And that would he gladly do; for what had he left on earth except--recollections? O, too many recollections, too few hopes--Who would be grieved at his fall?--the loved one, who, after all, resigns him,--or her brother, whom he saves and flies from,--or his good lord, who perhaps rests already in the earth,--or his Emanuel, whose loving arms are already crumbling to dust?--"Yes, him only will my dying affect," said he, "for he will long for his faithful scholar, he will on some sun open his arms and look down along the way to the earth, and I shall come up with a great wound on my breast, and my streaming heart will lie naked on the wound.--O Emanuel, despise me not, I shall cry; I was truly unhappy, after thou hadst died; receive me and heal the wound!"
--"Seest thou my father?" said the blind Julius, and his face approached a smile of rapture. Victor started and said, "I talk with him, but I do not see him."--But this checked his exaltation. He had been hitherto the paraclete and nurse of the poor blind charge; he could not leave him, he must needs put off the _retreating-shot_ of life till the arrival of Clotilda, that she might protect the helpless one. Ah, the good night-walker and night-sitter (in the proper sense) had at first every day prayed Victor to operate upon his eye, and give him back the light, before his dear father should crumble to pieces, that he might see once more, only once more, the fair countenance not yet undermined by worms; yes, he would at least touch blindly the cold mask,--this he had in the beginning implored; but in a few weeks he had drawn his arms away from under the dead man, and folded them entirely (like a true child) with all his caressing love around Victor, who _always_ stayed at home with him. And in the night they reached out to each other their warm hands out of their adjoining beds, and thus linked together went into the evening-lands of dreams. To the childlike blind one, even the continuous din of the city turmoil, which his village had wanted, had been a comfort....
Victor, therefore, waited first for the arrival of Clotilda;--ah! he would have done it even without reference to the blind youth.--Must he not see once more his good mother, hear once more the voice of his never-to-be-forgotten beloved?--For the rest, I cannot disguise the fact, that not merely the salvation of Flamin, but a real disgust at life, guided his hand in his death-sentence. The verdict of murderous disgust had, for its grounds of decision, the sunset of Emanuel,--Victor"s oft-recurring night-thoughts upon this our lucubration of life,--his entire revolution of his social relations,--the corresponding past or future example of his Lordship,--his panting for a deed full of energy,--and, most of all, the death-chill about his forlorn and naked bosom, which once was covered by so many warm hearts. One can do without love and friendship only so long as one has not yet enjoyed them;--but to lose them, and that without hope, _this_ one cannot do without dying. Upon his conscience he played off the optical deception and stage-trick of asking it whether he might not draw his friend out of the water at the hazard of his life; whether he might not leap from the plank, which could hold only one, into the waves, in order to make his death the purchase-money of another"s life.--Two singular ideas sweetened for him his deadly purpose more than all.
The first was, that on his death-day (after the disclosure to the Prince) he could repair to Flamin"s prison, and grasp his hand, and boldly say: "Come out,--to-day I die for thee, that I may prove to thee that Clotilda was thy sister, and I thy friend.--I quench the black word, which can only be forgiven on the death-day, with my innocent blood, and death folds me again to thy arms.---O, I do it gladly, so that I may only love thee once more right heartily, and say to thee, My good, precious, never-to-be-forgotten youthful friend!"--Then would he fall upon his neck with a thousand tears, and forgive him all; for _in the neighborhood of death, and after a great deed_, man can and may forgive man everything, everything.
Every tenderer soul will easily divine the second thought that sweetened that of death.--It was this, that he could go once more to his beloved and think, though not say, before her, "I fall for thee."
For he now felt, after all, that the resolve of a parting for life was too hard, and only that of doing so by death was easy.--O right easy and sweet it is, he felt, to close the wet eye in the presence of the loved one, then to see nothing more on the earth; but with the high flames of the heart, and with the dear image pressed to the bosom, like the encoffined mother with the dead darling, to step blindfold to the brink of this world, and throw one"s self headlong into the still, deep, dark, cold sea of the dead.... "Thou art," he often said, "painted on my conscious being, and nothing can sever thy image from my heart; both must, as in Italy the wall and the picture upon it, be transported together."--And as now there was no longer any need to care for his body, he could call forth, of his own accord, the tears which agitated him. He wanted really to offer something of his life to Clotilda: therefore he rehea.r.s.ed, for some days in succession, the part of the bloodiest farewell scene, even to exhaustion, and made pen-and-ink sketches of his sorrow, and said to himself, when thereby headaches and heart-beatings came upon him, "I can thus at least suffer something for _her_, though _she_ knows nothing of it."
