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 1896' . 
 
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 FRAGILE PAPER 
 Please handle 
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Cornell University Library 
 PT 2455.A3B62 1895 
 
 3 1924 026 189 260 
 
BOHN'S STANDARD LIBRARY. 
 
 RICHTER'S 
 FLOWER, FRUIT. AND THORN PIECES. 
 
GEORGE BELL & SONS 
 
 LONDON : YORK ST. COVENT GARDEN 
 AND NEW YORK : 66 FIFTH AVENUE 
 CAMBRIDGE : DEIGHTON* BELL & CO. 
 
FLOWER, FRUIT, AND THORN 
 PIECES : 
 
 OR, THE 
 
 WEDDED LIFE, DEATH, AND MARRIAGE 
 
 OF 
 
 FIRMIAN STANISLAUS SIEBENK.ES, 
 
 PARISH ADVOCATE 
 IN THE BURGH OF KUHSCHNAPPEL. 
 
 (A GENUINE THORN PIECE.) 
 
 BY 
 
 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER. 
 
 (ItansIatcB from 'dcjt ©ettiran 
 
 BT 
 
 ALEXANDER EWING. 
 
 LONDON 
 
 GEORGE BELL AND SONS 
 
 180=; 
 
 '%.„ 
 
Reprinted from Stereotype plates. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 SECOND EDITION. 
 
 What advantage shall I reap in giving to the world this, 
 my new edition of ' Siehenkges,' embellished and perfected as 
 it is with all the additions, corrections, and improvements 
 which it has been in my power to make? Can I expect to 
 be any the better for it? People will, I daresay, buy it 
 and read it ; but not give much of their time to the study 
 of it, nor be sufficiently detailed and thorough in theii 
 criticism of it. The Pythia of Criticism has hitherto been 
 chary of her oracles to me, as the Greek Pythia was to 
 other inquirers ; she has chewed up my laurels, instead of 
 crowning me with them, and prophesied little or nothing. 
 The author very distinctly remembers setting to work, foi 
 instance, at the second edition of his ' Hesperus,' * with 
 his pruning-saw in his left hand and his oculist's- knife in 
 his right, and applying both instruments to the work to 
 an extraordinary extent ; it was in vain, however, that he 
 looked for anything like an appreciative notice of it, 
 either in literary or non-literary publications. Similarly, 
 in all his new editions (those of ' Fixlein,' the ' Prepara- 
 tory School,' and 'Levana,' are proofs and witnessest), 
 however he may set to work, hanging up new pictures, 
 turning some of the old ones' faces to the wall — marching 
 
 Name of one of the author's other works. t Other works of his. 
 
VI PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. 
 
 off some ideas, relieving them by others — making cha- 
 racters conduct themselves better, or worse, or hit npon 
 better, or upon worse, ideas, as the case may be, — the deuce 
 a reviewer takes the least notice of it, or says a word to 
 the world on the subject. But in this way I learn little, 
 am not told where I have done pretty well, or the reverse, 
 and am minus, perhaps, some little bit of praise and en- 
 couragement which I may deserve. 
 
 This is how the question stands, and several conse- 
 quences follow as matters of course ; the indifferent class 
 of readers consider the author incapable of making any 
 critical emendations, while the enthusiastic class think 
 none are necessary — their common point of agreement 
 being the supposition that he absorbs and emits the 
 whole thing with the same natural, matter of course, ease 
 and absence of effort as the Aphides, the plant-lice, 
 do the honey-dew, which is in such request with the 
 bees ; though, unlike the said bees, he is not very clever 
 at making the wax for it. 
 
 Then there are a good many who think every line 
 should be left in the condition in which it first flowed, 
 or burst, spontaneously from its author's fancy — just as if 
 corrections were not themselves spontaneous outbursts as 
 well as the other. Other readers prefer to belong to none 
 of the above factions — and consequently belong, to some 
 extent, to all. Were it my object to express myself briefly, 
 I should merely have to do so as follows : — firstly, they 
 say, it would be much better if he simply spoke artlessly 
 out whatever he finds it in his heart to say ! and (if this 
 is just what one happens to have done), secondly, how 
 much better would be the effect of that which he finds 
 it in that heart of his to say, and how much it would be 
 improved, were it to be done according to the canons of 
 taste and criticism! I can express these ideas likewise 
 
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. Vll 
 
 ia a more roundabout form, as follows : — If a writer 
 curbs himself too closely, if lie thinks less about the strong 
 throb of his heart than ahout the delicate arterial network 
 and plexus of taste, and breaks up its broad stream into 
 fine, minute, dew-drops of the invisible perspiration of 
 criticism — then they say — " the fact is, that the thicker 
 and more powerful a jet of water is, the higher it shoots, 
 penetrating the atmosphere, and overcoming its resist- 
 ance; whilst a more delicate jet is dissipated hefore it 
 gets half as far." But, when the author does just the 
 reverse of the above; when he presses out all his over- 
 flowing heart in one gush, and lets the blood-billows flow 
 when and how they will, then the critics point the fol- 
 loviing moral — doing it, however, in a metaphor other than 
 I should have expected of them — " A work of art is like a 
 paper kite, which rises the higher the more the boy pulls 
 and holds back the string, but falls the moment he lets 
 it go." 
 
 We return at last to our book. The most [important 
 of the emendations made upon it are, perhaps, the his- 
 torical ; for, since the first edition appeared, I have had 
 the good fortune — ^partly because I have had an opportunity 
 of visiting and seeing Kuhschnappel itself, the scene of 
 the story (as was some time since stated in Jean Paul's 
 letters), partly from my correspondence with the hero of 
 it himself — of becoming acquainted with family circum- 
 stances and occurrences which, probably, I could not have 
 got at in any other way, unless I had sat down and coolly 
 invented them. I have even made prize of some fresh 
 Leibgeberiana, which I am happy to be able now to com- 
 municate to the public. 
 
 The new edition is also improved by the banishment of 
 all those foreigners of words which occupied places more 
 appropriately to he fiUed by natives of the country ; also 
 
VUl PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITIOK. 
 
 by a critical cleansing away of all the genitive final s's 
 of compound words. But really the labour of sweeping 
 and striking out letters and words all through, four long 
 volumes can be estimated so highly by nobody, not even 
 by Posterity, as by the sweeper and striker-out himself. 
 
 Another of the improvements made in the Second 
 Edition is, that I have placed both the " Flower-pieces " at 
 the end of the second volume * (for in the former edition 
 they came both at the "beginning of the first), and that it 
 is no longer the first volume, but, much more appro- 
 priately, the second, which closes with the first Truit- 
 piece. 
 
 And lastly, it may, perhaps, be reckoned as one of the 
 minor improvements, that in the two Flower-pieces — par- 
 ticularly in that of the Dead Christ — I have not made 
 any improvements, but left everything as it was, and not 
 attempted to scrape away any of the golden writing-sand 
 with which I had made the letters a little rough and 
 illegible. 
 
 The above are the principal alterations, concerning 
 which I should be so glad to be favoured with the 
 opinions of able reviewers, to the increasing of my in- 
 formation, perhaps also of my reputation. But, as there 
 could not be a more troublesome business than the com- 
 paring of the old book with the improved one, page by 
 page, as it were, I have deposited in the school-book shop 
 the printed copy of the old edition, in which all the 
 writing-ink emendations of the printing-ink, that is to 
 say, all the places which have been written or stroked 
 through, can be easily seen at a glance, often half and 
 whole pages done to death, so that it would really astonish 
 you. Critics not on the spot must, indeed, content them- 
 
 * Second Book in the translation. 
 
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. IX 
 
 selves with laying the volumes of each of the editions 
 into the opposite scales of a grocer's balance, and then 
 looking, when they will see how much the new edition 
 outweighs the old. Prom my strict and anxious treat- 
 ment ofmy Second Edition, then, all critics may form an 
 idea of my strict and anxious treatment of my first ; they 
 may also form an idea how much I struck out of my 
 manuscript hefore printing, when they ohserve how much 
 I have struck out after printing. 
 
 De, Jean Paul Fk. Eichter. 
 Bjiyreuth, September, 1817. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 FAGS 
 
 PEEFACB TO THE Second Edition ... . v 
 
 PEEP ACE, with which I was obliged to put Jacob Oehrmann, 
 General Dealer, to sleep, because I wished to narrate the 
 " Dog Post Days," and these present " Flower-Pieees," 
 &e., &c., to his Daughter , 1 
 
 Wedded Liee, Death, and Maeeiagb op F. S. SiEBENKiES. 17 
 
 a ©enuine tSSjaxn Piece. 
 
 BOOK I. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 A Wedding Day, succeeding a day of respite — The Counterparts 
 — Dish Quintette in two Courses — Table-talk — Six Arms and 
 Hands '. . . . 19 
 
 CHAPTER n. 
 
 Home Fun — Sundry formal Calls — The Newspaper Article — A 
 Love Quarrel, and a few hard words — Antipathetic ink on 
 the wall — Friendship of the Satirists — Government of 
 Euhschnappel 36 
 
 Appendix to Chapteb II. 
 Government of the Imperial Market Borough of Kuhsohnappel 58 
 
xii CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTEK III. 
 
 Lennette's Honeymoon — Book Brewing — Scbulratli Stiefel — 
 Mr. Everard —A Day before the Fair — The Bed Cow — St. 
 Michael's Fair — The Beggars' Opera — Diabolical Tempta- 
 tion in the Wilderness, or the Mannikin of Fashion — Autnmn 
 Joys — A New Labyrinth 64 
 
 CHAPTER rV. 
 
 A Matrimonial Partie k la Guerre — Letter to that Hair Collector, 
 the Venner — Self-deceptions — Adam's Marriage Sermon — 
 Shadowing and Over-shadowing 100 
 
 End OP THE Pbeface AND OF THE FiEST Book . . . .121 
 
 PREFACE TO THE Second, Thibd and Foueth Books . 131 
 
 PREFACE BY THE AUTHOB OF ' Hespebus ' ... 133 
 
 BOOK II. 
 
 (JHAPTER V. 
 
 The Broom and the Besom as Passion Implements — The Im- 
 portance of a Bookwriter — Diplomatic Negotiations and Dis- 
 cussions on the subject of Candle SuufBng — The Pewter 
 Cupboard — Domestic Hardships and Enjoyments . . 139 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 Matrimonial Jars — Extra Leaflet on the Loquacity of Women — 
 More Pledging — The Mortar and the Snuif-mill — A Scholar's 
 Kiss — On the Consolations of Humanity . . . .171 
 
 CONTINTTATION AND CONCLttSlON OP CHAPTER VI. 
 
 The Checked Calico Dress — More Pledges — Christian Neglect 
 of the Study of Judaism — A Helping Arm (of Leather) 
 stretched forth from the Clouds — The Auction . , .190 
 
 CHAPTER Vn. 
 
 The Shooting-Match — Rosa's Autumnal Campaign — Considera- 
 tions conoorning Curses, Kisses, and the Militia . . .210 
 
CONTENTS. xiii 
 
 CHAPTEE VIII. 
 
 Scruples as to Payment of Debts — The Rich Pauper's Stmday 
 Throne-eeremonial — Artificial Flowers on the Grayo — New 
 Thistle Seedlings of. Contention 243 
 
 JFirst JFIofajEt ^iect. 
 The Dead Christ proclaims that there is no God . . . 259 
 
 SecanU jFlotoei: ^itu. 
 A Dream within a Dream 265 
 
 BOOK III. 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 A Potato War with Women — and with Men — A Walk in 
 December — Tinder for Jealousy — A War of Succession on 
 the subject of a piece of checked calico — Eupture with Stiefel 
 — Sad Evening Music 271 
 
 CHAPTEE X. 
 
 A Lonely New-Year's Day — The Learned Schalaster — Wooden- 
 leg of Appeal — Chamber Postal Delivery — The 11th of 
 Februnry, and Birth-day of the year 1786 .... 312 
 
 CHAPTEE XL 
 Leibgeber's Disquisition on Fame — Firmiau's " Evening Paper " 335 
 
 CHAPTEE XIL 
 
 The Flight out of Egypt — The Glories of Travel — The Un- 
 known — Bayreuth — Baptism in a Storm — Nathalie and the 
 Hermitage — The most important Conversation in all this 
 Book — An Evening of Friendship 347 
 
 CHAPTEE XIIL 
 A Clock of Human Beings — A Cold Shoulder — The Venner . 379 
 
XIV CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 pAca 
 A Lover's Dismissal — Fantaisie — The Child with the Bouquet 
 — The Eden of the Night, and the Angel at the Gate of 
 Paradise 391 
 
 Jirst Jtuit ^te. 
 Letter of Dr. Victor to Cato the Elder, on the Conversion of I 
 into Tliou, He, She, Ye, and They ; or the Feast of Kindness 
 of the 20th March 408 
 
 Postscript by Jean Paul 425 
 
 BOOK IV. 
 
 CHAPTER SV. 
 Eosa von Meyern — Tone-Echoes and After-Breezes from the 
 loveliest of all Nights — Letters of Nathalie and Firmian — 
 Table-talk by Leibgeber 433 
 
 CHAPTER XVI. 
 
 The Homeward Journey, with all its Pleasures — The Arrival at 
 Home 451 
 
 CHAPTER XVII. 
 
 The Butterfly Eosa in the Form of Mining Caterpillar — Tliom- 
 crowns, and Thistle-heads of Jealousy .... 457 
 
 CHAPTER XVIIL 
 After-Summer of Marriage — Preparations for Death . . 463 
 
 CHAPTER XIX. 
 The Apparition — Homecoming of the Storms in August, or the 
 last Quarrel — The Raiment of the Children of Israel . . 471 
 
 CHAPTER XX. 
 
 Apoplexy — The President of the Board of Health — The Notary- 
 Public — The last Will and Testament — The Knight's Move 
 — Revel, the Morning Preacher — The Second Apoplectic 
 Attaxsk . . 484 
 
CONTENTS. XV 
 
 CHAPTER XXI. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 T>r. CElhafen and Medical Boot and ShoemaJring — The Burial 
 Society — A Death's Head in the Saddle — Frederick II. and 
 his Funeral Oration 505 
 
 CHAPTER XXII. 
 
 Journey through Fantaisie — Re-union on the Bindlocher Moun- 
 tain — Bemeok — Man-doubling — Gefrees — Exchange of 
 Clothes — Miinchherg — Solo-whistling — Hof — The Stone 
 of Gladness and Double-parting 515 
 
 CHAPTER XXIII. 
 
 Days in Vaduz — Nathalie's Letter — A New Year's Wish — 
 Wilderness of Destiny and the Heart .... 533 
 
 CHAPTER XXIV. 
 
 News from Kuhsohnappel — Woman's Anticlimax — Opening of 
 the Seventh Seal 5-13 
 
 CHAPTER XXV., AND LAST. 
 
 The Journey — The Churchyard — The Spectre — The End of 
 the Trouble, and of the Book .... , 5S3 
 
PREFACE, 
 
 tVITH WHICH 1 WAS OBLIGED TO PUT JACOB OEHEMANN, GENEEAI. 
 DEALER, TO SLEEP, BECAUSE I WISHED TO NAEKATE THE 
 "DOG POST days"* and THESE PRESENT "FLOWER-PIECES," 
 &C., &C., TO HIS DAUGHTER. 
 
 On Christmas Eve of 1794, when I came from the pub- 
 lishers of the two works in question, and from Berlin, to 
 the town of Scheerau, I went straight from the mail 
 coacli to the house of Mr. Jacob Oehrmann (whose law 
 afiairs I had formerly attended to), having with me letters 
 from Vienna which might be of considerable service to 
 him. A child can see at a glance that at that time there 
 was no idea of anything connected with such a matter as 
 a Preface in my head. It was very cold — ^being the 24th 
 of December — the street lamps were lighted, and I was 
 frozen as stiff as the fawn wliich had been my fellow- 
 passenger (a " blind " one f), by the coach. In the shop 
 itself, which was fiill of draughts and other kinds of wind, 
 it was impossible for a preface-maker of any sense, such as 
 myself, to set to work, because there was a j'oung lady 
 preface-maker — Oehrmann's daughter and shop-girl — 
 already at work making oral prefaces to the little books 
 she was selling — Christmas almanacs of the best of all 
 kinds— duodecimo books, printed on unsized paper indeed, 
 but full of real fragments of the golden and silver ages — 
 I mean, the little books of mottoes, all gold and silver 
 leaf, with which the blessed Christmas gilds its gifts like 
 the autumn, or silvers them over like the winter. I don't 
 blame the poor shop-wench that, besieged as she was bj' 
 
 * The chapters in one of the author's hooks are called " Dog Post 
 Days," for a reason therein explained. 
 
 t This means, in German, one who pays no fiire. Puns which are 
 not trr.nelaiahle must be " explained," or else tbo sentence left out. 
 
 n. M 
 
I PBEFAOE. 
 
 such a crowd of Christmas Eve customers, she hardly 
 had a nod to throw at me, old acquaintance as I was ; 
 and, although I had only that moment arrived from Berlin, 
 she showed me in to her father at once. 
 
 All was in a glow in there, Jacob Oehrmann as well as 
 his counting-house. He, too, was sitting over a book, not 
 as a preface-maker, however, but as a registrator and 
 epitomator ; he was balancing his ledger. He had added 
 up his balance-sheet twice over already, but, to his horror, 
 the credit side was always a Swiss oertlein (that is, 13^ 
 kreuzers, Zurich currency) more than the debit side. The 
 man's attention was wholly fixed upon the driving-wheel of 
 the calculating machine inside his head ; he hardly noticed 
 me, well as he knew me, and though I had Vienna letters. 
 To mercantile people, who, like the carriers they employ, 
 are at home all the world over, and to whom the remotest 
 trading powers are daily sending ambassadors and envoyes, 
 namely, commercial travellers — ^to them, I say, it makes 
 little difference whether it be Berlin, Boston, or Byzance, 
 that one happens to arrive from. 
 
 Being well accustomed to this commercial indifference 
 to fellow mortals, I stood quietly by the fire, and had my 
 thoughts, which shall here be made the reader's property. 
 
 I cogitated, as I stood at the fire, on the subject of the 
 public in general, and found that I could divide it, like 
 man himself, into three parts — into the Buying-public, 
 the Eeading-public, and the Art-public, just as speculativa 
 persons have assumed that man consists of Body, Soul, 
 and Spirit. The Body, or Buying-public, which consists 
 of scholars by trade, professional teachers, and people en- 
 gaged in business — that true corpus callomm of the German, 
 empire — buys and uses the very biggest and most corpulent 
 books (works of body), and deals with them as women 
 do with cookery books, it opens them and consults them 
 in order to be guided by them. In the eyes of this class 
 the world contains two kinds of utter idiots, differing 
 from each other only in the direction taken by their 
 crack-brained fancies, those of the one going too much 
 downward, those of the other too much upward; in a 
 word, philosophers and poets. Naudaeus, in his 'Enume- 
 ration of the Learned Men who were supposed to be 
 
PEEFAOE. 3 
 
 Kecromanoers in the Middle Ages,' has admirably re- 
 marked that this never was the case with jurists or 
 theologians, but always with philosophers. It is the case 
 to this day with the wise of the world, only that, the noble 
 idea of" wizard " and " witchmaster," — whose spiritus rector 
 and grand master seems to have been the devil himself — 
 having got degraded to a name applied to great and clever 
 men and conjurors, the philosopher must be content to 
 put up with the latter signification of the term. Poets 
 are in a more pitiable case still; the philosopher is a 
 member of the fourth faculty, has recognised official posi- 
 tions — can lecture on his own subjects; but the poet is 
 nothing at all, holds no state appointment — (if he did he 
 would no longer be " born," he would be " made " by the 
 Imperial Chancery), and people who can criticise him and 
 pass their opinions upon him throw it in his teeth without 
 ceremony that he makes plentiful use of expressions which 
 are current neither in commerce, nor in synodal edicts, 
 nor in general regulations, nor in decisions of the high 
 court of justiciary, nor in medical opinions or histories of 
 diseases — and that he visibly walks on stilts, is turgid and 
 bombastic, and never copious enough or condensed enough. 
 At the same time, I at once admit that, in the rank thus 
 assigned to the poet, he is treated very much as the night- 
 ingale was by Linnaeus, which (as he was not taking its 
 song into account) he, no doubt properly, classed among 
 the funny, jerking water-wagtails. 
 
 The second part of the public, the Soul, the Eeading- 
 public, is composed of girls, lads, and idle persons in 
 general. I shall praise it in the sequel ; it reads us all, 
 at any rate, and skips obscure pages, where there's 
 nothing but talk and argument, sticking, like a just and 
 upright judge, or historical inquirer, to matters of pura 
 fact. 
 
 The Art-public, the Spirit, I might, perhaps, leave 
 altogether out of consideration ; the few who have a taste, 
 not only for all kinds of taste, and for the taste of all 
 nation's, but for higher, almost cosmopolitan beauties, such 
 as Herder, Goethe, Lessing, Wieland and one or two more 
 — an author has little need to trouble himself about their 
 votes, they are in such a minority, and moreover, they 
 
 B 2 
 
4 PREFACE. 
 
 don't read him. At all events, ttey don't deserve the 
 dedication with which I, at the fireside, came to the con- 
 clusion that I would bribe the great Buying-public, which 
 is, of course, what keeps the book trade going. I resolved, 
 in fact, regularly to dedicate my ' Hesperus,' or the ' Kuh- 
 schnappler Siebenkses,' to Jacob Oehrmann ; and through 
 him, as it were, to the Buying-public. To wit, in this 
 way :— 
 
 Jacob Oehrmann is not a man to be despised, I can 
 tell you. He served as porter of the Stock Exchange in 
 Amsterdam for four years, and rang the Exchange bell 
 from 11.45 till 12 o'clock. Soon after this, by scraping 
 and pinching, he became a "pretty rich house" (though 
 he hept a very poor one), and rose to the dignity of seal- 
 keeper of a whole collection of knightly seals pasted on to 
 noble, escheated, promises to pay. True, like celebrated 
 authors, he assumed no municipal offices, preferring to do 
 nothing but write ; but the town militia of Scheerau, 
 whose hearts are always in the right place (that is to say, 
 the safest), and who bravely exhibit themselves to passing 
 troops as a watchful corps of observation, insisted upon 
 making him their captain, though he would have been 
 quite content to have been nothing but their cloth con- 
 tractor. He is honest enough, particularly in his dealings 
 with the mercantile world; and, far from burning the 
 laws of the Church, like Luther, all he bums even of the 
 municipal law is a title or two of the Seventh Command- 
 ment, indeed, he only makes a beginning at burning them, 
 as the Vienna censorship does with prohibited books ; and 
 even this only in the cases of carriers, debtors, and people 
 of rank. Before a man of this stamp I can, without any 
 qualms of conscience, burn a little sweet-smelling incense, 
 and make his Dutch face appear magnified, to some extent, 
 like a spectre's through magic vapour. 
 
 Now I thought I should portray, in his likeness, some 
 of the more striking features of the great Buying-public ; 
 for he is a sort of portable miniature of it — like itself, he 
 cares only for bread-studies, and beer-studies, for no talk 
 but table-talk, no literature but politics — he knows that 
 the magnet was only created to hold up his shop-door key 
 if he chooses to stick it on to it — the tourmaline only to 
 
PBEFACB. 5 
 
 collect his tobacco ashes, his daughter Pauline to take the 
 place of both (although she attracts stronger things, and 
 with greater attractive power than either) — he knows no 
 higher thing in the world than bread, and detests the 
 town painter, who uses it to rub out pencil marks with. 
 He and his three sons, who are immured in three of the 
 Hanse towns, read or wiite no other, and no less impor- 
 tant, books than the waste-hook and the ledger. 
 
 " May I be d — d," thought 1, as I was warming myself 
 at I the stove, "if I can paint the Buying-public to greater 
 perfection than under the name of Jacob Oehrmann, who 
 is but a twig, or fibre, of it ; but then it couldn't possibly 
 know what 1 meant " it occurred to me ; and on account of 
 this eiror in my calculations, I have to-day hit upon quite 
 another plan. 
 
 Just as I had committed my error the daughter came in, 
 rectified her father's, and brought out the balance cor- 
 rectly. Oehrmann looked at me. now, and became to tome 
 extent conscious of my existence; and, on my presenting 
 the Vienna epistles by way of credentials (epistles of this 
 kind are more to him than poetical, or St. Pauline, epistles) 
 — from being a mere fresco figure on the wall, as I had 
 been up to that time, I became a something possessed of a 
 mind and a stomach, and I was asked (together with the 
 latter) to stay to supper. 
 
 Now, although the critics may set all the cliques and 
 circles of Germany about my ears — aye, and have a new 
 Turkish bell cast specially for the purpose — I mean to 
 make a clean breast of it here, and state in plain words 
 that it was solely on account of the daughter that I came, 
 and that I staj'ed, there. I knew that the darling would 
 have read all my recent books, if the old man had given 
 her time to do it ; and for that very reason it was impos- 
 sible for me to blink the fact that it was' incumbent upon 
 me as a simple duty to talk, if not to sing, her father to 
 sleep, and then tell his daughter all that I had been telling 
 the world, though the agency of the press. This, as of 
 course you perceive, was why I usually came there to 
 have a talk on the evenings of his foreign mail days, when 
 it didn't take much to put him to sleep. 
 
6 PREFACE. 
 
 On tlie Christmas Eve, then, what I had to do was to 
 condense and abridge my " 45 Dog Post Days " into the 
 space of ahont the same number of minutes ; a longish 
 business, rendering a sleep of no brief duration necessary. 
 
 I wish Messrs. the Editors and Eeviewers, who find 
 much to blame in this proceeding of mine, could have just 
 sat down, for once in their lives, on the sofa beside my 
 namesake Johanna Paulina ; they would have related to 
 her most of my biographical histories in those cleverly 
 epitomised forms in which they communicate them in 
 their magazines and papers to audiences of a very diiferent 
 type. They would have been beside themselves with 
 rapture at the truth and felicity of her remarks, at the 
 natural, unaffected, simplicity and> sincerity of her manner, 
 at the innocence of her heart, and at her lively sense of 
 humour, and they would have taken hold of her hand, and 
 cried " let the author treat us to comedies half as delicious 
 as this one which is sitting beside us now, and he is the 
 man for us." Indeed, had these gentlemen, the editors 
 and reviewers, got to know a little more than they do about 
 the art of briefly extracting the pith and marrow of a book, 
 and had they been able to move Pauline just a little more 
 than I think such great critical functionaries could be 
 expected to do .; and had they then seen, or more properly, 
 nearly lost sight of, that gentle face of hers as it melted 
 away in a dew of tears (because girls and gold are the 
 softer and the more impressionable the purer they are), and 
 had they, as of course they would have done, in the 
 heavenliness of their emotion, well-nigh clean forgotten 
 
 themselves, and the snoring father 
 
 ***** 
 
 Good gracious ! I have got into a tremendous state over 
 it myself, and shall keep the preface till to-morrow. It is 
 clear that it must be gone on with in a calmer mood. 
 
 ***** 
 
 I thought I might take it for granted that the master 
 of the house would have tired himself so much with letter- 
 writing on the Christmas Eve, that all that would be 
 wanted to put him to sleep would be some person who 
 ehould hasten the process by talking in a long-winded and 
 tedious style. I considered myself to be that person. 
 
PREFACE. 7 
 
 However, at first, while supper was going on, I only 
 introduced subjects which he would understand. While 
 he was plying his spoon and fork, and till grace had been 
 said, a sleep of any duration was more than could be 
 expected of him. Wherefore I entertained him with matter 
 of interest and amusement, such as my blind fellow- 
 passenger (the fawn), one or two stoppages of payment — 
 my opinions on the French War, and the high prices of 
 everything — that Frederick Street, Berlin, was half ii mile 
 in length — that there was great freedom, both of the .press 
 and of trade, in that city. I also mentioned that in most 
 parts of Germany which I had visited, I had found that the 
 beggar boj's were the "revising barristers" of and "lodgers 
 of appeals" against the newspaper writers; that is to say, 
 that the newspaper makers bring to life, with their ink, the 
 people who are killed in battle, and are able to avail them- 
 selves of these resurrected ones in the next " affaire ; " whilst 
 the soldiers' children, on the other hand, like to kill their 
 fathers and then beg upon the lists of killed : they shoot 
 their fathers dead for a halfpenny each, and the newspaper 
 evangelists bring them to life again for a penny. And 
 thus these two classes of the community are, in a beautiful 
 manner, by reciprocity of lying, the one the antidote to the 
 other, This is the reason why neither a newspaper writer, 
 nor an orthographer, can strictly adhere to Klopstock's 
 orthographical rule, only to write what you hear. 
 
 When the cloth was off, I saw that it was time for me to set 
 my foot to work at the rocking of Captain Oehrmann's cradle. 
 My ' Hesperus ' is too big a book. On other occasions I should 
 Lave had time enough. On these occasions all I had to do to 
 get the great Dutch tulip to close its petals in sleep was, to 
 begin with wars and rumours of wars — then introduce the 
 Jjaw of Nature, or rather the Laws of Nature, seeing that every 
 fair and every war provides a fresh supply — from this point 
 I had but a short step to arrive at the most sublime axioms 
 of moral science, thus dipping the merchant before he knew 
 where he was into the deepest centre of the health-giving 
 inineral well of truth. Or I lighted up sundry new systems 
 (of my own invention), held them under his nose, attacked 
 and refuted them, benumbing and narcotising him with 
 the smoke till he fell down senseless. Then came freedom ! 
 
8 PREFACE. 
 
 Then his daughter and I would open the window to the 
 stars and the flowers outside, while I placed hefore the 
 poor famished soul a rich supply of the loveliest poetical 
 honey-bearing blossoms. Such had been my process on 
 previous occasions. But this evening I took a shorter 
 path. As soon as grace was said, I got as near as I could 
 to complete unintelligibility, and proposed to the house of 
 business of Oehrmann's soul (his body) the following 
 query: whether there were not more Kartesians than 
 Newtonists among the princes of Germany. " I do not 
 mean as regards ihe animal wo)ld," I continued slowly 
 and tediously. " Kartesius, as we know, is of opinion 
 that the animals are insentient machines, and conse- 
 quently, man, the noblest of animals, would be im- 
 properly comprehended in this dictum; what my meaning 
 is, and what I want to know, is this — <lo not the majority 
 (of the princes of Germany) consider that the essentiality 
 of a realm consists in Extension, as Kartesius holds that 
 of matter to do, only the minority of them holding, as 
 Newton (a greater man) does of matter, that its essentiality 
 consists in Solidity." 
 
 He terrified me by answering with the greatest liveli- 
 ness, and as broad awake as you please, " There are only 
 two of them that can pay their way — the Prince of 
 Flachsenfingen and the Prince of " 
 
 At this point his daughter placed a basket of clothes 
 come from the wash upon the table, and a little box 
 of letters upon the 15asket, and set to work printing her 
 brothers' names at full length upon their shirts. As she 
 took out of the basket a tall white festival tiara for her 
 father, and took away from him the base Saturday cowl 
 which he had on, I was incited to become as obscure and 
 as long-winded as the night-cap and my own designs 
 called upon ine to be. 
 
 Now, as there is nothing about which he is so utterly 
 indifferent as my books, and polite literature in all its 
 branches, I determined to settle him, once for all, with 
 this detested stufiK, I succeeded in pumping out what 
 follows. 
 
 " I almost fear, Captain, that you must have rather 
 wondered that I have never enabled you to make acquaint- 
 
PREFACE. 9 
 
 ance in anything like a very detailed or explicit manner 
 with my two latest opijscula, or little works ; the elder 
 of the two is, curiously enough, called ' Dog Post Days,' 
 and the later ' Flower-pieces.' Perhaps, if I just give you 
 a slight idea to-night of the principal points of my forty-five 
 Dog Post Days, and then fetch np with the Flower-pieces 
 this day week, I shall be doing a little towards making 
 amends for my negligence. Of course, it's my fault alone, 
 and nobody else's, if you find you don't quite know what 
 the first of the two may be about — whether you are to 
 suppose it to be a work on heraldry or on insects — or a 
 dictionary of some particular dialect — or an ancient 
 codex — or a Lexicon Homericum — or a collection of 
 inaugural disputations — or a ready reckoner — or an 
 epic poem — or a volume of funeral sermons. It really is 
 nothing but an interesting stoiy, with threads of all the 
 above subjects woven into it, however. I should be very 
 glad myself. Captain, if it were better than it is ; and 
 particularly I wish it were written with that degree of 
 lucidity that one could half read it, and half compose it 
 even, in his sleep. I do not know, Captain, quite what 
 your canons of criticism may be, and hence I cannot say 
 whether 3'our taste is British or Greek. I must admit 
 that I shrewdly suspect that it is not much in the book's 
 favour that there are parts of it to be found — I hope not 
 very many — in which there are more meanings than one, 
 of all kinds of metaphors and flowery styles hashed up 
 together, or an outside semblance of gravity with no reality 
 behind it, but only mere fun (you see Germans insist upon 
 a businesslike style), and (which I am most of all afraid 
 is the case), though the book is of some considerable extent, 
 my attempts at imitating the romances of chivaliy so 
 popular in the present day (which so often seem as if they 
 really must have been written by the old artless knights 
 themselves, fellows who were better at wielding the heavy 
 two-handed sword than the light goose quill) — that my 
 attempts, I say, at imitating these romances have scarcely 
 been attended with that amount of success at which I have 
 aimed at attaining. Perhaps, too, I might oftener have 
 offended the modesty and the ears of the ladies, as many 
 men of the world have thought I might ; for, indeed, booka 
 
10 PREFACE. 
 
 ■which, do not offend the ears of the great — hut only those 
 ©f the chaste — are not considered the most objectionable." 
 
 I saw here, when too late, that I had struck on a subject 
 which enlivened him up prodigiously. I did, indeed, 
 instantly make a jump to a quite different topic, saying, 
 "it is probably the safest way of all, to have improper 
 books deposited in public libraries, where the librarians are 
 of the usual type, because the rudeness of their manners 
 and their disagreeable behaviour, does more to prevent 
 these books from being read than an edict of the censor- 
 ship." But Jacobus would speak out his thought, " Pauline, 
 don't let me forget that the woman Stenzin hasn't paid 
 her fine yet." 
 
 It was uncommonly annoying that, just when I got 
 sleep lured on to within a step or two of him, the Captain 
 should all of a sudden draw his trigger and let off a thing 
 calculated to blow all my sleeping powder to the four 
 winds of heaven. There is nobody more dif&cult to weary 
 than a person who wearies everybody else. I would 
 rather undertake to weary put a lady who happens to have 
 nothing to do in five minutes' time, than a man of business 
 in as many hotjrs. 
 
 Pauline, the darling, anxious to hear the stories which I 
 had accompanied in manuscript to Berlin, put slowly into 
 my hand one by one the following letters from her letter- 
 box : "Story" — i.e. she wanted to be told the "Dog Post 
 Days " that evening. 
 
 . So I set to work again, and, with a sigh, began in this 
 ■way : " The fact is, Mr. Oehrmann, that your humble 
 servant here will soon be setting letters of this sort flying 
 about in Berlin, by his new book, and my " Post Da j-s " may 
 be printed on shirts quite as fine as those your sons' names 
 are being printed upon, if the people happen to have made 
 their paper from such. But, indeed, I must admit to you 
 that as I was sitting on the coach on my way to Berlin, 
 ■with my right foot under my manuscripts, and my left 
 beneath a bale of petitions on their way to the Prince of 
 Scheerau, with the army, the only thing I had in the way 
 of a comforting thought was this ■jrery natural one, ' Devil 
 make a better of it all ! ' Only he's just the very last 
 person to do it. For, good heavens ! in an age like this 
 
PREFACE 1 1 
 
 present age of ours, wlien the instruments of univeraal 
 world historj' are only beitig tuned in the orchestra before 
 the concert begins, that is to say, are all grumbling and 
 squeaking together in confusion (which was why on one 
 occasion the tuning of the orchestra pleased a Morocco 
 Ambassador at Vienna much better than the opera itself) 
 —in such an age, when it is so hard to tell the coward 
 from the brave man — him who lets eveiything go as it 
 pleases fiom him who strives to do something great and 
 good-^those who are withering up from those who are 
 ■flourishing and promising fruit, just as in winter the 
 fruit-bearing trees look much the same as the dead ones — 
 in such an age, there is only one consolation for an author, 
 one which I have not yet spoken of to-night, and it is this : 
 that, after all, though it be an age in which the nobler 
 kinds of virtue, love, and freedom, are the rarest of 
 Phoenixes and birds of the sun, he can manage to put up 
 with it, and can go on drawing vivid pictures and writing 
 lively descriptions of all the birds in question, until they 
 wing their way to us in the body. Doubtless, when the 
 originals of the pictures have fairly come and taken up 
 their abode here on earth, then will all our panegyrics of 
 them be out of place, and loathsome to the palate, and a mere 
 threshing of empty straw. People who are incapable of 
 business can work for the press." 
 
 " There's work, and there's work," the merchant, wide 
 
 awake, struck in; " it all depends Now trade keeps a 
 
 man; but book-writing isn't much better than spinning 
 cotton, and spinning is next door to begging — not meaning 
 anything personal to yourself. But all the broken-down 
 book-keepers and bankrupt tradesmen take to the making 
 of books — arithmetic books, and so on." 
 
 The public sees what a poor opinion this shopkeeper- 
 captain had of me, because my business was only the 
 making of books, though in old days I had been con- 
 tinually running in to him day and night, as notary 
 depute, for the protesting of bills. I know the sort of 
 view many people take of the convenances of society ; but 
 I think anjone on earth will consider that, after being 
 treated in liiis style, I was to be excused for going quite 
 wild on the spot, and responding to the fellow's imperti 
 
12 PREFACE. 
 
 nence, although he was no longer quite in his five senses, 
 in no less formidable a manner than by repeating, accu- 
 rately and without abridgment, my " extra leaflets " from 
 my ' Hesperus.' 
 
 This, of couise, was hmind to put him to death — sleep, I 
 mean. 
 
 And then thousands of propitious stars arose for the 
 daughter and. the author — then commenced our feast of 
 unleavened bread — then I could sit down with her at the 
 front window, and tell her all that which the public has 
 for some time had in its hands. Truly there can be 
 nothing sweeter than to some kind tender heart, hemmed 
 in on all sides and besieged by sermons — which cannot 
 refresh itself at so much as a birthday ball, were it only the 
 superintendent's and his wife's, nor with a novel, though 
 its author be the family legal adviser : to such a beleaguered 
 famishing heart, I say, it is more delicious than virgin 
 honey to march up with a strong army of relief, and, 
 taking hold of some mesh in the nun's veil which is 
 over the soul, tear it wider, let her peep through and 
 look out at the glimmer of some flowery eastern land — to 
 wile the tears of her dreams to her waking eyes — to lift her 
 beyond, her own longings, and at a stroke set free the fond 
 tender heart, long heavy with yearning, and bound in' 
 bitter slavery — to set it free, and to rock it softly up and 
 down in the fresh spring breeze of poesy, while the dewy 
 warmth gives birth to flowers therein of fairer growth 
 than those of the country round. 
 
 I had just finished by one o'clock. I had taken only 
 three hours to the three volumes of my story, because 
 I had torn out all the " extra leaves "' " If the father is the 
 Buying-public, the daughter is the Reading-public, and we 
 must not plague her with anything that's not purely 
 historical," I said, and sacrificed my most precious digres- 
 sions, for which, moreover, such an enchanting neighbour- 
 hood is not quite the proper soil. 
 
 Then the old man coughed, got up from his chair, asked 
 what o'clock it was, wished me good night, and opening 
 the door saw me out (thereby depriving me of a good 
 one), and saw me no more till that night week, on New 
 Year's Eve. 
 
PKEFACE. 13 
 
 My readers will remember that I had promised to come 
 on that evening, because I had to make a brief report 
 to my client concerning my " Flower-pieces " — this very 
 book. 
 
 I assure the gentle reader that I shall report the events 
 of the evening exactly as they occurred. 
 
 I appeared again, then, on the last evening of the year 
 1794, on the red waves of which so many bodies, bled to 
 death, were borne away to the Ocean of Eternity. My 
 client received me with a coldness which I attributed 
 partly to that of the temperature outside (for both men 
 and wolves are most ferocious in hard frost), partly to the 
 Vienna letters which I had — kot with me; and on the 
 whole, I had but little to say to the fellow on this occasion. 
 As, besides, I was going to leave Scheerau on the 
 New Year's Day by the Thursday coach, and was very 
 anxious to lay before my dear Pauline some more Paulina, 
 namely these sketches, iDecanse I knew that whatever other 
 wares she might find upon her counter, these wouldn't be 
 among them — I consider that no editor who has any 
 principles whatever can possibly get into a passion at my 
 having duly appeared. Let any hot-headed person of the sort 
 just listen to the plan I had. I wanted first to give to 
 this silent soul-flower the Flower-pieces, two dreams made 
 of flowers put together mosaic-fashion — next the Thorn- 
 pieces,* from which I had to break away the thorns, that 
 is, the satires, so that nothing lemained but a mere curious 
 story^— and lastly, the Fniit-piece was to be served up last, 
 as it is in the book itself, by way of dessert ; and in this 
 ripe fruit (from which I had previously orally expressed all 
 the chilling ice-apple juice of philosophy, which the press 
 has, however, left in) I meant to appear at the end of the 
 day, myself as Appleworm. This would have led by easy 
 steps to my departure or farewell ; for I did not know 
 whether I should ever again see or hear of Pauline, this 
 flower-polypus, stretching out eyeless, palpitating, tenta- 
 cula, from mere instinct towards the light. With the old 
 
 * This is how all these pieces were really arranged in the first, un- 
 improved edition ; but I am sure Pauline won't be offended that, in 
 the second edition (so strikingly improved) I have adverted more to th« 
 entile German empire, and arranged them very differently. . 
 
14 PREFACE. 
 
 decayed wood ou whicli the polyp was blooming I, of 
 course, having no Vienna letters, had little to do. 
 
 But near as it was to the time for wishing new year's 
 wishes, the old year was doomed to end with wishes 
 unfulfilled. 
 
 Yet I have little to blame mj'self about ; for, as soon as 
 ever I came in, I did my best to tire out the live East India 
 House and put him to sleep, and I continued to do so 
 while he sat there. The only agreeable remarks I made to 
 him were, that when he had said some insulting things 
 about my successor, his present legal adviser, I extended 
 them so as to apply them to the legal profession in 
 general, thus elevating the mere pasquinade into the nobler 
 satire : " I always picture lawyers and clients as two 
 strings of people with buckets or purses near a kind of 
 en gine for quenchin g money thirst — the one row, the clients, 
 always passing away with their buckets, or purses, empty, 
 and the other row standing and handing each other buckets 
 or purses full," said I. 
 
 I think it was not otherwise than on purpose, that I 
 painted to him the great Buying-public with lineaments 
 much like his own — for he is a small Buying-public, only 
 a few feet long and broad. In fact, I made on him an 
 experiment to ascertain what the Buying-public itself 
 would aay to the following ideas. 
 
 " The public of the present day. Captain, is gradually 
 getting to be a ilourisl ling North India Company, and, it 
 seems to me, it will soon rival the Dutch, amongst whom 
 butter and books are articles of export trade only ; the attic 
 salt they have a taste fijr, is that which Benkelszoon used 
 for pickling fish with. Though they have provided 
 Erasmus, in consideration of Ms salt (of a better quality), 
 with a statue (he never ate salt, by the way), yet I think 
 this was excusable in them, when we remember that 
 they first had one erected to the fish-curer in question. 
 Even Campe, who by no means classes the inventors of the 
 spinning-wheel and of Brunswick beer beneath the con- 
 structors and brewers of epic poems, will coincide with me 
 when I say that the German is really being made somc"- 
 thing of at the present day ; that he is positively becoming 
 a serious, solid, well-grounded fellow — a tradesman, a man. 
 
PREFACE, 15 
 
 Df business ; a man getting past his youthful follies, who 
 knows edible from cogitable matter (when he aees it), and 
 can winnow out the latter from the former; who can 
 distinguish the printer from the publisher, and the book- 
 seller (as the more important) from both ; he is becoming 
 a speculative individual who, like the hens who run from 
 a harp string with fox-gut, can't bear the noise of any 
 poet's harp whatever, were it strung with the harper's 
 own heart-strings — and who will soon come to suffer no 
 pictorial art to exist, except upon bales of merchandise,* 
 nor any printing except calico-printing." 
 
 Here I saw, to my amazement, that the merchant 
 was asleep already, and had shut the window-shutters of 
 his senses. was a good deal annoyed that I had been 
 standing in awe of him, as well as talking to him, all this 
 time unnecessarily ; I had been playing the part of the 
 Devil, and he that of King Solomon, supposed by the evil 
 one to be alive when he was dead.f 
 
 Meantime, with the view of not waking him up by means 
 of a sudden change of key, I went on talking to him as if 
 nothing had happened, speaking to him all the time I was 
 slipping away from him further and further towards the 
 window with an exceedingly gradual diminuendo of my 
 tone, as follows : — " And of such a public as this, I quite 
 expect that a time will come when it wUl value shoe 
 leather much above altar - pieces, | and that, when 
 the moral and philosophical credit of any philosopher 
 chances to be in question, its first inquiry of all will be, 
 ' is the fellow solvent ? ' And further, my beloved listener 
 (I continued in the same tone, so as not to run the risk of 
 waking the sleeper by any change in the hind of sound), it 
 
 * I earnestly beg that section of the public the description of whion 
 is here levelled at the head of the shopkeepei-captaia not to suppose 
 it is meant for them ; they must see that I am only joking, and my 
 intention, of course is clear. 
 
 t The Koran says, the devils were compelled to serve and obey 
 Solomon. After his death he was stuffed, and, by means of a stick in 
 his hand, and another propping him up about the os coccygis, kept on 
 such an apparent footing of being alive, that the devils themselves 
 were taken in by it, until the hinder axis of him was eaten by worms, 
 and the sovereign rolled over topsy-turvy. — See Boysen's Koran ia 
 Miohaelis' ' Orient. Bibl.' { Untranslatable pun. 
 
J 6 PREFACE. 
 
 is to be lioped and expected that I shall now have an 
 opportunity of going through, for your entertainment, my 
 Flower-pieces, which have not even been committed to 
 paper as yet, and which I can quite easily finish this 
 evening, if he (father Jacobus) will have the goodness to 
 sleep long enough." 
 
 I commenced, accordingly, as follows : — 
 
 P.S. — But it would be too utterly ridiculous altogether, 
 if I were to have the whole of the Flower and Thorn pieces, 
 which are all in the book itself, printed over again in the 
 preface ! At the end of book the first, however, I shall 
 give the continuation and conclusion of this preface, and 
 of the New Years Eve, and shall then go on with the second 
 book, so that it may be ready for the Easter fair. 
 
 Jean Paul Fr. Eichtek. 
 Hor, 7th Novemhm-j 1796. 
 
WEDDED LIFE. DEATH AND MAEKIAGE 
 
 OF 
 
 F. S. SIEBENKiES, 
 
 PABISH ADVOCATE IK THE ROTAL BURGH OF KTHSCHKAPPaL. 
 
 A GENUINE THORN PIECE. 
 
BOOK I. 
 
 CHAPTEE I. 
 
 A WEDDING DAY, SUCCEEDING A DAT OF RESPITE — THE COUNTER- 
 "PAETS — DISH QUINTBTTB IN TWO COUESES — TABLE-TALK — 
 SIX ARMS AND HANDS. 
 
 SiEBENKa;s, parisli advocate* for the royal borougli of 
 Kuhsohnappel, had spent the whole of Monday at his 
 attic-window watching for his wife that was to be, who 
 had heen expected to arrive from Angspurg a little he- 
 fore service-time, so as to get a sip of something warm 
 before going to church for the wedding. 
 
 The Schulrath of the place, happening to be returning 
 from Augspurg, had promised to bring the bride with him 
 as return cargo, strapping her wedding outfit on to his 
 trunk behind. 
 
 She was an Augspurger by birth — only daughter of the 
 deceased Engeltraut, clerk of the Lutheran Council — and 
 she lived in the Euggery, in a roomy mansion which was 
 probably bigger than many drawing-rooms are. She was 
 by no means portionless, for she lived by her own work, 
 not on other people's, as penisoned court-ladies'-maids do. 
 She had all the newest fashions in bonnets and other head- 
 gear in her hands earlier than the richest ladies of the 
 neighbourhood, albeit in such miniature editions that not 
 even a duck could have got them on; and she erected 
 
 ♦ Or "Poor's Advocate" (more literally). The appointment sc 
 named, exists, or lately existed, in Scotland. 
 
 c 2 
 
20 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH RICHTEB. [BOOK I. 
 
 edifices for tho female head at a few days' notice, on a 
 large scale, after these miniature sketches and small-scale 
 plans of them. 
 
 All that Siebenkaes did during his long wait was to 
 depose on oath (more than once) that it was the d'jvil 
 who invented seeking, and his grandmother who devised 
 waiting. At length, while it was still pretty early, came, 
 not the bride, but a night post from Augspurg, with an 
 epistle from the Schulrath to say that he and the lady 
 " could not possibly arrive before Tuesday. She was still 
 busy at her wedding-clothes, and he in the libraries of 
 the ex-Jesuits, and of Privj' Councillor Zopf, and (among 
 the antiquities) at the city gates." 
 
 Siebenkses's butterfly-proboscis, however, found plenty 
 of open honey cells in every blue thistle blossom of his 
 fate; he could now, on this idle Monday, make a final 
 application of the arm file and agate burnisher to his room, 
 brush out the dust and the writing-sand with the feather 
 of a quill from his table, rout out the accumulations of 
 bits of paper and other rubbish from behind the mirror, 
 wash, with unspeakable labour, the white porcelain ink- 
 stand into a more dazzling whiteness, and bring the butter- 
 boat and the coffee-pot into a more advanced and promi- 
 nent position (drawing them up in rank and file on the 
 cupboard), and polish the brass nails on the grandfather's 
 leather arm-chair till they shone again. This new temple- 
 purification of his chamber he undertook merely by way of 
 something to do ; for a scholar considers the mere arranging 
 of his books and papers to he a purification as of the temple, 
 at least so maintained the parish advocate, saying further, 
 "orderliness is, properly defined, nothing but a happy 
 knack which people acquire of putting a thing for 
 twenty years in the old place, let that place be where 
 it will," 
 
 Not only was he tenant of a pleasant room, but also of a 
 long red dining-table, which he had hired and placed beside 
 a commoner one ; also of some high-backed arm-chairs ; 
 moreover the landlords or proprietors of the furniture and 
 of the lodgings (who all lived in the house) had all been 
 invited by him to dinner on this his play Monday, which 
 was an excellent arrangement, inasmuch as — most of tha 
 
CHAP. I.] FLOWEK, FKUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 21 
 
 people of the house being working-men — their play Monday 
 and his fell together ; for it was only the landlord who was 
 anything superior, and he was a wig-maker. 
 
 I should have had cause to feel ashamed of myself 
 had I gone and used my precious historical colours in 
 portraying a mere advocate of the poor (a fit candidate 
 for his own services in that capacity). But I have had 
 access to the documents and accounts relating to my hero's 
 guardianship during his minority, and from these I can 
 prove, at any hour, in a court of justice, that he was 
 a man worth at least 121)0 Ehenish guldens (i.e. lOOZ.), 
 to say nothing of the interest. Only, unfortunately, the 
 study of the ancients, added to his own natural turn of 
 mind, had endowed him with an invincible contempt for 
 money, that metallic mainspring of the machinery of our 
 human existence, that dial plate on which our value is 
 read oflf, although people of sense, tradespeople for example, 
 have quite as high an opinion of the man who acquires, 
 as of him who gets rid of it; just as a person who is 
 electrified gets a shining glory round his head whether 
 the fluid be passing into or out' of him. Indeed, 
 Siebenkses even said (and on one occasion he did it) that 
 we ought sometimes to put on the beggar's scrip in jest, 
 simply to accustom the back to it against more serious 
 times. And he considered that he justified (as well as 
 complimented) himself in going on to say, " It is easier to 
 bear poverty like Epictetus than to choose it like Anto- 
 ninus; in the same way that it is easier for a slave to 
 stick out his own leg to be cut ofi", than for a man 
 who wields a sceptic a yard long to leave the legs 
 of his slaves alone." Wherefore he made shift to live 
 for ten years in foreign parts, and for half a 3'ear in the 
 imperial burgh, without asking his guardian for a single 
 halfpenny of the interest of his capital. But as it was 
 his idea to introduce his orphan, moneyless bride as mis- 
 tress and overseer into a silver mine all ready opened and 
 timbered for her reception (for such he considered his lOOZ. 
 with the accumulated interest to be), it had pleased him 
 to give her to understand, while he was in Augspurg, that 
 he had nothing but his bare bread, and that what little he 
 could scrape together by the sweat of his brow, went from 
 
22 JEAN PAUL FEIEDKICH KICHTEE, [bOOK I. 
 
 hand to mouth, thougli he worked as hard as any man, 
 and cared little about the Upper House of Parliament or 
 the Lower. " I'll be hanged," he had long ago said, "if I 
 ever marry a woman who knows how much I have a year. 
 As it is, women often look upon a husband as a species of 
 demon, to whom they sign away their souls — often their 
 child — that the evil one may give them money and 
 
 This longest of summer days and Mondays was followed 
 by the longest of winter nights (which is impossible only 
 in an astronomical sense). Early next morning, the 
 Schulrath Stiefel drove up, and lifted out of the carriage 
 (fine manners have twice their charm when they adorn a 
 scholar) a bonnet-block insteaid of the bride, and ordered 
 the rest of her belongings, which consisted of a white 
 tinned box, to be unloaded, while he, with her head under 
 his arm, ran upstairs to the advocate. 
 
 " Your worthy intended," he said, " is coming directly. 
 She is getting ready at this moment, in a farm cottage, 
 for the sacred rite, and begged me to come on before, lest 
 you should be impatient. A true woman, in Solomon's 
 sense of the teim, and I congratulate j"ou most heartily." 
 
 " The Herr Advocate SiebenksBs, my pretty lady ? — I 
 can conduct you to him myself. He lodges with me, and 
 I will wait upon j'ou this moment," said the wig-maker, 
 down at the door, and offered his hand to lead her up ; 
 hut, as she caught sight of her second bonnet-block, stUl 
 Bitting in the carriage, she took it on her left arm as if 
 it had been a baby (the hairdresser in vain attempting 
 to get hold of it), and followed him with a hesitating step 
 into the advocate's room. She held out her right hand 
 only, with a deep curtsey and gentle greeting, to her 
 bridegroom, and on her full round face (everything in it 
 was round, brow, eyes, mouth, and chin) the roses far 
 out-bloomed the lilies, and were all the prettier to look 
 upon as seen below the large black silk bonnet ; while 
 the snow-white muslin dress, the many-tinted nosegay 
 of artificial flowers, and the white points of her shoes, 
 added charm upon charm to her timid figure. She at 
 once untied her bonnet — there being barely time to get 
 one's hair done and be married — and laid her mj'itle 
 
CHAP. I.J FLOWER, FEUIT, AND THOBN PIECES. 23 
 
 garland, whicli she had hidden at the farm that the 
 people might not see it, down upon the table, that her 
 head might he properly put to rights, and powdered for 
 the ceremony (as a person's of quality ought to be) by the 
 landlord, thus conveniently at hand. 
 
 Thou dear Lenette ! A bride is, it is true, during many 
 days, for everyone whom she's not going to many, a poor 
 meagre piece of shewbread — and ospecially is she so to 
 me. But I except one hour, namely, that on the morning 
 of the wedding-day, wi>en the girl, whose life has been 
 all freedom hitherto, trembling in her wedding dress, over- 
 grown (like an ivied tree) with flowers and feathers, which, 
 with others like them, fate is soon to pluck away — and 
 with anxious pious eyes, overflowing on her mother's 
 heart for the last and loveliest time ; this hour, I say, 
 moves me, in which, standing all adorned on the scaffold 
 of joy,- s"he celebrates so many partings, and one single 
 meeting ; when the mother turns away from her and goes 
 back to her other children, leaving her, all fainthearted, 
 to a stranger. " Thou heart, beating high with happiness," 
 I think then, " not always wilt thou throb thus throughout 
 the sultry, years of wedded life ; often wilt thou pour out 
 thine own blood, the better to pass along the path to age, 
 as the chamois hunter keeps his foot from sliding by 
 the blood from his own heel." And then I would 
 fain go out to the gazing, envious virgins by the wayside 
 leading to the church, and say to them, "Do not so 
 begrudge the poor girl the happiness of a, perhaps fleeting, 
 illusion. Ah, what you and she are looking at to-day 
 is the strifB- and beauty-apple of marriage hanging only 
 on the sunny side of love, all red and soft ; no one sees 
 the green sour side of the apple hidden in the shade. 
 And if ye have ever been grieved to the soul for some 
 luckless wife who has chanced, ten years after her wed- 
 ding, to come upon her old bridal dress, in a drawer, while 
 tears for all the sweet illusions she has lost in these ten 
 years rise in a moment to her eyes, are you so sure it will 
 be otherwise with this envied one who passes before you 
 all joy and brightness now ? " 
 
 I should not, however, have performed this unexpected 
 modulation into the "remote key" of tenderheartedness, 
 
24 JEAN PAUL FRIEDEICH KICHTEE. [bOOK I. 
 
 had it not been that I managed to form to myself a picture 
 BO irresistibly vivid of Lenette's myrtle wreath, beneath 
 her hat (I really had not the slightest intention to touch 
 on the subject of my own personal feelings), and her being 
 all alone without a mother, and her powdery whitt'-flower 
 face, and (more vivid still) of the ready willingness with 
 which she put her young delicate arms (she was scarcely 
 past nineteen) into the polished handcuffs and chain-rings 
 of matrimony, without so much as looking round her to 
 
 see which way she was going to be led by them 
 
 I could here hold up my hand and take oath that the 
 bridegroom was quite as much moved as mj'selt, if not 
 more so ; at all events, when he gently wiped the Auricula 
 dust from the blossom-face, so that the flowers there were 
 seen to bloom unobscured. But he had to be careful how 
 he carried about that heart of his — so full to the brim of the 
 potion of love, and tears of gladness — lest it should run 
 over in the presence of the jovial hairdresser and the 
 serious Schulrath, to his shame. Effusion was a thing 
 he never permitted himself. All strong feeling, even of 
 the purest, he hid away, and hardened over : he always 
 thought of poets and actors, who let on the waterworks 
 of their emotions to play for show ; and there was no 
 one, on the whole, at whom he bantered so much as 
 at himself. For these reasons, his face to-day was drawn 
 and crinkled by a queer, laughing, embarrassment, and 
 only his eyes, where the moisture gleamed, told of the 
 better side of this condition. As he noticed presently 
 that he wasn't masking himself sufficiently by merely 
 playing the part of barber's mate, and commissary of pro- 
 visions (of the breakfast), he adopted stronger measures, 
 and began to exhibit himself and his movable property 
 in as favourable a light as possible to Lenette, in- 
 quiring of her whether she didn't think her room " nicely 
 situated," and saying, " I can see into the senate house 
 window, on to the great table, and all the ink bottles. 
 Several of these chairs I got last spring at a third of their 
 value, and very handsome they are, don't you think 
 so? My good old grandfather's chair here, though" 
 (he had sat down in it, and laid his lean arms on the 
 chair's stuffed ones), " does, I think, take the precedence in 
 
CHAP. I.] FLOWEB, FRUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 25 
 
 the grandfather dance ; * ' how they so softly rest,' arm 
 ■upon arm ! The flowers upon my table-cloth are rather 
 cleverly done, but the coffee-tray is considered the better 
 work of the two, I am given to understand, on account of its 
 flora being japanned ; however, they both do their best in 
 the flower line. My Leyser with his pigskin ' Meditations ' 
 is a great ornament to the room : the kitchen, though, is 
 the place — better still than this rocm ; there are pots, all 
 ranged side by side — and a]', sorts of things — the Imre- 
 skinner and the hare-spit~-my father used to shoot the 
 hares for these." 
 
 The bride smiled on him so contentedly that I must 
 almost believe she had heard the greater part of the story 
 of the lOOZ. (with interest) in her Fuggery through twenty 
 united ear- and speaking-trumpets. I shall be the more 
 inclined to believe this if the public should happen to be 
 looking forward eagerly to the hour when he is to hand it 
 over to her. 
 
 It may not be othenvise than agreeable to my fair readers 
 to be informed that the bridegroom now put on a liver- 
 coloured dress coat, and that he waited to the church with 
 his diess-maker without any dress cravat, and with no 
 queue in his hair, picturing as lie went, to his own satirical 
 delight, the slanderous glances with which the fair Kuh- 
 schnappelers were following the good stranger girl across 
 the market to the sacrificial altar of her maiden name. He 
 had said on a previous occasion," We ought rather to facilitate 
 than obstruct backbiting, to a moderate extent, in a married 
 woman, as some slight compensation for lost flatteries." 
 
 The Schulrath Stiefel remained in the bridal chamber, 
 where he sketched the outlines of a critique on a school- 
 programme at the writing-table. 
 
 I see before me, as I write, the lovers kneeling at the 
 altar steps ; and I should like to cast wishes at them (as 
 flowers are thrown), especially a wish that the}' may be 
 like the married in Heaven, who, according to Sweden- 
 borg's vision, always merge into one angel — although on 
 earth, too, they are often fused, by warmth, into one angel, 
 and that a fallen one — the husband (who is the head of 
 
 * The " Grandfather Dance " is equivalent to the English " Sir 
 Roger de Coverley." 
 
26 JEAN PAUL FEIEDKICH EICHTEE. [bOOK I. 
 
 the wife) representing the butting head of this evil one ; 
 this wish, I say, I would fain cast at them ; but my atten- 
 tion, in compaon with that of all the wedding company 
 is riveted by an extraordinary circumstance and puzzling 
 apparition behind the music desks of the choir. 
 
 For there appears there, looking down at us — and we all 
 looking up at it — Siebenkses's spirit, as the popular ex- 
 pression has it, i. e. his body, as it ougM to be called. If 
 the bridegroom should look up he might turn pale, and 
 think he saw himself. We are all wrong ; he only turns 
 red. It was his friend Leibgeber who was standing there, 
 , having many j'ears ago vowed to travel any distance to 
 / his marriage, solely that he might laugh at him for twelva 
 hours' time. 
 
 There has seldom been a case of a royal alliance between 
 two peculiar natures like that between these two. The 
 same contempt for the childish nonsense held in this 
 life to be noble matter, the same enmity to all pettiness and 
 perfect indulgence to the little, the same indignation with 
 dishonourable selfishness, the same delight in laughing in 
 this lovely madhouse of an earth, the same deafness to 
 the voice of the multitude, but not to that of honour; 
 these are but some of the first at hand of the similarities 
 which made of these two but one soul doing duty in two 
 bodies. And the fact that they were also foster-brothers 
 in their studies, having for nurses the same branches of 
 knowledge, including the Law herself, I do not reckon 
 among their chief resemblances ; for it is often the case 
 that the very identity of study becomes a dissolving de- 
 component of friendship. Indeed, it was not even the dis- 
 similarity of their opposite poles which determined their 
 I mutual attraction for each other (Siebenkses leant towards 
 ' forgiving, Leibgeber towards punishing ; the former was 
 more a satire of Horace, the latter a street ballad of Aristo- 
 phanes with unpoetic as well as poetic harshnesses). But, 
 as two female friends are fond of being dressed alike, these 
 two men's souls had put on just the same frock-coat and 
 morning costume of life; I nioan, two bodies of identical 
 fashion, colour, button-holes, finishings, and cut. Both 
 had the same flash of the eyes, the same earthy- coloured 
 face, the same tallness, leanness, and everything. And 
 
CHAP. I.] FLOWER, FETJIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 27 
 
 indeed, the Nature freak of counterpart faces is commoner 
 than we suppose, because we only notice it when some 
 prince or great person casts a corporeal reflection. 
 
 For which reason I very much wish that Leibgeber had 
 not had a slight limp, so that he might not have been 
 thereby distinguishable from Siebenkaes, seeing, at least, 
 that the latter had cleverly etched and dissolved away his 
 own peculiar mark by causing a live toad to breathe its last 
 above it. For there had been a pyramidal mole near his left 
 ear, in the shape of a triangle, or of the zodiacal light, or a 
 tumed-up comet's tail, of an ass's ear in short. Partly from 
 friendship, partly from the enjoyment they had in the 
 scenes of absurdity which their being confounded with each 
 other gave rise to in every-day life, they wished to' carry 
 the algebraic equation which existed between them yet a 
 step further, by adopting tlio same Christian and surname. 
 But on this point tliey had a friendly contest, as each 
 wanted to be the other's namesake, till at length they set- 
 tled the difference by exchanging names, thus following 
 the example of the natives of Otaheite, among whom the 
 lovers exchange names as well as hearts. 
 
 As it is now several years since my hero was thus 
 lightenedof his worthy name by this friendly name-stealer 
 receiving the other worthy name in exchange, I can't do 
 anything to alter this in mj- chapters. I must go on 
 calling him Firmian Stanislaus Siebenkces as I did at the 
 beginning, and the other Leibgeber ; although it is quite un- 
 necessary for any reviewer to point out to me that the more 
 comic name of Siebenkses would have been better suited to 
 this more humoristic newcomer, with whom, however, the 
 world shall yet be better acquainted than I am myself. 
 
 When these two counterparts caught sight of one another 
 in the church, their blushing faces crinkled and curled 
 oddly, at which the looker-on laughed, until he compared 
 the faces with the eyes, which glowed warm with the 
 deepest affection. While the wedding-rings were being 
 exchanged, Leibgeber in the choir took from his pocket a 
 pair of scissors and a quarto sheet of black paper, and cut 
 out a distant view of the bride's profile. This cutting out 
 of likenesses he generally gave out as being Ins cookshop and 
 bakery upon his perpetual journeyings ; and as it appears 
 
28 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEIOH EICHTEE. [bOOK I. 
 
 that this strange man does not choose to disclose upon 
 what eminences the waters gather which well up for him 
 down in the valleys, I am glad to quote (and express my 
 own belief in) a frequent saying of his regarding his 
 profile cutting — " In the process of clipping, slices of 
 bread, we know, fall with the cuttings for the book- 
 hinder, the letter-writer, and the lawyer, when the paper 
 is white ; but in clipping hlack paper, whether profiles or 
 white mourning letters with black borders, there fall many 
 more ; and if a man is versed in the liberal art of painting 
 his fellow Christian blacker than he is — with more mem- 
 bers than one — the tongue for instance can do it to some 
 extent — then Fortune, the Babylonish harlot, will ring 
 that man's bells (his dinner bell, and his little altar bell), 
 till her arm is half crippled." 
 
 While the deacon was laying his hands on the pair, 
 Leibgeber came down and stood at the red velvet steps of 
 the altar. And when the ceremony was over he made, on 
 the occasion of a meeting such as this, after a separation 
 of some half-a-j-ear or so, the following somewhat lengthy 
 speech : — 
 
 " Good morning, Siebenkaes." 
 
 They never said more to each other, though years might 
 have elapsed ; and at the resurrection of the dead, Sie- 
 benkaes will answer him, just as he did to-day, — 
 
 " Good morning, Leibgeber." 
 
 The twelve hours of banter, however, which friends 
 often find it an easy matter to threaten each other with 
 in absence, are an impossibility to the tender heart, keenly 
 enough alive though it may be to the humorous sides of 
 matters, when it is moved (as in this case) at the sio-ht 
 of the friend passing into the vestibule of some new 
 labyrinth of our subteiranean existence. 
 
 I have now before my writing-desk the long wedding- 
 table set out ; and 1 am soriy that no painting of it occurs 
 on any of the vases buried at Herculaneum, as it would 
 have been dug out with the rest, and an exact copy of it 
 given in the Herculanean illustiations, so that I could 
 have inserted the copy in place of anything else. Few 
 have a higher opinion of the powers of my pen than 
 I have myself; but I see quite well that it is neither m 
 
CHAP. I.] FLOWER, FEUIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 29 
 
 my power nor in my pen's to hilf portray, and that in a 
 feeble style, how the gnests — there were almost as many 
 there as there were chairs — enjoyed themselves at the 
 dinner; how, moreover, there was not one single rogue 
 among them (for the bridegroom's guardian, Heimlicher 
 von Blaise, had sent an excuse, saying he was very sick 
 indeed); how the landlord of the house, a jovial, con- 
 sumptive Saxon, did something towards expediting his de- 
 parture from this life by his powdering and his drinking ; 
 how they banged the glasses with the forks, and the table 
 with the marrowbones, that the former might be filled 
 and the latter emptied ; how in all the house not a soul, 
 not" even the shoemaker or the bookbinder, did a stroke of 
 any other work but eating, and how even the old woman 
 Sabel (Sabine) who squatted under tie mouse-coloured 
 town gate, shut up her stall on this one day before the 
 closing of the gate; how not only was there one course 
 served up, but a second, a " Doppelganger." To anyone, 
 indeed, who has dined at great men's tables, and there 
 remarked how fine dishes, if there are two courses, have 
 got to be marshalled according to the laws of rank, it will 
 not appear unheard of or over splendid that Siebenkees 
 (the hairdresser's wife had done the cooking on this 
 occasion) provided for the first course. 
 
 1. In the centre the soup-tub, or broth fishpond, where- 
 in people could enjoy the sport of crayfish-catching with 
 their spoons, although the crayfish, like the beavers, had 
 in this water no more than Eobespierre had in the con- 
 vent — that is to say, merely the tail. 
 
 2. In the first quarter of the globe a beautiful beef 
 torso, or cube of meat, as pedestal of the entire culinary- 
 work of art. 
 
 3. In the second, a fricassee, being a complete pattern- 
 card of the butcher's shop, sweetly treated. 
 
 4. In the third, a Behemoth of pond-carps, which might 
 have swallowed the prophet Jonah, but which underwent 
 his fate itself. 
 
 5. In the fourth, a baked hen-house of a pie, to which 
 the birds had sent their best members, as a community 
 does to parliament. 
 
 I cannot deny myself and my fair readers the pleasure 
 
30 JEAN PAUL FEIEDBICH EICHTEK. [bOOK L 
 
 of just slightly sketching for them a little "cookery -piece" 
 of the second course. 
 
 1. In the middle stood, as a basket of garden-flowers 
 might, a pile of cress-salad. 2. Then the four comers 
 were occupied hy the four syllogistic figures, or the four 
 faculties. In the first corner of the table was, as first 
 syllogistic figure and faculty, a hare, who, as antipode of 
 a barefooted friar, had kept on his natural fur boots in the 
 pan, and who, as Leibgeber justly remarked, had come 
 from the field with his legs safe and sound in spite of the 
 enemy's fire, more fortunate, in this respect, than many 
 a soldier. The second syllogistic figure consisted of a 
 calf's tongue, which was black, not from arguing, but 
 from being smoked. The third, crisped cole wort, but 
 without the stalks : this, ordinarily the food of the two 
 preceding faculties, was on this occasion eaten along with 
 them- thus is it that in this world one goes up and 
 another down. The concluding figure was made up of the 
 three figures of the bridal pair and an eventual baby 
 baked in butter ; these three glorified bodies, which, like 
 " the three children," had come forth unscathed from the 
 fiery furnace, and had raisins for souls, were eaten up 
 bodily, . skin and bones, by those cannibals the guests, 
 with the exception of an arm or so of the infant, which, 
 like the bird Phoenix, was personified ere it existed. 
 
 This picture draws me on. But it ought to be coloured, 
 and as regards the luxury of the feast, it would not be 
 passing it over too lightly were I to compare it to a Saxon 
 electoral banquet, by reference to which I might illns>- 
 trate it. It is true, the electors of that country require 
 a good deal (and on that account they used to be weighed 
 every year) ; and I am quite aware that at the beginning 
 of the 16th century, a Saxon treasurer made the following 
 entry in his accounts : — " This daj' was our gracious 
 sovereign at the wine, with his court, for which I have 
 had to disburse the sum of fifteen gulden (26s.). That's 
 what I call banquetting ! " But what would the Saxon 
 treasurer have written? how he would have lifted his 
 hands up with amazement if he had read in my very first 
 chapter that a poor's advocate had gone and spent three 
 gulden and seven groschen more than his royal master ! 
 
CHAP. I.] FLOWEK, PEUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 81 
 
 As is tho case -with many natural springs, the fountains 
 of mirth, which welled but slowly in the daytime, jetted 
 up higher in the hearts of the guests as the evening came 
 on. The two advocates indeed told the company that, as 
 they remembered from their college days, though the 
 privilege formerly possessed by every German of drinking 
 his fill had been but too much curtailed by emperors and 
 parliaments, and the imperial decrees of 1512, 1531, 1548, 
 and 1577 permitted no drunkenness, yet they did not 
 prohibit Kuhschnappel from exercising the right common 
 to all imperial states, of abrogating imperial statutes in cases 
 where local laws exist within their own boundaries. The 
 Schulrath alone could not quite see (and he shook his 
 head about it internally to himself twenty times) how 
 two scholars, two lawyers at all events, could go on 
 gravely joking with a set of such unlearned plebeians and 
 empty heads as were here supported upon elbows ; — ^joking 
 with them, and actually conversing about the utter rubbish 
 which they talked. More than once he spliced on threads 
 of scholarly speech, concerning the newest, most highly 
 elaborated school addresses, as well as sundry critiques on 
 the same, but the advocates would have nothing to do with 
 his threads, but made the bookbinder speak the appren- 
 tice speech he made at his admission to the rank of master, 
 to which the shoemaker, of his own motion, stitched and 
 cobbled on one which he had made on a similar occasion. 
 
 Siebenkses remarked to the company in general that in 
 the upper circles of society people are much graver, and 
 more tedious, and empty than in the lower ; that in the 
 former, if any party happens to come to an end without 
 accursed tedium, people talk of it for a whole week, whereas 
 in the latter everyone contributes so much to the merry 
 picnic of conversation that the only thing there generally 
 is not enough of, is beer. " Oh !" he went on, " if everyone 
 of our condition would but think of it, he would but envy 
 those of a lower; how accurately, in a figurative sense too, 
 does that old truth hold good, that coarse linen keeps one 
 much warmer than fine linen, or even silk, just as a wooden 
 house is easier warmed than a stone one — and the stone 
 one again doesn't get cool so soon as the wooden in summer 
 —or as coarse brown flour is much more nourishing than 
 
32 JEAN PAUL FRIEDKICH RICHTEB. BOOK I. 
 
 the fine wliite, as all the doctors tell us. And I cannot 
 bring myself to believe that ladies in Paris who wear 
 diamond hairpins, lead half such happy lives as the women 
 there who get their living by picking np old hairpins out 
 of the street sweepings; and many a one whose fuel is 
 nothing but dry fir-cones, gathered by himself as a substi- 
 tute for fir-fuel" (here the fuel economising company 
 thought vividly of their own case), "is often quite as well 
 off on the whole as people wh.) can preserve green cones in 
 sugar and eat them." 
 
 " Friend Parish Advocate," said Leibgeber, " there you 
 hit it ! In the tap-room and the bar-parlour the worst is 
 at the beginning, the blow, the kick, the angry word come 
 first of all ; the pleasure swells with the reckoning. The 
 reverse is the case in the palace ; in a ' palais ' for the 
 'palais' everybody's enjoyment goes into his mouth at 
 the same instant ; just as the little Aphides on the leaves 
 all lift up their tail-ends, and squirt out the honey at the 
 same moment,* in the palace it is absorbed with like simul- 
 taneousness and sociability. Tediousness, ajjain, annoy- 
 ance and satiety, are only mixed up ingeniously among the 
 various pleasures which are served up and administered in 
 the course of a great entertainment, just as we give a dog 
 an emetic by rubbing him all over with it, so that he may 
 bring it to operate by licking it slowly off." 
 
 And other similar sayings were spoken. When once 
 any pleasure has reached a considerable height, its natural 
 tendency is to become greater. Many of the lower class 
 members of the sitting exercised the privilege of drink, 
 and of the special inquisition, to say " Thou " to one 
 another. Even the gentleman in the red plush coat (the 
 Schulrath was given to wear one in the dog-day holidays) 
 screwed up his lips, and smiled in a seductive manner, as 
 elderly maiden ladies do in the presence of elderly single 
 gentlemen, and gave hints that he had got at home a couplo 
 of real Horatian bottles of champagne. " Not sparkling 
 then, I'm sure?" Leibgeber answered inquiringly. The 
 Schulrath, who thought the best kind of champagne exactly 
 the worst, replied with some self-consciousness, "If it isn't 
 sparkling, well and good, I swear I'll drink every drop of 
 
 * Wilhelm's ' Kuoreations in Natural History. Insects.' Vol. L 
 
CHAP. I.J FLOWER, FKUIT, AND THORN PIECES. SW 
 
 it myself." The bottles appeared. Leibgeber, taking the 
 first one, carefully filed throngh its barrier chain, removed 
 the cork and opened it as if it had been a last will and 
 testament. 
 
