he cannot possibly make out what does it, since he allows him nothing emaciating, neither thinking, nor motion, nor passions, sensibility, vinegar, nor anything else.

As to the drum, the corpse is obliged—since he is full as hard of hearing as he is of comprehending, and never can adopt a reason, for the very reason that he never hears one—to carry that round, strapped to him, because during its vibration he can better apprehend what his employer and prosector has to censure in him.[49] The Doctor now began to scold at him down below—Schoppe stood listening at the window—in the following wise: "I would the Devil had taken your cursed father of blessed memory before he had died. You shrink up like army-cloth under your lamentation, and yet never wake him up, though you cried your nose away. Drum better, church-mouse! Don't you know, then, scrub, that you have made a contract with another, to grow into fat as well as you can, and that it's expensive maintaining a fellow that steals his wages in this way, till he becomes available? Others would gladly grow fat, if they had such a chance. And you! speak, rope!" Malt let the drum-sticks clatter down under his thighs, and said: "Thou hast hit the true secret of thy trouble with me,—there is no real blessing upon our grease,—and one of us silently wears away at the thought. As to my blessed father, verily, I send him out of my head, let him happen in when he will."

30. CYCLE.

The paternal letter, which shook Albano's soul in all its joints, runs, when translated, thus:—

"Dear Albano: I regret to say, that in the Campanian vale I received a letter informing me of the continued recurrence and increasing violence of thy sister's asphyxias; it was written on Good Friday, and looked forward to her death as a settled thing. I, too, am prepared for the event. So much the more am I struck with thy account of the juggler of the Island, who would play the prophet. Such a prediction presupposes some circumstance or other, which I must trace out more nearly in Spain. I think I already know the impostor. Be thou, on thy birthday, watchful, armed, cool, and bold, and, if possible, hold the jongleur fast; but bring no ridicule upon thyself by speaking of the subject. Dian is in Rome, working away right bravely. Put on court-mourning for the dear old Prince, out of courtesy. Addio!

"G. de C."

"Ah, precious sister!" he sighed inwardly, and drew out her medallion, and looked through his tears upon the features of an old age which was denied her, and read with dim eyes the refuted subscription: "We see each other again." Now, when life was opening before him broad and smiling, it came home to him much more nearly, that fate laid its hand so darkly and heavily upon his sister; to which was added, too, the melancholy question, whether he was not guilty of her disappearance and decline, since on his account the frightful Zahouri of the Island had carried on perhaps a sacrificing jugglery: even the circumstance that she was his weakly twin-sister was a pang. But now his feelings stood contending against each other in his mind, as on a battle-field. "What destiny is on its way to meet me!" thought he. "Take the crown!" that voice had said. "What one?" his ambitious spirit rose up and asked, and boldly conjectured whether it consisted of laurels or thorns or metals. "Love the beautiful one!" it had said; he asked not, however, in this case, "What one?" only he feared, since the father of Death seemed terribly to certify his name and credentials, that the voice announced for the ascension- and birth-night might name some other name than the most beloved.

In the evening, after the three new-comers had fairly got through their household arrangements,—which, however, had never yet been able to efface from Albano's undulating soul the multiplied magic splendor of the Linden-city,—the Lector introduced the Count to the hereditary prince, Luigi. That individual was engaged half an hour every day copying in the picture-gallery; and appointed the two to attend him there. They went in. Any other than myself would have set before the world a bill of fare raisonnÉ of all the show-dishes in the gallery; but I cannot so much as present it with the seventeen pictures, over whose charms those silken shame-aprons or veils hung, which a Paris dame would gladly take off from her own, merely for the sake of modestly covering therewith works of art. One may easily conceive that our Alban, in this picture-gallery, must have been vividly reminded of that one of his mother's,[50] and that he would gladly have pressed every nail, had no one been there.

But the Princess Julienne was there, whom he (as we all do) still recognized right well as a BlumenbÜhl acquaintance, as she also did him. She was truly full of youthful charms, but one did not find these out till one had been for two days violently in love with her; that made her every minute afterward prettier, as in fact love is rather the father than the son of the goddess of grace, and his quiver the best casket of jewels and the richest toilet-box, and his bandage the best mouchoir de Venus and beauty-patch that I know.

