Part 8
In this way she appeared to the Count every day more worthy of his father. As into a warm spring sunshine did he enter for the first time into the flattering magic circle of female friendship, which even here cast and moulded two wings for love out of the wax-cells of the enjoyed honey; it was, however, with him love for Liana, to whom the friend could most easily give wings for Italy. He felt that soon an hour of overflowing esteem would strike, when he could confidingly open the high-walled cloister-garden of his former love. For she made room for him to be near her as often as the narrow compass of a throne and the all-betraying height of its location would admit. But something disturbed, watched, beset both,--a rival neighbor, as it seemed. It was the singular Julienne, who always, when things were getting on, stepped out of her box on to the stage of the Princess, and confounded the play. Frequently she came after him; sometimes he had gotten invitations from her just the moment before others from the Princess followed, which hers, therefore, as it seemed, must have anticipated. What did she mean? Would she possibly win from a youth whom she had so often provoked by her contempt of men, and by the lightning-like dartings of her indignation, his love, merely, perhaps, because he had always so warmly reciprocated her friendly glances, as those of so dear a--friend of his beloved? Or did she want of him only hatred for the honored Princess, and that indeed out of envy and the usual resemblance of women to ivory, whose _white_ hue so readily becomes _yellow_, and which only by a thorough warming gets the fair color again?
These questions were rather repeated than answered by an evening which he and Julienne spent at the Princess's. A good reading was to give the picture-exhibition of Goethe's Tasso. Fine art, and nothing but art, was with the Princess the art of Passau[35] against court- and life-wounds; and, in general, the world-system was to her only a complete picture-gallery and Pembroke cabinet and gallery of antiques. The reading parts were so distributed by the manager, the Princess, that she herself got the Princess, Julienne the _confidente_ Leonore, Albano the Poet Tasso, a youthful-cheeked Chamberlain the Duke, and Froulay Alphonso. This latter, who had learned to prefer works of artifice to works of art, and the princely cabinet to any cabinet of art, in spite of his heart stood ready there for a journey to the mountain of the muses, arrayed for that purpose by the Princess in a mountain-habit. Thus forced more and more every day into the poetical fashion, he looked, of course, like any other abortion, which has come into the world with pantaloons, queue, and the like all born on him, on purpose to condemn the modish way of the world, just like a street-sweeper in Cassel.
Albano read with outward and inward glow, not toward the reading Princess, but toward the Princess she personated, from a habit of his heart which life always set a-glow; and the Princess read the _rôle_ of her _rôle_ very well, of course. Her artistic feeling told her, even without the prompting of tender sensibility, that in Goethe's Tasso,--which, for the most part, is related to the Italian Tasso, as the heavenly Jerusalem to the Jerusalem delivered,--the Princess is almost Princess of Princesses. Never did the god of the muses and of the sun pass more beautifully through the constellation Virgo than here. Never was veiled love more radiantly unveiled.
The Minister read off the powerful proser Alphonso, as he scolds at Tasso and Albano, as well as a trumpeter of cavalry reads the notes which are affixed to his sleeve; in fact, he found the man quite sensible.
The younger[36] Princess might, in the general poetic concert, have done her share of the talking some quarter of an hour, more or less, when she suddenly threw down, in a lively manner, the beautiful volume of Goethe's works, of which there were three copies there, and said, with her impetuosity, "A stupid part! I cannot abide it!" All the world was silent. The senior[37] Princess looked at her significantly; the junior Princess looked at _her_ still more significantly, and went out, without coming back again. A court dame took up the reading, and went calmly on.
To most of those present this interlude was properly the most interesting; and they willingly continued to think of it during the reading of the latter part. The Princess, who had long believed the Princess loved the Count, was delighted with the inconsiderateness of her adversary. Albano, although her warm eye had struck him of old, explained to himself the absconding on the ground of chagrin at the subordinateness of her part in the reading, and the general incompatibility of the two women; for while Julienne, at her own expense, slighted the Princess, and took little pains to conceal her opinion, so also did that of the Princess appear involuntarily. So soon as one party manifests its hatred, the second can hardly conceal its from the third.
When Albano came home, he found the following leaf on his table:--
"The P---- decoys thee; she loves thee. With _éclat_ she will send in the next place the M---- back, in order to give bold relief to her virtue, and produce an imposing effect upon thee. Shun her! I love thee, but differently and eternally.
"_Nous nous verrons un jour, mon frère_."
