Part 22

Schoppe, readily divining that with this female soul-dealer the walk or _gang_ was a press-gang,[93] the white linen, hunting-gear, the shawl, a bird-net,[94] and the neck, a swan's-neck for any fox that happened to be near, caught her by the hand at the threshold of the two chambers, and asked her, "Do you, also, take as much interest as I in the universal joy of the land, and the long-desired court-mourning? Your eyes indicate something like it, Mrs. Provincial Physician." "What interest do you mean?" said the medical lady, struck quite stupid. "In the pleasure of the courtiers, who, in general, are distinguished from monkeys, as the orang-outangs are, by the fact that they seldom make leaps of joy; at least, like young performers on the piano-forte, they drum away, without the smallest emotion, their most mournful and their merriest pieces one after the other. O, if only nothing bitter should spoil the mourning of the court-household! Do you wish the dear ones to have arrayed themselves in vain in the black robes of joy, wherein, like the grandsons of those who were left behind in the battle of Leuctra, they go to meet the jubilee of a new prince? What!" Unluckily she replied, in a sarcastic tone: "Black is, in these parts, the mourning-color, Mr. Schoppe." "Black, Mrs. Doctor!" (he bounced back with astonishment.) "Black?--black is a travelling-color, and bridal-color, and gala-color, and, in Rome, a princely-children's color; and, in Spain, it is a law of the empire that the courtiers, like the Jews in Morocco,[95] shall appear in black.

"Pestalozzi, madam--but there's Malt, does he understand me?" Schoppe turned round to the man, who had his drum on, and meant secretly to tap it during the procession, so as to catch something of the muffled funeral drums, and exhorted him to give a beat or two, in order that he might profit by the discourse. "Malt," said he, louder, "Pestalozzi remarks very justly, that the great ones of our time, in face, dress, posture, image-worship, superstition, and love for charlatans, approach daily nearer and nearer the Asiatics; it speaks in favor of Pestalozzi, that they borrow of the Chinese, who dress themselves in black for joy, and in white for mourning, not merely temples and gardens and caricatures, but also this very black of joy."

Among the children,--of whom the uneducated alone were not ill-bred,--Boerhave, Galen, and Van Swieten made themselves most prominent by the inlaid work and designs of the present company, which they were engraving on their bread and butter; and Galen showed his satirical projection of Mama, saying, "Only see what a long nose I have made Mama have!"

The Librarian, who was turning something similar, arrested her, as she offered to go in, assuring her he would not let her pass till she surrendered to his views: the funeral column of march could hardly have got an acre's distance out of Tartarus, and would give him time enough. He continued:--

"Genuine mourning, on the contrary, my dear, always, like anger, makes one party-colored, or, like terror, white; e. g. the creatures of a dead Pope mourn violet, so does the French king, his lady chestnut brown, the Venetian Senate, for their Doge, red. But to a regent you cannot, more than I, allow any mourning whatever; to the high-priest and a Jewish king[96] it was wholly forbidden; why should we allow the household more than the master? And must not a sovereign, my best one! who should permit the expensiveness of public mourning, manifestly open afresh the closed wounds of private sorrow? And could he, when, like Cicero,[97] he had, by his exile, thrown twenty thousand people into mourning weeds, answer it to his conscience, that his last act was a _Droit d'Aubaine_, a robbery, and that the dying-bed, whereupon one formerly bequeathed clothing to servants and the poor, should now strip them thereof? No, madam, that does not look like regents at least, who often, even by their dying, as Marcion[98] asserted of Christ's journey to hell, bring up a Cain, Absalom, and several others of the Old-Testament culprits out of hell into the heaven of the new administration.

"You do not yet give in, and the Cadaver looks at me like a cow; but consider this: peruke- and stuff-weavers have frequently besought crowned heads to wear their manufactures, in order that they might get a sale for them;--an hereditary and crown-prince, on the first happy consecration- and regency-day, when he deposes, that is, deposits his predecessor in the ground, puts on coal-black, because the black wool is not good for much, and does not sell well, and such an example at once strikes the whole metropolis,--even cattle, drums, pulpits, black. Only one word more, love: I assure you there is nothing coming yet but the company of choristers. For this very reason has the princely corpse, which might easily spoil the whole pleasure of the funeral, been previously disposed of, and only a vacant box is carried along, in order that the procession may have no other _pensées_ than _Anglaises_[99].... O dearest, one last word: What can you see, then, in the corps of equerries and pages? Well, go now! I too rejoice to see at once so many people, and the prince so happy in the midst of his children."