She was just sketching the gypsum-cast of a noble old head, which seemed to the Count as if it must have been drawn from the antique-cabinet of his memory, and toward which his swelling heart flowed out right lovingly; but he could not recall the original. At last Julienne, in despite of etiquette, said, looking up most kindly, "Ah, dear Augusti, my father lies dead in Lilar." The word Lilar suddenly colored, in Albano, the pale image of recollection,—perfectly like this white bust had the old man in the moonshine looked, who, in that poetical summer-night, pressed Zesara's hands together on the mountain for prayer, and said, "Go home to sleep, dear son, ere the storm comes." Now another would have inquired after the name of the bust, and then, and not till then, have disclosed the nocturnal history; but the Count, in his warmth, did merely the latter, after waiting a short time for the conversation to run out. Augusti, when Albano began the history—to him a foreign one—of his acquaintance with the original, was on thorns to interrupt him; but Julienne gave him a nod, to let him go on, and the youth true-heartedly communicated to the sympathizing soul the beautiful meeting, with a tenderness of emotion and fire, both of which increased when her eyes flowed over into her smiles. "It was my father,—that is his cast," said Julienne, weeping and glad. Albano, after his manner, clasped his hands together, with a sigh, before the bust, and said, "Thou noble, heartily-beloved form!" and his large eye gleamed with love and sorrow.

The good female soul was carried away by a sympathy so uncourtly, and she gave herself up completely to her inborn fire. Female and court life is truly only a longer punishment of bearing arms (as, according to the model of the yes-sirs, there are no-sirs, so royal governesses are true no-ma'ams); the seven-colored cockade of gay, dancing liberty is there torn off, or runs into the black of court-mourning; every female pleasure-grove must be an unholy one; I know nothing more fatal,—but the curly-haired Julienne, in spite of you and me, broke through the eternal imprisonment (with sweet bread and strong water), some twelve times a day, and laughed to the free heavens, and offended (herself and others never) the royal governess always. She now related to the Count (while from nervous weakness and vivacity she continued to smile more brightly and speak more rapidly) how her dear, feeble father, more childlike than childish, whose old lips and disabled thoughts could not possibly any longer do more than lisp a response to prayers, had shut himself up with a snowy-headed mystical court-preacher in an oratory at Lilar (a gray head loves to hide itself before it disappears forever, and seeks, like birds, a dark place for going to sleep),—and how she and FrÄulein von Froulay (Liana) had alternately read prayers before the half-blind old man, and, as it were, tolled the evening-bell of devotion to the weary, sleep-drunken life. She painted how, in this antechamber of the tomb, he had outlived or forgotten all that he had once loved; how he had kept always asking after her mother, whose death was ever slipping again from his memory; and how the dimmed eye had taken every hour of the day for evening, and accordingly every one who went out as one going to bed.

We will not look too long at this late time of life, when men again, like children, shrink up for the more lasting cradle of the grave; and when, like flowers sleeping at evening, they become undistinguishable, and grow all alike, even before death makes them so.

The Lector, like all courtiers, was particularly ill-suited with these funereals; he would also fain heal the Job's malady of her lamentation by changing the current of discourse, and bringing it nearer to Liana. But in the very act of describing the sympathy and sacrifices of this friend, and when memory brought back to her the long, tearful embrace in which Liana had locked her and pain at once as it were fast to her bosom, then came back into her heart anew every dark, heavy drop of blood which her powerful arteries had sent forth, and she ceased to portray either this history or the head upon which she had been engaged.

The two female friends were none of those who send a kiss to each other through two thicknesses of veil, or who know how to hug each other without wounding or bruising a curl, or whose love-feast every year, as the sacramental bread every century, breaks lighter and thinner; but they loved each other intensely,—with eyes, lips, and hearts,—like two good angels. And if hitherto joy had taken her harvest-wreath and made it a wedding-ring of friendship, so now did grief seek to do the same with his girdle of thorns. You good souls! to me it is very easily imaginable how such a pure, bright linking of souls should at once painfully distend and blissfully exalt the heart of your friend Albano, as the aerostatic ball at once destructively swells and soars. For Liana's entry, there stood besides beautifully decorated triumphal gates to the highest heavens in his innermost being!

Meanwhile a stranger would not, without this pen of mine (nor I myself without the fee-provost Hafenreffer), have been able to observe anything in the Count, while speaking, except a mild, wandering glow in his face, and rapidity of utterance.

31. CYCLE.

Into the midst of these delineations and enjoyments the successor, or rather the afterwinter of the cold old man, Luigi, suddenly entered. With a flat, carved work of spongy face, on which nothing expressed itself but the everlasting discontent of life-prodigals, and with a little full-grown miniver[51] on his head (as forerunner of the wisdom-teeth), and with the unfruitful superfetation of a voluminous belly, he came up to Albano with the greatest courtliness, in which a flat frostiness towards all men stood prominent. He immediately began to dust about him with the bran of empty, rapid, disconnected questions, and was constantly in a hurry; for he suffered almost more ennui than he caused; as in general, there is no one with whom life drags so disagreeably as with him who tries to make it shorter. Luigi had run over the earth as quickly as through a powdering room, and had, as in such a room, become decently gray; the milk-vessels of his outer and inner man had, because they were to be converted into cream-pots and custard-cups, for that very reason, perverted themselves into poison-cups and goblets of sorrow. As often as I pass along before a painted prince's-suite in a corridor, I always fall upon my old project, and say, with entire conviction: "Could we only contrive for once, like the Spartans and all the older nations, to get a regent to the throne in a healthy state, then we should have a good one into the bargain, and all would go well. But I know these are no times for such a thing. It is a sin, that only at torture do surgeons and physicians assist, not at joy, to point out nicely the degree of pleasure as they do of the rack, and to indicate the innocent conditions."