 What I maintain is, that, even should the two balsam- 
 trees of life, namely wit and the love of onr fellow men, be 
 ■withered away up to the very topmost twig, they can still 
 be brought to life by a proper shower out of the watering 
 pot of these said bottles — in three minutes they will begin 
 to sprout. As the glad, wild essence, the wine of the 
 silver foam, touched the heads of the guests, every brain 
 began to seethe and glow while fair air-castles rose in 
 fcach amain. Brilliant and many tinted were the floating 
 bubbles blown and set free by the Schulrath Stiefel's ideas 
 of all categories, his simple as well as his compound ideas, 
 his innate ideas, and also his fixed. And can it ever be 
 forgotten that he ceased to make learned statements, except 
 on the subject of Lenette's perfections, and that he told 
 Leibgeber in confidence, that he should really like to 
 marry, not indeed, " the tenth Muse, or the fourth Grace, 
 or the second Venus— for it was clear who had got her 
 already — but some step-sister goddess, a distant relation 
 or other of hers." During the whole journey, he said, he 
 had preached from the coachbox, as from a pulpit, enlarging 
 to the bride on the subject of the blessedness of the married 
 state, painting it to her in the brightest colours, and drawing 
 such a lively picture of it, that he quite longed to enter 
 into it himself: and the bridegroom would have thanked 
 him if he had seen how gratefully she had looked at him 
 in return. And, indeed, the bride was a great success, 
 and happy in all she did that day, and particularly 
 that evening; and what became her best of all was that 
 on such a high day as this, she waited upon others more 
 than she let herself be waited upon — that she put on a 
 light every-day dress — that even at this advanced stage 
 of her own education she took private lessons in cookery 
 and household matters from her female guests, who aired 
 their own theories on these subjects — and that she already 
 began to think about to-morrow. Stiefel, in his inspired 
 state, ventured upon exploits which were all but impos- 
 sible. He placed his left arm under his right, and thus 
 
 n. D 
 
34 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH EICHTEE. [bOOK I. 
 
 supporting its weight and that of its plush sleeve, in a 
 horizontal position, snuffed the candle before the whole 
 company, and did it rather skilfully on the whole ; some- 
 what lite a gardener on a ladder holding out his pruning 
 shears at arm's length to a high branch and snipping off 
 the whole concern by a slight movement of his hand at the 
 bottom. He asked Leibgeber plump out to give him a 
 profile of Lenette, and later on, when he was going away, 
 he even made an attempt (but this was the only one 
 of his ventures which failed) to get hold of her hand and 
 kiss it. 
 
 At length all the joy-fires of this happy little company 
 burnt down like their candles, and one by one the rivers 
 of Eden fell away into the night. The guests and the 
 candles got fewer and fewer ; at last there was only one 
 guest there, Stiefel (for Leibgeber is not a guest), and one 
 long candle. It is a lovely and touching time when the 
 loud clamour of a merry company has finally buzzed itself 
 away into silence, and just one or two, left alone, sit 
 quietly, often sadly, listening to the faint echoes, as it 
 were, of all the joy. Finally, the Schulrath struck the 
 last remaining tent of this camp of enjoyment, and de- 
 parted ; but he would not for a moment suffer that those 
 fingers, which, in spite of all their efforts, his lips could not 
 touch, should be clasped about a cold brass candlestick, 
 for the purpose of lighting him downstairs. So Leibgeber 
 had to do this lighting. The husband and wife, for the 
 first time, were alone in the darkness, hand in hand. 
 
 Oh, hour of beauty ! when in every cloud there stood a 
 smiling angel, dropping flowers instead of rain, may some 
 faint reflection from thee reach even to this page of mine, 
 and shine on there for ever. 
 
 The bridegroom had never yet kissed his bride. He 
 knew, or fancied, that his face was a clever one, with sharp 
 lines and angles, expressing energetic, active effort ; not a 
 smooth, regular, " handsome " one : and as, moreover, he 
 always laughed at himself and his own appearance, he sup- 
 posed it would strike other persons in the same light. 
 Hence it was that, although as an every-day matter he 
 rose superior to the eyes and tongues of a whole street 
 (not even taking the pains mentally to snap his fingers at 
 
CHAP. I.] FLOWEB, FEUIT, AND THOKN PIECES. 35 
 
 them), he never, except in extraordinary moments of 
 dithyrambics of friendship, had mustered up the courage 
 to kiss his Leibgeber — lei alone Lenette. And now he 
 pressed her hand more closely, and in a dauntless manner 
 turned his face to hers (for, you see, they were in the dark, 
 and he couldn't see her); and he wished the staircase had 
 as many steps as the cathedral tower, so that Leibgeber 
 might be a long time coming back with the candle. Of 
 a sudden there danced (so to speak) over his lips a gliding, 
 tremulous kiss, and — then all the flames of his affection 
 blazed on high, the ashes blown clean away. For Lenette, 
 innocent as a child, believed it to be the bride's duty to give 
 this kiss. He put his arms about the frightened giver with 
 the courage of bashfulness, and glowed upon her lips with 
 his with all the fire wherewith love, wine and joy had en- 
 dowed him ; but — so strange is her sex — she turned away 
 her mouth, and let the burning lips touch her cheek. And 
 there the modest bridegroom contented himself with one 
 long kiss, giving expression to his rapture only in tears 
 of unutterable sweetness which fell like glowing naphtha- 
 drops upon Lenette's cheeks, and thence into her trembling 
 heart. She leant her face further away ; but in her 
 beautiful wonder at his love, she drew him closer to her. 
 
 He left her before his darling friend came back. The 
 tell-tale powder-snow which had fallen on the bridegroom 
 — that butterfy-dust which the very slightest touch of 
 these white butterflies leaves upon our fingers (and hence 
 it was a good idea of Pitt's to put ataxon powder in 1795) 
 — ^told some of the story, but the eyes of the friend and the 
 bride, gleaming in happy tears, told him it all. The two 
 friends looked for some time at each other with embarrassed 
 smiles, and Lenette looked at the ground. Leibgeber said, 
 " Hem ! Hem !" twice over, and at length, in his perplexity, 
 remarked, " We've had a delightful evening 1" He took up 
 a position behind the bridegroom's chair, to be out of sight, 
 and laid his hand on his shoulder, and squeezed it right 
 heartily ; but the happy Siebenkaes could restrain him- 
 self no longer; he stood up, resigned the bride's hand, 
 and the two friends, at last, after the long yearning of the 
 long day, as if celebrating the moment of their meeting, 
 stood silently embracing, united by angels, with Heaven 
 
 D 2 
 
36 JJEAN PAUL FBIEDEICH EICHTEE. [bOOK L 
 
 all aioTind them. His heart beating higher, the bridegroom 
 ■would fain have widened and completed this circle of union, 
 by joining his bride and his friend in one embrace ; but 
 the bride and the friend took each one side of him, each 
 embracing only him. Then three pure heavens opened in 
 glory in three pure hearts; and nothing was there but 
 God, love, and happiness, and the little earthly tear which 
 hangs on all our joy-flowers, here below. 
 
 In this their great joy and bliss, overborne bj' unwonted 
 emotion, and feeling almost strange to each other, they 
 had scarce the courage to look into each other's tearful 
 eyes ; and Leibgeber went away in silence, without a word 
 of parting or good night. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 HOME FUN SUNDRY FORMAL CALLS THE NEWSPAPER ARTICLE 
 
 — A LOVE QUARREL, AND A FEW HARD WORDS ANTIPA- 
 THETIC INK ON THE WALL FRLENDSHIP OF THE SATIRISTS 
 
 — -GOVERNMENT OF KUHSCHNAPPEL. 
 
 There is many a life which is as pleasant to live as to write, 
 and the material of this one, in particular, which I am 
 ' engaged in writing, is as yet always giving out, like 
 rosewood on the turning lathe, a truly delicious perfume, 
 all over my workshop. Siebenkaes duly arose on the 
 Wednesday, but not till the Sunday was it his intention to 
 deposit in the hands of his diligent house goddess — who 
 put a cap on to her cap-block in the morning before she 
 put one on to herself — the silver ingots from his guardian's 
 coffer (wrapped in blotting paper), her palisades of 
 refuge in the siege of this life ; for in fact he couldn't do 
 «o any sooner, because his guardian had gone into the 
 country, that is to saj', out of town, till the Saturday 
 night. " I can give yon no notion, old Leibgeber," said 
 Siebenkses, " what a joy I feel in looking forward to how 
 
CHAP. II.j FLOWER, FRUIT, AND THORN PIECES. '67 
 
 this will delight my wife; I'm sure, to give her pleasure, 
 I could wish it were three thousand dollars. The dear 
 child has always hitherto had to live from bonnet to bon- 
 net, but how she mil consider herself a woman set up 
 on a sudden for life, when she finds she can carry out a 
 hundred housekeeping projects, which, I see as well as 
 possible, she has got in her head already. And then, 
 old boy, with the money in our hands, we shall begin 
 the keeping of my silver wedding directly, the moment 
 the evening service is over — there shall be a good half- 
 florin's worth of beer in every room in the house. Look 
 here ! why shouldn't the dove, or call him the sparrow, of 
 my hymen play out beer on the people as the two-headed 
 eagle in Frankfort does wine at a coronation ?" Leibgeber 
 answered, " The reason he can't is, that the prey he 
 catches is of quite another brand. The sour wine (of the 
 Frankfort eagle) is but the grapeskins — the feathers, the 
 wool, and the hair which eagles always eject." 
 
 It would be of no use whatever — because hundreds of 
 Kuhschnappelers would correct my statement in their local 
 paper, the ' Imperial News ' — if I were to tell a falsehood 
 here (which I should like very much to do), and assei t 
 that the two advocates spent the short week of their being 
 together with that gravity and propriety which, becoming 
 as they are to mankind in general, do yet more particularly 
 secure to scholars and to the learned the respect and 
 consideration of commoner minds, to say nothing of the 
 Kuhschnappelian intelligences. 
 
 Unfortunately I have got to sing to another tune. In the 
 town of Kuhschnappel, as in all other towns, provincial, or 
 metropolitan, what Leibgeber was least of all conspicuous 
 for was a proper gravity of deportment and behaviour. 
 Here, as elsewhere, his first proceeding was to get an iniro- 
 duction to the club, as a stranger artist, in order that he might 
 ensconce himself on a sofa, and, without uttering a word or 
 a syllable to a human being, go to sleep under the noses of 
 the company of the " Eelaxation " as the club was called. 
 " This," he said, " was what he liked to have the opportunity 
 of doing in all towns where there were clubs, casinos, 
 museums, musical societies, &c. ; because to sleep in any 
 rational manner at night in one's ordinary quiet bed was a 
 
38 JEAN PAUL FBIEDEICH EICHTEB. [bOOK I. 
 
 thing which he, at least, found he was seldom able to 
 manage, on account of the loud battle of ideas which 
 went on in his head, and the firework trains of processions 
 of pictures all interweaving and whirling in and out with 
 such a crash and a din that one could hardly see or hear 
 one's self. Whereas when one lies down upon a club sofa, 
 everything of this sort quiets itself down, and a universal 
 truce of ideas establishes itself; the delicious effect of the 
 company all talking at once — ^the happily chosen and appro- 
 priate words contributed to the political-and-other-con- 
 versation-picnic, of which one distinguishes nothing but 
 an ultima, perhaps, or sometimes only an antepenultima ; 
 this alone sings you into a light slumber. But when a 
 more serious discussion arises, and some point is argued, 
 disputed and discussed in all its bearings in a universal 
 clamorous shout — your barometer becomes completely sta- 
 tionary, and you sleep the deep sleep of a flower which 
 is rocked, but not awakened, by the storm." 
 
 One or two towns with which I am acquainted must, I 
 am sure, remember a stranger who always used to go to 
 sleep in their clubs, and must also recollect the beaming 
 expression of countenance with which he would look about 
 him when he got up and took his hat, as much as to say, 
 " Many thanks for this refreshing rest." 
 
 However, I have little to do with Leibgeber's waking or 
 with his sleeping here in Kuhschnappel ; him I may treat 
 with some indulgence, seeing that he is soon to be off again 
 into the wide world. But it is anything but a matter of 
 indifference that my young hero, just established here 
 with his wife, and whose pranks I have undertaken to 
 give some account of, as well as of the hits he gets in 
 return, should go and conduct himself just as if his name 
 was Leibgeber; which had long ceased to be the case, 
 seeing that he had given formal notice to his guardian that 
 he had changed it to Siebenkses. 
 
 To mention but one prank — was it not a piece of true tom- 
 foolery that, when the procession of poor scholars, singing 
 for alms about the streets, were just beginning their usual 
 begging hymn under the windows of the best religious 
 families on the opposite side of the street, and just as they 
 had struck their key-note and were going to start off with 
 
CHAP. IT.] FLOWEB, FEUIT, AND THOEN PIECES. -39 
 
 their chorus, Leibgeber, to begin with, made his boar- 
 hound " Saufinder" (he couldn't live without a big dog) look 
 out of window with a fashionable lady's night-cap on his 
 head ? And was it by any means a soberer proceeding on 
 Siebenkaes's part, that he took lemons and bit into tiiem 
 before the eyes of the whole singing class, so that all their 
 teeth begun to water in an instant ? The result will 
 answer these questions for itself. The singers, having 
 Saufinder in his night-cap in full view, could no more 
 bring their lips together into a singing position than a 
 man can whistle and laugh at the same instant. At the 
 same time all their vocal apparatus being completely sub- 
 merged by the opening of their glands, every note they 
 attempted to give out had to wade painfully through 
 water. In short, was this entire ludicrous interruption of 
 the whole company of street singers not the precis* end 
 aimed at by both the advocates ? 
 
 But Siebenkses has only recently come back from college, 
 and being still half-full of the freedom of university life, 
 may be excused a liberty or two. And indeed I consider 
 the little exuberances of university youth to be like the 
 adipose matter, which, according to Eeaumur, Bonnet, 
 and Cuvier, is stored up by the caterpillar for the nourish- 
 ment of the future butterfly during its chrysalis state; 
 the liberty of manhood has to be alimented by that of 
 youth, and if a son of the muse has not room given him 
 to develop in full freedom, he will never develop into 
 anything but some office-holder creeping along on all 
 fours. 
 
 Meanwhile the two friends spent the following days — 
 not wholly in a disorderly manner — in the writing of 
 marriage cards. With these, on which of course there was 
 nothing but the words, " Mr. Firmian Stanislaus Siebenkses, 
 Poor's Advocate, and his wife, nee Engelkraut ; with com- 
 plLtnents," — with these papers, and vrith the lady, they 
 were both to drive about the town on the Saturday, and 
 Leibgeber had to get down at all the respectable houses 
 and hand in a card, which is by no means otherwise than 
 a laudable and befitting custom in towns where people 
 observe the usages of good society. But the two brethren, 
 Siebenkses and Leibgeber, appeared to follow these usages 
 
40 JEAN PAUL FKIEDEICH EICHTEE. [BOOK I. 
 
 of imperial and rural towns more from satirical motives 
 ttan anything else, conforming to them pretty minutely, 
 it is true, but clearly chiefly for the fun of the thing, 
 each of them playing the part of first low comedian 
 and of audience at the same time. It would be an insult 
 to the borough of Kuhschnappel to suppose that, notwith- 
 standing Siebenkees's zealous readiness to join in all the 
 processions of the little place, m and out of churches, 
 to the town hall and the shooting-ground, it was wholly 
 unobservant of the satisfaction which it afforded him 
 rather to make fun of some properly ordered cortege, and 
 mar the effect of it by his unsuitable dress and absurd 
 behaviour, than to be an ornament to it. And the 
 genuine eagerness with which he tried to get admitted 
 as a member of the Kuhschnappel shooting-club was as- 
 cribed rather to his love of a joke than to his being the 
 son of a keen sportsman. As for Leibgeber, he of course 
 has the very devil in him as regards all such matters; but 
 he is younger than Siebenk»s, and about to set out on his 
 travels. 
 
 So they drove about the town on the Saturday — and where 
 anybody in the shape of a grandee lived they stopped, left 
 their passengers' tickets and drove on, without any mis- 
 behaviour. Many ladies and gentlemen, it is true, got 
 the wrong sow by the ear, and confounded the card carrier 
 with the young husband sitting in the carriage; but the 
 card carrier maintained his gravity, knowing that fun 
 has its own proper time. The cards (some of which were 
 glazed) were delivered according to the directory, firstly 
 to the members of the government, both of the greater and 
 lesser council — to the seventy members of the greater, and 
 the thirteen of the lesser council ; consequently the judge, 
 the treasu rer, the two finance councillors, the Heimlicher (so 
 to say, tribune of the people) and the remaining eight 
 ordinary members — these constituting the said lesser 
 council — each received his card. After which the carriage 
 drove down lower, and provided the minor government 
 ofB.cials in the various chambers and offices with their 
 cards, such as the Offices of Woods, of the Game Com- 
 missioners, the Office of Eeform (which latter was for the 
 repression of luxury), and the Meat Tax Commission, 
 
CHAP. 1I.J FLOWEE, FKUIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 41 
 
 whicli was presided over by a single master butcher, a very 
 nice old man. 
 
 I am much afraid I have made a considerable slip, inas- 
 niuch as I have drawn up no tables relative to the consti- 
 tution, &o., of this imperial borough of Kuhschnappel 
 (which is properly a small imperial town, though it was 
 once a large one) to lay before the learned and statistical 
 world. However, I can't possibly pull up here in the full 
 gallop of my chapter, but must wait till we all get to the 
 end of it, when I can more conveniently open my statis- 
 tical warehouse. 
 
 The wheel of fortune soon began to rattle, and throw up 
 mud ; for when Leibgeber took his eighth part of a placard 
 of Siebenk«s's marriage to the house of his guardian, the 
 Heimlicher von Blaise, a tall, meagre, barge-pole of a 
 woman, wrapped up in wimples of calico, the Heimlicher's 
 wife, received it indeed, and with warmth, but warmth of 
 the sort with which we generally administer a cudgelling; 
 moreover, she uttered the following words (calculated to 
 give rise to reflection) — 
 
 " My husband is the Heimlicher of this town, and 
 what is more, he's away from home. He has nothing 
 to do with seven cheeses ; * he is tutor and guardian to 
 persons belonging to the highest and noblest families. You 
 had better be off as fast as you like; you've got hold of 
 the wrong man here." 
 
 " I quite think we have, myself," said Leibgeber. 
 
 Siebenkses, the ward, here tried to pacify his letter or 
 paper carrier with the woman a little, by suggesting that, 
 like every good dog, she was but barking at the strangers 
 before fetching and carrying for them : and when his friend, 
 more anxious than himself, said, " You're quite sure, are 
 you not, that you took proper legal precautions against 
 any venomous ' objections ' which the guardian might 
 make to paying up your money, on account of your changing 
 your name ? " he assured him, that before he had esta- 
 blished himself as Siebenkses, he had procured his 
 guardian's opinion and approval in writing, which he 
 would show him when they got home. 
 
 * Siebenkses means " seven cheeseB.'' 
 
42 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH EIOHTEE. [bOOK I. 
 
 But when they did get home, Von Blaise's letter was 
 nowhere to be found — it wasn't in any of the boxes, nor in 
 any of the college note-books, nor even among the waste- 
 paper — in fact, there was nothing of the kind. 
 
 " But what a donkey I am to bother about it ! " cried 
 Siebenksas, " what do I require it for, at all ? " 
 
 Here Leibgeber, who had been glancing at the Saturday 
 newspapers, suddenly shoved them into his pocket, and said 
 in a somewhat unwonted tone of voice, " Come out, old boy, 
 and let's have a run in the fields." When they got there, 
 he put into his hands the ' Schafifhausen News,' the ' S wabian 
 Mercury,' the ' Stuttgart Times,' and the ' Erlangen Gazette,' 
 and said, " These will enable you to form some idea of the 
 sort of scoundrel you have for a guardian." 
 
 In each of these newspapers, the following notification 
 appeared : — 
 
 "Whereas, Hoseas Heinrich Leibgeber, now in his 
 29th year, proceeded to the University of Leipzig in 1774, 
 but since that date has not been heard of: now the said 
 Hoseas Heinrich Leibgeber, is hereby, at the instance of 
 his cousin, Herr Heimlicher von Blaise, edictally cited and 
 summoned by himself or the lawful heirs of his body, 
 within six months from the date of these presents (whereof 
 two months are hereby constituted the first term, two 
 months the second, and two months the third and per- 
 emptory term), to appear within the Inheritance Office of 
 this borough; and, on satisfactory proof of identity, to 
 receive over the sum of 1200 Ehenish gulden deposited 
 in the hands of the said Heimlicher von Blaise as trustee 
 and guardian ; whicji failing, that, as directed by the decree 
 of council of 24th July 1655 (which enacts, that any 
 person who shall be for ten years absent from the realm, 
 ehall be taken pro mortuo), the above-named sum of 1200 
 Khenish florins may be made over and paid to his said 
 guardian and trustee, the aforesaid Heimlicher von Blaise. 
 Dated at Kuhschnappel in Swabia, the 20th August, 1785. 
 
 " Inheritance Office of the free Imperial 
 Borough of Kuhschnappel." 
 
 It is unnecessary to remind the legal reader that the 
 
CHAP. II.] FLOWER, FKUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 43 
 
 decree of council referred to is not in accordance with 
 the legal usage of Bohemia, where thirty-one years is 
 the stipulated period, but with that which formerly pre- 
 vailed in France, when ten years were sufficient. And 
 when the advocate came to the end of the notice, and 
 stared, motionless, at its concluding lines, his soul's 
 brother took hold of his hand, and cried, "Alas! alas! 
 it is I who am to blame for all this, for changing names 
 with yon." 
 
 " You ? — oh, you ? The devil alone, and nobody else. 
 But I must find that letter," he said, and they made 
 another search all over the house, in every corner where a 
 letter could be. After an hour of this Leibgeber hunted 
 out one with a broken seal of the guardian, of which the 
 thick paper, and the broad legal fold, without an envelope, 
 told unmistakeably that it had been addressed neither by 
 a lady, a merchant, nor courtier, but by the quill of a bird 
 •of quite a different tribe. However, there was nothing in 
 this letter, except Siebenkaes's name in Siebenkass's own 
 writing — not another word, outside or inside. Quite 
 natural; for the advocate had a bad habit of trying his 
 hand and his pen on the backs of letters, and writing his 
 own name and other people's as well, with flourishes about 
 them. 
 
 The letter Jiad once been written in the inside, but, to 
 save an incredible waste of good paper, the Heimlioher 
 von Blaise had written his concurrence in the exchange of 
 the names with an ink which vanishes frota the paper 
 of itself, and leaves it, in integrum, white as it was before 
 it was written on. 
 
 I may, perhaps, be doing a chance service to many 
 persons of the better classes, who nowadays more than 
 ever have occasion to write promissory notes and other 
 business documents, if I here copy out for them the receipt 
 for this ink which vanishes after it is dry ; I take it from 
 a reliable source. Let the man of rank scrape oif the 
 surface from a piece of fine black cloth, such as he wears 
 at court — grind the scrapings finer still on a piece of 
 marble — moisten this fine cloth dust repeatedly with water, 
 then make his ink with this, and write his promissory 
 note with it ; he will find that, as soon as the moisture 
 
44 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH EICHTEK. [BOOK 1. 
 
 has evaporated, every letter of the promissory note has 
 flown away with it in the form of dust ; the white star 
 will have shone out, as it were, through the blackness of 
 the ink. 
 
 But I consider that I am doing an equal service to the 
 holders and presenters of such promissory notes as to 
 the drawers of them, inasmuch as, for the future, they 
 will be careful not to be satisfied with a security of this 
 description, till they have exposed it for some time to 
 the sun. 
 
 Some time ago, I should have here been apt to confound 
 this cloth ink with the gympathetic ink (likewise possessing 
 the property of turning pale and disappearing after a time), 
 which is commonly made use of in both the preliminary 
 and final treaties entered into between royal persons ; the 
 latter however, has a red tint. A treaty of peace of three 
 years' standing is no longer legible to a man in the prime 
 of life, because the red ink — the encaustum, with which 
 formerly no one but the Eoman emperors might write — 
 is too apt to turn pale, unless a sufficient number of human 
 beings (from whom, as from the cochineal insect, this dye 
 stuff is prepared) have been made use of in its manufac- 
 ture ; and this (from motives of sordid parsimony) is not 
 always the case. So that the treaty has frequently to be 
 engraved and etched into the territory afresh with good 
 instruments — the so-called " instruments of peace " — at the 
 point of the bayonet. 
 
 The two friends kept the happy young wife in ignorance 
 of this first thunderclap of the storm which was threaten- 
 ing her married life. On the Sunday morning they went 
 to make a friendly call on the Heimlicher during the 
 church service ; unfortunately he was at church, however. 
 They postponed their entertaining visit till the afternoon ; 
 but then he himself was paying one to the chapel of the 
 orphan asylum, the whole blooming body of the orphans, 
 boys and girls, having previously made one to him, to enjoy 
 the privilege of kissing his hand in his capacity of superin- 
 tendent of the orphan asylum ; for the inspectorship of that 
 institution was, as he modestly but truly observed, entrusted 
 to his unworthy hands. After the evening sermon, he 
 had to perform a service of his own in his own bouse, in 
 
CHAP. n.J FLOWER, FEUIT, AND THOKN PIECES. 45 
 
 short, he was fenced off from the two advocates by a triple 
 row of spiritual altar rails. It was his admirable custom 
 to permit the members of his household, not indeed to eat, 
 but to pray at the same table with him. He thought it 
 well to spend the Sunday as a day of labour in psalm- 
 singing with them, because, by such devotional exercises, 
 he best preserved them from sins of Sabbath breaking, 
 such as working on their own account, at sewing, mend- 
 ing, &c. And, on the whole, he thought it well to make 
 of the Sunday in this manner a day of preparation for the 
 coming week, just as actors in places where Sunday 
 representations are not allowed, have their rehearsals on 
 that day. 
 
 However, I recommend people in delicate health not to 
 go near or smell at this sort of beautiful sky-blue plants 
 which grow in the Church's vineyard only to be looked 
 at, as an English garden is adorned with the pretty 
 aconite and its sky- or Jesuit's-blue poisonous flowers, 
 which grow pyramidally to man's height.* People like 
 Von Blaise, not only ascend Mount Sinai and the Golgotha, 
 that, like goats, they may feed as they climb ; but they 
 occupy these sacred heights for the purpose of making 
 attacks and incursions from them, just as good generals 
 take possession of the hills, and particularly the gallows- 
 hills. The Heimlicher mounts from earth to the heavens 
 oftener than Blanchard does, and with similar motives, 
 indeed, he can keep his soul on the wing in these elevated 
 regions for half a day at a time, in which respect, how- 
 ever, he does not quite equal the King of Siam's dragon 
 kites which the mandarins, by relieving each other at 
 the task, manage to keep up in the sky for a couple of 
 months at a time. He soars, not as the lark does, to make 
 music, but as the noble falcon does, to swoop down upon 
 something or other. If you see him praying on a Mount 
 
 * Sky-blue is the colour of the order of the Jesuits, as also of the 
 Indian Krisna, and of anger. The hypothesis of the natural philo- 
 sopher Marat, that blue and red together make black, should be ex- 
 perimented upon, by roixlng the cardinal's red with the Jesuit's blue. 
 He himself, subsequently, during the French Eevolution, produced 
 from blue, red, and white the most beautiful ivory black, or the Indian 
 ink with which Napoleon afterwards painted. 
 
46 JEAN PAUL PEIEDKICH EICHTEK. 'lBOOK I. 
 
 of Olives, be sure that he's going to build an oil mill on it; 
 and if ho -weeps by a brook Kedron, depend upon it he's 
 either going a-fishing in it, or else thinking of pitching 
 somebody into it. He prays with the object of luring to 
 him the ignes-fatui of sins ; he kneels, but only as a front 
 rank does, to deliver its fire at the foe before it; he 
 opens his arms as with warm benevolent affection, to fold 
 some one, a ward say, in their embrace, but only inthe 
 manner of the red-hot Moloch, that he may burn him to 
 cinders ; or he folds his arms piously together, but does it 
 as the machines called "maidens" did, only to cut people 
 to pieces. 
 
 At last the friends, in their anxiety, came to see that 
 there are some people whom one can only manage to get 
 access to when one comes as thieves do, unannounced 
 so at 8 o'clock on the Sunday evening they walked, sans 
 fagon, into Von Blaise's house. Everything was still and 
 empty ; they went through an empty hall into an empty 
 drawing-room, the half-open folding doors of which led 
 into the household ' chapel. All they could see through 
 the crevice was six chairs, an open hymn-book lying on 
 its face on each of them, and a table with wax-cloth cover, 
 on which were Miller's ' Heavenly Kiss of the Soul,' and 
 Schlichthoher's 'Five-fold Dispositions for all Sundays 
 and Feasts of the Church.' They pressed through the 
 gap, and lo and behold! there was the Heimlicher all 
 alone, continuing his devotions in his sleep, with his cap 
 under his arm. His house- and church-servants had read 
 to him till sleep had stiffened him to a petrifaction, or 
 pillar of salt (an event which occurred every Sunday), for 
 his eyes and his head were alike heavy with the edible, 
 the potable, and the spiritual, refreshment of which he 
 had partaken; or because he was like many who think 
 it well to close their eyes during the sowing of the 
 heavenly seed, just as people do when their heads axe 
 being powdered, or because churches and private chapels 
 are still like those ancient temples in which the com- 
 munications of the oracles were received during sleep. 
 And as soon as they saw his eyes closed, the servants 
 would read more and more softly, to accustom him gra- 
 dually to the complete cessation of the sound ; and, by and 
 
OHAP. II.J FLOWEE, FEUIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 47 
 
 by, the devout domestics would steal gently away, leaving 
 Mm in his attitude of prayer till 10 o'clock ; at that hour 
 (when, moreover, Madame von Blaise generally came 
 home from paying visits) the domestic sacristan and 
 night watchman would rouse him from his sleep with a 
 shrill "Amen," and he would put something on to his 
 bald head again. 
 
 This evening matters fell out differently. Leibgeber 
 rapped loudly on the table two or three times with the 
 knuckle of his forefinger to wake the city's father out of 
 his first sleep. When he opened his eyes and saw before 
 him the two lean parodies and copies of one another, h& 
 took, in his beer- and sleep-heaviness of idea, a glass peri- 
 wig from off a block, and put that on his head instead of his 
 cap, which had fallen down. His ward addressed him 
 politely, saying he wished to present to him his friend 
 with whom he had made the exchange of names. He 
 likewise called him his "kind cousin and guardian." 
 Leibgeber, more angry and less self-contained, because 
 he was younger, and because the wrong had not been 
 done to Mm, fired into the Heimlicher's ears, from a posi- 
 tion closer to him by three discourteous paces, the in- 
 quiries, "Which of us two is it that your worship has J 
 given out pro mortuo, that you may be able to cite him as 
 a dead man ? There are the ghosts of two of us here both 
 together." Blaise turned with a lofty air from Leibgeber 
 to Siebenkses, and said, " If you have not changed your 
 dress, sir, as well as your name, I believe you are the 
 gentleman whom I have had the honour of talking with 
 on several previous occasions. Or was it you, sir?" he 
 said to Leibgeber, who shook like one possessed. "Well," 
 he continued in a more pleasant tone, " I must confess to 
 you, Mr. Siebenkffis, that I had always supposed, until 
 now, that you were the person who left this for the uni- 
 versity ten years ago, and whose little inheritance I then 
 assumed the guardianship or curatorship of. What pro- 
 bably chiefly contributed to my mistake, if it be a mistake, 
 was, I presume, the likeness which, proeier propter, you 
 certainly seem to bear to my missing ward ; for in many y 
 details you undoubtedly differ from him ; for instance, ho- 
 had a mole beside his ear." 
 
48 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH EICHTEE. [BOOK I 
 
 " The infernal mole," interrupted Leibgeber, " was ob- 
 literated by means of a toad, on my account entirely, 
 because it was like an ass's ear, and he never thought 
 that, when he lost his ear, he should lose a relative along 
 with it." 
 
 " That may be,'' said the guardian coldly, " You must 
 prove to me, Herr Advocate, that it was to you I had been 
 thinking of paying over the inheritance to-day ; for your 
 announcement that you had exchanged your family name 
 for that of an utter stranger I considered to be probably 
 one of the jokes for which you are so celebrated. But I 
 learned last week that you had been proclaimed in church 
 and married in the name of Siebenkaes, and more to the 
 same effect. I then discussed the question with Herr 
 Grossweibel (the President of the Chamber of Inherit- 
 ance), and with my son-in-law, Herr von Knarnschilder, 
 . and they assured me I should be acting contrary to my 
 J duty and safety if I let this property out of my hands. 
 What would you do — they very properly said — what an- 
 swer would you have to make if the real owner of the 
 name were to appear and demand another settlement of 
 the guardianship accounts ? It would be too bad, truly, 
 for a man, who, besides his manifold business of other 
 kinds, undertook this troublesome guardian work, which 
 the law does not require him to do, purely from affection 
 for his relative, and from the love which he bears to all 
 his brethren of mankind* — it would be too bad, I say, for 
 him to have to pay up this money a second time out of 
 his own pocket. At the same time, Mr. Siebenkses, as, 
 in my capacity of a private individual, I am more disposed 
 to admit the validity of your claim than you perhaps 
 suppose, you being a lawyer, know quite as well as I that 
 my individual conviction carries with it no legal weight 
 whatever, and that I have to deal with this matter not as 
 a man, but as a guardian — it would probably be the best 
 
 * He styles mankind his bi-etliren, as many monks, princes, and 
 religious persons are given to do to eacli other, and perhaps he is right 
 in so doing, seeing that he treats these brethren of his just as many 
 eastern princes treat theirs, and, in fact, mor.e kindly, beheading, 
 blinding, and cutting them 'jp m a spiritaal sense only, not in t 
 corporeal. 
 
CHAP. II.] FLOWER, FRUIT, AND THORN PIECES. ''■9 
 
 course to let some third party less biassed ia my favour, 
 such as the Inheritance Office, decide the question. Let 
 me have the satisfaction, Mr. Siebenkses, as soon as it 
 may be possible " (he ended more smilingly, and laying 
 his band on the other's shoulder) " to see that vyhich I 
 hope may prove the case, namely, that you are my long- 
 missing cousin, Leibgeber, properly established by legal 
 proof." 
 
 "Then," said Leibgeber, grimly calm, and with aU 
 kinds of scale-passages and fugatos coursing over the 
 colour-piano of his face, " is the little bit of resemblance 
 which Mr. Siebenk»s there has to — to himself, that is to 
 say, to j'our worship's ward, to be taken as proving 
 nothing ; not even as much as an equal similarity in a 
 case of comj)araiio literarum would prove ? " 
 
 " Oh, of course," said Blasius, " something, certainly, 
 but not everything; for there were several false Neros, 
 and three or four sham Sebastians in Portugal ; suppose, 
 now, you should be my cousin yourself, Mr. Leibgeber ! " 
 
 Leibgeber jumped up at once, and said in an altered 
 and joyful voice, " So I am, my dearest guardian — it was 
 all done to try you— I hope you will pardon my friend his 
 share in ttie little mystification." 
 
 "All very well," answered Blasius, more inflatedly, 
 "but your own changes of ground must show you the 
 necessity for a proper legal investigation." 
 
 This was more than Siebenkaes could endure, he squeezed 
 his friend by the hand, as much as to say, '"Pray be patient," 
 and inquired in a voice which an unwonted feeling of 
 hatred rendered faint, " Did you never write to me when 
 I was in Leipzig?" — "If you are my ward, I certainly 
 did, many times ; if you are not, you have got hold of my 
 letters in some other way." 
 
 Then SiebenksBS asked, more faintly still, "Have you no 
 recollection at all of a letter in which you assured me 
 there was not the slightest risk involved in my proposed 
 change of name, none whatever ? " 
 
 " This is really quite ludicrous," answered Blaise, " in 
 that case there could be no question about the matter 1 " 
 
 Here Leibgeber clasped the father of the city with his 
 two lingers as if they had been iron rivets, grasped hia 
 
 n. V 
 
50 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH EICHTEE. [BOOK T. 
 
 shoulders as one does tte pommel of a saddle at mounting, 
 clamped him firmly into his chair, and thundered out, 
 " You never wrote anything of the kind, did you ? you 
 smooth-tongued, grey-headed old scoundrel! Stop your 
 grunting, or I'll throttle you ! never wrote the letter, eh ? 
 keep quiet — if you lift a finger, my dog wUl tear your 
 windpipe out. Answer me quietly — you say you never 
 received any letter on the subject, do you?" 
 
 "I had rather say nothing," whispered Blasius, "evi- 
 dence given under coercion is valueless." 
 
 Here Siebenkaas drew his friend away from the Heim- 
 Kcher, but Leibgeber said to the dog, "Mordax! hooy, 
 Sau.," took the glass periwig from the head of the servant 
 of the state, broke off the principal curls of it, and said to 
 Siebenkses (Saufinder lay ready to spring), " Screw Mm 
 down yourself, if the dog is not to do it, that he may listen 
 to me. I want to say one or two pretty things to him — 
 don't let him say ' Pap ! ' — Herr Heimlicher von Blasius, I 
 liave not the slightest intention of making use of libellous 
 or abusive language to you, or of spouting an improvised 
 pasquinade ; I merely tell you, that you are an old rascal, 
 a robber of orphans, a varnished villain, and everything 
 else of the kind — for instance, a Polish bear, whose foot- 
 marks are just like a human being's.* The epithets which 
 I here make use of, such as scoundrel — Judas — gallows- 
 bird" (at each word he struck the glass turban like a 
 cymbal against his other hand), " skunk, leech, horse- 
 leech — nominal definitions such as these are not abuse, 
 and do not constitute libel, firstly because, according to 
 'L. § de injur.,' the grossest abuse may be uttered in 
 jest, and I am in jest here — and we may always make use 
 of abusive language in maintaining our own rights — see 
 'Leyser.'! Indeed, according to Quistorp's 'Penal Code,' 
 we may accuse a person of the gravest crimes without 
 animus injurandi, provided that he has not been already 
 tried and punished for them. And has your honesty ever 
 been put on its trial and punished, you cheating old grey- 
 headed vagabond ? I suppose you are like the Heimlicher 
 
 * The same robbing, strangling paw is masked in both under the 
 likeness of the traok of a man. f ' Sp.' 347, N. Tr. 
 
CHAP. II.] FLOWER, FKUIT, AND THOKN PIECES. 51 
 
 in Freyburg * — ^rather a different sort of man to you, it's 
 to be hoped — and have half-a-dozen years or so, during 
 which no one can lay hold of you — but I've got hold of 
 you to-day, hypocrite ! — Mordax ! " The dog looked up at 
 this word of command. 
 
 " Let him go, now," Siebenkses begged, compassionating 
 the prostrate sinner. 
 
 " In a moment ; but don't you put me in a fury, please," 
 said Leibgeber, letting fall the plucked wig, standing on 
 it, and taking out his scissors and black paper, " I want 
 to be quite calm while I clip out a likeness of the padded 
 countenance of this portentous cotton-nightcap of a crea- 
 ture, because I shall take it away with me as a gage d'amour. 
 I want to cany this ecce homunmdus about with me half 
 over the world, and say to everybody, ' Hit it, bang away 
 at it well ; blessed is he who doth not depart this life till 
 he hath thrashed Heimlicher Blasius of Kuhschnappel ; 
 I would have done it myself if I had not been far too 
 strong.' 
 
 " I shan't be able," he went on, turning to Siebenkses, 
 and finishing a good portrait, " fo give that' sneak and 
 sharper there an account by word of mouth of my success, 
 for a whole year to come ; but by that time the one or two 
 little touches of abuse which I have just lightly applied 
 to him will be covered by the statute of limitations, and 
 we shall be as good friends as ever again." 
 
 Here he unexpectedly requested Siebenkaes to stay by 
 Saufinder — whom he had constituted into a corps of obser- 
 vation by a motion of his finger — as he was obliged to 
 leave the room for a moment. On the last occasion of his 
 being in Blaise's grand drawing-room (where he displayed 
 his magnificence before the Kuhschnappel world, great and 
 small), he had noticed the paper-hangings there, and an 
 exceedingly ingenious stove, in the form of the goddess 
 of justice, Themis, who does, indeed, singe as frequently 
 as she merely warms. And this time he had brought with 
 Iiim a camel's-hair pencil, and a bottle of an ink made 
 from cobalt dissolved in aquafortis, with a little muriatic 
 
 * The Pleimlicher of Freyburg is inviolable for throe years during 
 his tenure of ofBce, and for three years after it expires. 
 
 E 2 
 
52 JEAN PAUL FEIEDKICH KICHTEK. lBOOK I. 
 
 acid dropped into it. Unlike the black cloth ink, which 
 is visible at first and disappears afterwards, the sj'm- 
 pathetio ink here spoken of is invisible at first, and only 
 comes out a green colour on the paper when it is warmed. 
 Leibgeber now wrote with his camel's-hair pencil and this 
 ink the following invisible notification on the paper which 
 was closest to the stove, or Themis. 
 
 " The Goddess of Justice hereby protests in presence 
 of this assembly against being thus S3t up in efSgy, and 
 warmed and cooled (if not absolutely hanged), at the 
 pleasure of the Heimlicher von Blaise, who is long since 
 condemned at her inner secret tribunal. 
 
 " Themis." 
 
 Leibgeber came away, leaving the silent seed of this 
 Priestley's green composition behind him on the wall with 
 the pleasing certainty that next winter, some evening 
 when the drawing-room was nicely warmed by the goddess 
 for a party, the whole dormant green crop would all of a 
 sudden shoot lustily forth. 
 
 So he came back to the oratory again, finding Saufinder 
 keeping up his appointed official contemplation, and his 
 friend maintaining his observation of the dog. They then 
 all took a most polite leave, and even begged the Heim- 
 licher not to come into the street with them, as it mightn't 
 be so easy to keep Mordax from a bite or so there. 
 
 When they got to the street Leibgeber said to his friend, 
 "Don't pull such a long face about it — I shall keep flying 
 backwards and forwards to you, of course. Come through 
 the gate with me — I must get across the frontier of this 
 country; let's lun, and get on to royal territory before 
 six minutes are over our heads." 
 
 When they had passed the gate, that is to say, the un- 
 Palmyra-like ruins of it, the crystal reflecting grotto of the 
 August night stood open and shining above the dark-green 
 earth, and the ocean-calm of nature stayed the wild storm 
 of the human heart. Night was drawing and closing 
 her curtain (a sky full of silent suns, not a breath of 
 breeze moving in it), up above the world and down 
 beneath it; the reaped corn stood in the sheaves without 
 a rustle. The cricket with his one constant song, and a 
 
CHAP. II.] FLOWER, FEDIT, AND THORN PIECES. 53 
 
 pcxM- old man gathering snails for the snail-pits, seemed to 
 be the only things that dwelt in the far reaching darkness. 
 The fires of anger had suddenly gone out in the two friends' 
 hearts. Leibgeber said, in a voice pitched two octaves 
 lower, " God be thanked ! this writes a verse of peace 
 round the storm bell within ! the night seems to me to 
 have muffled my alarum drum with her black robe, and 
 softened it down to a funeral march. I am delighted to 
 find myself growing a little sad after all that anger and 
 shouting." 
 
 " If it only hadn't all been on my account, old Henry," 
 said Siebenkaes, "your humorous fury at that barefaced 
 old sinner." 
 
 " Though you are not so apt to shy j'our satire into 
 people's faces as I am," said Leibgeber, " j-ou would have 
 been in a greater rage if you had been in my place. One 
 can bear injustice to one's self — particularly when one has 
 as good a temper as I have — but not to a friend. And 
 unluckily you are the martyr to my name to-day, and eye- 
 witness and blood-witness into the bargain. Besides, I 
 should tell you that, as a general rule, when once I am 
 ridden by the devil of anger — or rather when 1 have got on 
 to his back — I always spur the brute nearly to death, till he 
 falls down, so that I mayn't have to mount him again for 
 the next three months. However, I have poured you out a 
 nice basin of black broth, and left you sitting with the spoon 
 in your hand." Siebenkses had been dreading for some time 
 that he would say something about the 1200 gulden, those 
 baptismal dues of his re-baptism, the discount of his name. 
 Ho therefore said, as cheerfully and pleasantly as his heart, 
 tu: n by this sudden, nocturnal parting, would let him , " My 
 wife and I have plenty of supplies in our little bit of a 
 fortress of Konigstein, and we can sow and reap there too. 
 Heaven only grant that we may have many a hard nut to 
 crack ; they give a delicious flavour to the table- wine of our 
 stale, flat, everyday life. I shall bring my action to-morrow," 
 
 They both concealed their emotion at the approach of 
 the moment of parting under the cloak of comic speeches. 
 These two counterparts came to a column which had been 
 
 erected by the Princess of on the spot where, on her 
 
 return from England, she had met her sister coming from 
 
54 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH EICHTEK. [bOOK I. 
 
 the Alps ; and as this joyful souvenir of a meeting had a quite 
 opposite significance to-night, Leibgeber said, " Now, right 
 about face — march ! Your wife is getting anxious — it's 
 past eleven, o'clock. There, you see, we have reached j'our 
 boundary mark, your frontier fortress, the gallows. I am, 
 off at once into Bayreuth and Saxony to cut my crop — other 
 people's faces, to wit, and sometimes my own fgol's face into 
 the bargain. I shall most likely come and see you again, 
 just for the fun of the thing, in a year and a day, when 
 the verbal libels are pretty well out of date. By the by," 
 he added, hastily, " promise me on your word of honour to 
 do me one little favour." 
 
 Siebenkass instantly did so. "Don't send my deposit 
 after me * — a plaintiff has payments to make. So fare you 
 well, dearest old man," he blurted huskily out, and after a 
 hurried kiss, ran quickly down the little hill with an air 
 of assumed unconcern. His friend, bewildered and for- 
 saken, looked after the runner, without uttering a syllable. 
 When he got to the bottom of the hillock, the runner 
 stopped, bent his head low towards the ground, and — 
 loosened his garters. 
 
 " Couldn't you have done that up here ?" cried Sieben- 
 kses, and went down to him, and said, " We'll go as far as 
 the gallows hill together." The sand-bath and reverbe- 
 rating furnace of a noble anger made all their emotions 
 warmer to-day, just as a hot climate gives strength to 
 poisons and spices. As the first parting had caused their 
 eyes to overflow, they had nothing more to keep in con- 
 trol but voice and language. 
 
 " Are you sure you feel quite weU after being so much 
 vexed?" said Siebenkses. "If the death of domestic ani^ 
 Inals portends the death of the master of the house, as the 
 superstition runs," said Leibgeber, "I shall live to all 
 eternity, for my menagerie j of beasts is all alive and 
 kicking." At last they stopped at' the market house, 
 beside the place of execution. " Just up to the top," said 
 Siebenkees, " no further." 
 
 When they came to the top of this boundary-hill of so 
 
 * It consistoJ oMeliy of curious coins, vicariat-dollavs, &c. 
 
 t I'lnto likens ouv lower passions to animals kicking inside us. 
 
CHAP. n.J FLOWER, FKUIT, AND THOKN PIECES. 55 
 
 many an unhappy life — and when Siebenkses looked down 
 upon the green spotted stone altar where so many an 
 innocent sacrifice had been offered up, and thought, in 
 ^ that dark minute, of the heavy blood drops of agony, the 
 burning tears which women who had killed their children * 
 (and were themselves put to death by the state and their 
 Rovers) had let fall upon this their last and briefest rack 
 of torture here in this field of blood — and as he gazed 
 from this cloudbank of life out over the broad earth with 
 the mists of night steaming up round its horizons and over 
 all its streams — he took his friend's hand, and, looking to 
 the free starry heaven, said, " The mists of our life on 
 earth must be resolved into stars, up there at last, as the 
 mists of the milky way part into suns. Henry, don't 
 you yet believe in the soul's immortality ?" — " It will not 
 do yet, I can not," Leibgeber replied. " Blasius, now, hardly 
 deserves to live once, let alone twice or several times. I 
 sometimes can't help feeling as if a little piece of the other 
 world had been painted on to this, just to finish it off and 
 make it complete, as I've sometimes seen subsidiary sub- 
 jects introduced in fainter colours towards the edge of a 
 picture, to make the principal subject stand out from the 
 frame, and to give it unity of effect. But at this moment, 
 human beings strike me as being like those craljs which 
 priests used to fasten tapers to and set them crawling 
 about churchyards, telling the people they were the souls 
 of the departed. Just so do we, in a masquerade imper- 
 sonation of immortal beings, crawl about over graves with 
 our tapers of souls. Ten to one they go out at last." 
 
 His friend fell on his heart, and said with vivid convic- 
 tion, " We do not go out ! Farewell a thousand times. 
 We shall meet where there is no parting. By my soul 1 
 we do not go out. Farewell, farewell." 
 
 And so they parted. Henry passed slowly and with 
 drooping arms through the footpaths between the stubble- 
 fields, raising neither hand nor eye, that he might give no 
 sign of sorrow. But a deep grief fell on Siebenkaes, for 
 men who rarely shed tears shed all the more when they 
 do weep. So he went to his house and laid his weary 
 
 " He happened to have the case sf one to defend, just then. 
 
56 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH KlOHTEK. [bOOK I. 
 
 melting heart to rest on his wife's untronbled breast (there 
 ■was not even a dream stirring it). But far on into the fore- 
 court of the world of dreams did the thought of the days 
 in store for Lenette attend him — and of his friend's, 
 night journey under the stars, which he would be look- 
 ing up at without any hope of ever being nearer to 
 them; and it was chiefly for his friend that his tears 
 flowed fast. 
 
 Oh ye two friends — thou who art out in the dark- 
 ness there, and thou who art here at home ! But where- 
 fore should I be continually harping back upon the old 
 emotion which you have once more awakened in me — the 
 same which in old days used to penetrate and refresh me 
 
 , so when I read as a lad about the friendship of a Swift, 
 iin Arbuthnott and a Pope in their letters ? Many another 
 
 ' heart must have been fired and aroused as mine was at the 
 contemplation of the touching, calm affection which the 
 hearts of these men felt for one another ; cold, sharp, and 
 cutting to the outer world, in the inner land which was 
 common to them they could work and beat for each other ; 
 like lofty palm trees, presenting long sharp spines towards 
 the common world below them, but at their summits full 
 of the precious palm- wine of strong friendship. 
 
 So, in their lesser degree, I think we may find some- 
 thing of a similar kind to like and to admire in our two 
 friends, Leibgeber and Siebenkses. "We need not inquire 
 very closely into the causes which brought about their 
 friendship ; for it is hate, not love, which needs to be ex- 
 plained and accounted for. The sources whence every- 
 thing that is good wells forth from this universe upwards 
 to Grod himself, are veiled by a night all thick with stars ; 
 but the stars are very far away. 
 
 These two men, while as yet in the fresh, green springtime 
 of university life, at once i-aw straight through each other's 
 breasts into each other's hearts, and they attracted each. 
 other with their opposite poles. What chiefly delighted 
 Siebenkses was Leibgeber's firmness and power, and even 
 hi.s capability of anger, as well as his flights and laughter 
 over every kind of sham grandeur, sham fine feeling, sham 
 scholarship. Like the condor, he laid the eggs (of his act 
 or of his pregnant saying) in ro nest, but on the bare 
 
CHAP. II.] FLOWER, FRUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 57 
 
 rock, preferring to live without a name, and consequently / 
 always taking some other than his own. On which ac- 
 count the poor's advocate used to tell him, ten times over, 
 the two following anecdotes, just to enjoy his irritation at 
 them. 
 
 The first was, that a German professor in Dorpat, who 
 was delivering a eulogistic address on the subject of the 
 reigning grand duke Alexander, suddenly stopped in the 
 middle of it, and gazed for a long time in silence on a 
 bust of that potentate, saying at length, " The speechless 
 heart has spoken." 
 
 The second was that Klopstock sent finely got-up copies 
 of his ' Messiah ' to schoolporters, with the request that the 
 most deserving among them might scatter spring-flowers 
 on the grave of his own old teacher, Stubel, while softly 
 pronouncing his (Klopstock's) name. Towhich,if Leibgeber 
 had anything to adduce on the subject, Siebenkses would 
 go on to add that the poet had called up four new porters 
 to give them three readings apiece from his ' Messiah,' re- 
 warding each with a gold medal provided by a friend. 
 After telling him this he would look to see Leibgeber's 
 foaming and stamping at a person's thus worshipping 
 himself as a species of reliquary full of old fingers and 
 bones. 
 
 "What Leibgeber, on the other hand, — more like the 
 Morlacks, who, as Towinson and Forlis tell us, though 
 they have but one word to express both revenge and 
 eanctification (osvetaY do yet have their friends betrothed 
 to them with a blessing at the altar — chiefly delighted in 
 and loved about his satirical foster-brother was the dia- 
 mond brooch which in his case pinned together poetry, 
 kindly temper, and a stoicism which scorned this world's 
 absurdities. And lastly, each of them daily enjoyed the 
 gratification of knowing that the other understood him 
 completely and wonderfully, whether he were in jest or in 
 earnest. But it is not every friend who meets with another 
 of this stamp. 
 
58 JEAN PAUL PRIEDEICH EIOHTEB. TbOOK I, 
 
 APPENDIX TO CHAPTEE II. 
 
 GOVERNMENT OF THE IMPERIAL MAEKET BOROUGH OF 
 K0HSCHNAPPEL. 
 
 1 HAVE omitted, all tlirougli two chapters, to state that tha 
 free imperial torough of Kuhschnappel (of which, it 
 appears, there is a namesake in the Erzgebirge country) is 
 the thirty-second of the Swahian towns which takes its 
 seat on Swahia's town-bench of thirty-one towns. Swabia 
 may look upon herself as being a hotbed and forcing-housa 
 of imperial towns, these colonies, or hostelries, of the 
 goddess of freedom in Germany, whom persons of position 
 worship as their household goddess ; and according to 
 whose " election of grace " it is that poor sinners are 
 called to salvation. I must now, in this place, accede ia 
 the universally expressed desire for an accurate sketch map 
 of the Kuhschnappel Government ; though few readers, 
 save people such as Nikolai, Schlsezer and the like, can ba 
 J expected to form an idea of the difficulty I have experienced, 
 and the sum I have had to expend in postage, before getting 
 hold of information somewhat more accurate than that 
 which is generally current on the subject of Kuhschnappel. 
 Indeed, imperial towns, like Swiss towns, always plaster 
 over and stop up the combs where their honey is stored, 
 as though their constitutions were stolen silver plate with 
 the owner's name still unobliterated — or as though the 
 little bits of towns and territories were fortresses (which 
 indeed they are as against their own inhabitants more than 
 against their enemies), of which strangers are not allowed 
 to take sketches. 
 
 The constitution of our noteworthy borough of Kuh- 
 schnappel seems to have been the original rough draft or 
 sketch which Bern (a place at no great distance) has 
 copied hers from, only with the pantograph on a larger 
 scale. For Bern, like Kuhschnappel, has her' Upper House, 
 or supreme council, which decides upon peace and war, 
 and has the power of life and death just as in Kuhschnap- 
 pel, and consists of chief magistrates, treasurers, Venners, 
 
CHAP. n.J FLOWEK, FRUIT, AND THOKN PIECES. 59 
 
 Heimlichers and cotmsellors, only that there are more of 
 them in Bern than in Kuhschnappel. Further, Bern has 
 her Lower House, consisting of presidents, deputies and 
 pensioners, subsidiary to the Upper. The two Chambers 
 of Appeal, those of Woods and Forests, Game Laws, and 
 Eeform, the Meat Tax and other commissions are clearly 
 but large text copies of the Kuhschnappel outlines. 
 
 To speak the truth, however, I have drawn this com- 
 parison between these two places solely with the view of 
 being comprehensible (perhaps at the same time agreeable) 
 to the Swiss generally, and particularly to the people of 
 Bern. For in reality, Kuhschnappel rejoices in a much 
 more perfect and aristocratic constitution than Bern, such 
 as was to be found in a measure in Ulm and Nlirnberg, 
 though the stormy weather of the revolution has rather 
 kept them back than brought them forward. A short time 
 since, Niirnberg and Ulm were as fortunate as Kuhschnap- 
 pel is now, inasmuch as they were governed, not by the 
 common, working classes, but by people of family only, so 
 that no mere citizen could meddle with the matter in the 
 leait degree either in person or by deputy. Now, unfor- 
 tunately, it appears to be the case in both towns that the 
 cask of the state has had to be fresh tapped just about an 
 inch or so above the thick dregs of the common herd, 
 because what came from the tap nearer the top proved sour. 
 However, it is impossible for me to go on until I have 
 cleared out of the way a much too prevalent error respect- 
 ing large towns. 
 
 The Behemoths and Condors among towns — Petersburg, 
 London, Vienna — might, if they chose, establish universal 
 equality of liberty and liberty of equality; very few sta- 
 tisticians have been struck by this idea, although it is so very 
 clear. For a capital which it takes two hours and a quarter 
 to go round is, as it were, an JStna-crater of equivalent 
 circumference for an entire country, and benefits the neigh- 
 bourhood of it as the volcano does, not only by what it 
 ejects (its eruptive matter), but by what it swallows up. 
 It clears the country in the first place of villages, and 
 next of country towns — which are primarily the outhoust s 
 and office-buildings of capital cities — inasmuch as ]t 
 pushes itself outwards in all directions year by year, and 
 
GO JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH EICHTEK. [BOOK I. 
 
 gets grown over, fringed round, and walled about witli the 
 villages. London, we know, has converted the neigh- 
 bouring villages into streets of itself; but in the lapse of 
 centuries the long, constantly extending arms of all great 
 towns must enfold not only the villages, but also the 
 country towns, converting them into suburbs. Now, in 
 this proL-ess, the roads, fields and meadows which lie 
 between the giant city and the villages get covered over 
 like a river-bed with a deposit of stone-paving ; and conse- 
 quently the operations of agriculture can no longer be 
 carried on otherwise than in flower-pots in the windows. 
 "Where there is no agriculture, I cannot see what the agri- 
 cultural population can become but unemployed idlers, 
 such as no state allows within its boundaries ; and, pre- 
 veotion being better than cure, the state will have to clear 
 this agricultural population out of the way before it sinks 
 into this condition of idling, either by means of letters inhi- 
 bitory directedagainst the increaseof population, or byexter- 
 mination, or by ennobling them into soldiery and domestics. 
 In a village which has undergone this process of being 
 morticed into a town like a lump of rubble, — or converted 
 into a stave of the great tun of Heidelberg in this manner 
 — any country people that might be still to the fore, would 
 be as ludicrous as useless ; the coral cells of the villages 
 must be cleared out before they attain the dignity of be- 
 coming reefs or atolls of a town. 
 
 When this is done, the hardest step towards equality 
 has, no doubt, been taken ; the people of the country 
 towns, a class the most hostile of all classes, at heart, to 
 equality — -have next to be attacked and, if possible, exter- 
 minated by the great town ; this, however, is more a 
 matter of time than of good management. At the same 
 time, what one or two residency-towns have accom- 
 plished in this direction, is a good beginning at all events. 
 Could we attain to our ideal, however — could we live to 
 see the day when the two classes who are the most formid- 
 able opponents of equality — the peasants, and the people 
 of the smaller towns — should have disappeared ; and when 
 not only the agricultural races but the lower nobility, the 
 small proprietors, should be extinct — ah ! then the world 
 would be in the blissful enjoyment of an equality of a 
 
CHAP. n.J FLOWER, FllCIT, AND THOBN PIECES. ()1 
 
 nobler sort than that which obtained in France, where it 
 was merely a plebeian one. There would be an absolute 
 equality it' pure nobility and collective humanity could 
 rejoice in the possession of one patent of nobility, and of 
 real authentic ancestors. In Paris, the revolution wrote 
 (as people did in the most ancient times) without capital 
 letters; but if my golden age came to pass, the writing 
 would be as it was in somewhat later times than those 
 just alluded to, all capital letters, not, as at present, with 
 capitals sticking up like steeples among quantities of small 
 letters. But though such a lofty style, such an ennoble- 
 ment of humanity as this may be nothing but a beautiful 
 dream, and though we must be content with the minor 
 consolation of seeing, in towns, the middle classes restricted 
 to a single street, as is now the case with the Jews ; even 
 that would be a clear gain to the intellectual portion of 
 mankind in the eyes of anyone who considers what an 
 accomplished, capable set of people the higher nobility 
 are. 
 
 It is upon the smaller towns, however, that we can more 
 confidently rely than upon the great residency-towns, for aid 
 in bringing about the nobilisation of the collective human 
 race, and this brings me back to Kuhschnappel. People 
 really seem to forget that it is too much to expect that the 
 four square versts or so which a residency-town occupies 
 shall be able to dominate, swallow up, and convert into 
 portions of itself, more than a thousand square miles of the 
 surrounding country (just as the boa-constrictor swallows 
 animals bigger than itself). London has not much above 
 600,000 inhabitants ; what a miserably small force com- 
 pared to the 5J- millions of all England, which that city 
 has to contend with, and cut off the wings, and supplies 
 of, alone and unassisted — to say nothing of Scotland and 
 Ireland ! This, however, does not apply to provincial 
 towns; here the number of villages, villagers, and 
 burghers which have to be coerced, starved, and put to 
 rout, are in a fair proportion to the size of the town, the 
 numbers of the aristocracy or governing classes, who have- 
 to execute the task, and work the smoothing planf^ 
 which is to level the surface of humanity. Here there is 
 little difSculty in p-edpitating the citizens (as if they wora 
 
62 JEAN PAUL FKIEDEICH KICHTEE. [bOOK I, 
 
 a kind of coarse dregs swimming in the clear fluid of 
 nobility) ; and when this precipitation is not snccessftilly 
 accomplished, it is the aristocracy themselves who are to 
 blame, in that they often show mercy in the wrong place, 
 and look upon the Burgher-bank as a grassbank, the grass 
 of which is, it is true, grown only to be sat upon and 
 pressed down, but is kept always watered, in order that it 
 may not wither from being so constantly sat upon. If there 
 were to be nothing left but the noblest classes, the citizenic 
 cinnamon-trees would be completely barked, by means of 
 taxes and levyings of contributions — (which none but 
 plebeian authors term " flaying " and " pulling the hide 
 over the ears"), — and, the bark being off, the trees of 
 course wither and die. At the same time, this process of 
 aristocratization costs men. But in my opinion it would be 
 cheaply purchased by the few thousands of people it would 
 cost, seeing that the Americans, the Swiss, and the Dutch 
 paid (so to speak) whole millions of men " cash down," on 
 the battlefield, as the price of a freedom of a much more 
 restricted kind. The fault which is sometimes found with 
 modern battle pictures, namely that they are overcrowded 
 with people, can rarely be found with modern countries. 
 We should rather notice the clever manner in which many 
 German states have, by energetic treatment, determined 
 their population, as morbid matter, in a downward direction 
 (as good physicians are wont to do), namely, down to the 
 United States of America, which are situated straight 
 helow them. 
 
 Kuhsohnappel (to return to our subject) has the pull 
 over hundreds of other towns. I admit, as Nioolai's 
 assertion, that of the 60,000 which Niirnberg contained 
 there are but 30,000 left, and that is something ; at the 
 same time it takes fifty burghers, and more, to be equiva- 
 lent to one aristocrat, which is much. Now I im ^n a 
 position to show at any moment by reference to registers 
 of deaths and baptisms, that the borough of Kuhsohnappel 
 contains almost as many aristocrats as burghers, which is 
 all the more wonderful when we reflect that the former, 
 on account of their appetites, find it a harder matter to 
 live than the latter. What modern town, I ask, can point 
 to so many free inhabitants ? Were there not even in free 
 
CHAP, ir.] FLOWEB, FRUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 63 
 
 Athens and Eome — in the West Indies there were of course — 
 more slaves than free men, for which reason the latter did 
 not dare to make the former wear any distinctive dress ? 
 And are there not in all towns more tenants than noble 
 landlords, although the ]0,ttei ouglit, one would think, to be 
 in the majority, since peasants and burghers grow only by 
 nature, while aristocrats are raised, both by nature, and by 
 art (in the shape of princely and imperial chanceries). If 
 this appendix were not a digression (and digressions are 
 generally expected to be brief) I should proceed to show, 
 at some length, that in several respects Kuhschnappel, if 
 she does not surpass, is at least quite on a par with, many 
 of the towns of Switzerland ; for instance, in a good method 
 of sharpening and lengthening the sword of justice, and, 
 on the whole, in her manner of wielding a good, spiked, 
 knotty mace — in the tax she levies on (ecclesiastical) corn, 
 not that imported from abroad, but that of home growth, 
 to exclude ikbugTit and other (in an ecclesiastical sense) 
 rubbish of that sort — and even in her " green market," or 
 trade in young men. As regards the latter, the reason 
 why the trade with France for young Kuhschnappelers to 
 serve as porters and defenders of the Crown has hitherto 
 been so flat is, that the Swiss have so terribly overdone 
 the market with fine young fellows who go and stand 
 in front of all the doors and (in war time) in front of all the 
 cannons. Of course, were it not for this, there would be 
 more doors than one with a Kuhschnappeler standing and 
 saying, " Nobody at home." (Indeed, here in my second 
 edition, I can assert that Kuhsohnappel continues to main- 
 tain its title of imperial market town, like a secondary 
 electoral dignity, and keeps up its old protective laws 
 against the import of ideas and the export of information, 
 and its blood tithO; or young men tithe to France, just as 
 Switzerland does, which is like the keeper of the castle of 
 the Wartburg, who keeps constantly re-blackening the in- 
 delible mark of the ink which Luther threw at the devil.) 
 
64 JEAN PAUL FRIEDEICH EICHTEK. [bOOK K 
 
 CHAPTEE III. 
 
 LENETTe's IIOJSEYMOON — BOOK BREWING — SCHULRATH STIEFEL 
 
 ME. EVERARD — A DAY BEFORE THE FAIR THE BED COW — 
 
 ST. Michael's fair — the beggars' opera — diabolical temp- 
 tation IN THE WILDERNESS, OR THE MANNIKIN OF FASHION 
 
 AUTUMN JOYS — A NEW LABYRINTH. 
 
 The world could not make a greater mistake tiian to 
 suppose that our common hero would be to be seen on the 
 Monday sitting in a mourning coach, in a mourning 
 cloak, crape hat-band and scarf, and black shoe-buckles, 
 figuring as chief mourner at the sham funeral of his happi- 
 ness and his capital. 
 
 Heavens ! how can the world make such an exceedingly 
 bad shot as that ? The advocate was not even in quarter 
 mourning, let alone half; he was in as good spirits as if 
 he had this third chapter before him, and were just begin- 
 ing it, as I am. 
 
 The reason was, that he had drawn up an able plaint 
 against his guardian, Blaise (enlivening it with sundry 
 satirical touches, which nobody but himself understood), 
 and laid it before the Inheritance Office. When we are in 
 a difficulty, it is always so much gained if we can but do 
 something or other. Let fortune bluster in our faces with 
 ever so harsh and frosty an autumn wind — as long as it 
 does not break the fore joint of our wing (as in the case of 
 the swans), our very fluttering, though it may not trans- 
 port us into a warmer climate, will at all events have 
 the effect of warming us a little. From motives of kind- 
 ness, Siebenkses kept his wife in ignorance of the delay in 
 the settling of his heritage accounts, as well as of the old 
 story of the change of names ; he thought there was very 
 little likelihood of a struggling advocate's wife ever having 
 an opportunity of looking over a patrician's shoulder into 
 his family hand at cards. 
 
 And, indeed, what could a man who had made a sudden 
 plunge from out his hermit's holy-week of single blessed- 
 ness, into the full honeymoon of double blessedness wish 
 lor besides? Not until now had he been able to hold 
 
CHAP. III.J FLOWER, FEtllT, AND THOKN PIECES. 65 
 
 Ms Lenette in both his arms rightly^hitherto his friend,, 
 always fluttering backwards and forwards in life, had been 
 held fast with his left aim ; but now, she was able to stretch 
 herself out far moie comfortably in the chambers of hia 
 heart. And the bashful wife did this as much as she dared. 
 She confessed to him, albeit timidly, that she was almost 
 glad not to have that boisterous Saufinder lying under the 
 table and glaring out in that terrible way of his. Whether 
 she experienced a similar relief at the absence of his wild 
 master, she could not be brought to say. To the advo- 
 cate she felt a good deal like a daughter, and her great 
 tall father could never have enough of her quaint little 
 ways. That, when he went out, slie used to look after 
 him as long as he was in sight, was nothing in comparison 
 to the way in which she used f o run out after him with a 
 brush, when she noticed from the window that there was 
 such a quantity of street paving sticking to his coat-tails 
 that nothing would do but she must have him back again 
 into the house, and brush his back as clean as if the 
 Kuhschnappel municipality would charge him paving-tax 
 if any of the mud were found on him. He would take hold 
 of the brush and stop it, and kiss her, and say, " There's a 
 good deal inside as well ; but nobody sees it there ; when 
 I come back we'll set to work and scrub some of that 
 arwAj." 
 
 Her maidenly obedience to his every wish and hint, her 
 daughterly observance and fulfilment of them, were more 
 than he looked for or required, indeed ; but not too great 
 for the love he bestowed ^.r: return. " Senate clerk's 
 daughter," he said, " you mustn't be too obedient to me ; 
 remember I'm not your father, a senate clerk, but a poor's 
 advocate who has married you and signs himself Siebenkfes, 
 to the best of his belief." 
 
 " My poor dear father,'' she answered, " used often to 
 compose and write down things too at home, himself, A^-ith 
 ais own hand, and then fair-copy them beautifully after- 
 wards." But he enjoyed these crooked answers which she 
 used to make. And though, from sheer veneration of him, 
 she never understood a single one of the jokes which he 
 was always making about himself (for she gainsaid him 
 when he satirically depreciated himself, and agreed with 
 
 II. F 
 
66 JEAN PAUL FEIEDKICH KICHTEK. [BOOK I. 
 
 him completely if he ironically lauded himself), yet these 
 mental provincialisms of hers pleased him not a little. 
 She would use such words as "fleuoh"for "fliehe," "reuch" 
 and " kreuch " for " riehe " and " kriehe ; " religious 
 antiquities out of Luther's Bible, which were valuable and 
 enjoyable contributions to her stock of idiosyncracies, and 
 to the happiness of bis honeymoon. One day when he 
 took a particularly pretty cap which she had tried on with 
 much satisfaction to each of her three cap-blocks, one after 
 =another (she would often gently kiss these cap-blocks), 
 and putting it on her own little head before the looking- 
 ^lass, said, " See how it looks on your oivn head ; perhaps 
 that's as good a block as the others," she laughed with 
 immense delight, and said, " Now, you are always flattering 
 one ! " 
 
 Believe me, this naive failure of hers to see his joke so 
 ■touched him that he made a secret vow never to make 
 another of the kind, except in private to himself. But 
 there was a greater honeymoon pleasure still. This was 
 that, when there came a fast day, Lenette would on no 
 account allow him to kiss her, when she came into the 
 room (ready for church), her white and red bloom of youth 
 shining out with threefold beauty from under her black 
 lace head-dress, and the dark leafage of her dress. 
 
 " Worldly thoughts of that kind," she said, " weren't at 
 all proper before service, when people had on their fast- 
 day things ; people must wait ! " 
 
 " By hejiven ! " said Siebenkajs to himself, " may I stick 
 a soup spoon five inches long and three broad through my 
 lower lip, like a North American squaw, and go about 
 with it there, if ever I begin spooning and kissing the 
 fpious soul again, when she has a black diess on, and the 
 'bells are ringing." And though he wasn't much of a 
 lOhurchgoer himself, he kept his word. See how we, men 
 Tsehave in matrimonial life, young ladies ! 
 
 DFrom all which it will readily appear how perfectly happy 
 .the advocate was during his honeymoon, when Lenette, 
 in the most delightful manner, did all those things for 
 Ihim which he used previously to have to do for himself 
 in a most miserable fashion and against the grain, making 
 'by unwearied sweepings and brushings Lis dithyranibio 
 
CHAP. III.] FLOWER, FRUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 67 
 
 chartreuse as clean .and level and smooth as a billiard- 
 table. Whole honey-trees full of cakes did she plant 
 during the honeymoon ; humming lound him of a morning 
 like a busy bee, carrying wax into her little Live (while 
 he was going quietly on with his law-papers, building 
 away at his juridical wasp's nest), forming her cells, clean- 
 ing them out, ejecting foreign bodies, and mending chinks ; 
 he now and then looking out of his wasp's nest eit the 
 pretty little figure in the tidiest of household dresses, at 
 sight of which he would take his pen in his mouth, hold 
 his hand out to her across the ink-bottle, and say, " Only 
 wait till the afternoon comes and you're sitting sewing — ; 
 then, as I walk up and down, I shall pay you with kisses 
 to your heart's content.!' But that none of my fair readers 
 may be unhappy about the souring of the honey of thiS; 
 moon which the conduct of that disinheriting blackguard 
 Blaise might bring about, let me just ask one question ? 
 Hadn't Siebenkres a whole silver mine and a coining mill, 
 in the shape of seven law suits all going on, full of veins 
 of rich ore ? And hadn't Leibgeber sent hitn a military 
 treasury chest on four wheels of fortune, containing 
 two spectacle dollars of Julius Duke of Brunswig, a 
 Eussian triple-dollar of 1679, a tail or queue ducat — a 
 gnat or wasp dollar — five vicariat, ducats, and a heap of 
 Ephraimites ? For he might melt down and volatilise 
 this collection of coins without a moment's hesitation, in- 
 asmuch as his friend had only pocketed them by way 
 of a jest on the people who pay a hundred dollars for 
 one. They two had all things corporeal and mental in 
 common to an extent comprehensible by few. They had 
 arrived at that point where there is no distinction visible J 
 between the giver and the receiver of a benefit, and they 
 stepped across the chasms of life bound together, as the 
 crystal-seekers in the Alps tie themselves to each other to 
 prevent their falling into the ice clefts. 
 
 ( )ne Lady Day, towards evening, however, he hit upon 
 an idea which will quite reasstire all fair readers of his 
 history who may be in a state of anxiety about him, and 
 which made Mm happier than the receipt of the biggest 
 basket of bread with little baskets of fruit in it would 
 have done — or a hamper of wine. He had felt sure all 
 
 F 2 
 
68 JEAX PAUL FKIEDIUCH EICHTEE. [bOOK U 
 
 along that he would hit upon an idea. Whenever he was 
 in a difficulty of any kind, he always used to say, " Now, 
 I wonder what I shall hit upon this time; for I shall hit 
 upon something or other as sure as there are four chambers 
 in my brain." The delightful idea in question was, that 
 he should do what I am doing at this moment — write a 
 ' book ; only his was to be a satirical one.* A torrent of 
 blood rushed through the opened sluices of his heart, right 
 in amongst the wheels and mill-machinery of his ideas, 
 and the whole of the mental mechanism rattled, whirred, 
 and jingled in a moment — a peck or two of material for 
 the book was ground on the spot. 
 
 I know of no greater mental tumult — hardly of any 
 sweeter — which can arise in a young man's being, than 
 that which he experiences when he is walking up and 
 down his room, and forming the daring resolution that he 
 will take a book of blank paper and make it into a manu- 
 script; indeed it is a point which might be argued 
 whether Winckelmann, or Hannibal the great general, 
 strode up and down tlieir rooms at a greater pace when 
 they respectively formed the (equally daring) resolution 
 that they would go to Eome. Siebenkses, having made up 
 his mind to write a ' Selection from the Devil's Papers,' 
 was forced to run out of the house, and three times round 
 the market-place, just to fix his fluttering, rushing ideas 
 into their proper grooves again by the process of tiring his 
 legs. He came back wearied by the glow within him — 
 looked to see if there was enough white paper in the house 
 for his manuscript — and running up to his Lenette, who- 
 was tranquilly working away at a cap, gave her a kiss 
 before she could well take the needle out of her mouth — ^last 
 thorn upon the rose-tree ! During the kiss she quietly 
 gave a finishing stitch to the border of the cap (squinting 
 down a; it the best way she could without moving her head). 
 
 " Eejoice with me !" he cried, " come and dance about 
 with me ! to-morrow I'm going to begin a work, a book ! 
 Roast the calf's head to-night, though it be a breach of our 
 ten commandments." For he and she, on the Wednesday 
 
 » The book wa3 published in 1789, by Beckmann of Gera, and was 
 entitled, ' Selections from the Devil's Papers.* I shall venture to 
 express my opinion on these satires further oa 
 
CHAP. III.] FLOWEK, FKDIT, AND THOKN PIECES. 69 
 
 before, had formed themselves into a committee on food 
 regulations, and, of the Thirty-nine articles of domestic 
 economy, which had then been passed and subscribed to, 
 one was that. Brahminlike, they were to do without meat 
 At supper. 
 