Here is one such mournful leaf.
"O thou angel! Were it not that it would affect thee too sadly, I would go to thee, and before thy eyes fill my heart with tears, with images of the fairer time, with the bitterest sorrows, until it broke and sank,--or I would slay myself in thy presence. Ah! it were sweet to pierce my heart with lead, as it leaned on thy bosom, and to let my blood and life flow out on thy breast.--But, O G.o.d! no, no! Smiling will I go to thee, good soul, when thou comest back again, as if it were merely for joy at thy return,--only the pink with the red drop will I beg of thee, that my heart, adorned with it, may moulder under the last flower of life. I will, indeed, bleed so near thee, heavenly murderess, as the corpse does before its murderess, but yet only inwardly; and every drop of blood will fall merely from one thought to another.--Then, at last, will I be silent for a long time, and go, and that forever, only saying this and no more: "Think of me, beloved, but be happier than heretofore."----Whither then will I go, after an hour?
I shall take the dumb, dreary road to the poisonous Buo-upas-tree,[176]
to where death stands solitary, and there die all alone, all alone.----The dead are mutes, they have bells, and in the blue a mute will hover, and toll the death-bell.... Clotilda, Clotilda! then our love on earth is over!"
Dost thou, reader, still recognize the voice which, in his inner being, always, amidst the weeping of music, rang in the cadence of verse? Here it rings again.--But his hurricane of resolve soon gave place to gentler deeds and hours, just as the equinoctial storm of autumn dissolved into still after-summer days. The thought, "In a few weeks thou wilt fly to the land beyond the grave," made him a _free-born_ creature and an angel. He forgave everybody, even the Evangelist. He filled his little sphere with virtues as with an after-bloom of life, and devoted his short hours, not to sweet fantasies, but to needy patients. He denied himself every expenditure, in order to leave to Julius his paternal property unimpaired. He was neither vain nor proud.
He spoke frankly about and against the state;--for what is there to fear so near to the storm- and weather-shed of the coffin-lid?--But for the very reason that he felt only love for what is good, and no pa.s.sions and no cowardice in his inner man, therefore he resisted _gently_ and _quietly_; for when once man is convinced for himself that he has laid up courage for a day of need, he no longer seeks to make a show of it before others. The thought of death used to incline him to humorous follies, but now only to good actions. He was so happy, men and scenes around him appeared to him in the mild, soothing evening-light, wherein he always beheld both in the _sicknesses_ of his childhood. It seemed as if he wanted (and he succeeded in it) to bribe his conscience by this piety to a legible indors.e.m.e.nt of his autographic sentence of death. To him, as to the departed Emanuel, men appeared as children, the light of earth as evening-light, everything seemed softer, everything a little smaller; he had no anxiety or hankering; the earth was his moon; now for the first time he understood the soul of his Dah.o.r.e....
--And thou, my reader, dost thou not feel that thou, too, so near to the cloister-gate of death, wouldst improve just so? But thou and I are in fact already standing before it. Is not our death as certain as Victor"s, although the certainty ranges through a longer interval? O, if every one only had a fixed belief that after fifty years, on an appointed day, Nature would lead him to her place of execution, he would be a different man; but we all banish the image of death out of our souls, as the Silesians on Laetare-Sunday cast it out of the cities.
The thought and the expectation of death improve us as much as the certainty and the choice of it.
And now the fair, blue after-summer days of this year"s October floated on tender b.u.t.terfly-wings of spider-webs across the heavens. Victor said to himself, "Fair earthly heaven, I will take one more walk beneath thee! Good mother-land, I will look out upon thee once more, with thy woods and mountains, and fix thy image in the immortal soul, ere thy yellow green grows over my heart, and strikes its roots therein. I will see thee, St. Luna of my childhood, and you, my fair Whitsuntide paths, and thee, thou blessed Maienthal, and thee, thou good old Bee-father,[177] and will give back to thee thy watch that counts the hours of joy----and then I shall have lived long enough."
