As princes feel no pressure of the atmosphere, except that of the air which is in their bodies, January"s grat.i.tude for his deliverance from this pressure, was so unbounded that for the whole day he would not let the Doctor go from his side. He must dine,--sup,--ride,--play with him.
In the palace it was tolerable; it was not like Nero"s, a city within a city, a Flachsenfingen in Flachsenfingen, but merely barracks and a kitchen full of soldiers and cooks. For before every mouldy archive, before every room where lay genuine diamonds, before every door-lock, and before every stairway a bayonet was planted, with the protector and patron who was attached to it. The numerous crew of kitchen-servants lived and fired up in the palace, because his Highness was continually eating. By this continual eating he would make his fasting easier for him; for at the three ritual mealtimes of men he touched--because Culpepper would so have it--desperately little, and could not wholly contradict the courtiers who praised his strict diet. A watchmaker from London had done the most to help him out in this moderation by contriving for him a servant"s bell, and a spring-work whose index stood upon a great dial-plate in the servants" apartment; the margin of the dial-plate was encircled, instead of the hours and the days of the month, with the names of viands and wines. January had only to ring the bell and press the spring, and the household immediately knew whether the tongue and the victual-index pointed to pastry or to Burgundy. In this way, by tinkling like a mill when his inner man had nothing more to grind, he was most easily enabled to observe a stricter diet than physicians and moralists could well demand, and he shamed more than one grandee, whom, after eviscerating in death, they were obliged to lay out upon the bed of state with the hungry stomach under one arm and the thirsty liver under the other, as they give to capons also their two viscera as a body-guard between their two wings.
Victor was as much at home in the palace as in the parsonage; for the court proper, the proper courtly worms"-nest and frog-sp.a.w.n, was resident merely in the palace of the actual minister, Von Schleunes, because he had to do the _honneurs_ of the throne, to invite amba.s.sadors, strangers, &c. The Princess resided in the large old palace, which was called the Paullinum. Thus, then, did January spend his days without pomp, but with comfort and convenience, in the true solitude of a philosopher, and pa.s.sed them away in eating, drinking, and sleeping; hence could the Flachsenfingen Prorector compare him, without flattery, to the greatest of the old Romans, in whom we admire a similar hatred of show and state. January had, in fact, no court, but went himself to the court of his actual minister; with extreme reluctance, however: he could not love anything there,--neither the Princess, who was always there, nor Schleunes"s unmarried daughters, which would have been against his London vow.
About twelve o"clock at night Zeusel would have been glad to find out how all was going on, and brought to the physician in ordinary his niece _Marie_, whom he offered to him as a female lackey. The physician, who could not play the fool with any fool in the world, especially under four eyes, thrust before the slender pike a crateful of the food of truth, which the latter greedily devoured as if it were pine-apple. Marie was a relative and a Catholic, impoverished by a lawsuit, and disappointed in love, who, in the cold, hollow family of the apothecary, received and expected nothing but thrust-wounds of words and shot-wounds of looks; her broken and crushed soul resembled the marsh-willow, of which one can strip down backward all the twigs with the mere hand. She felt no longer pained at any humiliation; she seemed before others to crawl, but in truth she lay continually prostrate on the ground. When the gentle Victor saw this meek, averted form, over which so many tears had flowed, and this once beautiful face, on which, not the sorrows of fancy had laid their charming painter"s-touches, but physical pangs had emptied their poison-bags, then did the fate of mortals bring sadness to his heart, and, with the softest of courtesy towards Marie"s station, s.e.x, and sorrow, he declined her services. The apothecary would have despised himself if he had taken this politeness for anything else than fine raillery and good breeding. But Victor threw her off once more; and the poor girl withdrew in silence, and, like a maidservant, without spirit enough for courtesy.
Nevertheless, in the morning the rejected one brought him his breakfast with downcast eyes and painfully smiling lips; he had heard in his bed how the apothecary and his hard sprouts of daughters had twitted Marie with her "doleful whining air," and therefrom inferred a "_refusal_ from the jesting gentleman" overhead. His soul bled within him, and at last he accepted Marie;--he made his eye and his voice so soft and sympathetic that he could have lent either to the most tender maiden; but Marie took nothing of it to herself.