 But he had the greatest difficulty in getting her to 
 understand how it was that he made out that he would be 
 able to procure her another calf's head with a single sheet 
 of the ' Selections from the Devil's Papers,' and that he was 
 perfectly justified in issuing a dispensation from that 
 evening's fast ; for like the common herd of mankind, or 
 like the printers, Lenette thought that a written book was 
 paid for at the same rate as a printed one, and that the 
 compositor got rather more than the author. She had 
 never in her life had the slightest idea of the enormous 
 sums which authors are paid nowadays ; hhe was like 
 Eacine's wife, who did not know what a line of poetiy or 
 a tragedy was, although she kept house upon them. For 
 my part, however, I should never lead to the altar, or into 
 my home as my wife, any woman who wasn't capable of at 
 least completing any (•entence which death should knock me 
 over with his hour-glass in the middle of, — or who wouldn't 
 be imspeakably delighted when I read to her learned 
 Gottingen gazettes, or universal German magazines, in 
 which I was bepraised, more than I deserved perhaps. 
 
 The rapture of authorship had set all Siebenk«s's blood- 
 globules into such a flow, and all his ideas into such a 
 whirlwind this whole evening that, in the condition of vi- 
 vidness of feeling and fancy in which he was (a condition 
 which in him often assumed the appearance of temper), 
 he would instantly have flown out and exploded like so 
 much fulminating gold at everjHhing of a slow moving 
 kind which he came across — such as the servant girl's 
 heavy dawdling step, or the species of dropsy with which 
 her utterance was afflicted ; — ^but that he at once laid hold 
 on a precious sedative powder for the over-excitement 
 caused by happiness, and took a dose of it. It is easier to 
 communicate an impetus and a rapid flow to the slow- 
 gliding blood of a heavy, sorrowful heart, than to moderate 
 and restrain the billowy, surging, foaming cuiTent which 
 rushes through the veins in happiness; but he could always 
 
70 JEAN PAUL FEIEDRTCH EICHTER. [bOOK I. 
 
 calm himself, even in the wildest joy, by the thought of the 
 inexhaustible Hand which bestowed it, and that gentle 
 tenderness of heart wherewith onr eyes are drooped to 
 earth as we remember the invisible, etfernal Benefactor of 
 all hearts. At snch a time the heart, softened by thank- 
 fulness and by joyful tears, will speak its gratitude by at 
 least being kindlier towards all mankind, if in no other 
 way. That fierce, untamed delight, which is what Nemesis 
 avenges, can best be kept within due bounds by Ihis 
 sense of gratitude; and those who have died of joy would 
 either Tiot have died at all, or would have died of a better 
 and lovelier joy, if their hearts had first-been softened by 
 a grateful heavenward gaze. 
 
 His first and best thanksgiving for the new, smooth, 
 beautiful banks, between which liis life-stream had now 
 been led, took the form of a zealous and careful drawing up 
 of a defence which he had to prepare in the case of a girl 
 charged with child-murder, to save her from torture on 
 the rack. The state-physician of the borough had con- 
 demned her to the '-trial by the lungs," a neither more 
 nor less suitable punishment than the " trial by water " 
 (which used to be inflicted on witches). 
 
 : Calm spring-days of matrimony, peaceful and un- 
 disturbed, laid down their carpet of flowers for the feet of 
 these two to tread upon. Only there sometimes appeared 
 under the window, when Lenette was stretching herself 
 and her white arm out of a morning, and slowly accom- 
 plishing the fastening back of the outside shutters, a gen- 
 tleman in flesh-coloured silk. 
 
 "I really feel quite ashamed to stretch," she said; 
 "there's a gentleman always standing in the street, and 
 he takes off his hat, and notes one down jnst as if he were 
 the meat appraiser." 
 
 The Schulrath Stifefel kept, on the school Satm-d'ay 
 holidays, the solemn promise he had made on the wedding- 
 day to come and see them often, and at all events to be 
 sure and come on the Saturdays. I think I shall call him 
 Peltzstiefel (Furboots) as a pleasing variety for the ear — 
 seeing that the whole town gave him that name on 
 account of the gray miniver, faced with hareskin, which he 
 wore on his legs by way of a portable ■wood-economising 
 
CHAP. Ill,] FLOWER, FRUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 71 
 
 stove. Well, Peltzstiefel, tlie moment he came in at tlia 
 door, fastened joy-flowers together into a nosegay, andi 
 stuck them into the advocate's button-hole, by appointing, 
 him on the spot his collaborateur on the ' Knhschnappeli 
 Indicator, Heavenly Messenger, and School Programme 
 Review' — a -work ■which ought to be better known, sO' 
 ;that the works recommended by it might be so too. This 
 newspaper engagement of Siebenkses is a great pleasure to- 
 me ; it will at any rate bring my hero in sixpence or so 
 towards a supper now and then. The Schulrath, who was 
 editor of this paper, had a high sense of the power and' 
 • responsibility of his post ; but Siebenkses had now risen to 
 the dignity of an author— the only being who in his eye? 
 was superior even to a reviewer — for Lenette had told him 
 on the way to churph that her husband was going to have 
 a great thick book printed. The Schulrath considered the 
 ' Salzburg Literary Gazette ' of the period the apocryphaJ, 
 , and tie ' Jena Literary Gazette ' th& canonical scriptures : 
 •the single voice of one reviewer was, for Ms ears, multiplied 
 by the echo in the critical judgment hall into a thousand 
 voices. His deluded imagination multiplied the head of 
 one single reviewer into several Lernrean heads, as it was 
 believed of old that the devil used to surround the heads 
 of sinners with delusive false heads, that the executioneir 
 : might miss his stroke at them. 
 
 The fact that a reviewer writes anonymously gives to a. 
 single individual's opinions the weight and authority they 
 would possess, if arrived at by a whole council ; but thett 
 if, his name were put at the end, for instance, "X.YJ5., 
 Student of Divinity," instead of " New Universal German. 
 •Library," it would weaken the effect of the divinity student's 
 learned laying down of the law to too great an extent. 
 The Schulrath paid court to my hero on account of his 
 satirical turn ; for he himself, a very lamb in common life, 
 transformed himself into a wehrwolf in a review article ; 
 which is frequently the case with good-tempered men when 
 they write, particularly on himaniora and such like sub- 
 jects. As indeed, peaceful shepherd races (according to 
 Gibbon) are fond of making war, and of beginning it, or 
 just as the Idyllic painter, Gessner, was himself a biting 
 caricaturist. 
 
72 JEAN PAUL FKIEDKICH EICHTER. [bOOK I. 
 
 And our hero for his part afforded Stiefel a great pleasure 
 this evening, as well as holding out to him the prospect of 
 many more such, when he took from Leibgeber's collection 
 of coins a gnat or waap dollar, and gave it to him, not as a 
 douceur for his appointment to the critical wasp's nest, 
 but that he might turn it into small change. The Schul- 
 rath who, being himself the zealous " Silberdiener " (master 
 of the plate and jewels) of a dollar-cabinet of his own, 
 would have been delighted if money had existed solely for 
 the fake of cabinets — (meaning, however, numismatic, not 
 jjolitical, cabinets) — sparkled and blushed delighted over 
 the dollar, and declared to the advocate (who only wanted 
 the absolute value of it, not the coin-fancier's price) that 
 he considered this a piece of true friendship. " No," 
 answered Siebenka3s, " the only piece of true friendship 
 about the matter is Leibgeber giving me the dollar." " But 
 I'll give you, certainly three dollars for it, if you like to 
 ask it," said Stiefel. Lenette, delighted at Stiefel's delight, 
 and at his kindly feeling, and secretly giving her husband 
 a push as an admonition not to give way, here struck in 
 with an amount of determination which astonishes me, 
 '• But my husband's not going to do anything of the kind, 
 I assure you ; a dollar's a dollar." '• But," said Siebenkses, 
 '' I ought rather to ask you only a third of the price, if I'm 
 going to hand over my coins to j'ou one at a time in this 
 way." Ye dear souls ! If people's " yeses " in this world 
 were only always such as your " buts." 
 
 Stiefel, confirmed bachelor though he was, wasn't going 
 to let himself be found wanting, on such a delightful 
 occasion as this, at all events, in proper politeness towards 
 the fair sex, least of all towards a woman whom he had 
 begun to be so fond of, even when he was bringing her 
 home to be married, and whom he liked twice as much now 
 that she was the wife of such a dear friend, and was such 
 a dear friend herself too. He therefore adroitly led her to 
 join in the converbation (which had pieviously been too 
 deep and scholarly for her) by using the three cap-blocks 
 as stepping-stones over, to the journal of fashions ; only 
 he slid back again sooner than he might have done to a 
 more ancient journal of fashions, that of Kubenius oa 
 the ' Costume of the ancient Greeks and Eomans.' Uo 
 
CHAP. III.] FLOWER, I'KXIIT, AND THORN PIECES. 73 
 
 said he should be happy to lend her his sermoiis every 
 Sunday, as advocates don't deal in theology much. And 
 when she was looking on the floor at her feet for the 
 hnuflFers which had fallen, he held the candle down that 
 she might see. 
 
 The next Sunday was an important day for the house 
 (or rather rooms) of Siebenkses, for it introduced thereto 
 a grander character than any who have appeared hitherto, 
 namely the Venner (Finance Councillor) — ^Mr. Everard 
 Eosa von Meyern, a young member of the aristocracy, 
 who went daily in and out at Heimlicher von Blaise's to 
 "learn the routine of official business;" he was also en- 
 gaged to be married to a poor niece of the Heimlicher's, 
 who was being brought up and educated for his heart in 
 another part of Germany. 
 
 Thus the Venner was a character of consequence in the 
 borough of Kuhschnappel as well as in our ' Thorn-piece,' 
 and this in every political point of view. In a corporeal 
 point of view he was much less so. His body was stuck 
 through his flowered garments much like a piece of stick 
 through a village nosegay ; under the shining wing-covers 
 of his waistcoat (in itself a perfect animal-picture) * there 
 pulsated a thorax, perpendicular, if not absolutely concave, 
 and his legs had, aU told, about the same amount of calf 
 as those wooden ones which stocking-makers put into 
 their windows as an advertisement. 
 
 The Venner gave the advocate to understand, in a cold 
 and politely rude manner, that he had merely come to 
 relieve him from the task of defending the case of child- 
 murder, as he had so much to attend to besides. But 
 Siebenkaes saw through this pretence with great ease. It 
 was a well-known circumstance that the girl accused of 
 this crime had adopted as the father of her child (now 
 flown away above this earth) a certain commercial traveller, 
 whose name neither she nor the documents connected with 
 her case c^uld mention; but that the real father — who, 
 like a young author, was bashful about putting his name 
 to his piece fugitive — was no other than the emsiciated 
 
 * The fashionable waistcoats of those days had animals and flowers 
 spon them. 
 
7-1 JEAN PAUL FKIEDRICH EICHTEE. [BOOK t. 
 
 Vennet, Everard Eosa von Meyem himsielf. There are 
 certain things which a whole town will determine and 
 make np its mind to ignore ; and one of these was Eosa's 
 authorship. Heimlicher von Blaise knew that Siebenkass 
 was aware of it, however, and feared that he might, out of 
 revenge for the affair of the inheritance, purposely make 
 a poor defence of the girl, that the shame and disgrace of 
 her end might fall upon his relative, Meyern's shoulders. 
 What a terrible, mean suspicion ! 
 
 And yet the purest minds are sometimes driven to 
 entertain such suspicions. Fortunately Siebenkass had 
 already got the poor mother's lightning-conductor all 
 ready forged and set up. When he showed it to this 
 false bridegroom of the supposed child-murderess, th© 
 latter immediately declared that she could not have found 
 an abler guardian saint among all the advocates in the 
 town ; to which author and reader can both add " nor on© 
 who should be actuated by worthier motives," as we know 
 he did it as a thank-offering to Heaven for the first idea of 
 the 'Devil's Papers.' 
 
 At this juncture, the advocate's wife came suddenly 
 back from the adjoining bookbinder's room, where she 
 had been paying a flying visit. The Venner sprang to- 
 meet her at the threshold with a degree of politeness 
 which couldn't have been carried further, inasmuch as 
 she had to open the door before he could reach her. He 
 took her hand, which, in her respect and awe of him, she 
 half permitted, and kissed it stooping, but twisted his eyes 
 up to her face, and said : 
 
 " Meddem ! I have had this beautiful hand in mine for 
 several days." 
 
 "■'■ It now appeared, from what he said, that he was the 
 identical flesh-coloured gentleman who had stolen hei 
 hand with his drawing-pen when she had had it out of 
 the' window ; because he had been anxious to get a pretty 
 Dolce's hand for a three-quarter portrait of the young lady 
 he was engaged to, and hadn't known what to do; her 
 head he was doing from memory. He then took off his 
 gloves, in which alone he had dared as yet to touch her 
 (as many of the early Christians used only to touch the 
 Eucharist in gloves from reverence therefor), displaying 
 
CHAP. III.J FLOWER, FEUIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 75 
 
 the fires of his rings and the snow of his skin. To pre- 
 serve the whiteness of the latter from the sun, he harily 
 ever took his gloves off, except in winter when i.ne sun 
 has scarcely power to burn. 
 
 The Kuhsohnappel aristocracy, particularly its j'ounger 
 members, give a willing obedience to the comma r.dment 
 wjiich Christ gave to His apostles, to " greet no man by 
 the way," and the Venner observed the required degree of 
 incivility towards the husband, though not by any means 
 to the wife, towards whom his condescension was infinite. 
 An inborn characteristic of Siebenkees's satirical disposi^ 
 tion was a fault which he had of being too polite and 
 kindly with the lower classes, and too forward and aggres- 
 sive with the upper. He had not as yet sufficient know- 
 ledge of the world to enable him to determine the precise 
 angle at which his back should bend before the various 
 great ones of the place, wherefore he preferred to go about 
 bolt upright, though he did so against the promptings of 
 his kind heart. An additional cause was, that the pro- 
 fession to which he belonged being of a belligerent nature,, 
 has a tendency to embolden those who belong to it ; an 
 advocate has the advantage of never requiring to employ 
 one himself, and consequently he is often inclined to treat 
 even the grandest folks with some amount of coolness,, 
 unless they happen to be judges or clients, at the disposal 
 of both of vphich classes of society his best services are at 
 all times ready to be placed. Notwithstanding which, it 
 generally happened that, in Siebenkaes's kindly feeling to 
 all mankind, his moveable bridge got shoved down so lo'W 
 under his tightened strings that the notes given out by 
 them became quite low and soft. On the present occasion,, 
 however, it was nn^ch more difficult to be polite to the 
 Venner (whose designs as regarded Lenette he was com- 
 pelled to see) than to be rude to him. 
 
 Moreover, he had an inborn detestation for dressy men. 
 -^although just the contra,ry feeling for dressy women — 
 so that he would often sit and stare for a long time at the 
 little Fugel-mannikins of dress in the fashion journals, 
 just to get properly angry at them ; and he would assure 
 the Kuhschnappelers that, there was nobody whom he should 
 BO delight in playing practical jokes upon as on such a 
 
76 JEAN PAUL FKIEDBICH EICHTEE. [bOOK I. 
 
 tnannikin — yea, in insulting him, or even doing him an 
 injury (to the extent of a good cudgelling). Also it had 
 always been a source of delight to him that Socrates and 
 Cato walked barefoot about in the market-place; going 
 bareheaded, on the other hand (chapeau has), he did not like 
 half so much. 
 
 But, ere he could utter himself otherwise than by 
 making faces, the wooden-head of a Venner stroked his 
 sprouting beard, and in a distant manner graciously offered 
 himself to the advocate in the capacity of cardinal pro- 
 tector or mediator in the Blaise inheritance business ; 
 this he did, of course, partly to blind the advocate's eyes, 
 and partly to impress upon him how immeasurably in- 
 ferior was his station. The latter, however, shuddering 
 :at the idea of taking a gnome of this kind for paraclete 
 and household angel, said to him (but in Latin) — 
 
 " In the first place I must insist that my wife shall not 
 hear a syllable about that insignificant potato quarrel. 
 And moreover, in any legal question I scorn and despise 
 anybody's assistance but a legal friend's, and in this in- 
 stance I am my own legal friend. I fill an ofiScial position 
 here in Euhschnappel; it is true, the official position by 
 no means fills me." The latter play upon words he ex- 
 pressed by means of a Latin one, which displayed such an 
 unusual amount of linguistic ability, that I should almost 
 like to quote it here. The Venner, however, who could 
 neither construe the pun nor the rest of the speech with 
 the ease with which we have read it here, answered at 
 once (so as to escape without exposing his ignorance) in 
 the same language, " Imo, immo," which he meant for yes. 
 Firmian then went on, in German, saying, " Guardian 
 and ward, intimate as their connection should be, in this 
 case came into contact to an extent almost too great to be 
 pleasant ; although, no doubt, there have been cases before 
 where one cousin has cozened another ; * however, the 
 very members of ecclesiastical councils have come to fisti- 
 cuffs before now, e. g. at Ephesus in the fifteenth century. 
 Indeed, the Abbot Barsumas and Dioscurus, Bishop of 
 
 * For the next six pages or so the original literally hristles Avlth 
 untranslatable puns and plays upon words. — Tbasslator. 
 
CHAP III.] FLOWER, FEUIT, AND THOKN PIECES. 77 
 
 Alexandria, men of position,' pummelled the good Flavian 
 on that very occasion till he was as dead as a herring.* 
 And this was on a Sunday too, a day on which, in these 
 absurd old times, a sacred truce was put to quaiTels and 
 differences of every description ; though now, Sundays and 
 feast-days are the very days when the peace is broken j 
 the public-liouse bells and the tinkling of the glasses ring 
 the truce out, and, people pummel each other, so that the 
 law gets her finger into the pie. In old days, people mul- 
 tiplied the number of saints' days for the sake of stopping 
 fights, but the fact is that everybody connected with the- 
 legal profession, Herr von Meyern (who must have some- 
 thing to live upon), ought to petition that a peaceable 
 working-day or two might be abolished now and then, so> 
 that the number of rows might be increased, and with 
 them the fines and the fees in like ratio. Yet who thinks 
 of such a thing, Venner ?" 
 
 He was quite safe in spouting the greater part of this 
 before Lenette ; she had long been accustomed to under- 
 standing only a half, a fourth, or an eighth part of what 
 he said ; as for the whole Venner, she gave herself no con- 
 cern about him. When Meyern had taken his departure 
 with frigid politeness, Siebenkses, with the view of helping 
 to advance him in his wife's good opinion, extolled his 
 whole and undivided love for the entire female sex (though 
 engaged to be married), and more particularly his attach- 
 ment to that preliminary bride of his, who was now in the 
 condemned cell of the prison ; this, however, rather seemed 
 to have the effect of lowering him in her good opinion. 
 
 " Thou good, kind soul, may you always be as faithful 
 to yourself and to me!" said he, taking her to his heart. 
 But she didn't Tcnow that she had been faithful, and said, 
 " to whom should 1 be Mrafaithiul ? " 
 
 From this day onwards to Michaelmas Day, which was 
 the day of the borough fair, fortune seems to have led our 
 ^pathway, I mean the reader's and mine, through no very 
 special flower-beds to speak of, but merely along the smooth 
 green turf of an English lawn, one would suppose on purpos* 
 that the fair on Michaelmas Daj' may suddenly arise upon' 
 
 * Jloaheim's ' Eoolesiastical History.' 
 
Ii8 JEAN PAUL FHIEDKICH RICHTEK. [bOOK I, 
 
 ■our view as some shining, daKzling town starts up out of 
 -a valley. Very little did occur until then; at least, m}' 
 ■jien, which only considers itself bound to record incidents 
 of some importance, is not very willing to be troubled to 
 mention that the Venner Meyern dropped in pretty often 
 at. the bookbinder's (who lived under the same roof with 
 the Siebenka3ses) — he merely came to see whether the 
 - Liaisons Dangereuses ' were bound yet. 
 
 But that Michaelmas ! Truly the world shall remember 
 it. And in fact the very eve of it was a time of such a 
 splendid and exquisite quality that we may venture to 
 give the world some account of it. 
 
 Let the world read the account of this eve of preparation 
 at all events, and then give its vote. 
 
 On this eve of the fair all Kuhschnappel (as all other 
 places are at such a time) was turned into a workhouse 
 and house of industry for women ; you couldn't have found 
 a woman in the whole town either sitting down, or at 
 peace, or properly dressed. Girls the most given to read- 
 ing opened no books but needle-books to take needles out, 
 and the only leaves they turned over were paste ones to 
 be put on pies. Scarcely a woman took any dinner ; the 
 Michaelmas cakes and the coming enjoyment of them were 
 the sole mainspring of the feminine machinery. 
 
 On these occasions women, may be said to hold their 
 exhibitions of pictures, the cakes being the altar-pieces. 
 Everyone nibbles at and minutely inspects these baked 
 escutcheons of her neighbour's nobility ; and each has, as 
 it were, her cake attached to her, as a medal is, or the lead 
 tickets on bales of cloth, to indicate her value. They 
 scarcely eat or drink anything, it is true, thick coffee being 
 ^heir consecrated sacrament wine, and thin transparent 
 pastry their wafers ; only the latter (in their friend's and 
 hostess's houses) tastes best, and is eaten almost with 
 fondness when it has turned out hard and stony and shot 
 and dagger proof — or is burnt to a cinder — or, in short, is 
 wretched from some cause or other; they cheerfully ac- 
 knowledge all the failures of their dearest friends, and try 
 to comfort them by taking them to their own houses and 
 treating them to something of a very different kind. 
 
 As for our Lenette, she, my dear lady reader, has always 
 
CHAP. III.] FLOWEE, FRUIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 79 
 
 been a baker of such a sort that male connoisseurs have 
 preferred her crust, and female connoisseurs her crum, both 
 classes maintaining that no one but she (and yourself,' 
 ■dearest) could bake anything like either. The kitchen 
 fire was this salamander's second element, for the first and 
 native element of this dear nixie vi^as vp^ater. To be scour- 
 ing with sand, and squattering and splattering in it, in a 
 great establishment like Siebenkses's (who had devoted all 
 Leibgeber's Ephraimites to the keeping of this feast), was 
 quite her vocation. No kiss could be applied to her glow- 
 ing face on such a day — and indeed she had her hands 
 pretty full, for at ten o'clock the butcher came bringing 
 more work with him. 
 
 The world will be glad (I'm perfectly certain in my 
 own mind) if I just give them a very short account of this 
 business — who could have done it better, for that matter ? 
 The facts of it were these : at the beginning of summer the 
 four fellow lodgers had clubbed together and bought a cow 
 in poor condition which they had then put up to fatten. 
 The bookbinder, the cobbler, the poor's advocate and the 
 hairdresser — between whom and his tenants there was 
 this distinction, that they owed tJieir rent to Mm, whereas 
 he owed his to his creditors — caused to be prepaid and 
 drawn up by a skilful hand (which was attached to the 
 arm of Siebenbffis) an authentic instrument (here Kolbe 
 the word-purist will snarl at poor innocent me in his 
 usual manner for employing foreign words in a document 
 based on the Eoman law) relative to the life and death of • 
 the cow ; m which instrument the four contracting parties 
 aforesaid — who all stood attentively round the document, 
 he who was sitting and drawing it excepted — bound and 
 engaged themselves in manner following, that is to say, 
 that — 
 
 Istly. Each of the four parties interested, as aforesaid, 
 in the said cow might and should have the privilege of 
 milking her alternately. 
 
 2ndly. That this Cooking or Fattening Society might 
 and should defray from a common treasury chest the 
 price of said cow, the cost of the carriage of imple- 
 ments and provisions, and maintenance generally of the 
 same: and 
 
so JEAN PAUL FRIEDEICH EICHTEK. [BOOK 1/ 
 
 3rdly. That the allied powers as aforesaid should not 
 only on the day before Michaelmas, the 28th September, 
 1785, slaughter the said cow, but further that each quarter 
 of the same should then and there be further divided into 
 four quarters, conformably to the lex agraria, for partition 
 among the said parties to the said contract. 
 
 Siebenkees prepared four certified copies of this treaty, 
 one for each; he never wrote anything with graver 
 pleasure. All that now remained to be performed of the 
 contract by the house association of our four evangelists, 
 who had collectively adopted as their armorial crest or 
 emblematic animal, one single joint-stock beast, namely, 
 the female of that of Saint Luke — was the third article 
 of it. 
 
 However, I know the learned classes are panting for 
 my fair, so I shall only dash down a hurried sketch of my 
 Man-and-Aiiimal piece (Kolbe of course goes on taking 
 me to task). 
 
 That Septembriseur, the butcher, did his part of thu 
 I business well, though it was at the close of Fructidor — 
 the four messmates looking on throughout the operation, as 
 also did old Sabine, who did a good deal, and got something 
 for it. The quadruple alliance' regaled itself on the slain 
 animal at a general picnic, to which each contributed 
 something in order that the butcher might be included 
 gratis ;■ and it is undeniable that one member of the league, 
 whom I shall name hereafter, attended this picnic in a^ 
 frame of mind and in a costume barely serious enough for 
 the occasion. The slaughter confederation then set to 
 ■working its division sum, according to the number of its 
 members, and the golden calf round which their dance 
 was executed was cut up with the appropriate heraldic 
 cuts. Then the whole thing was over. I think I can 
 say nothing more laudatory of the manner in which the 
 whole process of zootomic division was carried out than 
 what Siebenkses, an interested party, said himself, viz., '■ 
 " It's to be wished that the twelve tribes of Israel, as well 
 as, in later times, the Eoman empire, had been divided 
 into as many and as fair divisions as our cow and Poliand 
 have been." 
 
 I shall be doing ample justice to the cow's embonpoint 
 
CHAP. III.] FLOWER, FRUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 81 
 
 if I merely mention that Feclit the cobbler uttered a pane- 
 gyric which commenced with the most lively and vigorous 
 oaths, and the statement that she was an (adjective) bag 
 of skin and bones, and ended with an assurance, uttered in 
 mild and pious accents that Heaven had indeed favoured 
 the poor beast, and " blessed us unworthy sinners above 
 measure." A frolicsome colt by nature, he had had the 
 heavy coach-harness of pietism put on to him, and was 
 consequently obliged to keep softening down the " strong 
 language" which came naturally to him into the pious 
 sighs appropriate to his " converted state." And it was to 
 the frame of mind and the costume of this very Fecht that 
 I made allusion above as being barely suitable to the 
 occasion, for I'm sorry to say he had no breeches on him 
 the whole day of this great slaughter, but ran up and 
 down the slaughter-house in a white frieze frock of his 
 wife's, having a strange general eifept of looking something 
 like his own better half. However, the members of the 
 association didn't take any offence ; he couldn't help it, 
 because while he was going about got up in this Amazon's 
 demi-negligee, and presenting this hermaphrodite appearance, 
 his own black-leather leg-cases were in the dye pot, being 
 prepared for a reissue. 
 
 The poor's advocate had begged Lenette (about a quarter 
 past four in the afternoon) not to go on working herself to 
 death, and never to mind bothering about any supper, as he 
 was going to he miserly for once, save himself a supper to- 
 night, and sup upon eighteen penn'orth of pastry : but the 
 busy soul kept running about brushing and sweeping, and 
 by six o 'clock they were both lying resting in the leather 
 arras ot^ — a big easy chair (for he had no flesh and she no 
 bones), and looking around them with that expression of 
 tranquil happiness which you may see in children while 
 eating, at the room in its state of mathematical order, at 
 the way in which everything in it was shining, at the 
 pastry new-moon-crescents in their hands, and at the 
 liquid burnished gold (or rather foilgold *) of the setting 
 sun creeping up and up upon the gleaming tin dishes. 
 There they rested and reposed like cradled children, with 
 
 * Gold iu leaves, o two colours, used by bookbinriers. 
 U. a 
 
82 JEAN PAUL FEIEDSICH EICHTEE. [BOOK I. 
 
 the screeching, clattering, twelve herculean labours of the 
 rest of the people of the house going on all round them ; 
 and the clearness of the sky and the newly cleaned windows 
 added a full half-hour to the length of the day ; the bell- 
 hammer, or tuning-hammer of the curfew bell gently let 
 down the pitch of their melodious wishes till they — lapsed 
 into dreams. 
 
 At ten o'clock they woke up and went to bed . . . . ! 
 
 I quite enjoy this little starry night picture myself* 
 though my head has reflected it all gliminery and out of 
 focus, as the gilt hemisphere of m.v watch does the evening 
 sun when I hold it up to it. Evening is the time when 
 we weary, hunted men long to be at rest; it is for the 
 evening of the da)% for the evening of the year (autumn), 
 and for the evening of life, that we lay up our hard-eamed 
 harvests, and with such eager hopes ! But hast thou never 
 seen in fields, when the crops w^ere gathered, an image and 
 emblem of thyself — I mean the autumn daisy, the flower 
 of harvest ; she delays her blossom till the summer is past 
 and gone, the winter snows cover her before her fruit 
 appears, and it is not till the — coining spring that' that 
 fruit is ripe I 
 
 But see how the roaring, dashing surges of the fair-day 
 morning come beating upon, our hero's bedposts ! He 
 comes into the white, shining room, which Lenette had 
 stolen out of bed like a thief before midnight to wash 
 while he was in his first sleep, and had sanded all over 
 like an Arabia ; in which manner she had her own way 
 while he had his. On a fair-day morning I recommend 
 ' everybody to open the window and lean out, as Siebenkajs 
 did, to watch the rapid erection and hiring of the wooden 
 booths in the market-place, and the falling of the first 
 drops of the coming deluge of people, only let the reader 
 observe that it wasn't by my advice that my hero,, in the 
 very arrogance of his wealth (fur there were samples of 
 every kind of pastry which the house contained on a table 
 behind him), called down to many of the little green aris- 
 tocratic caterpillars whom he saw moving along in the 
 street with even greater arrogance than his own, and whose 
 natural history he felt inclined to learn by a look at theii 
 laces. 
 
CHAP. III.J FLOWER, FKUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 83 
 
 " I say, sir, -will you jnst be good enbu^h to look at that 
 house, that one there — do you notice any thing particular ?" 
 '> If the caterpillar lifted up its physiognomy, he oould 
 peruse and study it at his ease, — which was of course his 
 object. 
 
 " You don't notice anything particular ?" he would ask. 
 
 "When the insect shook its head, he concurred with it,, 
 and did the same up at the window, sajing : 
 
 " No, of course not ! I've been looking at it for the last 
 twelve months myself, and can't see anything particular 
 about it ; but I didn't choose to believe my own eyes." 
 
 Giddypated Firmian ! Your seething foam of pleasure 
 may soon drop down and disappear — as it did that Saturday 
 when the cards were left. As yet, however, his little drop 
 of must which he has squeezed out of the forenoon hours 
 was foaming and sparkling briskly. The landlord moved 
 at a gnllop, casting (with his powder-sowing machine) seed 
 into a fruitful soil. The bookbinder conveyed his goods 
 (consisting partly of empty manuscript books, partly of 
 still emptier song books, partly of " novelties," in 
 almanacs) to the fair by land-carriage in a wheelbarrow, 
 which he had to make two journeys with in going, but 
 only one in returning in the evening, because then he had 
 got rid of his almanacs to purchasers and to sellers 
 (almanacs are the greatest of all novelties, or pieces of 
 news — for there is nothing in all the long course of time 
 so new as the new year). Old Sabel had set up her East 
 India house, her fruit garner, and her cabinet of tin rings 
 at the town gate; she wouldn't have let that warehouse 
 of hers go to her own brother at a lower figure than half- 
 a-sovereign. The cobbler put a stitch in no shoe on this 
 St. Michael's Day except his wife's. 
 
 Suck away, mj' hero, at your nice bit of raffinade sugar 
 of life, and empty your forenoon sweetstuff spoon, not 
 troubling your head about the devil and his grandmother, 
 although the pair of them should be thinking (after the 
 nature of them) about getting a bitter potion, even a 
 poison cup, made ready and handing it to you. 
 
 But his greatest enjoyment is still to come, to wit, the 
 numberless beggar people. I will describe this enjoyment, 
 and so distribute it. 
 
 G 2 
 
84 JEAK PAUL FKIEDEICH EICHTEE. [BOOK I. 
 
 » 
 
 A fair is the higli mass whicli the beggars of all jartks 
 and classes attend ; when it is still a day or two off, all the 
 footsoles that have nothing to walk upon but compassionate 
 hearts, are converging towaids the spot like so many radii, 
 but on the morning of the fair-day itself the whole annual 
 congress of boggardom and the column of cripples are 
 fairly on the march. Anyone who has seen Fiirth, or been 
 in Elwangen during P. Gassner's government, may cut 
 these few leaves out of his copy ; but no one else has any 
 idea of it till 1 proceed and lead him in at the town-gate 
 of Kuhschnappel. 
 
 The street choral service and the vocal serenades now 
 commence. The blind sing like blinded singing-birds — 
 better, but louder ; the lame walk ; the poor preach the 
 gospel themselves ; the deaf and dumb make a terrible 
 noise, and ring in the feast with little bells — everybody 
 lyings his own tune in the middle of everybody else's — a 
 paternoster is clattering at the door of every house, and in 
 the rooms. inside nobody can hear himself swear. Whole 
 cabinets of small coppers are lavished on one hand, pocketed 
 on the other. The one-legged soldiery spice their ejacula- 
 tory piaj'ers with curses, and blaspheme horribly, because 
 people don't give them enough — in brief, the borough which 
 had made up its mind for a day's enjoyment, is invaded 
 and almost taken by storm by the rabble of beggars. 
 
 And now the maimed and the diseased begin to appear. 
 Whoever has a wooden jury-leg under him, sets it and 
 his long third leg and fellow-labourer the crutch, in motion 
 towards Kuhschnappel, and drives and plants his sharp- 
 pointed timber toe into moist earth there in the vicinity ot 
 the town-gate, in hopes of its thriving and bearing fruit. 
 Whosoever has no arms or hands left, stretches both out 
 for an alms. Those to whom Heaven has entrusted the 
 beggars' talent, disease, above all paralysis, the beggars' 
 vapeurs — trades with his talent, and the body appertaining 
 to it, levying contributions with it on the whole and the 
 sound. I'eople who might stand as frontispieces to works 
 on surgery and medicine, quite as appropriately as at city 
 gates, take up their position near the latter and announce 
 what they lack, which is, first and foremost, other people's 
 cash. There are plenty of legs, noses, and arms in Knh- 
 
CHAP, III.] FLOWEB, TEUIT, AND THOBN PIECES. 89 
 
 schuappel, but a great many more people. There is one most 
 extraordinary fellow — (to be admired at a distance, though 
 impossible to be equalled — ^looked upon with envj', though 
 indeed only by such blotting-paper sonls as can never see 
 supreme excellence without longing to possess it) ; there's 
 only half of him there, because the other half's in his grave 
 already, everything you could call legs having been shot 
 clean away ; and these shots have placed him in a position 
 at once to arrogate and assume to himself the primacy and 
 generalship-in-chief of the cripples, and be drawn about 
 ou a triumphal car as a kind of demigod, whose soul, in 
 place of a corporeal garment, has on merely a sort of cape 
 and short doublet. " A soldier," said Siebenkees, " who 
 is still afflicted with one leg, and who on that ground 
 expostulates with fate, inquiring of her, 'Why am J not 
 shot to pieces like that cripple, so that I might make as 
 much in the day as he does ? ' seems to forget that on the 
 other side of the question there are thousands of other 
 ■warriors besides himself who haven't even one wooden leg 
 (let alone more), but are totally unprovided with even that 
 fire- and begging-certificate ; moreover, that however 
 manj' of his limbs he might have been relieved of by bul- 
 lets, he might still keep on asking, ' Why not more ? ' " 
 
 Siebenkses was merry over the poor because they aie 
 merry over themselves ; and he never would kick up a 
 politico-economical row about their occasionally tippling 
 and guzzling a little too much, — when, for instance, a whole 
 lazarette-wagon, or ambulance-load of them, halting at some 
 shepherd's hut, they get down, and go in, and their plasters, 
 their martyrs' crowns, their spiked girdles and hair-shirts 
 come off, leaving nothing but a brisk human being who has 
 left off sighing just for a minute ; or — since what every- 
 body works for is, not merely to live, but to live a little 
 better now and then — when the beggar too has some- 
 thing a little better than his everyday fare, and when the 
 cripple pulls the goddess of joy into his boarded dancing- 
 barn to dance with him as his partner, and her hot mask 
 falls off in the waltz (as for our ball-rooms, it never falls off 
 in them J. 
 
 About 11 o'clock, the devil, as I have half hinted already, 
 dropped a handful of blue-bottle flies into Firmian's wed- 
 
S6 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH EIOHTEK. [BOOK I. 
 
 ding soTip — to wit, Ilerr Eosa von Meyern, who giaciously 
 intimated Hs aristocratic intention of coming to call that 
 afternoon, " because there was such a good view of the 
 market-place." People of impecunious gentility, who can't 
 issue orders in any Viouses hut their own, construct in their 
 ■own, with much ease, loopholes whence they can fire upon 
 the enemy who makes his attack from — within. The ad- 
 vocate had a piece of ludeness towards the Venner to put 
 into either scale of his balance of justice, so as to determine 
 which was the least of the two. The one was, to let him 
 be told he might stay where he was ; the other, to let him 
 in, and then behave just as though the noodle were up in 
 the moon. Siebenkass chose the latter as the smaller. 
 
 Women, good souls, have always to cairy and hold up 
 ihe Jacob's ladder by which the male sex mount into the 
 blue sether and into the evening-red ; this call of the 
 Venner came as an extra freight loaded on to Lenette's 
 two burden-poles of arms. The laving of all moveable 
 property, and the aspersion of all immoveable, recommenced. 
 Meyern, the false lover of the pour child-murderess, Lenette 
 detested with all her heart ; at the same time, all her 
 polishing machinery was at once set agoing on the loom. 
 Indeed, I think women dress themselves more and with 
 greater pains for their lady-enemies than for their lady- 
 friends. 
 
 The advocate went up and down, all behung wnth long 
 chains of ratiocination, like a ghost, and would fain have buu- 
 ceeded in imbuing her with the idea that she shouldn't give 
 herself the slightest bother of any kind about the nincom- 
 poop. " It was no good," she said," what would he think 
 <jf nie ?" It was not until having eliminated from the room 
 MS a piece of crudity his old ink-bottle, into which he had 
 only that minute put ink-powder to dissolve and make ink 
 lor the ' Selection from the Devil's Papers,' she was about 
 to lay hands on that holy ark, his writing-table — that the 
 head of the house i-amped up — on his hind legs, pointing 
 with his fore paw to the line of demarcation. 
 
 Eosa appeared ! Nobody who had just a little soft place in 
 his heart could really have cursed this youngster, or beaten 
 him into a jelly; one rather got to feel a kind of a likinf 
 for him, between his pranks. He had white hair on his 
 
CHAP. III.] FLOWEK, FKUIT, AND THOKST PIECES. 87 
 
 head and on his chin, and was soft all over ; and had stuff 
 like milk instead of blood in his veins, like the insects^ 
 just as poisonous plants have generally white milky juice. 
 He was of a very forgiving nature, espe6ially towards 
 •women, and often shed more tears himself in an evening at 
 the theatre than he had caused many whom he had ruined 
 to let fall. His heart was really not made of stone, or 
 lapis infernalis, and if he prayed for a certain time, he grew 
 pious during the proce.^s and sought out the most time- 
 honoured of religious formulniies to give in his adhesion to 
 them then and there. Thunder was to him a watchman's 
 Tattle, arousing him from the sleep of sin. He loved to take 
 the needy by the hand, especially if the hand was pretty. All 
 things considered, he may perhaps get to heaven sooner or 
 later; for, like many debtors in the upper circles of society, 
 lie doesn't pay his play-debts, and he also has in his heart 
 ^n inborn duel- prohibition against shooting and hacking. 
 As yet he is not a man of his word ; and if he were 
 poorer, he would steal without a moment's hesitation. 
 Like a lap-dog, he lies down wagging his tail at the feet of 
 people of any importance, but tugs women by the skirts, 
 'Or shows his teeth and snarls at them. 
 
 Pliant water-weeds of this sort fall away from the very 
 slightest satiric touch, and you can't manage to hit them 
 with one, I'ichly as they deserve it, because its effect is 
 only proportionate to the resistance it meets with. Sieben- 
 kass would have been better pleased had Von Meyern only 
 been a little rougher and coarser, for it is just these yielding, 
 pitiful, sapless, powerless sort of creatures that filch away 
 good fortune, hard cash, feminine honour, good appoint- 
 iments and fair names, and are exactly like the ratsbane 
 lor arsenic, which, when it is good and pure, must be quite 
 white, shining and transparent. 
 
 Eosa appeared, I have said, but oh ! lovely to behold 
 Sfoeyond expression ! His handkerchief was a great Molucca 
 of perfume ; his two side locks were two small ones. On 
 his waistcoat he had a complete animal kingdom painted 
 (as the fashion of the day was), or Zimmermann's Zoological 
 Atlas. His little breeches and his little coat, and every- 
 thing about him salted the women of the house into Lettish 
 salt-pillars, merely in passing therii by on his way upstairs. 
 
88 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICII EICHTEE. [bOOK I. 
 
 1 must say, tliough, that what dazzle me personally, are 
 the rings which emboss six of his fingers, — there were 
 profile portraits, landscapes, stones, even beetle-wing 
 covers all employed in this gold -shoeing of his fingers. 
 
 We may quite properlj' apply to the human hand tlie 
 expression " it was shod, with rings like a horse's hoof," 
 it has been long applied to the horse's hoof itself, and 
 Daubenton has proved, by dissections, that the latter 
 contains all the different parts of the human hand. The 
 use of these hand or finger manacles is quite proper and 
 permissible ; indeed rings are indispensable to the fingers 
 of those who ought by rights to have them in their noses. 
 Accoiding to the received opinion, these metal spavins, or 
 excrescences of the fingers, were only invented to make 
 pretty hands ugly, as a kind of chain and nose-rings to 
 keep vanity in check ; so that fists which are ugly by 
 nature can easily dispense with these disfigurements. I 
 should like to know whether there is anything in another 
 idea of mine bearing on this subject. It is this. Pascal 
 used to wear a great iron ring with sharp spines on it 
 j round his naked body, that he might always be ready to 
 ' punish himself for anj' vain thought which might occur to 
 him by giving this ring a slight pressure ; now is it not 
 perhaps the case that these smaller and prettier rings in a 
 similar way chastise any vain thoughts which may occur, 
 by slightly, but frequently hurting ? They seem at least to 
 be worn with some such object, *br it is exactly the people 
 who suffer most from vanity who wear the greatest 
 quantities of theni, and move about their beringed hands, 
 the most. 
 
 Unwished-for visits often pass off better than others; 
 on this occasion everyone got on pretty comfortably. 
 Siebenkses of course was in his own house— ^and behaved 
 himself accordingly. He and the Venner looked out of 
 the window at the people in the market-place. Lenette, 
 in accordance with her upbringing, and the manners and 
 customs of the middle classes of small towns, didn't ven- 
 ture to be otherwise than silent, or at the most to take an 
 exceedingly subordinate, obligate, accompanying part in 
 the concert of a conversation between men ; she fetched and 
 xsariied in and out, and, in fact, sat most of the time down 
 
CHAP. III.] FLOWEB, FRUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 89 
 
 stairs with the other women. It was in. vain that the 
 courteous, gallant Eosa Everard, tried upon her his 
 wonted wizai d spells to root women to a given spot. To- 
 her husband he complained that there was little real 
 refinement in Kuhschnappel, and not one single amateur 
 theatre where one could act, as there was ir. Ulm. Ho 
 had to order his new books and latest fashions from, 
 abroad. 
 
 Siebenkses in return expressed to him merely his enjoj-- 
 ment over the — beggars in the market-place. He made 
 him notice the little boys blowing red wooden trumpets, 
 loud enough to burst the drum of the ear, if not to over- 
 throw the walls of Jericho. But he added, with proper 
 thoughtful ness, that he shouldn't omit to notice those 
 other poor devils who were collecting the waste bits of 
 split wood in their caps for fuel. He asked him if, like 
 other members of the chamber, he disapproved of lotteries 
 and lotto, and whether he thought it was very bad for the 
 Kuhschnappel common people's morals that they should be 
 crowding about an old cask turned upside down, with an 
 index fixed to the bottomof it which revolved round a dial 
 formed of gingerbread and nuts, and where the share- 
 holders, for a small stake, carried oif from the banker of 
 the establishment, a greedy old harridan of a woman, a 
 nut or a ginger cake. Siebenkses took pleasure in the 
 little, because in his eyes it was a satirical, caricaturing^ 
 diminishing mirror of everything in the shape of 
 burgherly pomposity. The Venner saw no entertainment 
 whatever in double-meaning allusions of the kind ; but 
 indeed the advocate never dreamt of amusing anybody 
 but himself with them. " I may surely speak out what- 
 ever I like to myself," he once said ; " what is it to me if 
 people choose to listen behind my back, or before my face 
 either ? " 
 
 At length he went down among the people in the 
 market-place, not without the full concurrence of the- 
 Venner, who expected at last 1o be able to have some- 
 rational conversation with the wife. Now that Tirmian 
 was gone, Everard begun to feel in his element, swimming 
 in his own native pike-pond as it were. As an intro- 
 ductory move he constructed for Lenette a model of hei 
 
90 JEAN PAUL FRIEDEICH EICHTER. [BOOK I. 
 
 native town ; he knew a good many streets and people in 
 Augspurg, and had often ridden through the Fuggery, 
 and it seemed only yesterday, he said, that he saw her 
 there working at a lady's hat, beside a nice old lad^-, her 
 mother he should think. He took her right hand in his 
 •(in an incidental manner), she allowing him. to do so out 
 ■of gratefulness for calling up such pleasant memories ; he 
 pressed it — then suddenly let it go to see if she mightn't 
 just have returned the pressure the least bit in the world, 
 in the confusion of fingers as it were — or should try to 
 recover the lost pressure. But he might as well have 
 pressed Giitz ,von Berlichingen's iron hand with his 
 thievish thumb as her warm one. He next came upon the 
 subject of her millinery work, and talked about cap and 
 bonnet fashions like a man who knew what he was talking- 
 .about ; whereas when Siebenkass mixed himself up with 
 these questions, he displaj'ed no real knowledge of the 
 subject at all. He promised her two consignments, of 
 patterns from Ulm, and of customers from Kuhschnappel. 
 " I know several ladies who must do what I ask them," he 
 said, and showed her the list of his engagements for the 
 coming winter balls in his pocket-book; "I shan't dance 
 with them if they don't give you an order." " 1 hope it 
 won't come to that," said Lenette (with many meanings).^ 
 Finally, he was obliged to ask her to let him see her at 
 work for a little, his object here being to weaken the 
 •enemy by effecting a diversion of her forces — her eyes 
 being occupied with her needle, she could only have her 
 «iirs at liberty to observe him with. She blushed as she 
 took two bodkins and stuck one of them into the round 
 red little pincushion of — her mouth ; this was more than he 
 could really allow, it was so very dangerous — it formed a 
 hedge against himself — and she might swallow either the 
 stiletto in question, or at all events some of the poisonous 
 verdigris off it. So he drew this lethal weapon with his 
 ■own hand out of its sheath in her lips, .scratching the 
 ■cherry mouth a little, or not at all— as he loudly lamented 
 — in the process, however. A venner of the right sort 
 ■considers himself liable in a case of this kind for the fees 
 land expenses consequent upon the accident ; Everard, 
 in Us liberality, took out his English patent pomade, 
 
■CHAP. III.J FLOWER, FKUIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 91 
 
 emeared some on to her left forefinger, and applied the 
 .salve to the invisible vfound with the finger as a spatula — 
 in doing which he was obliged to take hold of her whole 
 hand as the handle of the spatula, and frequently squeeze 
 it unconsciously. He stuck the unfortunate stiletto itself 
 into his shirt front, giving her his own breastpin instead, 
 and exposing his own tender white breast to — the cold. I 
 particularly beg persons who have had experience in this 
 description of service to give their opinion with firm im- 
 partiality on my hero's conduct, and, sitting in court 
 martial on him, to point out such of his movements and 
 ■dispositions as they may consider to have been ill- 
 advised. 
 
 Now that she was wounded, poor thing, he wouldn't let 
 lier go on working, but only show him her finished pro- 
 diictions. He ordered a copy of one of them lor Madame 
 von Blaise. He begged her to put it on and let him see 
 it (in her — and he set it himself just as Madame von Blaise 
 would wear it. By heaven ! it was better even than he 
 had thought ; he swore it would suit Madame von Blaise 
 quite as well, as she was just the same height as Lenette. 
 This was all stuff and nonsense, really the one was taller 
 by quite half a nose than the other. Lenetle said so 
 herself, she had seen Madame von Blaise at church. Eosa 
 stuck to his own opinion, and swore by his soul and sal- 
 vation (for in cases of tlie kind he was given to profane 
 language), and by the sacrament, that he had measured 
 himself with her a hundred times, and that she was half- 
 an-inch taller than himself. " By heaven ! " he said, 
 suddenly jumping up, " of course I carry her measure 
 about with me, like her tailor ; all that need be done is ' 
 that you and I measure ourselves together." 
 
 1 shall not here withhold from little girls a golden rule 
 of war made by myself, " Don't argue long with a man, 
 whatever it may be about — warmth is always warmth, 
 even if it only be warmth of argument — one forgets one's 
 self, and ultimately takes to proving by syllogistic figures, 
 and this is just what the enemy wants — he converts these 
 figures into poetical figures — ultimately even into plastic 
 figures." 
 , Lenette, a li,'-.tle giddy with the rapid whirl of events^ 
 
92 JEAN PAUL FRIEDEICH EICHTEB. [bOOK L 
 
 good naturedly stood up to serve as recmit measure for 
 her recruit Eosa ; he leant his back to hers. " This won't 
 do," he said, " I can't see," and unlocked his fingers which 
 had been intertwined together, backwards, over the region 
 of her heart. He turned quickly round, stood before her, 
 and embraced her gently, so as to determine, by com- 
 paring the levels of their eyes, whether their brows were 
 an exact height or not. His were glaring quite an inch 
 liigher up than hers ; he clasped her closely and said, 
 turning red, " you see you were right ; but my mistake 
 was that I added your beauty to your height," and in this 
 proximity he pressed his mouth, red as sealing-wax, upon 
 her lips, very founts and sources of truth as they were. 
 
 She was ashamed, annoyed and embarrassed, angry, and 
 ready to cry, but had not the courage to let her indigna- 
 tion break out upon a gentleman of quality. She didn't 
 speak another word then. He set her and himself at the 
 window, and said he would read her some songs, of rather 
 a different kind, he hoped, to those which were being 
 hawked down in the street. For he was one of the 
 greatest poets in Kuhschnappel, although as yet it was 
 not so much that his verses had made him known, as that 
 he had made his verses known. His poems, like sa 
 many others nowadays, were like the muses themselves, 
 children of memory. Every old Trankish town has at 
 least its one fashionable fop, a person who fait les lionneurs ; 
 and every town, however old, prosaic, imperial-judicature- 
 endowed, possesses its genius, its poet, and sentimentalist ; 
 often both these ofBces are filled by the same individual 
 — as was the case in Kuhschnappel. The greater and 
 likewise the lesser house of assembly looked upon Eosa as a 
 mighty geniuSjSmittenwiththe genius-epidemic-fever. This 
 disease is something like elephantiasis, of which Troil in his 
 travels in Iceland gives such an accurate description in 
 twenty-four letters, and the principal features of which 
 are that the patient is exactly like am elephant as to hair,^ 
 cracks, colour, and lumps of the skin, but has not the 
 pmoer of the elephant, and lives in a cold climate. 
 
 Everard took a touching elegy out of one of his pockets, 
 the left one, in which (i mean in the elegy) a noble 
 gentleman, lovesick, sang himself to death ; and he told 
 
CHAP. in.J FLOWER, FKUIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 93 
 
 'her he should like to read it to her, if his feelings would 
 let him get through it without breaking dowji. However, 
 the poem shortly drew more than one tear and emotion 
 from its owner, and he, to his honour, was constrained to 
 furnish a fresh proof of the fact that however manly and 
 cold he and poets of his stamp can be to the heaviest 
 sorrows of humanity, they really cannot quite contain 
 themselves at the woes of love, but are compelled to weep 
 at them. Meanwhile Eosa, who, like swindlers at play, 
 always kept one eye upon a reilecting surface of some sort 
 — water, window panes, or polished steel for instance, so 
 as to catch a passing glimpse of the female countenance 
 from time to time — saw by means of a little mirror in 
 one of the rings of his left hand, in which hand he was 
 , holding the elegy, just a trace or two in Lenette's eyes of 
 the tragic dew left there by his poem. So he pulled out 
 •of his second pocket a ballad (it is, no doubt, printed long 
 ago) in which an innocent child murderess, with a tearful 
 adieu to her lover, throws herself upon a sword. This 
 >. ballad (very unlike his other poetical children) had real 
 poetic merit, for luckily (for the poem at least) he was a 
 lover of that kind himself, so that he could speak /rom the 
 heart to the heart. It is not easy to portray the emotion 
 and the melting pitying tears on Lenette's face ; all her 
 heart rose to her tear-dimmed eyes. 
 
 It was an experience utterly new to her to be thus 
 agitated by a combination of truth and fiction. 
 
 The Venner threw the ballad into the fire, and himself 
 into Lenette's arms, and cried — 
 
 " Oh ! you sympathising, noble, holy creature !" 
 
 I cannot paint the amazement with which, cpmpletely 
 unprepared for and incomprehensive of this transition from 
 •crying to kissing, she shoved him away. This made little 
 impression on him ; he was on his high horse and said he 
 must have some souvenir of this "sacred entrancing 
 moment" — only a little lock of her hair. Her humble 
 station, his high-flown language, and the fact that she 
 was perfectly unable to form the slightest idea what use 
 her hair would be to him, even supposing she gave enough 
 to stuff a pillow — all this put into her head the foolish 
 idea that he wanted it to perform some magical rite with, 
 
94 JEAN PAUL FEIEDBICH EICHTEE. [bOOK I. 
 
 sucli as putting ter under a love spell, or somethfng of the 
 sort. 
 
 He might have stabbed himself thei'e ' and then before 
 her, hewn himself in pieces, impaled himself alive, hhe 
 ■wouldn't have interfered ; she might indeed have shed her 
 Mood to save him, but not a single hair of her head. 
 
 He had still one resource in petto — he had really never 
 met with such a case as this before; he lifted up his hand 
 and vowed that he would get Herr von Blaise to recognise 
 her husband as his nephew, and pay over his inheritance 
 — and that with the greatest ease, because he would 
 threaten to jilt his niece unless he did it — ^if she would 
 just take the scisbors and cut off a little hair memorial, no 
 bigger even than the fourth part of a moustache. 
 ' She knew nothing about the business of the inheritance, 
 and he was consequently obliged, to the great detriment of 
 his enthusiastic state, to give a prosaic, detailed account of 
 the species facti of the whole of that law suit. By great 
 good fortune he had still in his pocket the number of the 
 ' Gazette ' in which the inheritance chamlser's inquiry as to. 
 the advocate's existence appeared in print, and he was able 
 to put it into her hands. And now this plundered wife 
 began to cry bitterly, not for the loss of the money, but 
 because her husband had told her nothing about it all this- 
 time, and still more because she couldn't quite make out 
 what her own name really was, or whether she was 
 married to a Siebenkses or to a Leibgeber. Her tears 
 flowed faster and faster, and in her passion of grief she 
 would have let the deceiver before her have all the pretty 
 hair on Tier head, had not an accidental circumstance burst 
 the whole chain of events, just as he was kneeling and 
 imploring her for one little look. 
 
 But we must first look after her husband a little, and 
 see how he is getting on. and whither he bends his steps. 
 At .first amcing the market stalls; for the many-throated 
 roaring, and the 011a Podrida of cheap pleasures, and the 
 displayed pattern cards of all the rags out of, and upon, 
 which, we human clothes moths construct our covering 
 cases and our abodes — all these caused his mind to sink 
 deep into a sea of humoristic-melancholy reflections con- 
 cerning this mosaic picture of a life of oiirs, made up as it 
 
CHAP. III.] FLOWEK, TUUIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 9& 
 
 is of SO inanj- little bits, many-tinted moments, motes,, 
 atoms, di'ops, dust, vapour-s. He laughed, and listened, 
 with an emotion incomprehensible by many of my readers,, 
 to a ballad singer, bawling, with his rhapsodist's statf in 
 his right hand pointed at a big, staring picture of a 
 horrible murder, and his left full of smaller, printed pic- 
 tures, for sale, in which the misdeed and the perpetrator of 
 it were displayed to the German public in no brighter 
 colours than those of poetry. Siebenkses bought two copies, 
 and put them in his pocket, to lead in the evening. 
 
 This tragic murder picture evoked in the background of 
 his fancy that of the poor girl he had defended, and the 
 gallows, on to which fell those burning tears which had 
 flowed from, his wounded heart — that heart which nobody 
 on earth, save one, understood — when last it had been, 
 lacerated. He left the noisy market-place, and sought 
 all-peaceful nature, and that isolatorium, destined alike- 
 for friendship and for guilt, the gallows. When we pass 
 from the stormy uproar of a fair into the still expanse of 
 .wide creation, entering into the dim aisles of nature's 
 ihushed cathedral, the strange sudden calm is to the soul 
 as the caressing touch of some beloved hand. 
 
 "With a sad heart he climbed up to the well-known 
 spot, whose ugly name I shall omit, and from these ruins 
 he gazed around upon creation, as if he were the last of 
 living beings. Neither in the blue sky, nor upon the widfr 
 earth, was there voice or sound; nothing but one forlorn 
 cricket, chirping in monosyllables, among the bare furrows, 
 where the harvest had been cleared away. The troops of 
 birds flocking together with discordant cries flew to the 
 green nets spread upon the ground — and not to meet the 
 ■green spring far away. Above the meadows, where all 
 the flowers were withered and dead, above the fields, 
 where the corn ^ras waved no more, floated dim phantom 
 forms, all pale and wan, faint pictures of the past. Over 
 the grand eternal woods and hills a biting mist was 
 draped in clinging folds, as if all nature, trembling into 
 dust, must vanish in its wreaths. But one bright thought 
 pierced these darlv fogs of nature and the soul, turning 
 them to a white gleaming mist, a dew all glittering with 
 yainbow colours, and gently lighting upon flowers. He 
 
96 JEAN PAUL FEIEDKIOH EICHTER. [bOOE 1 
 
 turned liis face to the nortli-east, to tlie hills whicli lay 
 between him and his other heart, and up from behind 
 them rose, like an early moon in harvest, a pale image of 
 his friend. The spring, when he should go to him and 
 see him once more, was at work already preparing for him 
 ■a, fair broad pathway tliither, all rich with grass and 
 flowers. Ah ! how we play with the world about us, so 
 quickly dressing it all with the webs which our own spirits 
 spin. 
 
 The cloudless sky seemed sinking closer to the dusky 
 ■earth, bright with a softer blue. And though a whole 
 long winter lay between, the music of the coming spring 
 already came, faint and distant, to his ear ; it was there in 
 the evening chime of the cattle bells down in the meadows, 
 in the birds' wild wood notes in the groves, and in the 
 free streams flowing fast away amid the flowery tapestries 
 that were yet to be. 
 
 A palpitating chrysalis was hanging near him still in 
 her haif-shrivelled caterpillar's case, sleeping away the 
 time till the flower cups all should open ; phantasy, that 
 ■eye of the soul, saw beyond and over the sheaves of 
 autumn the glories of a night in June; every autumn- 
 tinted tree seemed blooming once again ; their bright 
 coloured crests, like magnified tulips, painted the autumn 
 mist with rainbow dyes; light breezes of early May 
 seemed chasing e?ich other through the fresh, fluttering 
 '.eaves ; they breathed upon our friend, and buoyed him 
 up, and Toso with him on high, and held him up above the 
 harvest and above the hills, till he could see beyond these 
 hills and lands — and lo ! the springs of all his life to 
 come, lying as j-et enfolded in the bud, lay spread before 
 his sight like gardens side by side — and there, in every 
 spring time, stood his friend. 
 
 He left the place, but wandered a long while about the 
 •meadows, where at this time of year there was no need to 
 ihunt carefully for footpaths — chiefly that his ej'es might 
 not betray where his thoughts had been to aU the market 
 people who were to be met. It was of little use — for in 
 -certain moods the torn and wounded heart, like injured 
 trees, bleeds on and on, and at the slightest touch. 
 
 He shunned eye-witnesses, such as Eosa above all, foi 
 
CHAP. III.] FLOWEE, FKUIT, AND THOKN PIECES. 97 
 
 this reason, that he was (I am sorry to have to say it) in 
 just one of those moods when, whether from modesty or 
 f;Eom vividness of feeling, he was most disposed to mask, 
 his emotion under the semhlance of temper. At last a 
 weapon of victory came to his hand, the thought that he 
 had to apologize and make amends to his guest for so long 
 and so uncourteous an absence. 
 
 When he got home — what a strange state of matters ! 
 The old guest gone — another there in his place — and near 
 the latter his wife in tears. When he came into the room, 
 Lenette went to one of the windows, and a fresh torrent 
 of tears fell down. " Madame Siebenk»s," said the Schul- 
 rath, continuing his address to her, and keeping hold of 
 her hand, "submit yourself to the will of God, I beseech 
 you ; nothing has happened but what can be put to rights 
 without difSculty. I am willing to concede you a sorrow 
 of the heart — but it must be a restrained and a subdued 
 one." 
 
 Lenette looked out of the window, not at her husband. 
 
 The Schulrath related, in the first place, all that I 
 have already given my account of (Firmian, listening 
 to him and looking at him, took the glowing hand of 
 Lenette, whose face was still averted), and then con- 
 tinned — 
 
 " When I came in, merciful Heavens, there was his 
 lordship on his knees before Madame Siebenkaes, with 
 carnal fears, and — I am constrained to have the gravest 
 suspicions — a design upon her precious honour ! How- 
 ever, I raised him up, without the least ceremony, and 
 I said to him, with the boldness of St. Paul himself 
 — for which I am ready to answer before God and man 
 — ' Your Lordship, are these the doctrines which I incul- 
 cated into your Lordship when I was your private tutor ; 
 is it Christian conduct to go down upon your knees in 
 such a manner ? Fie, for shame, Herr von Meyem. Fie, 
 for shame, Herr von Meyern ! ' " 
 
 Here the Schulrath got into a terrible heat again, and 
 strode up and down the room with his hands in the 
 pockets of his plush coat. 
 
 Firmian said, " It'sa, simple matter to set up a scarecrow 
 and plant a hedge to keep off a hare like Airo ; but what 
 
 II. H 
 
&8 JEAN PAUL FBIEDEICH RICHTEE. [bOOK 1. 
 
 ails you, ]ove," he said, "and what are you crying so 
 bitterly about ?" 
 
 She cried more bitterly than ever ; when the Schulrath 
 planted his hands on hie sides, and said to her in much 
 wrath, " Very well, Madame SiebenkKs, this is the way oi 
 it, is it? This is all the impression my good counsel and 
 comforting words have made upon your mind, is it ? I 
 never should have believed it of you ! 
 
 "It was all for nothing then (as I am constrained to 
 conclude) that, when I had the honour of bringing you 
 here from Augspurg in my carriage, I described to you with 
 all the eloquence at my command, the blessedness of the 
 married state, before you had had an opportunity of learn- 
 ing it by experience ; it seems I might just as well have 
 spoken to the winds of heaven. Can it really be the case 
 that all that I said to you in the carriage simply went in at 
 one ear and out at the other ? when I told you how happy a 
 wife was in and through her husband, how she often could 
 hardly help crying for joy at possessing him — how these 
 two had but one heart and one flesh, and shared every- 
 thing between them, joy and sorrow, everj' morsel of food, 
 every wish and desire, ay and the very smallest secrets. 
 Well, well, Madame Siebenkaes, I see the Schulrath may 
 keep his breath to cool his porridge." 
 
 Upon this she twice wiped and dried her eyes hurriedly, 
 constrained herself to look at him very kindly indeed, and 
 with a forced appearance of being quite pleased again, and 
 said with a deep sigh, but softly and not in a tone of pain, 
 " Oh dear me !" 
 
 The Schulrath touched her hand as it hung down with 
 his finger tips in a priestly manner, and said — 
 
 " But may the Lord be your physician and helper in all 
 your necessities " (he could hardly say more, for his tears 
 were coming); "Amen, — which is, being interpreted, ' Yea, 
 verily, so mote it be.' " Here he embraced and kissed the 
 husband, and this with much warmth, saying, "Send for 
 me, if your wife can obtain no consolation — and may God 
 give you both strength. 0, by the by — the very thing 
 I came here about — the review of the Easter programme 
 must be ready by Wednesday — and I am in your debt 
 for the eight lines or more you did about that piece oi 
 
"chap, hi.] flowee, fkuit, and thoen pieces. 99 
 
 rubbish the other day, which you gave such a capital 
 dressing to." 
 
 When he had gone, however, Lenette didn't seem so 
 thoronghly consoled as might have been expected; she 
 leant at the window sunk in deep, hopeless, amazement 
 and reflection. It was in vain that Firmian pointed out 
 that of course he wasn't going to change his and her pre- 
 sent name any more, and that her honour, marriage, and , 
 love didn't depend upon a wretched name or so up or < 
 down, but upon himself and his heart. She restrained her 
 tears, but she continued to be troubled and silent the 
 whole of the evening. 
 
 Now let no one call our good JFirmian over jealous or 
 suspicious when, having just got well rid of one wretched 
 sacrilegious robber of marriage honour, the Venner, the 
 idea of a volcanic eruption which might throw stones and 
 ashes all over a great tract of his life suddenlj' occurs to 
 him ; what if his friend Stiefel should be really (as it / 
 almost seems) falling in love with his wife, in all innocence, 
 himself. His whole behaviour from the very beginning — 
 his attentions on the wedding-day, his constant visits, 
 and even his exasperation with the Venner that very day, 
 and his warm feeling and sympathy on the occasion alto- 
 gether, all these were the separate parts of a prettj' 
 coherent whole, and seemed to indicate a deep and growing 
 affection, thoroughly honourable, no doubt, and unper- 
 ceived by himself. Whether or not a spark of it had 
 jumped off into Lenette's heart, and was smouldering 
 there, it was impossible as yet to determine ; but true 
 and good as he knew his wife and his friend to be, his 
 hopes and his fears could not but be pretty equally 
 balanced. 
 
 Dear hero ! Do continue to be one ! Destiny, as I see ; 
 more and more clearly as time goes on, seems to have 
 made up her mind gradually to join the separate pieces of 
 a drill machine together with which to pierce through the 
 diamond of thy stoicism ; or else by slow degrees to build 
 and fashion English scraping and singeing machines 
 (made out of poverty, household worries, law suits, and 
 jealousy) to scrape and singe away from thee every rough 
 and ill-placed fibre, as if you were a web of finest English 
 
 H 2 
 
100 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH ETCHTEK. [BOOK I. 
 
 cloth. If tliis should be so, do but come out of the mill aa 
 splendid a piece of English stutf as was ever brought to 
 the Leipzig cloth and book fair, and you will be glorious 
 indeed. 
 
 CHAPTEE IV. 
 
 A MATRIMONIAL PARTIE A LA GUEREE — LETTER TO THAT HAIR 
 
 COLLECTOR, THE VENNER — SELF-DECEPTIONS ADAm's MARRIAGE 
 
 SERMON SHADOWING AND OVER-SHADOWING. 
 
 There is nothing which I observe and note down with 
 more scrupulous and copious accuracy than two equinoctial 
 periods, the matrimonial equinox when, after the honey- 
 moon, the sun enters the constellation Libra (or the 
 balance), and the meteorologic vernal equinox; because, 
 by observing the w^eather which prevails at these two 
 periods, I am enabled to prognosticate with surprising 
 accuracy the nature of that which will characterise the 
 succeeding season. I consider the first storm of the spring 
 to be always the most important, and similarly, the first 
 matrimonial storm ; the others all come from the same 
 quarter. 
 
 When the Sohulrath was gone, the poor's advocate took 
 his sulky house-goddess into his arms, and plied her with 
 every conceivable method of proof; with proofs derived 
 from immemorial hearsay, partial proofs, evidential proof, 
 proof on oath, and by logical deduction — every kind of 
 proof wherewith one can harden one's own heart, or soften 
 another's. 
 
 But the whole of the evidence he adduced was useless. 
 He might just as well have been embracing the cold hard 
 angel at the baptismal font in the principal church, his 
 own angel remained quite as cold and silent. Purboots 
 had been the tourniquet which stopped the hemorrhage of 
 Lenette's open, streaming artery ; but his departure had 
 taken the German tinder stopping from her eyes — ^and 
 now they streamed unstanched 
 
CHAP. IV.] FLOWEE, FKDIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 101 
 
 SiebenksBS went often to the window, and up and down 
 in the room, that she might not see that he was following 
 her example, and that her sorrow, little reasonable as it was, 
 infected him by sympathy. We can more easily bear, and 
 forgive pain of our own causing than of another's. All 
 the following day there was an unendurable silence in the 
 house. This was the very first of the beds of the matri- 
 monial nursery-garden in which a seed of the apple of 
 discord had been planted, and as yet not the faintest rustle 
 of its sap was audible. It is not in the first domestic 
 squabble, not till the fourth, tenth, ten-thousandth, that a 
 woman can keep perfect silence with her tongue, yet make 
 a tremendous noise with her body, and turn every chair 
 which she shoves about, and every reel of cotton which 
 she lets fall, into a language-machine and fountain of 
 speech, and play her instrumental music all the louder, 
 because her vocal parts are counting their rests. Lbnette 
 Wendeline moved everything and said everything, as 
 softly as if her liege lord had the gout and was lying 
 with cramped foot pressed in agony against the trembling 
 bottom board of his bed. 
 
 When the third day of this came on, he was vexed and 
 annoyed — and he had reason. 1 beg to say that, for my own 
 part, I should be quite prepared to quarrel with my own 
 wife, if I had one — ay, and to do it with a will — and that 
 to some purpose, and to bandy words with her, as well as 
 letters (though I should prefer the former). But there's 
 one thing which would kill me outright, and that would 
 be her keeping up a long, dreary, tearful sulking, a thing 
 which, like the sirocco wind, ends by blowing out all a 
 man's lights, thoughts, and joys, and at length his life 
 itself. Just as we all of us, rather like a violent thunder- 
 storm in summer, and think it refreshing rather than 
 otherwise in itself — and yet considci- it a cursed nuisance 
 on the whole, because it's sure to be followed by some days 
 of dreary wet weather. Siebenkses was all the more vexed 
 on this occasion, because he was a man who scarcely 
 ever was vexed. As other jurists have reckoned them- 
 selves among men exempt from torture, so Siebenkses 
 had long ago fortified himself against grief and care, 
 those torture racks of the so'ul (by the help of Epic- 
 
102 JEIAN PAUL FKIEDEICH KICHTEK. [bOOK I. 
 
 tetns), as effectually as he had the infanticide against 
 bodily torture. 
 
 The Jews hold that when Messiah comes, hell will be 
 joined on to paradise, so us to make a bigger dancing 
 saloon. And all the year long, Siebeiikees occupied himself 
 in building and adding on his torture chambers and schools 
 of suffering to the entertainment halls of his bagatelle, so 
 as to have more room to perform his ballets. 
 
 He often said a medal should be struck for any citizen 
 who should be three hundred and sixty-five days, five 
 hours, forty-eight minutes and fifty-five seconds, without 
 either growling or snarling. 
 
 He wouldn't have got that medal himself in the year 
 1785. On the third day, the Saturday, he was so wild at 
 his wife's speechlessness, that he was wilder still with 
 that kill-joy of an Everard. For, of course, that minne- 
 singer might come in again at any moment, bringing in 
 his company the goddess of discord (who, as directrix and 
 ambassadress, performs such important poetical functions 
 in Voltaire's Henriade), and introducing her into the 
 homely " Volkslied " of an advocate, by way of a dea ex 
 macMna to unloose the matrimonial knot, and tie a fresh 
 one with the Venner. Siebenkaes accordingly wrote him 
 the following academic-controversial document. 
 
 " May it please your Lordship, 
 
 " I take the liberty to lay before your Lordship in this 
 little memorial my humble petition, 
 
 " That you will be pleased to stay at home, and spare me 
 the honour of your visits. 
 
 "Should your Lordship find it necessary to become 
 possessed of a certain quantity of my wife's hair — the 
 undersigned hereby undertakes to cut and deliver the 
 same himself. In the event of your Lordship's being 
 minded to exercise a jm« compasmi, or right of free common 
 and pasturage in my premises, and appearing therein in 
 person, I shall embrace with much pleasure the oppor- 
 tunity then afforded uie of plucking as many of your 
 Lordship's own hairs as may be requisite to constitute a 
 souvenir out of your Lordship's head, by the roots, like 
 monthly radishes, with my. own hands. While I was in 
 
CHAP. IV.] FLOWEK, FEUIT, AND THOKN PIECES. 103 
 
 Niimberg, I used of en to go and dine in the neighbouring 
 villages (against the will of the authorities) with a fine old 
 Prugkl Ksecht,* i. e. with a private tutor, who had 
 towzed out and excerpted from the heads of three little 
 slips of nobility, while he was giving fhem their lessons, 
 enough silky hair to make him a handsome mouse-coloured 
 bag-wig, which the man most probably wears to this day. 
 His motivein thus applying himself to the production of silk, 
 or rather, his reason for divesting these little heads of their 
 exterior foliage, was, that his own beams might the more 
 effectually ripen the fruit within, as, for similar reasons, it 
 is usual to remove leaves from the vines in August. 
 
 " I have the honour to remain, &c." 
 
 I shall be very sorry if I cannot manage to get the reader 
 to understand that the advocate wrote this biting letter 
 without the slightest bitterness of feeling. He had read 
 the brilliant satirical writings of the three merry wise men 
 of London, Butler, Swift, and Sterne — those three bodies j 
 of the satirical giant, Geryon, or three furies (Parcae) of the 
 foolish. — to such an extent that, as their disciple and 
 follower, he never thought whether it was a biting letter 
 or not. In his admiration of the artistic beauties of his i 
 composition, he lost sight of its meaning ; and indeed, if 
 a stinging speech were made to himself, he would think 
 nothing of the length of its prickles in comparison with 
 its form and shape. I need merely instance his ' Selection 
 from the Devil's Papers ;' the satirical poison bubbles and 
 venomous prickles so frequent in that work came from his 
 pen and ink— «. e. his head only, not from his heart. 
 
 I take the opportunity of begging the reader always to 
 infuse the very soul of gentleness and kindness into every 
 word and tone he utters (because it is our words more 
 than our deeds which make people angry), and, more 
 particularly still, into every page he writes. For, truly, 
 even if your correspondents have forgiven you an episto- 
 
 * According to Kliiber's notes to Delacurne de Sainto Palaye on 
 Chivalry, this was the title of the official who superintended the 
 tourney, or gymnastic practices and exercises. There are at the pre- 
 sent day certain private tutors in aristocratic families who are feeble 
 imitations of him. 
 
104 JEAN PAUL FKIEDKICH EICHTEE. [BOOK I 
 
 lary pereat long ago, yet the old leaven of ill-will ferments 
 anew, if the sorrel-leaf of a letter containing it chances to 
 come to hand again. We may, of course, on the other 
 hand, reckon upon a similar immortality for a piece of 
 epistolary kindness. Truly, though a long, cutting 
 December wind had made my heart stiff and immoveahk 
 to everything in the shape of kindly feeling for one who, 
 once on a time, used to write me absolute Epistles of 
 St. John, tender pastorals of letters, what would it matter, 
 if I should but chance to turn up these old letters in my 
 letter-treasury of bundles and packets of letters ? 
 
 The sight of the beloved handwriting, the welcome seal, 
 the kind, endearing words, and the pieces of paper where 
 so many a pleasure found space to sport and play, would 
 cast the sunshine of the old affection- upon the frozen heart 
 once more ; it would reopen at the memory of the dear 
 old time, as some flower that has closed reopens when a 
 sunbeam lights upon it, and its only thought — ay, were it 
 but the day before yesterday that it had conceived itself 
 mortally offended — would be, " Ah ! I was too hard upon 
 him (or her) after all." Many of the saints in the first 
 century used to drive devils out of the possessed, in a 
 somewhat similar way, merely by means of letters. 
 