He asked himself, "Am I, then, ripe for the granary of the churchyard?--But then is any man ripe? Is he not in his ninetieth year still incomplete as in his twentieth?"--Yes, indeed! Death takes off children and Patagonians; man is summer fruit, which Heaven must pluck before it matures. The other world is no uniform alley and orangery, but the tree-nursery of our present seed-nursery.
Before Victor left the blind one, with tears and kisses, he sent for poor Marie the evening previous to come to the cabinet, and commended to her (as well as to the Italian servant) the care of the dependent youth. But his design was to give and announce beforehand to the crushed and powerless soul the hope of some hundred florins; for so much he could already expect as inheritance from his well-circ.u.mstanced father, Eymann. The selfishness of this humiliated creature, which would have made others cold, was precisely what moved his innermost being. Long since he had said, "One should not have compa.s.sion on any man who thought philosophically or loftily, least of all on a learned man,--with such a one the wasp-stings of fate hardly went through the stocking,--on the contrary, with the poor vulgar soul he suffered and wept infinitely, which knew nothing greater than the goods of earth, and which, without principles, without consolation, pale, helpless, convulsed, and rigid, sank at the sight of the ruin of its goods."--It therefore only redoubled his pity when this Marie in wild grat.i.tude pa.s.sed in his presence from abrupt utterances of thanks, e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.ns, gushes of joy, to kissing of the coat, silly laughing, and kneeling.
When he went the next morning,--first to St. Luna,--and pa.s.sed along before the convent of Mary, where once the adopted daughter of the Italian Tostato would have offered a sixth finger, Marie was just coming out of a limb-shop,[178] where she had bought two wax hearts.
Victor drew out from her by long and ingenious questioning that she was going to hang one of them, which represented hers, on the holy Mary, because hers no longer pained her so much nor was so much oppressed as it had been the week before.--As to the second, she would not for a long time let anything out; at last she confessed: it was Victor"s own, which she was going to offer to the Holy Mother of G.o.d, because she thought it must pain him also right sorely, as he looked so pale and sighed so often.----"Give it to me, love," he said, too deeply moved, "_I will offer my heart myself_."
"Ay," he repeated out under the still heaven, "the heart behind the wall of the breast will I offer,--that, too, is of wax,--and to mother Earth will I give it, that it may heal,--heal." ...
Let him weep freely, my friends, now that he beholds smiling the still, pale earth, even up to its hazy mountains.--For softness of sensibility loves to ally itself with petrifying processes and the art[179] of Pa.s.sau against the calamities of fate. Let him weep freely, as he looks upon this flowerless earth, spinning itself, as it were, into the silk of the fugitive summer, and feels as if he must fall down and kiss the cold meadow as a mother, and say, "Bloom again sooner than I; thou hast given me enough of joys and flowers!"--The silent dissolution of nature, on whose corpse the full-blooming daisy stood as if it were a death-garland, softly unnerved his powers by this loosening friction,--he was exhausted and stilled,--nature reposed around him and he in it,--the exhaustion overflowed almost into a sweet, tickling faintness,--the tear-gland swelled and pressed no more before it ran over; but its water trickled down like dew out of flowers, easily and without stopping, as the blood flowed through his breast.
He saw now St. Luna lying before him, but, as it were, withdrawn from him in a moonlight. He pa.s.sed not through, in order not to see the wax statue, whose funeral sermon he had delivered, and for which he also possessed a heart of wax; but he went round along the outskirts. "Grow ever broader and more bustling, fair spot: never may an enemy beleaguer thee around!" He said no more. For as he pa.s.sed by the church-yard he thought, "Have not all these, then, also taken leave of the place; and am I the only one who does it?"--The mere backward glance at the slated roof of the parsonage kindled one more lightning flash of pain at the thought of a _mother"s_ tears for his death; but he soon whispered to himself the consolation, that the maternal heart of the parson"s wife, never weaned from Flamin, would cure its sorrow for the victim by its joy over the rescued favorite.