Albano, a stranger in the company and in the eyes of this class of men, looked upon the gulf between himself and Luigi as much less deep than it was; it was merely annoying and uncomfortable to him, as it is to certain people, when, without their knowledge, a cat is in the chamber. The progress of moral enervation and refinement will yet so cleanse and equalize all our exteriors,—and according to the same law, indeed, by which physical weakness throws back the eruptions of the skin and drives them into the nobler parts,—that verily an angel and a satan will come at last to be distinguishable in nothing except in the heart. Alban had already brought with him from Wehrfritz, whom he always heard contending for the right of the province against the prince, an aversion to his successor; so much the more easily flamed up in him a moral indignation, when Luigi turned toward the pictures and drew aside the curtains or aprons from several of the most indecent, in order, not without taste and knowledge, to appraise their artistic worth. A copied Venus of Titian, lying upon a white cloth, was only the forerunner. Although the innocent hereditary prince made his voyage pittoresque through this gallery with the artistical coldness of a gallery inspector and anatomist, and sought more to show than to enrich his knowledge, still the inexperienced youth took it all up with a deaf and blind passionateness, which I know not how to vindicate in any way, not even by the presence of the princess, and so much the less, because in the first place she busily divided her soul only between the gypsum-bust and its copy, and because, secondly, in our day, ladies' watches and fans (if they are tasty) have pictures on them which Albano would want other fans to hide. The two flames of wrath and shame overspread his face with a glowing reflection; but his awkward honesty of scorn contrasted with the ease of the Lector, who with his cold tone, quite as precise as it was light, preserved independence and protected purity. "They please me not, one of them," he said, with severity: "I would give them all away for a single storm of Tempesta's." Luigi smiled at his scholar-like eye and feeling. When they stepped into the second picture-chamber, Albano heard the Princess going away. As this apartment threatened him with still more rent veils of the unholiest, he took his leave without special ceremony, and went back without the Lector, who had to-day to give a reading.

Never did Schoppe grasp his throbbing hand more heartily than this time; the aspect of an abashed young man is almost fairer (especially rarer) than that of an abashed virgin; the former appears more tender and feminine, as the latter appears more strong and manly, by a mixture of the indignation of virtue. Schoppe, who, like Pope, Swift, Boileau, forced into combination a sacred reverence for the sex with cynicism of dress and language, emptied the greatest vials of wrath upon all libertinage, and fell like a satirical Bellona upon the best free people; this time, however, he rather took them under his protection, and said, "The whole tribe love the blush of shame in others decidedly, and defend it more willingly than shamelessness, just as (and on the same kind of grounds) blind persons prefer the scarlet color. One may liken them to toads, who set the costly toad-stone (their heart) on no other cloth as they do upon a red one."

The Lector—who with all his purity and correctness would, nevertheless, without hesitation, have helped a Scarron write his ode on the seat of a duchess—when he would treat the matter of the Count's flight, was at a loss what to make of it, when the latter sprinkled him with some rose-vinegar, and said, "The bad man's father is lying on the board, and one lies before his own iron brow: O, the bad man!" Certainly the physical and moral nearness of the two fair female hearts, and his love for them, had done most to excite the Count against Luigi's artistic cynicism. The Lector merely replied, "He would hear the same at the Minister's and everywhere; and his false delicacy would very soon surrender." "Do the saints," inquired Schoppe, "dwell only upon the palaces and not in them?" For Froulay's bore upon its platform a whole row of stone apostles; and on one corner stood a statue of Mary, which was to be seen from Sphex's house among nothing but roofs.

Youthful Zesara! how does this marble Madonna chase the blood-waves through thy face, as if she were the sister of thy fairer one, or her tutelar and household goddess! But he took care not to hasten his entrance into this Lararium of his soul, namely, the delivery of his father's letter of introduction, by a single whisper, for fear of suspicion; so many missteps does the good man make in the very gentile fore-court of love; how shall he stand in the fore-court of the women, or get a footing in the dim Holy of Holies?