January could hardly wait for him to come again.
The third day also it was just so.
And so, too, the next week.
--But I could wish my readers had all ridden in a body, at this time, through the Flachsenfingen gate, and that this learned company had scattered itself through the city in order to inst.i.tute inquiries about our hero. The reading scouts sent by me to the coffee-houses would learn that the new English doctor had already unseated the old one,--helped the parson"s son at St. Luna to the post of Regency-Counsellor,--and that great changes in all departments were at hand. The division which I distributed among the butlers, butchers, fishery-masters, castellans, and valets of the court, would bring me word that the Prince had patted the Doctor, not on the fingers, but on the shoulder,--that he had day before yesterday showed him with his own hand his picture-cabinet, and sent him the best piece out of it,--that in the theatre he had looked out with him from the stage-box,--that he had presented to him a snuff-box rich with jewels (the usual civic crown of rulers, and their calumet, as if we were Greenlanders, who never love to receive any other present so much as snuff),--and that they would travel together. Two of the very finest and most dignified readers whom I had detached from these columns, and of whom I had despatched the one to the Paullinum to the Princess, the other to the actual Minister, would at least report to me the news that Prince and Doctor had called together upon both, and that both had looked upon my hero as a singular, shy, taciturn Englishman, who owed everything to his father.
But the last piece of news which the readers have related to me they cannot, I am sure, possibly know; and I will myself tell it to them.
--Before I deliver this, let me first simply explain in three words how it was that Victor rose so rapidly. There may be Evangelist-Matthieus among my readers who take this sudden rise, like that of the barometer, as the sign of a speedy fall,--who will say that laurels and salad, which have been forced to ripen in twenty-four hours by spirit on a cloth, wither again just as soon,--nay, who will even joke about the matter, and give out that the Prince"s intestines, with their ether, are a fish"s swimming-bladder to my hero, who only by its inflation mounts upward. Mining-superintendents laugh at such readers, and inform them that men, particularly the occupants of thrones, look upon a new physician as a new specific,--that they are always most ready to obey a new one,--that Sebastian always deported himself towards every one the first time in the finest manner, whereas with old acquaintances he never said unnecessarily anything witty,--that January loved every one whom he could see through, and that he fortunately recognized in my hero merely a gay fellow fond of life, and did not remark around his head any of Bose"s Beatifications,[198] which smell of phosphorus and emit painful sparks,--that Victor was not, like Le Baut, a _pot-plant_ in a crown, but a hyacinth hanging in the open air high above it,--that he was cheery, and made every one else so,--and that another mining-superintendent would not have made so much ceremony with his readers as I: _he_ would merely have told them the main circ.u.mstance, that in Victor, in his waggery and behavior generally, the Prince had found and fallen in love with an enchanting resemblance to his fifth son, the _Monsieur_ (lost on the Seven Islands), and that he had made this observation even in London, although Victor was five years younger than the latter.
January chose, himself, to present his favorite to everybody, and so to the Princess too. The philosophers have it to explain why Sebastian never once remembered, until he sat beside the princely bridegroom on the coach-cushion, the mad, enamored little strip of paper which, in Kussewitz, he had pasted above the Imperator of the _montre-a-regulateur_, and thrown into the Princess"s bargain. He started, and held it to be impossible that he should have been such a fool. But such a thing is easy for a man. His fancy flung back upon every scene, upon every idea, so many focus-lights from a thousand mirrors, and spread around the future, which stretched out beyond, so many colored shadows and so much blue mist, that he was really frightened when a foolish action came into his head; for he knew, that, when he should have rejected it ten times and then thought it over thirty times more, then, after all, he should go and do it.--When the two appeared before the Princess, Victor was in that agreeable frame, which is nothing new to tutors and young scholars, which stiffens the limbs to bone, and sends the heart up into the mouth, and petrifies the tongue;--it was not the certainty that _Agnola_ (that was the name of the Princess) had read the aforesaid advertis.e.m.e.nt on the watch, which so disconcerted him, but the uncertainty whether she had or not. In his agony he never thought of _this_,--that she, of course, did not even know his handwriting or the authorship of the little slip; and even if one does think of that in his agony, still it does not leave him.