He went now towards Maienthal, and carefully kept away his dreaming thoughts from its exalted places, in order (at evening on the arrival) to enjoy so much the more--sorrow. But now his conscious soul spun itself into a new ideal web. He thought over the pleasure of sinking without any sick nights into the earth, bright and erect, not prostrate, but upright like the giant Caenaeus,[180]--he felt himself shielded against all disasters of life, and purged from the fear perpetually gnawing on in every heart,--all this, and the joy of having fulfilled his duties and controlled his impulses, and the lights of the blue day standing as if in flower-dust, so cleared his turbid life-stream, that at last he could have wished (had not his determination forbidden it) to play longer in the bright stream.... So great does contempt of death render the beauty of life,--so sure is every one, who in _cold blood_ renounces life, of being able to endure it,--so sound is the advice of Rousseau, before death to undertake a good deed, because one can then do without dying.... --As Victor thought thus, Fate stepped before him and asked him sternly, "Wilt thou die?"--He answered, "Yes!"--as, just before sundown, he beheld again in Upper Maienthal Clotilda"s carriage, which he had seen there at its starting upon the journey. Now the death-cloud fell upon the landscape.
He hurried by,--at the window he saw his mother and the lady, the mother of Flamin,--his inner being was in a tumult,--his eyes glowed, but remained dry,--for he was choosing among the instruments of death.---Why did he go, so late, in the dark, with a stormy soul, which obscured all sweet dreams, to Maienthal?--He would go to Emanuel"s grave; not to mourn there, not to dream there, but to seek for himself a hollow there, namely, the last. His impetuous grief had sketched a picture of his dying, and he had approved the sketch; namely, so soon as fate had decided the necessity of his death by the disappearance of his father and by the peril of Flamin, he meant to scoop out his grave near the weeping birch, lay himself down in it, kill himself therein, and then let the blind Julius, who could not know nor see anything of it, fling the earth over him, and so, veiled, unknown, nameless, flee out of life to the side of his mouldering Emanuel....
Black funeral processions of ravens flew slowly like a cloud through the sunless heavens, and settled down like a cloud into the woods,--the half-moon hung above the earth,--a strange, little shadow, as big as a heart, ran fearfully beside him. He looked up: it was the shadow of a slowly hovering hawk; he rushed through Maienthal; he saw not the leafless garden nor Dah.o.r.e"s closed house, but ran through the chestnut alley toward the weeping birch.--
But under the chestnuts, at the place where Flamin would have killed him, he saw Clotilda"s withered pink, with the b.l.o.o.d.y drop in its chalice, lying on the ground.... And as a lark, the last songstress of Nature, still quivered over the garden, and called with too ardent tones after all the spring-times of life, and pierced the heart with an infinite, deathly yearning, then did my Victor look up and weep aloud; and when, up on the grave, he had wiped away the great, dark tears, there stood--Clotilda before him.
One thrill ran through him, and he was dumb.... She hardly recognized the paled form, and asked, trembling, "Is it you? Do we see each other again?"--His soul was torn asunder, and he said, but in another sense, "We see each other again." She was in the bloom of health, having been restored by the journey. But there was blood on her handkerchief;--it was the blood which Emanuel"s bosom had shed during the duel in the alley. He stared inquiringly at the blood. She pointed to the grave, and veiled her weeping eyes.--With the question, "Has your honored father come?" the good soul sought gently to lead him aside; but she led him to his grave,--his eye sought wildly the place for the last cool grotto of life,--she had never seen her gentle lover thus, and would fain soothe his soul by quiet remembrances of Emanuel,--she filled out the chasm in her letter, and related how quietly and composedly the dead man went from England, and previously at his departure lowered down into an extraordinarily deep hollow of the fallen temple all his East-Indian flowers, three pictures, written palm-leaves, and collections of loved ashes....
Victor was beside himself,--he supported himself by his hand on the dew-cold, wet, yellow grave,--he wept in one steady stream, and could no longer see his beloved,--he threw himself upon her quivering lips, and gave her the farewell-kiss of death. He could venture to kiss her; for there is no rank among the dead. He felt her streaming tears, and a cruel longing seized him to provoke these tears forth; but he could only not speak. He choked her words with kisses and his own with grief.
At last he was able to say, "Farewell!" She extricated herself with terror, and looked on him with greater tears, and said, "What is it with _you_? You break my heart!"--He said, "Only mine must break!" and hurriedly drew out the heart of wax, and crushed it to pieces on the grave, and said, "I offer my heart to thee, Emanuel; I offer thee my heart." And when Clotilda had fled with alarm, he could only call after her, with exhausted tones, "Farewell! farewell!"