Who wrote it? Not even as to the admission-ticket of this cartel could the servant make any deposition. Who wrote it? Julienne; to this point, at least, all roads of probability converged; only in that case mysteries lay round about him. Significant was the French subscription, which stood in like manner exactly under the picture of his sister, which his father had given him on Isola Bella;[38] but that might be a coincidence. He investigated now these new silver-veins of his Diana-[39] and family-tree by the touchstone of his whole history. His mother and Julienne's had gone to Italy with his father in one and the same year; both had been uncommon women and mutual friends, and his father the friend of both. There was the possibility of a false step on the part of his father, which had been concealed. Quite as easily might the traces of this error have been shown to Julienne. Then, further, the hypothesis of her sisterly love would throw light on her whole previous winding course; her affectionate interest in Albano; her love-race with the Princess; her correspondence with his father; her enlisting of the Count's affection for Romeiro, which, as it seemed, heated her quite as much against the Princess as it chilled her toward Liana; above all, the singularity of her love for him, which never unfolded itself further and more openly;--all this gave ground to suspect that it might be only a sister's kindred blood which blazed so often on her round cheeks, when she had unconsciously gazed at him too long. After this step he made forthwith the leap; he now suspected, also, that she alone had sought to dazzle and delude him into the love of her Linda with the magic mirror of spiritual existences.
As respects the relation of the Princess to the Minister, every word upon that subject was to him a lie. He was quite as reluctant to let himself part with a good opinion of others as a bad one. Ordinary men readily give the good opinion away and hold the bad one fast; weaker ones are easily reconciled, and hardly parted. He was unlike either. Hitherto he had so easily ascribed in his own mind the Princess's friendship for the Minister, her visitation journeys with him through the land, and the like, to her manly prudence and foresight, which would fain at once keep watch over the future hereditary land of her brother and hold the key to it; and to this probability, as the Minister accommodated himself equally well to the related parts of a cicerone and an overseer, he still adhered.
The following week brought along a circumstance, which seemed to throw a greater light into the dark billet.
91. CYCLE.
The promised circumstance has its root again in older circumstances which occurred between the Princess and the Minister; these I here premise.
The Minister had been very soon furnished by his friend Bouverot--whose clammy woodpecker's tongue licked off unseen the vermin of all mysteries out of all musty cracks in the throne--with a description of all that the Princess concealed in herself in the shape of Phoenix ashes and rubbish: he had instructed him that she, cold as a piece of ice ground into a convex lens, never would melt herself, but only others; that she was one of those more rare coquettes who, like sweet wines, become sour through warmth, and only sweeter by cold; and that she therefore had about her one of the worst habits,--which made the most grievous jobs for every one. It was, namely, the following: She had a heart, and would never suffer it to lie in her bosom as dead capital; but it must pay interest, and circulate. So the lover became, in the beginning, more wide awake and gay from day to day, then from hour to hour; he knew all by-ways through wood and hollow, all thieves' paths and shorter cuts in this love-garden regularly by heart, and would foretell the critical[40] quarter of an hour on his repeating watch when he should arrive at the summer-house. It was not by any means unknown to him (but comical) what it signified, that the said lover would pass with her from sentences to glances, from these to kissing of the hand, then to kissing of the mouth, whereupon he would find himself caught, entrapped, and imprisoned in the Whistonian comet's-train of her ell-long (or mile-long) hair as in a bird-net (in which, however, the noose was also the berry-bait), and bent up in his prison to such a degree as to know what o'clock it had struck on his repeater. But just then, when all clouds seemed fallen from heaven, he himself would fall out of both into a basket from her;--that was the bad point. In fact, German princes of the oldest houses, who had made all other experiments, saw themselves made immoral, ay, ridiculous, and knew not at all what to think about it; for the Princess openly wondered at such monsters, gave all the world a copy of her challenge, showed all the world the redness and the loftiness of her turkey-hen's-neck, and suffered such an old tempter of a Prince, or whoever it was, never more in her haughty presence.
As princes (in such cases) know what they want, so of course they spread it about that she knew not what _she_ would have; and often not till long after an hereditary prince came the apanaged brother of the same court, and later the legitimated one. However, the thing remained the same; namely, she remained like the spherical concave mirror, which indeed images behind itself what stands close before it, as large and upright, but so soon as it comes into its focus, makes it invisible, and then out beyond that point hangs it quite diminished and topsy-turvy in the air. Her love was a fever of debility, in which Darwin, Weikard, and other Brownists, by _stimulating_ means--wine, for instance--produce a _slower_ pulse, and even promise therefrom a cure. So far Bouverot to the Minister!