--But all was, at once, above, below, and contrary to his expectation.
The Princess had laid aside the face of sensibility with her travelling-dress, and had put on instead a fine, firm gala-face. The crowned bridegroom January was received by her with as much warm decorum as if he were his own amba.s.sador of the first rank. For January, the disk of whose heart charged itself full of sparks on the electrizing-cushion of a fair cheek or a bosom-handkerchief, had for that very reason towards Agnola, with whom merely from policy he had concluded the concordats of marriage, all the warmth of the month after which he was named. Towards Victor, the son of her hereditary foe, the successor to the house-thief of princely favor, she cherished, as is easy to guess, true tenderness. Our poor hero, surprised at January"s coldness, which seemed to promise on the part of the wife no special warmth toward himself, demeaned himself as gravely as the elder and younger Cato at once. He thanked G.o.d (and so do I) that he came away.
But all the way back he kept thinking: "If I could only have got my missive out of the watch-case! Ah, then I would have done everything, poor Agnola, to reconcile thee to thy fate and thy husband!--Ah, St.
Luna," he added, as they pa.s.sed along before the city parson"s house, "thou peaceful spot, full of flowers and of love! The masters of the hunt send thy Bastian from one baiting-house to another!"
For he must also, for politeness" sake, go at least to the actual Minister"s, and January took him along with him. Thither he went with gusto, as if into a sea-fight, or into a quarantine hospital, or into the Russian ice-palace.
Furniture and persons in the house of Schleunes were in the finest taste. Victor found there, from the wabble-headed figures[199] and court-people, even to the basaltic busts of old philosophers, and to the dolls in the shape of Schleunes"s daughters, from the polished floor to the polished faces, from the powdering cabinet to the reading cabinet,--both of which painted the head in the mere pa.s.sage through them,--in short, everywhere he found all that the sumptuary laws have ever forbidden. His first embarra.s.sment with the Princess gave him the pitch for a second. It was no longer the old Victor at all. I see beforehand that the worthy schoolmasters at the Marianum in Scheerau will be hard upon him for it,--especially the rector,--that he should have so little knowledge of the world as to be, while in this company, witty without vivacity, constrainedly free without complaisance, too constantly in motion with his eyes, too immovable in his other members.
But one must suggest to these courtly and scholarly people, that he could not help it. The rector himself would have been embarra.s.sed as well as Victor before the _bel-esprit_ of a minister"s lady, whom, though, to be sure, Meusel has not introduced her into his, the court has into _its_ Learned Germany,--before her quizzing daughters, especially the handsomest, who was named Joachime,--before a number of strangers,--before so many people who hated him on his father"s account, and who watched him in order to explain and verify his relations with the Prince,--before the Princess herself, whom the Devil had also brought hither,--before Matthieu, who here was in his element, and in his leading character and bravura air,--and before the Minister,--especially before this last. Victor found in him a man full of dignity, from whom business did not take away politeness, nor thinking wit; and whom a little irony and coldness only the more exalted, but who seemed to despise feeling, scholars, and mankind.
Victor generally imagined to himself a minister--e. g. Pitt--as a Swiss glacier, on which the clouds and dew that nourish it freeze overhead, which oppresses the low places, and, in its alternation between melting and congealing, sends out great torrents down below, and out of whose clefts corpses are drifted.