 Furboots came, as if he had been sent for, on the 
 Saturday evening, like a Jewish Sabbath. I have often 
 seen a guest serve as cement or hefting powder to two 
 better halves in a state of fracture, because shame and 
 necessity compelled them to speak and behave kindly to 
 each other, at all events while the guest was there. 
 Every husband should be provided with two or three 
 visitors of this sort, to come in when he's suffering from 
 an attack of wife-possessed-too-long-with-the-devil-of- 
 dumbness; as long as the people are there, at all events, 
 she must speak, and take the iron thief-apple of silence — 
 which grows on the same stalk as the apple of discord — out 
 of her mouth. 
 
 The Schulrath stood up before Lenette Wendeline as if she 
 were one of his school girls, and asked her if she had borne 
 this first cross of her married life patiently, and like a 
 worthy sister in suffering of the patriarch Job. She 
 drooped her big eyes, wound a thread the length of a 
 
CHAP. IV.] FLOWEE, FETJlT, AND THOEN PIECES. 105 
 
 finger into a white snowball, and breathed deeper. Her 
 Imsband answered for her : " I was her brother in afflic- 
 tion, and bore the cross-bar of the burden — I without a 
 murmur, she without a murmur. In the twelfth centurj', 
 the heap of ashes on which Job endured his sufferings 
 used still to be shown. Our two chairs are our heaps of 
 ashes ; there they are still to be seen ! " 
 
 "Good woman!" said Stiefel, in the softest pianissimo 
 of his pedal reed-stop of a masculine voice, and laid his 
 mow-white hand on the soft, raven hair upon her fore- 
 head. SiebenkEfs heard a multiplying sympathetic echo 
 of these words in his heart, and laid his arm on Lenette's 
 shoulders, who was blushing with pleasure at the honour 
 conferred upon her by this kindness of the man in office. 
 Her husband softly pressed her left side to his right, and 
 said : — 
 
 " She is good, indeed ; she is gentle, and quiet, and patient, 
 and only too industrious. If the whole tag, rag and bob- 
 tail of Hell's army, in the shape of the Venner, had only 
 not advanced upon our little summer-house of happiness, 
 to knock its roof off, we should have lived happy in it for 
 many a day, Mr. Stiefel, far into the winter of our lives. 
 For my Lenette is good, and too good for me and for 
 many another man." Here Stiefel, in his emotion, sur- 
 rounded that hand of hers which had the skein of thread 
 in it, at the seat of the pulse with his fine fingers — the 
 empty hand being in her husband's possession — and the 
 Wound Water of our pain, the great drops of which trickled 
 from her drooped eyes down her cheeks, w^here her im- 
 prisoned hands could not wipe them away, made the two 
 male hearts very tender. And besides, her husband could 
 never praise any one long without his eyes overflowing. 
 He went on, faster, " Yes, she might have been very com- 
 fortable and well-off with me, but that my mother's money 
 is kept back from me in this terrible way. But, even for 
 all that, I should have made her happy without the money, 
 and she me — we never had a word, never a single unhappy 
 moment — now had we, Lenette? nothing but peace and 
 love, till the Venner came. He has taken a good deal 
 from us ! " 
 
 The Schulrath raised his slenched fist in wrath, and 
 
106 JEAN PAUL TKIEDBIOH BIOHTER. [BOOK I. 
 
 ■exclaimed, sawing the air with it, " You child of hell ! 
 you robher-oaptain and filibuster! You silken Catiline 
 and mischief-maker ! Does it ever strike you that you'll 
 iiave to answer for this and your other pranks one day ? 
 Mr. Siebenkses, this, at all events, I do expect of you, that 
 if ever he comes here again asking for hair, you will turn 
 tim out by the hair of his own head, or hit this fur-maggot 
 "(as you call him yourself) across the shoulders with a 
 iboot-jack, and squeeze his hand with a pair of pincers — in 
 fact, the long and the short of it is, I mil not have him 
 come here any more." 
 
 And here Siebenkses, to cool down his own emotions and 
 other people's, mentioned the fact of his having already 
 taken steps in the matter, and served the necessary letter 
 ■of inhibition upon the Venner. Stiefel clucked his tongue 
 in a joyful manner, and nodded his head approvingly. He 
 considered any person high in office to be a vicegerent of 
 ■Christ on eaith, a count to be a demigod, and an emperor 
 as a whole one ; — but a single one of the deadlj"^ sins com- 
 mitted by any of them all would at once cost them the 
 whole of his deferential good will, — -and a slip in Latin 
 grammar, though committed by a head crowned with gold, 
 he Would at once have done battle with in a whole Latin 
 Easter programme. Men of the world have straight bodies 
 and crooked souls ; scholars often have neither the one nor 
 the other. The last of Lenette's clouds cleared away when 
 «he heard that a paper escarpment and cheval de /rise 
 ^against the Venner had been constructed at her door. 
 " Then he will trouble me no more ! Thanks be to 
 Heaven! He goes about lying and deceiving everyone 
 he comes across."* 
 
 " We don't employ these words, Madame Siebenktes, if 
 •we care to speak grammatically," said Stiefel ; " irregular 
 verbs such as ' Jcriechen, triigen, liigen,' though they are vei-ha 
 ■anomala, and as such have ' kroch, log, trog,' and so on in 
 the imperfect tense, are still always inflected quite regu- 
 
 * In this last speech Lenette makes use of several of the obsolete 
 tforms of verbs referred to in a previous chapter as " religious anti- 
 ■quitiea out of Luther's Bible." I cannot give English equivalents. 
 •Of course -what follows would be unintelligible without this explana- 
 tion. — Teanslatob. 
 
CHAP. IV.] , FLOWEK, FEUIT, AND THOKN PIECES. 107 
 
 larly in the present by the best German giammaiians — 
 although the poets permit themselves a poetical licence in 
 such cases, as, I am sorry to say, they do in most others — 
 and therefore we say, if we care to be grammatically cor- 
 rect, ' liigt, triigt, hriecht' &c., at the present day, that is." 
 
 " Don't find fault with my dear Augspurger's Lutheran 
 inflections," said Siebenkses ; " there's something touching 
 to me about these irregular verbs of hers ; they are the 
 Schmalkaldian article of the Augspurg confession." Here 
 she drew her husband's ear softly down to her lips and 
 said, " What Turould you like me to get for supper ? Tell 
 the gentleman that you know I mean no o Hence, whatever 
 words I use. And I wisli you would ask his reverence, 
 Pirmian dear, when I'm out of the room, whether our 
 marriage is really all right according to the Bible." He 
 asked this question on the spot. Stiefel answered it de- 
 liberately as follows : — " We have only to look at the case 
 of Leah, who was conducted to Jacob's tent under the 
 pseudonym of Eachel on her marriage night, and whose 
 marriage the Bible holds to be perfectly valid. Is it 
 names or bodies that exchange rings ? And can a name 
 fulfil the marriage vow ? " 
 
 Lenette answered these questions,, and spoke her thanks 
 for this consistorial decision by a bashful glance of restored 
 content and a beaming face upturned towards him. She 
 went to the kitchen, but kept constantly coming back and 
 snuffing the candle, which was on the table at which the 
 two gentlemen sat talking ; and probably nobody, except the 
 advocate and I, will consider this to be any indication 
 of a more than ordinary liking for Stiefel. The latter 
 always took the snuifers from her, saying "it was his duty." 
 Siebenka3s clearly perceived that both the apples of his 
 eyes revolved, satellite-fashion, round his own planet, 
 Lenette ; but he did not grudge the Latin knight his little 
 glimpse of an age of chivalry thus sweetened by a Dul- 
 cinea ; like most men, he could far sooner pardon the rival 
 lover than the unfaithful fair ; women, on the other hand, 
 hate the rival more than the unfaithful lover. Moreover, 
 he knew perfectly that Stiefel had not the least idea 
 himself whom or what he cared for or sighed for, and 
 that he was a far better hand at reviewing schoolmen 
 
108 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH EIOHTEE. [bOOK 1. 
 
 and authors than himself. For instance, his own anger 
 , he called professional zeal ; his pride, the dignity due to 
 / his ■ oiBce ; his passions, sins of weakness ; and on this 
 occasion love appeared to him disguised as mere philan- 
 thropy. The arch of Lenette's troth was firmly finished 
 off in the keystone of religion, and the Venner's assault 
 upon it had not shaken this sacred masonry in the slightest 
 degree. 
 
 At this juncture the postman stumped up stairs with a 
 new constellation which he set in their serene family sky, 
 namely, the following letter from Leibgeber. 
 
 « Bayieuth, 21 Sept., 1785. 
 
 " My dear Brother, Cousin, and Uncle, 
 Father and Son ! 
 
 " For the two auricles and the two ventricles of thy 
 heart constitute my entire genealogical tree ; — as Adam, 
 when he went for a walk, carried about with him the 
 whole of his blood relations that were to be, and his long 
 line of descendants — which is not wholly unreeled and 
 wound up even at this day — till he became a father, and 
 his wife bare a child. I wish to goodness I had been the 
 first Adam ! Siebenkaes, I do adjure you, let me, let me, 
 follow up this idea which has struck me tnd taken hold 
 of me with such power ; let me not write a word in this 
 letter that does not add a touch to the three-quarter- 
 length portrait which I shall draw of myself as the first 
 father of mankind ! 
 
 " Men of learning are much mistaken who suppose my 
 reason for wishing I were Adam to be, that Puffendoif 
 and many other writers very properly award me the 
 whole of this earth as a kind of European colony in the 
 India of the universe, as my jpatrimonium Petri, Pauli, 
 Jud(B and the rest of the Apostles; inasmuch as I, being 
 the sole Adam and man, and consequently the first and 
 last of universal monarchs (although as yet without any 
 subjects), might of course lay claim to the entire earth. 
 It might occur to the pope, indeed (he being holy father, 
 though not our first father), to make a similar claim, oi 
 rather it did occur to him some centuries ago, when he 
 
CHAP. IV. J FLOWEE, FEUIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 109 
 
 constituted himself the guardian and the heir of all the 
 countries of the earth, and indeed made bold to set two 
 other crowns on the top of his earthly one, a crown of 
 heaven and a crown of hell. 
 
 "How snail a thing it is that I desire ! All that I wish 
 I had heen the old Adam (in fact, the oldest Adam) for, 
 ia merely that I might have strolled up and down with 
 Eve among the espaliers of Eden on our marriage night, 
 in our aprons and beasts' skins, and delivered an address in 
 Hebrew to the mother of all living. 
 
 " Before commencing my address I beg to observe that, 
 while I was yet unfallen, it fortunately occurred to me to 
 note down the more important heads of my universal 
 knowledge. For I had, in my condition of innocence, a 
 perfect and intuitive knowledge of all the sciences, of 
 history, both universal and literary, the various criminal 
 and other codes of law, all the dead languages as well as 
 the living, and was a kind of live Pindus and Pegasus, 
 a portable Lodge of Light and learned society, a pocket 
 university, and miniature golden Siecle de Louis XIV. 
 Considering what my mental powers were at that juncture 
 it is a miracle (and what's more, a very lucky job) that in 
 my leisure moments 1 put down the cream of my uni- 
 versal knowledge on paper, because when I subsequently 
 fell, and became simple and ignorant, I had these excerpts, 
 or Catalogues raisonnes, of my former wisdom by me, so 
 that I could refer to them. 
 
 " 'Virgin! ' (it was thus that the sermon delivered out- 
 side Paradise commenced) 'it is true we are the first of 
 parents, and are minded to originate all the subsequent 
 parents ; though all that you think about is sticking your 
 spoon into a forbidden apple. However, I, being a man 
 and protoplast, reflect and ponder, and as we walk to and 
 fro, I shall undertake the office of preacher of the sermon 
 on this, the occasion of our entering into the bonds of 
 wedlock (not having as yet, unfortunately, begotten any- 
 body else to do it), and, in a brief wedding exhortation, 
 direct your attention to the doubts affecting and the rea- 
 sons deciding, the protoplasts, or the first parents and 
 first of wedded couples (that is to say, you and me), in the 
 act of reflecting and considering, and how— 
 
110 JEAN PAUL PEIEDEICH EIOHTEK. [bOOK I. 
 
 " ' In the first place, they consider the reasons why they 
 should not people the earth, but emigrate this very day, the 
 one into the old world, the other into the new ; and 
 
 " ' In the second place, the reasons why they should do 
 nothing of the kind, but marry. 
 
 '"After which a short elench, or usus epanorthoticus, 
 will be adduced, and will conclude the lecture and the 
 night.' 
 
 IN THE FIRST PLACE 
 
 " ' My dearly beloved ! 
 
 " ' Here, in my sheepskin, as I appear before you, 
 grave, thoughtful, and wise, it is neverthele&s the fact that 
 I am fall to the very brim of — not so much follies as fools, 
 with a good many wise men stuck in here and there between 
 them by way of parentheses. I am of short stature, it is 
 true, and' the ocean * came a good deal above my ancles, 
 and besprinkled my new beasts' skin ; and yet, as I walk 
 up and down here, I am girt about with a seed cloth, 
 containing the seeds of all nations, and carrying the 
 repertory of the whole human race, an entire world in 
 miniature and orhig pictus, round my middle like a pedlar's 
 stock in trade. For Bonnet, who is in me among the rest, 
 will sit down at his desk (when he comes out), and prove 
 that they are all one inside the other, like a nest of boxes 
 or a set of parentheses, that the father contains the son, 
 that the grandfather contains them both, the great-grand- 
 father consequently the grandfather and all the contents 
 of him, the great-great-grandfather the great-grandfather 
 and the contents of his contents and all his episodes, all 
 sitting waiting one inside the other. Are there not then 
 here embodied in thy bridegroom — this is a point, dear 
 bride, which cannot be made too intelligible to you — all 
 religious sects, excepting the Preadamites, but including 
 the Adamites,f and all giants, the great Christopher himself 
 among them — every individual of every nation of all the 
 
 * The French academician, N. Beurion, made out that- Adam was 
 123 feet 9 iucljes high, and Eve 118 feet 9| inches. The rest is related 
 by the Eabbin, that Adam went through the ocean after his fall. 
 
 t The members of this celebrated sect went to church without any 
 clothes on them. 
 
CHAP. IV. j FLOWEE, FEUIT, AND THOKN PIECES. Ill 
 
 earth — uH tlie shiploads of negroes desliined for America, 
 and the packets marked with red containing the soldiers 
 promised by England to Anspach and Bayreuth"? Eve, 
 am I not, as I stand here before you, a whole Jews'-quarter 
 — a Louvre of all the crowned heads of the earth — since I can 
 bring them all into existence if I please, and if I am not 
 induced by this first head of ray discourse to refrain from 
 doing so? You will admire me, and yet laugh at me at 
 the same time if you but look at ine well, lay your hand 
 on mj- shoulder, and say to yourself : " Now, in this man 
 and protoplast are contained all mankind, all the learned 
 faculties, all schools of philosophy, and of sewing and 
 spinning, cheek by jowl in peace and haimony, the highest 
 and noblest royal families and princely houses (though not 
 yet sorted out from among the common ship's company), 
 all free imperial orders of Ivnighthood, packed higgledy- 
 piggledy with their vassals, cottiers, and tenants, it is true — 
 monasteries and nunneries next door to each other — ^barracks 
 and members of Parliament, to say nothing of cathedral 
 chapters, with all their provosts, deans, priors, sub-priors, 
 and canons! What a man! What an Anak!" you will add. 
 You are right, dear, I am indeed — the very nest dollar of the 
 human coin-cabinet, the universal court of assembly of all 
 judicatures, with all the members of all assemblies, not one 
 out of its place, the walking corpus juris of all civil, canon, 
 criminal, feudal, and municipal law. Haven't I Meusel's 
 ' Learned Germany ' and Jbcher's ' Scholastic Lexicon ' 
 within me all complete, and Jocher and Meusel themselves, 
 to say nothing of their supplementary volumes ? I wish I 
 could just let you see Cain — who, if head second of this 
 discourse should determine me, would be our first offshoot 
 and sucker, our Prince of Wales, Calabria, Asturias and the 
 Brazils. You would see, if he were transparent — as I 
 believe him to be — how he contains all the rest, one inside 
 the other, like beer glasses — all oecumenical councils, 
 inquisitions, and propaganda, and the devil and his grand- 
 mother. But, loveliest, thou didst not write dovm any of 
 thy scicntia media before thy fall, as I did, and conse- 
 quently thou starest into the future as blind as a bat. I, 
 however, who see into it quite clearly, am enabled by 
 my chrestomathy to perceive that, where other men begei 
 
112 JEAN PAUL FEIEDKICH EICHTEE. [BOOK I. 
 
 perhaps some ten fools, I shall beget whole millions of tens, 
 and units into the bargain, seeing that the Bohemians , 
 Parisians, Viennese, Leipzigers, Bayreuthers, Hofians, 
 Dublinese, Kuhsohnappelers (and their wives and daughters 
 over and above) have all got to come into existence through 
 me, and that in every million of them there will always be 
 at least five hundred who neither have, nor will listen to, 
 reason. Duenna, as yet you know little of the human 
 race, but two in fact, for the serpent is not one ; but I 
 know what sort of race I am going to produce, and that in 
 opening my limhus infantum, I open at the same time a 
 Bedlam. By heaven, I weep and lament when I merely 
 peep in between the leaves of the centuries in their long 
 course, and see nothing there but gouts of gore, and a con- 
 geries of idiots — when I think of the trouble and pain to 
 be undergone before a century shall learn to write a legible 
 hand, a hand even as good as a minister's or an elephant's 
 trunk — before poor humanity gets through its dame's 
 school, and private tutors, and French governesses, so as tc 
 be fit for Latin grammar schools, public schools, Jesuit 
 seminaries, and next for fencing classes, dancing classes, 
 dogmatic and clinical courses. By old Harry, I feel hot. 
 Nobody will think of you as the brood-hen of the coming 
 flock of starlings, as the spawning codfish in whom Leu wen- 
 hack will count 9J millions of eggs ; not you, my little 
 Eve, but your husband, will get all the blame, who should 
 have known better, and rather begotten nothing than such 
 a rabble of thieves and robbers, crowned emperors on the 
 Koman throne, and vicegerents on the Roman chair, the 
 former of whom will call themselves after Antoninus and 
 Osesar, the latter after Ohristus and Petrus, and among 
 whom there are men whose thrones shall iDe Liineburg 
 torture chairs for the human race, if not the converse of 
 a Place de Grfeve, where the masses shall be put to death, 
 and the single individual feted and amused.* And I shall 
 
 * It seems almost to indicate a crossing of the breeds between the 
 grave tiger and the playful ape, that the Place de Greve in Paris ia 
 ' the place where malefactors are executed, aad where the populace 
 assemble for fetes— that on the selfsame spot horses tear a regicide to 
 pieces and citizens celebrate the accession of a new king ; the fii-e 
 wheels of the fireworks and of the people who are broken on the wheel 
 
CHAP. IV.J FLOWER, FEUIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 113 
 
 he taken to task oa account of Borgia, Pizarro, St. Dominio, 
 and Potemkin. Even supposing I should manage to evade 
 .teing blamed for black exceptions such as these, I should 
 be obliged to admit that my descendants really cannot 
 get through the space of half-an-hour without either 
 thinking or doing something foolish, that the -war of 
 giants, waged in them by their passions, is never broken 
 by a peace, seldom even by a truce ■ that the greatest of 
 all man's faults is that he has such a number of little ones ; 
 that his conscience serves for scarcely anything but 
 hating Ms neighbours and being morbidly sensitive to their 
 transgressions ; that he never leaves off evil ways till he is 
 on his deathbed ; that he learns and loves the language of 
 virtue, but is at enmity with the virtuous — just as the 
 English employ French language teachers, though they 
 detest the French themselves. Eve, Eve, we shall have 
 little to congratulate ourselves upon if we marry ; Adam 
 means in the original " red earth," and truly my cheeks will 
 consist entirely thereof, and will blush scarlet at the mere 
 thought of the indescribable and unparalleled conceit and 
 vanity of our great-grandchildren, increasing as the cen- 
 turies go on. Nobody will tweak himself by the nose — 
 unless perhaps when he is shaving. Critics will set them- 
 selves up above authors, authors above critics — Heimlicher 
 von Blaise will give his hand to be kissed by orphans ; 
 ladies theirs to be kissed by all and sundry ; mighty ones 
 the embroidered hems of their garments. Eve, I had only 
 got as far on with my prophetic extracts from the world's 
 history as the sixth century, when you bit the apple under 
 the tree, and 1, like a fool, did as you did, and everything 
 slipped out of my head : God only knows what sort of a 
 set thr fools and foolesses of the subsequent centuries may 
 turn out to be. Virgin, wilt thou now put into action thy 
 Sternocleidomastoideum, as 'Summering styles the muscle 
 which nods the head, and so express your " yes " when I 
 put to you the question, " Wilt thou have the marriage- 
 preacher to thy wedded husband ?" 
 
 whirling at the selfsame time and place. Frightful contrasts 1 we 
 may not adduce others lest we should get to imitating those whom we 
 have here found fault with. 
 
 U. 1 
 
114 JEAN PAUL FKIEDEIOH EICHTEE. [bOOK 1. 
 
 " ' You will no doubt reply, let us first hear the second 
 head of the discourse, in which the subject is considered 
 from another point of view. And indeed, dearly beloved, 
 we had almost forgotten that we must proceed to the 
 
 SECOND PLACE, 
 
 and consider the reasons which may persuade first parents 
 to become such, and to marry, and serve Destiny in the 
 capacity of sewing and spinning machines of linseed, hemp, 
 flax, and tow, to be wound by her in endless networks 
 and coils around the earthly sphere. My strongest reason, 
 and, I trust, yours also, is the thought of the Day of Judg- 
 ment. For, in the event of our becoming the entrepreneiirg 
 of the human race, I shall see all my descendants, when 
 they ascend from the calcined earth like vapour, at the 
 last day, into the nearest planet, and fall into order for the 
 last review ; and among this harvest of children and grand- 
 children, I shall hit upon a few sensible people with whom 
 one may be able to exchange a rational word or two — men 
 whose whole lives were passed, as well as lost, amid thunder 
 and lightning (as according to the Eomans those whom 
 the gods loved were killed by lightning), and who never 
 closed their eyes or their ears, however wild the storm. I 
 see the four heathen evangelists among them too, Socrates, 
 Cato, Epictetus, and Antoninus, men who went through 
 the world, using their voices like fire-engine pipes, two 
 hundred feet long, to save people from being burnt out of 
 house and home by the fire of their own passions, sluicing 
 them all over with pure, cold. Alp-water. And there can 
 be no doubt after all, that 1 may really be the arch-papa, and 
 you the arch-mamma, of some very great and celebrated 
 people, that's to say, if we choose. I tell you. Eve, that I 
 have it here in black and white among my excerpts and 
 collectanea that I shall be the forefather, ancestor, and 
 Bethlehem of an Aristotle, Plato, Shakespeare, Newton, 
 Eousseau, Goethe, Kant, Leibnitz, people, take them for all 
 in all, who are as able thinkers as their protoplast himself, 
 if not abler. Eve, thou active and important member of the 
 fruit-bearing jointstock company, or productive class of the 
 state (consisting of thyself and this marriage-preacher), I as- 
 
CHAP. IV.J FLOWER, FEUIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 115 
 
 BUie you 1 expect to pass a few hours of exquisite enjoyment 
 ■when on that neighbouring star I survey in a cursory man- 
 ner that classic concourse newly risen from the dead, and at 
 length kneel down, and cry, " Good morning, my children 1 
 Such of you as are Jews were wont to utter an ejaculalory 
 prayer when ye met a wise man ; but what such utterance 
 would suffice for me, now that I behold all the wise and all 
 the faculties at once, all of them my own blood relations 
 too, who amid the wolfish hunger of their desires have 
 stedfastly refrained from forbidden apples, pears, and 
 pine apples, and, deep as their thirst for wisdom might be, 
 committed no orchard-robbery on the tree of knowledge, 
 though their first parents seized upon the forbidden fruit, 
 although they had never known what hunger was, and upon 
 the tree of knowledge, although they possessed all know- 
 ledge, except knowledge of the serpent nature." And then 
 I shall arise from the ground, pass into the angelic crowd, 
 fall on the bosom of some distinguished descendant, and, 
 throwing my arms around him , say, "Thou, true, good, 
 contented-minded, gentle son ! If I could just have shown 
 thee only, sitting in thy brood-cell, to my Eve, the queen- 
 bee of this great swarm here present, at the time when I 
 was delivering the second head of my marriage sermon, 
 I'm sure she would have listened to reason, and given a 
 favourable answer." ' 
 
 " And thou, Siebenksss, art that same, true, good son, 
 and thou restest ever on the warm, heaving breast of 
 
 " Thy Friend. 
 
 " Postscript and Clausula Salutaris. 
 
 " Please to forgive me this merry private ball and witches' 
 dance upon cheap and nasty letter-paper, notwithstanding 
 that you are unfortunately an infinitesimal fractional part 
 of the German, race, and as such, can't be expected either 
 to stand, or to understand, such a dance of ideas. This is 
 why I never print anything for the unwieldy German 
 intellect; entire sheets which I have spawned full of 
 playful idea-fishes of this sort I consign at once to regions 
 where such productions do not usually arrive till they 
 
 I 2 
 
116 JEAN PAUL FEIEDKICH EICHTEK. [bOOK I. 
 
 attain the evening of their days, having previously exer- 
 cised the right of transit through the booksellers' shops. 
 I was eight days in Hof, and am at present living a 
 retired life at Bayreuth ; in both of these towns I have 
 made faces, that is, other people's profiles ; but most 
 of the heads which sat or stood to my scissors opined 
 that all was not quite right in mine. Tell me the real 
 truth of the matter ; it's not altogether a matter of in- 
 difference to me, because if I should turn out not to be 
 quite 'all there,' I should be incapable of devising my 
 property by will, or of exercising various civil functions. 
 
 " In conclusion, I send a thousand kind remembrances 
 and kisses to your dear, good Lenette, and my compli- 
 ments to Herr Schulrath Stiefel, and will you please ask 
 him if he is any relation to Magister Stiefel, the rector of 
 Holzdorf and Lochau (in Wittemberg), w^ho prophesied 
 (incorrectly, as I consider) that the end of the world 
 would take place on the 1st January, 1533, at 8 o'clock 
 in the morning, and lived to die in his own bed after all. 
 
 also send, for you and the ' Advertiser,' a couple of pro- 
 grammes of Professor Lang's of this place, relative to the 
 General Superintendent of Bayreuth, and one of Dr. 
 Frank's of Pavia. There is a very charming joung lady, 
 exceedingly clever and intellectual, living here at the Sun 
 Hotel (she is in the front rooms, and I in the back). 
 She has been very much pleased with me and my face, I 
 am happy to tell you, seeing how exactly you and I are 
 alike, the only diflerence between us being my lame foot. 
 So that the things I pride myself upon in ladies' society 
 are my likeness to you and my weaknesses. Unless I 
 have been misinformed, this lady is a poor niece of your 
 old uncle's with the broken glass wig, and is being 
 brought up at his expense, and destined for a marriage 
 vnth some Kuhschnappeler of the upper ten thousand. 
 Perhaps she may soon be forwarded to you, entered in 
 the way-bill as bridegroom's eifects. 
 
 " The above is my oldest news, but my newest news, 
 namely your own self, I shall not expect to arrive here at 
 Bayreuth till I and the spring get back to it together (for 
 the day after to-morrow I am off to meet it in Italy), and 
 we, I and the spring, together beautify the world to such 
 
CHAP. IV.J FLOWEE, FEUIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 117 
 
 a degree that you will certainly enjoy a happy time of it 
 in Bayreuth, the houses and the hills of that place being 
 so particularly charming. And so, fare thee somewhat 
 well." 
 
 They all felt certain that the Kuhschnappeler of rank for 
 whom the Heimlicher's niece was being tarought up could 
 be none other than the Venner Eosa, whose little burnt- 
 down stump of a heart — what was left of it after being 
 hitherto made use of to set fire to the bosoms of female 
 humanity in general (as the lamp in a smoking-room 
 serves to kindle the pipes of the collective frequenters 
 thereof) — would be the marriage torch to light her to 
 her new home. 
 
 As there were three heavens in this letter — one for each 
 of the party — kind remembrances for Lenette, the pro- 
 grammes for Peltzstiefel, the letter itself for Siebenkses — 
 I shouldn't have been astonished if the terzetto of them 
 had danced for joy. The Schulrath, intoxicated with de- 
 light — for the glad blood rose to his sober head — opened 
 the papers sent him upon the square patterned supper- 
 cloth (which was laid already"), and hungrily began to 
 devour his three printed " relishes before supper," and 
 literary petits soupers, upon the tin plate without even 
 saying grace, until an invitation to stay and have some 
 supper reminded him that he must be off. But before 
 leaving, he petitioned that, by way of fee for having acted 
 as middleman and court of arbitration between them, or 
 as an alkali to promote the blending of his oil with her 
 water — ^he might have a new profile of Lenette. The old 
 one cut out by Leibgeber (which the letter brought to his 
 recollection), and which, as we may remember, Leibgeber 
 let him have, happened to have been put into the pocket 
 ^f his dressing-gown and sent to the wash with it (being 
 of much the same colour, moreover). " It shall be put on 
 the stocks to-night," said Siebenkses. 
 
 When the Schulrath was going, as he could see that the 
 ring upon Lenette's finger didn't squeeze it so uncom- 
 fortably as it had done (and gave himself credit for having 
 l>een the means of filing it smoother and padding it softer), 
 lie shook her hand with much warmth, and said — 
 
118 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH EICHTBE. [.BOOK I. 
 
 " I shall always be delighted to come whenever there's 
 the slightest thing the matter with you two charming 
 people." 
 
 Lenette answered, " Oh yes, do come very often." 
 And Siebenkaes added, " The oftener the better." 
 And yet, when he had gone, the ring seemed to be not 
 quite so comfortable again, and medical students who may 
 be working at psychology may be a little surprised that 
 during supper the advocate said very little to his wife, 
 and she very little to him. The reason was that he had 
 Leibgeber's letter lying by his plate in the place where 
 the bread normally is, and the image of his beloved friend 
 shone bright before his mental vision from Bayreuth all 
 athwart the far misty darkness between — their first happy 
 meeting to come floated magically before him. Hope shot 
 down a pure clearing ray into the dark mephitic cave 
 where he was panting and toiling now — and the coming 
 spring stood like some cathedral tower all hung with 
 lamps lofty and bright in the distance, beaming through 
 the dark night sky. 
 
 At length he " came to himself," i. e. to his wife ; the 
 strong image of Leibgeber had buoyed him up from the 
 sharp stones which strewed the present ; the dear old 
 friend, who had clipped out the bride's profile up in the 
 choir on the wedding-day, and been with them in the 
 early weeks of their honeymoon, seemed to fling a chain 
 of flower- wreaths about him and draw him closer to the 
 silent form by his side. " Well darling, and how are you 
 getting on ?" he said, awaking from his reverie and taking 
 her hand, now that all was peace again between them. 
 She had, however, the feminine peculiarity or foible, 
 habit at all events, of being much quicker to show that 
 she was vexed than that her anger was over ; of, at all 
 events, being slow to show the latter ; and of commencing 
 a reconsideration of all the matters in dispute at the very 
 moment that amends have been made and accepted, and 
 pardon begged and granted. There are very few married 
 women indeed who will put their hand into their hus- 
 bands', and say " There, I'm good again," without a very 
 considerable hesitation and delaj'^ ; unmarried women are 
 much more ready to do it. Wendeline did hold hers out. 
 
CHAP. IV. I FLOWEE, FKUIT, AND THOKN PIECES. 119 
 
 but did it too coldly, and drew it away again in a great 
 hurry, to take up the table-cloth, which she asked him to 
 help her to smooth and fold up. He did this smilingly — she 
 gravely giving her whole attention to the process of folding 
 the long white parallelogram into exact squares — ^and at 
 length, when the last and thickest square was arrived at, 
 he held it fast there — she pulled, trying to look very 
 serious — he looked at her very fondly and tenderly — she 
 couldn't help smiling at this — and then he took the table- 
 cloth from her, pressed it and himself with it to her heart, 
 and said, in her arms, "Little thief! how can you be so 
 naughty to your old ragamuffin of a Siebenkaes, or what- 
 ever his name may be?" And now the rainbow of a 
 brighter future appeared shining above the fast ebbing 
 
 flood which had risen as high as their hearts so lately 
 
 But, my dears, rainbows now-a-days very often mean just 
 the reverse of what the first was said to signify. 
 
 The prize he awarded to his queen of the rose-feast of 
 the heart was to ask her to let him take a profile of her 
 pretty face, that Peltzstiefel might find a joy and a present 
 waiting for him on the morrow. I think I shall just trace 
 an outline of his outline-tracing for people of taste in this 
 place ; but I must stipulate that nobody is to expect a pen 
 to be a painter's brush — or a painter's brush to be an 
 engraver's style — or an engraver's style a flower anther, 
 generating generation upon generation of lilies and roses. 
 
 The advocate borrowed a drawing-board, viz. the fa5ade 
 of a new pigeon-house, from Fecht the cobbler. Lenette's 
 shoulder fitted into the oval portal of it as a clasp-knife 
 does into its handle ; a sheet of white paper was tacked 
 on to the board — her pretty, soft head was pressed on the 
 stiff paper — he applied, with much care and self-restraint, 
 his pencil at the upper part of the brow, difficult as it was 
 to catch the shadow in such immediate proximity to the 
 reality — and went slowly down the beautiful, flowery de- 
 clivity all roses and lilies. But little or nothing came of 
 it; the hack part of the head was pretty good. His eyes 
 would keep turning away from his work to the sitter, so 
 that he drew as vilely as a box-painter. 
 
 " Wendeline, your head isn't still a moment," he said. 
 A.nd indeed her face, as well as her brain-fibres, shook by 
 
120 JEAN PAUL FKIEDKICH EICHTEE. [bOOK I 
 
 reason of the heightened heat of her pulse and the quick- 
 ening of lier breathing ; while, on the other hand, his 
 pencil stutlihled when it came to the delicate hasso relievo 
 of her; little nose, fell into the cleft at her lips, and 
 stranded on the shoal of her chin. He kissed those lips 
 which he couldn't draw, and which she always had either 
 loo much open or too tightly closed, and brought a shaving- 
 glass and said, "See, haven't you got more faces than 
 Janils, or any Indian god? The Sohulrath will think 
 you were making faces, and I copying them. Look, here's 
 where you moved, and I sprung after you like a chamois ; 
 the effect of the jump is, that the upper part of the face 
 sticks out before the lower like a half-mask. Just think 
 how the Schulrath will stare in the morning." 
 
 " Try once more, dear ; I'll do just as you tell me ; I 
 should like it to be very nice," Lenette said, blushing ; 
 and stiffened her neck, and steadied her soft cheek against 
 the drawing-board. And as her husband gently glided his 
 drawing ovipositor over her brow- — like a segment of some 
 white hemisphere — instead of breathing, he found she wafa 
 holding her breath this time till she shook again, and till 
 the colour came to her face. 
 
 And here jealousy, like some exploding fire-ship, sent 
 hard fragments of the wreck of his shattered happiness 
 crashing on a sudden against his heart. 
 
 "Ah!" (he thought) "can it be that she does really 
 love him?" (i. e. the Schulrath). 
 
 His pencil stood still in the obtuse angle between her 
 nose and her chin as if under a spell ; he heard her let go 
 her pent-up breath ; his pencil made black zigzags at the 
 edge of the paper, and as he stopped at the closed lips, 
 which nothing warmer than his own, and her morning 
 prayers, had ever touched, and thought " Must this come 
 upon, me too ? must this joy be taken from me like all the 
 rest? And am I drawing up my bill of divorce and 
 Uriah-letter here with my own very hands?" He could 
 do no more at it. He took the drawing-board quickly 
 from hershoulder — fell upon her closed lips — kissed away 
 the pent-up sigh — pressed the life out of his jealousy 
 between his heart and hers, and said — 
 
 " I can't do it till to-morrow, Lenette ! Don't be vexed. 
 
CHAP. IV. J FLOWEE, FETJIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 121 
 
 darling! Tell me, are you quite as you used to be in 
 Augspurg? Don't you understand me? Have you not 
 the slightest idea what I am driving at?" 
 
 She answered quite innocently, " Now you will be 
 annoyed, Firmian, I know, but I really have not the 
 slightest idea." 
 
 Then the Goddess of Peace took from the God of Sleep 
 his poppy garland, and twined it into her own olive 
 wreath — and led the wedded pair, garlanded and recon- 
 ciled, hand in hand into the glittering, gleaming, icefields 
 of the land of dreams — the magic shadowy background of 
 the noisy jarring, shifting day — our camera obscura full 
 of moving miniature pictures of a world all dwarfed, in 
 which man, like the Creator, dwells alone with his own 
 creations. 
 
 END OF THE PEEFAOE AND OF THE FIEST 
 BOOK. 
 
 The reader will remember that, at the beginning of the 
 preface, I stated that I succeeded in putting the old 
 merchant into a sweet sleep, and in providing his daughter 
 with a gladsome feast of tabernacles, in the shape of the 
 young unopened buds of this, my little cottage-garden 
 here. But the foul fiend knows how to breeze up a 
 «x\dden rain squall, and let it splattering down upon all 
 our loveliest fireworks. I was only performing a duty in 
 converting myself into a small, pocket circulating library 
 for a poor lonely thing of a girl, whose father gave her no 
 chance of a word or two of rational conversation except 
 with her parrot, and with the family lawyer aforesaid. 
 
 The cage of the former was placed near her inkstand 
 ^md waste-book ; and he acquired from his mistress as 
 much in the shape of German-Italian as a bookkeeper finds 
 necessarj"^ for carrying on his foreign correspondence. 
 And a parrot being always incited to talkativeness by a 
 looking-glass in his cage, he and his language-mistress 
 were enabled to look at themselves in it together. The 
 
122 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH BIOHTEB. [bOOK I. 
 
 latter (the family lawyer) I myself was. But the Captain 
 — ^for fear of seductive princess-kidnappers and pirates 
 Buch as me, and because her mother was dead, and because 
 she was useful in the business — would let her speak to 
 no man whomsoever, except in the presence of a third 
 party (viz., himself). So that it was very seldom any 
 man came to the house, except me ; whereas, a father 
 generally decoys whole museums of insects into his house 
 by means of a blooming daughter, just as a cherry-tree 
 in blossom near a window fills a room with wasps and 
 bees. It wasn't exactly everybody who, when he wanted 
 to speak a rational word with her (i. e. one her father 
 shouldn't hear), could manage to draw the flute stop of his 
 organ, and then play away for an hour to this Argus till he 
 should close his hundred green eyes, so that two blue ones 
 might be looked into. I did manage it, indeed ; but the 
 world shall hear what sort of a psalm of thanksgiving and 
 vote of thanks I was treated to for my pains. 
 
 The old man — who had grown suspicious on account of 
 the length of time I had remained the evening before — ^had 
 this evening only pretended to be asleep, that he might see 
 what I was going to be at. The rapidity with which he 
 w^ent asleep (the reader no doubt remembers it at the 
 beginning of the book) ought to have struck me more than 
 it did. I ought to have reckoned on a contrary state of 
 matters myself, and been ready with more prefaces in 
 addition to this present one, to serve as sleeping powders. 
 
 The rascally eavesdropper lay in wait till I had made 
 my report on the two Flower-pieces and the four first 
 chapters of this book. At the end of the fourth he 
 bounced up as a mole-trap does when one walks on it. and 
 addressed me from behind with the following harangue of 
 congratulation — " Has the devil got you by the coat-tails? 
 You must come here from Berlin, must you, and stuff my 
 daughter's head with all sorts of atheistical, nonsensical, 
 romantic balderdash and nonsense, till she'll be of no 
 more use in a shop than " 
 
 " Just listen to one word, Herr Pigtail ! " said I quite 
 quietly, taking him into the next room, where there was 
 neither fire nor light; "just listen to one single, Iwlf- 
 word!" 
 
CHAP. IV.] FLOWER, FElflT, AND THOEN PIECES. 123 
 
 I put my hands upon his shoulders, and gaid, "Herr 
 Pigtail — for in Charles the Great's time every officer was 
 so styled, because in those days the soldiers wore tails, as 
 the worsen do now — Herr Pigtail, I'm not going to have 
 a tussle with you to-night, when the old year's going out 
 and the new year's coming in. I assure you solemnly 
 
 that I am the son of the ,* and that I shall never 
 
 see you moie, though you shall have all the Vienna letters 
 just the same. But I implore you, for God's sake, to allow 
 your daughter to read. Now-a-days everj' tradesman reads 
 —one of whom will be her husband — and every trades- 
 man's wife. Yet for all this reading, there's still plenty of 
 spinning and cooking going on ; there are shirts in plenty, 
 and fat people in abundance. And as for corrupting her — 
 why ! that's just what a man who reads will find it most 
 difficult to accomplish in the case of a woman who reads, 
 and most easy in the case of one who hardly knows her 
 ABC. Let me entreat you. Captain." 
 
 " If you would but just mind your own affairs ! What's 
 the girl to you ? " was his reply. It was a true harbour 
 of refuge for me that, on neither of these two evenings, 
 the Christmas Eve or the New Year's, had I, in the 
 enthusiasm of narration, so much as touched anything of the 
 daughter's but about a groschen's worth of hair (and 
 that not her own), which got among my fingers some- 
 how or other, 1 hardly know how. 
 
 It would hava been little to have seized her hands, in 
 the fervour of my biographical enthusiasm it would have 
 been nothing at all ; but, as I have said, I hadn't done it> 
 I had said to myself, " Enjoy a pretty face as you would 
 a picture, and a female voice as you would a nightingale's, 
 and don't touch the picture or throttle the bird. What ! 
 must every tulip be cut up for salad, and all altar-cloths 
 made into camisoles ?" 
 
 Of all truths, the one which we bring ourselves to credit 
 last of all is that there are certain men whom no amount 
 of truth will convince. That Herr Pigtail was one of 
 these presently occurred to me, not so soon as it ought 
 to have done, and I determined that the only sarmon I 
 
 * ThiB is au alhision to ' Hesperus.' 
 
124 JEAN PAUL FRIBDRIOH EICHTEK. [bOOK I. 
 
 should pi-eaoh to him would be of the jocular and middle- 
 age-Easter kind.* " Not so loud, Herr Pigtail, or made- 
 moiselle will hear every syllable; you have pinned her, 
 poor butterfly, into your letter book ; but at the great day 
 of judgment I shall accuse you of not having given her 
 my works to read. I do wish you had only gone on 
 pretending to be asleep long enough to allow me to tell 
 her the other books of the history of Kuhscbnappel, where 
 SiebenksBs's troubles occur, and his death, and his marriage. 
 But, mademoiselle, I shall tell my publisher in Berlin to 
 send you the remaining books of the story the moment 
 they are in print, fresh out of the press, still all damp, 
 like a morning newspaper. And now, adieu, Herr Pigtail ; 
 may Heaven grant you a new heart with the new year, 
 and your dear daughter a second heart inside her own." 
 
 The elemental conflict of his and my dissimilar com- 
 ponents raged louder and louder : but I say no more about 
 it — every additional word would have the appearance of 
 an act of vindictiveness. This, however, I may at all 
 -events say : happy is every daughter who may read my 
 works while her father is awake (very few such daughters, 
 however, recognise this truth). Unhappy is every de- 
 pendent of an Oehimann, because he will be starved, as a 
 greyhound is, that he may be the more nimble at running 
 >(I do not mean on the piano with his fingers), as the 
 dancers' children get nothing to eat that they may spring 
 (the better ! And fortunate are all needy persons who 
 have nothing to do with him ; because Jacob Oehrmann 
 gives to everyone just as much moral, as he possesses mer- 
 lOantHe, credit, to which recruit-measure of worth he has 
 been habituated by his fellow-tradesmen, who measure 
 •each other with yard-measures of metal. The only people 
 who find favour in his sight are those who are complete 
 paupers, and this because they serve as pedestals for his 
 ■charity ; for the alms which he distributes in the name of 
 the town and out of its exchequer, he looks upon as his 
 own. Peace be with him ! At that time I had not taken 
 a part myself in celebrating the peace-festival of the soul 
 which I have described in the Fruit-piece of this book, and 
 
 * Jocular discourses •were delivered on Easter Sunday in the middle 
 ages, and went by the name of " Christian Easter-Merriment." 
 
CHAP. IV.J FLOWER, FKUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 125 
 
 I had read but little of what I have there written concern- 
 ing the year of Jnhilee which ought to last as long as the 
 Long Parliament in our hearts with respect to all our moral 
 debtors ; for if I had I should not even have contradicted 
 Herr Pigtail. 
 
 I vexed him, I am sorry to say, once more by my parting 
 speech to his daughter (for I wished him and her my 
 wishes both together and at once, so that it might not 
 appear which was for which). 
 
 " Herr Pigtail, and mademoiselle, I bid you a long fare- 
 well. No more shall I be able, in elysian evenings, to 
 relate to you any of my biographies (shorn of the digres- 
 sions) ; and the feast days and the holidays, as well as the 
 eves thereof, will come and will go, but he who has caused 
 you such vivid emotions will come no more. May fate 
 send thee books instead of bookmakers, sometimes stir 
 thy dull heart with a poetic throb, heave thy still breast 
 with tender sighs prophetic qf the future — bring to thy 
 eyes some gentle tear drops, such as an andante causes 
 to flow, and lead thee on through the hot, toilsome summer 
 days, not to an after summer, but to a flowery tuneful 
 spring. And so, good night." 
 
 It goes to my heart to part with people ; even were it 
 my sworn hereditary foe : one is going to see him no 
 more. Pauline was anything but my sworn hereditary 
 foe. Out in the streets there were more new year well- 
 wishers going their rounds, the watchmen, who were giving 
 utterance to their good wishes in wind instrumental music 
 and miserable verse. Stiff, old-fashioned, rude verses 
 always touch me more — particularly in an appropriate 
 mouth — than your sapless, new poems, all tricked out with 
 artificial flowers and ice-plants ; poetry altogether wretched 
 is better than the mediocre. I decided upon going through 
 the town gate ; my heart was filled with emotions of very 
 different kinds — ^for you see it was only eleven o'clock and 
 the cold night was full of stars. And it was the last night 
 of the year, and I didn't want to pass from the old year to 
 the new in sleep, though that is how I would pass from 
 this life to the next. I resolved to take that flushed, 
 throbbing heart of mine out of the streets, and to a quietei 
 company. 
 
126 JEAN PAUL FBIEDKICH KICHTEE. [bOOK 1 
 
 Place a man in some waste Sahara desert stretching 
 further than the eye can reach, and afterwards pen him 
 up into the narrowest of comers, he will he struck, in both 
 cases, by the same vivid consciousness of his own indivi- 
 duality — the widest spaces and the narrowest have the 
 same powerful effect in quickening our perception of our 
 own Ego and of its relationship. 'I'here is nothing, on the 
 , whole, oftener forgotten than that which is what forgets — 
 ^ namely, the forgetter's self. Not only do the mechanical 
 employments of labour and trade always draw men out of 
 themselves, but the mental effort of study and investigation, 
 also, renders scholars and philosophers just as deaf and 
 blind to their own Ego, and its position with respect to 
 other entities — deafer and blinder even. Nothing is more 
 difficult than to convert an object of contemplation (which 
 we always move away to a certain distance from ourselves, 
 , and from the mind's eye, so as to bring the latter to bear 
 j (m it properly) into an object of sensation, and to feel that 
 the object is the eye itself. I have often read whole books 
 on the subject of the Ego, and of printing, right through, 
 until at last I saw, to my astonishment, that the Ego 
 and the printed letters were before me — so to speak under 
 my nose. 
 
 Let the reader say truly : has he not even at this 
 moment, while I have been talking, been forgetting that 
 / there are letters before him, ay, and his own Ego into the 
 bargain ? 
 
 But out where I was, under the twinkling heavens, and 
 on a snow-covered height, round about which there 
 gleamed a white, frozen plain, my Ego burst away from 
 its relationships (while in connection with them it was no 
 ( more than an attribute, a quality), and it became a person- 
 age — a separate entity. And then I could look upon my- 
 self. All marked points of time — stanzas as it were, or 
 music phrases, of existence — new years' days for example, 
 and birthdays, lift man high out of and up above the waves 
 / which are round him ; he clears the water from his eyes, 
 ' and looks about him, and says — " How the current has 
 been carrying me along, drowning my hearing, and blind- 
 ing my sight I Those are the waves, down there, onward, 
 which have been bearing me along, and these, now coming 
 
CHAP. IV.] FLOWER, FEUIT, AND THOBN PIECES. 127 
 
 toward me, when I dip down among them, will whirl me 
 away !" 
 
 Without this clear, distinct consciousness of one's Ego, 
 there can be no freedom, and no ■calm equanimity amid the 
 crowding elbowing tumult of the world. 
 
 I shall go on with my story. I stood upon an iceberg, 
 but my soul was all aglow — the cloven moon shone brightly 
 down, and the shadows of the pine-trees about me lay, lili 
 dismembered limbs of the night, black upon the lily groimd 
 of snow. Away, some distance from me, a man seemed to 
 be kneeling motionless on the ground. 
 
 And now 12 o'clock struck, and 1794, year of war and 
 tumult, fell, with all its rivers of blood, into the ocean of 
 eternity ; the booming after-tone of the bell seemed to say 
 to me, " Now has Destiny, with the twelfth stroke of her 
 hammer, knocked down the old year to you, poor perishing 
 mortals, at her auction of minutes." 
 
 The kneeling man now stood up and went quickly away. 
 I could long see him and his shadow disappearing in the 
 moonlight. 
 
 I left my height, the boundary hill between two years, 
 and went down to where the man had been kneeling. I 
 found a crucifix and a black leather prayer-book in duo- 
 decimo, all thumbed yellow, except one leaf at the begin- 
 ning on which was the name of the owner, whose knees 
 had worn deep traces in the ice. I knew him well, he was 
 a cottager whose two sons had had to go to the war. On 
 looking more closely, I found he had drawn a circle in the 
 snow, to keep off evil spirits. 
 
 I saw it all ; the simple, weak-minded creature, whose 
 soul was darkened by a perpetual annular eclipse, had 
 gone there on this solemn night to hearken to the hollow 
 distant muttering thunder of the coming storm, and 
 laid his prostrate soul, as it were, upon the earth to 
 hear the distant march of the approaching foe. "Shal- 
 low, timid soul," thought I, why should the dead that 
 are to be come floating athwart the face of the clear, 
 still night — thy sleeping sons among them, membeiiess ? 
 Why strive already to see the darting flames of con- 
 flagrations yet to come, and to hear the dismal turmoil, 
 the bitter wail, of a woe as yet unborn? The coffins 
 
128 JEAN PADL FEIEDKICH EICHTEE. [BOOK I. 
 
 of the coming year have, as in times of pestilence, nc 
 inscriptions yet — why should the names appear upon 
 them ? Oh ! thy Solomon's ring has heen no protection 
 against the destroying ' an gel who dwells within our 
 breasts. And that vague, ugly giant-cloud, behind which 
 are death and the future, will prove, on approach, to be 
 death and the future itself." 
 
 In hours like these we are all ready to lay our hats and 
 swords on to the bier — ay, and ourselves as well — our old 
 wounds burn anew, and our hearts, not being truly healed, 
 a little thing breaks them again, like anns imperfectly 
 set. But the cruel, piercing lightning flash of some great 
 minute, the reflection of which stretches gleaming athwart 
 the whole river of our life, is necessary to us to make us 
 blind to the ignes fatui and glowworms which meet us, to 
 guide us, every hour : and frivolous, giddy man needs 
 some powerful shock to counteract his tendency to con- 
 tinual petty naggling. Therefore, to us little crustaceans 
 sticking with our suckers upon the ship of this earth, every 
 new year's night is, like night in the old mythologies, a 
 mother of many gods in us — and in such a night ther§ 
 begins for us a better normal year than that which began 
 in 1624. And I felt as if I should kneel, humble and 
 penitent, on the spot where the poor childless father had 
 knelt. 
 
 But now a brisker air brought to my ears a burst of 
 gladsome music ; it came like the breath of flowers across 
 the frozen plain, horns and trumpets on the church tower, 
 sending their cheering harmonies over the sleeping earth, 
 ushering, with glad vigorous tones, the first hour of the 
 new year in to a world of anxious, doubting men. And I 
 too grew glad and strong ; I raised my glance from the 
 white shroud of the coming spring, and gazed at the moon ; 
 and on these spots on her face (these spots which grow 
 green as you approach) I saw our earthly spring reposing 
 upon flowers, and already moving his young wings, soon 
 to take his flight with other birds of passage, and, bright 
 with glittering plumes, and hailed by skylarks' anthems, 
 come and alight upon our shores. 
 
 ■Xhe distant new year's music flowed around me still 
 I felt much happier, and far more tender; I saw the coming 
 
CHAP. IV.] FLOWEK, FKUIT, AND THOKN PIECES. 129 
 
 sorrows in the new bom year, but they wore such lovely 
 masks that they were more like sorrows that are past, or 
 like the music around me — just as the rain which falls 
 through the great caverns in the Derbyshire hills sounds 
 in the distance like music. 
 
 But when I looked around me, and saw the white earth 
 shining like a white sun, and the silent deep blue sphere 
 all round, like a household circle of one great family — and 
 as the music, like lovelier sighs, accompanied my thoughts 
 — as I fixed my gaze, vrith grateful heart, upon the starry 
 sky where all these thousands of stedfast witnesses of 
 the beautiful moments (moments faded, out of bloom, 
 indeed, now — but the great Beneficence spreads their seed 
 for evermore) — when I thought of the men asleep all 
 around me, and wished that they might all be happier 
 when they opened their eyes in the morning — and when 
 I thought of those awake under me, whose slumbering 
 souls stood in need of such a wish, — my heart, oppressed 
 by the music, and by the night, grew heavy and grew full, 
 and the blue sky, the glittering moon, and the sparkling 
 snow-height all melted into one great floating shimmer. 
 
 And in the shimmer, and amid the music, 1 heard voices 
 of my friends, and dear fellow-creatures, tenderly and 
 anxiously wishing their new year's wishes. They touched 
 my heart so deeply, that I could but barely think my 
 own — 
 
 " Oh ! may you all be happy all the years of your lives." 
 
 END OF BOOK I. 
 
 u. 
 
rCBFACE TO THE SECOND, THIRD, 
 AND FOURTH BOOKS. 
 
 It has often been a source of muoli annoyance to me that 
 to every preface I write I am obliged to append a book / 
 — like the endorsement on a bill of exchange — or an 
 appendix to letters A to Z. Many a man who dabbles 
 in authorship by way of amusement has his books sent 
 to him all ready written and complete, straight from the 
 cradle ; so that all he has to do is to attach his gold 
 frontlets of prefaces to their foreheads — which is nothing 
 but painting the corona about the sun. As yet, however, 
 not a single author has applied to me for a preamble to a 
 book, although for several years I have had a considerable 
 number of prefaces by me (all ready beforehand, and going 
 at great bargains), in which I extol to the best of my ability ' 
 works which have not as yet come into being. In fact, I have 
 now a perfect museum of these prize medals and commemora- 
 tion medals of other people's cleverness at the service of 
 anyone who may stand in need of them ; they are all 
 made by the very finest of mint-machinery, and my collec- 
 tion of them is increasing day by day ; so that I shall be 
 obliged to sell it off wholesale before very long (I don't see , 
 what else I can do), and, bring out a book — consisting of J 
 nothing but pre-existent prefaces. 
 
 They will still be obtainable singly, however, until the 
 Easter fair, and authors who make early application can 
 have the entire fascicle of preludes forwarded to them, so that 
 they can pick out for themselves whichever preface seems 
 to them the most laudatory of a book. After the Easter 
 fair however, when the Book of Prefaces above mentioned 
 comes out (and it will be interleaved with the fair 
 catalogue), the literary world will only be beglorifled in 
 corpore, in coro, and I shall be (so to speak) making a 
 present of a patent of nobility to the republic of letters in 
 
 K 2 
 
132 PEEFACE TO SECOND, THIED, AND FOUETH BOOKS. 
 
 the lump, — as the Empress Queen did in 1775 to the 
 whole mercantile community of Vienna ; although I have 
 before my eyes (in the shape of the poor reviewers who 
 work themselves well nigh to death, hammering and 
 building away at the temple of fame, and at triumphal 
 arches) the melancholy proof that though a man were to 
 extol the republic of letters even in six volumes folio, 
 he would get less for it than Sannazaro did for belauding 
 the republic of Venice in as many lines — for each line in 
 the latter case brought the poet in a matter of a hundred 
 five-dollar pieces. 
 
 I propose to interstratify one of the prefaces in question 
 
 , in this place by way of a specimen and experiment, making 
 
 1 as if its celebrated author had written it to order for this 
 
 book (which is the actual truth, moreover). There is nc 
 
 , difficulty in my splitting myself up into two characters, 
 
 J the flower painter and the preface maker. But, — as one 
 
 cannot quite lose sight of feelings of becoming modesty 
 
 — I carefully pick out the most miserable specimen of the 
 
 lot, one in which laudation occurs but to a very moderate 
 
 extent, one which places the author of the book attached 
 
 to it upon a funeral car, rather than upon a triumphal one, 
 
 with nothing whatever to draw it along moreover ; whereas 
 
 the other prefaces harness posterity to them, and the 
 
 reading public are, by them, yoked on to the heavenly 
 
 chariot, the Elijah's chariot, of Immortality, in which they 
 
 draw the author along. 
 
 In conclusion, then, I have only to observe that the cele- 
 brated author of ' Hesperus ' has been kind enough to look 
 / through my Flower-pieces, and contribute to them the 
 ^ following preface, which will be found well worthy of 
 perusal. 
 
PREFACE, BY THE AUTHOR OF 
 'HESPERUS.' 
 
 The following remarks may be thrown into the form of a 
 series of postulates, which are, at the same time, so many 
 similes. 
 
 Many authors (Young is an instance) set fire to their 
 nerve-spirit, which, like burning spirit of another kind 
 (brandy), tinges every person who stands round the ink- 
 bottle where it is flaring with a sham deadly pallor. But, 
 unfortunately, each looks only at the others, none looks 
 into the mirror. The effect of the proximity of this 
 universal mortality all about, upon people and authors, 
 is that each is impressed with a livelier sense of the 
 exceptional nature of his own immortality ; and this is 
 remarkably comforting to us all. 
 
 The consequence is, as it seems to me, very plain. 
 Poets, living in fifth, or fiftieth floors, may make poems, 
 but not marriages ; neither may they keep, nor establish, 
 houses. Canaries' breeding cages have to be more roomy 
 than their singing cages. 
 
 If this be so, then, what does the author's pen do ? Like 
 a child's, it traces in ink the characters which nature has 
 faintly marked in the reader with pencil. 
 
 The author's strings only vibrate in unison with the 
 reader's octaves, fifths, fourths, and thirds — not with his 
 seconds or sevenths. Unsympathetic readers do not become 
 sympathetic ones ; it is only the cognate, or congruent, 
 sort which rise to the author's level or pass beyond it. 
 
 And with this stands or falls my fourth postulate. The 
 iron shoe of Pegasus is the armature of the magnet of 
 truth, increasing its power of attraction; yet we are 
 aungry birds, and fly at the poet's grapes as though they 
 were real ones, thinking the boy a painted one, when 
 we really ought to be frightened at Mm. 
 
134 PBEFACE, BY THE AUTHOE OF 'HESPERUS.' 
 
 The transition from this to the fifth postulate is a self- 
 evident matter. Man has such a high opinion of everything 
 in the shape of antiquity, that he prolongs it, and keeps 
 it alive, and lives according to it, though it be hut the 
 cover and the mask of the very poison which will destroy 
 itself. There are two proofs of this proposition which I 
 leave aside, of set purpose ; the first is, Eeligion, which is all 
 gnawed to worm dust ; the second, Freedom, which is quite 
 as much crumbled to powder as the other. In my capacity 
 of a member of the Lutheran Church, I merely glance at 
 the subjeqt of relics (in support of the proposition) — relics, 
 in the case of which, as Vasquez the Jesuit informs us, if 
 they chance to be entirely eaten up of worms, we must 
 continue to worship what remains — that is to say, the 
 worms which have eaten them. Wherefore, meddle not 
 with that nest of worms, the time in which thou livest, or 
 it will eat thee up ; a million of worms are quite equal to 
 one dragon. 
 
 This must be admitted and assumed, at least if my sixth 
 postulate is to have any sense in it which is, — that no man 
 is wholly indifferent to, and unafiected by, every kind of 
 truth ; indeed even if it . be only to poetical refections 
 (illusions) that he swears allegiance — inasmuch as he does 
 even that he thereby does homage to truth ; for in all poetrj' 
 it is but the part which is tnie which goes to the heart 
 (or head), just as in our passions and emotions nothing 
 but the Moral produces effect. A reflection which should 
 be nothing whatever but a reflection would necessarily, for 
 that very reason, not be a reflection. Every aemblance 
 (meaning every thing which we see, or suppose we see) pre- 
 supposes the existence of light somewhere, and is itself light, 
 only in an enfeebled or reflected condition. Only, most 
 people in our, not so much enlightened as enlightening times, 
 are like nocturnal insects who avoid, or are pained by, the 
 light of day, but, in the night, fly to every nocturnal light, 
 every phosphorescent surface. 
 
 The graves of the best men are like those of the 
 Moravians, level and flat, and this earthly sphere of ours 
 is a Westminster Abbey of such levellings and fla.ttenings 
 —ah ! what innumerable drops of tears as well as blood 
 (which are what the three grand trees of this world — the 
 
PREFACE, BY THE AUTHOR OF 'HESPERUS.' 135 
 
 treies of Life, of Knowledge, and Liberty — are watered with) 
 have been shed, but never counted. History, in painting 
 the human race, does not follow the example of that 
 painter who, making a portrait of a one-eyed king, drew 
 only his seeing profile ; what history paints is the blind 
 side, and it needs some grand calamity to bring great men 
 to light — as comets are seen during total eclipses of the 
 sun. Not upon the battle-field only — upon the holy 
 ground of virtue also, and upon the classic soil of truth — 
 the pedestal whereon history raises on high some single 
 hero whose name rings in all men's ears has to be composed 
 and built up of thousands of other heroes who have fought 
 and fallen, nameless and unknown. The noblest deeds of 
 heroism are done within four walls, not before the public 
 gaze, — and as history keeps record only of the men sacri- 
 ficed, and, on the whole, writes only in sp?lt blood, doubt- 
 less our annals are gi'ander and more beautiful in the eyes 
 of the all-pervading spirit of the universe than in those 
 of the history-writer ; the great scenes of history are 
 estimated according to the numbers of angels or devils on 
 the stage, the men not being taken into account. 
 
 These are the grounds on which I rely when I assert 
 with a good deal of boldness that when we inhale the 
 perfume of the full-blown blossoms of joy with too deep 
 and strong an inhalation,, without having first given them 
 a good shake, we run the risk of snufSng up some torment- 
 ing insect (before we know what we are about) through 
 the ethmoid into the brain ; * and who — tell me if you can — 
 is to get it out again ? Whereas little or nothing of a 
 risky sort can be snuffed up out of Flower-pieces, and their 
 painted calices, since painted worms remain where they are. 
 
 This, then, is what I have to postulate by means of 
 similes. What the puhlio postulates, or demands, is my 
 opinion of these Flower-pieces. The author is a promising 
 youth of five years of age ;'] he and I have been friends 
 
 * In the 3rd part of the ' Liohtenberg PhiloBophical Magazine,' the case 
 is mentioned of a woman, who, while smelling at a flower, inhaled a 
 worm into her brain, which tormented her with delirium, headache, 
 &c., till it- came out at her nose again, still alive. 
 
 t Voltaire proves that a person who is 23 years old, has only lived 
 3J years in the proper sense of the word. 
 
1 36 PEEFACE, BY THE AUTHOR OF ' HESPERUS.' 
 
 since childhood, and, I think, can assert that we have but 
 one soul between us, as Aristotle says should be the case 
 with friends. He gets me to read over everything he thinks 
 of publishing, and to give him my opinion and advice. 
 And, as I returned these Flower-pieces to him with the 
 warmest (and, at the same time, sincerest) expression of 
 my approval, he has requested me to make my verdict 
 somewhat more widely known, believing as he does 
 (rather too flatteringly perhaps) that it may carry a 
 certain amount of weight with it, more especially as it is 
 an impartial verdict, and, as such, one which can be placed 
 in the hands of the critics as a species of ruler wherewith 
 to draw the lines upon which their verdicts may be 
 written. 
 
 In this, however, he goes a little too far. All I can say 
 is that the work is written quite as if I had done it myself. 
 There is no greater amount of dynamic ornamentation in 
 it than is usual in books, and, happy as the author would 
 have been to have thundered, stormed, and poured in it, 
 there was of course no room in a parish advocate's lodgings 
 for Ehine cataracts, thunderstorms, tropical hurricanes 
 (of tropes) or waterspouts, and he has had to reserve 
 his more terrific tornadoes for a future work. I have his 
 permission to mention the name of this future work ; it is 
 the ' Titan.' In this work he means to be an absolute 
 Hecla, and shatter the ice of his country (and himself into 
 the bargain) to pieces ; like the volcanoes in Iceland, he 
 will spout up a column of boiling water four feet in 
 diameter to a height of eighty-nine or ninety feet in the 
 air, and that at such a temperature that when this wet fire 
 pillar falls down again and flows into the book shops, it 
 will still be warm enough to boil eggs hard or their mother 
 soft. " Then " (he always says — very sadly however — 
 because he sees what a hard matter it is to distinguish 
 between full half of our battling and harrying here below 
 and a JackPudding farce and piece of utter buffoonery and 
 nonsense, — also, that the cradle of this life rocks us, and 
 ttills us indeed, but carries us not a step on our way) 
 — " then may the Arbor Toxicaria Macassarierms * of the 
 
 * The poisonous Boa Upas, beneath which one loses one's hair in a 
 few minutes. 
 
PBEPAOE, BY THE AUTHOB OF 'HESPERUS.' 137 
 
 Ideal, beneath which I have lost a little hair already, go on 
 poisoning me, and dispatch me to the Land of the Ideal. 
 At all events, I have knelt down and prayed nnder 
 the solemnising soul-elevating sighing roar of its death- 
 dealing branches. And why should there be a hut made 
 ready for the traveller beside the eternal well of truth, 
 marked with the title ' Travellers' rest,' if no one ever 
 enters it ? " He wants, by way of broad " flies " for his 
 life stage on earth, merely a regular, downright, rainy 
 year or two (two will suffice) ; for a broad, bright, open 
 sky overpowers us, and weakens the hand's pen power by 
 making the eyes over full. And here the book-maker 
 differs markedly from his provision-contractor, the paper- 
 maker, who shuts Ms mill up precisely when the weather 
 is wet. 
 
 I should also be glad if readers would have the goodness 
 to go once more through the few chapters composing the 
 first book — that they may see what they really lack ; and 
 indeed a book which is not worth reading twice is not 
 worth reading once. 
 
 In conclusion, I (albeit the most inconsiderable olubbist 
 and vote-possessor of all the public) would fain incite the 
 author to the production of other seedlings, suckers, and 
 infantas of the same stamp, trusting that the reading 
 world may form its opinion on his work with the same 
 careful favour and indulgent approval as I have formed 
 mine. 
 
 Jean Paul Fe. Kichter. 
 Hof in Voigtland, 
 June 5th, 1796. 
 
 * * ^ ^ ^ itt * 
 
 Thus far my friend's preface. Utterly absurd as it is, 
 my own preface, you see, has got to be concluded too, 
 and at the end of it I can but sign myself as my aforesaid 
 man Friday and namesake does, videlicet, 
 
 Jean Paul Fe. Eichter. 
 Hof in Voigtland, 
 June 5th, 1796. 
 
BOOK IT. 
 
 CHAPTEE V. 
 
 THE BROOM AND THE BEBOM AS' PASSION IMPLEMENTS — THE 
 IMPORTANCE OP A BOOICWBITER — DIPLOMATIC NEGOTIATIONS 
 AND DISCDSSIONS ON THE SUBJECT OF CANDLE iSNOFFIKG — THE 
 PEWTER CUPBOARD — DOMESTIC HARDSHIPS AND ENJOYMENTS. 
 
 Catholics hold that there were fifteen mysteries in the 
 life of Christ — five of Joy, five of Woe, five of Glory. I 
 have carefully accompanied our hero through the five joy- 
 ful mysteries of which the Linden honey-month of bis 
 marriage has had to tell. I now come with him to the 
 five mysteries of Woe with which the series of the mysteries 
 of most marriages is — concluded. I trust, however, that 
 his may yet be found to contain the five of Glory also. 
 
 In my first edition, I began this book of my hero's 
 story in an unconcerned manner, with the above sentence 
 just as if it were literally correct. A second, and care- 
 fully revised edition, however, renders it incumbent upon 
 me to add, as an emendation, that the fifteen mysteries in 
 question do not come one after another, like steps of stairs, 
 or ancestors in a pedigree, but are shuffled up together 
 like good and bad cards in a hand. Yet, in spite of this 
 shuffling, the joy outbalances the sorrow, at any rate in 
 its duration, as has been the case, indeed, with this terres- 
 trial globe, our planet itself, which has survived several 
 last days, and as a consequence still more springs, that 
 is to say, re-creations on a smaller scale. 1 mention all 
 this to save a number of poor devils of readers from the 
 dreadful thought that they have got to wade through 
 a whole " Book II." full of tears, partly to be read about, 
 partly to be shed out of compassion. I am not one of 
 those authors who, like very rattlesnakes, can sit and 
 gazo upon thousands of charmed people running up 
 and down, 'a prey to every kind of agitation, suspense. 
 
140 JEAN PAUL FRIEDKICH KICHTEE. [BOOK II. 
 
 and anxiety, till his time comes to spring upon them and 
 swallow them up. 
 
 When Siebenkses awoke in the morning, he at once 
 packed the devil of jealousy, the marriage devil, off to 
 the place where all other devils dwell. JFor a calming 
 sleep lowers the pulse of the soul's fever — the grains 
 thereof are fever-bark for the cold fever of hate, and also 
 for the hot fever of love. Indeed he put down the tracing 
 board, and with a pantograph made a correct, re- 
 duced copy of his yesterday's free translation of the 
 Bngelkrautian countenance, and blackened it nicelj'. 
 When it was done, he said to his wife, for very love of 
 her, " We'll send him the profile this morning, at once. 
 It may be a good long while before he comes to fetch it." 
 " Oh yes ! he won't be here till Wednesday, and by that 
 time he'll have forgotten all about it." " But I could 
 bring him here sooner than that, " Siebenkses answered; 
 " I need only send him the Eussian Trinity dollar of 1679 
 to get changed for me ; he won't send me a farthing of the 
 money — he'll bring it himself as he always has done all 
 through Leibgeber's collection." " Or you might send him 
 the dollar and the picture both," said Lenette, " he would 
 like it better." "Which would he like better?" he 
 asked. She didn't see exactly what answer to make to 
 this ridiculous question (whether she meant the stamped 
 face or the pictured one) sprung upon her like a mine in 
 this sort of way, and got out of her difficulty by saying, 
 " Well, the things, of course." He spared her any further 
 catechising. 
 
 The Schulrath, however, sent nothing but an answer 
 to the effect that he was beside himself with delight 
 at the charming presents, and would come to express 
 his thanks m person, and to settle up with the advocate, 
 by the end of the following week at latest. The little 
 dash of bitter flavour which was perceptible to the taste 
 in this unexpected answer of the too happy Scliulrath, 
 was by no means sweetened away by the arrival at this 
 moment of the messenger of the Inheritance Office, with 
 Heimlicher von Blaise's first proceedings in the matter 
 of the plaint lodged against him, consisting of a petition 
 for three weeks' grace within which to lodge answers, 
 
CHAP. V.J FLOWER, FRUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 141 
 
 a delay which the Court had readily accorded. Siebenbses, 
 as his own poor's advocate, lived in the sure and certain 
 hope that the promised land of inheritance, flowing 
 with milk and honey, would be reached by his children, 
 though lie would in all probability have long ere that 
 time perished in the wilderness of the law ; for justice 
 is given to recompensing the children, and the children's 
 children, for the uprightness of the fathers, and for 
 the goodness of their cause. It was more or less in 
 convenient, at the same time, to have nothing to live 
 upon during one's own lifetime. The Eussian Trinity 
 dollar — for which the Schulrath hadn't even paid as yet 
 — couldn't be lived upon, and there were but one or two 
 queue ducats remaining of the treasury chest provided 
 by Leibgeber, for the carrying on of operations against 
 the Heimlicher. This gold coin and those few silver 
 ones were (although I have said nothing about it till now) 
 the entire money contents remaining in the Leibgeberian 
 saviour's scrip, and indeed none but a true disciple and 
 follower of the Saviour could be expected to hold out 
 upon them. My silence on this matter of the emptying of 
 the coin cabinet may perhaps be accepted in evidence 
 of the fact that I try as much as I can to avoid mentioning 
 anything calculated to give my readers pain. 
 
 " Oh ! I shall get on somehow or other," said Siebenkses 
 quite gleefully, as he set to work harder than ever at his 
 writing, with the view of getting a considerable haul of 
 money into the house, at the earliest moment possible, 
 in the shape of payment for his ' Selection from the 
 Devil's Papers.' 
 
 But there was a fresh purgatorial fire now being stoked 
 and blown, till it blazed hotter and hotter about him. 
 I have refrained from saying anything about the fire in 
 question till now, though he has been sitting roasting at it 
 since the day before yesterday, Lenette being the cook, 
 and his writing table the larkspit. 
 
 During the few days when the wordless quarrel was 
 going on, he had got into a habit of listening with the 
 closest attention to what Lenette was doing, as he sat 
 writing away at his ' Selection from the Devil's Papers' ; 
 and this sent his ideas all astray. The softest step, the 
 
142 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH EICHTER. [bOOK II. 
 
 •very slightest shake of anything affected him just as if 
 he had had hydrophobia, or the gout, and put one or two 
 fine young ideas to death, as a louder noise kills young 
 canaries, or silkworms. 
 
 He controlled himself very well at first. He pointed 
 out to himself that his wife really could not help moving 
 about, and that as long as she hadn't a spiritual or glorified 
 body and furn iture to deal with, she couldn't possibly go 
 about as silently as a sunbeam, or as her invisible good and 
 evil angels behind her. But while he was listening to this 
 cours de morale, this collegium pietatis of his own, he lost the 
 run of his satirical conceits and contexts, and his language 
 was deprived of a good deal of its sparkle. 
 
 But the morning after the silhouette evening, when 
 their hearts had shaken hands and renewed the old 
 royal alliance of Love, he could go much more openly to 
 work, and so, as soon as he had blackened the profile, and 
 had only his own original creations to go on blackening — 
 i. e. when he was going to begin working in his own chai'coal 
 burning hut, he said to his wife, as a preliminary — 
 
 " If you can help it, Lenette, don't make very much 
 noise to-day. I really can hardly get on with my writing, 
 if you do —you know it's for publication." 
 
 She said " I'm sure you can't hear me — I go about so 
 very quietly." 
 
 Although a man may be long past the years of his 
 youthful follies; j'et in every year of his life there crop 
 up a few weeks and days in which he has fresh follies 
 to commit. It was truly in a moment of one of these days 
 that Biebenkaes made the request above mentioned ; for 
 he had now laid upon himself the necessity of lying in 
 wait and watching to see what Lenette would do in 
 consequence of it. She skimmed over the floor, and 
 athwart the various webs of her household labours, with 
 the tread of a spider. Like her sex in general, she had 
 disputed his little point, merely for the sake of disputing 
 it, not of doing what she was asked not to do. Siebenk»s 
 had to keep his ears very much on the alert to hear what 
 little noise she did make, either with her hands or her 
 feet — ^but he was successful, and did hear the greater 
 .part of. it. Unless when we are asleep we are more 
 
CHAP, v.] FLOWER, IKUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 143 
 
 attentive to a slight noise tlian to a loud one ; and our 
 author listened to her wherever she went, his ear and his 
 attention going about fixed to her like a pedometer where- 
 ever she moved. In short he bad to break off in the 
 middle of the satire, called " The Nobleman with the 
 Ague," and jump up and cry to. her (as she went creeping 
 about), " For one whole hour have I been listening and 
 watching that dreadful tripping about on tiptoe. I had 
 much rather you would stamp about in a pair of the iron- 
 soled sandals people used to wear for beating time in.* 
 Please go about as you usually do, darling." 
 
 She complied, and went about almost as she usually did. 
 Ho would have very much liked to have prohibited the 
 intermediate style of walking, as he had the light and 
 the heavy ; but a husbf nd doesn't care to contradict him- 
 self twice in one morning; once is enough. In the 
 evening he asked her if she would mind going about 
 the house in her stockings when he was at work at his 
 writing. She would find it nice and cool for the feet. 
 " In fact," he added, " as I'm working all the forenoon 
 literally for our bread, it would be well if you would do 
 nothing that isn't absolutely necessary while I am at my 
 literary work." 
 