43. DOG-POST-DAY.
Matthieu"s Four Whitsuntide Days and Jubilee.
It is a stroke of art in me to write down true scenes of villany in the higher cla.s.ses in French first, and then interpret them into the vernacular, as Boileau composed his insipid verses originally in prose.--As I attach great importance to the Forty-Third Dog-Post-Day,--because therein the n.o.ble Mat seeks to save his Flamin even at the sacrifice of his virtue and of Lord Horion,--accordingly I meditate to translate it so faithfully into German out of the French, in which I have written it, that my French author himself shall bestow on me his approbation.
Hardly had Matthieu heard that Clotilda"s and Flamin"s mother had come from London, when this Reineke marched out of his fox-kennel to Flachsenfingen, because he would not let any one take from him the honor of releasing Flamin. He seldom, despite his fieriness, antic.i.p.ated opportunity; but he watched and only helped things on here or there; as in a romance, so in life, a thousand light trivialities, brought together at last, hook into each other firmly, and a good Mat twists at last out of scattered cobweb-meshes of accident a regular--silk noose for his fellow-man.--He boldly contrived to get himself a secret audience with the Prince, "because he would rather go to meet his punishment (on account of the challenge to the duel) than let certain weighty things remain in silence any longer." _Weighty_ and _dangerous_ had long since been kindred terms with January, but now were absolutely identical, because the Princess entertained him every morning with a few strophes out of the penitential psalm and owl"s song about sedition, Ankerstr[oe]ms,[181] and propagandists. She and Schleunes blew upon _one_ horn,--at least, they blew one melody from it.
Matthieu entered and produced the great weighty matter,--the bold pet.i.tion for Flamin"s life. January p.r.o.nounced an equally bold "No!"
for man is quite as indignant at him who drives him into a groundless fear, as at him who drives him into a well-grounded one. Matthieu coldly repeated his request: "I simply beg your Highness not to suppose that I should ever hold mere friendship as an adequate apology for such a bold pet.i.tion,--the duty of a subject is my excuse."--January, who was annoyed at the uncourteous retraction, broke it off: "The guilty cannot pet.i.tion for the guilty."--"Most gracious sir," said the Evangelist, who sought to drive him into fear and fury at once, "in any other times than ours it would be quite as punishable to guess or to predict certain things as to decree them; but in ours, these three things are easier. Against the day when the Regency-Councillor should lose his life, a plan is arranged, which certain persons have formed for the salvation of his life at the expense of their own."--The Prince--enraged at a boldness which ordinarily resides not within the _snow-line_[182] of courts, but only at the democratic equator--said, with the death-sentence which Mat had long since wanted to get into his face: "I shall have you required to tell tomorrow the names of the wretches who propose to sacrifice their lives for the sake of turning the course of justice." ... Here the page fell down before him, and said quickly: "My name is the first; it is now my duty to be unhappy.
My friend has killed no one, but I did it; he is not the son of a priest, but the first-born son of the murdered Mr. Le Baut." ...
Since pier-mirrors first existed, never was such a dumfounded, distracted visage seen in them as to-day. January dismissed him, in order to collect himself.
We will now in the antechamber say three words about the absent one. A shrewd thinker once said to me, that he had once said to a great connoisseur of the world, "The fault of the great was never to trust themselves in anything, and hence they were led by every one"; and that the connoisseur answered, he had hit it.--January had a grudge against Mat, and that merely on account of his satirical and sensual face,--but not anywise on account of his vices. I take for granted that the reader will certainly have seen courts enough--on the stage, where the higher cla.s.ses get their notions of country people, and we ours of them--to know what one hates there----not vicious persons, not even virtuous ones, but both of these one really loves there (precisely as they do violinists, mechanics, Wetzlar attorneys, intendants) whenever they have need of them.----
The page appeared again. January had allayed the sweet paternal ebullition at the news, since he had heretofore given up all his children for lost. He desired now the proof that Flamin was the (nominal) son of the Chamberlain. About the duel he gave himself not the least concern. The proof was easy for the upright soul to produce.