But the longer he saw the procession growing, that loose juggler's thread, by which they were letting down the empty but figured chest of Cypselus[100] into the family vault, so much the more indignant became his mockery. He applied his hypothesis to every sable member of the dark chain. He praised them for opening the _bal masqué_ of the new administration with these slow minuet steps, and preparing themselves for the waltz of the wedding and the grandfather's-dance of the allegiance-day. He said, as one loved on festive days to make everything easy for himself and his beast, as, accordingly, the Jews, on the Sabbath, would not allow themselves or their cattle to carry anything, not even the hens to carry the rags sticking to them; so he saw with pleasure, that in the ceremony-carriages, and in the parade-box, and on the mourning-horses, nothing was suffered to lie or sit; yes, that even the trains of the mourning-mantles were borne by pages, and the four points of the bier-cloth by four stout gentlemen. The only fault he found was, that the soldiery in their joy had seized their guns upside down, and that precisely the persons of the highest rank, Luigi, Froulay, Bouverot, as they came from a hasty funeral potation at once into the open air, were obliged, by reason of their staggering, to be led along and held up on both sides.

47. CYCLE.

In Albano another spirit spoke than in Schoppe, but the two soon met. To the Count the night-like forms of crape, the still funeral banners, the dead-march, the creeping sick-man's-walk, and the tolling of the bells, opened wide all earth's charnel-houses, especially as before his blooming eyes these death plays came for the first time: but one thing more loudly than all--one will hardly guess what--proclaimed before him the partings of life,--namely, the beat of the drum stifled by the funeral cloth; a muffled drum was to him a broken reverberation of all earthly catacombs. He heard the dumb, strangled complainings of our hearts,--he saw higher beings looking down from above on the lamentable three hours' comedy of our life, wherein the ruddy child of the first act fades in the fifth to the old man in jubilee, and then, grown up and bowed down, vanishes behind the falling curtain.

As, in spring, we think more of death, autumn, and winter than in summer, so also does the most fiery and energetic youth paint out to himself in _his_ season of life's year, the dark leafless one oftener and more vividly than the man in that stage which is nearest to it; for in both springs the wings of the ideal unfold widely and find room only in a future. But before the youth, Death comes in blooming, Greek form; before the tired, older man, in Gothic.

Schoppe generally began with _comic_ humor, and ended with _tragic_; so also now did the empty mourning-chest, the crape of the horses, their emblazoned caparisons, the Prince's contempt of the heavy German Ceremonial; in short, the whole heartless mummery, lead him up to an eminence, to which the contemplation of a multitude of men at once always impelled him, and where, with an exaltation, indignation, and laughing bitterness hard to describe, he looked down upon the eternal, tyrannical, belittling, objectless and joyless, bewildered and oppressed frenzy of mankind, and his own too.

Suddenly a gay, shining knight broke the dark chain: it was Roquairol, on the parading gala-horse, who agitated our two men, and none besides. A pale, broken-down face, glazed over with long inward fire, stripped of all youthful roses, lightening out of the diamond-pits of the eyes under the dark, overhanging eyebrows, rode along in a tragic merriment, in which the lines of the veins were redoubled under the early wrinkles of passion. What a being, full of worn-out life! Only courtiers or his father could have set down this tragic exultation to an adulatory rejoicing over the new regency; but Albano took it all into his heart, and grew pale with inward emotion, and said, "Yes, it is he! O, good Schoppe, he will certainly become our friend, this distracted youth. How painfully does the noble one laugh at this gravity, and at crowns, and graves and all! Ah, he too has, indeed, once died." "There the rider is right," said Schoppe, with quivering eyes, and suddenly tapped Albano's hand and then his own head; "my very skull here appears to me like a close _bonsoir_, like a light-extinguisher, which death claps upon me,--we are neat silvered figures, kept up in an electrical dance, and we leap up with the spark; fortunately I am still alive and kicking,--and there is our good Lector creeping along, too, and trailing his long crape,"--in which respect Augusti's citizenly-serious mood contrasted very strongly with the humanly-serious one of the Librarian.

All at once Schoppe, out of patience with this general emotion, said: "What a masquerade for the sake of a mask! Rag and tag for a piece of rag-paper! Throw a man quietly into his hole, and call nobody to see. I always admire London and Paris, where they toll no alarm-bells, nor set the neighborhood stirring, when the undertaker carries one, who has fallen asleep, to bed." "No, no," said Zesara, full of capacity for grief, "I admire it not: to whomsoever the holy dead are of no consequence, to him the living are so too;--no, I will gladly let my heart break into one tear after another, if I can only still remember the dear being."

O, how did the neighborhood accord with his heart! In a cistern, before which the coffin of the coffin passed by, there stood a bronze statue of the old man on horseback, who saw pass by below him the unsaddled mourning-horses, and the mounted festive-steed; a deaf and dumb man was stopping from door to door, and making, with his bell, a begging jingle, which neither he nor the buried one could hear: and was not the forgotten Prince laid in the earth all unseen, and more lonesome than any one of his subjects? O Zesara! it sank into thy heart, how easily man is forgotten, whether he lies in the urn or in the pyramid; and how our immortal self is regarded, like an actor, as _absent_, so soon as it is once behind the scenes, and frets and fumes no longer among the pl