 Next morning he sat in judgment (mentally) upon 
 evei-ything that went on behind his back, and challenged 
 it to see if it could produce the free-pass of necessity — 
 going on with his writing all the time, but doing it 
 worse than usual. This scribbling martyr endured a 
 great many things with as much patience as he could 
 muster, but when Wendeline took to whisking the straw 
 under the green painted marriage torus with a long 
 broom, the cross grew too heavy for his shoulder. It 
 happened, moreover, that he had been reading two days 
 before in an old Ephemeris of scientific inquirers, that 
 a clergyman, of the name of Johann Pechmann, couldn't 
 bea,r the sound of a besom— that it nearly took his breath 
 away, and that he once took to his heels and bolted 
 when a crossing sweeper accidentally ran against him. 
 The effect of his having read this was, that he was 
 
 * The musicahs among ,tlie ancients wore tliem. — Bartholia de TiK 
 Vet. iii. 4. 
 
144 JEAN PAUL FEIEDKICH EICHTEE. [BOOK IL 
 
 in voluntarily more observant and intolerant of a cognate 
 discomfort. He called out to the domestic sweeper in the 
 next room, from his chair where he sat — 
 
 " Lenette, do not go on sorubhing and switching about 
 with that besom of yours, it drives away the whole of my 
 best ideas out of my head. There was an old clergyman 
 once of the name of Pechmann, who would rather have been 
 condemned to sweep a crossing in Vienna himself, than 
 to listen to another sweeping it — he would rather have 
 been flogged with a birch-broom, than have heard the 
 infernal sound of it swishing and whishing. How is 
 a man to get a coherent idea, fit to go to the printer and 
 publisher, into his head with all this sweeping and 
 scrubbing going on?" 
 
 Lenette did what every good wife, and her lap dog, 
 would have done ; she left off the noise by degrees. At 
 last she laid down the besom, and merely whisked three 
 straws and a little feather fluif gently with the hair- 
 broom, from under the bed, not making as much noise 
 even as he did with his writing. However the editor 
 of the ' Devil's Papers' managed to hear it, in a manner 
 beyond his fondest hopes. He rose up, went to the 
 bedroom door and called in at the room, " My darling, it's 
 every bit as hellish a torment to me if I can hear it at 
 all. You may fan those miserable sweepings with a pea- 
 cock's feather, or a holy-water asperger, or you may puff 
 them away with a pair of bellows, but I and my poor book 
 must suffer and pay the piper all the same." 
 
 " I'm quite done now, at all events," she said. 
 
 He set to work again, and gaily took up the threads 
 of his fourth satire, " Concerning the five Monsters and 
 their receptacles, whereon I at first intended to subsist." 
 
 Meanwhile Lenette . gently closed the door, so that he 
 was driven to the conclusion that there was something or 
 other going on to annoy him again in his Gehenna and 
 place of penitence. He laid down his pen and cried — 
 
 " Lenette, I can't hear very distinctly what it is — ^but 
 you're up to something or other in there that I can not 
 stand. For God's dear sake, stop it at once, do put a 
 period to my martyrdom and sorrows of Werther, for this 
 one day — come here, let me see you." 
 
CHAP. V.J FLOWEE, FEUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 145 
 
 She answered, all out of breath with hard work — 
 
 " I'm not doing anything." 
 
 He got Tip and opened the door of his chamber of 
 torture. There was his wife rubbing away with a piece 
 of grey flannel, polishing up the green rails of the bed. 
 The author of this history once lay sick of smallpox in 
 a bed of this kind, and knows them well. But the reader 
 may not be aware that a green slumber cage of this kind 
 is a good deal like a magnified canaries' breeding cage 
 with its latticed folding doors or portcullises, and that 
 this trellis and hothouse for dreams is, though less hand- 
 some in appearance, much better for health than our 
 heavy bastille towers all hung about with curtains which 
 keep away every breath of fresh air. The advocate 
 swallowed about half a pint of bedroom air, and said, in 
 measured accents — 
 
 " You're at your brushing and sweeping again, are you ? 
 although you know quite well that I'm sitting there 
 working like a slave for you and myself too, and that 
 I've been wilting away for the last hour with scarcely 
 an idea in my head. Oh ! my heavenly better half ! 
 out with all your cartridges at one shot, for God's sake, 
 and don't finish me off altogether with that rag of yours." 
 
 Lenette, full of astonishment said, " It's simply im^ 
 possible, old man, that you can hear me in the next 
 loom" — and polished away harder than ever. He took 
 her hand, somewhat hastilj"^, thougli not roughly, and said 
 in a louder tone, " Come, get up ! — It's exactly that which 
 I complain of, that I can't hear you in the next room ; I'm 
 obliged to rack my brains to guess what you're at — and 
 the only ideas left in my head are connected with brush- 
 ing and scrubbing, so that all the brilliant notions which 
 I might otherwise be putting down on paper are driven 
 away. My darling child, nobody could possibly sit 
 and work away here more composedly and con+entedly 
 than I, if it were only grape-shot and canister, howitzer 
 shells, and hundred-pounders that yon "R'ere banging 
 away with at my back out of these embrasures of yours. 
 What it is that I really can not stand, is a quiet noise." 
 
 All this talk having put him a little out of temper, ho 
 fetched her out of the room, rag and all, saying — 
 
 II. L 
 
146 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH KICHTER. [bOOK II. 
 
 " It does seem a little hard that, while I'ln labouring 
 away here with all my might, working myself almost to 
 death, to provide a little entertainment for the reading 
 public, a regular bear-baiting pit should be started in 
 my own room, and that an author's very bed should be 
 turned into a siege-trench, and arrows and fire-balls sen 
 about his ears out of it. There, I shan't be writing while 
 we're at dinner, I'll talk the thing out at full length with 
 you then." 
 
 At noon, then,* as he was about to enter on the subject 
 of the morning's tourney, he had first to hold a prayer- 
 tourney. I mean this : " prayers " do not, in Niirnberg 
 and Kuhschnappel, mean a certain hereditary office and 
 service of mass in a court chapel, but — the ringing of the 
 twelve o'clock bell. Now the dining-table of our couple 
 etood against the wall, and was not put in the middle of 
 the floor except for meals. Well, Siebenkaes never suc- 
 ceeded above twice during his married life in having this 
 table brought forward before the soup came in (for if 
 a woman once forgets a thing, she goes on forgetting it a 
 thousand times running |), though he preached his lungs 
 as dry as a fox's (which are used for curing ours) ; both 
 soup and table were always moved together, after the 
 soup came in, without the spilling of a greater quantity 
 of the latter than one might have used in swallowing a 
 pill. 
 
 To-day this was the case as usual. Siebenkaes slowly 
 chewed the pill which he swallowed with the soup. The 
 delay in moving the table he observed anxiously (as if it 
 had been a delay in the arrival of an equinox), with a long 
 face and slow breathing, and when the soup-libation was 
 duly poured as usual, he broke out as follows, in a calm 
 tone of voice, however — ■ 
 
 * The common German dinner-time then. — Tbanslatob. 
 
 t So do men forget it, though in a lesser degree. Suppose a man 
 who does ninety things every day, accurately remembering them, 
 should once or twice forget a ninety-first thing, he'll go on forgetting 
 that afterwards, though he remembers all the rest. There's no remedy 
 for this unless some person happens to come in, or something chances 
 to occur just at the instant of forgetting, and recalls the ninety-first 
 thing to his mind. If he once forgets to forget, he won't forget any 
 more, 
 
CHAP, v.] FLOWEK, FRUIT, AND THOKN PIECES. 147 
 
 " The fact is, Lenette, we are on board a good ship. At 
 sea, you know, people spill their soup because their vessel 
 rolls and pitches— and ours is spilt for a similar reason. 
 See here, the dinner-table and the morning besom are both 
 in a tale together ; they are two conspirators who will 
 blowout your husband's candle — to use a strong expression 
 — before they have done." 
 
 This, the exordium of his sermon, was followed by way 
 of hymn, by the arrival of the town fool of Kuhsohnappel, 
 who brought in a great sheet of paper containing aninvita- 
 tation to the shooting match on St. Andrew's Day, the 30th 
 of November. Every one of us must, I am sure, have 
 gathered from what has already been said that the only 
 money left in the house was the queue-ducat. At the same 
 time, Siebenkses couldn't leave the shooting-club, without 
 thereby granting to himself a certificate of poverty, a 
 testimonium paupertaiis, in the face of the whole town. And 
 really a shooting-ticket for this match was almost as good 
 as mining shares or East India stock to a man who was 
 as good a shot as Siebenksss. It would also give him an 
 opportunity of doing that public honour to his wife which 
 she, as a senate clerk's daughter from Augspurg, had a 
 right to expect. Unfortunately, however, the grave man 
 of folly couldn't be got to give change for the curious 
 queue-ducat, particularly as "Siebenkses aroused his sus- 
 picions with respect to it himself, by saying, " This is a 
 very good tail or queue-ducat, I assure you. I don't wear 
 a tail myself," he added, " but that's no reason why a 
 ducat shouldn't, if the King of Prussia chooses to immor- 
 talise his own by having it stamped upon it. Wife, would 
 you get our landlord, the hairdresser, to come up ; nobody 
 can know better than he whether it's a queue-ducat or not, 
 seeing he has queues (not upon ducats) in his hands every 
 day." The pickle-herring of Kuhsohnappel didn't vouch- 
 safe the ghost of a smile at this. The hairdresser came, 
 and declared it to be a queue, and civilly took It away 
 himself to get it changed. Hairdressers can run ; in five 
 minutes he brought the change for the ducat. 
 
 When the melancholy buffoon had pocketed his portion 
 of it, Lenette's face was all over double interjections and 
 marks of interrogation ; wherefore Siebenkaes resumed his 
 
 L 2 
 
148 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH EICHTEE. [bOOK II. 
 
 midday sermon. " The principal prizes," he said, " are 
 pewter dishes and sums of money for hitting the bird, and 
 mostly provisions for the other marks we shoot at. I sus- 
 pect that you and I shall dine on St. Andrew's Day upon a 
 nice piece of roast meat in a new dish, hoth of which I 
 shall have shot into j'our kitchen, if I only take a little 
 pains. And at all events don't worry yourself, darling, 
 because our money's nearly all gone. Take refuge behind 
 me. I am your sandbag, your gabion, your shelter trench, 
 and with my rifle, more certainly still with my pen, I feel 
 pretty sure I shall keep the devil of poverty at his distance, 
 till my precious guardian hands over my mother's property. 
 Only for God's sake don't let your work interrupt mine. 
 Your rag and your besom have cost me at least sixteen 
 currency dollars this morning. For supposing I get eight 
 imperial dollars a printed sheet for my Devilish Papers 
 (counting the imperial dollar at ninety kreuzer) — and I 
 ought to get more — I should have earned forty-eight cur- 
 lency dollars this morning if I had written a (printed) 
 sheet and a half. But you see I had to stop in the middle 
 of it and expend a great many words upon you, for none of 
 which I get a single kreuzer. You should look upon me 
 as a fat old spider stowed away in a box to shrivel up in 
 time into a precious gold nugget or jewel. Whenever I 
 take a dip of ink I draw a thread of gold out of the ink 
 bottle, as I've often told you, and (as the proverb says) 
 I the morning hours have gold in their mouths (Morgenstund 
 hat Gold im Mund). Go on with your dinner, and listen. 
 I'll just take this opportunity of explaining to you the 
 principal points in which the preciousness of an author 
 consists, and so give you the key to a good many things. 
 In Swabia, in Saxony, and Pomerania, there are towns in 
 which there are people who appraise authors as our master 
 butcher here does beef. They are usually known by 
 the name of tasters or ruleis of taste, because they try the 
 flavour of every book as it comes out, and then tell the 
 people whether they'll like it or not. We authors in our 
 irritation often call these people critics, but they might 
 bring an action against us for libel for so doing. Now as 
 these directors of taste seldom write books themselves, they 
 have all the more time to read and find fault with othei 
 
CHAP, v.] FLOWEE, FKUIT, AND THORN PIECES, 149 
 
 people's. Yet it does sometimes happen tliat some of them 
 have written, bad books themselves, and consequently know 
 a bad book in a moment when they come across one. 
 Many become patron saints of authors and of their books 
 for the same reason that St. John Nepomuck became the 
 patron saint of bridges and those who cross them ; because 
 he was once thrown off one into the water. Now these 
 scribblings of mine will be sent to these gentlemen as soon 
 as they are in print (as yonr hymn-book is). And they'll 
 peer all through my productions to see whether or not I've 
 written them quite legibly and distinctly (not too large or 
 too small), whether I've put any wrong letters, a little e 
 for a big, or an f instead of a ph, whether the hyphen- 
 strokes are too long or too short, and all that sort of thing : 
 indeed they often even give opinions about the thoughts 
 in the book (which they have nothing to do with). Now 
 you see, if you go on scrubbing and swishing about 
 with besoms behind me, I shall keep writing all sorts of 
 stuff and nonsense, and it'll all be printed. Of course that's 
 a terrible thing to happen to a man, for these tasters tear 
 great frightful holes and wounds in the paper however 
 fine it is, with nails as long as fingers (buttonmakers' nails 
 are shorter, but not circumcisers' among the Jews), before 
 they give it a name to carry about with it, as the circum- 
 cisers do to the Jew boys. And after this, they circulate a 
 slip of unsized paper, in which they find fault with me, and 
 give me a bad name, all over the empire, in Saxony and 
 Pomerania, and tell all Swabia in so many plain words 
 that I'm an ass. May the devil confound their imperti- 
 nence ! This is the sort of birching, you see, that besom 
 of yours will be getting me in for. Whereas, if I write 
 beautifully and legibly, and with proper attention and 
 ability — and every sheet of my Devilish Papers is so written 
 — if I carefully weigh and consider every word and every 
 page before I write it, if I am playful in one place, in- 
 structive in another, pleasing in all, — in that case I am 
 bound to tell you, Lenette, that the tasters are people who 
 are quite capable of appreciating work of that sort, and 
 would, think nothing of sitting down and circulating papers 
 in which the least they would say of me would be that I 
 had certainly brought something away from college in my 
 
150 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH EICHTEK. [BOOK II. 
 
 head, and had a little to show for my studies. In short, 
 they would say, they hadn't expected it of me, and there 
 was really something in me. Now a panegyric of this kind 
 upon a husband is reflected, of course, upon his wife, and 
 when the Augspurg people are all asking ' Where does he 
 Hve, this Siebenkses whom everybody's talking of ?' there 
 are sure to be lots of folks in the Fuggery to answer, ' Oh! 
 he lives in Kuhschnappel, his wife was a daughter of 
 Engelkraut, the senate clerk, and a very good wife she 
 is to him.' " 
 
 " You've told me all that about bookmaking hundreds 
 of times," she answered. " And it's just what the book- 
 i binder says too ; and I am sure le has all the best books 
 through his hands, binding them." 
 
 This allusion to his repetitions of himself, though not 
 meant ill-temperedly, he didn't very much relish. In 
 fact, the habit had hitherto been, as it were, incubating 
 ■unperceived in him, as a fever does in its early stage. 
 Husbands, even those who are sage and of few words, talk 
 to their wives with the same boundless liberty and un- 
 restraint as they do to their own selves ; and a man repeats 
 himself to himself immeasurably oftener than to anybody 
 else, and that without so much as observing that he does 
 it, let alone taking any count of how often. The wife, 
 however, both observes and counts ; accustomed as she is 
 to hear the cleverest (and most unintelligible) remarks 
 from her husband's lips daily, she can't help remembering 
 them when they occur again. 
 
 The hairdresser reappeared unexpectedly, bringing a 
 fleeting cloud with him. He said he had been to all the 
 poor devils in the house to see if he could get as much of 
 the Martinmas rent out of them in advance as would pay 
 his subscription to the shooting match, but that they were 
 a set of church mice and he hadn't succeeded. The whole 
 garrison of them were naturally unequal to the payment 
 of an impost of this description six whole weeks before it 
 was due, inasmuch as the majority of them didn't see how 
 they were to pay it when it was due. So the Saxon came 
 to the grandee of his house, to the " Lord of Ducats " as 
 he styled the advocate. Siebenkaes couldn't find in his 
 heart to disappoint the patient soul with another " no " ou 
 
CHAP. V.J FLOWEE, FRUIT, AND THOKN PIECES. 151 
 
 the top of those he had home so good-humouredly ; his 
 wife and he scraped together the little small change they 
 had left out of the ducat, and sent him away rejoicing 
 with half of the rent, three gulden. All they had left 
 for themselves was — the question what they should do for 
 light in the evening; for there weren't even a couple of 
 groschen in the house to get half a pound of candles, and 
 there were no candles in nalura. 
 
 I cannot say that he here turned deadly pale, or feinted, 
 or began to rave. Praise he 'm every manly soul who has 
 drunk the icy whey of stoicism for only half a spring, and 
 does not fall down paralysed and frozen, like a woman, 
 before the chill spectre of penury. In an age which has 
 had all its strongest sinews cut through except the uni- 
 versal one, money, any diatribe, even the most extravagant, 
 against riches, is nobler and more useful than the most 
 accurately just depreciation of poverty. For pasquinades 
 on gold dirt are agreeable to the rich, reminding them 
 that though their riches may take to themselves wings, 
 true happiness does not depend thereon ; while the poor 
 derive from them not bitterer feeling merely, but also the 
 sweeter satisfaction of conquering the same. All that is 
 base in man — thoughts, fancies, what we look on as being 
 examples — all join in one chorus in praise of gold ; why 
 should we desire to deprive poverty of her true reserve 
 .force, her cJievaliers d'honneur, philosophy and beggars' 
 pride ? 
 
 The first thing Siebenk^s opened was not his mouth, but 
 the door, and then the pewter cupboard in the kitchen, 
 from which he carefully and with a good deal of gravity 
 took down a bell-shaped tureen and three pewter plates, 
 and put them on a chair. Lenette could no longer stand 
 by in silence ; she clasped her hands and said in a faint 
 voice of shame, " Merciful Providence ! is it come to selling 
 our dishes ?" 
 
 " I'm only going to turn them into silver," he said ; " as 
 kings make church bells into dollars, so shall we make our 
 bell-dishes into coin. There's nothing you need be ashamed 
 about in converting trash of table ware, the coffins of 
 beasts, into currency, when Duke Christian of Brimswick 
 turned a king's silver coffin into dollars in 1662. Is a 
 
152 JKAN PAUL FEIEDEICH EICHTER. [BOOK IL 
 
 plate an apostle, do you think? Great monarchs -liaTe 
 taken many an apostle, if lie happened to he a silver one, 
 Hugo of St. Caro and others as well, divided them (as it 
 were) into chapters, verses, and legends, sent them to the 
 mint, and then dispatched them off all over the world in 
 that analysed form." 
 
 "Ah! stupid nonsense," she answered. 
 Some few readers will probably say " What else was it?" 
 and I ought long ago to have apologized, perhaps, for the 
 style of speech, so incomprehensible to Lenette, which 
 the advocate makes use of. 
 
 He justified it satisfactorily to himself by the considera- 
 tion that his wife always had some distant idea of what he 
 was talking about, even when he made use of the most 
 learned technical expressions, and the farthest-fetched 
 plays upon words, because of its being good practice, and 
 of his liking to hear himself do it. " Women," he would 
 repeat, "have a distant and dim comprehension of all 
 these things, and therefore don't waste, in long tedious 
 efi'orts to discover the precise signification of these unin- 
 telligibilities, precious time which might be better em- 
 ployed." This, I may observe, is not much encouragement 
 for Keinhold's ' Lexicon to Jean Paul's Levana,' nor for 
 me personally either, in some senses. 
 
 " Ah ! stuff and nonsense " had been Lenette's answer. 
 Firmian merely asked her to' bring the pewter into the 
 sitting-room, and he would talk the matter over sensibly. 
 But he might as well have set forth his reasons before a 
 woman's skin stuffed with straw. What she chiefly blamed 
 him for, was that by his contribution to the shooting-club 
 purse he had emptied hers. And thus she herself suggested 
 to him the best answer he could have made. He said, " It 
 was an angel that put it in my head; because on St. 
 Andrew's Day I shall regain everything that I turn into 
 silver now, and repewterise it immediately. To please 
 you, I shall keep not only the tureen and the plates I get 
 as prizes, but all the rest of the pewter ware, and put it all 
 into your cupboard. I assure you I had made up my mind 
 before to sell all my prizes." 
 
 What was to be done, then ? There was no help for it. 
 This banished and expatriated table ware was lowered in 
 
CHAP. V.J FLOWEK, FKUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 153 
 
 the darkness of evening into old Sabel's basket — and she 
 was celebrated all over the town for transacting this sort 
 of commisvsion agency or transfer business, with as discreet 
 a silence as if she were dealing in stolen gold. " Nobody- 
 gets it ont of me" she would say, " whose the things are. 
 The treasurer, who'n dead and gone poor man — you know / 
 I sold everything he had in the world for him — he often 
 used to say there was never the equal of me." 
 
 But, my poor dear young couple, I fear this Sabbath * , 
 or " Descent of the Saviour into Hades " is but little likely ' 
 to help you long, in that antechamber of hell which j-ou've 
 got into. The flames are gone from about you to-day, 
 certainly, and a cool sea-breeze is refreshing you, but to- 
 morrow and the day after the old smoke and the old fire 
 will be blazing at your hearts ! However, I don't v?ant 
 to put any restrictions upon your trade in tin. We're 
 quite right to have a good dinner to-day though we know 
 perfectly well we shall be just every bit as hungry 
 to-morrow again. 
 
 So the next morning Siebenkees begged that he might 
 be allowed to be all the quieter that day because he had 
 been obliged to talk so much the day before. Our dear 
 Lenette, who was a live washing-machine and scouring- 
 mill, and in whose eyes the washing bill and the bill of 
 fare had much of the weight of a confessor's certificate, 
 would sooner have let go her hold of everything in the 
 world — her husband included — than of the duster and the 
 besom. She thought this was merely Ms obstinate persis- 
 tency, whereas it was really her own, in blowing the organ 
 bellows and thundering away upon her pedal reed stops 
 right behind her author's back during the morning hours, 
 whose mouths had two kinds of gold in them for him, 
 namely gold from the golden age, and ordinary metallic 
 gold. She might have played with a thirty-two feet stop out 
 in the afternoon as long as she liked, but she wasn't to be 
 got out of her usual daily routine. A woman is the most 
 heterogeneous compound of obstinate will and self-sacrifice 
 that I have ever met with ; she would let her head be cut 
 
 * Accoiding to the Kabbin, the pains of the damned are intermiHed 
 on the Sabbath; the Christians hold that the same was the cueo 
 duiing the descent into Hades. 
 
154 JEAN PAUL FKIEDEICH KICHTEE. [bOOK II. 
 
 off by the headsman of Paris for her husband's sake, very 
 likely, but not a single hair of it. And she can deny her- 
 self to almost any extent for others' good, but not one bit 
 for her own. She can forego sleep for three nights running 
 for a sick person, but not one minute of a nap before 
 bed-time, to ensure herself a better night's sleep in bed. 
 Neither the souls of the blest nor butterflies, though neither 
 of them possess stomachs, can eat less than a woman going to 
 a ball or to her wedding, or than one cooking for her guests ; 
 but if it's only her doctor and her own health that forbid 
 her some Esau's mess or other, she eats it that instant. 
 Now men's saci'ifices are all just turned the opposite way. 
 
 Lenette, impelled by two imposing forces, what she was 
 asked to do and what she wanted to do, tried to iind the 
 feminine line of the resultant, and hit upon the middle 
 course of stopping her scouring and sweeping as long as 
 he was sitting at his writing. But the moment he got up, 
 and went to the piano for a couple of minutes, or to the 
 window, or across the doorstep, that instant back she 
 would bring her washing and scrubbing instmments of tor- 
 ture into the room again. Siebenl?8es wasn't long in be- 
 coming cognisant of this terrible alternation and relieving- 
 of-the-guard between her besom and his (satirical) one ; 
 and the way she watched and lay in wait for his move- 
 ments drove all the ideas in his head higgledy-piggledy. 
 At first he bore it with really very great patience, as great 
 as ever a husband has, patience, that is, which lasts for a 
 short time. But after reflecting for a considerable period ia 
 silence, that the public, as well as he, were sufferers by 
 this room-cleaning business, and that all posterity was, in 
 a manner, watching and hanging upon every stroke of that 
 besom, which might do its work just as well in the after- 
 noon when he would only be at his law papers — the tumour 
 of his anger suddenly broke, and he grew mad, i.e. madder 
 than he was before, and ran up to her and cried — 
 
 " Oh ! this is the very devil ! At it again, eh ! I see 
 what you're about. You watch till I get up from the 
 table! Just be kind enough to finish me off' at once; 
 hunger and worry will kill me before Easter, whether or 
 not. Good God ! It's a thing I really can not comprehend. 
 She sees as well as possible that my book is our larder — 
 
CHAP, v.] FLOWER, FEUIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 155 
 
 that there are whole rations of bread in every page of it — 
 yet she holds my hands the entire morning, so that I can't 
 do a line of it. Here I've been sitting on the nest all this 
 time and only hatched as far as letter E, where I describe 
 the ascent of Justice to heaven. Oh ! Lenette ! Lenette ! " 
 
 " Very well," said Lenette, "it's all the same whatever 
 I do, it's sure to be wrong; do let me tidy the house 
 properly, like any other woman." 
 
 And she asted him, in a simple manner, why it was that 
 the bookbinder's little boy (the language is mine, not hers), 
 who played fantasias the whole day long upon a child's toy 
 fiddle, composing and enjoying whole Alexander's Feasts 
 upon it, didn't disturb him with his screeching wmhar- 
 monical progressions — and how he bore the chimney- 
 sweep's sweeping the other day so much better than he 
 did her sweeping of the room. And as he couldn't quite 
 manage to condense, just in a moment, into few words the 
 demonstration of the magnitude of the difference which 
 existed between these things, he found it better to get into 
 a rage again, and say — 
 
 " Do you suppose I'm going to make a great long speech 
 and explanation gratis, and lose dollar after dollar at my 
 w^ork ? Himmel ! Kreuz ! Wetter ! The municipal code, 
 the Eoman pandects, forbid a coppersmith even to enter a 
 street where a professor is working, and here's my own 
 wife harder than an old jurist — and not only that— she's 
 the coppersmith herself. I'll tell you what it is, Lenette, 
 I shall really speak to the Sohulrath about this." This 
 did a great deal of service. 
 
 The produce of the Trinity dollar here arrived before 
 the Bchulrath ; a piece of polite attention which no one 
 would have expected from a man of so much, learning and 
 knowledge. No doubt all my readers will be as much de- 
 lighted as if they were husbands of Lenette themselves at 
 ihe fact that she was a perfect angel all the afternoon ; her 
 liands made no more noise at their work than her fingers 
 or her needle ; she even put off the doing of several things 
 which were not necessai-y. She accompanied a sister in 
 the oratorical art, who came in with a divine bonnet (in 
 her hands, to be altered), all the way down stairs, not 
 BO much out of politeness as thoughtfulness, that all the 
 
156 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH EICHTEE. [bOOK IL 
 
 points of principal importance connected with the doing 
 up of the bonnet, which had already been settled, might 
 be gone over again two or three times out of the advocate's 
 hearing. 
 
 This touched the old noise-hunter, and went to the weak 
 and tender spot in him, his heart. He sought long in him- 
 self for a fitting thank-offering in return, till he at last hit 
 upon quite a new sort of one. 
 
 " Listen, child," he said, taking her hand very affection- 
 ately ; " wouldn't it be more reasonable in me if I were to 
 amuse myself with my writing in the evening ? I mean, 
 if the husband were to do his creating at a time when the 
 wife had no washing to do. Just think what a life of 
 nectar and ambrosia that would be ; we should sit opposite 
 to each other with a candle between us — you at your sew- 
 ing, I at my writing — the other peopl* in the house would 
 all have their work done and be at their beer— of course 
 there wouldn't be customers with bonnets coming at that 
 time of night to make themselves visible and audible. The 
 evenings will be getting longer too, and of course I shall 
 have the more time for my writing fun, but we need say 
 nothing about that now. What do you think, or what do 
 you say (if you like the expression betterj, to this new 
 style of life ? Eemember too, that we're quite rich again 
 now — the Eussian Trinity dollar is like so much found 
 money." 
 
 " Oh ! it will be delightful," she said, " I shall be able 
 to do all my household work in the morning, as a proper 
 reasonable housekeeper should." 
 
 " Yes, just so," he answered, " I shall write a,way 
 quietly at my satires all morning, then wait till evening, 
 and go on where I left off." 
 
 The evening of nectar and ambrosia came duly on, and 
 was quite without a rival among all evenings that had 
 gone before it. A young married couple, sitting one on 
 each side of a table, working away quietly at their work, 
 with a candle between them, have a considerable notion 
 what happiness is. He was all happy thoughts and kisses ; 
 she all smiles, and what little noise she made with the 
 frying-pan seemed no louder to him than what she made 
 with her needle. " When people are earning double 
 
CHAP. V.J FLOWEE, FKUIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 157 
 
 working-pay by tlie light of one candle," he said, greatly 
 delighted at the domestic reformation, " they needn't, as 
 far as I see, restrict themselves to a miserable dip, the 
 thickness of a worm, which they can see nothing by, 
 unless it be the wretchedness of its own light. To-morrow 
 we'll set up a mould candle, and no more about it." 
 
 As I take some credit to myself for selecting for narra- 
 tion in this story such events only as are of universal 
 interest, it will be sufficient cursorily to mention that 
 the mould candle duly appeared next evening, and kindled 
 a feeble strife, because, apropos of this candle, the advocate 
 once more brought forward a new theory of his, concern- 
 ing the lighting of candles. He held the somewhat ■ 
 schismatic opinion that the rational way of lighting all 
 candles, more particularly thick ones, was to light them 
 at the thick end, and not at the top or thin end ; and that 
 this was the reason of there being two wicks projecting 
 from every candle. " A law of combustion," he would 
 add, " in support of which I need only refer (at least for 
 women of sense) to the self-evident truth that, when a 
 candle is burning down, it keeps growing larger and larger 
 at its lower extremity — just as people who are burning 
 down from debauchery grow thicker at theirs, with fat 
 and dropsy. If we light the candle at the top, we find 
 the result to be a useless lump, plug, or stump of tallow 
 running all over our candlestick. Whereas, if we light 
 it at the bottom, the liquefied grease from the thick end 
 wraps itself gradually and with the most exquisite sym- 
 metry all over the thinner end as if feeding it, and equal- 
 ising its proportions." 
 
 In reply to which, Lenette, with some force, adduced i 
 Shaftesbury's tohchstone of truth, ridicule. " Why, every- 
 body that came in of an evening, and noticed that I had 
 put my candle upside down in the candlestick, would, 
 burst out laughing ; and it would be the wife that every- 
 body would blame." So that a mutual treaty of peace had 
 to put a period to this battle of the candle, to the efieot that 
 he should light his candle at the bottom, and she hers at 
 the top. And for the present, as the candle common to 
 both parties happened to be thick at the top, he agreed to 
 admit, without objection, the erroneous method of lighting. 
 
158 JEAN PAUL FEIEDKICH KICHTEB. [bOOK II. 
 
 However, the Devil, wto crosses and blesses himself at 
 such treaties of peace, managed so to play his cards, that 
 on this very day Siebenkaes chanced, in his reading, to come 
 upon the touching anecdote of the younger Pliny's v^ife 
 holding the lamp for her husband that he might see to 
 write. And it occurred to him that, now that he was 
 getting along so swimmingly with his selection from the 
 said Devil's Papers, it would be a splendid arrangement, 
 and save him many interruptions, if Lenette would snuff 
 the candle always instead of his doing it himself. 
 
 " Of course," said she, " I shall be delighted." The 
 first fifteen or twenty minutes passed, and everything 
 ■ seemed to be all right. 
 
 The above period having elapsed, he cocked up his chin 
 towards the candle, by way of reminder to her to snuff it. 
 Next, he gently touched the snuffers with the tip of his pen, 
 with the like object, not saying anything however ; and a 
 little while after that, he moved the candlestick a little bit, 
 and said softly, " The candle." Matters now began to 
 assume a more serious aspect ; he began to observe and 
 watch with greater attention the gradual obscuration of 
 his paper, and consequently the very snuffers which, in 
 Lenette's hands, had promised to throw so much light on 
 his labours, became the means of impeding his progress 
 quite as effectually as the crabs did Hercules in his battle 
 with the hydra. The two wretched ideas, " snuff " and 
 " snuffers," took bodily shape, and danced hand in hand, 
 with a sprightly pertness up and down on every letter of 
 his most biting satires. " Lenette," he bad soon to say- 
 again, " please to amputate that stupid black stump there, 
 on both our accounts." 
 
 " Dear me, have I been forgetting it ?'" she said, and 
 snuffed it in a great hurry. 
 
 Eeaders of a historical turn — such as I should wish, 
 mine to be — can now see that things couldn't but get 
 worse and worse, and more and more out of joint. He had 
 often to stop, making letters a yard or so in length, wait- 
 ing till some beneficent hand should remove the black 
 thorn from the rose of light, till, at length, he broke out 
 with the word "Snuff!" Then he took to varying his 
 verbs, saying, " Enlighten ! " or " Behead ! " or " Nip-off." 
 
CHAP. V.J FLOWEK, FKUIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 1-59 
 
 Or he endeavoured to introduce an agreeable variety by 
 using other forms of speech, such as "The candle's cap, 
 Capmaker ; " " There's a long spot in the sun again ; " or, 
 " "This is a charming chiaroscuro, well adapted for night 
 thoughts in a beautiful Correggio- night ; but snuff away 
 all the same." 
 
 At last, shortly before supper, when the charcoal stack in 
 the flame had really attained a great height, he inhaled half 
 a river of air into his lungs, and, slowly dropping it out 
 again, said, in a grimly mild manner, " You don't snuff a 
 bit — as far as I can see, the black funereal pyre might 
 rise up to the ceiling for all you would care. All right \ 
 I prefer to be the candle-snuffer of this theatre myself till 
 supper-time ; and while we're at supper I shall just say to 
 you, as a rational man, what there is to say on the sub- 
 ject." "Oh ! yes, please," she said, quite delighted. 
 
 When she had set four eggs on the table, two for each, 
 he commenced : " You see, I had been looking forward to 
 my working at night being attended with several advan- 
 tages, because I thought you would have managed this 
 easy little task of snuffing the candle always at the right 
 time, as a Eoman lady of high rank made herself do duty 
 as a candlestick for her celebrated husband, Pliny junior 
 (to use a commercial expression), and held his light for 
 him. I was mistaken, it appears; for, unfortunately, I 
 can't write with my toes under the table, like a person 
 with no arms, nor yet in the dark, as a clairvoyant might. 
 The only use the candle is to me, in the circumstances, is 
 that it serves as an Epictetus lamp, enabling me to get 
 some practice in stoicism It had often as much as twelve 
 inches of eclipse, like a sun, and I wished in vain, darling, 
 for an invisible eclipse — such as frequently occurs in the 
 heavens. The cursed slag of our candle hatches just these 
 obscure ideas and gloomy night thoughts, which authors 
 (too) often have. Whereas, gracious goodness ! if you had 
 only snuffed, as you ought to have done " 
 
 " You're in fun, are you not?" she asked. " My stitches 
 are much smaller than your strokes, and I'm sure I saw 
 quite well." 
 
 " Well, dear," he continued, " I'll proceed to point out 
 to you that, on the grounds of psychology and mental 
 
160 JEAN PAUL PEIEDRICH EICHTEK, [BOOK 11, 
 
 Bcienoe, it isn't that it matters a bit whether a person who 
 is writing and thinking sees a little more or less distinctly 
 or not, it's the snuffers and the snnfif that he can't get out 
 of his head, and they get behind his spiritual legs, trip up 
 his ideas, and stop him, just as a log does a horse hobbled 
 to it. For even when you've only just snuffed the candle, 
 and I'm in the full enjoyment of the light, I begin to look 
 out for the instant when you'll do it next. Now, this 
 watching being in itself neither visible nor audible, can b i 
 nothing but a thought, or idea ; and as every thought has 
 the property of occupying the mind to the exclusion of all 
 others, it follows that all an author's other and more 
 valuable ideas are sent at once to the dogs. But this is 
 by no means the worst of the affair. I, of course, ought 
 not to have had to occupy my head with the idea of 
 candle-snuffing any more than with that of snuff-taking ; 
 but when the ardently longed-for snuffing never comes off 
 at all, the black smut on the ripe ear of light keeps 
 growing longer — the darkness deepening — a regular 
 funereal torch feebly casting its ray upon a half-dead 
 writer, who can't drive from his head the thought of the 
 conjugal hand which could snap all the fetters asunder 
 with one single snip; — then, my dearest Lenette, it's not 
 easy for the said writer to help writing like an ass, and 
 stamping like a dromedary. At least, I express my own 
 opinion and experience on the subject !" 
 
 On this, she assured him that, if he were really serious, 
 she would take great care to do it properly next evening. 
 
 And, in truth, this story must give her credit for keep- 
 ing her word, for she not only snuffed much oftener than 
 the night before, but, the fact is, she hardly ever left off 
 snuffing, particularly after he had nodded his head once 
 or twice by way of thanks. 
 
 " Don't snuff too often, darling," he said, at length, but 
 very, very kindly. " If you attempt too fine sub-sub-sub- 
 divisions (fractions of fractions of fractions of fractions") 
 of the wick, it'll be almost as bad as ever — a candle 
 snuffed too short gives as little light as one with an over- 
 grown wick — which you may apply to the lights of the 
 world and of the Church, that's to say if you can. It's 
 only for a short while before and after the snuffing, entre 
 
CHAP. V.J FLOWKK, FRUIT, AND THOKN PIECES. 161 
 
 chien ct loup as it ■were, that that delicious middle-age of 
 the soul prevails when it can see to perfection ; when it is 
 truly a life for the gods, a just proportion of black and 
 white, both in the cmdle and on the book." 
 
 I and others really do not see any great reason to con- 
 gratulate ourselves upon this new turn of events. The 
 poor's advocate has evidently laid upon hiraself the addi- 
 tional burden, that all the time he is writing he has to 
 keep watching and calculating, — superficially perhaps, but 
 slill, watching and calculating — the mean term, or middle- 
 distance, between the long wick and the short. And what 
 time has he left for his work ? 
 
 Some minutes after, when the snufSng came a little 
 ^00 soon, he asked, though somewhat doubtfuUj', " Dirty 
 clothes for the wash already ? " Next time, as she Jet it 
 be almost too long before she snufied, he looked at her 
 interrogatively, and paid, " Well ? well ? " 
 
 " In one instant," said she. By-and-by, he having 
 got rather more deeply absorbed than usual in his writing, 
 and she in her work, he found, when he suddenly came to 
 himself and looked, one of the longest spears in the candle 
 that had yet appeared, and with two or three thieves round 
 it to the bargain. 
 
 " Oh, good Lord ! Ton my soul, this is really the life 
 of a dog ! " cried he ; and, seizing the snuffers in a fury, he 
 snuffed the candle — out. 
 
 This holiday pause of darkness afforded a capital oppor- 
 tunity for jumping up, flying into a passion, and pointing 
 out to Lenette more in detail how it was that she plagued 
 and tormented him, however admirably he might have 
 arranged things ; and, like all women, had neither 
 rhyme nor reason in her ways of doing things, always 
 snuffing either too close or not close enough. She, how- 
 ever, lighted the candle without saying a word, and he 
 got into a greater rage than before, and demanded to be 
 informed whether he had ever as yet asked anything of 
 her but the merest trifles possible to conceive, and if 
 anybody but his own wedded wife would have hesitated 
 for a moment to attend to them. "Just answer me," he 
 paid. 
 
 She did not answer him ; she set the freshly-lighted 
 
 II. m 
 
162 JEAN PAUL FEIEDRTCH BICHTEE. [bOOK II. 
 
 candle on the table, and tears were in her eyes. It was 
 ( the firbt time ho had caused her a tear, since her marriage. 
 In a moment", like a person magnetised, he saw and 
 diagnosed all that was diseased and unhealthy in his sys- 
 tem ; and, on the spot, he cast out the old Adam, and 
 shied him contemptuously away into a corner. This was 
 an easy task for Aim ; his heart was always so open to 
 love and justice, that the moment these goddesses came 
 into view, the tone of anger with which he had commenced 
 a sentence would fall into gentle melody before he reached 
 the end of it ; he could stop his battle-axe in the middle 
 of its stroke. 
 
 So that a household peace was here cencluded, the in- 
 struments thereof being one pair of moist ej'es and one 
 pair of bright kind ones ; and a Westphalia treaty of peace 
 accorded one candle to each party, with absolute freedom 
 of snuffing. 
 
 But the peace was soon embittered, inasmuch as Penia, 
 goddess of poveitj' (who has thousands of invisible churches 
 all about the country, where most houses are her taber- 
 nacles and lazar cells), began to make manifest her bodily 
 presence and her all-controlling power. There was no 
 more money in the house. But, rather than place his 
 honour and his freedom in pledge, and incur obligations 
 which he had less and less prospect of repaying — I mean, 
 rather than borrow — he would have sold all he had, and 
 himself into the bargain, like the old German. It is said, 
 the national debt of England, if counted out in dollars, 
 would make a ring round the earth, like a second equator ; 
 however, I have not as yet measured this nose-ring of the 
 British Lion, this annular eclipse, or halo, round the sun 
 of Britain, myself. But I know that Siebenkaes would 
 have considered a negative money-girdle of this sort about 
 his waist to be a penauce-belt stuck full of spines, or an 
 iron ring, such as people who tow boats have on ; a girdle 
 compressing the heart in a fatal manner. Even supposing 
 he were to borrow, and then stop payment, as nations 
 and banking-houses do — a catastrophe which debtors and 
 aristocratic persons, who have their wits about them, 
 manage to avoid without difficulty, by the simple expe- 
 dient of ne'^'er beginning paj'ment — yet, having only one 
 
CHAP. V.J FLOWEE, FEUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 163 
 
 friend whom he could convert into a creditor (Stiefel), he 
 couldn't possibly have seen this dear friend, who was in 
 the first rank of his spiritual creditors already, figuring 
 in the fifth rank, or that of the unpaid. He therefore 
 avoided such a two-fold transgression as this would have 
 heen — a sin against hoth friendship and honour — hy pledg- 
 ing things of lei-s value, namely, household furniture. 
 
 He went back (but alone) to the pewter cupboard in 
 the kitchen, and peeped through the rail to see whether 
 there were two ranks cjf dishes or three. Alas ! there was 
 but one rear-rank man of a plate standing behind his 
 front-rank man, like double notes of interrogation. He 
 marched the rear-rank man to the front accordingly, and 
 gave him for travelling companions and fellow-refugees a 
 herring-dish, a sauce-boat, and a salad-bowl. Having 
 effected this reduction of his army, he extended the re- 
 maining troops so as to occupy a wider front, and sub- 
 divided the three large gaps into twenty small ones. He 
 then moved these disbanded soldiers to the sitting-room, 
 and went and called Lenette, who was in the bookbinder's 
 room. 
 
 " I've been looking at our pewter cupboard for the last 
 five or ten minutes," he said. " I really shouldn't have 
 noticed, if I hadn't known it, tbat I had taken away the 
 tureen and the plates. Should you ? " 
 
 " Ah, indeed, I do notice it every day of my life," she 
 declared. 
 
 Here, however, being rather uneasy at the idea of what 
 might be the result of too long an inspection, he hurried 
 her into the sitting-room, where the dishes were which he 
 had just taken out, and made known his intention of 
 transposing, like a clever musician, this quartett from the 
 key of pewter into that of silver. He proposed the selling 
 of them, that she might be got to agree the more easily to 
 their being pawned. But she pulled out every stop of the 
 feminine organ, the clarion, the stopped diapason, flute, 
 bird-stop, vox humana, and, lastly, the tremolo stop. He 
 might say whatever he liked ; she said whatever she liked. 
 A man does not try to arrest the iron arm of necessity, or 
 to avert it ; he calmly awaits its stroke ; a woman tries to 
 struggle away from its grip, at any rate for a few hours. 
 
164 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH EICHTEE, [bOOK II. 
 
 before it encircles her. It was in vain that Siebenknes 
 quietly and dimply asked her if she knew what else was to 
 be done. To questions of this sort, there float up and 
 down in women's heads not one complete answer, but 
 thousands of half answers, which are supposed to amount 
 10 a whole one, just aa in the differential calculus an 
 infinite number of straight lines go to form a curved one. 
 Some of these unripe, half-formed, fugitive, mutually 
 auxiliary answers were — 
 
 "He shouldn't have changed his name, and he would 
 have had his mother's money by this time." 
 
 " Of course, he miglit borrow." 
 
 " Look at all his clients, well off and comfortable, and 
 he won't ask them to pay him." 
 
 " He never dreams of asking a fee for defending the 
 infanticide." 
 
 " And he shouldn't spend so much money." " He 
 needn't have paid that half-term's rent in advance." For 
 the latter would have kept him going for a day or two, 
 you see ! 
 
 It is always a vain task to oppo.'-e the "minority of 
 one " of the complete and true answer to the imniense 
 majority of feminine partial proofs of this sort ; women 
 know, at any rate, thus much of the law of Switzerland, 
 that four half or invalid witnesses outweigh one whole or 
 valid one.* But the best way of confuting them is, to let 
 them say what they have got to say, and not utter a word 
 yourself; they're certain to diverge, before very long, into 
 subsidiary or accessory matters, which you yield to them, 
 confuting them, as regards the real subject of argument, 
 simply by action. This is the only species of confutation 
 which they ever forgive. Siebenkaes, unfortunately, at- 
 tempted to apply the surgical bandage of philosophy to 
 Lenette's two principal members, her head and her heart, 
 and therefore commenced as follows — 
 
 "Dear wife, in the parish church you sing against 
 worldly riches, like the rest of the congregation, and yet 
 you have them fixed on your heart as firmly as your 
 
 • In Bern and the Pays-du-Vaud, two male witnesses, or foui 
 female, are necessary for a legal proof. 
 
CHAP. V.J FLOWER, FRUIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 1()5 
 
 brooch. Now, I don't go to a church, it's true, but I have 
 a pulpit in my own breast, and I prize one single happy 
 moment more than the whole of this pewter dirt. Tell 
 me truly now, has your immortal heart been pained by | 
 the tragical fate of the soup-tureen, or was it only your 
 pericardium ? The doctors prescribe tin, in powder, for 
 worms ; and may not this miserable tin, which we have 
 broken into little pieces and swallowed, have had a similar 
 efifect on the abominable worms of the heart? Collect 
 yourself, and think of our cobbler here, does his soup taste 
 any the wor^e to him out of his painted iron sauciere 
 because his bit of roast meat is eaten out of it too ? You 
 sit behind that pincushion of yours, and can't see that 
 society is mad, and drinks coffee, tea, and chocolate out 
 of different cups, and has particular kinds of plates for 
 fruit, for salad, and for herrings, and particular sorts of 
 dishes for hares, fish, and poultry. And I say that it 
 will get madder and madder as time goes on, and order 
 as many kinds of fruit plates from the china shops as there 
 are different fruits in the gardens— at least, I should do it 
 myself ; and if I were a crown prince, or a grand master, 
 I should insist upon having lark dishes and lark knives, 
 snipe dishes and snipe knives ; neither would I carve the 
 haunch of a stag of sixteen upon any plate I had once had 
 a stag of eight upon. The world is a fine madhouse, and 
 one gets up and preaches his false doctrine in it when 
 another has done, just as they do in a Quaker meeting. 
 So the Bedlamites think that only two follies are veiitable 
 follies, follies which are past, and follies which are yet 
 to come — old follies and new ; but I would show them 
 that theirs partake of the nature of both." 
 
 Lenette's only reply was au inexpressibly gentle request : 
 " Ohl please, Firmian, do not sell the pewter." 
 
 "Very well, then, I shan't!" (he answered, with a bitter 
 satirical joy at having got the brilliant neck of the pigeon 
 fairly into the noose which he had so long had ready baited 
 for it). " The emperor Antoninus sent his real silver plate 
 to the mint, so that I might surely send mine ; but just as 
 you like : I don't care twopence. Not an ounce of it shall be 
 sold ; I shall merely pawn ! I'm r.:.ach obliged to you for 
 the suggestion ; and if I only hit the eagle's tail on St 
 
166 JEAN PAUL FEIEDKICH EICHTEK. [bOOK U. 
 
 Andrew's Day, or the imperial globe, I can redeem the 
 whole of it in a minute — I mean with the money of the 
 prize ; at all events, the salad-bowl and the sonp-tureen. 
 I think you're quite right. Old Sabel 's in the house, is 
 she not? She can take the things and bring back the 
 money." 
 
 She let it be so now. The shooting-match on St. 
 Andrew's Day was her Fortunatus's wishing-cap, the 
 wooden wings of the eagle were as waxen flying-apparatus 
 fixed on to her hopes, the powder and shot were the flower- 
 eeeds of her future blossoms of peace (as they are to crowned 
 heads also). Thou poor soul, in many senses of the word ! 
 But the poor hope incredibly more than the rich ; there- 
 fore it is that poor devils are more apt to catch the infec- 
 tion of lotteries than the rich — -just as they are to catch 
 the plague and other epidemics. 
 
 Siebenkses— who looked down with contempt not only 
 on the loss of his household goods, but on the loss of his 
 money — was secretly resolved to leave the trash at the 
 pawnbroker's, unredeemed for ever, like a state-bond, even 
 though he should chance to be king (at the shooting-match), 
 and convert the transaction into a regular sale some future 
 day, when he happened to be passing the shop. 
 
 After a few bright quiet days Peltzstiefel came again to 
 make an evening call. Amid the manifold embargoes laid 
 upon their supplies, the risks attending their smuggling 
 operations, and as a tear or a sigh was laid as a tax which 
 must necessarily be paid upon every loaf of bread, Firmian 
 had had no time, to say nothing of inclination, to remember 
 his jealousy. In Lenette's case, matters were necessarily 
 exactly reversed ; and if she really has any love for Stiefel, 
 it must grow faster on his money-dunghill than on. the 
 advocate's field all over wells of hunger. The Sohulrath's 
 eye was not one of those which read the troubles of a 
 household in a minute, though they are masked by smiling 
 faces ; he noticed nothing of the kind. And for that very- 
 reason it came to pass that this friendly trio spent a happy 
 hour free from cloiids, during which, though the sun of 
 happiness did not shine, yet the moon of happiness (hope 
 and memory) rose shimmering in their sky. Moreover, 
 Siebenkass bad the enjoyment of being provided with a 
 
CHAP. V.j FLOWEE, FRUIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 167 
 
 cultivated listener, who could follow and appreciate the 
 jingle of the bells on the jester's cap, the trumpet fanfares 
 of his Leibgeberish sallies. Lena tte could neither follow 
 nor appreciate them in the very least, and even Peltzstiefel 
 didn't understand him when he read him, but only when 
 he heard him talk. The two men at first talked only of 
 persons, not of things, as women do ; onl3' that they called 
 their chronique soandaleuse by the name of His>tory of 
 Literature and Men of Letters. For literary men like to 
 know every little trait and peculiarity of a great author — ■ 
 what clothes he wears, and what his favourite dishes are. 
 iFor similar reasons, women minutely observe eveiy little 
 trait and peculiarity of any crown princess who happens 
 to pass through the town, even to her ribbons and fringes. 
 From literary men thej' passed to scholarship ; and then 
 all the clouds of this life melted away, and in the land of 
 learning, the fair realm of science, the downcast sorrowful 
 head, wrapped and veiled in the black Lenten altar-cloth of 
 hardship and privation, is lifted up once more. The soul 
 inhales the mountain air of its native land, and looks down 
 from the lofty peak of Pindus upon its poor bruised and 
 wounded body lying beneath — that body which it has to 
 drag and bear about, sighing under its weight. When 
 some dunned, needy scholar, some skin-and-bone reading- 
 master, a poor curate with five children, or a baited and 
 badgered tutor, is lying woeful and wretched — every nerve 
 quivering under some instrument of torture — and a larother 
 of his craft, plagued by just as many instruments of torture 
 as himself, comes and argues and philosophises with him a 
 whole evening, and tells him all the latest opinions of the 
 literary papers, then truly the sand-glass which marks the 
 hours of the torture * is laid on its side — Orpheus comes, 
 all bright and shining, with the lyre of knowledge in his 
 hand, into the psychic hell of the two brethren in of&ce, 
 the sad tears vanish from their brightening eyes, the snakes 
 of the furies twine into graceful cuil^i, the Ixion's wheel 
 rolls harmoniously to the lyre, and these two poor Sisy- 
 phuses sit aesting quietly on their stones and listen to 
 Hie music. But the ^oor curate's, the reading-master's, the 
 
 ♦ The saud-glass is uprigbt during the time tlio torture goes on. 
 
168 JEAN PAUL FEIEDKICH EICIITBR. [bOOK II. 
 
 scholar's, good wife, what is her comfort in her misery ? 
 She has none except her husband, who ought, therefore, to 
 lie very tender to all her shortcomings. 
 
 The reader was made aware in the first book that 
 Leibgeber had sent three programmes from Baj'reuth. 
 Stiefel brought the one, by Dr. Frank, with him, and asked 
 Siebenkees to write a notice of it for the ' Kuhschnappel 
 Heavenly Messenger.' He also took out of his pocket 
 another little book, to receive its sentence. The reader 
 will hail both these works with gladness, seeing that my 
 hero and his has no money in the house, and will be able 
 to live for a day or two by reviewing them. The second 
 manuscript, which was in a loll, was entitled : ' Lessingii, 
 Emilia Galotti. Pro gymnasmatis loco latine reddita ei 
 publice acta, moderante J. H. Stefiens. Cellis 1788.' 
 
 It seems that a good many of the subscribers to the 
 ' Heavenly Messenger ' have complained of the lenj^th of 
 time which elapsed before this work was noticed, drawing 
 disadvantageous comparisons between the ' Messenger ' and 
 the ' Universal German Library ;' for the latter, notwith- 
 standing the greatness of its universal German circulation, 
 notices good works within a few years of their birth — 
 sometimes even as early as th^ third year of their existence 
 — so that the favourable notice can frequently be bound up 
 with the work, the first paper-covers of it not being worn 
 out before. The reason, however, why the ' Heavenly 
 Messenger ' did no*^, and in fact could not, review more of 
 the books of the year 1788, was, that it was not until five 
 years after that date that it — first saw the light itself. 
 
 " Don't you think," said Siebenkaes, in a friendly manner 
 to Peltzstiefel, "that if I'm going to write proper notices 
 of Messrs. Fiank and Stefiens here, my wife should take 
 care not to make a thundering noise, swishing away with 
 her broom at my back ?" 
 
 " That might really be a matter of very considerable 
 importance," said Stiefel, gravely. Upon which a playful 
 and somewhat abridged report of the proceedings in the 
 hon ehold action of inhibition was laid before him. Wen- 
 deline fixed her kindly eyes on Peltzstiefel's face, striving 
 to read the Bubrum (the red title), and the Nignim (the 
 black body matter) of his judgment there before it was 
 
CHAP, v.] FLOWEK, FRUIT, AND THOltN PIECES. KJy 
 
 pronounced. Both colours were there. But though Stiefel's 
 bosom heaved with genuine sighs of the deepest affection 
 for her, he nevertheless addressed her as follows — 
 
 " Madame Siebenkses, this really won't do at all ; for 
 God hath not created anything nobler than a scholar sitting J 
 at his writing. Hundreds of thousands of people, ten times 
 told, are sitting in eveiy quarter of the globe, as if on 
 school-forms before him, and to all of these he has to speak. 
 Errors held by the wisest and cleverest people he has to 
 eradicate : ages, long since gone to dust and passed awaj% 
 with those who lived in them, he has to describe with 
 accuracy and minuteness ; systems, the most profound and 
 the most complex, he has to confute and overthrow, or 
 otherwise to invent and establish, himself. His light has 
 to pierce through massj' crowns, through the Pope's triple 
 tiara, through Capuchin hoods and through wreaths of 
 laurel — to pierce them all and enlighten the brains within. 
 Tliis is his work ; and this work he can perform. But 
 Madame Siebenkses, what a strain on his faculties ! What 
 a grand sustained effort is necessary ! It is a hard matter 
 and a difficult to set up a book in type, but harder still 
 to write it ! Think what the strain must have been when 
 Pindar wrote, and Homer, earlier still — I mean in the 
 ' Iliad ' — and so with one after another, down to our own 
 day. Is it any wonder, then, that great writers, in the 
 terrible strain and absorption of all their ideas, have often 
 scarcely known where they were, what they were doing, 
 or what they would be at; that they were blind and 
 dumb, o,nd insensible to everything but what was per- 
 ceived by the five interior spiritual senses, like blind people, 
 who see beautifully in their dreams, but in their waking 
 state are, as we have said, blind ! This state of absurbed- 
 noss and strain it is which I consider to explain how it 
 was that Socrates and Archimedes could stand and be 
 completely unconscious of the storm and turmoil going 
 on around them ; how Cardanus in the profundity of his 
 meditation was unconscious of his Chiragra; o.theis of the 
 gout ; one Frenchman of a great conilagration, and a second 
 Frenchman of I he death of his wife." 
 
 " There, you see," said Lenette, mut;h delighted, in a 
 low voice to her husband, "liovv can a learned gentleman 
 
170 JEAN PAUL FKIEDRICH EICHTBE. [bOOK II, 
 
 possibly hear his wife when she's at her washing and 
 scrubbing?" 
 
 Stiefel, unmoved, went on with the thread of his argu- 
 ment : " Now, a fire of this description can only be kindled 
 in absolute and uninterrupted calm. And this is the reason 
 why all the great aitists and men of letters in Paris live 
 nowhere but in theEue Ste. Victoire ; the other streets are 
 all too noisy. And it is hence that no smiths, tinkers, or 
 tinmen, are allowed to work in the street where a professor 
 lives." 
 
 " No TINMEN especially," added Siebenkaes, very gravely. 
 " It should always be lemembered that the mind cannot 
 entertain more than half-a-dozen of ideas at a time ; so that 
 if the idea of noise should make its appearance as a wicked 
 seventh, of course some one or other of the previous ideas, 
 which might otherwise have been followed up or written 
 down, takes its departure from the head altogether." 
 
 Indeed Stiefel made Lenette give him her hand as a 
 pledge that she would always stand still, like Joshua's sun, 
 while Firmian was smiting the fue with pen and scourge. 
 
 " Haven't I often asked the bookbinder myself," she said, 
 " not to hammer so hard upon his books, because my hus- 
 band would hear him when he was making Ms." However, 
 she gave the Schulrath her hand, and he went away con- 
 tented with their contentment, leaving them quite hopeful 
 of quieter times. 
 
 But, ye dear souls, of how little use to you is this state 
 of peace, seeing ye are on half-pay and starving in this cold, 
 empty, orphan hospital of an earth — how little will it help 
 you in these dim labyrinthian wanderings of your destiny, 
 of which even the Ariadne clue-threads all turn to nets and 
 snares ? How long will the poor's advocate manage to live on 
 the produce of the pawned pewter, and on the price of the 
 two reviews which he is going to vi'rite ? Only, we are all 
 like the Adam of the epic, and take our first night to be the 
 day of judgment, and the setting of the sun for the end of 
 the world. We sorrow fur our friends, just as if there 
 were no brighter future yoni/ER, and we sorrow for our- 
 selves as if there were no brighter future here. For all out 
 passions are born Atheists and unbelievers. 
 
CHAP. VI.] FLOWER, FEUIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 171 
 
 CHAPTEE VI. 
 
 MATRIMONIAL JAES EXTRA LEAFLET OS THE LOQUACITY OP 
 
 ■WOMEN — MORE PLEDGING— THE MORTAE AND THE SNUFF-MILL 
 
 A scholar's kiss— ON THE CONSOLATIONS OF HUMANITY — 
 
 CONTINUATION OF THE SIXTH CHAPTER. 
 
 This cliapter commences at once with pecuniary diflS- 
 culties. 'J^he wretclied, leaky Danaid's bucket which our 
 good couple had to use for washing their groschen or two, 
 their grains of gold-dust — few and far between as they 
 were— out of the sands of their Pactolus, had always run 
 dry again in the course of a couple of days, or of three 
 at the outside. On this occasion, however, they had some- 
 thing certain to go upon, namely, the reviews of the two 
 •works ; they could count upon four flotins certainly, if 
 not upon five. 
 
 '■ ' Early next day, after his morning kiss, Firmian seated 
 himself upon his critical judgment-bench again, and pro- 
 ceeded to pass his sentences. He might have written an 
 epic poem, so light were the trade-winds which had 
 hitherto been prevalent during the early hours of the day. 
 Trom eight o'clock in the morning till eleven in the fore- 
 noon, he was engaged in holding up to the world in a 
 favourable light the programme of Dr. Frank of Pavia, 
 which was entitled : ' Sermo Academicus de civis medici in 
 republica conditione atque officiis, ex lege praeipue erutis. 
 Auct. Frank; 1785.' He criticised, praised, blamed, and 
 made extracts from this little production, till he thought 
 he had covered enough paper to earn what would suffice 
 to redeem the pawned herring-dish, salad-bowl, sauce-boat, 
 and plates — his views on the work occupying one sheet, 
 four pages, and fifteen lines. 
 
 The morning had passed so pleasantly, in holding Vehm- 
 gericht in this manner, that he thought he might as well 
 go on, and hold another in the afternoon on the other 
 book. He had never ventured upon this before ; in the 
 afternoons he had done advocate's work, not reviewer's^ 
 appearing in the character of defendant (maker of defence). 
 
]72 JEAN PAUL FKIEDEICH EICHTER. [bOOK.IL 
 
 not of fiscal (proseoutor). He had ample reason for this, 
 seeing that every afternoon girls and maid-servants came 
 with bonnets and caps, and with mouths full of conver.-a- 
 tional treasures, which they at once unpacked; richer in 
 language than the Arabs, who have only a thousand wordg 
 to express the same idea, these young women had a 
 thousand idioms for it, or different ways of putting it ; — 
 and, as an organ when it 's out of order, immediately be- 
 gins to cipher on twenty of its pipes or so at a time as 
 soon as j'ou begin to work the bellows, though no notes 
 may be pressed down, so would they the moment the 
 bellows of their lungs was set a-going. He didn't mind 
 this, however, seeing that at the particular hours to 
 which these feminine alarum clocks were set, he let his 
 own juristical alarum go rattling off too, and during the 
 arguing of Lenette's cases, went on with the arguing of 
 his. He wasn't disturbed by this ; he maintained : " A 
 lawj'er is not 1;o be put out, he can open and close his 
 sentences when he chooses — his periods are long tape- 
 worms, and can be lengthened or cut down with impunity 
 — for each segment of them is itself a worm, each comma 
 a period." 
 
 But reviewing was another matter, and couldn't be 
 done so well. At the same time, I shall here faithfullj' 
 transcribe for the benefit of the unlearned (the learned 
 have read the review long ago), so much as he actually 
 did manage to get done after his dinner. He wrote down 
 the title of S'ett'en's Latin translation of " Emilia Galotti," 
 and proceeded as follows — 
 
 " This translation meets a want which we have long 
 experienced. It is, indeed, a striking phenomenon, that 
 so few of the German classics have as yet been translated 
 into Latin fur the use of scholars, who, for their part, have 
 supplied us with German versions of nearly all the Greek 
 and Eoman classic authors. The German nation can point 
 J to literary productions of its own which are quite worthy 
 of perusal by scholars and by linguists, who, although 
 they can translate tliem, do not understand them, because 
 they are not written in Latin. Lichtenberg's ' Pocket 
 Calendar' has appealed simultaneously in a German 
 edition— for the English, who are studying German — and 
 
CHAP. VI.J FLOWER, FKUIT, AND THORK PIECES. 173 
 
 in a French for our own haute noblesse. But why should 
 not German original -works, and even the very 'Calendar' 
 itself, be made known to linguists and to scholars by 
 means of a good and faithful Latin translation ? There 
 can be no doubt that they would be the very fiist to be 
 struck by the great resemblance which may be traced 
 between the odes of Eamler and those of Horace, if the 
 former were but translated. The reviewer must confess 
 that it has alwaj's been matter of surprise, as well as 
 regret, to him that but two correct editions of Klopstook's 
 ' Messiah ' have as yet appeared, the original edition and 
 his own — and that there is no Latin edition of it for 
 scholars — (Les^ing having scarcely translated the ' Invo- 
 cation ' in his miscellaneons writings) — nor one in the 
 curial style for lawyers, nor a plain prose one for the 
 commercial world, nor one in Jew-German for the Jewish 
 community." 
 
 When he had got thus far, he was compelled to stop, 
 because a housemaid wouldn't stop, but went on reiterat- 
 ing what her mistress had gone on le-iterating, namely, 
 how her night-cap was to be done up ; twenty times did 
 she sketch the ground-plan and elevation of the said cap, 
 and laid weight on the necessity for speedy execution. 
 Lenette answered her tautologies with equivalent ones, 
 paying her back to the full in her own coin. Scarce 
 was the housemaid out at the door, when the reviewer 
 said — 
 
 " I haven't written a word while that windmill was 
 clacking. Lenette, tell me, is it really a positive impossi- 
 bility for a woman to say, 'It's four o'clock,' instead of 
 ' The four quarters to four have gone ? ' Can no woman 
 say, ' The head-clout will be ready to-morrow,' and then 
 an end of the matter? Can no woman say, 'I want a 
 dollar for it,' and there an end of the story ? Nor, ' Eun 
 in again to-morrow ! ' and no more about it ? Can you not 
 do it, for instance ? " 
 
 Lenette answered very coldly, " Oh ! of course you 
 think everybody thinks just as you think yourself! " 
 
 Lenette had two feminine bad habits, which have sent 
 millions of male rockets, or pyrotechnic serpents — namely, 
 curses — up skywards. The first was, that whenever sha 
 
174 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH EICHTER. [BOOK IS 
 
 gave the servant an order, sie did it as if it were a 
 memorial in two copies, and then went out of the room 
 with her and repeated the order in question three or four 
 times more in the passage. The second was, that let 
 Siebenkaes shout a thing to her, as distinctly as man 
 could, her fii'st answer was, " "What ? " or, " What do you 
 say ? " Now, I not only advise ladies always to demand a 
 " second of exchange " of this sort when they are in any 
 embarrassment for an answer, and I laud them for so 
 doing ; but in cases where what is required of them is 
 attention, not the truth, this ancora and his which they 
 cry to a speaker who is anxious not to waste time, is as 
 cumbersome as it is unnecessary. Matters of this kind 
 are trifles in married life only so long as the sufferer by 
 them does not complain o^ them. But when they have 
 been found fault with they are worse than deadly sins, 
 und felonies, and adulteries — seeing that they occur much 
 more frequently. 
 
 If the author were disturbed at his work by pleonasms 
 of the above description; what he would do would be, 
 not deliver a serious lecture, but (because this is a good 
 opportunity) wi;ite the following 
 
 Extra. Leaflet on Female Loquacity. 
 
 " The author of the work on ' Marriage ' has said, ' A 
 woman who does not talk is a stupid woman.' But it is 
 easier to be his encomiast than his disciple. The cleverest 
 women are often silent with women, and the most stupid 
 and most silent are often both with men. On the whole, 
 this statement, which has been applied to the male sex, 
 is true also of the female, namely, that those who think 
 most have least to say ; as frogs cease croaking when a 
 light is brought to the side of their pond. Moreover, the 
 extreme talkativeness of women is a result of the sedentary 
 nature of their occupations. Men, whose work is seden- 
 tary, such as tailors, shoemakers, weavers, have in com- 
 mon with women not only their hypochondriac fancies, 
 but also their loquacity. 
 
 '' The little work-tables, where feminine fingers are 
 employed, are also the playgrounds of the feminine 
 imagination, and their needles become little magic wands, 
 
CHAP. VI.J FLOWEE, FEUIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 175 
 
 ■wherewitli they transform their rooms into isles of spirits 
 filled with dreams. Hence it is that a letter or a book 
 distracts a woman who is in love more than the knitting 
 of a whole pair of stockings. Savages say that the 
 monkeys refrain from talking that they may not be made 
 to work ; but many a woman talks twice as much when 
 Bhe is working as when she is not. 
 
 " I have devoted much thought to the question, what 
 purpose this peculiarity subserves in the economy of the 
 universe. At first it might strike us that Nature has or- 
 dained these re-iterations of that which has been already 
 said with a view to the development of metaphysical 
 truths ; for, as demonstration, according to Jacobi and 
 Kant, is merely a series, or progression, of identical pro- 
 positions, it is evident that women, who always proceed [ 
 from the same thing to the same thing, are continually ^ 
 demonstrating. There can be no doubt, however, that the 
 object which Nature has chieflj' had in view is the follow- 
 ing. Accurate observers of nature have pointed out that 
 the reason why the leaves of trees keep up their constant 
 fluttering motion is that the atmosphere may be purified 
 by this perpetual flagellation — this oscillation of the 
 leaves having very much the effect of a light and gentle 
 hreeze.* It would, however, be very wonderful had 
 Nature — always economising her forces. Nature, who 
 never does anything in vain — ordained this much longer 
 oscillation, this seventy years' ■v^'agging of the feminine 
 tongue, to no definite purpose. For the purpose in ques- 
 tion, however, we have not far to seek. It is the same 
 which is subserved by the quivering of the leaves of 
 trees. The endless, regular, unceasing beat of the 
 feminine tongue is to assist in agitating and stirring up 
 the atmosphere, which would otherwise become putrescent. 
 The moon has her ocean of water, and the feminine head 
 has its ocean of air, to stir into salubrity and to keep 
 in perpetual freshness. Hence a universal Pythagorean 
 
 * We cannot say, however, tbat it is by carrying away noxious vapours 
 that the wind purifies the air, since while it blows my noxious emana- 
 tions to the person behind me, it brings me those of the person before 
 me ; and because stagnant water does not become putrid solely because 
 there is no current to carry away decaying matter. 
 
176 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH EIOHTEE. [bOOK IL 
 
 noviciate would, sooner or later, give rise to epidemicg, 
 and Chartreuses of nuns would become pesthouses. Hence 
 it is that diseases of the pestiferous type are less frequent 
 among civilised nations, who talk the most. And hence 
 Nature's beneficent arrangement that it is exactly in the 
 largest cities — and moreover in the winter — and moreover 
 indoors — and in large assemblages — that women talk most, 
 inasmuch as it is exactly in these places and at these 
 periods that the atmosphere is most impure, and charged 
 with the largest proportion of carbonic acid and other 
 products of lespiration, &c., requiring to be thoroughly 
 tanned and set in motion. And, indeed, Nature here 
 overthrows all artificial barriers and impediments; for, 
 although many European women have endeavoured to 
 imitate those of America — who fill their mouths -with. 
 water in order to keep silence — and, while making calls, 
 fill theirs with tea or coffee, yet these fluids have been 
 foimd rather to facilitate than to prevent the free flow of 
 feminine speech. 
 
 " I trust that in tbis I am far from being like the narrow- 
 minded teleologists, who, to eveiy grand sun-path, or sun- 
 orbit of Nature, must always be appending and interca- 
 lating little sribsidiary foot-tracks and ' ends in view. 
 Such persons might permit themselves the supposition (1 
 should be ashamed to do so) that the oscillation of the 
 female tongue, the use of which is sufficiently apparent in the 
 motion which it communicates to tjje atmosphere, may pos- 
 sibly serve to give typical illustration to some thoughtor idea 
 of a spiritual nature — e. g. the female soul itself, perhaps. 
 
 " This belongs to that class of things with respect to 
 which Kant has said that they can neither be proved nor 
 disproved. I myself should rather incline, however, to the 
 opinion that the talking of women is an indication of the 
 cessation of thought and mental activity — as in a good mill 
 the warning bell only rings when there is no corn left in 
 the hopper. Moreover, every husband knows that tongues 
 are attached to women's heads in order to give due notice, 
 by their clanging, that some contradiction, something 
 irregular or impossible, is dominating in them.* Similarly, 
 
 * A woion finds it much easier to yield and say nothmg when sLa 
 is in tha Tv;ht than when she is in the wrong. 
 
CHAP. VI.J FLOWER, FBUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 177 
 
 H. Mtiller's calculating machine has a little bell in it, which 
 lings merely to give notice that some error has occurred in 
 a calculation. However, it now remains for the natural 
 philosopher to prosecute this inquiry, and to determine to 
 what extent my views may prove to he erroneous." 
 
 I may just mention that the above leaflet was written by 
 the advocate. 
 
 He did not finish his review till the following morning. He 
 had intended to go on writing down his ideas on the subject 
 of the translation of Emilia Galotti till the money coming 
 to him as the price of the ideas should be enough to pay 
 for new toes to his boots — Fecht asked a sheet and a half 
 for doing the pair — but he had not time for this, as he was 
 obliged to calculate the price of his notice by the com- 
 positor's sight-rule, and get the money for it that very day. 
 
 The reviews were sent to the editor ; the critical invoice 
 amounted to three florins four groschen and five pfennige 
 Strange ! we smile when we see the spiritual and the cor- 
 poreal, intellect and hard cash, pain and pecuniary compen- 
 sation, stated as sums in proportion ; but is not our whole 
 life an equation, a sum in " partnership " between soul and 
 body ; and is. not all action upon us corporeal, and all re- 
 action from us spiritual ? 
 
 The servant-girl brought back only " kind regards ;" not 
 the leaves of silver which his ink should have crystallised 
 into. Peltzstiefel had not given the matter a thought. 
 He was so absorbed in his studies that he was indifferent 
 to his own money, and blind to the poverty of other people. 
 He was capable, indeed, of noticing a hiatus ; but it must be 
 in a manuscript — not in his own or other people's shoes, 
 stockings, &c. An inward fire blinded this fortunate man to 
 the phosphorescence of the rotten wood around him. And 
 happy is every actor in the school-theatricals of life who 
 finds the lofry inward delusion sufSce to compensate him 
 for the delusions without, or to hide them from his view ; 
 — who is so carried away by the enthusiasm with which 
 he enters into and renders his spiritual rdle, that the coarse 
 daubs of landscapes of the scenery seem to bloom, and the 
 branches to rustle in the refreshing showers (of peas) from 
 the lain-box — and who does not wake to reality at the 
 shifting of the scenes. 
 
178 JEAN PAUL FKIEDEICH EICHTER. [bOOK II* 
 
 But this beautiful blindness of the Eath was very dis- 
 tressing to our two dear friends ; their little constellation, 
 which was to have shone in their evening sky, fell all down 
 in meteoric drops upon the earth. I do not blame Stiefel ; 
 he had an ear for distress, though not an eye. But ye rich 
 and great ones of the earth, who, helpless in the honey- 
 combs of your pleasures, swimming with clogged wings in 
 your melted sugar of roses, do not find it an easy matter to 
 move your hand, put it into your monej'-bag, and take out 
 the wage of him who helped to fill your honey-cells— an hour 
 of judgment will strike at last for you, and ask you if ye were 
 worthy to Ike, let alone to live a life of pleasure, when ye 
 avoid even the trifling trouble of paying the poor who have 
 undergone the immense trouble of earning. But ye would 
 be better if ye thought what misery j'our comfortable, indo^ 
 lent, indisposition to open a purse, or to read a little 
 account, often inflicts upon the poor; if ye pictured to 
 yourselves the backward start of hopeless disappointment of 
 some poor woman whose husband comes home without his 
 money^the staivation, the obliteration of so many hopes, 
 and the weary soiTowful days of a whole family. 
 
 The advocate, therefore, put on his wicked silverising 
 face again and went prying about into every corner with 
 his eyeglass, making himself into a species of pressgang of 
 the furniture. As a king or an English minister sits up in 
 his bed at night, lests his head on his hand, and considers 
 what commodity or what tree-stem full of birch-sap he may 
 stick his winefap of a new tax into, or (in another meta- 
 phor) so cut the peat of taxation that new peat may grow 
 in its place : thus did Siebenkses. With his letter of marque 
 in his hand he scanned minutely every flag that hoveia 
 sight ; he lifted up his shaving-dish and set it down ; he 
 shook the paralytic arms of an old chair till they cracked 
 again — he subjected it to a trial more severe, by sitting 
 down in it and getting up again. — I interrupt my period to 
 observe en passant that Lenette fully understood the danger 
 of this conscription and measuring of the children of the 
 land, and that she protested continuously and unavailingly 
 against this game of pledges with Job-like lamentations. — 
 He also took down from its hook an old yellow mirror, 
 with a gilt leaf-pattern frame, which hung in the bedroom 
 
CHAP. ^l.J .FLOWER, FKUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 179 
 
 opposite the green-railed bed, examined its wooden case and 
 the back of it, moved the glass of it up and down a little 
 and then hung it up again — an old firedog and some bed- 
 room crockery he did not touch ; he whipt the lid off a porce- 
 lain butter-boat, made, according to the plastic art of the 
 period, in the shape of a cow, and glanced into the inside of 
 it, but set it back, empty and full of dust, as an ornament 
 on the mantelpiece again ; he weighed, longer and with 
 both hands, a spice-mortar, and put it back again into the 
 oupboard. 
 