But to the Minister came thereby an inexpressible favor. For princes' sins jumped not at all with his professional studies and trade. When, therefore, she had decided upon having his understanding and powerful physiognomy near her, and had named him Minister of her most intimate relations in Haarhaar, then was it solemnly laid down and sworn to within him, never, though she were kindness itself, to be the robber of her honor to her straw-widower. In the beginning, like all his predecessors, he got on easily with mere pure feelings and discourses; as yet there was nothing desired of him, except that he should sometimes unexpectedly dart at her a sly look full of loving tenderness; and he must also have a longing. He darted the look; he also got up longings; and so he felt himself comfortably enough insured for such a successful love affair.
But it stopped not here. Hardly had her Albano appeared, when the thorn-girdle and hair-shirt of the pure Minister was made disproportionately more rough and thorny, and the strongest requirements, namely, gifts, redoubled, in order that the poor Joseph might the more speedily assail her honor and therefore run into his ruin, which should be bait for the Count. By this time he had been already brought along so far that he wove and knotted in her flying hair (to him poisonous snake-hair),--he must needs blow out soap-bubbles of sighs from his pipe,--he must needs quite often be beside himself; yes, he must even (if he would not see himself chased away as a hypocritical rascal) be half-sensual, although still decent enough. Meanwhile he was not to be tempted into a temptation by the Devil himself. Whenever he even thought of the subject, shuddering, how the least misstep might hurl him from his ministerial post, then he would as soon have let himself be impaled and quartered as bewitched. For a third party, not for these two,--they were the sufferers,--it would perhaps have been a feast, to have seen how they (if I may use a too low comparison) resembled a pair of silk stockings drawn over each other, which for and by each other, when one keeps them distended[41] at a certain distance, ethereally blow themselves and fill, but immediately collapse, flat and flabby, when they touch each other.
Of course, in the long run, it fell heavily upon the old statesman to have to leap along before the dancing pageantry of love-gods as their arch-master, tackled into the triumphal car of the Cyprian,--a flower-garland on his state-peruke, in his eyes two Vauclusa fountains, the cavity of his breast a choked-up Dido's cave, wearing in his button-hole an arrow in a heart, or a heart on an arrow, and faring toward the capitol, in order there, after the Roman fashion, not so much to sacrifice as to be sacrificed. Nothing except the tin boxes which the government officers and exchequer messengers stowed away for him at home could fan fresh and cool again the stalemated man, who would fain be a checkmated one.
He read with her Catullus, she with him the better pictures out of the Prince's cabinet; it was allowed him to reward her by his Latinity for her artistic favors: but he remained, nevertheless, as he was.
When women wish to carry a point, and find hindrances constantly recurring, they grow at last blind and wild, and dare anything and everything. The tour to Italy approached so fast; still the Minister was no nearer to letting go his high consideration for his beloved,--although from just her own motive, that of the tour, with the nearness of which he animated himself to a cheerful endurance of so short a flame. Her passion for the Count increased with the Count's tranquillity, because coldness strengthens strong love, just as physical coldness makes strong people more vigorous and weak ones more puny. Froulay, as an old man, was, as it seemed, capable of creeping along so for a whole age to his object, without making one unnecessary leap, since old people, like ships, always move slower the longer they have been going, and on similar grounds, namely, that both, by the adhesion of filth, weeds, barnacles, and the like, have become unwieldy. In short, the Princess at last ceased to ask for anything, but matters went thus:--
The Prince had gone a journey, the Princess had been invited as god-mother out into the country. The castellain on one of her country castles, who had already the year before invited the Minister, had not been restrained by bashfulness from making his way still farther up on this rope-ladder, with his descendant under his arm, and up there on the throne laying his child of the land in the arms of her, the Princess herself. Princes love to let themselves down--on thin silk-worm threads--(as well as up); they value the good-natured, stupid people, and would fain in this way raise somewhat the poor creeping dwarf-beans,--for they well know how little it matters,--and, so to speak, pole them and boot them by means of the leg of the princely chair. Beside this, the Minister had been invited as grand-god-father (so called). The autumn day was only a brighter, more perfect spring, and the autumnal night stood under a brilliant full moon. Courts always long so exceedingly to be away in the country, among the idyls of murmuring rivulets, sighing branches, and tree-tops, and bleating Swisseries, and farmers; Courts--that is, courtiers, court-dames and official chamberlains'-staves, and others--yearn so for the society of human beings; as beasts are driven by the December hunger, so does a noble hunger drive them down from the throne-mountains into the flat plains; not that they would fly from _ennui_, but they desire only a different kind, as their very pastime consists in the abbreviation and alternation of their _ennui_.