The soul appealed directly to the mother, who had this very moment arrived from London, having come to save her son, and to the sister herself. The soul had again the antecedent proposition to prove that both had knowledge of the matter:--Matthieu appealed to the letter of the mother which he had some years before read to the blind lord with the borrowed voice of Clotilda, and to the sister"s exclamation during the duel in Maienthal Park, "It is my brother,"--and finally he adduced one more domestic witness in the case, the after-summer, which would now soon appear, and would retouch the maternal mark of the apple, which Le Baut"s son bore on his shoulder.
Matthieu had too much veneration for his Prince and master to call the sovereign of the son the son"s father. He now closed by saying, "He knew not for what reasons Lord Horion had hitherto concealed Flamin"s extraction; but whatever they might have been, all excuses his Lordship had were also his own excuses for having himself kept silence so long,--and so much the more, as the proof of this descent must be more difficult for him than for his Lordship.--Only now, by the arrival of the mother, the _facility_ of the proof was made as great as the _necessity_ of it. All that he could do as a family friend of the Chamberlain had been to become Flamin"s confidant in order to be his protector."
Thereby the Prince was necessarily brought back to the subject of the duel, which he in the beginning, after a few hints, had let drop. It was his way of business to break off soon from an affair of importance to him, to talk quite as long about other things, then to bring that matter forward again, and so pack the important matter away under quite as big layers of unimportant matters, as the booksellers slip contraband books in sheets under white or other paper. Then, too, Flamin"s innocence of the murder was now of more consequence to January; he therefore naturally inquired why he had exposed his friend as a victim even to the show of a duel.
Matthieu said it would be a long story, and it was a bold step to entreat so much attention on the part of his Highness. He began with reporting what--the Dog-Post-Days have hitherto reported. He lied very little. He intimated that, in order to _break off_ Flamin"s love for his unknown sister Clotilda,--at least he wanted to _increase_ it,--he had tried to make him jealous, but had not been able to set him at variance with any one except the lover; nay, it had not even helped matters at all that he had let him be himself an ear-witness of the very pardonable infidelity of Clotilda, but that his friend had at the very last manifested a rage at his sister"s betrothal, which he had been able to appease in no other way than by the illusion of a disguised duel with the father. For in order to prevent a second fight between father and son; he had himself undertaken it, but unhappily with too disastrous an effect.
So far the n.o.ble Mat. The true circ.u.mstances, which are familiar to us, I suppress. January, who was now favorably inclined toward the Evangelist for the removal of a fear into which he himself had thrown him, put to him the natural question, why Flamin took upon himself the murder.--Matthieu: "I fled at once, and it was not in my power to prevent his untruth, which I could not have looked for; but it was in my power to refute it."--January: "Go on in your frankness; it is your vindication; do not evade!"--Matthieu, with a freer mien: "What I had to say I have already said in the beginning, for the sake of saving him; and now he is saved." January went back in thought, could not comprehend, and begged, "Make yourself a little more clear."--Matthieu, with the designed look of a man who prepares silverings-over of his story: "From magnanimity he would have died for him (Mat) who had sinned for him, did not his friends come to the rescue." January shook his head incredulously. "For," the other continued, "as he knows not his high rank, he more readily adopted certain French principles, which would have _alleviated_ for him his death quite as much as certain Englishmen would have made use of them with the people to prevent it."
As a proof, by the way, he adduced the blowing-up of the powder-house.
January saw with astonishment a light glide into a dark cavern, and saw far into the cavern.
One wrongs the excellent Evangelist, if one thinks it satisfies him merely to have saved his friend. His good heart was also bent upon setting up for his Lordship a monumental column, and of laying him under the column as its corner-stone. He gladly (as in "Hamlet") quartered in the play another play, and raised two theatre-curtains. We will seat ourselves in the first box. His previous conduct toward the Regency-Councillor shows plainly enough how far he was capable of carrying a true friendship without offending other friends, e. g. the Princess; for to the latter the finding again of the lost son of the Prince was no remarkable disadvantage, since the son was presented at once as master of a Jacobin lodge and rebel against his step-father and father both, and since his Lordship was so terrible a loser in the matter besides. But inasmuch as Matthieu had nothing to reproach himself with in the case, except his excess of philanthropy, he sought to counteract this extreme by an opposite one, of malice, because Bacon writes: "Exaggerations are best cured by their opposites." Neither, according to his too ardent notions of friendship, could he be a genuine friend of his Lordship"s, since, according to Montaigne, one can have only _one_ true friend, as well as only one lover; and his Lordship already exhibited one such in the person of January.