January himself was not quite comfortable among them: what availed him the finest dishes, if they were embittered by the finest conceits? The card-table was, therefore, especially upon the peaceful arrival of his spouse, his quiet place of anchorage; and his Victor was for this once also glad to anchor beside him. My correspondent thinks that the tuning-key to this over-fine, demi-semi-_tone_ was turned by the Minister"s lady merely, who had all sciences in her head, and to be sure at-her tongue"s end, and for that reason held a weekly _bureau-d"esprit_. In this ridiculous position, Sebastian played away his evening and gobbled down his _souper_; he could tell a good story, but he had no story to tell,--in the few _contes_ which stayed by him all was anonymous, and to the circle about him the names were precisely the things of the first importance; nor could he make use of his humor either, because a humor like his places the possessor himself in a mild comic light, and because, therefore, only among good friends whose respect one cannot lose, but not among bad friends whose respect one must hold by defiance, can it venture out in its sock and harlequin"s-collar,--he did not even enjoy the happiness of inwardly laughing at them all, because he had no time for it, and because he never found people ridiculous till their backs were turned.
He was confoundedly badly off. "You"ll not catch me here again very soon," he thought to himself; and when, through the two tall gla.s.s doors of the balcony, which looked out upon the garden, the moon stole in with its dreamy light, which out there fell upon stiller dwellings, fairer prospects, and calmer hearts,--then he stole out upon the balcony (as his partnership at the card-table was broken up by the Prince after supper), and the night that glistened on the earth and in the heavens exalted his bosom with greater scenes. With what love thought he then of his father, whose philosophic coldness was like the January snow, which covers the seed from the frost, whereas that of the court resembles the snow of March, which devours the buds! How sorely did he reproach himself for every discontented thought about his honest Flamin"s slight want of refinement! O, how his inner man erected itself like a fallen and forgiven angel, when he imagined to himself Emanuel leading Clotilda by the hand, and rapturously asking him, "Where hast thou found to-day an image of this my friend?" At this moment he yearned inexpressibly to be back again in his St. Luna....
His quickening heart-beats were all at once checked by _Joachime_, who came out with a burst of laughter directed toward the parlor. As it was a burden to her to sit for a single hour, (I wonder how she could lie in bed a whole night,) she extricated herself as often as she could from the curb-bit of the card-table. The Princess released her this time, who suspended this _night-work_ of great people on account of the weakness of her eyes. Joachime was no Clotilda, but still she had two eyes polished like two rose-diamonds, two lips like painted ones, two hands like casts, and, in fact, all the duplicate members were very pretty.... And with these a court-physician can keep house well enough, though the single ones (heart, head, nose, forehead) are not those of a Clotilda. As now under the open heaven he recovered his spirits, and on the balcony, which for him was always a parlor, the use of his tongue,--as Joachime"s tone attuned him again to his own,--as she a.s.sailed the taciturnity of the English, and he defended the exceptions,--as he could now run, like a spider, up and down along the thread of the conversation, and was no more to be disturbed by the Princess, who had followed after to cool off in the night-air her inflamed eyes,--and as one complains of feeling ennui only when one himself inflicts it,--and as I transcribe all this, I do enough (I think) for a reviewer, who stands up behind the coach-body of the Prince, and reflects and wonders what he shall have to hold on to (except the footmen"s straps), in case Victor, sitting before him in the carriage, does not during the ride home wish the Minister"s house at the Devil, but thinks more contentedly,--Well, it"s tolerable enough![200]
Victor"s society agreed so well with the Prince, that he fancied he could as little do without him as a canoness out of the house can think of taking the badge of her order off her person. He always plunged into the sacred cup and welcome of the warm spring of a new friendship as immoderately as a guest at Carlsbad does into his. When he felt ennui, the Medicus was besought to come and drive it away; when he experienced an inward jubilee, that person was again entreated to appear, that he might partic.i.p.ate in the jubilation. Only those times at which January felt neither ennui nor the contrary were left to his friend to spend entirely at his own pleasure. Victor had sworn beforehand to make an easy matter of refusing, and had broken out upon people of easy consent; now, however, he said, "The Devil may say, No! Just let a man find _himself_ in the same situation first!" ... And so must our poor Victor describe nothing but empty, dizzying gyres in the court-circle of the throne, among people for whose tone he could more easily have an _ear_ than a _tongue_, and whom he could read, but could not win.
A youth in whose breast hang the night-pieces of Maienthal and St.