32. CYCLE.

The Court now caused to be made known in writing (it could not speak for sorrow) that the dead Nestor had departed this life. I set aside here the lamentation of the city, together with the rejoicing of the same over the new perspective. The Land-physicus Sphex had to eviscerate the Regent like a mighty beast,—whereas we subjects are served up with all our viscera, like snipes and ground-sparrows, on the table of the worms. At evening, there reposed the pale one on his bed of state,—the princely hat and the whole electrical apparatus of the throne-thunder lay quite as still and cold beside him on a Tabouret; he had the suitable torches and corpse-watchers around him. These Swiss-guards of the dead (the sound of the word rings through me, and I at this moment see Liberty lying on her bed of state in the Alps, and the Swiss guarding her) consist, as is well known, of two regency-counsellors, two counsellors of the exchequer, and so on. One of the exchequer-counsellors was Captain Roquairol. It can be only touched upon here, in the way of interpolation, how this youth, who of financial matters understood little more than a treasury-counsellor in ——h,[52] arose, nevertheless, to be a counsellor in war-matters there,—namely, against his own will, through old Froulay, who (in himself no very sentimental gentleman) was always reviving and retouching the youthful remembrances of the old Prince, because, in this tender mood, one could get from him by begging what one would. How odious and low! so can a poor prince have not a smile, not a tear, not a happy thought, out of which some court-mendicant, who sees it, will not make a door-handle to open something for himself, or a dagger-handle to inflict a wound; not a sound can he utter which some forester and bugle-master of the chase shall not pervert to the purpose of a mouth-piece and tally-ho.

Julienne, at nine o'clock in the evening, visited the only heart which, in the whole court, beat like hers and for hers,—her good Liana. The latter gladly offered her forehead to her commencing sick-headache, and sought only to feel and to still another's pain. The friends, who, before strangers' eyes, only displayed pleasantry, and before each other only a tender, enthusiastic seriousness, sank more and more deeply into this mood before the severe and religious lady of the Minister, who never found in Julienne so much soul as in the soft hour after weeping, as stock-gilliflowers begin to scent the air when they are sprinkled. Not the struggle, but the flight of pain, beautifies the person; hence the countenance of the dead is transfigured, because the agonies have cooled away. The maidens stood enthusiastically together at the window, the waxing moonlight of their fancy was made full moonlight by that of the outer world; they formed the nun's-plan to live together, and go in and out together for life. Often it seemed to them, in this still hour of emotion (and the thought made them shudder), as if the murmuring wings of departed souls swept by over them (it was only a couple of flies, who, with feet and wings, had caught a few tones on the harp of the Minister's lady); and Julienne thought most bitterly of her dead father in Lilar.

At last she begged the sister of her soul to ride with her this night to Lilar, and to share and assuage the last and deepest woe of an orphan. She did it willingly; but the "yes" was hard to extort from the Minister's lady. I see the gentle forms step, from their long embrace in the carriage, out into the mourning chamber at Lilar,—Julienne, the smaller of the two, with quivering eyes and changing color; Liana, more pale with megrim and mourning, and milder and taller than her companion, having completed her growth in her twelfth year.[53]

Like supernatural beings the two maidens beamed upon Roquairol's soul, already burning in every corner. A single tear-drop had power to bring into this calcining oven boiling and desolation. Already this whole evening had he been glancing at the old man with fearful shudderings at the childish end of that faded spirit, which once had been as fiery as his own now was; and the longer he looked, so much the thicker smoke-clouds floated from the open crater of the grave over into his green-blooming life, and he heard therein a thundering, and he saw therein an iron hand glowing and threatening to grasp at human hearts.

Amidst these grim dreams, which illuminated every inner stain of his being, and which sternly threatened him that a day would come, when, in his volcano too, there would remain nothing fruitful but the—ashes, the mournful maidens entered, who, on their way, had wept only over the face that had grown cold, and now wept still more heavily over the form that had grown beautiful; for the hand of death had effaced from it the lines of the last years,—the prominent chin, the fire-mounds of the passions, and so many pains underscored with wrinkles, and had, as it were, painted upon the earthly tabernacle the reflection of that fresh, still morning light which now invested the disrobed soul. But upon Julienne a black taffeta-plaster on the eyebrows, which had been left behind by a blow,—this sign of wounds made a more violent impression than all signs of healing: she observed only the tears, but not the words of Liana. "O, how beautifully he rests there!" "But why does he rest?" said her brother, with that voice, murmuring from his innermost being, which she recognized as coming from the amateur-stage; and grasped her hand with agitation, because he and she loved each other fervently, and his lava broke now through the thin crust: "for this reason,—because the heart is cut out of his breast, because the wheel is broken at the cistern, because the fire-wheel of rapture, the fountain-wheel of tears, moves therein no more!"

This cruel allusion to the opening of the body wrought terribly on the sick Liana. She must needs avert her eyes from the covered breast, because the anguish cramped the breath in her lungs; and yet the wild man, desolating others as well as himself, who had hitherto been silent by the side of the stiff corpse-guard, went on with redoubled crushing: "Feel'st thou how painfully this cricket-ball of fate, this Ixion's wheel of the wishes, rolls within us? Only the breast without a heart is calm."