 He looked more and more dangerous, and more and more 
 merry ; he- drew out with both arms the drawer of a ward- 
 robe, shoved back table-napkins, and begun to overhaul a 
 
 mourning-dress of checked cotton a little . But here 
 
 Lenette flew out, seized him by his overhauling arm, and 
 cried, " Why not, indeed ! But, please God, it shall not 
 come to Ihat with me J" 
 
 He shut the drawer quietly, opened the cupboard again, 
 and carefully lifted the mortar on to the table, saying, 
 *' Oh ! very well, it matters little to me, it comes all to the 
 same thing ; the mortar will have to take its departure." 
 By covering this bell of shame with his open hand by way 
 of a damper, he was able to take out the pestle, its clapper, 
 without producing any ring or clang. He had been per- 
 fectly aware all the time that she would rather pawn the 
 garment of her soul (i. e. her body) than the checked gar- 
 ment of that garment ; but it was of set purpose that, like 
 the Court of Eome, he demanded the entire hand that he 
 might be the more likely to obtain a single finger of it — in 
 this case the mortar — and moreover he hoped the mere 
 frequency with which he reiterated his determination would 
 eave him the necessity of stating any reasons, and that he 
 would familiarise Lenette with the bugbear and hobgoblin 
 by keeping it continually before her eyes (I mean, with 
 bis design upon the mortar). Wherefore he went on to 
 say, " The fact is, that it's very little that we have to 
 pound in the course of a twelvemonth, except when we have 
 a quarter of a fat beast ; at the same time, just give me 
 eome idea why you're so anxious to keep the checked gown 
 — what on earth is the use of it ? The only time you can weai 
 it will be when I depart this life. Now, Lenette, that's a 
 
 N 2 
 
J 80 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH BICHTEE. [bOOK U. 
 
 terrible sort of idea ; I can't stand it. Coin the dress into 
 silver — eliminate it altogether; I'll send two pairs of 
 mourning-buckles of mine along with it; I hope I may 
 never have anything to buckle with them again." 
 
 She stormed without bounds and preached with much 
 wisdom against all " careless, thoughtless householders;" 
 and this fur the very reason, that she felt it was only too 
 probable that he would soon take every article of furniture 
 in the place (which he had been feeling and valuing, like a 
 person buying bullocks) to the slaughter-house, and — good- 
 ness gracious ! — the checked dress among the lest. " 1 had 
 , rather starve," she cried, " than throw away that mortar 
 J for a mere song. The Schulrath is sure to be here to-morrow 
 evening, with the money for your reviews." 
 
 "Now you begin to talk sense," said he; and he carried 
 the pestle horizontally in both his hands into the bedroom, 
 and laid it on to Lenette's pillow — next bringing the mortar, 
 and placing it on his own. " If people should happen to 
 hear it ring," he said, " they would think I wanted to turn 
 it into silver, as we were pounding nothing in it; and I 
 shouldn't like that." 
 
 The united capital contained in his greenish-yellow 
 cotton-purse, and her large money-bag (which she wore at 
 her girdle), amounted to about three groschen, good money. 
 In the evening there would have to be a groschen-loaf 
 liought, fur cash, and the remainder of the metallic-seed 
 must be sown in the morning to grow the breakfast- and 
 dinner-crop. The servant-girl went out for the bread, but 
 came back with the groschen and with the Job's message, 
 " There's nothing left at the bakers' shops at this time of 
 night but two-groschen loaves ; father (the cobbler Fecht) 
 couldn't get any either." This was lucky ; the advocate 
 could enter into partnership with the shoemaker, and it 
 would be easy for these partners, by each contributing a 
 groschen to the partnership funds, to obtain a two-groschen 
 loaf. The Fechts were asked if they agreed to this. The 
 cobbler, who made no secret of his daily bankruptcies, 
 answered — 
 
 " With all my heart. G — d d— n me ! (Heaven forgive 
 me for swearing) if I and the whole crew of young tatter- 
 demalions in the place have had a scrap of anything to fill 
 
■GHAP. VI.J FLOWEE, FEtllT,' A.ND THOKN PIECES. 181 
 
 OTir mouths with the whole blessed day but waxed-ends." 
 In short, this coalition of the tiers etat with the learned 
 estates put an end to the famine, and the covenanting parties 
 broke the loaf in two and weighed it in a just balance, 
 it being itself both the weight and the thing weighed. 
 Ah ! 3'e rich ! Ye, vvitli your manna, or bread sent from 
 heaven, little think how indispensable to poverty are small 
 weights, apothecaries' measure, heller-loaves,* a dinner for 
 eight kreuzers (and your sJiirt washed into the bargain) ; 
 and a broken-bread shop, where mere cnimbs and black- 
 bread powdei' are to be had for money ; and how the com- 
 fort df a whole family's evening depends on the fact that 
 your hundredweights are on sale in lots of half-an-ounce. 
 
 They ate, and were content. Lenette was in good 
 humour because she had gained her point. At night the 
 advocate put the things which were io be pawned upon a 
 soft chair. In the moining she facilitated his writing by 
 keeping very quiet. It was a good omen, however, that 
 she did not put the mortar back into the cupboard. And 
 Siebenkass fired oiF various queries out of the said bomb- 
 mortar in parabolic curves. He knew perfectly well that 
 the Loretto- and Harmonica-bell in question must march 
 that day or the next over the frontier for a small pecuniary 
 Ahzug-geld.^ Women always like to put everything off till 
 the very last possible moment. 
 
 Peltzstiefel came in that evening. It was both ridiculous 
 and natural to expect that the first thing the editor of the 
 ' Heavenly Messenger ' would do would be to pay the critic 
 his wages, so that he might at least be able to set before 
 his editor a candlestick with a candle in it, and a beer- 
 glass containing beer. Nothing can be more cruel than an 
 anxiety of this sort, because this kind of shame breaks in a 
 moment all the springs in the human machine. Siebeukass 
 wouldn't let it trouble his head, because he knew Stief'el 
 wouldn't let it trouble his. But Lenette was to be pitied, 
 inasmuch as the blushes of her shame were heightened by 
 her fondness for Stiefel ! At last the Bath put his hand in 
 
 * Heller = half-a-farthinoj. 
 
 + X e. a sum which piiople pay to the exchequer for permission tc 
 leave the country. 
 
182 JEAN PAUL FEIEDKICH EICHTEK. [bOOK II. 
 
 his pooket. They thought now he was going to produce the 
 review-money ; but all he took out was his snuff-machine, 
 his tobacco-grater, and he dived back into his coat-tail 
 pocket for half-an-ounce of rappee to put upon this little 
 chopping-bench. But he had grated the half-ounce already. 
 He searched his breeches-pockets for money to send for 
 another half-ounce. Truly — and here he swore an oath for 
 which he would have incurred a fine had he been in 
 England — he had sent, like an ass, not only his purse but 
 also the money for the reviews, carefully counted out and 
 neatly wrapped in paper, with his breeches — they were his 
 plush ones — to the tailor's. He said it wasn't the first 
 time, and it was a lucky job that the tailor was an honest 
 man ; the only thing was, he hadn't noticed how much 
 there was in his purse. He innocently requested Lenette 
 to " send and get him an ounce of rappee ; he would repay 
 her next morning, when he sent the money for the reviews." 
 Siebenkajs roguishly added, " And send for some beer at 
 the same time, dear." He and Stiefel looked out of win- 
 dow ; but he saw that his poor wife — her bosom torn with 
 J sighs, and suffering peine forte et dure — -stole into the bed- 
 room and noiselessly put the spice-mill into her apron. 
 
 After a good half-hour, rappee, beer, money, and happi- 
 ness entered the room ; the bell-metal of the mortar was 
 transformed into sustenance for the inward man, and the 
 bell in question had been somewhat like the little altar-bell, 
 which in this case, besides announcing a transubstantiation, 
 or transformation of the substance of the bread, as it does 
 in the Eoman Catholic Church, had undergone one itself. 
 Their blood no longer gurgled among rocks and stones, but 
 flowed softly and tranquilly along, by meadows, and over 
 silver sands. Such is man. When he is in the depths of 
 misery, the first happy moment lifts him out ; when he is 
 at the height of bliss, the remotest sorrowful moment, 
 even though it is down beneath the horizon, casts him to 
 earth. No great man, who has maitres de cuisine, clerks of 
 the cellar, capon-stuffers, and confectioners, has any true 
 enjoyment of the pleasure it is to give and receive hospi- 
 tality ; he gets and gives no thanks. But a poor man and 
 his poor guest, with whom he halves his loaf and his can^ 
 are united by a mutual bond of gratitude. 
 
CHAP. VI.] PLOWEK, FRUIT, AKD THOEN PIECES. 183 
 
 The evening wound a soft bandage about the pain of 
 the morning. . The poppy-juice of sixty drops of hap- 
 piness was taken hourly, and the medicine had a gently 
 soothing and exhilarating power. When his old, kind 
 friend was leaving, Siebenkses gave him a hearty, grateful 
 kiss for his cheering visit, Lenette standing by, with the 
 candle in her hand. Her husband, as some little compen- 
 sation to her for having pounded her little fit. of obstinacy 
 to groats in the mortar, said to her in an off-hand, cheerfiil 
 manner, " You give him one, too." The blushes mantled 
 on her cheeks like fire, and she leant back, as if she had 
 a mouth to avoid already. It was quite clear that, if she 
 had not been obliged to perform the office of torch-bearer, 
 she would have fled to her room on the spot. The Eath 
 stood before her beaming with affectionate friendliness — 
 something like a white winter-landscape in sunshine — 
 waiting till — she should give him the kiss. The fruitless- 
 ness of this expectation, and the prematureness of her 
 bending her head out of the way, began to vex him a 
 little at last. Somewhat hurt, but still beaming as affec- 
 tionately as ever, he said — 
 
 " Am I not worth a kiss, Madam Siebenkses ? " 
 
 Her iusband said, " Surely you don't expect my wife 
 to give you the kiss. She would set her hair and every- 
 thing in a blaze with the candle ! " 
 
 Upon this, Peltzstiefel inclined his head slowly and cau- 
 tiously, and at the same time commandingly, down to her 
 mouth, and laid his warm lips on hers, like the half of a 
 stick of melted sealing-wax on the other half. Lenette 
 gave him more space, by bending back her head ; yet it 
 must be said that while she held her left arm with the 
 candle high up in the air, for fear of fire, she did a good 
 deal to push away the Eath — another, more proximate, fire 
 — politely with the other. When he was gone, she was 
 still j ust the least bit embarrassed. She moved about with 
 a certain floating motion, as though some great happiness 
 was buoying her up with its wings — the evening red was 
 still bright on her cheek, though the moon was high in 
 the heavens ; her eyes were bright, but dreamy, seeming 
 to notice nothing about her — her smiles came before her 
 words, and she spake very few — not the slightest allusion 
 
18 1 JEAN PAUL FRIEDltlCH EICHTER. [bOOK II- 
 
 was made to the mortar. She touched everything more 
 gently, and looked out of the window at the sky two or 
 three times. She didn't seem to care to eat more of the 
 two-groschen loaf, and drank no beer, but only a glass or 
 two of water. Anybody else — myself for example — would 
 f have held up his finger and sworn he was looking upon a 
 girl who had just had a first kiss from her sweetheart. 
 
 And I shouldn't have regretted having taken that oath 
 had I seen the sudden blush which suffused her face next 
 day when the money for the reviews and the snuff was 
 brought. It was a miracle, and an extraordinary piece of 
 politeness, that Peltzstiofel should not have forgotten about 
 his having contracted this little loan — little debts of two 
 or three groschen always escaped his preoccupied memory. 
 But rich people, who always carry less money about them 
 than the poor, and therefore borrow from them, ought to 
 inscribe trifling debts of this sort on a memorial tablet in 
 their brain, because it is very wrong to break into a poor 
 devil's purse, who gets, moreover, no thanks for these 
 groschen of his which thus drop into the stream of Lethe. 
 
 Now, I beg to say, I should be happy to give two sheets 
 I of this manuscript if the day of the shooting-match were 
 but come, solely because our dear couple build so upon it 
 and upon its bird -pole. For the position of these people 
 is really going on from bad to worse ; the days of their 
 destiny move with those of the calendar, from October 
 on to November, that is to say, from the end of summer to 
 the beginning of winter, and they find that moral frosts 
 and nights get harder and longer in the same ratio with 
 
 / those of the season. However, I must go regularly on 
 
 ^ with my story. 
 
 I think there is no doubt that November, the month 
 which is such a Novemhriseur of the British, is the most 
 horrible month of all the year — for me it is a regular Septem- 
 hriseur. I wish I could hybfemate, sleep, till the beginning 
 of the Christmas month, December. The November of 
 '85 had, at the commencement of its rei<>n, a dreadful 
 wheezing breath, a hand as cold as death, and an unpleasant 
 lachrymal fistula ; in fact it was unendurable. The north- 
 east wind, which in summer it is . so pleasant to hear 
 
CHAP. VI.] FLOWER, FRUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 185 
 
 blowing past one's ears, because one knows it is a sure 
 sign of settled weather, is, in autumn, only a sign of 
 steady cold. To our conple the weathercock was really a 
 funeral standard. Though they didn't exactly go out to the 
 woods themselves with baskets and barrows to pick up 
 fallen branches and twigs, like the poor day-labourer, they 
 had to buy the stuff for firewood from the wood-gatherers, 
 by weight, as if it had been wood from the Indies, and it 
 had to he dried by the combustion of other wood before it 
 would burn. But this damp cold weather was more trj'ing 
 to the advocate's stoicism, after all, than even to his purse ; 
 he couldn't run ont and go up a hill, and look about him, 
 and seek in the heavens fur that which consoles and com- 
 forts the anxious and sorrowful, that which dissipates 
 the clouds which shroud our life, and shows us guiding 
 nebulae (Magellan's clouds), if nothing else, gleaming 
 through the fog-banks. For when he could go up the 
 Eabenstein, or some other hill, he could get sight from 
 thence of the aurora of the sun of happiness, though that 
 sun was under his horizon ; the s-orrows and torments of 
 this earthly life lay, wiithing, like other vipers, in the 
 clefts and hollows beneath him, and no rattlesnake could 
 rear itself with its fangs up to his hill. Ah ! there, in the 
 free air, close to the ocean of life which stretches on into 
 the invisible distance of infinity, near to the lofty heavens, 
 the blue coal smoke of the stifling, suffocating dwelling 
 of our daily life cannot rise to us, we see its wreaths 
 hanging far down beneath ; our sorrows drop, like leeches, 
 from our bleeding bosoms, and raised, for the time, above 
 our woes, we stretch our arms — no fetters on them now, 
 though sore and marked, and bruised with the galling iron — 
 we stretch them out as if to soar in the pure bright aether ; 
 we stretch them out, and fain would take to our bosom 
 the peaceful universe above us, we stietch them to the 
 invisible eternal Father, like children hastening home to 
 Him — and we open them wider yet to clasp our visible 
 mother, created Nature, crying, " Oh take not this solace, 
 this comfort, away from me, when I am down there again 
 among the fog and the sorrow." And why is it that 
 prisoners and the sick are so wretched in their confine- 
 ment? They are there shut up in their holes, the clouds 
 
186 JEAN PADL FKIEDEICH EICHTEE. [bOOK II. 
 
 sail over them, they can only see tlie mountains far away 
 in the distance, these mountains whence, as from those ol 
 the Polar regions in summer midnights, the sun, down 
 below the horizon, can be seen shining with a mild face, 
 as if in slumber. But in this wretched weather though 
 Siebenkses could not enjoy the consolations of imagination, 
 which bloom beneath the open sky, he could derive com- 
 fort from reason, which thrives in the flower-pots of the 
 window-sills. His chief consolation, which I commend to 
 everybody, was this : Man is under the pressure of a 
 necessity of two kinds — an every-day necessity, which 
 everybody bears uncomplainingly, and a rare, or yearly- 
 recurrent necessity, which is only submitted to after 
 struggles and complaints. The daily and everlastingly 
 recurrent necessity is this — that corn does not ripen in 
 winter — that we have not got wings, though so many lower 
 creatures have them — or that we cannot go and stand 
 upon the ring-shaped craters of the lunar mountains, and 
 looking down into the abysses, which are miles in depth, 
 watch the marvellous and beautiful effects of the setting 
 sun's rays. The annual, or rarely recurrent, necessity is 
 that there is rainy weather when the corn is in blossom — 
 that there are a great many water-meadows of this world 
 where it is very bad walking, and that sometimes, because 
 we have corns, or no shoes, we cannot even walk anywhere. 
 Only the annual necessity and the daily are of exactly 
 equal magnitude, and it is just as senseless to murmur 
 because we have paralysed limbs as because we have no 
 wings. All the past — and this alone is the subject of our 
 sorrow — is of so iron a necessity that in the eyes of a 
 superior intelligence it is just as senseless of an apothecar}- 
 to mourn because his shop is burnt to the ground as to 
 sigh because he can't go bolanising in the moon, although 
 there may be many thiiigs in the phials there which he has 
 not got in his. 
 
 I mean to introduce an extra leaflet here on the con- 
 solations which we may meet with in this damp, chilly, 
 draughty life of ours. Anybody who may be annoyed at 
 these brief digressions of mine, and is scarcely to be 
 consoled, let him seek consolation in this — 
 
CHAP. VI.J FLOWER, FEUIT, AND THOKN PIECES. 187 
 EXTRA LEAFLET ON CONSOLATION. 
 
 A time may, that is to say, must come when it shall be 
 held to be a moral obligation not only to cease to torment 
 other people, but to cease to torment ourselves; a time 
 must and will come when we shall wipe away the greater 
 part of our tears, even here on earth, were it only from 
 proper pride. 
 
 It is true, nature is so constantly drawing tears from 
 our eyes, and forcing sighs from our breasts, that a wise 
 man. can scarcely ever whojly lay aside his body's garb of 
 mourning ; but let his soul wear none ! For if it is a 
 simple duty or merit to endure minor sorrows with proper 
 cheerfulness, it is likewise a merit, only a greater one, to 
 bear the greatest sorrows bravely, just as the same reason 
 which enjoins the forgiveness of small injuries is equally 
 valid for the forgiveness of the greatest. 
 
 What we have principally to contend against, and to 
 treat with due contempt, in sorrow, as in anger, is its 
 paralysing poisonous sweetness, which we are so loth to 
 exchange for the exertion of consoling ourselves and of 
 exercising our reasoning faculties. 
 
 We must not expect Philosophy 1o produce, with one 
 stroke of the pen, the converse effect to that which Eubens 
 produced, when he converted a smiling child into a weep- 
 ing one with one stroke of his brush. It is sufficient if 
 she converts the soul's deep mourning garb into half- 
 mourning ; it is enough when I car say to myself, " I am 
 content to bear that share of my sorrow of which my 
 philosophy has not relieved me ; but for her it would 
 have been greater — the gnat's sting would have been a 
 wasp's." 
 
 It is only through the imagination, as from an electric 
 condenser, that even physical pain emits its sparks upon 
 us. We would bear the severest physical pains without a 
 wince if they were not of longer duration than a sixtieth 
 part of a second ; but we never really do have an hour of 
 •pain to endure, but only a succession of sixtieth parts of a 
 second of pain, the sixty separate rays of which are con- 
 centrated into the focus and burning-point of a second, 
 aod directed upon our nerves by the imagination alone. 
 
188 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH EICHTEK. [BOOK II. 
 
 The most painful part of corporeal pain is the /wcorporeal 
 part of it, that is to say, our own impatience, and our 
 delusive conviction that it will last for ever. 
 
 We all know for certain that we shall have given up 
 grieving for many a loss, in twenty, ten, or two years 
 why do we not say to ourselves, " Very well — if this is an 
 opinion which I shall cease to hold in twenty years' time, . 
 — I prefer to abandon it to-day, at once? Why must it 
 take me twenty years to abandon an error, when I need not 
 hold it twenty hours?" 
 
 When I awake from a dream which has painted for me 
 an Otaheite on the black background of the night, and find 
 the flowery land melted away, I scarcely sigh, and I 
 think it was but a dream. How were it if I had actuallj' 
 pof^sessed this flowery island in waking life, and it had 
 been submerged in the sea by an earthquake? Why 
 should I not, then also, say, " The island was but a dream" ? 
 \Vhy am I more inconsolable for the loss of a longee 
 dream than fur the loss of a shorter (for that is what 
 constitutes the distinction), — and why does man think 
 a great loss less necessary and less probable than a 
 small ? 
 
 The reason is that every sentiment and every passion is 
 a mad thing, demanding, or building, a complete world of 
 its own. We are capable of being vexed because it's past 
 twelve o'clock, or lieoause it's not past, but only just 
 twelve o'clock. What nonsense ! The passion wants 
 besides a personality of its own (sein eignes Ich), and a 
 world of its own, — a time of its own as well. I beg every 
 one, just for once, to let his passions speak plainly out, 
 and to listen to them, and ascertain what it is that they 
 really each of them want ; he will be dismayed when he 
 sees what monstrous tilings are these desires of theirs 
 which they have previously only half muttered. Anger 
 would have but one neck for all mankind, love would 
 have but one heart, sorrow but one pair of lachrymal 
 ducts, and pride two bent knees ! 
 
 When I was reading in Widman's ' Hofer Chronik ' the 
 account of the fearful, bloody times of the thirty years' 
 war, and, as it were, lived them over again ; when I 
 heard once more the cries for help of those poor sufiiering 
 
CHAP. VI.J FLOWER, FEUIT, AND THOKN riECES. 189 
 
 psople, all struggling in the Danube-whirlpools of their 
 days — and saw the beating of their hands, and their 
 delirious wanderings on the crumbling pillars of broken 
 bridges, foaming billows and drifting ice-floes dashing 
 against them ; and then, when I thought " All these waves 
 have gone down, the ice is melted, the howling turmoil is 
 all sunk to silence, so are the human beings and all their 
 sighs" — I was filled with a melancholy comfort, a thought 
 of consolation for all times, and I asked, " Was, and is, 
 then, this passing, cursory, transient burst of sorrow at the 
 OHUECHYAED-GATE OF LIFE, which three steps into the nearest 
 cavern could end, a fit cause fur this cowardly lamen- 
 tation?" Truly if, as I believe, there be such a thing 
 as true patience under an eternal woe, then, verily, patience 
 under a transitory sorrow is hardly worth the name. 
 
 A great but unmerited national calamity should not 
 humble us, as the theologians would have it— it should 
 make us proud. When the long, heavy sword of war falls 
 upon mankind, and thousands of blanched hearts are torn 
 and bleeding — or when in the blue, pure evening sky the 
 hot cloud of a burning city, smoking on its funereal pyre, 
 hangs dark and lurid, like a cloud of ashes, the ashes of 
 thousands of hearts and joys all burnt to cinders and dust 
 — then let thy spirit be lifted up in pride, let it loathe, 
 contemn, and despise tears, and that for which they fall, 
 and let it say — 
 
 " Thou art much too small a thing, thou every-day, 
 common life, that an immortal being should be inconsolable 
 with regard to thee, thou torn and tattered chance-bargain 
 of an existence. Here upon this earth — the ashes of cen- 
 turies rolled into a sphere, worked into shape and form 
 from vapour by convulsion — the cry of one dreaming in a 
 sorrowful dream — I say, it is a disgrace that the sigh should 
 cease only when the breast which gives it utterance is 
 resolved into its elements, and that the tear should ceasie 
 to flow only when the eye is closed in death." 
 
 But moderate this thy sublime transport of indignation 
 and put to thyself this question, " If He, the Infinite one, 
 who, veiled from tliy sight, sits surrounded. by the gleaming 
 abysses, without bounds save such as Himself creates, were 
 to lay bare to thy sight the immeasurability of infinity, and 
 
190 JEAN PAUL FEIEUKICH EICHTER. [bOOK II. 
 
 let Himself be seen of ttee as he distributes the suns, the 
 great spirits, thp little human hearts, and our days^ and a 
 tear or two therein; wouldst thou rise up out of thy 
 dust against Him, and say, ' Almighty, be other than thou 
 art ! '" 
 
 But there is one sorrow which will be forgiven thee, and 
 for -which there is recompense ; it is sorrow for thy dead. 
 For this sweet sorrow for thy lost ones is, in truth, but 
 another form of consolation ; when we long for them, this 
 is but a sadder way of loving them still : and when we 
 think of their departure we shed tears, as well as when we 
 picture to ourselves our happy meeting with them again. 
 And perhaps these tears differ not. 
 
 CONTINUATION AND CONCLUSION 
 OF CHAPTEE VI. 
 
 THE CHECKED CALICO DRESS — MORE PLEDGES — CHRISTIAN NEGLECT 
 
 OF THE STUDY OF JUDAISM A HELPING ARM (OF LEATHER) 
 
 STRETCHED FORTH FROM THE CLOUDS — THE AUCTION. 
 
 The St. Andrew's shooting-match will take place in the 
 seventh chapter : the present one fills up the wintry thorny 
 interval up to that period — tha,t is to say, the wolf-month 
 with its wolf-hunger. Siebenkses would at that period have 
 been much annoyed if any one had told him beforehand 
 with what compassion the flourishing state of his trading 
 enterprises was one day to be described by me, and, as a 
 consequence, read by millions of persons in aU. time to come. 
 He wanted no pity, and said, " If I am quite happy, why 
 should you be pitying me?" The articles of household 
 furniture which he had touched, as with the hand of death, 
 or notched with his axe, like trees marked for cutting, were 
 one by one duly felled and hauled away. The mirror, with 
 the floral border, in the bedroom (which, luckily for itself, 
 could not see itself in any other), was the fi.rst thing to be 
 tolled out of the house by the passing- or vesper-bell, under 
 the pall of an apron. Before he stationed it in the train of 
 this dance < f death, he proposed to Lenette a substitute for 
 
CHAP. VI.J FLOWEK, FKUIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 191 
 
 it, fclie cliecked calico mourning-dress, in order to accustom 
 her to the idea. It was the " Censeo Carthaginem delendam" 
 (I vote for the destruction of Carthage) which old Cato used 
 to say daily in the senate after every speech. 
 
 Next the old arm-chair was got rid of bodily (not like 
 Shakespeare's arm-chair, which was weighed out by the 
 ounce, like saffron, or in carats, like gold), and the firedog 
 went in company with it. Siebenkses had the wisdom to 
 say, before they went away, " Censeo Carthaginem delen- 
 dam," i. e. " Wouldn't it be better to pawn the checked 
 calico?" 
 
 They Could barely subsist for two days upon the dog and' 
 the chair. 
 
 And then the process of alchemical transmutation of 
 metals was applied to the shaving-basin and' the bedroom 
 crockery, which were converted into table-money. Of 
 course he previously said " Censeo." It is scarcely worth 
 the trouble, but I may just observe here how little fruit 
 was born by this branch of trade ; it was rather a woody 
 branch than a fruit-bearing one. 
 
 The lean porcelain cow or butter-boat would scarcely 
 have served as their nourishing milch cow for more than a 
 day, if she had not been attended by seven potentates (that 
 is to say, most miserable prints of them), who went " into 
 the bargain," but for whom the woman at the shop added 
 some melted butter. Wherefore he said " Censeo." Many 
 of my readers must remember my mentioning that, a short 
 time ago, when he was distributing sentences of death 
 among the furniture, he did not take very much notice of 
 certain table-napkins which were lying beside the checked 
 calico dress. Now, however, he acted as screech-owl, or 
 bird of death, and gallows-priest to them also, and routed 
 them out all but a few. When they were gone, he re- 
 marked, in an incidental'manner, shortly before Martinmas 
 Day, that the napkin-press was still to the fore, though it 
 was not very clear what was the use of it, as there was 
 nothing for it to press. 
 
 " If such a thing should be necessary," he said, " the 
 press might very well get leave of absence on private 
 affairs, until we get through the smoothing-press, oiling- 
 press, and napkin-press of destiny, and come out all smooth 
 
192 JEAN PAUL FRIEDEICH KICHTEB. [UOOIL II. 
 
 and beautiful ourselves, and can stick the napkins into our 
 button-holes on their return." His first intention had even 
 been to reverse the order of the funeral procession, and put 
 the press in the van of it as avant-courier of the napkins, and 
 in that event he would only have had to inveit his syllo- 
 gism (as well as his procession) in this way : " I don't see 
 what we can do wiih the napkins, or how we're to press, 
 them and keep them smooth, till we get the press home 
 again." 
 
 I am most iirmly convinced that the majority of people 
 would have done as Lenette did with reference to my trade- 
 consul SiebenkKs, and his Hanseatic confederation with 
 everybody who dealt in anything — that is, clasped her 
 hands above her head, and said, " Oh ! the thoughtless, silly 
 creature ! he'll soon be a beggar at this rate : the beautiful 
 furniture ! " 
 
 Pirmian's constant answer was — 
 
 " You would have me kneel down and howl, and tear my 
 coat in lamentation, like a Jew — my coat, whioii is torn 
 already — and pull my hair out by the roots— that hair, 
 which terror frequenlly causes to fall off in a single night. 
 Isn't it enough if you do the howling? Are you not my 
 appointed prcefica and keening-woman ? Wife, I swear to 
 you, and that as solemnly as if I were standing on pig's 
 bristles,* that if it is the will of God, who has given me so 
 light and merry a heart — if it be His will that I am to go 
 about the town with eight thousand holes in my coat, and 
 without a sole to either shoe or stocking — that I am to go 
 on always getting poorer and poorer " (here his eyes grew 
 moist in spite of him, and his voice faltered), "may the 
 devil take me and lash me to death with the tuft of his tail 
 if I leave off laughing and singing ; and anybody who pities 
 me, I tell him to his face, is an ass. Good heavens ! the 
 apostles, and Diogenes, and Epictetus, and Socrates, had 
 seldom a whole coat to their backs — never such a thing as 
 a shirt — and shall a creature such as I let a hair of him turn 
 grey for such a reason, in miserable riiovjNciAHSTic times 
 such as these?" 
 
 * Jews were formerly obliged to stand witlj baic feet on pig's-skin 
 vihen thej' took ontli. 
 
;:HAP. V1.J FLOWEE, FRUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 193 
 
 Bight, my Krmian ! Have a proper contempt for the 
 narrow heart-sacs of the big clothes-moths about you— the 
 human furniture-boring worms. And ye, poor devils, who 
 chance to be reading me — whether ye be sitting in colleges 
 or in offices, or even in parsonage-houses, who perhaps 
 haven't got a hat without a hole in it to put on your heads, 
 most certainly haven't got a black one — rise above the 
 effeminate surroundings of your times to the grand Greek 
 and Boman days, wherein it was thought no disgrace to a 
 noble human creature to have neither clothes nor temple, 
 like the statue of Hercules ; take heed only that your soul 
 shares not the poverty of your outward circumstances; 
 lift your faces to heaven with pride — a sickly &.int northern 
 Aurora is veiling it, but the eternal stars are breaking 
 through the thin blood-red storm ! 
 
 It was but a few weeks now to the St. Andrew's Day 
 siiooting-match, which was Lenette's consolation in all her 
 troubles, and to which all her wishes were directed ; how- 
 ever, there came one day on which she was something worse 
 than melancholy — inconsolable. 
 
 This was Michaelmas : on that day the press was to have 
 followed Lenette's Salzburg emigrants, the napkins, as their 
 lady superior; but nobody in all the town would have 
 anything to do with it. The sole anchor of refuge was one 
 Jew, because there was no species of animal (in the shape 
 of articles of merchandise) which did not flee to his Noah's 
 ark of a shop. Unfortunately, however, the day when the 
 napkin-press applied to him was a Jewish feast-day, which 
 he kept more strictly than ever he did his word. He said 
 he would see about it to-morrow. 
 
 Permit me, if you please, to take this opportunity of 
 making a few remarks of importance. Is it not a piece of 
 most culpable negligence on the part of the Government 
 that, seeing the Jews are, as it were, farmers-general and 
 metal-kings of the Christians in German states, the days 
 of their feasts and fasts, and other times connected with 
 their worship, are not published and clearly made known 
 for the benefit of those very numerous persons who wish 
 to borrow of them, or have any business to transact with 
 them? Those who suffer most from this omission are just 
 the upper circles of society, persons of birth and rank^ 
 
 II. o 
 
194 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH KICHTEB. [bOOK II. 
 
 officials: of Mgh. position ; these are the persons who bring 
 papers and want money on Feasts of Haman, Feasts of 
 Esther, of the Destruction of the Temple, of the Eejoicing 
 of the Law, and can't obtain any. Surely the Jewish fes- 
 tivals, with the hours at which they begin and end, ought to 
 be given in every almanack — as they have been fortunateily, 
 for a considerable time, in those of Berlin and Bavaria — or 
 ia newspapers — or be proclaimed by the crier, and carefully 
 taught in schools. The Jew, indeed, has m need of a 
 calendar of our festivals, since we are always ready to put 
 oif and postpone, if he likes, every Sunday of me year, 
 though it were the first Sunday of it, the feast of the Jewish 
 Circumcision ; and consequently hereafter, when the uni- 
 versal monarchy of the Jews is actually established, he 
 won't take the trouble to append a Christian calendar to 
 his own Jewish calendars, as we now append the Jewish to 
 our Christian. The necessity, however, of inculcating in 
 our schools a better and liiore exact acquaintance with the 
 seasons of the Jewish festivals, and with their religious 
 observances in general, will not be so fully manifest until 
 hereafter, when the Jews shall have elevated Germany to 
 the proud position of being their Land of Promise, leaving 
 us to make our crusade, and our retiim to the Asiatic land 
 of promise, if we feel disposed — to a holy sepulchre, and a 
 sacred Calvary. 
 
 And yet I think (to close this digression by another), 
 that hereafter, when we become the Christian numerators 
 of Jewish denominators, we should be wrong to set out, as 
 modem crusaders, for the holy land, as to which the Jews 
 themselves trouble their heads but little. It is certain that 
 they will treat us with a far wider measure of the spirit of 
 tolerance than we, unfortunately, have extended to them ; 
 but their genius for commerce, which they have hitherto 
 been so much reproached with, will be found to prove itself 
 a guardian angel for us poor Christians, and to take us under 
 its tutelage, inasmuch as we are so indispensably necessary 
 to them as purchasers and consumers of the unprepared hind- 
 quarters of the cattle (for it is only the fore-quarters which 
 they may eat, unless the veins are all taken out). Who 
 «ise but Christians can take the place of the beasfs of 
 burden — as no animal may be degraded by working on 
 
CHAP. TI.J FLOWEE, FEUIT, AND THOKN PIECES. 195 
 
 the " Soliabbes " * (Sabbath) — and perform the necessary 
 draught and other labour ? and to ■whom are they to entrust 
 the performance of menial and manual employments, like 
 the ancient republicans, but to us, their nobler slaves and 
 helots, whom they -will, therefore, be sure to treat with 
 more consideration than they have heretofore treated us 
 when we have omitted to pay our promissory notes as they 
 became due. 
 
 I return to our poor's advocate, and record that oa 
 Michaelmas Day he could get no money, and consequently 
 no Michaelmas goose. Lenette's grief at the absence of 
 the goose of her ecclesiastical communion we must all 
 share. Women, who care less about eating and drinking 
 than the most ascetic philosophers — caring, indeed, more 
 about the latter themselves than about the former — are at 
 the same time not to'be controlled if they have to go without 
 certain chronological articles of diet. Their natural liking 
 for burgherly festivities brings it about that they would 
 rather go without the appointed hymns and the gospel of 
 the day than without butter-cakes at Christmas, cheese- 
 cakes at Easter, the goose at Michaelmas ; their stomachs 
 require a particular cover for each festival, like Catholic 
 altars. So that the canonical dish is a kind of secondary 
 sacrament, which, like the primary one, they take, not for 
 the palate's sake, but " by reason of the ordinance." Anto- 
 ninus and Epiotetus could provide Siebenkaes with no 
 efficient substitute for the goose, with which to console the 
 weeping Lenette, who said, "We really are Christians, 
 whatever you may say, and belong to the Lutheran Church ; 
 and every Lutheran has a goose on his table to-day — I'm 
 sure my poor dear father and mother always had. As for 
 you, you believe in nothing." Whether he believed in. 
 anything or not, however, he slipped off, though it was the 
 afternoon of the Jewish feast-day, to the Jew, who kept a 
 nice pen of geese, with livers both fat and lean, serving 
 as a post-stable for country friends of his own religion. 
 
 ♦ Animals may not carry anything on the Sohahbes ; even the lappets 
 ■which fowls sometimes have tied to them as marks of distinction, havo 
 to be taken off on that day ; and the Jews must get non-Jews to niilk 
 for them; they may not even wipe off dust or moisture from their 
 persons. 
 
 o2 
 
196 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH KICHTEE. [bOOK II. 
 
 When he went into his place he pulled a duodecimo Hebrew 
 Bible out of his pocket and put it down on the table, with 
 the words, " It was a great pleasure to him to meet with a 
 keen, diligent, student of the law ; to such a man it would 
 be a r6al satisfaction to make a present of his Bible, without 
 asking a halfpenny for it ; as it was, an unpointed edition 
 (that is to say, one without vowels), he couldn't read it 
 himself, especially as even if it had had points,- he couldn't 
 have managed it. This napkin-press of mine,. here" — he 
 said, producing it from under his coat-tails — "I should 
 be verj' glad if you would allow me fo leave with you, 
 because I find it a good deal in my way at home ; 1 
 don't quite know what to do with it. You see, I have 
 particular reasons for being anxious to get hold of a goose 
 out of your pen ; 1 don't mind if it's as thin as a whipping- 
 post. If you like, joii may call it. giving it to me in charity 
 on a holy day of this sort, for all I care; it '11 make no 
 difference to me. If I should ever come and take away the 
 press again, it'll be an eaisy matter, and it'll be time enough, 
 to go into the transaction afresh." 
 
 It was thus that, in order to secure his wife the free 
 exercise of her religious observances, he brought in this 
 goose of controversj', which seemed to have some polemical 
 bearing, as well as to be connected with distinctive doc- 
 trines of faith; and next day these two Doctor Martin 
 Lutherists ate up the Schmalkaldian article (and, indeed, 
 another Schmalkaldian article, a commercial one — cold iron, 
 namely — has often been employed in defence of the articles 
 of theology). Thus was the capitol of the Lutheran 
 religion saved, in an easy manner, by the bird, which was 
 roasted (so to speak) at the fire of an auto-da-fe. 
 
 But on this particular morning up came the wigmaker, 
 an individual whom he was delighted to see generally, 
 though not to-Aay, for on the day before, Michaelmas, the 
 quarter's house rent was due, as we may remember. The 
 Friseur presented himself as a sort of mute bill " at sight ;" 
 yet he was polite enough not to ask for anything. He 
 merely mentioned, in a casual manner, that "there was 
 going to be an auction of a variety of things on the Monday 
 before St. Andrew's Bay, and in case the advocate might 
 care to get together a few things for it, he thought he 
 
CHAP. VI.] FLOWER, FRUIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 197 
 
 would give him notice of it, as he held a life appointment 
 from the Houses of Assembly as auction-crier." 
 
 He was scarcely down stairs before Lenettegave deep, 
 but not loud, expression to her woes, saying he had " dunned 
 them now, and that the whole house must know all, about 
 their disreputable style of housekeeping : had he not talked 
 about furniture?" It was incomprehensible how the poor 
 woman could have fancied anybody had been in the dark 
 about it before ! Poor people are alwaj'^s the first to nose 
 out poverty. At the same time Firmian had been ashamed 
 to tell the Friseur that he had been obliged to appoint 
 himself auctioneer of his own furniture. ' Here he per- 
 ceived that he blushed for his poverty more before one 
 person, and before the poor, than he did before a whole 
 town, and before the rich ; and he flew into a furious indigo 
 nation with these execrable eructations of human vanity iu 
 his noblest parts. 
 
 The path from hence to St. Andrew's Day, all bordered 
 with nothing but thistles as it is, cannot possibly seem 
 longer, even to the reader, than it did to my hero, who, 
 moreover, had to take hold of the thistles and pull them up 
 with his own hands. The garden of his life kept getting 
 more and more like a jardin Anglais, where only prickly and 
 barren trees, but no fruit-trees, were to be found. 
 
 Every night, when he opened the latch of his bed- 
 railings, he would saj', with great enjoyment, to his 
 Lenette, " Only twenty (or nineteen, or eighteen, or seven- 
 teen) days now to the shooting-raatch." But the hair- 
 dresser and auction-crier had played the deuce and all with 
 Lenette, though the evenings were long and dark and 
 splendidly convenient for needy borrowers on deposit, 
 veiling and hiding the naked, abashed, misery of the poor ; 
 she was ashamed the people in the house should know, 
 and afraid to meet them. Firmian, who was astonished 
 equally at the inexhaustible resources of his brain and of 
 his house, and who kept saying to himself, " Do you know, 
 I'm really curious to see what 1 shall hit upon to-day again, 
 and how I shall manage to get out of iMs difficulty now — " 
 Firmian, a day or two after the Michaelmas dinner, got his 
 eye upon two more good articles of furniture — a long cask- 
 siphon and a rocking-horse (a relic of his childhood). " \\ e 
 
198 JEAN PAUL FRIEDKICH EICHTEE. [bOOK 17. 
 
 haven't a cask, and we haven't a baby," he said. But his 
 ■wife implored him, for heaven's sake, " not to put her to 
 ■this shame. The horse and the siphon" (she said) "are 
 things that -would stick out of the basket so terribly, or out 
 from under one's apron, and in the moonlight everybody 
 ■would see them." 
 
 And yet something must go ! Pirmian said, in an odd 
 cutting, yet sorrowful -way, " It must be so ! Fate, like 
 Pritzel,* is beating on the bottom of the drum, and the oats 
 are jumping on the top of it ; ■we have got to eat off the 
 drum." 
 
 " Anything," she said, faint and beaten, " except things 
 that stick out so." She searched about, opened the top 
 dla-wer of the cupboard, and took out a faded wreath of 
 artificial flowers : she said, " Eather take this ! " and neither 
 smiled nor wept ! He had often looked at it ; but as he 
 had sent it to her himself last New Year's Day, the day of 
 their betrothal, and because it was so romantically beautiful 
 (a white rose, two red rosebuds, and a border of forget- 
 me-nots) every fibre of that tender heart of his would have 
 stood out against parting with this pretty relic — this me- 
 morial of better, happier, days. . The patient, resigned way 
 in which she made the sacrifice of these poor old flowers 
 tore his heart in two. " Lenetfe ! " he said, moved beyond 
 expression — "why, you know, these are our betrothal 
 flowers ! " 
 
 " Well, who's to be any the wiser," she said, quite cheer- 
 fully and quite coolly. " You see they're not so hig a& 
 other things are.'' 
 
 " Have you forgotten, then quite," he stammered, " what 
 I told you these flowers meant?" 
 
 " Let me see," she said, more coldly still, and proud of 
 the goodness of her memory, "the forget-me-nots mean 
 that I'm not to forget you, and that you won't forget me — 
 ike buds mean happiness — ^no, no, the buds mean happi- 
 ness that's not quite all come yet^and the white rose— I 
 don't recollect now what the white rose means " 
 
 * Prizelius trained war-horses to stand the beating of the drums in 
 battle, by stre'wing oats on the tops of drama, and beating on the lo'wer 
 side of them -while the horses ate the oats as they jumped about on 
 the top. 
 
CHAP. VI.] FLOWEB, FEtTlT, AKD THOKN PIECES. 199 
 
 " It meaus pain " (he said, overwhelmed with emotion), 
 " and innocence, and sorrow, and a poor white face." He 
 clasped her in his anus, as the tears came to his eyes, and 
 cried, "Oh! poor darling! poor darling! What can! do? 
 It's all beyond me ! I should like to give you everything 
 the world contains, and I have nothing " 
 
 He ceased suddenly, for while his arms were round her, 
 she had shut up the drawer of the cupboard, and was 
 looking at him with calm, clear, gentle eyes, not the trace 
 of a tear in them. She resumed her petition in the old tone 
 saying, '.' I may keep the siphon, and the horse, mayn't I ? 
 We shall get more money for the flowers." What he said 
 was, " Lenette !^0h, darling Lenette," over and over again, 
 each time more tenderly. 
 
 " But why not ? " she asked, more gently each time, for 
 she didn't understand him in the least. "I had sooner 
 pawn the coat off my back," was his answer. But as she 
 now got the alarming idea into her head that what he was 
 driving at was the calico gown, and as this put her into a 
 great state, and as she immediately began to inveigh warmly 
 against all pledging of large articles ; and as he clearly 
 perceived that her previous coldness had been thoroughly 
 genuine, and not assumed, he knew, alas ! the very worst, 
 a grief which no sweet drops of philosophy could avail to 
 alleviate, namely — she either loved him no longer, or, she 
 had never really loved him at alt. 
 
 The sinews of his arms were now fairly cut in two, the 
 sinews of his arms which had till now kept misfortune at 
 bay. In the prostration of this his (spiritual) putrid fever 
 he could say nothing but — " Whatever you please, dear ; 
 it's all the same to me now." 
 
 Upon that, she went out delighted, and quickly, to old 
 Sabel, but came back again immediately. This pleased him ; 
 sorrow having gnawed deeper into his heart during the 
 three moments she was gone, he could follow up the bitter 
 speech with these quiet words : " Put up your marriage 
 wreath along with the other flowers, there'll be a little 
 more weight, and a little more money for it ; though it is 
 nothing like such pretty work as my flowers." 
 
 " My marriage wreath ? " cried Lenette, colouring with 
 anger, while two bitter tears burst from her eyes. " No, 
 
200 JEAN PAUL 'FBIEDKICH EICHTEK. [book II. 
 
 that I positively shall not let go, it sball be put with me 
 into my coffin, as my poor dear mother's was. Did you not 
 take it up in your hand from the table on my wedding-day, 
 ■when I had taken it off to have my hair powdered, and 
 say you thought quite as much of it as you did of the 
 marriage ceremony itself, if not more ? (I noticed what 
 you said very carefully, and remember it quite distinctly). 
 / No, no, I am your wife, at all events, and I shall never let 
 that wreath go as long as I live." 
 
 His emotion now took a new bent, one more in harmony 
 with hers, but he masked this behind the question, " What 
 made you come back in such a hurry ? " It was that old 
 Sabel had just been in at the bookbinder's, it seemed, and 
 Herr von Meyern had been there too. That young gentle- 
 man was in the habit of getting off his horse and dropping 
 in, partly to see what new books the ladies were having 
 bound at the bookbinder's, and in what sort of pretty 
 bindings, partly to stick up his leg with its riding boot 
 upon the cobbler's bench and get him to stitch a top 
 tighter, asking about all sorts of things during the process. 
 The world — (which expression can only mean the col- 
 lection of female tongue-threshers of empty straw belong- 
 ing to Kuhschnappel) — may undoubtedly conclude, if it 
 be so minded, the Venner to be a regular Henry the Fowler 
 with respect to more women than one in the house, the 
 latter being a feminine Voliere to him ; but I want pioofs 
 of this. Lenette, however, didn't trouble herself about 
 any proofs, but piously fled out of the way of £osa the 
 birdcatcher. 
 
 I further relate (doing so, moreover, without any very 
 marked blush for the mutability of the human heart) that 
 at this point Firmian's compressed thoracic cavity grew 
 several inches wider, so as to give admission to a con- 
 siderable modicum of happiness, for no other reason but 
 that Lenette had kept such a tight grasp of her marriage- 
 wreath, and had endured the Venner for so short a time. 
 " She is faithful, at all events, although she may be 
 rather cool ; in fact, I don't really believe she is a bit cool, 
 either, after all." So that he was quite pleased that she 
 should have her way (which was Ms also) about keeping 
 the wedding- wreath in the house and in her heart. Be- 
 
CHAP. VI.'J FLOWER, FEUIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 201 
 
 sides which, without contending further about the be- 
 trothal-wreath, he let her have that other way of hers, 
 though less willingly — this being a proceeding which 
 hurt Ms feelings only, not hers. His old flower keepsake 
 was accordingly deposited in the hands of an obliging lady 
 who rejoiced in the title of " Appraiser," on the solemn 
 understanding that it was to be redeemed with the very 
 first dollar which should drop from the bird-pole on St. 
 Andrew's Day. 
 
 The blood-money of these silken flowers was so parcelled 
 out as to be made available by w^y of stepping-stones in 
 the muddy path leading to the Sunday before the shooting- 
 match. This Sunday (the 27th November, 1785) was to 
 be followed by the Monday for which the auction had 
 been announced ; on the Wednesday he (and I hope all 
 of us with him) would be in his place in front of the 
 bird-pole. 
 
 It is true, however, that on the Sunday he had to ford 
 a stream swollen to a considerable extent by rainy weather; 
 we will go through it after him, but I give due notice that, 
 in the middle, it is pretty deep. 
 
 The stomach of his inner man evinced a wonderful dis- 
 relish, and exhibited a reversed peristaltic motion towards 
 everything in the shape of pawning, since the affair of 
 the flowers. The reason was — there was nothing more to 
 which he could refer his wife. At first, he used to refer 
 her to the shooting-match ; but when the mortar, and the 
 chair had evacuated the fortress without tuck of drum, 
 they not being articles of a sort to be obtained as prizes 
 for shooting, he took to referring her to public auctions 
 at which he could always buy what he might require at 
 about half price. Finally, though still referring her to 
 auctions, he did so no longer with a view to import, 
 but to export, trade — as a seller, rather than as a buyer, 
 of commodities ; in which respect he surpasses Spain. 
 
 He who has risen victorious over great and serious 
 attacks of an insulting or offensive nature, has often had ti > 
 yield to very small and trifling ones ; and so it is witli 
 our troubles. The stout, firm heart, which has beat 
 strongly on all through long years of bitter trial and 
 / affliction, will often break at once, like over-flooded ice, at 
 
202 JBAN PAUL FEIEDRICH EICHTES. [BOOK IL 
 
 some lightest touch of Fortune's foot. Till now, Siebenkses 
 had carried himself erect, and borne his burden ■without a 
 bend, ay, and with a merrier heart than many a man. 
 tFp to this hour, he really hadn't minded the whole affair 
 one single button. Had he not (merely to mention one or 
 two instances) pointed out that, in the matter of clothes, he 
 was better off than the Emperor of Germany, who (he said) 
 had nothing to put on, on his coronation-day in Frankfort, 
 but a frightful old cast-off robe of Charles the Great's, not 
 much better than Eabelais's old gown, though that was not 
 by several centuries so old as the Imperial one? And 
 once when his wife was sadly looking over his fading 
 perennial clothes flora, he told her all she had to do was 
 to suppose he was serving in the new world with a 
 thousand or so of other Anspach men, and the ship which 
 was bringing out their new uniforms had been captured 
 by the enemy, so that the whole force had nothing to put 
 on but what they would have preferred to have been able 
 to take off. Likewise that what he had had to go upon, 
 and to take his stand upon for a considerable time past, 
 had been something much superior to his own pair of 
 boots (by this he clearly meant pure apathy) ; as for his 
 boots, they, having been twice new fronted, had been 
 shoved in like pocket telescopes, or trombones, till they 
 had become a pair of fair half-boots ; just as the German 
 corpora, also, by the influence of long years of civilisa- 
 tion and culture, have got considerably taken in, the long 
 rifle having been docked into a short, or non-commis- 
 «ioned officers' rifle. ^ 
 
 But on the Sunday to which I am alluding, he was far 
 too much scared at the sight of one single bird of prey and 
 of ill omen, flying athwart the lonely Sahara desert in 
 which his life was passing. He himself was taken by 
 surprise at this alarm of his ; he would have expected 
 anything else but alarm under the circumstances. For as 
 it had hitherto been his custom to prepare himself for dark 
 and tragic scenes by comedy rehearsals of them — ^by which 
 I mean, that he carefully read up, beforehand, all the 
 legal steps which Herr von Blaise could take against him, 
 thus taking up, in sport, and in advance, the burdens 
 which the future had in store — it astonished him greatly 
 
CHAP, VI.J FLOWER, FEUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 203 
 
 to find that an ill, quite certain to come, and clearly fore- 
 seen, should prove to have longer thorns, when it came 
 up towards him out of the future, than it seemed to possess 
 while still at a distance. 
 
 So that when, on the Sunday, the messenger of the 
 Inheritance Office came, with the long-expected third dila- 
 tory plea of the Heimlicher, and with the third affirmatory 
 decree written on the face thereof, as his breast was in 
 thei condition of a vacuum (no air to breathe in it) before 
 his coming, his poor heart grew sick and breathless indeed, 
 when this fresh stroke of the air-pump exhausted the 
 receiver even more thoroughly than it had been emptied 
 before. 
 
 Amid the multiplicity of matters which it has been my 
 duty to report to the public, I have omitted, on purpose, all 
 mention of the second of Mr. Blaise's dilatory pleas, because 
 I thought I might assume that every reader who has had as 
 much as half a ship's pound weight of legal documents 
 through his hands— or one single settlement of law accounts 
 -^would take it for granted, as a matter of course, that the 
 first petition for delay would infallibly be followed by a 
 second. It reflects much discredit on our administration of 
 justice that every upright, honourable counsel finds himself 
 compelled to adduce such a number of reasons (I wish I 
 might say " lies ") before he can be accorded the smallest 
 necessary term of delay; he has got to say his children 
 «nd his wife are dying ; that he has met with all kinds of 
 unfortunate accidents, and has thousands, of things to do, 
 journeys to make, and sicknesses. Whereas it ought to be 
 quite enough for him to say that the preparation of the 
 innumerable petitions for delay with which he is over- 
 whelmed, leaves him little time to write anything else. 
 People ought to notice that these petitions for delay tend, 
 as all other petitions do, to the protracting of the suit, just 
 as all the wheels of a watch work together to retard the 
 principal wheel. A slow pulse is a sign of longevity not 
 only in human beings but in lawsuits. It seems to me 
 that an advocate who has any -conscience is glad to do 
 what he can to promote the length of life in his opponent's 
 suit— -not in his own client's, he would make an end of that 
 in a minute if he could — partly to punish the said opponent, 
 
204 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH EICHTER. [bOOK ". 
 
 partly to terrify him, or else to snatch from his grasp a 
 favourable judgment (a sort of thing as to which nobody 
 can form an idea whether it is likely or not) — for as many 
 years as possible ; just as in ' Gulliver's Travels,' the 
 people who had a black mark on their brow were doomed 
 to the torture of eternal life. The object of the man of 
 business on the opposite pide is a similar prolongation of 
 the war to his opponents, and thus the two counsel immesh 
 the two clients in a long drag-net of documents, &c., each 
 with the best possible intentions. On the whole, lawyers 
 are not so indifi'erent to the question, " What is the law ? " 
 as to the question, " "What is justice?" For which reason 
 they prefer arguing to writing ; as Simonides, when he was 
 asked by the king the question, " What is God ? " begged 
 for a day to consider his answer — then for another day — 
 then for another — and for another, and always for another, 
 because no man's life is sufBcient to answer that question — 
 so the jurist, when he is asked. " What is justice ? " keeps 
 continually aisking for more and more delays — he can 
 never reply to the question — indeed, if the judges and 
 clients would let him, he would gladly devote his whole 
 life to writing replies to a legal question of this sort. 
 Advocates are so used to this way of looking at matters, 
 that it never strikes them that there is anything imusual 
 about it. 
 
 I return to my story. This blow of the iron secular arm, 
 with its six long thief- and writing-fingers, all but felled 
 Siebenkres to the earth. The vapours about his path in 
 life condensed to morning mist, the morning mist to even-, 
 ing clouds, the clouds to showers of rain. "Many a poor 
 devil has more to do than he can manage," he said. If he 
 had had a pleasant, cheerful wife, he would not have said 
 this ; but one such as his, who painfully trailed her cioss 
 (instead of taking it up), and was all lamentations — an 
 elegiac poetess, a Job's comforter — was herself a second 
 cross to bear. 
 
 He set to work and thought the whole thing over; he 
 had hardly enough left to buy the next year's almanack, 
 or a bundle of Ham.burgh quills (for his satires used up 
 Lenette's feather dusters much moie than his own ener- 
 gies, so that he often thought of cutting Stiefel's red 
 
CHAP. V1.J FLOWKE, FRUIT, AND THOKN PIECES. 205 
 
 pipe-stalk into a pen) ; he would have been delighted to 
 convert his plates into something to eat (there were none 
 left, however), following the example of the Gauls, who 
 used round pieces of bread as plates first, and afterwards 
 as dessert ; or of the Huns, who, after riding upon pieces 
 of beef (by way of saddles) till it was partly cooked, dined 
 upon these saddles.' His half-boots would need to be new 
 fronted, and abbreviated 'for the third time, before the 
 arrival of the impending shooting-match day ; and of the 
 necessary requisites for the performance of that operation 
 the only one in existence was the artist, Fecht the cobbler. 
 In short, for that important occasion he had nothing to 
 put on his back or in his pocket, his bullet-pouch, or his 
 powder-horn. 
 
 "When a man intentionally works his anxieties and ap- 
 prehensions up to the highest possible pitch, some con- 
 solation is sure to fall upon his heart from heaven, like a 
 drop of warm rain. Siebenk»s began catechising himself 
 more strictly, asking himself what it really was that he 
 was tormenting himself about Nothing but the fear of 
 having to go to the shooting-match without money, with- 
 out powder and shot, and without having had his boots 
 abbreviated for the third time ! " Is that really all ? " he 
 said. " And what, if you please, is there to make it a 
 compulsory matter that I should go there at all ? i I'll 
 tell you what it is " (he went on to himself), " I am the 
 monkey complaining bitterly that, having stuck his hand 
 into a narrow-mouthed bottle of rice, and filled it, he can't 
 pull it out without a corkscrew. All I've got to do is to 
 sell my rifle and my shooting ticket ; all I've got to do is 
 to open my hand and draw it out empty." So he made up 
 his mind to take his rifle to the barber on the day of the 
 auction to be put up to se le. 
 
 All battered, bruised, and weary with the day, he 
 climbed into his bed, with the thought of which safe and 
 sheltered anchoring ground he consoled himself all day 
 long. " There is this blessed property about night," he 
 said, as he sat and spread the feathers of his quilt level, 
 " that while it lasts we need trouble ourselves neither about 
 candles, coals, victuals, drink, debts, nor clothes ; all we 
 want is a bed. A poor fellow is in peace and comfort aa 
 
206 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH EICHTEB. [BOOK II. 
 
 long as he is lying down ; and, luckily, he has only got to 
 stand for half of his time." 
 
 The attacks of syncope, to which our souls and our 
 cheerfulness are subject, cease, as those of the body do 
 (according to Zimmermann), when the patient is placed in 
 a horizontal position. '■ 
 
 Had his bed been provided with bed-tassel, I should 
 have called it the capstan, whereby he heaved himself 
 slowly up on the Monday morning from his resting place. 
 When he got up, he ascended to the garret, where his ri£e 
 was nailed up in an old, long field-chest, to keep it safe. 
 This rifle was a valuable legacy from his father, who had 
 been huntsman and gun-loader to a great prince of the 
 empire. He took a crowbar, and, using it as a lever, prised 
 up the lid with its roots, i. e. nails ; and the first thing he 
 J saw in it was a leather arm, which " gave him quite a 
 turn ;" for he had had many a good thrashing from that 
 arm in bygone days. 
 
 It will not take me too far out of my way to expend a 
 word or two on this subject. This full-dress arm had been 
 borne by Siebenk^s's father on his body (as it might be in 
 "* the field of his escutcheon) ever since the time when he 
 had lost his natural arm in the military service of the 
 before-mentioned prince, who, as some slight reward, had 
 got him his appointment as gun-loader to his corps of 
 Jagers. The gun-loader wore this auxiliary arm fastened 
 to a hook on his left shoulder ; it being more like the arm 
 of a Hussar's pelisse, or an elongated glove, worn by way of 
 ornament, than as a mouth Christian of an arm (pretending 
 to be what it was not). In the education of his children, 
 however, the leather arm served, to some extent, the pur- 
 pose of a school library and Bible Society, and was the 
 colldborateur of the fleshly arm. Every-day shortcomings 
 —for instance, when Firmiah made a mistake in his mul- 
 tiplication, or rode on. the pointer-dog, or ate gunpowder, 
 or broke a pipe — were punished not severely, that is, only 
 with a stick, which in all good schools runs up the backs 
 of the children by way of capillary sap-vessel or siphon, 
 to supply the nourishing juice of knowledge ; or is thfe 
 carriage-pole to which entire winter-schools are harnessed, 
 and at which they tug with a will. But there were two 
 
CHAP. VI,J PLOWEE, FEUIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 207 
 
 other sorts of transgressions -which he punished more 
 severely. When one of the children laughed at table 
 during meals, or hesitated, or made a blunder during 
 the long table-grace or evening prayers, he would imme- 
 diately amputate his adventitious arm with his natural 
 one, and administer a tremendous thrashing to the little 
 darling. 
 
 Krmian remembered, as if it had happened yesterday, 
 one occasion when he and his sisters had been thrashed, 
 turn about, for a whole half-hour at dinner-time with tha 
 battle-flail, because one of them began to laugh while the 
 long muscle was swishing about the ears of another, -who 
 was serious enough. The sight of the bit of leather made 
 his heart burn even at this day. I can quite see the advan-. 
 tage to parents and teachers who try the expedient of 
 unhooking an empty by an organic arm, and smiting a 
 pupil with this species of Concordat, and alliance between 
 the temporal and spiritual arms ; but this mode of punish- 
 ment ought to be invariably the one made use of; for there 
 is nothing which infuriates children more than anything 
 new in the way -^f instruments of punishment, or a new 
 mode of application of those in general use. A child who 
 is accustomed to rulers and blows on the back, must not 
 be set upon with boxes on the ear and bare hands ; nor 
 one accustomed to the latter treated to the former. The 
 author of these Flower-pieces had once a slipper thrown 
 at him in his earlier days. The scar of that slipper is still 
 fresh in his heart, whereas he has scarcely any recol- 
 lection of lickings of the ordinary sort. 
 
 Siebenkffis pulled the arm of punishment and the rifl» 
 out of the chest; but what a treasure trove there was 
 beneath them ! Here was help, indeed ! At all events he- 
 could go to the shooting-match in shorter boots, and eat 
 whatever he liked for some days to come. What most 
 astonishes both him and me in this affair (it is easily 
 explicable, however) is that ho had never thought of it 
 sooner, inasmuch as his father was a Jager ; while, on the 
 other hand, I must confess it could not have happened on 
 a luckier day, because it chanced to be just the day of the 
 auction. 
 
 The hunting spear, the horse's tail, the decoy bird, the 
 
208 JEAN PAUL FRIEDEICH EICHTEB. [bOOK II. 
 
 fox-trap, the couteau de chatse, the medicine-ohest, the 
 fencing mask and foil — a collection of things which he 
 had never had a thought of looking for in the chest— could 
 be taken over instantly to the town-house, and set up to 
 auction on the spot by the hairdressing Saxon. 
 
 It was done accordingly. After all his tioubles, the 
 little piece of good luck warmed and gladdened his heart. 
 He went himself after the box — which was sent just as it 
 stood to the auction, except that the rifle and. the leathern 
 artery were kept back — to hear what would be offered for 
 the things. 
 
 He took up his position (on account of the excessive 
 length of his half-boots) at the back of the auctioneer's 
 table, close to his hectic landlord. The sight of this pile 
 ■of heterogeneous goods and chattels all heaped up hig- 
 gledy-piggledy (as if some grand conflagration were raging, 
 and it had been collected in haste for safety ; or as if it 
 were the plunder of some captured city), goods and chat- 
 tels sold, for the most part, by people on the downward 
 path to poverty, and bought by those who had arrived at 
 poverty already — had the effect of making him contemn 
 and despise more every moment all this complex pumping 
 apparatus, this machinery for keeping the spring-wells of 
 a few petty, feeble lives in clear and vigorous flow ; and 
 he himself, the engineer and driver of this machinery, felt 
 his sense of manliness grow stronger. He was furious 
 with himself, because his soul had seemed yesterday to 
 be but a sham jewel, which a drop of aquafortis deprives 
 of its colour and lustre, whereas a real jewel never loses 
 either. 
 
 Nothing awakens our humour more, nor renders us more 
 utterly indifferent to the honour paid to mere rank and 
 worldly position, than our being in any manner compelled 
 to fall back upon the honour due to ourselves (independently 
 of our chance position), our ovro intrindc worth, our being 
 compelled to tar over our inner being with philosophy (as 
 if it were a Diogenes' tub), by way of protection against 
 injuries from without; or (in a prettier metaphor) when, 
 .like pearl oysters, we have to exude pearls of maxims to 
 fill the holes which worms bore in our mother-of-pearl. 
 Now pearls are better than uninjured mother-of-pearl ; 
 
CHAP. VI. 1 FLOWER, FEUIT, AND THOKN PrECES. 209 
 
 an idea which I should like to have written in letters of 
 gold. 
 
 I have good reasons of my own for prefacing what has 
 to follow with all this philosophy, because I want to get' 
 the reader into such a frame of mind that he may not make 
 too great a fuss about what the advocate is going to do 
 now : it was really nothing but a harmless piece of fun. As 
 the be-powdered lungs of the auctioneer were more adapted 
 to wheezing and coughing than to shouting, he took the 
 auction-hammer from this hammer-man and sold off the 
 things himself. True, he only did it for about half an 
 hour, and only auctioned his own things ; and even then 
 he would have thought twice about taking the hammer in 
 hand and setting to work, if it hadn't been such an inde- 
 scribable delight to him to hold up the horse's tail, the 
 spear, the decoy-bird, &c., and hammer on the table and 
 cry, " Four groschen for the horse's tail, once ! five kreuzer 
 for the Aecoj, twice! — going! Half-a dollar for the fox- 
 trap, once ! two gulden for this fine foil, twice ! two 
 gulden — going — going — and gone!" He did what it is 
 an auctioneer's duty to do, he praised the goods. He 
 turned the horse's tail over and over, and opened it out 
 before the huntsmen who were at the sale (the shooting- 
 match had attracted many from a distance, as carrion 
 does vultures), stroked it with and against the hair, and 
 said there was enough of it to make snares for all the 
 blackbirds in the Black Forest. He held up the decoy- 
 bird in its best light, exhibiting to the company its wooden 
 beak, its wings, talons, and feathers, and only wished there 
 were a hawk present, that he might bait the decoy and 
 lure it. 
 
 The entries in his housekeeping account-book, which, on 
 account of the wretchedness of ray memory, I have had to 
 refer to twice, show that the sum received from the huntsmen 
 amounted to seven florins and some groschen. This does 
 not include the medicine-chest nor the long-necked mask ; 
 for nobody would have anything to say to them. When 
 he went home he poured the whole of this crown-treasuie 
 and sinking-fund into Lenette's gold satchel, taking occa- 
 sion to warn her and himself of the dangers of great riches, 
 and holding up to both the example of those who are arro- 
 
 n. p 
 
210 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH EICHTEK. [BOOK II. 
 
 gant by reason of wealtli, and must therefore of necessity, 
 sooner or later, come to ruin. 
 
 In my Seventh Chapter, which I shall commence imme- 
 diately, I shall at length be able, after all these thousands 
 of domestic worries and miseries, to conduct the learned 
 world of Germany to the shooting-ground and present to- 
 them my hero as a worthy member of the shooting-club, 
 with a rifle and bullets, and properly and respectably — well, 
 looted, more than attired — for his bullets are cast, his rifle 
 cleaned, and his boots have put on their shoes, Fecht having 
 stitched, on his kne^., the three-quarter boots down to half- 
 Iboots, and soled them with the — leather arm, of which 
 enough has been said already. 
 
 CHAPTER Vn. 
 
 THB SHOOTING-MATCH EOSA S AUTUMITAL CAMPAIGN CON- 
 SIDERATIONS CONCERNING CURSES, KISSES, AND THE MIlmA. 
 
 There is nothing whioh so much inconveniences me, or is 
 so much to the prejudice of this story (so beautiful in 
 itself), as the fact that I have made a resolution to restrict 
 it within the compass of four alphabets. I have thus, by 
 my own act, deprived myself of everything in the shape of 
 room for digressions. I find myself, metaphorically, in a 
 somewhat similar position to one which I once found myself 
 in, without metaphor, on an occasion when I was measuring 
 tlie diameter and circumference of the town of Hof. On 
 that occasion I had fastened a Oatel's pedometer by a hook 
 to the waistband of my trousers and tiie silken cord which 
 runs down the thigh to a curved hook of steel at my knee, 
 80 that the three indexes on one dial (of which the first 
 marks a hundred steps, the second a thousand, and the third 
 up to twenty thousand) were all moving just as I moved 
 myself. At this moment I met a young lady, whom it was 
 incumbent on me that I should see home. I begged her 
 to excuse me, as I had a Catel's pedometer on, and had 
 already made a certain number of steps towards my mea- 
 surement of the diameter of Hof. " You see, in a moment," 
 
-CHAP. VII.] FLOWEB, FEUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 211 
 
 I said, " how I am situated. The pedometer, like a species 
 of conscience, records all the steps I take ; and, with a lady, 
 I shall be ohliged to take shorter steps, besides thousands 
 ■of sideway and backward steps, all of which the pedometer 
 will put to the account of the diameter. So, you see, I am 
 afraid it's quite impossible that I can have the pleasure 
 of " However, this only made her the more deter- 
 mined that I should, and I was well laughed at ; but I 
 screwed myself to the spot, and wouldn't stir. At last I 
 said I would go home with her, pedometer and all, if she 
 would just read off my indexes for me (seeing I couldn't 
 twist myself down low enough to see the dial)— ^read them 
 off for me twice — firstly, then and there, and secondly, 
 when we got to her house — so that I might deduct the 
 steps taken by me in this young lady's company from the 
 fiize of Hof. This agreement was honestly kept ; and this 
 little account of the occurrence may be of service to me 
 eome day if ever I publish (as I have not given up all 
 hopes of doing) my perspective sketch of the town of 
 Hof ; and townspeople who saw me walking with the said 
 young lady, and with the pedometer trailing at my knee, 
 might cast it in my teeth and say it was a lame affair, and 
 that nobody could calculate as to the steps he might take 
 in a lady's company, far less apply them to the measurement 
 of a town. 
 
 St. Andrew's Day was bright and fine, and not very 
 windy. It was tolerably warm, and there wasn't as much 
 snow in the furrows as would have cooled a nutshell of 
 wine, or knocked over a humming-bird. On the previous 
 Tuesday Siebenkses had been looking on with the other 
 spectators, when the bird-pole had described its majestic 
 are in descending to impale the black golden eagle with 
 outstretched wings, and rise again therewith on high. He 
 felt some emotion as the thought struck him, " That bird 
 of prey up there holds in his claws, and will dispense, the 
 happiness or the misery of thy Lenette's coming weeks, 
 and our goddess of Fortune has transformed herself and 
 dwindled into that black form, nothing left of her but her 
 
 WINGS and BALL." 
 
 On St. Andrew's morning, as he said gooa-bye to Lenette, 
 with kisses, and in his abbreviated boots, over which he 
 
 p2 
 
21 'i JEAN PAUL FEIEDKICH EICHTEK. [bOOK ::. 
 
 had a pair of goloshps, she said, " May God grant you luck, 
 and not let you do any mischief with your rifle." She 
 asked seveial times if there was nothing he had forgotten — 
 his eyeglass, or his handkerchief, or his purse ; " And mind 
 you don't get into any quarrel with Mr. von Meyem," was 
 her parting counsel : and finally, as one or two preliminary 
 thundrous drum-ru£3es were heard from the direction ot 
 the courthouse, she added most anxiously, " For God's 
 sake, mind and don't shoot yourself; my blood will run 
 cold the whole forenoon every time I hear a gun go off!" 
 
 At length the long thread of riflemen, rolled up like a 
 ball, began to unwind itself, and the waving line, like 
 a great serpent, moved off in surging convolutions to the 
 sound of trumpets and drums. A banner represented the 
 serpent's crest, and the standard-bearer's coat was like a 
 second flag beneath 'he other. The town-soldieiy, mors 
 remarkable for quality than for quantity, shot the mottled 
 line of competitors at intervals with the white of their 
 uniforms. The auctioneering hairdresser — the only member 
 of the lower ten thousand who rejoiced in a powdered 
 head — tripped along, keeping the white peak of his cap at 
 the due degree of distance from the leather pigtails of the 
 aristocracy, which he had that morning tied and powdered. 
 The multitude felt what a lofty position in this world 
 really was, when, with bent heads, they raised their eyes 
 to Heimlicher von Blaise, the director of the competition, 
 who accompanied the procession in his capacity of aorta of 
 the whole arterial system, or elementary fire of all these 
 ignes-fatui — or, in a word, as master of the shooters' lodge. 
 Happy was the wife who peeped out and saw her husband 
 marching past in the procession — happy was Lenette, for 
 her husband was there, and looked gallantly up as he 
 passed by. His short boots looked very nice, indeed ; they 
 were made both in the old fashion and in the new, and, 
 like man, had put on the new (short) Adam over the 
 old one. 
 
 I wish Schulrath Stiefel had given a thought or so to 
 the St. Andrew's shooting-match, and looked out of his 
 window at his Orestes; however, he went on with his 
 reviewing. 
 
 Now, when these processional caterpillars had crept 
 
CHAP. VII.J FLOWER, FRUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 213 
 
 together again at the shooting-ground, as upon a leaf — 
 ■when the eagle hung in his heavenly eyrie, like the crest 
 of the future's armorial bearings — when the wind instru- 
 ments, which the troop of " wandering minstrels " had 
 scarce heen ahle to hold firmly to their lips, blared out 
 their loudest now that the band was halted, and as the 
 procession, with martial tramp and rattle of grounded 
 rifles, came with a rush into the empty echoing shooting- 
 house, everybody, strictly speaking, was more or less out 
 of his senses, and mentally intoxicated ; and that although 
 the lots were not even drawn, far less any shot fired. 
 Siebenkaes said to himself, " The whole thing is stuff and 
 nonsense, yet see how it has gone to all our heads, and how 
 a mere unhrohen faded flower-wreath of pleasant trifles, 
 wound ten times about our hearts, half chokes and darkens 
 them. Our thirsty heart is made of loose, absorptive 
 mould ; a warm shower makes it swell, and as it expands 
 it cracks the roots of all the plants that are growing in it." 
 
 Mr. von Blaise, who smiled unceasingly upon my hero, 
 and treated the others with the rudeness becoming 
 authority, ordered the lots to be drawn which were to de- 
 cide the order in which the competitors were to shoot. The 
 reader cannot expect Chance to stop the wheel of Fortune, 
 thrust in her hand, and, behind her bandage, pull out from 
 among seventy numbers the very first for the advocate; 
 she drew him the twelfth, however. And at length the 
 brave Germans and imperial citizens opened fire upon the 
 Eoman eagle. At first they aimed at his crown. The 
 eagerness and zeal of these pretenders were proportioned 
 to the importance of the affair: was there not a royal 
 aevenue of six florins attached to this golden penthouse 
 when the bullet brought it down — to say nothing whatever 
 of other ci'own property, consisting of three pounds of tow 
 and a pewter shaving-dish. The fellows did what they 
 could ; but the rifle placed the crown of the eagle, not, 
 alas! on our hero's head, but upon that of No. 11, his pre- 
 decessor, the hectic Saxon. He had need of it, poor fellow! 
 seeing that, like a Prince of Wales, he had come into pos- 
 ees-iion of the crown debts sooaer than of the crown itself. 
 