Luna,--or one who has just arrived from a watering-village,--or one who has it in mind to fall in love,--or one who, in great cities or in their great circles, must be an _idle_ spectator,--every such one is also, for that very reason, a _dissatisfied_ spectator therein, and blows into his critical pipe against the trifling company, till he himself is drawn in. But when all these causes actually meet in one and the same man, then can he find no relief against his gall-bladder nor any biliary duct, except to take some fine paper and send off to the Eymanns in St. Luna a confounded satirical letter upon what he has seen.
My hero despatched the following to the Parson:--
"MY DEAR SIR AND ADOPTED FATHER:"--
"I have not had hitherto spare time enough to lift my eyes up and see what moon we have. Verily, a court wants time for virtue. The Prince carries me about with him everywhere, like a smelling-bottle, and shows up his foolish Doctor. Erelong they will not be able to endure me: not because I am good for anything,--on the contrary, I am convinced they could bear the most virtuous man in the world quite as well as the worst, and that merely because he would be an Anglicism, an _homme de fantaisie_,[201] a _lusus naturae_,--but because I do not talk enough.
Business-people never trouble themselves about any conversational or epistolary style; but with court-people the tongue is the artery of their withered life, the spiral-spring and flag-feather of their souls; they are all born critics, who look at nothing but fine turns, expression, fire, and speech. This comes of their having nothing to do; their good works are _bon mots_,[202] their exchange business consists in visiting-cards, their housekeeping is a card-party, and their agriculture a hunting-party, and the _minor service_ a physiognomy.
Hence they must have other people"s faults all day long in their ears as an antidote to tedious leisure, as the physicians inoculate with the itch to counteract stupidity; a court-establishment is the regular penny post-office of the smallest items of news, even about you commoners, when you happen to have done anything really ridiculous. It were to be wished that we had festivals, or card-parties, or plays, or a.s.semblies, or _soupers_, or something good to eat, or some amus.e.m.e.nt or other; but that is not to be thought of. We have, to be sure, all these things, but only their names; the President of the Exchequer would shrug his shoulders, if we should undertake to be, four times in a year, so brilliantly happy as you are four times a month. As our week consists of seven Sundays, it follows that our amus.e.m.e.nts are only signs in the calendar, epochs of time, to which no one pays heed; and a festival is nothing but a play-room for the plans which every one has in his head, the boards on which he is to act his leading part, and the season for continuing the intrigue against victims of love and of ambition. Here there is, every minute, a stinging mosquito, and the thistle-seed of beautifully painted trouble flies round far and wide.
"There are many women here who are good, and disciples of Linnaeus, and their eyes cla.s.sify men botanically, according to his fine and simple _s.e.xual_-system; they make a great distinction between virtuous and vicious love,--namely, that of _degree_, or at least of time; and the _best_ often speaks on the subject like the _worst_, and the worst like the best. Meanwhile we have here female virtue and manly fidelity, in their way,--but no idea of them can be communicated to a parson; for these two jellies are so soft and delicate, that, if I should undertake to carry them down over all the steps of the throne to the parsonage, they would arrive there in such a spoiled and ruined state, that one would give them down below there the two opposite names,--for which, however, we ourselves have up here our special and corresponding objects. Your commoners would find our elderly men ridiculous in matters of love, as _they_ would your daughters. But what often embitters for me this happy court-life is the universal want of dissimulation. For no one believes here what he hears, and no one thinks how he looks; all must, according to the regular laws of the game, like cards, have the upper side uniform, and put on an external stillness of face as a cover to the internal fire, as the lightning destroys only the sword and not the scabbard. Consequently, as a universal dissimulation is none at all, and as every one gives every other credit for poison, no one can _deceive_ another, but only _outwit_ him; only the understanding, not the heart, is taken in.
Meanwhile, to speak the truth, that is not truth; for every one has two masks,--the general and the individual. For the rest, the colors which are used upon the scientific, refined, and philanthropic painting of the outer man are necessarily sc.r.a.ped off from the inner man, but advantageously, since there is not much on the inner man, and the study of appearance lessens reality: so have I often seen hares lying in the woods that had not an ounce of flesh or a drop of fat on their bodies, because all had been absorbed by the monstrous fur which had continued to grow after their death.