At once Liana took a longer and more intense look at the corpse; an ice-cold edge, as if of death's scythe, cut through her burning brain,—the funeral torches (it seemed to her) burned dimmer and dimmer,—then she saw in the corner of the chamber a dark cloud playing and growing up;—then the cloud began to fly, and, full of gushing night, rushed over her eyes,—then the thick night struck deep roots into her wounded eyes, and the affrighted soul could only say, "Ah, brother, I am blind!"

Only hard man, but no woman, will be able to conceive that an Æsthetic pleasure at the murderous tragedy found its way into Roquairol's frightful anguish. Julienne left the dead, and her old sorrow, and, with the new one, flung herself around her neck, and moaned: "O my Liana, my Liana! Seest thou not yet? Do look up at me!" The distracted and distracting brother led on the sister, upon whose pale cheeks only single drops fell like hard, cold water, with the sharp question: "Does no destroying angel, with red wings, whiz through thy night; hurls he no yellow vipers at thy heart, and no sword-fish into thy network of nerves, in order that they may be entangled therein, and whet their saw-teeth in the wounds? I am happy in my pain; such thistles scratch us up,[54] according to good moralists, and smooth us down too. Thou anguish-stricken blind one, what say'st thou,—have I made thee truly miserable again?" "Madman!" said Julienne, "let her alone: thou art destroying her." "O, he is not to blame for that," said Liana; "the headache long since made it misty to my eyes."

The friends took their departure in double darkness, and therein will I leave it with all its agonies. Then Liana begged her maiden to say nothing of it to her mother so little time before sleep, since it might, perhaps, go away in the night. But in vain; the Minister's lady was accustomed to close her day on the bosom and lips of her daughter. The latter now came in, led along, and sought her mother's heart with a groping, sidelong motion, and, in this beloved neighborhood, could no longer refrain from a softer weeping; then, indeed, all was betrayed and confessed. The mother first sent for the Doctor before she, with wet eyes and with her gentle arms around her, heard her afflicted daughter's story. Sphex came, examined the eyes and pulse, and made no more of it than a nervous prostration.

The Minister, who had everywhere in the house leading-hounds with fine—ears, came in, upon being informed; and while Sphex stood by, he made, except long strides, nothing but this little note, "Voyez, Madame, comme votre le Cain[55] joue son rÔle À merveille."

As soon as Sphex had gone out, Froulay let loose several billion-pounders and hand-grenades upon his lady. "Such," he observed, "are the consequences of your visionary scheme of education (to be sure his own, in respect to his son, had not turned out specially well). Why did you let the sick ninny go?" He would himself have still more gladly allowed it from courtly views; but men love to blame the faults which they have been saved the trouble of committing; in general, like head-cooks, they had rather apply the knife to the white- than to the dark-feathered fowl. "Vous aimez, ce me semble, À anticiper le sort de cette reveuse un peu avant qu'il soit decidÉ de nÔtre."[56] Her silence only made him the more bitter. "O, ce sied si bien À votre art cosmÉtique que de rendre aveugle et de l'Être, le dieu de l'amour s'y prÊte de modÈle." Wounded by this extreme severity,—especially as the Minister himself had chosen and commanded this very cosmetic education of Liana, against the maternal wishes, to gratify his political ones,—the mother had to go and hide and dry her wet eyes in her daughter's bosom. Married men and the latest literati regard themselves as flints, whose power of giving light is reckoned according to their sharp corners. Our forefathers ascribed to a diamond belt the power to kindle love between spouses. I also still find in jewels this power; only this stone (which appertains to the flint species) leaves one, after the marriage-compact, as cold and hard as it is itself. Probably Froulay's marriage-bond was one of such precious stone.

But the lady only said, "Dear Minister, leave we that! only spare you the sick one." "VoilÀ prÉcisement ce qui fÛt votre affaire," said he, laughing scornfully. In vain did Liana eloquently and touchingly pour out to him her mistaken yet moving convictions, (aimed at the wall, however,) and plead for her brother, which everlasting advocacy of all sorts of people (which proved too much) was her only failing;—all in vain, for his sympathy with an afflicted one consisted in nothing but fury against the tormentors, and his love toward Liana showed itself only in hatred of the same. "Peace, fool! But Monsieur le Cain comes not into my house, madam, till further orders!" Out of forbearance, I say nothing further to the old conjugal bully than go—to the devil, or at least to bed.

33. CYCLE.

The German public may still remember the obligato-sheets promised in the Introductory Programme, and ask me what has become of them. The foregoing Cycle was the first, most excellent Public; but see through the matter, how it is with obligato-sheets, and that perhaps as much history lies therein as in any one Cycle, however it may be called.