 At a shooting contest of this kind nothing is better 
 calculated to dissipate evarything in the shape of tedium 
 
214 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH KICHTEE. [bOOK IB 
 
 tLan to have arrangements made for " running shooting " 
 (as it is called) being carried on by those who are waiting, 
 their turn at the birdpole. A man who has to wait while 
 sixty-nine other people slowly aim and shoot before his. 
 turn comes round, may find a good deal to amuse him if, 
 during that time, he can load and aim at something of a 
 less lofty kind — for instance, a Capuchin -general. The 
 " running '' or " swing " shooting, as carried out at Kuh- 
 schnappel, differs in no respect from that of other places. 
 A piece of canvas is hung up, and floats to and fro ; there 
 are painted dishes of edibles upon it, as on a table-cloth^ 
 and whoever puts a bullet through one of these paintings 
 obtains the .original — just as princes choose their brides, 
 from their portraits, before bringing home the brides in 
 person ; or as witches stick pins into a man's image in 
 order to wound the prototype himself. The Kuhschnap- 
 pelers were, oh this occasion, shooting at a portrait on this 
 canvas, which a great many persons considered to represent 
 a Capuchin general. I know that there were some who,, 
 basing their opinion chiefly upon the red hat in the 
 portrait, considered it to represent a cardinal, or cardinal- 
 protector, but these have clearly, in the first place, got to 
 settle the point with a third party, which differed from both 
 of those above mentioned, holding that it portrayed the 
 whore of Babylon — that is to say, a European one. From 
 all of which we may form a pretty accurate estimate of 
 the amount of truth contained in another rumour — which 
 I contradicted in the first hour of its existence — namely, 
 that the Augsburg people had taken offence at this efSgy- 
 arquebusading, and had written, in consequence, to the 
 attorney-general representing that they felt themselves 
 aggrieved, and that it was an injustice to one religion if, 
 within the bounds of the holy Eoman empire, a general of 
 a religious order should be shot to shavers, without a 
 Lutheran superintendent-general being also shot to shivers 
 at the same time. I should certainly have heard some- 
 thing further about this, if it had been anything but mere 
 wind. Indeed, I have a shrewd suspicion that the whole 
 Story is no more than a false uradition, or garbled version 
 of another story, which a gentleman of rank belonging to 
 Vienna recently lied to me at table. What he sa.d waS, 
 
CHAP. VII.J FLOWEE, FEtJIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 215 
 
 that in the more considerable towns of the empire, where 
 the spirit-level of religious toleration has established a beau- 
 tiful equilibrium between Papists and Lutherans, many had 
 complained, on the part of the Lutherans, of the circum- 
 stance that although there were equal numbers of night- 
 watchmen and censors (that is, transcendental night-watch- 
 men), keepers of hotels, and keepers of circulating, libraries 
 of each communion, yet there were more Papists hanged 
 than Lutherans; so that it was very clear, whether the 
 Jesuits had to do with it or not, that a high and important 
 post such as the gallows was not filled with the same 
 amount of impartiality as the Council of State, but with 
 a certain bias towards the Catholics. I thought of contra- 
 dicting the story, in the most distinct terms, in the 
 ' Literary Gazette ' of December last, but Government 
 declined to :pay the expense of the insertion. 
 
 However, although those who occupied themselves with 
 the " swing " shooting did only have a Capuchin to aim at, 
 the said swing shooting was every bit as important a 
 ^business as the shooting at the standing mark. I must 
 point out (in this connection) that there were edible prizes 
 attached to the divers bodily members of this said general 
 of his order, which had their attractions for riflemen of a. 
 reflective turn of mind. An entire Bohemian porker was 
 the prize appointed for him who ■ should ■ pierce the heart 
 of the Capuchin pasha — which heart, however, was repre- 
 sented by a spot no bigger than a beauty-patch — so that 
 he who should hit this little mark would have need of all 
 his skill and nerve. The cardinal's hat was easier of 
 attainment, for which reason it was worth only a couple of 
 jack. The honorarium of the oculist who should succeed 
 in inserting new (leaden') pupils into the cardinal's eyes 
 consisted of an equivalent number of geese. As he was 
 portrayed in the full fervour of prayer, it was well worth 
 anyone's while to send a buUet through between his hands, 
 seeing that this would be tantamount to knocking the two 
 fore-quarters out of a cantering, smoked pig. And each of 
 the cardinal's feet rested upon a fine hind-quarter or ham. 
 I do not hesitate for a moment^ — whatever the imperial 
 burgh of Kuhsohnappel may say to it — to record, with the 
 utmost distinctness, that no portion of the whole lord- 
 
21 C JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH KICHTER. [BOOK II. 
 
 protector was more poorly endowed, or had a scantier 
 revenue and salarinm allotted to it, than his navel ; for 
 there was nothing to be got out of that, with however good 
 a bullet, but a Bologna sausage. 
 
 The advocate had failed in his designs upon the crown ; 
 but fortune chucked him the cardinal's hat to make up for 
 it — the cardinal's hat with two pike inside it. But some 
 puissant necromantic spell of invulneraoility turned all his 
 bullets aside from the eagle's head, and from the general's 
 too. He would fain have sent one eye, at any rate, out of 
 the face of the harlot of Babylon, but he could not manage 
 that either. 
 
 Now the prize-lists — which are correct, seeing that they 
 were made out by the secretary, under the eyes of the 
 president, Herr von Blaise — state with distinctness that 
 the head, the ring in the beak, and the little flag, fell into 
 the hands of numljers 16, 2, and 63. 
 
 The sceptre was now being aimed at ; and Siebenkaes 
 would have been very very glad, for his dear little wife's 
 sake (waiting for him now, as she was, with the soup), to 
 have sent that, at least, flying out of the eagle's talons, 
 and to have fixed it, by way of a bayonet, on to his rifle. 
 
 All the numbers who had tried their best to break off 
 this golden oak-branch had shot in vain, except the worst 
 — the most to be dreaded of all — his own predecessor 
 and landlord. Me aimed, and shot — and the gilded har- 
 poon quivered. Siebenk«s fired — and the eel-spear came 
 tumbling down. 
 
 Messrs. Meyem and Blaise smiled, and uttered congra- 
 tulations ; the blowers of instruments, crooked and straight, 
 blew, in honour of the advent of this new bird-member, 
 a blast both loud and shrill (like the Karlsbad people, 
 when a new bath-guest arrives), looking closely and care- 
 fully at their music as they did so, though they had played 
 their little fanfares far oftener than the very night-watch- 
 men. All the infantas — I mean all the children — began a 
 race for the sceptre, but the buffoon dashed among them, 
 and" scattered them ; and, taking up the sceptre, presented 
 that emblem of sovereignty to the advocate with one hand, 
 holding in the other his own emblem of sovereignty, the 
 whip. 
 
CHAP. VII.] FLOWER, FEUIT, AND THOKN PIECES. 217 
 
 Siebenkses contemplated with a smile the little twig of 
 timber — the little branch, sticking to which the buzzing 
 swarms of nations are so often borne away ; and he veiled 
 his satisfaction under cover of the following satirical re- 
 marks (which the reigning Heimlicher overheard, and 
 applied to himself) : — 
 
 " A -vei:}' pretty little frog-shooter ! It ought, by rights, to 
 be a honey-gauge ; but the poor bees are crushed by it, that 
 their honey-bags may be got out of them ! The Waiwodes 
 and the despots, child-like, put the bees of the country to 
 death, and take the honey from their stomachs, not from 
 their combs. A truly preposterous and absurd implement I 
 It is made of wood ; very likely a piece broken off a shep- 
 herd's crook, and gilded, pointed, and notched — one of 
 those shepherd's staves with which the shepherds often 
 drag the sheep's fat out of them while they are feeding in 
 . the meadows ! " 
 
 He had ceased to be conscious, now, when he emitted the 
 bitterest satirical matter (there was never a drop of it in 
 his heart); he often turned mere aquaintances into foes 
 with some joke, made merely for the sake of jesting ; 
 and couldn't imagine what made people vexed with him, 
 and why it was that he couldn't have his little bit of fun 
 with them as well as any one else. 
 
 He put the sceptre into the breast of his coat and took it 
 home, seeing that they would not shoot up to his number 
 again before dinner-time. He held it up straight and stiff, 
 as the king of diamonds holds his, and said to Lenette, 
 " There's a soup-ladle and sugar-tongs for you, all in one ! " 
 the allusion being to the two pewter prizes, which, in 
 company with a sum of nine florins, had fallen to his share 
 by way of sceptre-fief. It was enough for one shot. And 
 next he gave an account of the catching of the pike. He 
 expected that Lenette would, at the very least, go through 
 the five dancing positions and execute Euler's " knight's 
 move" on the chess-board of the room-floor, into the bar- 
 gain, within the first five seconds after hearing the news. 
 She did what she could do, namely, nothing at all ; and 
 said what she knew, namely, that the landlady had been 
 holding forth, with bitter severity, to the bookseller's wife, 
 on the subject of the non-payment of the rent, aud further, 
 
218 JEAN PAUL FEIEDKICH EICHTEE. [bOOK II, 
 
 concerning her own husband, whom she characterised as a 
 smooth-tongued flatterer and payer of compliments — a man 
 who didn't half threaten people. "What I tell yon," 
 repeated the sceptre-bearer, " is, that I have this day had 
 the luck to shoot a couple of pikes and a sceptre^ Wende- 
 line Engelkraut!" and he banged his sceptre-knout in 
 indignation upon the table where the crockery was all set 
 out. She answered at last, " Well, Lucas came running a 
 short time ago and told me all about that ; I am ^so glad 
 ' about it, but I should quite think you will shoot a good 
 many more things yet—will you not? I said so to the 
 bookseller's wife." 
 
 She was slipping into her old cart-rut again, you see, 
 but Eirmian thought, " She can cry and mourn loud enough, 
 but deuce a bit of gladness can she show when a fellow 
 comes home with a pike or two under his arm, and a sceptre 
 or so." It was just the same with the wife of the gentle- 
 hearted Eacine, when he threw down a long purse of golden 
 Louis XVI. he had got hold of, on the table. 
 
 How, or whence, oh ! beloved wives, cometh to you the 
 naughty trick ye have of making a kind of parade of an 
 insupportable frigidity and indifference, just on the very 
 occasions when your husbands come to you laden with 
 good news, or with presents — that at the very moment 
 when Pate brightens the wine of your joy into " bloom," 
 your vats grow turbid with the lees of the old liquor? 
 Comes it from your custom of showing only one of your 
 faces at a time, like your sister and prototype, the moon ? 
 or from a peevish discontent with destiny ? or is its cause 
 a sweet, delicious, overflowing happiness and gladness, 
 making the heart too full and the tongue too hard to move ? 
 
 I believe it is often from all these causes combined. 
 
 In men, again — sometimes, too, in women, but only in 
 one out of a thousand — it may arise from the sad thought 
 of the sharks which tear off the arm with which, down in 
 the dark ocean, all breathless and anxious, we have clasped 
 hold of four pearls of happiness. Or, perhap.s, from a deeper 
 question still. Is not our heart's inward bliss but an olive- 
 leaf which a dove brings to us, fluttering over the great 
 deluge foaming and seething all round us — an olive-leaf 
 which she has culled for- us away in the far distant Para- 
 
CHAP. VII.] FEOWEE, FEUIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 219 
 
 dise, liigh up above the flood, clear and blissful in the 
 eternal sun? And if all we attain of that whole olive- 
 garden is but one leaf, instead of all its flowers and its 
 fruit, is this leaf of peace, is this dove of peace, to give to 
 us something beyond peace — namely, hope ? 
 
 Firmian went back to the shooting-ground, his breast 
 full of growing hopes. The heart of man, which, in matters 
 of chance, makes its calculations in direct defiance of the 
 theory of probabilities, and when heads have turned up 
 once, expects them three times running — (although what 
 oitgJit to be anticipated is the very reverse) — or reckons 
 upon hitting the eagle's talon because it has knocked the 
 sceptre out of it — this heart of man, uncontrollable alike in 
 its fears and in its hopes, the advocate took with him to 
 the shooters' trench. 
 
 He came not by the talons, however. And at the folded 
 praying claws or hands of the general of the Capuchins — 
 these algebraic exponents or heraldic devices of two fore- 
 quarters of pork — aimed he alike in vain. 
 
 It mattered not; more was left of the eagle, when all 
 was done, than would be this day of Poland, if the latter, 
 or its coat of arms — a silver eagle in a bloody field — were 
 to be set up on a throne or a bird-pole, and shot at by a 
 shooting-club composed of an army or two. 
 
 Even the imperial globe was not yet knocked down. 
 Number 69, a formidable foregoer, Mr. Everard Eosa von 
 Meyern, had taken his aim — eager to cull this forbidden 
 fruit — a Ribstone pippin and football fit for a very prince, 
 such as this imperial apple, was a thing of too great price 
 to be grasped for the sake of what was to be gained along 
 with it — 'twas honour alone that fired his heart — ^he pulled 
 his trigger, and he might just as well have aimed in the 
 opposite direction. Eosa — this particular apple being too 
 high out of his reach — went, all blushes, in among the lady 
 spectators, dealing out apples of Paris all round, and telling 
 each lady how lovely she was, that she might be convinced 
 ho\v handsome he was himself. In the eyes of a woman, 
 her panegyrist is, firstly, a very dever man, and, ere long, 
 such a nice-LooKma one. Eosa knew that grains of incense 
 are the anise which these doves fly after, as though 
 infatuated. 
 
220 JEAN PAUL FKIEDEICH EICHTEE. [bOOK II. 
 
 Our friend had no need to disquiet himself about any of 
 the would-be fruit-gatherers — about the second, eighth, or 
 ninth, till it came to the eleventh — and he was the Saxon, 
 who shot like the demon in person. There were few among 
 the seventy who didn't wish this accursed gallows-number 
 at the deuce, or at all events into the vegetable kingdom, 
 where it is altogether absent.* The hairdresser fired, 
 struck the eagle on the leg, and the leg remained hanging 
 aloft, with the imperial globe in the talons. 
 
 His lodger (and lawyer) came up to the scratch, but the 
 landlord stood still in the trench, to satisfy his soul with 
 curses of his luckless star. As the former levelled the sights 
 of his rifle upon the ball above, he made up his mind that 
 he would not aim at the ball at all, but at the eagle's tail, 
 so as simply to shaJce the apple down. 
 
 In one second the worm-eaten world- apple fell. The 
 Saxon cursed beyond all description. 
 
 Siebenkses all but ofifered up an inward prayer, not 
 because a pewter mustard-pot, a sugar-dish, and five florins 
 came showering along with the apple into his lap, but for 
 the piece of good luck^for the warm burst of sunshine 
 which thus came breaking out from among the clouds of 
 the distant storm. " Thou wouldst prove this soul of mine, 
 happy Fortune," thought he, " and thou placest it, as men 
 do watches, in all positions — perpendicular and horizontal, 
 quiet and unquiet— to see if it will go and mark the time 
 correctly in all, or no. Ay, truly ! it shall ! " 
 
 He let this little, bright, miniature earth-ball roll from 
 one hand to the other, spinning and weaving, as he did so, 
 the following brief chain of syllogisms : — " What a genea- 
 logical tree of copies! Nothing but pictures within pic- 
 tures — comedies within comedies! The emperor's globe 
 is an emblem of this terrestrial globe of ours — the core of 
 each is a handful of earth — and this emperor's globe of 
 • mine, again, is a miniature emblem of a real emperor's, with 
 even less of earth — none at all, in fact. The mustard-pot 
 and sugar-dish, again, are emblems of this emblem. What 
 a long, diminishing series, ere man arrives at enjoyment ! " 
 Most of man's pleasures are but preparations for pleasure ; 
 
 • There Is no plant witk eleven stamens. 
 
CHAP. VII.J FLOWER, FKUIT, AND THOKN PIECES, 224 
 
 he thinks he has attained his ends, when he has merely got 
 hold of his means to those ends. The burning sun of bliss 
 is beheld of our feeble eyes but in the seventy mirrors of 
 our seventy years. Each of these mirrors reflects that 
 sun's image less brightlj' — more faint and pale — upon the 
 next ; and in the seventieth it shimmers upon us all frozen, 
 and is become a moon. 
 
 He ran home, but without his globe, for he did not mean 
 to tell her of that till the evening. It was a great refresh- 
 ment to him to slip, during his shooting vacations, away 
 from the public turmoil to his quiet little chamber, give a 
 rapid narrative of anything of importance going on, and 
 then cast himself back into the meUe. As his number was 
 a next-door neighbour to Kosa's, and they had, conse- 
 quently, their holidays at the same time, it surprises me 
 that he did not come upon Herr von Meyern beneath his 
 own window, inasmuch as that gentleman was walking up 
 and down there, with his head elevated, like an ant. He 
 who desires to destroy a young gentleman of this species, 
 let him look for him under (if not in) a lady's window ; 
 just as an experienced gardener, when he wants to kill 
 woodlioe or earwigs, needs only lift up his flower-pots to 
 annihilate them by the score. 
 
 Siebenkses did not hit so much as another shaving the 
 whole of the afternoon ; even the very tail, which he had 
 attacked with such success in his bold stroke for the con- 
 quest of the globe of the holy Roman empire, resisted all 
 his efforts to knock it off. He let himself be drummed and 
 flfed home by the town militia towards evening. When he 
 got to his wife's door, he there assumed the role of Enecht 
 Euprecht (the children's " Bogie," who, on St.. Andrew's 
 Day, bestows upon them, for the first time in their career, 
 fruit, and fear along with the same), arid, growling in a 
 terrible manner, chucked his (wooden) apple in to her ; a 
 piece of fun which delighted her immensely. But really 
 I ought not to record such little trifles. 
 
 As Firmian laid his head on his pillow, he said to his 
 wife, " This time to-morrow, wife, we shall know if it be 
 two crowned heads that we are going to lay on the pillow, 
 or not I I shall just recall this important minute to 
 your memory to-morrow night, when we're going to bed ! " 
 
222 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH KICHTEE. [bOOK U. 
 
 "When he got up in the morning hcs said, " Very likely this 
 as the last time that I shall rise a common, ordinary person, 
 without a crown." 
 
 He was so anxious to have the mutilated bird (all wet 
 with dew, a mass of gunshot wounds and compound frac- 
 tures) once more hefore his bodily eyes, that he hardly 
 knew how to possess himself in patience till the time came. 
 But it was only as long as he did not see the eagle that his 
 hopes of shooting himself into a king at him endured. He 
 was, therefore, delighted to agree to a proposal made by 
 the clever Saxon, whose bullet had throughout the pro- 
 ceedings always cleared the way for his number-neigh- 
 bour's ; the proposal was, " we go shares in gains and in 
 losses — in the bird and in the cardinal." This copartner- 
 ship doubled the advocate's hopes by the process of halving 
 them. 
 
 But these companions in arms didn't bring down a single 
 painted splinter the whole of the afternoon. Each in his 
 secret heart thought the other was the bird of evil omen ; 
 for in matters of chance we are prone to hang our faith 
 wpon a bit of superstition, rather than to nothing at all. 
 The fickle Babylonish harlot went fluttering off with that 
 amount of bashful coyness, that the hairdresser once sent a 
 bullet within an ace of the fellow who was working her 
 backwards and forwards. 
 
 At last, however, in the afternoon, he sent his Capid's 
 dart right through that black heart of hers, and, by conse- 
 quence, through the pig at the same time. This almost 
 terrified Firmian ; he said that if he couldn't hit anything 
 himself he would accept only the head of this pig— this 
 polypus in the heart of the Babylonian fille de joie. All that 
 was left of the bird was its torso, which stuck to its perch 
 like the very Eump Parliament, which these pretenders to 
 the crown would so fain have dissolved. 
 
 A regular running musketry fusilade of eager interest, 
 enthusiasm, emulation, now went flashing from breast to 
 breast, fanned by every puff of powder which rose in smoke 
 as a rifle went off. When the bird shook a little all the 
 competitors shook also, except Herr von Meyern, who had 
 gone off, and — seeing what a state of excitement everybody 
 was in, especially our hero — marched away to Madame 
 
CHAP. VII.] FLOWEK, FRUIT, AND THOKN PIECES. 223 
 
 Siebenkajs, thinking that he had a better chance of be- 
 coming, in that quarter, king of a queen than he had here 
 of acquiring the sovereignty of the riflemen. However, my 
 readers and I shall slip into the Siebenkses' chamber after 
 him presently. 
 
 Twice already had the seventy numbers loaded in vain 
 for the decisive' shot ; the obstinate stump still stuck glued 
 to its perch, and scarce so much as trembled ; the poor 
 tantalised hearts were torn and pierced by every bullet 
 that sped on its course. Their fears waxed apace, so did 
 their hopes, but most of all their curses (those brief ejacu- 
 latory prayers to the devil). The theologians of the seventh 
 decade of the present century had the devil often enough 
 in their pens — in their denials or in their assertions of 
 him — but the Kuhschnappelers had him far oftener in their 
 mouths, particularly the upper classes. 
 
 Seneca, in his ' Eemedies for Anger,' has omitted the 
 simplest of all, the devil. True, the Kabbalists highly extol 
 the therapeutic powers of the word Shemhamphorash, 
 which is a name of a diametrically opposite character ; but 
 I have observed, for my part, that the spotted, malignant 
 fever of wrath, so readily diagnosed by the raving delirium 
 of the patient, is instantly relieved, dispersed, and miti- 
 gated, by invoking the name of the devil, which is per- 
 haps, indeed, quite as efiScacious a remedy as the wearing 
 of amulets. In the absence of this name, the ancients, who 
 were altogether without a Satan, recommended a mere' 
 repetition of the ABO, which, it is true, does contain the 
 devil's name, only too much diluted with other letters. 
 And the word Abracadabra, spoken diminuendo, was a cure 
 for corporeal fevers. As regards the inflammatory fever of 
 anger, however, the greater the quantity of morbid matter 
 which has to be ejected from the system through the secre- 
 tions of the mouth, the ' greater is the number of devils 
 necessary to make mention of. For a mere trifling irrita- 
 tion — a mild case of simple anger — " the devil," or perhaps 
 " hell and the devil," will generally be found sufficient ; 
 but for the pleuritic fever of rage I should be disposed 
 to prescribe " the devil and hie infernal grandmother :" 
 strengthening the dose, moreover, with a '■ donncrwetter" 
 or two, and a few " sacraments," as the curative powers of 
 
224 JEAN PAUL FEIEDKICH EICHTER. [bOOK 11. 
 
 the electric fluid are now so generally recognised. It is 
 unnecessary to point out to me that in cases of absoluto 
 canine fury or maniacal wrath, doses of the specific, such 
 as the foregoing, are of little avail ; I should, of course, let 
 a patient in lliis condition be " taken and torn by all the 
 devils in hell." But what I would fain render clear is 
 that, in all these remedies, the real specific is the devil ; for 
 as it is his sting which is the cause of our malady, he him- 
 self has got to be employed as the remedy, just as the stings 
 of scorpions are cured by the application of scorpions in 
 powder. 
 
 The tumult of anticipation shook up the aristocracy and 
 the sixpenny gallery into one common whole. On occa- 
 sions like this — as also in the chase and in agricultural 
 operations — the aristocracy forget what they are, viz., 
 something better than the citizen classes. An aristocrat 
 should, in my opinion, never for a momsnt lose sight of 
 the fact that his position with reference to the common 
 herd is that which the actor now a days stands in with 
 respect to the chorus. In the time of Thespis the whole 
 of the tragedy was sung and acted by the chorus, while 
 one single actor, called the protagonist, delivered a speech 
 or two, unaccompanied by any music, bearing on the subject 
 of the play, .i^schylus introduced a second actor, the 
 deuterag'onist ; Sophocles even a third, the tritagonist. In 
 more recent times the actors have been retained, but the 
 chorus omitted, unless we consider those who applaud to 
 represent it. In a similar manner also, in this world of 
 ours (mankind's natural theatre), the chorus, i. e. th& 
 people, has been gradually cleared off the stage, only with 
 more advantage than in the case of smaller theatrical ones, 
 and promoted from taking part in the action of the drama 
 (which the protagonists (princes), deuteragonists (minis- 
 ters), and tritagonists (people of quality), are better fit to 
 do), to the post of spectators who criticise and applaud — 
 what was the chorus in Athens, now sitting at ease in the 
 pit, near the orchestra, and before the stage where the 
 great " business " is going on. 
 
 By this time it was past two o'clock, and the afternoons 
 were brief; yet the saucy bird would not stir. Everybody 
 swore that the carpenter who had hatched it from its native 
 
CHAP. VII.] FLOWEB, FETJIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 225 
 
 block was a low scoundrel, and must have carved it out of 
 tough, branchwood. But at last, all battered, with nearly 
 the whole of its paint broken away from it, it did appear to 
 be somewhat disposed to topple down. The hairdresser, 
 who, like the common herd in general, was conscientious 
 towards individuals only, not towards an aggregation of 
 them, now without any scruple secretly doubled hisUuUets 
 (since he could not double his rifle), putting in one for him- 
 self and one for his brother in arms, in the hope that this 
 decomposing medium might have the effect of precipitating 
 the eagle. " The devil and his infernal grandmother ! "cried 
 he, when he had fired his shot, making use of tlie febrifuge 
 or cooling draught above alluded to. He now had to place 
 all his trust in his lodger, to whom he handed his rifle. 
 Siebenkaes fii-ed, and the Saxon cried, "Ten thousand 
 devils ! " doubling in vain the dose of devils, as he had the 
 dose of bullets. 
 
 They now, in despair, laid aside their rifles and also their 
 hopes ; for there were more pretenders to this crown than 
 there were to that of Eome in the time of Galienus, when 
 there were but thirtj'. This shooting septuaginta had all 
 telescopes at their eyes (when they had not rifles there), 
 that they might observe how there were a greater number 
 of bullets in this heaven-suspended constellation of theirs 
 than there are stars in the astronomical one of the eagle. 
 The fac6s of all beholders were now turned towards this 
 Keblah of a bird, like those of the Jews towards their ruined 
 Jerusalem. Even old Sabel sat behind her table of sweet- 
 meats customerless, and gazing up at the eagle. The earlier 
 numbers didn't even give themselves the trouble of shaking 
 a pinch of powder into their pans. 
 
 Firmian pitied these oppressed hearts, swimming heavily 
 in turbid, earthy blood — for whom at this time, the 
 setting sun, the bright array of sky tints, and the broad, 
 fair world were all invisible — or, rather, all shrivelled up 
 to a battered block of wood. The surest token that these 
 hearts were all lying fettered in the eternal dungeon of 
 need and necessity, was that none could make a single 
 witty allusion either to the bird or the kingship. It is 
 only concerning matters which leave our souls free and 
 unshackled that we notice similitudes and connection 
 
226 JEAN PAUL FHIEDlilOH BICHTEE. [BOOK I 
 
 " This bird," thought Firmian, " is the decoy of a 
 these men, and the money is what baits the lure." Br 
 he himself had three reasons for desiring to be ting 
 firstly, to laugh himself to death at his own coronation 
 secondly, on account of his Lenette : thirdly, on accoui 
 of the Saxon. 
 
 The second half of the seventy gradually fired off, an 
 the earlier numbers began to load again, if it were fc 
 nothing but the fun of the thing. Every one put in tw 
 bullets now. Our two Hanseatic confederates came one 
 more up to the mark, and Siebenkses borrowed a mor 
 powerful glass, screwing it on to his rifle like the finder c 
 a telescope. 
 
 No. 10 loosened the bird from its joining to the pol( 
 Nothing but the sheer weight of it now retained it on if 
 perch, for they had well nigh saturated and incrusted th 
 wood of it with lead (as certain springs transform woo 
 into iron). 
 
 The Saxon had but to graze the eagle-torso — ay, o 
 even the perch of it — ^nay, the very evening breeze ha 
 but to give an extra puff — to send the bird of prey swoop 
 ing down. He had his rifle to his shoulder — aimed fo 
 a whole eternity (there were fifty florins hanging ii 
 the sky) — and pulled his trigger. The powder flashei 
 in the pan. The band had all their trumpets ready a 
 their lips- — ^ trumpets horizontal, music perpendicular- 
 the boys stood round ready to seize the fallen skeleton 
 the buffoon in his excitement couldn't think of a joke t 
 make — his ideas were all up beside the bird ; the poo] 
 anxious, eager, excited hairdresser drew his trigger one 
 more, and again 'twas but a flash in the pan. Great drop 
 of perspiration bedewed him; he glowed, he trembled 
 loaded, aimed, fired, and sent his bullet several ells, at th 
 least, away over the bird. 
 
 Be stepped back, pale and silent, in a cold perspiration 
 not an oath did he utter ; nay, I suspect he offered up 
 silent prayer or two that his co-partner might, by heaven' 
 grace, capture the feathered game. 
 
 rirmian went forward, thinking as hard as he couli 
 about something else, to keep down his thrilling excite 
 ment; aimed, not very long, at this, his anchor in hi 
 
CHAP. VII.J FLOWEK, FBDIT, AND THOKN PIECES. 227 
 
 little storms, as it hung hovering in the twilight, fired; 
 saw the old stump turn three times round in the air, like 
 Fortune's wheel, and, at last, break loose, and come pitch- 
 ing down. 
 
 As, when the old French kings were crowned, a live 
 bird always fluttered in the air ; as, at the apotheoses of the 
 Koman emperors, an eagle soared skyward from out the 
 funeral pyre, so did one swoop downward from the heavens 
 at the coronation of my hero. 
 
 The children screamed, and the trumpets blared. One 
 tnoiety of the assemblage crowded to see who the new 
 king was, and to have a look at him; while the other 
 moiety streamed crowding round the jester, as he ad- 
 vanced bearing that shattered bullet-case, the eagle's 
 body, holding it up above the heads of the throng. The 
 barber ran to meet it, crying, " Vive le roi," and adding 
 that he was a king himself into the bargain ; and Firmian 
 moved towards the door in silence, full of happiness, but 
 fuller of emotion. 
 
 And now it is time that we should all of us hurry to the 
 town to see how Eosa fkres, what kind of throne he gains 
 chez Madame Siebenkses (while her husband is thus 
 ascending Ms) — a richer throne, or only a pillory — and 
 what number of steps he climbs towards whichever of the 
 two it may prove to be. 
 
 Eosa knocked at Lenette's door, and straightway entered 
 in at it, in order that she might not have a chance of 
 coining and ascertaining who was there. " He had torn 
 himself away from the shooting-match ; her husband was 
 coming immediately, and he would wait for him there. 
 His rifle had once more been excessively fortunate." It 
 was with these truths that he canie into the presence of 
 the alarmed Lenette, bearing, however upon his counte- 
 nance, an assumed aristocratic frigid zone. He walked, in 
 an easy and unconcerned manner, up and down the room. 
 He inquired whether this April weather afi'ected her 
 health at all ; as for himself, it produced in him a kind 
 of miserable prostrating low fever. Lenette, timid and 
 nervous, stood at the window, her eyes half in the street, 
 -lalf in the room. He glanced, in passing, at her work- 
 talile, took up a paper bonnet-shape and a pair of scissors, 
 
 q2 
 
228 JEAN PAUL FKIEDKICK EICHTEE. [bOOK I 
 
 and put them down again, his attention being arrested b 
 a paper of pins. " Why, these are No. 8's," he said ; " thes 
 pins are a great deal too large, Madame ; their head 
 would do for No. 1 shot. The lady whose hat you wei 
 putting them in ought really to be immensely grateful t 
 me." 
 
 He then went quickly up to her, and, from a spot 
 trifling distance below her heart (where she had a who] 
 quiver, or thorn-hedge of needles planted, ready for use^ 
 he plucked one out with a dauntless coolness, and held i 
 up for her inspection, saying, " Look how badly this i 
 plated ; 'twill spoil every stitch you take with it." H 
 threw it out of the window, and evinced symptoms o 
 being about to plnck out the remainder from that hear 
 (where the fates had stuck none other than such as wer 
 "badly plated"), and stick the contents of his owi 
 needle-book into that pretty pincushion instead. But shi 
 waved him oif with an icy, repellant, gesture, saying 
 " Don't trouble yourself." 
 
 " I really wish your husband would come," he said, look 
 ing at his watch. " The king's shot must be over lonj 
 ere this time." 
 
 He took up the paper cap-pattern again, and the scissors 
 but, as she fixed on him a gaze of deep anxiety (lest h( 
 should spoil her pattern), he took from his pocket a shee 
 of verses dipped in hippocrene, and, by way of passing 
 the time, he clipped this up, by wavy lines, into a series 
 of hearts, one within the other. This gentleman, who 
 like the Augurs, always strove to carry oif the hear 
 of the sacrifice — he, whose own. heart (like that of i 
 coquette) constantly grew again as often as he lost i1 
 (as a lizard's tail does) — he had the word " heart," whicl 
 Germans and men in general seem almost to shrink froic 
 uttering, contLnually on his tongue, or, at all events 
 impressions of it in his hand. 
 
 My belief that his motive for leaving behind him (as he 
 did) his needles, and his rhymeful hearts, was that he had 
 observed of women that they always think fondly of an 
 absent person when they chance to see something of his 
 which he has left behind. Eosa belonged to that class ol 
 persons (of both sexes) who never show any cleverness 
 
CHAP. VII. J FLOWER, FBUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 229 
 
 delicacy of perception, or knowledge of human nature, 
 save in matters relating to love of the opposite sex. 
 
 He now catechised out of her a number of cooking and 
 washing receipts of various kinds, and these, despite hei 
 cautious monosyllabicity, she imparted — prescription 
 fashion — in all their fulness, both of woids and of ingre- 
 dients, At length he made preparations for departure, 
 siying, he had been most anxious for her husband's home- 
 coming because of a certain matter of business which he 
 could not well discuss with him on the shooting-ground, 
 among so many people, and before Herr von Blaise. "I 
 shall come another day," he said ; " but the most important 
 point of the affair I can mention to yourself," and he sat 
 down before her, with his hat and stick in his hand. Just as 
 he commenced his recital, however, observing that she was 
 standing, he laid aside his hat and stick to place a chair 
 for her, opposite to his. His propinquity was grateful to 
 her Schneiderian membrane, at any rate ; his odour was 
 paradisaic ; his pocket-handkerchief a musk-bag, his head 
 an altar of incense, or magnified civet-ball. (Shaw has 
 remarked that the whole viper tribe has the property of 
 emitting a peculiar, sweet scent.) 
 
 " She might readily see," he said, " that it referred to 
 that wretched lawsuit with the Heimlicher. The poor's 
 advocate did not deserve, indeed, that a man should 
 interest himself in Ms favour; but then, jou see, he had 
 an admirable wife, who did deserve it." (He italicised the 
 ■word "admirable " by means of a hurried squeeze of her 
 hand.) " He had been fortunate enough to induce Herr 
 von Blaise to defer his ' no ' three separate times, though he 
 had not as yet been able to speak to the advocate in person. 
 But now, that a pasquinade of Blr. Leibgeber's (whose 
 hand was well known), had come to light near a stove- 
 statue at the Heimlicher's, nothing approximating to a 
 yielding, or a payment of the trust-fund, was to be dreamt 
 of for a moment. Now this was a state of matters for 
 which his ver^' heart bled, particularly as, since he had 
 been in such poor health of late, he felt only too keen a 
 sympathy and interest in everything ; he knew perfectly 
 well what an unhappy condition her (Lenette's) household 
 matters had been placed in by this lawsuit ; and had often 
 
230 JEAN PAUL FKIEDKICH BICHTEE. [bOOK II 
 
 sighed, in vain, over many things. He should be do 
 lighted, therefore, to advance whatever she might require 
 for current expenditure. As yet she did not know him in 
 the slightest degree, and perhaps could scarce surmise 
 what he did, from motives of the purest benevolence, for 
 six charities in Kuhschnappel — though he could produce 
 documentary evidence if she lited," and he did produce 
 and hand to her six receipts of the Charitable Commission. 
 I should not be giving proof of that impartiality of character 
 ^vhich I bear the reputation of possessing, did T not here 
 freely admit, and clearly place on record, that the Venner 
 had, from his j'outh up, always shown a certain disposition 
 to benefit and assist the poor of both sexes, and that his 
 consciousness that he dealt in this large-hearted manner, 
 did (when compared with the narrow close-fistedness 
 prevalent in Kuhschnappel) give him some warrant for 
 bearing himself with a certain amount of proper pride 
 towards those mean and miserly beings who sate in judg- 
 ment upon his little genial breaches of the moral laws. 
 For his conscience bore him witness that, conversely to 
 the process whereby spiders are metamorphosed into 
 jewels, he spun his shining webs (of gold and silver), and 
 in their meshes, wet with the glittering dew of tears, made 
 an occasional capture from time to time. 
 
 But for a woman like Lenette (he continued) he would 
 do things of a much grander description ,■ as proofs of 
 which, given already by him, he needed only to point to 
 the fact that he had set at defiance the Heimlicher's 
 hostility towards her husband, and that he had more than 
 once quietly swallowed speeches of her husband's own, 
 such as in his social position he had never suffered any- 
 body to address to him before. " Name any sum of money 
 you are in want of; by Heaven, all you have to do is to ask 
 for it." 
 
 IJenette, bashful and trembling, glowed red with shame 
 at this discovery of (what she had believed to be) the 
 mystery of her poverty and her pawnings. With the 
 view of pouring a few drops of oil on the troubled waters, 
 he began, by way of preamble, to make some disparaging 
 remarks concerning his fiancee at Bayreuth. " She reads 
 too much, and doesn't work enough. I only wish she could 
 
CilAP, VII.J FLOWEB, FRUIT, AND THOBN PIECES. 23i 
 
 have the henefit of a few lessons from you in housekeeping. 
 And really, a lady such as you, with so many attractions 
 (quite unaware of them, too, herself), so much patience, 
 such wonderful diligence and assiduity, should have a 
 very different kind of household than this place for her 
 sphere of action." Her hand was by this time lying still 
 in the stocks — the close arrest — of his; her wings and her 
 tongue, as well as her hands, were tied and fettered by 
 that fainthearted incapacity of self-assertion which is born 
 of the sense of poverty. When women were in question, 
 Mr. Everard's longings and likings paid no heed to 
 boundary-marks; but rather strove hard to obliterate 
 them, and get rid of them altogether. Most men, in the 
 wild, unreasoning whirl of their appetites, are like the 
 jay, which tears the carnation to tatters in order to get 
 at its seeds. 
 
 Upon her downcast eyes he now riveted a long gaze of 
 fondness, not withdrawing it, however, when she raised 
 them up ; and, by dint of keeping his eyes very wide 
 open, and thinking with great vividness on pathetic and 
 touching subjects, he managed to squeeze out about as 
 much water as would have suiHced to make an end of a 
 humming bird of the smaller sort. 
 
 In him, as in a fine actor, all false emotions became for 
 the time real and genuine ; and when he flattered any one, 
 he at once began to respect him. As soon as he felt there 
 were tears enough in his eyes, and sighs enough in his 
 breast, he asked her if she had any idea what was causing 
 them. She looked innocently, and with kindly alarm, into 
 those eyes of his, and her own began to overflow. This 
 greatly encouraged him, and he said, " It is the fact that 
 you have not such a happy lot as you deserve." 
 
 Ah ! selfish pigmy ! at such a moment you might have 
 .spared this poor, anxious, trembling soul, sinking, well 
 nigh, in an ocean of tears for all the long, long past. 
 
 But he knew no sorrow save of the theatrical, the 
 transient, the petty, and the sham sort ; and so he spared 
 her not. 
 
 Yet that which he had expected would prove the bridge 
 from his heart to hers, namely, sorrow, became, on the con- 
 trary, the portcullis barrier between them. A dance, or some 
 
232 JEAN PADL FEIEDEICH EIOHTEE. [liOOK II. 
 
 joyful tumult of the tenses would have brought him 
 furl her with this commonplace, e very-day, honest, and 
 tipright woman than three pailfuls of selfish tears. His 
 hopes rose high, as he laid his flowery, sorrow-laden head 
 upon his hands, down into her lap. 
 
 But Lenette jumped up with such a suddenness that it 
 nearly knocked him over altogether. She gazed inquiringly 
 into his eyes. Upright women must, I think, have some 
 instinct of their own concerning the lightnings of the 
 eye, by means of which they can distinguish between the 
 lurid flashes of hell and the pure coruscations of heaven. 
 This profligate was as little aware of the flashes of his 
 eyes as was Moses of the biightness of his countenance. 
 Her glance shrunk before his scorching gaze ; at the same 
 time I feel it incumbent on me as an historian — seeing 
 that readers by the thousand (and I myself into the bar- 
 gain) are all up in arms to such an extent against this 
 defenceless Everaid — not to conceal the fact that Lenette 
 had had her mind's eye fi.rmly fixed upon certain rather 
 rude and free-handed sketches which Schulratb Stiefel had 
 drawn for her of the manoeuvring grounds of rakes in 
 general (and this one in particular), and, in consequence, 
 had pricked up her ears in alarm at each move he made, 
 whether in advance or in letj'eat. 
 
 And yet every word I write in defence of the poor rascal 
 will only tell against him now; indeed, there are many 
 ladies whose acquaintance with the Salic Law (or Mr. 
 Meiner's work) teaches them that in former times the 
 penalty for touching a woman's hand was the same as for 
 hewing off a man's middle finger, namely, fifteen shillings, 
 and who, being indignant with Eosa for his hand pressures, 
 would fain have him to be duly punished therefor. I am 
 convinced that these ladies would by no means be pacified 
 were I to go on speaking in his extenuation, for they have 
 doubtless learnt, out of Mallet's ' Introduction to the History 
 of Denmark,' that formerly persons who kissed without 
 leave, and against the will, were, by the law of the land, 
 liable to be banished. And there are very many women of 
 tJbe present day who are strictly governed by the ancient 
 pandects of Germany, and, in the case of lip-thieves (since, in 
 the eye of the law, banishment and confinement to one place 
 
CHAP. \1I.J FLOWEE, FRUIT, AND THOEK CIECES. 233 
 
 are held to be tantamount and equivalent one to another), 
 they adjudge them — not, it is true, to he banished from their 
 chambers, but to remain in them ; similarly, they lodge 
 debtors (to whom they liave given their hearts, and who 
 insist on retaining possession of the same) in the Marshalsea 
 of the Matrimonial Torus. 
 
 "When Eosa jumped up (as before set forth), he had 
 nothing to urge in extenuation of his false step but an 
 aggravation or augmentation of it, and accordingly he fairly 
 
 took the marble goddess in his arms But at this point 
 
 my progress is barred for a moment by an observation which 
 has to be made ere I proceed ; it is this : There are many 
 kindly beauties who cover their retreats or make amends 
 for their denials by concessions. By way of making them- 
 selves some amends for their hard services in the campaign 
 of virtue, they offer no resistance at all in matters of the 
 smaller sort, skilfully abandoning a good many intrench- 
 ments and outworks (in the shape of words, articles of dress, 
 and so on), to enable them to deftly steal a march upon the 
 enemy and outmanoeuvre him — just as clever generals burn 
 the suburbs that they may fight the better up in the 
 citadel. 
 
 My sole object in making this observation is to point out 
 that it did not applj' to Lenette in any respect whatever, 
 Pure as she was in so'il and in body, she might have gone 
 straight away into heaven just as she stood, without 
 changing so much as a stitch of her attire — have taken her 
 feyes, heart, clothes, everything except that tongue of hers, 
 which was uncultivated, rude, indiscreet ; so that her 
 resistance to Everard's attempted burglary on her lips was 
 unnecessarily grave and discourteous (considering what a 
 trifling case of orchard-robbery it really was), much more 
 w than it would have been had Lenetto been able to drive 
 the Schulrafh's highly-coloured prognostics concerning 
 Eosa out of her head. 
 
 Eosa had anticipated a denial of a less rmpleasant kind. 
 His obstinacy availed him nothing as against hers, which 
 was the greater of the two. A gnat-swarm of fi.rm and 
 jTassionate resolves buzzed about his ears ; but when at 
 lungth (probably inspired thereto by the Schulrath) she 
 eaid, " Your lordship remembers that the Tenth Command- 
 
234 JEAH PAUL FEIEDEICH KICHTEIl. [bOOK II. 
 
 ment says, ' Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife' " — 
 from the crossroad between love and hatred, on which he 
 was standing, he suddenly made a great jump — into his 
 pocket and brought out a wreath of artificial flowers, 
 "There!" he cried, "take them, you nasty, inexorable 
 creature ! just this one forget-me-not as a souvenir ; devil 
 fly away with me if I want anything further!" If sha 
 had taken it, he would immediately have wanted something 
 further ; but she turned her face aside and repulsed the 
 silken garland with both hands. At this the honeycomb 
 of love in his heart soured into very vinegar ; he grew wild 
 with fury, and throwing the flowers right over the table, 
 he cried, " Why, they are your own pawned flowei-s — J 
 redeemed them myself — so take them you must." On which 
 he took his departure, not, however, without making his 
 bow, which Lenette, all hurt and offended as sh^ was, 
 ceremoniously returned. 
 
 She took the envenomed wreath to the window, to have 
 a better light to examine it by. Alas ! these were indeed, 
 and beyond all doubt, the very roses and rosebuds whose 
 steely thorns were wet with the blood-drops from a pair of 
 pierced hearts. Whilst she, thus weeping and bowed 
 beneath the weight of her woe, stunned and stupid rather 
 than observant, stood at her window, it suddenly str.ick 
 her as a strange circumstance that the torturer of her soul, 
 though he had gone rattling down the stairs in a hurry 
 •with, noise enough, had never gone out at the street-door. 
 After a long and attentive watch, during which anxiety, 
 closely bordering upon terror, assumed the role of com 
 forter and spake louder than her sorrow (the fulure, at the 
 same time, driving the past out of view), the becrowned 
 hairdresser came galloping homo (the crown of his hat 
 pointing heavenwards), and shouted to her in a mere paren- 
 thetical manner as he dashed by, " Madame the queen I " 
 for his great idea was, that before anything else he should 
 rush home, and there on the spot, and without a moment's 
 delay, make proclamation of the kingship and queenship of 
 four persons. 
 
 There now devolves upon me the duty of conducting my 
 readers to the corner where the Venner is cowering. From 
 Lenette he had descended (in two senses of that word) to 
 
OHAP. VII.j FLOWEE, FEOIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 235 
 
 the hairdresser's wife, one of that common class of women 
 who never so much as dream of an infidelity all the year 
 round — for no horse in all the kingdom is harder worked — 
 and commit one only when there appears on the scene some 
 tempter, whom they neither invite nor resist, probably 
 forgetting all about the incident by the time next baking 
 day comes round. On the whole, the superiority which the 
 female middle-class is disposed to arrogate to itself over 
 that of ,a higher rank, is just about equally great as it is 
 questionable. There are not a great many tempters in the 
 middle-class, and those there are are not of a very tempting 
 sort. 
 
 Like the earthworm, which has ten hearts that extend 
 all the way from one end of it to the other, Eosa was fitted 
 out with as many hearts as there are specieLS of women ; for 
 the delicate, the coarse, the religious, the immoral — every 
 sort, in fact; he was always ready with the appropriate 
 heart. For as Lessing and others so frequently blame the 
 critics for narrowness and onesidedness in matters of 
 taste, inculcating upon them a greater universality of it — 
 a greater power of appreciation of the beautiful, to what- 
 soever times and nations belonging — so do men of the world 
 also advocate a universality of taste for the live beautiful, 
 on two legs, not excluding any variety of it, but deriving 
 gratification from all. This taste the Venner possessed. 
 There was such a marked distinction between his feelings 
 for the wigmaker's wife and for Lenette, that, in revenge 
 upon the latter, he came to the determination, on the stair, 
 to take a jump right over this distinction and slip in to pay 
 a visit to the landlady, while her narrow-chested husband 
 was away scheming and plotting in confederacy for a crown 
 in another quarter. Sophia (this was her name) had been 
 always combing at wigs in the bookbinder's on the occa- 
 sions when the Venner had been sitting there on the busi- 
 ness of getting his novels and life romances done up and 
 bound, and there they had communicated to one other, by 
 looks and glances, all that which people arfe not in the 
 habi of confiding to third parties. Meyern made his entree 
 into the childless abode with all the confident assurance of 
 an epic poet, who soars superior to all prefaces. There was 
 a certain corner partitioned off from the room by boards : 
 
236 JEAN PAUL FKIEDEICH RICHTER. [bOOK II. 
 
 it contained little ov nothing — no window, no chair, a little 
 warmth from the sitting-room, a clothes-cupboard, and the 
 couple's bed. 
 
 When the first compliments had been exchanged, Eosa 
 took up a position behind the door of this partitioned space, 
 for the street passed close by the window, and at this late 
 hour he was anxious not to give occasion to unpleasant 
 surmises on the part of passers b}'. Of a sudden, however, 
 Sophia saw her husband run by the window. The intent 
 to commit a sin may betray itself by a superabundance of 
 carefulness and caution ; Eosa and Sophia were so startled 
 at the sight of the runner, that she begged the young gen- 
 tleman to get behind the partition until her husband should 
 go back to the shooting-range. The Venner went stumbling 
 into the sanctum sanctorum, while Sophia placed herself at 
 the door of it, and, as her husband entered, made as though 
 she were just coming out of it, closing tbe door after her. 
 The moment he had stuttered out the news of his elevation 
 in rank, he darted out of the room, crying, " She upstairs 
 there knows nothing about it yet." Gladness and hurried 
 draughts of liquor bad just blurred the shaip outlines of his 
 lighter ideas with a thin haze or fog. He ran out and 
 called " Madame Siebenk»s " up the stairs (he was anxious 
 to be off again so as to join the procession). She hastened 
 half way down, heard the glad news with trembling, and, 
 either by way of masking her joy, or as a fruit of a warmer 
 liking for her husband now that fortune seemed kinder to 
 him (or it may have been, perhaps, another fruit which 
 joy commonly bears, namely, anxiety, or shall I name it 
 fear ?), she threw down to him the question, " Ts Mr. von 
 Meyern out yet?" 
 
 "What! was Jie in my room just now?" cried he, while 
 his wife echoed, unbidden, from the door, " Has he been in 
 the house?" "He was here, upstairs," Lenette replied, 
 with a touch of suspicion, " and he hasn't gone out yet." 
 
 The hairdresser's suspicions were now awakened, for 
 the consumptive trust no woman, and, like children, take 
 every chimney-sweep they see for the devil himself, hoof, 
 horns, tail and all. " Things are not all exactly as they 
 should be here, Sophy," said he to his wife. The passinp- 
 brain-dropsy, induced by what he had drunk during the 
 
CHAP. VII.] FLOWEK, FRUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 237 
 
 day and by Lis talf-share in a throne and fifty florins, had 
 the effect of screwing his courage up to such a pitch that 
 he secretly formed the idea of treating the Venner to a 
 good sound cudgelling in the event of his coming upon 
 him in any illegal corner. Accordingly he started upon 
 voyages of discovery, first exploring the entrance passage, 
 where Eosa's sweet-scented head served him as a trail, or 
 lure ; he followed this incense-pillar of cloud into his own 
 room, observing that this Ariadne's thread of his, this 
 sweet odour, grew stronger as he went. Here among the 
 flowers lay the serpent — as, according to Pliny, sweet- 
 smelling forests harbour venomous snakes. Sophia wished 
 herself in the nethermost of Dante's hells, though in fact 
 and reality she was there already. It dawned upon the 
 hairdresser that if the Venner would only stay where he 
 was, in the closed titmouse-trap of the partitioned comer, 
 he should have bruin safe in his toils ; consequently he 
 reserved till the last a peep into the said corner. What is 
 historically certain is, that he seized upon a pair of curling- 
 tongs wherewith to. probe the dark comer and gauge the 
 cubic contents thereof. Into its dark depths he made a 
 horizontal lunge with his tongs, but encountered nothing. 
 He next inserted this probe, this searcher of his, into more 
 places than one — firstly, into the bed, next, under the bed 
 (taking this time the precaution to keep opening and 
 shutting the tongs, which were not hot, on the chance ol 
 some stray lock of hair getting caught in them in the dark- 
 ness.) However, all this trap captured was air. At this 
 juncture he came upon a clothes-cupboard, the door of 
 which had always stood gaping ajar for the last six years 
 or so ; the key had been lost just that time, and in this 
 slipshod household it was a matter of necessity to keep this 
 door open, otherwise the lock would have snapped to, and 
 there would have been no getting in. To-day, however, 
 this door was close shut. The Venner (in a profuse perspi- 
 ration) was inside ; the friseur pressed the lock home, and 
 then the net was fairly over the quail. 
 
 The hairdresser, now master of the situation, quietjy 
 took the command of his establishment at Ms ease; the 
 Venner could not get out ! 
 
 He despatched Sophia (as red as a furnace and loudly 
 
238 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH EICHTER. [BOOK IL 
 
 dissentient, though, forced to obey) for the locksmith and 
 his breaching implements; however, she quite made np 
 her mind to come back with a lie, not with a locksmith. 
 When she had marched off he fetched Fecht, the cobbler, 
 ap, to be at once his witness of and his assistant in that 
 which he proposed to accomplish. The shoe-stitcher crept 
 into the room softly at his heels ; the phthisic haircnrler 
 went Tip to the canary-cage and addressed the bird impri- 
 soned therein (tapping the while with his tongs on the 
 gate of this fortress of Engelsburg) as follows : " I hnow 
 you ^are in there, honourable Sir, make a move ; there's 
 nobody here but me, as yet (there'll soon be more). I can 
 break the cupboard open with my tongs and let you out." 
 Laying his ear close to the door of this Spandau, he heard 
 the captive sigh. 
 
 " Ah ! you are pufEng and panting a little, honourable 
 gentleman," said the wigmaker ; " I am here at the door 
 by myself now. When the locksmith comes and breaks it 
 open, we shall all see you, and I'll call the whole house ; 
 but all I shall ask to let you jump out now, quietly, and 
 be off unseen, will be a mere trifle. Give me that hat of 
 yours, and a shilling or two, and give me your custom." 
 
 At length the miserable prisoner knocked upon the door 
 and said, " I am in here ; just let me out, will you, my man, 
 and I'll do all you say. I can help, from the inside, to 
 break open the door." The wigmaker and the cobbler 
 applied their battering apparatus to the " parloir " of this 
 donjon-keep, and the captive bounded forth. During the 
 breaking open of the gates of jubilee the friseur parleyed 
 or negotiated a little more, and amerced the anchorite in 
 the locksmith's fee ; at last, bringing Eosa forth, like Pallas 
 in her mail, when she issued from Jove's cranium into the 
 light of day, "The landlord," said JFecht, "couldn't have 
 managed the job without me." 
 
 Eosa opened his eyes wide at the sight of this auxiliary 
 deliverer from the house of bondage, took off the sweet- 
 smelling hat (which the cobbler immediately clapped on 
 to his own head), shed some drops of golden rain from his 
 I waistcoat-pocket upon the pair, and, in dread of them and 
 of the locksmith's arrival, fled home bareheaded in tho 
 dark. The friseur, whose bald pate was so near to the 
 
CHAP. VII.J FLOWER, FUUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 239 
 
 triple crown of tlie emperors of old, and the popes ol 
 the present (for the eagle gave him a crown, the Venner 
 
 a hat, and his wife had nearly placed something else ), 
 
 — however, the friseur, in high satisfaction of this new 
 martyr- crown of felt, which he had heen envying the Venner 
 the possession of all the afternoon, went back with it to 
 the shooting-ground, that he might have the gratification 
 of marching home in company with his co-emperor, at- 
 tended by their subjects and their vassals. 
 
 The wigmaker took his hat off to his royal brother Sie- 
 benkses (that hat so much more worthy of a co-king than 
 his former one), and told him something of what had befen 
 happening. 
 
 The Heimlicher von Blaise smiled his Domitian smile 
 to-day more affectionately than ever, which made the 
 bird emperor far from comfortable; for friendliness and 
 smiling make the heart colder when it is cold to begin 
 with, and warmer when it is warm—just as spiritua nitri 
 does water. From a friendliness of this particular kind 
 nothing was to be expected but its opposite, as in ancient 
 jurisprudence excessive piety in a woman was merely a 
 proof that she had sold herself to the devil. Christ's im- 
 plements of torture became holy relics ; and, conversely, 
 relics of saints often become implements of torture. 
 
 Under the twinkling gleams of the wide, starry firma- 
 ment (where new constellations kept bursting into view, 
 in the shape of banging rockets) the grand procession 
 marched along. The competitors who had come after the 
 king's shot had fired their rifles in the air, by way of 
 salute to the royal pair. The two kings walked side by 
 side, but the one who belonged to the guild of wigmakers 
 found some difficulty in standing (what between joy and 
 beer), and would gladly have sat down upon a throne. 
 However, over these seventy Brethren of the Eagle, and 
 the two vicars of the empire, we are losing sight, and de- 
 laying to treat of something else. 
 
 To wit, the town militia, who are also present, or 
 more properly speaking, the Eoyal Kuhschnappel Militia. 
 Concerning this regiment I think a good deal, and say only 
 about half what I think. A city or county militia regi- 
 ment — and particularly the Eoyal Kuhschnappel Militia — 
 
240 JEAN PAUL FEIEDKICH KICHTER. [BOOK II 
 
 is a distinguished and important body of men, whose raison 
 d'etre is to scorn, and show contempt for the enemy, by 
 always turning their backs upon him — showing him, in 
 fact, nothing hut backs, like a well-ordered library. If 
 the enemy has anything in the nature of courage, then our 
 said force sacrifices to Fear like the ancient Spartans ; and 
 as poets and actors ought in the first place to experience 
 and picture to themselves in a vivid manner the emotions 
 they are about to portray, the militia endeavours to give 
 an illustration, in itself, of that panic terror into which it 
 would fain throw the enemy. Now with the view of 
 affording these men of war (or " of peace " if you prefer it) 
 the necessary amount of practice in the mimic representa- 
 tion of terror, they are daily put through a process of being 
 terrified at the city gates. It is called " being relieved." 
 When one of these men of peace is on sentry, another of 
 them, a comrade of his, marches up to his sentry box, 
 shouts out words of command at him in a warlike tone of 
 voice, and makes hostile and threatening gestures in close 
 proximity to his nose ; the one who is on sentry also cries 
 out in a similar voice, goes through certain motions with 
 his weapon, and then lays it down and gets away as fast 
 as he can; the conqueror in this brief winter campaign 
 retains possession of the field, and puts on the watchcoat 
 which he has taken from the other man by way of booty ; 
 but that thej' may each have an opportunity of being 
 terrified by the others, they take the part of conqueror 
 turn about. A warrior of this peaceful order may very 
 often be most dangerous in actual war, when, in the act of 
 bolting, he happens, in throwing his rifle away with the 
 bayonet fixed, to throw it too far, and harpoon his too 
 proximate pursuer with it. Militiamen of this sert 
 ("precious" they are in every sense) are usually posted, 
 for greater security's sake, in public places where they are 
 safe from injury, such as the gates of towns, where 
 these harpooners are protected by the town and gate ; at 
 the same time I have often wished, in pa;ssing, that these 
 students of the art military were provided with a good 
 thick stick, so that they might have something to defend 
 themselves with if anybody should try to take away their 
 muskets. 
 
CHAP. VII.] FLOWEK, FRUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 2il 
 
 It will appear to many that T am but ai'tfully cloaking 
 the shortcomings of the militia in tiiese respects; 1 am 
 prepared for this — hut it is not difficult to perceive that 
 this species of praise also apjjlies to all small standing 
 armies of lesser principalities forces which are recruited 
 only that they may recruit. I shall here utter myself on 
 this subject a little. Vuillaurae recommends educators 
 to teach children to play at soldiers, to maite them drill 
 and mount guard, in order to accustom them, by this play, 
 to firm and active habits both of body and of mind ; in 
 short, to render them firm and upright. This soldier-game 
 has been carried on for a considerable time already in 
 Campe's Institute. But is Mr. Vuillaume really ignorant 
 that scholar-drill, such as he recommends, has been long 
 fiince introduced by every good prince of the empire into 
 his dominions ? Does he suppose it is anything new 
 when I tell him that these princes seize upon all strong 
 young fellows (as soon as they attain the canonical height) 
 and have them drilled, in order that they, the State's 
 children, may thus be taught mores, carriage, and all that 
 has to be acquired in the State's school ? The truth is 
 that, even in the veiy smallest principalities, the soldiers 
 often possess all the acquirements and accomplishments of 
 real soldiers ; they can present arms, stand bolt upright at 
 portals, and smoke at all events, if not^re — matters which 
 a poodle learns with ease, but a country bumpkin with 
 more difficulty. 
 
 To these rehearsals of warlike business I attribute it 
 that many otherwise clever and sensible men have allowed 
 themselves to believe that this sham soldiery of the little 
 States, is in fact a real soldiery ; they must otherwise have 
 seen in a moment that with so small a force neither could 
 a small territory be defended, nor a large one attacked ; 
 neither is there indeed any need for even this small force, 
 since in Germany the question of relative strength is 
 merged in that of equality of religion. Hunger, cold, naked- 
 ness, and privation are the benefits which Vuillaume con- 
 siders the soldier-game tc hold out to his scholars, as 
 lessons in patient endurance and fortitude ; now these are 
 the very advantages which the State schools above referred 
 to confer upon the young men of the country — and that 
 
 U. B 
 
242 JEAN PAXIL FEIEDKICH BICHTEE. [BOOK II. 
 
 mucli more thoroughly and eflScacioiisly than Vuillaume 
 does — which, of course, is the entire ohject of the insti- 
 tution. I am quite aware that there are not infrequent 
 cases in which perhaps a third part of the population 
 escapes being made into soldiery, and consequently gets 
 none of the valuable practice in question ; at the same 
 time there can be no doubt that if we even get the length 
 of having two-thirds of the population with rifles on their 
 shoulders in the place of scythes, the remaining third (in- 
 asmuch as it has considerably less to mow, to thresh, and 
 to subsist upon) obtains the before-mentioned benefits (of 
 cold, hunger, nakedness, &c.}, almost gratis, and without 
 having to fire so much as a single shot. Let but barracks 
 be multiplied in a sufficient ratio in a country, in a pro- 
 vince, parish, town, village (as the case may be), and the 
 remainder of the houses will of themselves settle down 
 into suburbs, and accessory and out-buildings to the 
 barracks, nay, become absolute conventual establishments, 
 in which the three monastic vows (the Prince alone being 
 pere provincial) are, whether taken or not, at all events most 
 religiously Jcept, 
 
 We now hear the two vicars of the empire go into 
 their homes. The frisenr's sole punishment to his wife 
 is a narrative of the whole affair, and a sight of the hat ; 
 while the advocate rewards Lenette with the kiss which 
 she had refused to other lips. If her story did not please 
 him, the teller of it did, and on the whole the only thing 
 she omitted was the flower- wreath, and the allusions made 
 to it. She would not cloud the happiness of his evening, 
 nor bring back upon him the pain and the reproaches of 
 that other evening when she had pawned it. I, like many 
 of my readers, had expected that Lenette would have 
 received the news of the enthronisation far too coldly; 
 she has deceived us all ; she received it even too joyfully. 
 But there were two good reasons for this ; she had heard 
 of it an hour before, and consequently the first feminine 
 mourning over a joy had had time to give place to the joy 
 itself. For women are like thermometers, which on a sudden 
 application of heat sink at first a few degrees, as a prelimi- 
 nary to rising a good many. The second reason for her 
 being thus indulgent and sympathetic was the humiliating 
 
CHAP. VIII.] FLOWEH, FEpiT, AND THOKN PIECES. 243 
 
 conBcioTisness she possessed of the Vcniier's visit, and of 
 the wreath in its hiding-placo ; for we are often severe 
 when we are strong, and practise forbearance when we 
 stand in need of it. 
 
 I now wish the entire royal family and household a 
 good night, and a pleasant awaking in the eighth chapter. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 SCRUPLES AS TO PAYMENT OF DEBTS THE EICH PAUPER S SUNDAY 
 
 THRONE-CEEEMON'IAL ARTIFICIAL FLOWERS ON THE GRAVE — 
 
 NEW THISTlE SICEDLINGS OF CONTENTION. 
 
 SliiBENK^s, a king, and yet a poor's-advocate and member 
 of a wood-economising association, arose next morning a 
 man who could lay forty good florins down upon his table 
 at any hour of the day. The whole of that forenoon he 
 enjoyed a pleasure which possesses, for the virtuous and 
 right-thinking, an especial charm — that of paying debts ; 
 firstly, to the Saxon his house-rent, and then to the 
 butchers, bakers, and other nurses of this needy machine, 
 our body, their little duodecimo accounts. For he was 
 like the aristocracy who borrow from the lower classes, 
 not money, but only victuals, just as there are many judges 
 who are bribeable with the latter, but not with the 
 former. 
 
 That he does pay his debts is not a circumstance which 
 should lower him in the opinion of anybody who re- 
 members that he is a man of very poor " extraction " — 
 scarcely of any " extraction " at all, in fact. A man of 
 rank is expected (as a thing becoming his position) not to 
 pay his debts, for thanks to the papal indulgences granted 
 to his noble ancestors at the time of the Crusades, he need 
 give his mind no trouble on the subject of liability, and 
 least of all should liabilities of a pecuniary nature cause 
 him a thought. To place a man of a high and delicate 
 sense of honour, a courtier say, under an obligation (e.g. to 
 lend him money) is to wound his feelings to a greater or 
 
 u 2 
 
244 • JEAN PAUL FKIEDRICH EICHTEB. [bOOK II. 
 
 less extent ; and a wound of this sort to the feelings is 
 a matter which his refined sensitive nature naturally leads 
 him to endeavour to forgive ; he will, therefore, do his 
 utmost to drive the injury thus done him, with all its 
 attendant circumstances, completely out of his mind. 
 Should the person who inflicted this hurt upon his sense 
 of honour remind him of it, he will then, with genuine 
 delicacy of feeling, make as if he were scarcely aware that 
 he had heen wounded. Kough young squires, again, and 
 officers on the march do really pay, and moreover, they 
 coin (if the expression may be used) for themselves the 
 money they require, as is the case in Algiers, where every 
 one possesses the privilege of minting. In Malta there is 
 current a leathern coin of the value of eightpence, on 
 which is the legend " Non As, sed Pides." With leather 
 money of a somewhat different description, not circular in 
 shape, hut drawn out to some length, more like that of the 
 ancient Spartans (and, indeed, this sort of money usually 
 gets the appellation of dog-whips or riding-whips), the 
 landed gentrys and people of village nohility pay their 
 coachmen, Jews, carpenters, and others to whom they owe 
 money — going on paying them, in fact, until they are quite 
 satisfied. Indeed I once stood at table and saw officers, men 
 most tenacious of their honour, take their swords from the 
 wall or from their sides, and therewith, when the boots 
 asked for his money, pay him in the true currency of 
 antiquity (among the brave Spartans, also, weapons were 
 money), so that, in fact, the fellow's jacket got a better 
 brushing than most of the boots for cleaning which he 
 wanted to be paid. And looking at the matter all round, 
 ought it really to be accounted a grave ofience in military 
 personages, even of the highest rank, to pay their small 
 debts ? So that often, when some wretched tailor asks for 
 metal, they take the iron ell-measure from him, and (while, 
 moreover, applying to Mm in person the very measure which 
 he applied to their furs) press — not perhaps into his hands, 
 but on to a part of his body on which " contour " lines 
 might be drawn — not mere coins, or bills on approved 
 security, but a metal which Peru with all its wealth does 
 not boast the possession of, the aforesaid iron to wit ? In 
 Sumatra the skulls of the enemy are their Louis d'ors and 
 
eUAP. VIII.J FLOWER, FEOIT, AND THORN PIECES. 245 
 
 liead-pieces, and even ihig species of currency — the hostile 
 head of the tradesman who has furniwhed goods — is often 
 taken by the nobler cieditor, just by way of satisfying him 
 " in full of all demauds." Neither in tlie Clausular Juris- 
 pi'udence nor in the most recent Prussian code is it enacted 
 that a creditor is to stipulate in his bill which species of 
 currency he elects to be paid in by his nuble debtor, the 
 metallic currency or the castigatory. 
 
 On this Thursday morning Siebenkses had a tough and 
 ticklish argument, or piece of special pleading, to go 
 through on the subject of the half-heart or (half-pig) of 
 the cardinal protector, which his co-king, the hairdresser, 
 pressed the acceptance of upon him, by way of making 
 more sure of duly sharing all the prizes which appertained 
 to the king's shot himself. But his having gained the 
 twenty-five florin prize did not add to the warmth of his 
 arguments, and at last he agreed to the arrangement that 
 the animal should be eaten, pure and clean, like a pass- 
 over lamb, next Sunday in Siebenkaes's room by the lodgers 
 generally, and by the two rifle kings with their queens in 
 company with Schnhath Stiefel. The flower goddess of the 
 days of man took at this juncture a fingertipf'ul or two of 
 seeds of quickly blooming and quickly fading flowers 
 (such as like the hellebore come into blossom in our De- 
 cember) and sowed them be>ide the path which Firmian's 
 steps most often trod. Ah, happy man^ how soon will 
 these forced blossoms fall from your days. Will not your 
 philosophic Diana-and-bread-finit tree (which takes the 
 place, in your case, of an oak of lamentation) fare like the 
 cut plants which people put in lime-water in their 
 chambers on St. Andrew's Day, and which, after a hurried 
 outburst of yellowish leaves and feeble dingy flowers, fade 
 and perish for good and all ? 
 
 Sleep, riches, and health, to be truly enjoyed, must be 
 interrupted ; it is only during the first few days after the 
 burden of poverty or sickness has been lifted from a man's 
 shoulders, that the upright posture, and the free breath, 
 cause their fullest measure of delight. These days lasted 
 for our Firmian until the Sunday. He built a whole cubic - 
 foot of his Devil rampart (in his ' Selection from the Devil's 
 Papers '), he wrote reviews, he wrote law papers, he kept a 
 
246 JEAN PAUL PRIEDEICH EICHTEE. [iJOOK II. 
 
 careful eye on the maintenance of the household truce 
 (liable to be disturbed by the question of the redemption 
 of the pawned furniture). I shall treat of this matter 
 firstly, before proceeding to give an account of the Platonic 
 banquet of the Sunday. On Tirmian's coronation-day he 
 invested twenty-one florins in a watch, with the view 
 of avoiding frittering away his money by driblets ; he 
 thought it well to cast an anchor of hope into his watch- 
 pocket. Then, when Lis wife talked of redeeming the 
 salad-bowl, the herring-div~h, and other pledges — a matter 
 involving not kisses only but half of his capital — ^he would 
 say, " I'm not in favour of it, old Sabel would very soon 
 have to carry them off again; however, if you're deter- 
 mined, pray have them out, I shall not interfere." If he 
 had offered any opposition, back they would have had to 
 come ; but, inasmuch as he poured the greater portiou of 
 his cash into her money bag, and as she marked its daily 
 ebb — and as she could go and redeem the furniture any 
 day — ^why for that very reason she lot it alone. Women 
 are fond of putting off, men of pushing on; with the 
 former, patience most speedily gains us our point ; with 
 the latter (ministers of the crown for instance) impatience. 
 I here once more remind all German husbands, who have 
 any pledge they do not wish to redeem, how to deal with 
 their fair resisters. 
 
 Every morning she said, " Ah ! we really must send 
 and get back our plates," to which he as regularly anti- 
 phonated, "J don't think so; I praise j'on rather for not 
 doing it," And in this manner he caused his own desire 
 to assume the form of another person's desert. Firmian 
 understood some individual specimens of humanity, but 
 not humanity as a class, in its broad sense ; he was em- 
 barrassed with, every woman at first, while her acquaintance 
 was new, though not so afterw^ards when he came to know 
 her better; he knew exactly how one ought to talk, walk, 
 and stand, in " society," but he never put this knowledge 
 in practice ; he took accurate note of all outward and 
 inward awkwardness of other people, but yet retained all 
 his own; and after treating his acquaintances for years 
 with the airs of a superior, experienced man of the world 
 accustomed to "society," he would suddenly find, on some 
 
CHAP. VIII.] FLOWER, FKUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 247 
 
 occasion of his Tjeing from home, that, unlike a true man of 
 the world, he had no effect or influence whatever on people 
 to whom he was a stranger ; to make a long tale short, he 
 was a man of letters. 
 
 Meanwhile, however, before the Sunday came, notwith- 
 standing all the peace-sermons and peace-treaties in his 
 heart, he found that he had plumped, before he knew 
 where he was, right into the thick of a household battle of 
 the frogs and mice once more, which occurred as follows : — 
 It is matter of history, derived from his own statement, 
 that, as Lenette kept on ceaselessly washing her hands and 
 arms, as well as other things by the hundred (although, for 
 the most part, with cold water, it being impossible to have 
 warm water continually ready) — that, I say, he simply 
 asked, in the gentlest tone in the world, the kindly and 
 half-playful question, " Doesn't that cold water give you 
 cold?" She answered " No," in a «os<enMto voice. "Per- 
 haps warm water would be more likely to do so, would it ? " 
 he continued. Her answer was, " Yes, it would," delivered 
 in a snapping staccato. Moralists and psychologists, who 
 may be a good deal surprised at this half-angry answer to 
 a question so innocent, are, contrary to my expectations, far 
 behindhand in their knowledge of psychology in general, 
 and the psychology of this tale in particular, lenette 
 knew by experience that the advocate, like Socrates, gene- 
 rally opened his battles in the most dulcet tones, as the 
 Spartans commenced theirs to the sound of flutes, and, in 
 fact, continued them in the same strain, that, like the said 
 Spartans, he might retain complete command of himself. 
 She therefore dreaded that, on this occasion also, his flute- 
 text might usher in a declaration of war against the femi- 
 nine form of government, of which the various provinces 
 of work are divided one from another by washing-waters, 
 as the judicial districts of modern Bavaria are by rivers. 
 
 " What key is a husband to play his tune in, I ask you 
 all!" the advocate would often cry with curses, "since, 
 whether he takes it in the major or in the minor, or plays 
 piano or forte, it seems all the same in the end ?" 
 
 On the present occasion, however, all he was aiming at, 
 his gentleness of demeanour notwithstanding, was a preface 
 to a proper system of educating or training the bodies of 
 
248 JEAN PAUL PEIEDKICH KICHTEB, [bOOK II. 
 
 children. For after her answer he went on to say, " I am. 
 delighted to hear you say so. If we had children, I see 
 you would be continually washing them, and with cold 
 water, too, over their whole bodies, and this would invigo- 
 rate them and make them strong and hardy, since, as you 
 s^, it produces warmth." Her only answer to this was to 
 hold her hands aloft, folded for victory, like the "biblical 
 prophet — for, in her eyes, a cold bathing of children was a 
 Herodian blood-bath. Tirmian then developed with much, 
 greater clearness his invigorating system of upbringing, 
 while more and more strenuously strove his wife against 
 it, with all her feathers ruifled, till by dint of able expo- 
 sition on both sides of the respective masculine and femi- 
 nine systems of rearing, they had nearly reached a point 
 where they would have clashed together, like a couple of 
 summer thunderclouds, had not he dispelled these by firing 
 the following shot : " Good heavens ! have ice any children ? 
 Why should we make fools of ourselves in this way about 
 the matter?" 
 
 " I was speaking of other people's children," was Le- 
 nette's reply. 
 
 Consequently, as I said above, war did not break out, 
 but, on the other hand, the morning of the Sabbath of peaco 
 brake in, and with it came the guests who were bent upon 
 possessing themselves of (and eating) the warm and divided 
 heart, or pig, of the Babylonish harlot, or Cardinal Pro- 
 tector. It seemed, in fact, as if some happy star of tho 
 wise men of the Bast must be standing in the heavens 
 above this houseful of recipients of out-door relief, for theio 
 had, by good luck, been a gale of wind on the previous 
 Friday which had blown down some half of the Govern- 
 ment forest and strevm the path to Advent, for the poor, 
 so grandly with branches (and the trees attached) that the 
 entire staff of forest officials could not hinder the ingathering 
 of such a vintage. For many a long year the Morbitzer's 
 house hadn't boasted anything approaching to such a stock 
 of timber, part of it purchased, part adroitly collected. 
 
 And if every Sunday is^— in a poor man's quarters — in it- 
 self and in the nature of things, not only a sun-day, but a 
 moon-and-stars-day into the bargain — a day when a poor 
 feUow has his mouthful or two of food, his trifle or two of 
 
CHAP. VIII.] FLOWER, FEUIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 249 
 
 good clothes, his twelve hours for eating and twelve for 
 lying down, besides the necessary neighbours to talk with — 
 it may be conjectured in what a superlative sort this par- 
 ticular Sunday dawned upon the Morbitzer household, 
 where everybody was as sure of eating his share of the pig 
 in the afternoon as of hearing the sermon in the morning, 
 and with as little to pay for the one as for the other, seeing 
 that it was a settled matter that the lodger of greatest 
 dignity in the establishment had determined that his coro- 
 nation feast should be celebrated nowhere but there, at the 
 table with mere working men. 
 