"If one compares the substantial value of the throne and that of the low ground of the commonalty, the physical and moral exaltation of men appears to bear an inverse relation to that of their soil, just as the inhabitants of marshy lands are larger than mountaineers.
But, nevertheless, those elevated people bear the state easily on b.u.t.terfly-wings, survey its wheel-work with the hundred-eyed papilio"s eye, and with a walking-cane defend the people from lions, or chase therewith the lions among the people, as in Africa the children of the herdsmen scare away with a whip the real lions of Natural History from the grazing cattle.... Dear Mr. Court-Chaplain, this satire began to pain me already on the former page; but here one is malicious, just as he is vain, without knowing when: the former, because one is obliged to take too much notice of others; the latter, because he is compelled to think too much of himself. No! Your garden, your sitting-room, are pleasanter; there, is no stony breast on which one _crucifies_ the arms and veins of friendship like a tree trained on an espalier; there, one is not obliged, as I am, to be twice a day under the barber"s hands, and three times a day under the hair-dresser"s; there, one has leave at least to put on his polished boot. Write soon to your adopted son, for I still deny myself the festival of a visit to you. Are there many baptisms and burials? What is _Fox_[203] doing, and the deaf bellows-blower? At this very moment I hear the mortar, instead of your rat-drum, pounding down below. Farewell.
"And now at last I greet you, beloved mother! My hand is warm, and in my heart a pair of souls are beating; for now your face, full of motherly warmth, shines on all my satirical ice-peaks, and melts them into warm blood, which will throb for you and for you flow. How good it feels to love again! Your second son, Flamin, is well, but too busy, and at present in St. Luna.[204] Greet my sisters and all that love you.
"Sebastian."
He reserved the letter in order to despatch the Regency-Counsellor, who wanted to take his person along with him, with a freight at least.
Meanwhile his and January"s joint visits, with their stage entanglements, grew to quite other ones, even a ganglion of friendship between January and himself,--and at the same time gave this friendship increased notoriety. In St. Luna, in Le Baut"s house, three times as much was made out of it as there was in it,--in the parsonage, nine times. To this was added a trifle, namely, a scuffle,--properly, two. I have the incident from Spitz,--Victor got it from Flamin,--he from Matthieu,--in whose n.o.ble historical style it can here be handed over to posterity. The Evangelist was never ashamed of a commoner, provided he could make a fool of him. Therefore he visited the court-apothecary without scruple. To the latter, who cordially hated the barrack-physician, Culpepper, on account of his coa.r.s.e arrogance, and on account of the reason given in the note[205] below, Matthieu had long since promised to upset the Doctor. As the latter and the podagra had actually been banished by Victor from January"s feet, the Evangelist gave the apothecary to understand that he himself would, without _his_ hint and wishes, have contributed far less to the fall of Culpepper than he had done. Zeusel, especially as he had the successor of the barrack-physician in his house, came after some days to the billiard-table with the certain conviction that he, from his apothecary"s-shop, had thrust under Culpepper"s posteriors the invisible leg, and hurled him down from the steps of the throne. There were present, unfortunately, the barrack-physician himself, and the n.o.ble Mat. Zeusel came upon this stage with the festoons of three watch-chains, with a pair of breeches on whose knees some Arabesques were printed, with a double waistcoat and double neck-tie, and with double signs of exclamation in his face at the barrack-physician;--his money-purse lay exactly under the _os sacrum_, because he, like some Englishmen, had caused his breeches-pocket to be concealed in the region of the breeches buckle. He had with him as his chamber-moor his long, lean dispenser, who in the adjoining drinking-room encountered the very short dispenser of the second apothecary"s-shop, or shop of the _canaille_. The short dispenser, out of malice, followed the tall one about everywhere, merely to vex him; but this time he had just come back from the country with some hens"-eggs which he had collected as fees from convalescent patients.