The Count had not yet learned anything of Liana's misfortune, when he, with the others, went down to the dinner of the Doctor, who to-day was very hospitable. They found him seized with a most violent fit of laughter, his hands thrust into his sides, and his eyes bent over two little ointment vessels on the table. He stood up, and was quite serious. The fact was, he found in Reil's Archives of Physiology, that, according to Fourcroy and Vauquelin, tears dye violet-juice green, and therefore contain alkali. In order to prove the proposition and the tears, he had thrown himself into a chair, and laughed in right hearty earnest, so as afterward to cry and get a drop or two for the brine-gauge of the proposition; he would gladly have wrought himself into another kind of emotion, but he understood his own nature, and knew that nothing could be got out of it so,—not a drop.

He left the guests alone a moment,—the lady was not yet to be seen,—Malt sat on an ottoman,—the children had satirical looks,—in short, Impudence dwelt in this house as in her temple. Ridicule had no effect upon the old man, and he only countermanded what displeased himself, not what displeased others.

At length the rosy-cheeked wife of the physician flourished into the apartment,—as preparatory course or preamble of the dinner,—with three or four esprits or feathers in her cap,—with a dapple neck-apron,—in a red ball-dress, from which waltzing had taken out the color in which she had rouged,—and with a perforated fancy-fan. If I wished, I could be interested in her; for, touching these esprits (since the esprit, like the brain in Embrya, often sets itself upon the brain-pan, and there suns itself), she thought women and partridges were best served up at table with feathers on their heads; touching the fan, she meant to have it understood she had just come from a morning call (whereby she very clearly implied that ladies could no more go through the streets without their fan-stick than joiners without their rule); touching the rest, she knew the guest was a Count. Accordingly, it appears that she belongs to the honorables, who (for the most part), like rattlesnakes, are never better to be enjoyed than when one has previously put the head out of the way; but that we have still time enough to believe, when we come to understand her better.

The beautiful Zesara was for her blind, deaf, dumb, destitute of smell, taste, feeling; but there are many women whom one cannot, with the greatest pains and tediousness, displease; Schoppe could do it more easily. Sphex, for his own personal predilections, made more out of a cell of fat in Malt than out of the whole cellular texture of a lady, even of his own; like all business people, he held women to be veritable angels, whom God had sent for the ministration of the saints (the business men).

The dinner course began. Augusti, a delicate eater, enjoyed much, and took not only to the fine service, but to the torn napkins; the like of which he had often had in his lap at court, because there, in morals and in linen, rents are preferred to plasters. Soon, as usual, came forth even the outposts and first skirmishes of miserable dishes, the common prophets and forerunners of the best tit-bits, although at a hundred tables I have cursed them, that they did not, like good monthly magazines, give the best pieces first, and the most meagre last. The Doctor had already said to the three boys,—"Galen, Boerhave, Van Swieten, what is the polite way of sitting?" and the three physicians had already shoved three right hands between the waistcoat buttons, and three left hands into the waistcoat pockets, and sat waiting, "bolt upright" when good chap-sager was brought in for the dessert Sphex partly expressed pleasure in cheese, partly a horror of it, just as he found it in the way of his shop-business. He remarked, on one hand, how joiners, in their glue-pot, had no better glue than what stood here before them,—it had just that binding quality in a man,—yet he would rather, for his own individual self, with Dr. Junker, apply it externally, like arsenic; but he also confessed, on the other hand, that the chap-sager for the Lector was poison. "I would pledge myself for it," said he, "that you, if one could examine you, would be found hectic! the long fingers and the long neck speak in my favor, and particularly are white teeth, according to Camper, a bad sign. Persons, on the contrary, who have a set of teeth like my lady there may feel safe."

Augusti smiled, and merely asked the Doctor's lady, at what time one could best gain access to the Minister.

Such poisonous reflections, as well as cats'-dinners,[57] he gave out, not from satirical malice, but from mere indifference to others, whom, like an honest man, he never suffered in the least to sway him in his actions. With the liberty-cap of the doctor's hat on his head, he received, from his medical indispensableness, so many academic freedoms, that he, between his four house-walls, ate and acted not more freely than between the showy, bristling pale-work of the court. Did he ever there—I ask that—let a drop of sweet wine pass his lips without previously drawing out an Ephraimite, which did not itself outlive the probation-day, and hanging it in the glass, merely to prove before the court whether the Ephraimite therein did not grow black? And if the silver did so, was there not as good as a demonstration of the wine being oversmoked, and could not the physician have applied the whole right neatly, court, sweetness, blackening, poisoning, and oversmoking, if he had been the man to do it?