Hardly had the Court appeased its first longing for the people with whom it stood for half a quarter of an hour on a confidential, conversational footing, when it came to itself again, and dispersed itself through the princely garden, in order to consume full as long a time in satisfying its longing after nature. A sponsoress of the sponsoress promised Christianity in the stead of Princess and child. The Princess herself attached the Minister to her as a chamberlain. The grand-god-father looked out into the prospect of a d--d long evening, in which he should be obliged to parade round her procession-banner. For the enjoyment of the evening there was a concert, and for the enjoyment of the concert card playing had been arranged; and for the enjoyment of the latter, the Princess had seated herself alone with Froulay, in order, during the general playing of cards and instruments, to have some inaudible conversation with him. Suddenly the two pounds which were hung up in his breast--for no heart, according to the anatomists, weighs more than that--became two hundred-weight heavier, when she asked him whether he was steadfast and could confide in her and dare for her. He swore that, if only as Princess, she might expect of his two-pounder any and every sacrifice and mark of veneration. She went on: she had some weighty things to intrust him with to-day about herself and the Prince; she wished, when the _Foule_ was gone, to speak with him alone; he need only go up the little stairway from the side of the garden to the door of the library-chamber; this was open; in the poetical bookcase on the left side was a spring in the wall, the pressure of which would open to him the tapestry door of the apartment, where he was to await her.
Immediately she rose, presuming upon an affirmative. How it fared now with the two pounds of his sixty-four-ounce-heart can gratify none but his deadly enemy to realize. So much lay written before him with long, thick, stony letters, as on an epitaphium, namely, that after a few hours, when the other lords, in other respects still greater sinners than he, could snore away quietly in the pleasant ministerial houses which formed the court of the Palace, that then for him, innocent knave, the wolf-hour, that is to say, the shepherd's hour,[42] would so soon strike, when he on the most flowery meadow must kneel beneath the butcher's knife. But he--angry that his faith in female and princely impudence should prove a soothsayer--made silently all kinds of oaths to himself, that, even if as much were imposed upon him as on the greatest saints and universal philosophers, he would nevertheless behave like both, for instance, like old Zeno and Franz.
The Princess sought him all the evening less than usual. At last he took his respectful leave of the whole court, but with the prospect of creeping, not, like them, under silk quilts, but under cold bowers. He even marched--sure of himself--up the stairway, opened the library-chamber, found the spring, touched it, and stepped through the tapestry door into the princely--bedchamber. "It is certain, then," said he, and cursed about him inwardly to his heart's content, lying prostrate and crushed quite flat beneath the love-letter weight. In the side chamber on the left hand he already heard her and a chambermaid, who was undressing her. On the right the door of a second but lighted chamber stood ajar. He stood long in doubt whether he should step into that, or stay where he was under the light-screen of a dark corner. At last he laid hold of the protection of night. During his suspense and her disrobing, he had time to rehearse or read over his part; now he came to an agreement with himself, in case of necessity,--and if he should find himself pushed too hard--and all the more, as the place would speak more against _her_ than against _him_, inasmuch as every one must needs ask, whether he could otherwise have possibly gained admission,--in such a case of necessity, where only the choice between a satire and a satyr was left him, he determined to transform himself on the spot into a respectful--Faun.
Directly the Princess strode in, but in the direction of the illuminated chamber. "I have no further occasion for thee," she called back to the chambermaid. "_Diable!_" screamed she, in the bedchamber, spying out the tall Minister; "who stands there? Hanna, a light! _Ciel!_" she continued, recognizing him, but continuing to speak French, because Hanna understood nothing of that. "_Mais, Monsieur! Me voila donc compromise! Quelle méprise! Vous vous etes trompé de chambres! Pardonnéz, Monsieur, que je sauve les déhors de mon sexe et de mon rang. Comment avez-vous-pu_--" She uttered all this, perhaps, by way of blinding the German witness, with an angry accent. The grand-godfather--who, after all previous gratifications, felt like a cock, who has gulped down many live chafers, and is now threatened with his life by their sticking in his distressed crop--kept not silence, but replied in German, opening the tapestry door, meanwhile, that he had, even as she commanded, laid the books out of the library in the lighted chamber, and had been caught _in transitu_. He went immediately through the tapestry; but she could hardly contain herself for terror, had the physician called in the morning, and sent back her retinue. Froulay--however much like the Spanish he found his romances, among which, according to Fisher's assertion, the thieves' literature is the best--at last did not know, himself, what to make of it.
The chambermaid had to make profession with the vow of silence, which she kept as strictly as she could, but not more so. Next morning very few alighted before their own doors, most before the doors of others, in order to land the news together with the injunction of the Princess not to make the thing _éclatant_, because in that case the Prince would hear of it.
If ever the nobility of Pestitz was happy _en masse_, it was this very morning. Nothing was wanting to universal joy but a chambermaid who should have only understood as much French as a hunting-dog.
92. CYCLE.