Matthieu, after an exegetic hint to Zeusel, took the liberty of being of Culpepper"s opinion in regard to the Prince"s gout. Culpepper, who would fain be an old German,--such old Germans can never dissemble when they are angry, though they can very well do so from self-interest,--fired away and said the English doctor was a complete ignoramus. Zeusel displayed with a broad smile, as with a printer"s vignette, his contempt for the coa.r.s.e man. The Medicus looked like the Equator, the apothecary like Spitzbergen. Now the tourney went on merely upon the subject of the gout. The second and umpire, Matthieu, gave it to be understood, that "Zeusel, to be sure, loved his prince and lord, but still he could wish that this love had had the best means and the wholesomest influences. "In bawdy-houses," said Culpepper, "_that fellow there may_ have influence." When the apothecary, at these words, proudly and contemptuously straightened himself up, the Doctor slowly jammed him down on the chair and on his money-purse, and, bringing down his fist upon his shoulder, nailed the little c.o.xcomb with his purse to the seat.
This pinning-down vexed the tailor-bird most of all, and he replied, trying to get up, that "he would this very day, if he were consulted, advise his Highness to adhere to his present better choice." The barrack-physician might perhaps have too hurriedly withdrawn his hand from the shoulder which it covered; for he grazed with it, as with a cannon, the nose of his adversary, whereupon the latter, like Saint Januarius, discharged some blood. The Evangelist was personally grieved "that two such sensible men could not fall out and fight with each other without personal hatred and heat, since they _might_, like princes who go to war, attack each other without either,--but the bleeding too well attested Zeusel"s ebullition." ... Zeusel cried out to the Doctor, "You lout!" The latter, in his fury, actually took Matthieu"s opinion, that the former bled only from fury, and compared him to those corpses which in old times bled, indeed, at the approach of the murderer, but from none other than quite natural causes. The Medicus, therefore, looked for his cane, which like a prince was gold-headed, and took his leave with the crowned stick, drawing it a few times, as with magnetic pa.s.ses, across Zeusel"s fingers; but I would call the staff, if I were in the place of other people, neither an ear-trumpet for Zeusel, which the physician applied to him, as they often do to persons hard of hearing, that the latter might hear better, nor yet a door-knocker, which he stretched out before the truth, that it might the more easily get admission into the apothecary. What he wanted was merely to oblige him to let his handkerchief drop, in order that he might look him in the face as he bade farewell, which he clothed in the following forbearing and neatly turned remark: "You tell your Doctor that he and you there are the two greatest blockheads in town."
Under these last words both dispensers kept themselves still enough in other respects, though not with their tongues, indeed; for the tall dispenser saluted, as second chorus, the short one with the same war-song, and was a genuine Anti-Podagrist. Whoso considers that the tall one loved my hero on account of his politeness, and could not bear the short one, because Culpepper sent all his prescriptions to _his_ shop,--such a one cannot expect anything less of the couple than a reflection of the scene in the billiard-room; but the tall dispenser was composed, and never, like Portugal, propagated edifying truths with blood, but--the moment the barrack-doctor called the court-physician a blockhead--he quietly took the hat of the short dispenser, who had deposited his income of eggs therein to guard them from being broken, and coolly, without the least resentment, placed the aforesaid hatful of eggs on the head of the professional brother; and by a slight squeeze fitted the Doctor"s hat, which sat half an ell too high, upon the head of his friend,--with all the more propriety, as Castor and Pollux also had on egg-sh.e.l.ls,[206]--and having effected this promotion, he went his way, without exactly caring to have much thanks for the felt-stuffing and the streaming face-poultice.
Fisticuffs spread abroad lesser truths, as wars do great truths. The Court-Chaplain Eymann sent a long letter of congratulation to Victor, and called him "January"s kidney-keeper," and begged for his promised visit. A travelling[207]-advocate knocked at his door as at that of a superior court, and begged him for a princely injunction against the Regency-College. The apothecary, with his application about the _lavement_,[208] still holds back.