The Lector's accidentally inquiring about the time of seeing the Minister was what Albano had to thank for saving him from first learning the painful misfortune in the house of the Minister, or in the presence of the blind girl herself. "You can," answered Sara, the Doctoress, "also despatch the servant; he will subscribe for you all; I, however, pity none as I do the daughter." Now broke loose a storm of questions about the unknown accident. "It is so," began the physician, sulkily; but soon (because he saw in some eyes water for his mill, and because he sought to roll off all medical blame from himself upon Captain Roquairol) he set himself as well as he could to pathetic detail, and lied almost like a sentimentalist. With an unobserved hint to the affected lady, he pushed an empty dish towards her as a lachrymatory, in order that nothing might be lost. From the eclipsed eyes of the vainly struggling youth, this first woe of his life snatched some great drops. "May recovery be possible?" asked Augusti, exceedingly troubled, on account of his connection with the family.

"Certainly; it is a mere affection of the nerves," replied Schoppe, briskly, "and nothing more." Whytt relates, that a lady who had too much acid in her stomach (in the heart it were still worse) saw everything in a cloud, as girls do at the approach of sick-headache. Sphex, who had lied only for the sake of pathos and alkali, and who was vexed that the Librarian should have been of his private opinion, answered just as if the latter had not spoken at all. "The highest degree of consumption, Mr. Lector, often winds up with blindness, and it were well, in this case, to prescribe for both. Meanwhile I am acquainted with a certain periodical nervous blindness. I had the case in a lady[58] whom I brought out of it merely by blood-letting, smoke of burnt coffee, and the evening fog from the water; this we are now trying again in the case of our nervous patient. A dutiful physician will, however, always wish the devil would take mother and brother."

In other words, the return of Liana's periodical malady almost distracted him. Offences against his honor, his love, his sympathy, never wrought the Physicus into a heat; through all such he kept on his glazed frost surtout; but disturbances of his cures heated him even to the degree of flying to pieces; and so are we all a kind of Prince-Rupert's-drops, which can bear the hammer and never break, till one just breaks off the little thread point, and they fly into a thousand splinters; with Achilles, it was the heel, with Sphex, the medical D.'s ring-finger, with me, the writing-finger. The Doctor now shook out the contents of his heart, as some call their gall-bladder; he swore by all the devils he had done more for her than any and every physician,—he had, however, already foreseen that such a stupid education—merely to look well and pray and read and sing—would prove a cursed poor economy,—he had often longed to break the harmonica-bells and tambour-needles,[59]—he had often called the attention of the mother, with sufficient distinctness and without indulgence, to Liana's so-called charms, and to her sensibility, her bright redness of cheeks, and velvet-soft skin; but had seemed to himself, by so doing, almost to gratify more than to distress her. The only thing that delighted him was, that the maiden had, some years before, caught a deadly sickness from the first holy sacrament, from which he had tried to keep her away, because he had already experienced, in the case of a fourth patient, the most melancholy consequences from this holy act.

To the astonishment of every one my Count took part against all with Roquairol. Ah, thy first spring-storms were even now whirling round imprisoned in thy bosom, without a friendly hand to give them an outlet, and thou wouldst cover thy bloody grief! And wast thou not seeking a spirit full of flames, and eyes full of flames for thine own, and wouldst thou not rather have entered into brotherhood with a thundering hell-god than with an insipid pietistical saint, forever gnawing like a moth? Sharply he asks the Doctor, "What have you done with the Prince's heart?" "I have it not," said Sphex, startled; "it lies in Tartarus,[60] although it would have been more profitable to science had one been permitted to put it among one's preparations; it was large and very singular." He was thinking how often—when he could—he had, as an augur, during the dissection, secretly slipped aside one or another important member—as a princely or a cavalier-robber, À la minutta—for his study,—a honey-bag which he gladly cut out for himself with his anatomical honey-knife.

"Has the young lady, then, an unhappy passion, or anything of the sort?" inquired Schoppe. "More than one," said Sphex; "cripples, idiots, young orphans, blind Methusalems,—all these passions she has. Sports and young gentlemen, I often say to the old lady, would be better for her health."

But on this point, in the requirement of cheerfulness, I give in to him. Joy is the only universal tincture which I would prepare; it works uniformly as antispasmodicum, as glutinans and astringens. The oil of gladness serves as ointment for burns and chills at once. Spring, for example, is a spring-medicine; a country-party, an oyster-medicine; a recreation at the watering-places is, in itself, a glass of bitters; a ball is a motion; a carnival, a course[61] of medicine;—and hence the seat of the blest is at the same time the seat of the immortals.

"Yes, he had finally," the Doctor concluded,—"as they were people of rank,—prescribed a dose of pride (of the meadows), which manifests all the officinal healing powers of joy; taken in a stronger dose, it works fully as well as enjoyment itself, enlivens the pulse, steels the fibres, opens the pores, and chases the blood through the long venous labyrinth.[62] In the case of his weakly lady, such as they saw her there, he had used, he said, this medicament long ago by dresses and a doctor's rank, and had helped her to her legs thereby. But he would rather cure sixty common women than one distinguished one,—and he should regret, as family physician, merely his receipts and medical opinions, in case, as he certainly believed, the fair Liana should go hence."