Allow me in three words to be short and agreeable. If the Arabs have two hundred names for the snake, they should certainly add the two hundred and first,--that of Courtier. Indulge me further in saying, that a man of influence and tone, by a capital crime,--a so-called _debt of blood_,[183]--flourishes full as well as a whole state does upon more pitiful ones in the matter of money.--
January was now prepared to believe anything that explained the foregoing singular things. A lie which unties a knot is more credible to us than one which ties one. Matthieu went on: "He had attended all the republican _concerts spirituels_, in order to take measures against Flamin"s catching the contagion; and he did not carry to an extreme friendship for the three Englishmen and the Lord"s son (Victor), if he looked upon them and him more as tools of some other concealed hand, than as themselves workers on a plan.--This was confirmed by the misuse hitherto made of the innocent Flamin."--By way of excusing Victor, he said,--in doing which, he all along named him the Court-Physician, so that January, in his present mood, was more likely to think of a court-poisoner than anything else,--by way, then, of setting him in a favorable light, he said that individual was a mere lover of pleasure, and only carried out obediently what his father had sketched out for him,--that Victor had disguised himself as an Italian to watch the Princess, and afterward to report to the Lord, at whose behest he probably did it, in a secret interview on an island.--As Italian, he had handed the Princess a watch, in which he had covertly pasted a slip of paper, wherein he had forgotten the higher rank to flatter his own.
The Prince, who loved his spouse with greater jealousy than his betrothed, swept the floor with heavy strokes of the turkey-c.o.c.k"s wing, and pulled out the point of his nose to an unusual length, and proudly inquired how he knew that.--Matthieu replied calmly, "From Victor himself; for the Princess herself knew nothing of it." ...
The reader owes it to me, that he knows better about a thousand things.--Agnola certainly knew the contents of the watch very well; nay, I even imagine, that, when the enraged Joachime informed her of Victor"s direct confession of his _concepit_, she had allowed Mat or Joachime to trace the present recipe, according to which the bridegroom here has to swallow Sebastian"s _billet-doux_.
--"On the contrary," he continued, "she had long after presented his sister the watch, together with the billet.--Joachime had taken it out in Victor"s presence, and he had thought fit to confess to her freely that very thing, which neither she nor he himself had, out of respect, yet disclosed to the Princess.--Meanwhile his sister had _thereupon_ given him the slip,--_whereupon_ he had made advances to Clotilda, perhaps according to a paternal instruction to bring the brother into nearer relations.--But in every instance he mixed up with the paternal schemes of ambition his own of pleasure, and was well disposed, just as the Englishmen were, whom he held to be Frenchmen in disguise."
The Prince, during the whole exhibition of these pretty snake-preparations, concealed his fear behind anger; Matthieu, who saw both _mask_ and _face_, had hitherto cut all according to the former, and made the apparent want of fear the cloak of his boldness in exciting it.--And so he went from the Prince into a sort of indefinite, mock arrest for the murder; but January began to examine _persons_ and _papers_.
Before reporting the result, let me gladly confess that Mat, the n.o.ble, knows how to lie well enough, and all the more, that he puts in truth as lath-work to his mortar of falsehood. As in the Polish rock-salt mines, the good liar always, in the undermining, leaves so many truths standing for pillars as may be necessary to prevent the breaking-in of the arch. In fact, every lie is a happy sign that there is still truth in the world; for, without this, no lie would be believed, and therefore none attempted. Bankruptcies give pleasure to the honest man, as new evidences of the unexhausted religious fund of other men"s honesty, which must be extant, if it is to be deceived. So long as treaties of war and peace are disgracefully broken, so long is there still hope enough left, and so long courts will not want for genuine honesty; for every breach of a contract presupposes that one has been made,--and that is what no one could be any longer, if not one were any longer observed. It is with lies as with false teeth, which the gold thread cannot fasten, except to a couple of genuine ones still remaining.