Victor still laid up for himself his first visit to St. Luna like a ripening fruit, and thereby vexed the Regency-Counsellor, who wanted to persuade him into it. But he said: "Those who are left behind in a place long indescribably for him who has gone from it, until he has made his first visit; and so, too, with him. After the first, both parties wait quite coolly and composedly for the second."--What he neither said nor thought, but felt and feared, was this: that his demiG.o.ddess, Clotilda, who inhabited the most holy place in his breast, and who by her invisibleness had become dearer, more indispensable, and for that very reason more sure to his soul, would, perhaps, at her appearance, take away at once all hopes out of his heart.
It was on the evening of the day when he received Eymann"s letter, that he thus fantasied: "Ah, if January would only continue so well! He must have exercise, but of an unusual kind,--the rider must walk, the pedestrian must drive. We ought to travel together on foot through the country, in disguise. Ah, I might, perhaps, be of service to many a poor devil! We would steal homeward through St. Luna,--No, no, no!" ...
He started back himself, affrighted at a certain idea,--for he feared he should, when he had once had it, even execute it; hence he said to it three times, No. The idea was this,--to persuade the Prince to visit Clotilda"s parents. But it was of no use; he remembered that his father had held too strict a court of cognizance over the Chamberlain and the Minister. "And yet, what harm can Le Baut do to me? If I should only draw three sun-glances from January upon the poor fool! The wisest thing for me is, not to think any more about it to-day."
The dog will bring us the answer; I, for my part, make a bet--a fine connoisseur of human nature on my island bets the contrary--that he does not carry out this joke.
18. DOG-POST-DAY.
Clotilda"s Promotion.--Incognito-Journey.--Pet.i.tion of the Majors of the Chase.--Consistorial Messenger.--Caricature of the Flachsenfingeners.
To be sure he did--carry out the joke; but still at bottom I do not lose my bet. For it happened in this way. From the day when Doctor Culpepper had made that pa.s.s with his coa.r.s.e hand, as with an electrical discharger, before the full-blooded nose of Zeusel, the man with three watches pressed his company upon my hero, who carried only one, and that, too, the clumsy one of the Bee-father. Zeusel always thanked G.o.d, if only a court-courier got drunk at his house, or the court-dentist over-ate himself. He always brought with him, when he came, certain secret items of intelligence, which were to be published.
He kept nothing to himself, not though one had threatened to hang him in the cellar of his shop. He told our hero that the Minister was making interest in behalf of his Joachime for the place of second maid-of-honor to the Princess, who could select only the female part of her service for herself,--but that he could not fairly do it, because he, or his son Matthieu, had promised the Chamberlain Le Baut to procure the same place for Clotilda; he therefore begged my hero, who, as he saw, he said, was Matthieu"s friend, to spare him the embarra.s.sment, and induce the Prince (which would cost only _one_ word) himself to intercede with the Princess in behalf of Joachime; the Princess, who, besides, patronized the Minister, would, on more than one ground, do it with pleasure, and then the Minister could not help it, if the Chamberlain, the enemy of his Lordship, went away empty.
The simpleton, as one can see, had guessed out, merely from the two accounts, which he had got hold of, of the two office-seekers, the whole of the remaining case; and the very circ.u.mstance, which Matthieu disclosed to him, that the Minister was vacating a quarter of a wing of his palace, for a companion of his deceased daughter Giulia, had only strengthened his conviction. To such a degree does malice supply the place, not only of years, but also of information and insight!
My hero could say nothing to him except that--he did not believe a word of it. But after three minutes of private reflection he believed it all: for that was the reason, he saw, why the dear Clotilda had to come back from the seminary just at the arrival of the Princess,--that was the reason why Le Baut built around the Minister"s son so many altars of incense and thank-offerings,--that was the reason why the old lady (in the Sixteenth Dog-Post-Day) serenaded, and so loudly, court-life,--in fact, as he further saw, two such outlawed, captive Court-Jews in Babylon must have the live Devil in them, until they are reinstated in the old holy city, and if they happen to have a handsome daughter, they will use her as the relay of their journey, and the Montgolfier of their balloon-ascension....