The first question which Albano, who never missed anything that was said, put to Augusti on the way back from the Doctor's, was, What the Doctor's wife meant by the subscribing servant? He explained it. There is, namely, in Pestitz, as in Leipsic, an observance, that when a man dies or falls into any other misfortune, his family place a blank sheet of paper, with pen and ink, in the entrance-hall, in order that persons, who take and show a nearer interest, may send a lackey thither, to set their names on the paper as well as he knows how; this merchant-like indorsement of the nearer interest, this descending representative system by means of servants, who are generally, now-a-days, the telegraphs of our hearts, sweetens and alleviates for both cities great sorrow and sympathy through pen and ink.

"What! is that it? O God!" said Alban, and grew unusually indignant, as if people were forcing servants upon him as chrysographs and business-agents of his feelings. "O ye egotistical jugglers! through the pen of scribbling lackeys do ye pour yourselves out? Lector, I would condole with Satan himself more warmly than thus!"

Why is this veiled spirit so lively and loud? Ah, everything had moved him. Not merely lamentation over poor Liana, persecuted by all the nightly arrows of destiny, entered like iron into his open heart, but also amazement at the gloomy intermingling of fate with his young life. Roquairol's ever-recurring expression, "Breast without a heart," sounded to him as if it must be familiar; at last the converse of the expression came to his thoughts, the word of the Sphinx on the island, "Heart without a breast." So, then, even this riddle was solved, and the place fixed, when he was to hear, contrary to every expectation, the prophecy of the loved one; but how incomprehensible,—incomprehensible!

"O yes! Liana she is called, and no God shall change the name," said his innermost soul. For in earlier years even the most vigorous youth prefers, in maidens, interesting delicacy of health and a tender fulness of feeling and a moisture of the eye,—just as, in general, at Albano's age, one values the flood (later the ebb) of the eyes too highly, although, too often, like an over-rich inundation, they wash away the seed-corns of the best resolutions;—whereas, at a later period, (because he proposes to himself marriage and housekeeping,) he looks out rather for bright and sharp than after moist eyes, and for cold and healthy blood.

As Albano, for the most part, drew down the fire from his internal clouds on the discharging chains of the harpsichord strings,—seldomer into the Hippocrene of poetry,—so did he now unconsciously make out of his inner charivari a passage on the harpsichord. I transpose his fantasy into my fancy in the following manner. On the softest minor-tones the blindness, with its long pains, passed by, and in the whispering-gallery of music he heard all the soft sighs of Liana repeated aloud. Then harder minor-tones led him down into Tartarus, to the grave and heart of the friendly old man who had once prayed with him, and then, in this spirit-hour, fell softly, like a dew-drop from heaven, the sound, Liana! With a thunder-clap of ecstasy he fell into the major-key, and asked himself, "This delicate, pure soul could fate promise to thy imperfect heart?" And when he answered himself, that she would perhaps love him, because she could not see him,—for first love is not vain; and when he saw her led by her gigantic brother, and when he thought of the high friendship which he would give and require of him; then did his fingers run over the keys in an exalting war-music, and the heavenly hours sounded before him, which he should enjoy, when his two eternal dreams should pass over livingly out of night into day, and when brother and sister should furnish at once, to his so youthful heart, a loved one and a friend. Here his inner and outer storms softly died away, and the evenly-balanced temperament of the instrument became that of the player....

But a soul like his is more easily appeased with sorrow than with joy. As if the reality had already arrived, he pressed on still further; indescribably fair and unearthly, he saw Liana's image trembling in her cup of sorrow; for the crown of thorns easily ennobles a head to a Christ's head, and the blood of an undeserved wound is a redness on the cheek of the inner man, and the soul which has suffered too much is easily loved too much. The tender Liana appeared to him as already spun into the funeral veil for the Flora of the second world, as the tender limbs of the bee-nymph lie transparently folded over the little breast,—the white form of snow, which had once, in his dream, melted away on his heart, opened the bright little cloud again, and looked, blind and weeping, upon the earth, and said, "Albano, I shall die before I have seen thee."—"And even if thou shouldst never see me," said the dying heart in his breast, "yet will I still love thee. And even if thou shouldst soon pass away, Liana, still I gladly choose sorrow, and walk faithfully with thee till thou art in heaven."... Heaven and hell had both at once drawn aside their curtains before him,—only a few notes, and those the same as before, and only the highest, and that only interruptedly and faintly, could he any longer strike; and at last his hands sank down, and he began to weep, but without too severe pangs,—as the storm which has unburdened itself of its lightnings and thunders stands now over the earth only as a soft, diffused rain.

[45] One who dedicated a new house (somewhat as we name a ship). The glass fire-bucket which quenched the inner conflagration was probably the wine-glass or beer-tumbler.—Tr.