 Old Sabel was on the spot before the earliest church-bell 
 had begun to toll. The rifle-king's crown-treasury could 
 afford to appoint her hereditary mistress of the kitchen, 
 under Lenette, for a kreuzer or two and a plate or so of 
 victuals ; but the queen looked upon her as a superfluity and 
 coadjutor, or auxiliary queen. A king on the chessboard 
 gets two queens whenever a mere ordinary pawn gets moved 
 on to the place of royalty, one of the royal squares (though 
 he has not lost his first consort) ; and indeed it is just 
 the same when it happens under the canopy of a throne. 
 Lenette, however, would have preferred to have washed, 
 cooked, and served the meats with her own unassisted 
 hands, like a true Homeric or Cailovingian princess. The 
 marksman-monarch himself fled the noisy, dusty throne- 
 scaffold of the day, and in a loose old coat, happy and free, 
 he rambled about the broad green levels of the quiet, bine, 
 latter autumn, checked by no interfering dry stems or 
 straw sheaves standing sentry on the plain, and bursting 
 no thicker barrier-chains than the webs of the spiders. 
 Never do husbands more happily and tranquilly take their 
 walks abroad — out in the open country, or, indeed, up and 
 down in other people's roohis — than when, in their own, 
 the stamping-mills, the sugar and fanning-mills are at 
 work, whirling and roaring, and they promise themselves, 
 at their home-coming, the clean, finished product and out- 
 come of all these mill-wheels. Siebenkaes glanced with a 
 poet's idyllic eye from his quiet meadow into the distant 
 noise-chamber, full of pans, choppers, and besoms, and 
 found true and deep delight in a peaceful contemplation of 
 the whirl of backwards and forwards assiduitj' going on 
 
250 JEAN PAUL FEIEDKICH EICHTER. [BOOK II, 
 
 there, and in picturing to himself and joining in, the plea- 
 sant tongue-visions of the hungry guests, till suddenly he 
 grew red and hot. " You're doing a fine thing ! " he said, 
 addressing himself; "J could do that, myself, too! But 
 there's the poor wife scruhbing and cooking herself to death 
 at home, and nobody giving her even a thought of thanks." 
 And the least he could do was to vow, on the spot, that 
 however he might find things moved about and " put in 
 order " in the house on his return, he would accept and 
 belaud it all without a word of demur. 
 
 And history vouches, to his honour, for the fact that 
 when, on his reaching the house, he found his bookshelves 
 dusted and his inkpot washed white on the outside, and all 
 his belongings " put in order" — (in a different order to the 
 previous one, be it observed), — he at once praised Lenette 
 in the kindest manner, without a shade of irritation, and 
 said she had performed her household processes and accom- 
 plished her cleaning and brushing in a manner quite after 
 his heart, for that it was impossible to be too exquisitely 
 neat and spick and span in the eyes of commonplace women, 
 particularly such as composed the infernal triumvirate who 
 were to be present that day (i.e. the bookbinder's, the 
 barber's, and the shoemaker's wives) ; and on that account 
 he had left the intendance-general of the theatre of opera- 
 tions entirely to her — whereas, in the case of scholars, like 
 Stiefel and himself, the room might be turned into a com- 
 plete English scouring, carding, and brushing apparatus — 
 for men of their sort never glanced down at trifles of that 
 description from their sublime heights of mental contem- 
 plation. 
 
 But how pleasantly and cheerily did the president of 
 the eating congress put all things in train by this his 
 kindly temper, even before the assembling of the congress ; 
 though this appeared most fully after it had assembled. 
 When the thirteen United States, by their thirteen deputies, 
 dine together at a round table to celebrate some arrange- 
 ment which they have jointly arrived at (and that they do 
 «30 at least establishes the fact that when thirteen dine at a 
 table the thirteenth does not necessarily die), it is an easy 
 matter for the thirteen free states in question, paying, as 
 tliey do, the expenses out of thirteen treasuries, to treat 
 
CHAP. VIII.] FLOWER, FEUIT, AND THOKN PIECES. 251 
 
 their delegates as liberally as yirmian treated his guests. 
 It is pleasant to look at cattle grazing in tlie meadows, but 
 not so pleasant to see Nebuchadnezzar conducting himself 
 like one of them ; and similarly it is repulsive to see a man 
 of cultivation pasturing with a too eager delight on the 
 stomach's meadow, the dinner-table (though it is not so in 
 the case of the poor). Firmian's guests were all of one 
 mind, even the married couples ; for it is a leading cha- 
 racteristic of the lower classes that they enter into a dozen 
 treaties of peace and make as many declarations of war, in 
 the course of the four-and-twenty hours, and particularly 
 that they ennoble each of their meals into a feast of love 
 and reconciliation. Firmian saw in the lower classes a 
 kind of standing troupe of actors playing Shakespeare's 
 comedies, and thousands of times fancied that the dramatist 
 himself was prompting them unseen. He had long coveted 
 the pleasure of having some enjoyment or other of which 
 he could give away some portion to the poor; he envied 
 those rich Britons who pay the score of a beershop full 
 of labourers, or, like Caesar, give free commons to an entire 
 town. The poor who liave houses give to the poor who 
 have not — one lazzarone gives to another — as shell-fish 
 become the habitations of other crustaceans, and earth- 
 worms are the habitable universes of lesser worms. 
 
 In the evening arrived Feltzstiefel, who was too learned 
 3 man to eat swine's flesh, or a measure of salt, among the 
 untaught vulgar. And then Siebenkiss could once more 
 entertain an idea unintelligible to any one but Stiefel. 
 He could lay the sceptre and the tinted glass-ball of the 
 imperial globe upon the table, and in his capacity of king 
 of the feast and of the eagle, say that his long hair served 
 him for a crown, like that of the old Fiank kings, his own 
 crown having been knocked down by his landlord's rifle ; 
 he could assert that the rule by which only he by whose 
 hands the eagle was brought down became king was clearly 
 imitated from the code of the Fraticelli Berghadi, who 
 could only elect to the papacy a person who had killed a 
 child. That 'twas true he had it not in his power to reign 
 over Kuhschnappel so long by fourteen days as the King 
 of Frussia over the ecclesiastical see of Elten (the latter 
 period being one of fifteen days) — that 'twas true he had a 
 
252 JEAN PAUL FKIEDEICH KICHTEE. [bOOK IL 
 
 crown and revenues, but the latter were sadly reduced, 
 cut down by one-half, in fact — and that he was far too 
 much like the Great Mogul, who formerly had an income 
 of two hundred and twenty-six millions a year, but now 
 receives only the one hundred and thirteenth part of that 
 sum; however,at his (Siebenk»s's) coronation, though there 
 had been no general liberation of the wicked prisoners, yet 
 one good one had been leleased, namely, himself; also that, 
 like Peter the Second of x\rragon, he had been crowned with 
 nothing worse than bread : finally that, under his ephe- 
 meral rule, nobody was beheaded, lobbed, or beaten to 
 death ; and — which delighted him most of all — the feeling 
 that he was like one of the ancient German princes, who 
 governed, defended, and increased a free people, and was 
 a member of that free people himself, &c. &c. 
 
 The throats in this royal chamber grew louder and 
 drier as the evening advanced ; the pipes (those chimneys 
 of the mouth) made of the room a heaven of clouds, and of 
 their heads heavens of joy. Outside, the autumn sun 
 brooded, with warm, flaming wings, over the cold, naked 
 earth, as if in haste to hatch the spring. The guests had 
 drawn the quint (I mean the five prizes of the five senses) 
 out of the ninety numbers, or ninety years of the lotteiy 
 of human life ; the famished eyes were sparkling, and in 
 Firmian's soul the buds of gladness had burst their leaflet 
 envelopes and sv/elled forth into flower. Deep happiness 
 always leads love by the hand ; and Firmian longed to-day, 
 with an unutterable longing, to press his heart, all heavy 
 with bliss, upon Lenette's breast, and there forget all his 
 wants and hers. 
 
 These circumstances, in their combination, inspired him 
 with a strange idea. He determined, on this happy day, 
 / to go and redeem the pawned silken flower-wreath and 
 plant it in some dark spot out of doors, then take her out 
 there in the evening, or perhaps even in the night, and 
 give her a pleasant little surprise at the sight of it. He 
 slipped out and took his way to the pawnbroker's ; but — 
 as all our resolves begin in us as tiny sparks, and end in 
 broad lightning flashes — so, as he went, he improved his 
 original idea (of redeeming the wreath from pawn) into 
 an altogether different one, that of buying real flowers 
 
CHAP. VIII.] ■ FLOWER, FRUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 253 
 
 and planting them by way of goal of the nocturnal ramble. 
 There was no difficulty in getting red and white roses from 
 the greenhouse of a gardener of the Prince of Oettingen- 
 Spielbefg, who had lately come to the place. , He walked 
 round under the upright glass roofs, all behung with blos- 
 som, went to the gardener and got what he wanted — only 
 no forget-me-nots, for these, of course, the man had left 
 the meadows to supply. But forget-me-nots were indis- 
 pensable, to make the loving surprise complete. He there- 
 fore took his real autumn flowers to the pawnbroker 
 woman's, in whose hands his silk plants had been deposited, 
 that he might twine the dead, poor, cocoon forget-me-nots 
 among the living roses. What was liis astonishment to 
 learn that the pledge had been redeemed and taken away 
 by Mr. von Meyern, and that he had paid a sum of money 
 80 considerable that the woman thought she still owed the 
 advocate a debt of thanks. It needed all the strength of 
 a heart fortified by love to keep him from going at once to 
 the Venner with a storm of reproaches for this move of 
 warlike strategy — this pledge-robbery — for he could scarce 
 endure the thought (a mistaken idea, 'tis true, only given 
 rise to by Lenette's silence on the subject of the garland) 
 of his pure love's pretty token in Eosa's beringed and 
 thievish fingers. The brokeress, too, though she was not 
 to blame, would have been severely taken to task had it 
 been any other day, one less full of love and happiness ; as 
 it was, however, Firmian cursed in a merely general 
 manner, especially as the woman gave him silk forget-me- 
 nots of somebody else's, when he said he wanted some. 
 When in the street again, be was at variance with himself 
 as to the spot where he should plant his flowers ; he wished 
 he knew where to find some fresh-dug bed of fine old 
 mould, of which the dark colour should set off to advantage 
 the red and blue of the flowers. At length he saw a field 
 which is broken into beds at all seasons — in summer and 
 in winter, ay, in the bitterest cold — the churchyard, with 
 its church, hanging like a vineyard on the slope of a hill 
 beyond the town. He slipped in by a back entrance and 
 saw the fresh-raised boundary-hillock which marked the 
 close of an earthly life, rolled, as it were, up to the foot of 
 the triumphal gate, through which a mother, with her new- 
 
254 JEAN PAUL FBIEDKICH EICHTEK. [bOOK II. 
 
 born child in her arms, had passed away into the brighter 
 world. Upon this earthen bier he laid his flowers down, 
 like a funeral garland, and then went home. 
 
 The members of the gladsome company had scarcely 
 missed him ; they were floating, like fish benumbed in their 
 element saturated with foreign matter, paralysed with the 
 poison of pleasure ; but Stiefel was still in his senses, and 
 was talking with Lenette. The world has already learned 
 from the former portion of this history — the people of the 
 house, too, were well aware — that Firmian was fond of 
 aunning away from his guests, in order to throw himself 
 back into their society with a greater zest, and that he 
 interrupted his pleasures in order that he might savour 
 them — as Montaigne used to have himself awakened from 
 his sleep that he might thoroughly appreciate what it was 
 — and so Firmian merely said that he had been out. 
 
 All the waves, even the most turbulent of them, subsided 
 at last, and there was nothing left in the ebb save those 
 three pearl mussels, our three friends. Firmian gazed 
 with tender eyes upon Lenette's bright ones, for he loved 
 her the more fondly because he had a pleasure in store for 
 her. Stiefel glowed with a love so pure that, without any 
 serious error of logic, he was able to define and classify it to 
 himself as a mere sympathetic rejoicing in her happiness ; 
 particularly as his love for the wife placed wings, not 
 fetters, upon his affection for her husband. Indeed the 
 Schulrath's anxiety was directed altogether to the reverse 
 side of the question, his only doubt being whether he had - 
 it in him to express his love with adequate force and 
 ardour. Therefore he pressed both their hands many times, 
 and laid them between his own ; he said beauty was a thing 
 to which he very rarely paid any attention, but that he 
 had been observant of it that day, because that of Mrs. 
 Siebenkses had appeared to such great advantage amid all 
 her labours, particularly with all these ordinary women 
 about her, and at them he had not so much as looked; He 
 assured the advocate that he had considered his good- 
 ness and kindness to this admirable wife of his as a mark 
 of increased personal friendship for himself; and he 
 asseverated to her that his affection for her, of which he 
 had given some little proof as they came together from 
 
CHAP. VIII.J FLOWEB, FKUIT, AND THOKN PIECES. 255 
 
 Augspurg in the coach, would giow stronger the more sha 
 loved hie friend, and through that friend, himself. 
 
 Into this cup of joy of hers Pirmian of course cast no 
 drop of poison relative to (what he supposed to he) the 
 news of the Venner's having made prize of the flowers. 
 He was so happy that day ; his little toy crown had so 
 tenderly covered and soothed all the bleeding wounds on 
 that head of his whence he had lifted his crown of thorns 
 just a little way (as Alexander's diadem soothed the bleed- 
 ing head of Lysimachus), that his only wish was that the 
 night might be as long as a Polar one, since it was just as 
 calm and peaceful, as bright and serene. In moments like 
 these the poison fangs of all our troubles are broken out, 
 and a Paul, like him in Malta of old, has turned all the 
 tongues of the soul's serpents to stone. 
 
 When Stiefel rose to go, Firmian did not detain him, but 
 insisted that he should allow them both to go with him, 
 not to their own door only, but to his. They went out. The 
 broad heaven, with the streets of the City of God all lit 
 with the lamps which are suns, drew them on, out beyond 
 the narrow crossways of the town, and into the great 
 spectacle hall of night, where we breathe the blue of 
 heaven, and drink the east breeze. We should conclude 
 and sanctify all our chamber feasts by " going to church " 
 in that cool, vast temple, that great cathedral whose 
 dome is adorned with the sacred picture of the Most Holy, 
 portrayed in a mosaic of stars. They roamed on refreshed 
 and exalted by breezes of the coming spring hastening to 
 blow before their appointed time, those breezes which 
 wipe the snow away from the mountains. All nature gave 
 promise of a mild winter — ^to lead the poor, who have no 
 fuel, gently through the darkest quarter of the year — it 
 was a season such as none curse except the rich, who can 
 order sleighs but not snow. 
 
 The two men carried on a conversation befitting the 
 sublimity of the night ; Lenette said nothing. Firmian 
 said, " How near together these miserable oyster banks, 
 the villages, seem to be, and how small they are ; when 
 we go from one of these villages to another the journey 
 seems to us about the same in length as a mite's, if id 
 crawled on a map from the name of the one to the name of 
 
256 JEAN PAUL FRIEDEICH EICHTER. [BOOK 11 
 
 the other, might appear to it. And to higher spirits our 
 earth-ball may perhaps he a globe for their children, 
 
 I which their tutor tTims and explains.'' 
 
 " Yet," said Stiefel, " there may very possibly be worlds 
 even smaller than this earth of ours ; and, after all, there 
 must be something in ours since the Lord Christ died for 
 it." At this the warm blood rushed to Lenette's heart. 
 Firmian merely answered, " More Saviours than one have 
 died for this world and mankind, and I am convinced that 
 Christ will one day take many a good man by the hand, 
 and say, ' You have suffered under your Pontius Pilate too !' 
 And for that matter many a seeming Pilate is" very likely 
 
 / a Messiah, if the truth were known." Lenette's secret 
 dread was that her husband was really an absolute Atheist, 
 or at all events a " philosopher." 
 
 He led them by snaky windings and corkscrew paths to 
 the churchyard ; but suddenly his eyes grew moist, as 
 one's do when passing through a thick mist, when he 
 thought of the mother's grave with the flowers on it, and 
 on Lenette who gave no sign of ever becoming one. He 
 strove to expel the sadness from his heart by philosophic 
 speeches. He said human beings and watches stop while 
 they are being wound up for a new long day; and that he 
 
 7 believed that those dark intervals of sleep and death, which 
 break up and divide our existence into segments, prevent 
 any one particular idea from getting to glare too brightly, 
 and our never-cooling desires from searing us wholly — and 
 even our ideas from interflowing into confusion — just as 
 the planetary systems are separated by gloomy wastes of 
 space, and the solar systems by yet greater gulfs of dark- 
 ness. That the human spirit could never take in and contain 
 the endless stream of knowledge which flows throughout 
 eternity, but that it sips it by portions at a time, with 
 intervals between : the eternal day would blind our souls 
 were it not broken into separate days by midsummer 
 nights (which we call, now sleep, now death), framing its 
 noons in a border of mornings and evenings. 
 
 Lenette was frightened, and would have liked to run 
 away behind the wall and not go into the churchyard ; 
 however, she had to go in. Firmian, holding her closely 
 to him, took a roundabout path to the place where the 
 
CEAP. VIII.] FLOWEE, FEUIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 257 
 
 wreath was. He closed the little clattering metal gates 
 which guarded the pious verses and the brief life-careers. 
 Tihey came to the better-class graves nearest the church, 
 which lay round that fortress like a kind of moat. Here 
 there were nothing but upright monuments standing over 
 the quiet mummies below, while fuither on were mere 
 trapdoors let down upon recumbent human beings. A 
 bony head, which was sleeping in the open air, Firmian 
 «et a-rolling, and — heedless of Lenette's oft- renewed 
 entreaties to him not to make himself "unclean" — he 
 took up in both his hands this last capsule case of a spirit 
 •of many dwelling places, and, looking into the empty 
 twindow-openings of the ruined pleasure-house, said, 
 ■" They ought to get up into the pulpit inside there at 
 midnight, and put this scalped mask of our Personality 
 ■down upon the desk in place of the Bible and the hour- 
 .glass, and preach upon it as a text to the other heads 
 sitting there still packed in their skins. They should 
 have my head, if they liked to skin it after my decease, 
 and hook it up in the church like a herring's, upon a string, 
 fey way of angel at the font — so that the silly souls might 
 for once in their lives look ujaward and then downward — 
 (for we hang and hover between heaven and the grave. 
 The hazel-nut worm is still in our heads, Herr Schulrath, 
 (but it has gone through its transformation and flown out 
 from this one, for there are two holes in it and a kernel 
 -of dust." * 
 
 Lenette was terrified at this godless jesting in such close 
 proximity to ghosts ; yet it was but a disguised form of 
 mental exaltation. All at once she whispered, " There's 
 something looking down at us over the top of the chamel 
 house. See, see, it's raising itself higher up." It was only 
 the evening breeze lifting a cloud higher ; but this cloud 
 had the semblance of a bier resting on the roof, and a hand 
 was stretched forth from it, while a star, shining close to 
 the cloud's edge, seemed like a white flower laid on tho 
 heart of the form which lay upon the bier of cloud. 
 
 " It is only a cloud," said Firmian ; " come nearer to the 
 
 * Two holes ia a hazel-nut show that the beetle which gnawed awoy 
 its kernel, in the shape of a little larral worm, has crept out in its 
 ^transformed state. 
 
 II. s 
 
258 JEAN PAUL FKIEDEICH RICHTEi!. [BOOK II. 
 
 liouse, and then we stall lose sight of it." This famished 
 him with the best possible pretext for leading her up to- 
 the blooming Eden in miniature upon the grave. "When 
 they had walked some twenty paces, the bier was hidden 
 by the house. " Dear me," said the Eath, " what may 
 that be in flower there ?" " Upon my life," cried Firmian, 
 "white and red roses, and forget-me-nots, wife." She 
 looked tremblingly, doubtingly, inquiringly at this resting- 
 place of a heart, decked with a garland, at this altar with 
 the sacrifice lying beneath it. " Very well then, Tirmian," 
 she cried, " I'm sure I can't help it, it is no fault of mine j 
 but oh ! you shouldn't have done such a thing 1 oh dear f 
 oh dear I will you uewer cease tormenting me !" She began 
 to weep, and hid her streaming eyes on Stiefel's arm. 
 
 For she, who was so delicately clever in nothing as in 
 touchiness and taking umbrage, supposed this garland was 
 the silken one from her wardrobe, and that her husband 
 knew that Eosa had presented it to her, and had placed 
 the flowers upon this grave of a woman, dead in childbed, 
 in mockery either of her childlessness or of herself. These 
 mutual misunderstandings were to the full as confounding 
 to him as to her ; he had to combat her errors, and at the 
 same time ask himself what his own consisted of. It was 
 only now that she told him that Kosa had some time since 
 returned the pawned wreath to her. Upon the greea . 
 thistle-plant of mistrust of her love, a flower or two now 
 came out; nothing is more painful than when a person 
 whom we love hides something from us for the first time, 
 were it but the merest trifle. It was a great distress ana 
 disappointment to Firmian that the pleasant surprise he 
 had prepared should have taken such a bitter turn. There 
 was too much of the artificial about his garland to com- 
 mence with, but the foul fiend. Chance, had malevolently 
 crisped and twirled it up, with added weeds, into a more 
 unreal and unnatural afiair than ever. Let us take care 
 then not to hire Chance into the heart's service. 
 
 The Sohulrath, at his wits' end, gave vent to his embar- 
 rassment in a warm curse or two upon the Tenner's head ; 
 he tried to establish a peace congress between the husband 
 and wife (who were sunk in silent musing), and strongly 
 urged Letette to give her hand to her husband and be 
 
CHAP. VIII.J FLOWEB, FEUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 259 
 
 ipconciled to him. But nothing would induce her. Yet, 
 after long hesitation, she agreed to do it, but only on con- 
 dition that he would first wash nis hands. Hers shrunk 
 away in convulsive loathing from touching those which 
 had been in contact with a skull. 
 
 The Schulrath took away the battle-flag from them, and 
 delivered a peace-sermon which came warm from his heart. 
 He reminded them what the place was in which they stood, 
 surrounded by human beings all gone to their last account ; 
 he bade them think for a moment how near they were to 
 the angels who guard the graves of the just . the very 
 mother (he pointed out) who was mouldering at their feet, 
 with her babj' in her arms (and whose eldest son he him- 
 self was bringing along in his Latin studies — he was then 
 in Soheller's principia), might be said to be admonishing 
 them not to fall out about a flower or two over her quiet 
 grave, but rather to take them away as olive-branches of 
 peace. Lenette's heart drank his theologic holy water with 
 far greater zest than Firmian's pure, philosophic Alp 
 water, and the latter's lofty thoughts of Death shot athwart 
 her soul without the slightest penetration. However, the 
 sacrifice of reconciliation was accomplished and mutual 
 letters of indulgence exchanged. At the same time, a peace 
 like this, brought about by a third party, is always some- 
 thing in the nature of a mere suspension of hostilities. 
 Strangely enough they both awoke in the morning with 
 tears in their eyes, but could not tell whether happy dreams 
 or sad ones had left these drops behind. 
 
 FIRST FLOWER PIECE. 
 
 THE BEAD CHRIST PKOCLAIMS THAT THERE IS NO GOD. 
 
 INTKODUCTION. 
 
 My aim in writing this fiction must be my excuse for its 
 audacity. 
 
 Men, as a class, deny God's existence with about the 
 saTue small amount of true consideration, conviction, and 
 
 s 2 
 
260 JEAN PAUL PEIEDEICH EICHTEE. [bOOK TI. 
 
 feeling as that with which most individual men admit it. 
 Even in our regularly established systems of belief we form 
 collections of mere words, game-counters, medallions — just 
 as coin-collectors accumulate cabinetsful of coins — and 
 not till long after our collection is made do we convert the 
 words into sentiments, the coins into enjoyments. We 
 may believe in the immortality of the soul for twenty years 
 long, yet it may be the twenty-first before, in some one 
 supreme moment, we suddenly perceive, to our astonish- 
 ment, what this belief involves, 'and how wonderful is the 
 warmth of that naphtha spiing. 
 
 In a similar manner to this, I myself was suddenly 
 horror-struck at the perception of the poison-power of that 
 vapour which strikes with such suffocating fumes to the 
 heart of him who enters the school of Atheistic doctrine. 
 It would cause me less pain to deny immortality than to 
 deny God's existence. In the former case, what I lose is 
 but a world hidden by clouds ; but in the latter, I lose this 
 present world, that is to say, its sun. The whole spiritual 
 universe is shattered and shivered, by the hand of Atheism, 
 into innumerable glittering quicksilver globules of indi- 
 vidual personalities, running hither and thither at random, 
 coalescing, and parting asunder without unity, coherence, 
 or consistency. In all this wide universe there is none 
 so utterly solitary and alone as a denier of God. With 
 orphaned heart — a heart which has lost the Great Father — 
 he mourns beside the immeasurable corpse of Nature, a 
 corpse no longer animated or held together by the Great 
 Spirit of the Universe — a corpse which grows in its grave ; 
 and by this corpse he mourns until he himself crumbles 
 and falls away from it into nothingness. The wide earth lies 
 before such an one like the great Egyptian sphinx of stone, 
 half-buried in the desert sand ; the immeasurable universe 
 has become for him but the cold iron-mask upon an eternity 
 which is without form and void. 
 
 I would also fain awaken, with this piece of fiction, some 
 alarm in the hearts of certain masters and teachers (reading, 
 as well as read) ; for, in truth, these men (now that they 
 liave come to do their appointed day's work, like so many 
 .onvicts, in the canal- diggings and in the mine-shaft exca- 
 vations, of the "critical" schools of philosophy) discuss 
 
CHAP. VIII.J FLOWEPv, FRUIT, AND TIIOEN PIECES. 261 
 
 God's existence as cold-bloodedly and chill-lieartedly as 
 thougli it were a question of tlie existence of the kraken or 
 the nnioorn. 
 
 For others, who have not progressed quite so far as thif 
 I would further remark, that the belief in immortality may 
 without contradiction, co-exist with the belief in Atheism , 
 for the self-same necessity which, in this life, placed my 
 little shining dew-drop of a personality in a flower-cup and 
 beneath a sun, can certainly do the same in a second life 
 — ay, and could embody me with still greater ease for a 
 second time than for the first. 
 
 * lit * ^ ^ ^ 
 
 When, in our childhood, we are told that, at midnight, 
 when our sleep reaches near the soul and darkens our very 
 dreams, the dead arise from theirs, and in the churches ape 
 the religious services of the living, we shudder at death, 
 because of the dead, and in the loneliness of night we turn 
 our eyes in terror from the tall windows of the silent 
 church, and dread to look at their pale shimmer to see 
 whether it be truly the reflection of the moon's beams — or 
 something else ! 
 
 Childhood and its terrors (even more than its pleasures) 
 assume, in our dreams, wings and brightness, shining glow- 
 worm-like in the dark night of the soul. Extinguish not 
 these little flickering sparks ! Leave us the dim and 
 painful dreams even ; they serve to make life's high-lights 
 all the more brilliant. And what will ye give us in ex- 
 change for the dreams which raise and bear us up from 
 beneath the roar of the falling cataract back to the peace- 
 ful mountain-heights of childhood, where the river of life 
 was flowing as yet in peace, reflecting heaven upon its little 
 surface, on towards the precipices of the future course. 
 
 Once on a summer evening I was lying upon a quiet 
 hillside in the sun. I fell asleep, and dreamed that T awoke 
 in a churchyard. The rattle of the wheels of the clock 
 i-unning down as it was striking eleven, had awakened me. 
 1 looked for the si^n in the dark and void night sky, for I 
 supposed that some eclipse was hiding it with the moon. 
 And all the graves were open, and the iron doors of the 
 charnel-house kept opening and shutting, moved by in- 
 visible hands. Athwart the walls shadows went flitting ; 
 
262 JEAN PAUL FKIEDKICH EICHTEE. [bOOK 1L 
 
 but no bodies oast those shadows — and there weie others, 
 too, moving about out in the open air. Within the open 
 loffins there were none now asleep, except the children. 
 Nothing was in the sky but sultry fog, heavy and grey, 
 aanging there in great clammy folds ; and some gigantic 
 shadow closed and closed this fog as in a net, and drew it 
 ever nearer, closer, and hotter. Up overhead I heard the 
 thunder of distant avalanches, and beneath my feet the first 
 footfalls of a boundless earthquake. The church was heaved 
 and shaken to and fro by two terrific discords striving in 
 it, beating in stormy effort to attain barmonioiis resolution. 
 Now and then a greyish glimmer passed with rapid gleam 
 flittering athwart the windows; but, whenever this glimmer 
 came, the lead and iron of the frames always melted and 
 ran rolling down. The fog's net, and the quaking of the 
 earth, drove me into the temple, past gleaming, glittering 
 basilisks, brooding in poison-nests beside the door. I passed 
 among shadows, strange and unknown to me ; but they 
 all bore the impress of the centuries. These shadows stood 
 all grouped about the altar, and their breasts quivered and 
 throbbed — their hreasU but not their hearts. There was 
 but one of the dead still lying on his pillow, and he was 
 one who had but just been buried in the church ; he lay at 
 peace, his breast without a throb, a happy dream upon his 
 smiling face. But now, as I came in (I, one of the living), 
 his sleep broke, he awoke, and smiled no more ; with painful 
 effort he raised his heavy eyelids — and there was no eye 
 beneath — and in his beating breast there was no heart, but 
 a deep wound instead. He raised his hands, folded as it 
 for prayer; but then his arms shot out and came apart 
 from his poor trunk, the folded hands came off and fell 
 away. Upon the dome above ther-e was inscribed the dial 
 of eternity — but figures there weie none, and the dial itself 
 was its own gnomon; a great black finger was pointing at 
 it, and the dead strove hard to read tlie time upon it. 
 
 And at this point a lofty, noble form, bearing the im- 
 press of eternal sorrow, came sinking down towards our 
 group, and rested on the altar; whereupon all the dead 
 cried out, " Christ! Is there no God?" 
 
 He answered, " There is none." 
 
 At this the dead quivered and trembled ; but now it wag 
 
CHAP. Vin.J FLOWEE, FKUIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 263 
 
 not their breasts alone that throbbed ; the quivering ran 
 all through the shadows, so that one by one the shudder 
 ehook them into nothingness. And Christ spake on, 
 saying, " I have traversed the worlds, I have risen to the 
 suns, with the milky ways I have passed athwart the great 
 waste spaces of the sky ; there is no God. And I descended 
 to, where the very shadow cast by Being dies out and ends, 
 and I gazed out into the gulf beyond, and cried, ' Father, 
 where ait Thou ?' But answer came there none, save the 
 •eternal s,torm which rages on, controlled by none; and 
 towards the west, above the chasm, a gleaming rainbow 
 hung, but there was no sun to give it birth, and so it sank 
 and fell by drops into the gulf. And when I looked up to 
 the boundless universe for the Divine eye, behold, it glared 
 at me fiom out a socket, empty and bottomless. Over the 
 face of chaos brooded Eternity, chewing it for ever, again 
 and yet again. Shriek on, then, discords, shatter the 
 ■ehadpws with your bhrieking din, for He is not ! " 
 
 The pale and colourless shades flickered away to no- 
 thingness, as .frosty fog dissolves before warm breath, 
 and all grew void. Ah! then the dead children, who had 
 been asleep out in the graves, awoke, and came into the 
 temple, and fell down before the noble form (a sight to 
 jend one's heart), and cried, " Jesus, have we no Father ?" 
 He made answer, with streaming tears, " We are orphans 
 all, both I and ye. We have no Father." 
 
 TherL the discords clashed and clanged more hars-hly 
 ytt; the shivering walls (jf the temple parted asunder, 
 aud the temple and the children sank — the earth and sun 
 sank with them— and the boundless fabric of the universe 
 sank down before us, while high on the summit of immea- 
 .suvable nature Jesus stood and gazed upon the sinking 
 imiverse, besprent with thousand suns, and like a mine 
 dug in the face of black eternal night ; the suns being 
 miners' lamps, and the milky way the veins of silvery ore. 
 
 And as he gazed upon the grinding mass of worlds, the 
 wild torch dance of starry will-o'-the-wisps, and all the 
 coral banks of throbbing hearts — and saw how world by 
 world shook forth its glimmering souls on to the Ocean of 
 Death — then He, sublime, loftiest of finite beings, laised 
 ills eyes towards the nothingness and boundless void, 
 
264 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH EICHTEE. [bOOK II. 
 
 saying, " Oh dead., dumb, nothingness ! necessity endless 
 and chill ! Oh 1 mad unreasoning Chance — when will y» 
 dash this fabric into atoms, and me too ? Chance, knowest 
 thou — thou knowest not — when thou dost march, hurri ■ 
 rane-winged, amid the whirling snow of stars, extinguisb- 
 ing sun after sun upon thy onward way, and when the- 
 sparkling dew of constellations ceases to gleam, as thow 
 dost pass them by ? How every soul in this great corpse- 
 trench of an universe is utterly alone ? Jam alone — none 
 by me — Father, Father ! where is that boundless breast 
 of thine, that I may rest upon it ? Alas ! if every soul 
 be its own father and creator, why shall it not be its own 
 destroying angel too ? Is this a man still near me ? 
 Wretched being! That petty life of thine is but the 
 sigh of nature, or the echo of that sigh. Your wavering 
 cloudy forms are but reflections of rays cast by a concave 
 mirror upon the clouds of dust which shroud your world — 
 dust which is dead men's ashes. Look ye down into the 
 chasm athwart the face of which the ash-clouds float and 
 fly. A mist of worlds rises up from the Ocean of Death ; 
 the future is a gathering cloud, the present a falling 
 vapour. Dost thou see and know thy earth ? " 
 
 Here Christ looked downward, and his eyes grew full 
 of tears, and he spake on, and said, " Alas ! I, too, was 
 once of that poor earth ; then I was happ3'-, then I still 
 possessed my infinite Father, and I could look up from the 
 hills with joy to the boundless heaven, and I could cry 
 even in the bitterness of death, ' My Father, take thy Sot 
 from out this bleeding earthly shell, and lift Him to thy 
 heart.' Alas ! too happy dwellers upon earth, ye still 
 believe in Him. Your eun, it may be, is setting at this 
 hour, and amid flowers and brilliance, and with tears ye 
 sink upon your knees, and, lifting up your hands in 
 rapturous joy, ye ciy each one aloud up to the open heavens, 
 ' Oh Father, infinite, eternal, hear '. Thou knowest me 
 in all my littleness, even as Thou knowest all things, 
 and Thou seest my wounds and sorrows, and Thou wilt 
 receive me after death and soothe and heal them a.l ' 
 Alas 1 unhappy souls 1 For after death these wounds will 
 not be healed. But when the sad and weary lays down, 
 his worn and wounded frame upon the earth to sleep 
 
CHAP. VIII.J FLOWER, FKUIT, AND THOI^N PIECES. 265- 
 
 towards a fairer brighter morn all truth, goodness and joj', 
 — behold ! he awakes amid a howling chans, in a night 
 endless and everlasting ; and no morning dawns, there is 
 no healing hand, no everlasting Father. Oh, mortal, who< 
 standest near, if still thou breathest the breath of life, wor- 
 ship and pray to Him, or else thon losest Him for evermore.'' 
 
 And I fell down and peered into the shining mass of 
 worlds, and beheld the coils of the great serpent of eternity 
 all twined about those worlds; these mighty coils began! 
 to writhe and rise, and then again they tightened aisd 
 contracted, folding round the universe twice as closely as- 
 before ; they wound about all nature in thousandfolds, 
 and crashed the worlds together, and crushed dovm the 
 boundless temple to a little churchyard chapel. And all 
 grew narrow, and dark, and terrible. And then a great 
 immeasurable bell began to swing in act to toll the last 
 hour of Time, and shatter the fabric of the universe tO' 
 countless atoms, — when my sleep broke up, and I awoke. 
 
 And my soul wept for joy that it could still worship 
 God — my gladness, and lay weeping, and my faith — these 
 ■were my prayer ! And as I rose the sun was gleaming, 
 low in the wpst, behind the ripe purple ears of corn, and 
 casting in peace the reflection of his evening blushes over 
 the sky to where the little moon was rising clear and) 
 cloudless in the east. And between the heaven and th& 
 earth, a gladsome, shortlived world was spreading tiny 
 •wings, and, like myself, living in the eternal Fathei's- 
 sight. And from all nature round, on every hand, rose 
 music-tones of peace and joy, a rich, soft, gentle harmony,, 
 like the sweet chime of bells at evening pealing far away. 
 
 , SECOND FLOWER PIECE, 
 
 A DKEAM WITHIN A DREAM. 
 
 A SKY of glorious and sublime beauty was spread out 
 above this earth; a rainbow stood in the east, like- 
 the circle of eternity: a storm, with broken wings, 
 passed thundering, as if weary, along by the lightning 
 
266 JEAN PAUL FEIEDlUCn EICHTEE. [bOOK It 
 
 conductors, and away through the gk ;ving gate of Eden 
 in the west ; the evening sun gazed after the storm 
 with a brightness tender as if it shone through tears, 
 resting its glance upon the groat triumphal arch of 
 Nature. All enraptured with the loveliness of the scene, 
 I closed my eyes, and seeing nothing, save the sun 
 shining warm and glowing through my lids, listened to 
 the thunder as it died away in the far distance. And at 
 length the mists of sleep sank down into my soul, and 
 shrouded all the spring in folds of grey ; but soon there came 
 luminous bands of brightness piercing through the mist, 
 and by-and-by shone many-tinted lines of beauty, and ere 
 long the dark face of my sleep was painted with the. 
 brilliant pictures of the world of dreams. 
 
 And then I thought that I was standing in the second 
 world, and all about me a dim green grassy plain, which, in 
 the distance, merged into brighter flowers, and woods of 
 glowing red, and hills so clear that you could see the lodes of 
 gold within them. Beyond these crystal hills there glowed a 
 bright rose dawn of morning, with dewy rainbows arching 
 it all over. All the shiring woods were sprent with suns 
 (where earthly forests would have gleamed with drops of 
 dew) ; while all the flowers were draped with nebula, as 
 earthly flowers aie hung with gossamer. At times the 
 aneadows shook, as waves of motion passed quivering over 
 them — but this was not because the zephyrs b^nt the grasses 
 in their play^it was that passing souls brushed them 
 with unseen wings. I was invisible in this second world, 
 for there this shell of ours is but a little shroud, a tiny 
 fleck of fog not yet condensed. 
 
 And on the brink of this, the second world, reposed the 
 holy Virgin near her Son ; and she was looking down- 
 ward to our earth, there as it floated dwarfed and far 
 beneath, in its pale, feeble spring-time, on the mighty face 
 •of the Ocean of Death. And every wave was tossing it 
 at will, and its dim light was nothing but the shadow 
 •of a shadow. Then Mary's heart beat with a yearning 
 pulse, when she beheld the old beloved world, and all her 
 >oul grew tender, and she said, with brightening glance, 
 "Oh, Son! this heart of mine is full of longing, and 
 mine eyes with tears, for all these my beloved human 
 
CHAP. VIII.] FLOWEE, FKUIT, AND THOKN PIECES. 267 
 
 friends ! Eaise the earth near us, that I once more 
 inajf look into the eyes of mine own race, my brothers, 
 aiict my sisters. Ah! my tears will fall when I behold 
 thb'living once again." 
 
 But Christ replied, " The earth is but a dream of many 
 dreams ; and thou must sleep to see these dreams." 
 
 'And Mary answered, " 1 will gladly sleep that I may 
 dream of man." And then Ctirist said, "Say, what the 
 dream shall show thee." 
 
 " Oh beloved ! I would the dream would show me 
 mankind's love. Love such as hearts which meet once 
 more in bliss after long painful parting only know." 
 
 And as she spake it, lo ! the angel of Death stood close 
 behind her, and with closing eyes she sank upon his 
 bosom, which was cold as polar ice. And then the little 
 earth rose quivering up, but as it neared it paled and 
 narrowed, and grew more dim and small. The clouds 
 about it palrted, and the cleft mists gave to view the little 
 night in which it lay, and from a sleeping brook a star or 
 two of' the second world were mirrored back. And all 
 the children lay sleeping on the earth, and all were 
 smiling-^for they had seen Mary appear to them as they 
 slept, in semblance of a mother. But, in the night, stood 
 one unhappy being, the power of outward grief almost 
 gone from her, except in sighs which tore her breaking 
 heart. Even her very tears had ceased to flow. Oh ! gaze 
 no more, sad soul, towards the west, where stands the house 
 of mourning all behung with funeral crape ; nor to the 
 east, upon the grave and house of death. For this one 
 day, turn thy sad gaze away from that drear charnel house 
 where the loved corpse is laid, so that the cool night 
 breeze may fan and wake him from his sleep earlier than 
 if he were shut up within the narrow grave ! Yet, no I 
 bereaved one, gaze thy fill on thy beloved one while ho 
 still is here, and ere he falls to dust — and steep thy heart 
 deep in the eternal woe. 
 
 As then an echo' in the lone churchyard began to talk 
 in faint and murmuring tones, repeating the notes of the 
 low-voiced funeral hymn that rose within the house of 
 mourning; and this af;er-song, floating half-heard in 
 air — as though the dead were chanting low— tore all 
 
, 268 JEAN PAUL FBIEDEICH EICHTEB. [BOOK II. 
 
 her heart in twain ; and then her tears .found vent and 
 flowed anew, and wild with sorrow she raised her voice 
 and cried, " For ever silent ! oh my love, my love f 
 Callest thou me once more ? oh, speak again — hut once — 
 only this once, once more, to me whom thou hast left for 
 ever I Ah, no ! nothing hut silence ; no sound except the 
 echo stirring among the graves. All the poor dead lie deaf 
 heneath, and not a tone comes from the hroken heart." 
 
 But when the mourning hymn ceased of a sudden, and 
 the dying echo from the graves sung faintly on alone, 
 a tremor seized her, and her very life shook in the 
 halance ; for the echo came nearer and nearer, and from out 
 the night one of the dead came close. And he stretched 
 forth his pale and shadowy hand and took her own, 
 saying, " My darling, why is it that you weep ? Where 
 have we heen so long ? for I have been dreaming that 
 I had lost you ! " But they had not lost each other. 
 From Mary's closed lids there fell some happy tears, 
 and ere her son could wipe those tears away, the earth 
 had sunk back to its place again — and on its face this 
 happy pair, restored to one another, and in bliss. 
 
 Then all at once there rose a spark of fire up from the 
 earth, and presently a soul hovered all trembling near 
 the second world, as if in doubt whether to enter there. 
 And Christ a second time raised up the earth ball, and! 
 the bodily frame from whence this soul had winged its 
 way was lying still on earth, marked with the scars and 
 wounds of a long life. Beside this fallen leafage of 
 the soul a grey old man was standing, and, speaking to 
 the corpse, he said, " I am as old as thou ; why must my 
 death be after thine, oh kind and faithful wife ? Morning 
 by morning, evening by evening, now, what can I do but 
 think how deep thy grave, how far thy form has crumbled 
 on its course to imdistinguished dust, till my time comes 
 to lie and crumble with thee side by side ! I am alone ! 
 And what a loneliness is mine 1 For nothing hears me 
 now. She cannot hear! Well! well! To-morrow I 
 shall gaze with such a woe upon her faithful hands and 
 her grey hairs that my poor broken life must snap and 
 end. Oh, thou All-merciful! end it to-day; spare me 
 that last great sorrow." 
 
CHAP. VI1I.J FLOWEK, FBUIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 269 
 
 Why should it be that, even in old age, when man 
 has grown so weary and oppressed, and has descended to 
 the lowest and last of all the steps that lead him down- 
 ward to his grave, the spectre, Sorrow, sits so heavy upon 
 him, bowing his head (where every bygone year has left 
 its special thorns) to earth with a new despair? 
 
 But the Lord Christ sent not the angel of death with 
 the hand of ice ; fur he himself looked on the bereaved 
 old man, standirg so near him now, with such a glance 
 of glowing solar warmth that the ripe fruit broke from 
 the tree. Like sudden flame his soul burst upwards from 
 his riven heart, and hovering above the second world 
 rejoined that other soul it loved so well; there knit 
 together in silent close embrace, like those of old, they 
 trembled downward into Elysium, where no embrace finds 
 end. And Mary stretched, all love, her hands towards 
 them, and all joy and rapture from her dream, she cried, 
 " Ah, happy pair, ye are together now for evermore." 
 
 But now there rose a pillar of red vapour up on high 
 above the hapless earth, and clung there hiding with 
 its dun folds a battle-field's loud roar. At length the 
 smoke parted asunder, and two bleeding men were seen 
 lying enlocked in each other's bleeding arms. They were 
 two grand and glorious friends, and they had sacrificed all 
 to each other, ay! and their very selves, — but not the 
 Fatherland. " Lay thy wounds upon mine, beloved friend. 
 The past lies all behind us now, we can be friends again ; 
 thou hast sacrificed me to the Fatherland, as I have thee. 
 Give me thy heart again, ere it bleeds quite away. Alas ! 
 we can only die together now." And each gave to his 
 friend his pierced and wounded heart. But these glorious 
 friends beamed with a lustre such that Death shrank back, 
 and the great berg of ice, wherewith he crushes man, 
 melted away at touching their warm hearts. And the 
 earth Tcept those two, who rose above her level like two 
 iofty mountains, dowering her vnth streams, with healing 
 t'irtues, and with lofty views, she giving only clouds to 
 them in return. 
 
 Mary in her dream here glanced and bent her head 
 towards her son, for truly he alone can read support, ai:d 
 succour hearts like these. 
 
270 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH RICHTEE. [ BOOK II, 
 
 Wty does she smile now, like some happy mother ? Js 
 it because the earth she loves so well, still rising nearer, 
 seems to hover close above the border of the second world, 
 sweet with the flowers of spring, while nightingales lie 
 brooding, with those burning hearts of theirs pressed on 
 the grasses and the meadow blooms, — the stormy skies all 
 brightening into rainbows? Is it because the earth, 
 never to be forgotten of her heart, now shows so happy 
 and so gay bedecked in its spring dress, radiant in all its 
 flowers, the joy hymn bursting from all its singers' 
 throats ? No, not for this alone ; that happy smile breaks 
 over her sleeping face because she sees a mother and her 
 child. For this must be a mother w^ho bends down and 
 holds her arnis wide open, and calls in sweet enraptured 
 tones, " Come, darling child, come to my heart again." 
 This is her child, we see and know, standing all inno- 
 cence, within the ringing temple of the spring, by his 
 good genius who teaches him — and now goes running up 
 to that smiling form — thus early blest, pressed to that 
 heart overflowing with a mother's love, scarce under- 
 standing the blissful words she speaks. " Oh, dearest 
 child, how Ihou delightest me. Art thou happy too? 
 Thou lovest me ! Oh, look at me, my own, and smile for 
 evermore." 
 
 But now the very blissfulness of her dream woke Mary 
 up; and with a tender tremor she fell upon her own 
 son's heart, saying with tears, "None, save a mother, 
 knows what it is to love." And as she spoke the earth 
 sank to its place (where its own aether flowed around its 
 orb), and with it that glad mother with her arms about 
 her child. 
 
 And all this bliss bursting upon my heart dissolved my 
 dream. And I awoke — but nothing had truly changed 
 or passed away ; for the mother of my dream still clasped 
 her child close to her heart here on earth's face ; she reads 
 my dream, and, for its truth, forgives, perchance, the 
 dreamer who tells his tale. 
 
BOOK IIL 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 A POTATO WAR WITH WOMEN — AND WITH MEN — A WALK JiS 
 DECEMBER — TINDER FOR JEALOUSY — A WAR OF SUCCESSION 
 ON THE SUBJECT OF A PIECE OF CHECKED CALICO^RUPTURE 
 WITH STIEFEL — SAD EVENING MUSIC. 
 
 I SHOULD very mucli like to make an incidental digression 
 about this point ; however, I feel that I don't dare. 
 
 You see there are, now-a-days, so very few readers (at 
 all events, of the younger and more aristocratic sort) who 
 don't know everything — while, at the same time, they 
 expect heir pet authors (and I don't blame them for it) 
 to -know more than themselves — which is impossible. By 
 the help of the English machinery (now brought to such 
 high perfection), of encyclopaadias, of encyclopaedic-dic- 
 tionaries, of conversations-lexicons, of excerpts from con- 
 versations-lexicons, of Ersch and Gruber's ' Universal 
 Dictionaries of all the Sciences,' a young man, after de- 
 voting his days to it for a month or two (he has no occasion 
 to devote his nights) converts himself into a perfect Senatu& 
 Atademicus of all the Faculties of a University, which he 
 represents in his own single person ; besides, in a sense, 
 also himself standing to it in the relation of the student- 
 body at the same time. 
 
 I have never, myself, met with a phenomenal youth 
 of the sort above described, unless it were, perhaps, a 
 fellow I once heard playing in the Baireuth band, wha 
 represented in his own person a whole Koyal Academy 
 of Music — a complete orchestra — inasmuch as he held,, 
 carried, and played upon instruments of every kind. 
 This Panharmonist performing, to us Bartial harmonists 
 
272 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH EICHTEE. [BOOK. III. 
 
 a»nly (as we were), blew a French horn, which he held 
 "under his right arm, and this right arm bowed a fiddle 
 j)laced under his left; and that left arm beat, at the 
 proper moments, a drum which was fastened on his 
 l)ack ; his cap was hung round with bells, out of which 
 he shook an accompaniment " alia Turca," by moving 
 his head, and ho had a cymbal strapped upon each of 
 his knees, which he banged vigorously together; so 
 that the man was all music, from the crown of his head 
 to the sole of his foot. So that one is tempted to make 
 this simile-man an occasion and ground-work of further 
 similes, and liken him to a prince who represents in 
 ikis own person all the instruments of his State, and all 
 its members and representatives. Now, in the presence 
 of readers who are all-knowers, just as this man was an 
 all-player, how is a humble individual such as I, who 
 am but a mere Heidelberg master of seven arts, at the 
 •{Kitside, and doctor of a small trifle of philosophy, or 
 so, to venture to take upon himself to attempt such a 
 thing as a bit of a digression with any approach to the 
 tclever or the felicitous about it ? No ; the safe course, 
 in the circumstances, for me is to go quietly on with 
 any story. 
 
 We find the advocate, Siebenkaes, once more, then, in 
 full blossom of hope ; although that blossom is all sterile, 
 and not of the sort which bears fruit. After his royal 
 shot, he had reckoned upon, at any rate, as many happy 
 days as the money would last for — upon fourteen at least ; 
 but mourning-black, now the traveller's uniform, ought 
 to have been the colour of his upon his earthly night- 
 journey — that voyage jpittoresque for poets. Though mar- 
 mots and squirrels know how to plug up that particular 
 hole in their dwellings which chances to be on the side 
 from which the approaching storm is coming, men do not ; 
 iKrmian thought if the hole in his purse was mended no 
 more was necessary. Alas! a better thing than money now 
 -departed from him — Love. His good Lenette receded to a 
 greater distance from his heart, as he did from hers, day 
 •hj day. 
 
 Her having concealed from him the fact that Eosa had 
 
CHAP. IX.] FLOWEE, FEUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 273 
 
 given back the wreath, formed in his heart (as foreign 
 matter lodged in any vessel of the body always does) the 
 nucleus of a gradual deposit of stone about it. But that 
 •was only a small matter. 
 
 For ahe brushed and scraped of a morning, and every 
 morning, and that whether (as the saying goes) he " liked 
 it or lumped it." 
 
 She would persist, and insist, on communicating all her 
 prorogations of parliament and other decrees to the servant 
 girl, in several duplicates and revised copies, let him pro- 
 test as much as he chose. 
 
 She asked him everything she had to ask him (no matter 
 ■what) two or three separate times over ; and that whether 
 he shouted beforehand like a quack doctor at a fair, or 
 swore afterwards like one of his customers. 
 
 She continued to say, " It has struck four quarters to 
 four o'clock." 
 
 When he had proved, with immense care and trouble, 
 that Augspurg was not in the Island of Cyprus, she would 
 return him the quiet incontrovertible answer, " Well, it's 
 not in Koumania either, nor in Bulgaria, nor in the Prin- 
 cipality of Jauer, nor in Vauduz, nor in the neighbour- 
 bourhood of Hiishen — two very little, insignificant places, 
 both of them." He could never bring her to give an 
 unqualified assent, when he made the unconditional and 
 positive assertion (in a loud voice), " It's in Swabia — or 
 tlie devil's in it." She would go no further than to admit 
 that it was situated, in a certain sense, and to some extent, 
 between Franconia, Bavaria, and Switzerland, &c. ; it was 
 only to the bookbinder's wife that she would acknowledge 
 that it was in Swabia. 
 
 Burdens, nay, overloads, of this sort, however, can be 
 borne more or less easily and bravely by a soul fortified 
 by the example of great sufferers — siich as a Lycurgus, who 
 let himself be deprived of an eye, and an Epictetus, who 
 allowed his master to hack off his leg ; and all these little 
 failings of Lenette's have been touched upon in a previous 
 chapter. But I have to tell of new shortcomings besides ; 
 and as regards these, I leave it to unbiassed married men 
 to determine whether they are among the matters which 
 husbands can, and should, put up with. 
 
 II. T 
 
27i JKAN PAUL FEIEDRICH RICHTEK. [bOOK III. 
 
 Tirstly : Letiette washed her hands forty times in the 
 course of the day, at the very least ; no matter what she 
 touched, she. must needs put herself through this process of 
 Holy Ee-baptism ; like a Jew, she was rendered unclean 
 by the propinquity of everything. She would far more pro- 
 bably have followed the example of Eabbi Akiba, than 
 have been in the least astonished at his proceedings — who, 
 when he was a captive in prison, and in the direst distress 
 for water, instead of quenching his thirst with the very- 
 small quantity of it he could get, preferred to use it for 
 his ablutions. 
 
 " Of course it is right and proper that she should be 
 scrupulous about cleanliness," said Siebenkses, " and more 
 so than I am ; but there are limits to all things. Why 
 doesn't she lub herself with a towel when anybody breathes 
 upon her ? Why not puiify her lips with soap after a fly 
 has deposited itself (and not only itself) upon them ? I'm 
 sure she turns our sitting-room into a regular English 
 man-of-war, scoured and holystoned from stem to stem 
 every morning ; and I look on as pleased as any officer on 
 her quarter-deck." 
 
 If a heavy Irish rain-cloud, or a waterspout with its 
 attendant thunders and lightnings, came over his and her 
 days, she always managed to put her husband right under 
 water (like a Dutch fortress), with all his courageous 
 energy, and gave free course to all her tears. But when 
 the sun of happiness cast a feeble ray no broader than 
 a window into the room, Lenette would always have a 
 hundred things, other than this pleasant one, to attend to 
 and to look at. Firmian had particularly made up his 
 mind that he would most thoroughly winnow the husks 
 from the corn of these few days during which he had a 
 few shillings of ready money in his pocket ; that he would 
 skim off the cream of them, and completely hide, with a 
 thick veil, the secotd Janus face, let it be smiling or 
 weeping over the past or the future, as the case might be ; 
 but Lenette would insist upon rending this veil, and point- 
 ing to the hidden face. " My dear soul ! " her husband more 
 than once implored her, " do but wait (ill we're as poor as 
 church mice, and leading the life of a dog, again ; then 
 I'll groan and moan with you with the greatest pleasu! e." 
 And she only once made him any pertinent answer, 
 
CHAP. IX. J FLOWEU, FEDIT, AND TIIOEN PIECES. 275 
 
 namely, " How long -will it be before we're without a 
 farthing in the house ? " But to this he was able to 
 J eturn a still more apposite reply : " If that is your way 
 oi looking at the matter, you will never be able to enjoy 
 a single quiet, bright, happy day, unless one can give you 
 his solemn c^ath that there will never come another dark, 
 cloudy, wretched one again ; in which case, of course, you 
 can, never enjoy one. What king or emperor — ay ! an<l 
 though he had thrones upon the head of him and crowi.s 
 under his tail — can ever be sure but that any post-deli- 
 very, or any sitting of his pailiament, may bring him a 
 cloudy time of it ; yet he passes his happy day in his Sans 
 Souci, or his Bellevue (or whatever he may call it), and 
 enjoys his life." (She shook her head). " I can prove it to 
 you in print, and from the Greek." And, opening the New 
 Testament, he read out the following passage (inserted by 
 himself on the spur of the moment) : " If, in a time of 
 good fortune and happiness, thou delayest the joj' of thim; 
 heart until a moment shall come in which nothing shall 
 lie before thee save hopes in unbroken sequence for whole 
 years to come, then there can be no true happiness on the 
 face of this changing world. For after ten days, or years, 
 some sorrow shall surely come ; and thus thou canst 
 delight in no May-day, though it shower blossoms and 
 nightingales upon thee, since, beyond all doubt, the winter 
 will come thereafter, with its nights and its snowflakes. Yet 
 thou enjoyest thine ardent youth, not thinking with dread 
 upon the ice-pit of age, which is ready in the background, 
 with a gradually -increasing coldness to preserve thee for a 
 certain season. Look, then, upon the glad To-day as a long 
 youth; and let the sad Day-after^to-morrow appear unto 
 thee but as a brief old age." 
 
 " The Latin or the Greek always has a more religious 
 sound, I know," she answered, " and- we often hear the 
 thing in the pulpit, too ; and whenever I do hear it 
 preached I always go home and feel much comforted and 
 consoled, till the money's all gone again." 
 
 He had greater difSculty still to get her to jump for 
 joy quite to his liking at the dinner- table at mid-day. If, 
 instead of their every-day fare, some extraordinary flesh- 
 pot of Egypt should chance to bo smoking on the table^ 
 
 T 2 
 
276 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH EICKTEB. [bOOK III. 
 
 some dish such as the Counts of Wratislaw might have 
 Berved, and the Counts of Waldstein have carved, without 
 a blush — then Siehenk^s might be sure that his vrife 
 •would have at least one hundred things more than usual 
 to finish and to put away before she could come to dinner. 
 There sits her husband, eager to begin ; he looks round 
 for her, quietly at first, angrily after a while, but keeps 
 command of himself for two or three entire minutes, 
 during which he has time to remember all his troubles as 
 well as think about the roast — then, however, he discharges^ 
 the first thunder-clap of his storm, and shouts, " Thunder 
 and lightning ! here have I been sitting for a whole 
 Eternity, and everything getting as cold as charity. Wife t 
 Wife!!" 
 
 In Lenette, as in other women, the cause of this was not 
 ill-temper, neither was it stupidity, nor stubborn indifier- 
 ence to the matter or to her husband ; she really could 
 not do otherwise, however, and that's quite sufficient 
 explanation. 
 
 At the same time, my friend Siebenkses — who will have 
 this story in his hands even before the printer's devils get 
 hold of it — musn't take it ill of me that I divulge to the 
 world in general certain small breakfast-failings of his own 
 — which he has communicated to me with his own lips. 
 As he lay in his trellis-bed in the morning, before getting 
 up, with his eyes closed, there would suddenly flash upon 
 him ideas for his book, and forms in which to express 
 them, such as never occurred to him while he was sitting 
 or standing during the day ; and, indeed, I have in tho 
 course of my reading found that there have been many 
 men of learning — such, for instance, as Descartes, Abbe 
 Galiani, Basedow — I, myself, too, whom of course I don't 
 count, who belonged to the Coleopterous family of back- 
 swimmers {NotonectcB), and got on quickest in the recum- 
 bent position, and in whose cases bed has been the brew- 
 ing-kettle of their most brilliant and original ideas. I, 
 myself, could point to many such which I have written 
 down immediately after getting out of bed in the morning. 
 Any one who sets himself to work to explain this pheno- 
 menon should adduce in the first place the matutinal! 
 power of the brain, and the fact of its lending itself with 
 
CHAP. IX.J FLOWER, FKUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 277 
 
 a more nimble, as well as vigorous obedience to the im- 
 pulses of the spirit after its internal and external holiday 
 of rest ; next, the freedom and facility both of thinking 
 and of brain mobility, which the manifold impulsions of 
 the day has not yet begun to weary and impair ; and, 
 lastly, the vigour which is a peculiar property of all flrst- 
 ■born things — a vigour which our earliest morning thoughts 
 possess in common with the first impressions of youth. 
 
 Now, after the above explanations, it will doubtless 
 ^eem clear that, when the advocate lay in this fashion, 
 s^)TOuting and sending out long shoots in the warm. 
 forclBg^ouse of the pillow, and bearing the most precious 
 flowers andfruit, nothing could strike upon his ear in a 
 harsher and^more distracting manner than the voice of 
 Lenette calling from the next room, " Come to breakfast, 
 tie coffee's ready." He generally gave birth to one or 
 two more happy turns of expression after he did hear it, 
 pricking his ears all the while, however, in dread of a 
 second order to march. But as Lenette knew that he 
 always allowed himself a considerable number of minutes 
 of grace after the summons, she always cried, " Get up, the 
 coffee's cold," when it was only just coming to the boil. 
 The notonectio satirist, for his part, had observed the law 
 which governed this precession of the equinoxes, and lay 
 quietly among the feathers breeding his ideas happy and 
 undisturbed when it was only once that she had sum- 
 moned him, merely answering, " This very moment!" and 
 availing himself of the double usance prescribed by law. 
 
 This obliged his wife, for her part, to go farther back, 
 and when the coffee was made and standing by the fire, to 
 cry, " Come, dear, it's getting quite cold," Now, on this 
 system, of getting earlier on one side and later on the 
 other, matters became more critical every day, with 
 nowhere a prospect of extrication from the difBculty ; iu 
 fact, what was naturally to be expected was the arrival of 
 a state of things in which Lenette would end by calling 
 bim to get up a whole day too soon ; although, in the end, 
 this would eventuate in a mere restoration of the original 
 condition of affairs, just as our suppers at the present day 
 threaten to become too-early breakfasts, and our break- 
 fasts unfashionably early dinners. Had Siebenkscs been 
 
278 JEAN TAUL FKIEDEIC'H RICHTER. [BOOK III. 
 
 aHe to bear the piooess of grinding the coffee; he might 
 have moored himself to that as to an anchor of hope, ana 
 it would then have been a simple matter to calculate 
 the time the coffee would take to get ready ; but this he 
 could not, for, in the absence of a coffee-mill, the coffee- 
 was bought ready ground (by everybody in the house, for 
 that matter). If Lenette could have been induced to call 
 him just one exact minute before the coffee was boiling 
 and smoking, she would have done instead of the coffee- 
 mill — however, she could not be induced. 
 
 What are trifling differences of opinion before marriage 
 ^j assume large dimensions thereafter — as north winds are 
 warm in summer and cold in winter ; the zephyr, when 
 it is breathed forth by conjugal Lmgs, is like Homer's 
 zephyr, concerning the biting keenness of which the poet 
 sings so much. For this period onward, Firmian set 
 himself to look with much care and minuteness for every 
 crack, feather, flaw, or cloudiness, which might be dis- 
 coverable in that diamond — Lenette's heart. Poor fellow T 
 this being the case with thee, soon, soon must the crumb- 
 ling altar of thy love go toppling down one stone after 
 another, and the sacrificial fire flutter and go out. 
 
 He now discovered that she was not nearly as learaed a 
 woman as Mdlles. Burmann and Eeiske. It is true no book 
 Avearied her', but neither did any interest her, and she 
 cuuld read her one book of Sermons as often as scholars 
 can. go through Homer and Kant. Her secular or " pro- 
 fane" authors were only two ; in fact, one married pair of 
 Muthors — the immortal authoress of her own cookery 
 receipts, and tha,t lady's husband— but the latter she never 
 read. She paid his essays the tribute of her profoundest ad- 
 miration, but she never glanced into them. Three sensible 
 words with the bookbinder's wife were of more value 
 in her eyes than all the bookbinder's and bookmaker's 
 printed ones put together. To a literary man who is 
 making new arguments, and new ink, all the year long, it 
 is incomprehensible how those persons who have neither a 
 book, nor a pen, nor a drop of ink in the house (except 
 the jj'ale rusty liquid borrowed from the village school- 
 master) can exist at all. Firmian sometimes appointed 
 himself a species of special Professor-extraordinary, and 
 
CHAP. IX.J FLOWER, FETJIT, ASD THOEN PIECES. 279 
 
 mounted the professional chair with the view of initiating 
 Lenette into one or two of the elementary principles of 
 Astronomy ; hut either she had no pineal gland (that 
 manor-house of the soul and its ideas), or else the cham- 
 hers of her brain were saturated, satiated, and crammed to 
 the roof with lace, bonnets, shirts, and saucepans ; at all 
 events, it was beyond his power to get a single star into 
 her head bigger than a reel of cotton. With Pneuma- 
 tology (Psychology), again, his difificulty was exactly of 
 the converse sort. In this branch of science, where the 
 calculus of thp infinitesimally small would have come to 
 his aid with an equal amount of serviceableness as that of 
 the infinitely great in astronomy, Lenette expanded and 
 stretched out the dimensions of the angels, souls, and so 
 forth, passing the min>itest and most ethereal of spiritual 
 beings through the stretching mill of her imagination, so 
 that angels — of whom .the scholiasts would have invited 
 whole companies to a carpet-dance on the tip of a new 
 needle (or have threaded them with it by couples on one 
 and the same point of space) — expanded on her hands to 
 such an extent that each angel would have filled a cradle 
 by itself; and as for the Devil, he swelled out upon her till 
 he got to be pretty much about the size of her husband. 
 
 Further, Siebenkass discovered an iron-mould stain, a 
 pock-mark or wart, on her heart ; he could never warm her 
 into a true lyric enthusiasm of Love, in which she should 
 forget heaven and earth, and all things. She could count 
 the strokes of the town clock amid his kisses; though 
 some affecting story or discourse of his might bring the 
 big tears to her eyes, she could still hear the soup-pot 
 boiling oyer, and run away to it, tears and all. She would 
 join devoutly in the hymns which came resounding from 
 the other lodgers' rooms of a Sunday, but in the middle of 
 of a verse ask the prosaic question, " What shall I warm 
 for supper ?" and he never could forget that, once, when 
 she was listening, apparently much interested and quite 
 touched, to one of his chamber-sermons on death and im- 
 mortality, she looked at him, thoughtfully it is true, but 
 with a glance directed downward, and said, " Don't put on 
 that left Etocking to-morrow morning till I've daracd it 
 for you." 
 
280 JEAN PAUL FKIEDRICH KICHTER. [bOOK lit 
 
 The author of this tale declares that he has sometimes 
 been driven nearly out of his mind by feminine entr'actes 
 of this sort, against the ocourrence of ■which there is no 
 warranty for the man who soars up into the aether in 
 company with these beautiful birds of paradise, and there 
 hovers up and down with them, in the fond hope of 
 hatching the eggs of his phantasies upon their backs up 
 among the clouds.* All in an instant, down drops the 
 winged mate, as if by magic, with a green gleam, on to a 
 clod of earth. I admit that this is but an excellence the 
 more ; it makes them resemble the hens, whose eyes the 
 Great Optician of the Universe has made so perfect that 
 they can see the most distant sparrow-hawk in the sky as 
 well as the nearest grain of malt on the dunghill. It is 
 to be hoped, indeed, that the author of this story, should he 
 ever chauce to marry, may meet with a wife to whom he 
 may be able to give readings concerning the more essen- 
 tial principles and dictata of psychology and astronomy 
 without her bringing in the subject of hi'- stockings in the 
 middle of his loftiest and fullest flights of enthusiasm; 
 but yet he will be well content should one possessed of 
 moderate excellencies fall to his lot — one who shall be 
 capable of accompanying him, side by side with him, in 
 his flights, so far as they may extend — whose eyes and heart 
 may be wide enough to take in the blooming earth and 
 the shining heavens in great, grand masses at a time, and 
 not in mere infinitesimal particles ; for whom this uni- 
 verse shall be something higher than a nursery and a 
 ball-room ; and who, with feelings delicate and tender, and 
 a heart both pious and wide, should be continually making 
 her husband better and holier. The author's fondest 
 wishes go not beyond this. 
 
 Thus, then, while the flowers, if not the leaves, were 
 falling fast from Firmiau's love, Lenette's was like a rose 
 somewhat overblown, whose beauty a touch will scatter to 
 the earth. Her husband's endless arguments wearied her 
 heart at length. Moreover, she was one of those women 
 whose loveliest blossoms remain sterile and dead, unless 
 children troop around to enjoy them, as the flowers of the 
 
 * Allusion to the fable that the male birds of paradise hatch the 
 e^gs on the backs of the females up in air. 
 
OHAP. IX..J FLOWEK, FELIT, AND THOKN irIECES. 281 
 
 vine do not produce grapes unless frequented by bees. 
 She belonged to tnis class of women also in this respect, 
 that she was born to be the spiral mainspring of a house- 
 keeping engine — the stage-manageress of a great house- 
 hold theatre. Alas ! the market-value of the shares, and 
 the state of the treasury of the said theatre are well-known 
 to everybody — from Hamburg to Ofen. 
 
 Moreover, our couple, like phoenixes and giants, were 
 childless ; the two columns stood apart and unconnected, 
 BO fruit garlands twining about them to bind them one 
 to another. Firmian had, in imagination, thoroughly re- 
 hearsed the character of pere defamille, and despatcher of 
 invitations to be godfather, but it never came to a perfor- 
 mance. 
 
 What was most of all effective in breaking him away 
 from Lenetfe's heait, however, was his dissimilarity to 
 Peltzstiefel. The Schulrath had in him as much of the 
 wearisome, the deliberately circumspect, the grave and 
 reserved, the stiff and starched, the pompous and inflated, 
 
 the heavy and the dull, as these three lines have ; 
 
 but this delighted the very soul of our born housekeeper. 
 Siebenkses, again, was like a jerboa from morning till 
 night. She often said to him, " I'm sure people must think 
 you're not quite right in the head;" to which he would 
 answer, " And am I ?" He concealed the beauty of his 
 character behind a comedy mask, and the trodden-down 
 heels of the buskins he always wore made his stature seem 
 shorter than it really was. The brief drama of his own life 
 he turned into a mere burlesque and parodied epic, and it 
 was fromhighermotives than mere vain folly that he so gave 
 himself over to grotesque performances. In the first place 
 he delighted with a deep delight in the sense of freedom 
 of soul, and entire absence of all conventional trammels; 
 secondly.he found pleasure in the thought that he traTestied 
 — not imitated — the follies of his fellow-men. In acting his 
 part he had a double enjoyment — that of comedian as well 
 as that of the spectator. A pei son who puts humour into 
 action is a satirical improvisatore. Every male reader under- 
 stands this — though no female reader does. I have often 
 wished that I could place in the hands of a woman, 
 
282 JEAN PAUL FlUEDKICH EICIITEE. [bOOK lit 
 
 looking at the white sun-ray of -wisdom broken into a 
 tinted spectrum by the prism of humour, some powerful 
 lens which should burn that spectrum back into its pris- 
 tine whiteness, — but it is not to be done. The fine, delicate, 
 womanly sen^e of the fit, the proper, the becoming, seems 
 to be torn and scratched by the touch of anything angular 
 and unpolished ; these souls, so firmly welded on to the 
 every-day, commonplace, conventional relations of things, 
 cannot understand souls which place themselves in an- 
 tagonism to these relations. And therefore it is that 
 humorists are so rare in the hereditary kingdoms of 
 women, courts — and in their realm of shadows, France. 
 
 Xenette could not be otherwise than much, and con- 
 tinually, vexed and annoyed with this whistling, singing, 
 dancing husband of 'hers — a man who didn't behave to his 
 very clients with anything like proper professional gravity; 
 who, sad to say — and people assured her it was a fact— 
 often walked in circles round the galluws on the hill, — con- 
 cerning whose sanity sensible people spoke very doubtfully 
 — as to whom she complained, that you would never think, 
 to see him, that he lived in a royal burgh, the capital of the 
 province — and who was respectful and reserved only before 
 one person in the world , namely, himself. Why, when maid- , 
 servants, froin the very best houses in the place, came in — 
 with linen to be made up, and so on — didn't they very often 
 see him jump up and, without a " With your leave," or 
 '■By your leave," to anybody, run to his old, battered, 
 rattling piano (it still had all its keys, and nearly as manj' 
 strings), and there he would stand with a wooden yard-r 
 measure in his mouth, up which, as over a drawbridge, the 
 notes climbed to him from the soundboard, then through th& 
 portcullis of his teeth, finally aniving at his soul by waj' 
 of the Eustachian tube and the drum of the ear. He held 
 this stork's-beak of a yard-measure between his teeth ns 
 described in order to magnify the inaudible pianissimo of 
 his piano into a fortissimo at its upper end. However, 
 humour looks paler when reflected in narrative than in 
 the vividness of reality. 
 
 That portion of earth's surface on which these two 
 Btoud was riven into two distinct islets by these continual. 
 
DHAP. IX.J FLOWEE, FEXJIT, AND THOEN PIKCES. 283' 
 
 tremblings of the soil, and these islets kept drifting steadily 
 further and further apart. And ere long there came a 
 serious shock of earthquake. 
 
 For the Heimlicher came on the stage again, with his 
 plea of demurrer to Siebenkass's suit, in which all lie 
 demanded was justice and equity — in other words, the 
 money which was in question, unless Siebenkses couldl 
 prove himself to he himself, that is to say, the wa,rd, whose 
 patrimony the Heimlicher had hitherto kept in his paternal 
 hands and purse. This juridical Hell-river took Firmian's- 
 breath away and struck ice-cold to his heart, though he- 
 had jumped over the three previous petitions for postpone- 
 ment a,e easily as the crowned lion over the three livers in 
 the Gotha coat-of-arms. The wounds which we receive 
 from Fate soon heal, but those inflicted by the blunt and) 
 rusty torture-implement of an unjust man suppurate anii 
 take long to close. This cut, made into nerves already laid 
 bare by so many a rude clutch and sharp tongue, caused 
 our dear friend some severe pain ; yet he had seen that 
 the cut was coming long before it came, and had cried to 
 his spirit, " Look out — mind your head I" Alas ! there is 
 something new in every pain. He had even taken legal 
 steps in anticipation of it. A few weeks before he hadi 
 had evidence sent from Leipsic, where he had studied, to 
 prove that he had formerly been known by the name of 
 Leibgeber, and was, consequently, Blaise's ward. A young 
 notary there, of the name of Giegold, an old college friend 
 and literary brother in arms, had done him the service of 
 seeing all the people who had known of his Leibgeberhood 
 -^particularly a rasty, musty old tutor, who had often been 
 present when the guardian's register-ships came in — and a 
 postman, who had piloted them into port, and his landlord 
 and other well-informed persons, who all took the Jus 
 credulitalis (or oath of conviction), and whose evidence the 
 young lawyer forwarded to Siebenkses (like a mountain 
 full of precious ore) ; he had no great difficulty, to speak 
 of, in paying the postage of it, as he was king of the 
 marksmen. ' 
 
 With this stout club of evidence he resisted and with- 
 etood his guardian and robber. 
 
 When Blaise's denial was lodged, the timid Lenett* 
 
284 JEAN PAUL FRTEDEICH EICHTEK. [bOOK III. 
 
 gaTe herself and the suit up for lost ; poverty, lean and, 
 fcare, seemed in Tier eyes now to enmesh them in a net- 
 work of parasite ivy, and there was no other prospect for 
 them bnt to perish and fall to the ground. Her first pro- 
 ceeding was to burst into loud abuse of Von Meyern ; for 
 as he had himself told her that his father-in-law's three 
 applications for delay had been the result of A/« intercession, 
 which he had made for her sake alone, she looked upon 
 Blaise's plea of demurrer as being the first thorn-sucker 
 / sent forth by Kosa's revengeful soul in return for the im- 
 jprisonment and the sacking he had undergone in Firmian's 
 house (and half ascribed to her), and for what he had lost. 
 
 Up to the day of the shooting-match he had supposed 
 that the husband was his enemy, but not the wife ; then, 
 liowever, his pleasant conceit had been embittered and 
 proved to be groundless. But the Venner not being present 
 to hear her reproaches, she was obliged to turn the full 
 •stream of her anger on to her husband, to whom she attri- 
 buted all the blame, because of his having so wickedly and 
 sinfully changed names with Leit^eber. He who has 
 married a wife will be prepared to relieve me of the trouble 
 of mentioning that it made not the slightest difference what 
 ■Siebenkaes said in reply or adduced concerning Blaise's 
 wickedness (who, being the greatest Judas Iscariot and 
 •oorn-Jew the world contained, would have robbed him jusfc 
 •the same if his name had been Leibgeber still, and would 
 have found out a thousand legal byepaths by which to 
 (proceed to the plundering of his ward). It had no effect. 
 At last the following words were forced out of him : " You 
 are quite as unjust as I should be were I to attribute this 
 document of Blaise's to your behaviour to the Venner." 
 BTothing irritates women so much as derogatory compari- 
 sons ; they apply them indiscriminately, without distinc- 
 tion. Lenette's ears lengthened to tongues, like those of 
 Eumour; her husband was immediately out-bawled and 
 unlistened to. 
 
 He was obliged to send privately to Peltzstiefel to ask 
 ■where he had been so long, and why he had utterly 
 forgotten their house ; Stiefel was not even in his own 
 house, however, but out walking, for it was a beautiful 
 day. 
 
CHAP. IX.] FLOWEE, TBUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 28S 
 
 " Lenette," said Siebenkaes suddenly — hB often preferred 
 ▼aulting over a marsh on the leaping-pole of an idea to 
 ■wading painfully across it on the long stilts of syllogism, 
 and was anxious to banish from her memory the ianocettt 
 remark which he had let slip about Hosa, and which she 
 had BO utterly misunderstood — " Lenette, I'll tell you what 
 we'll do this afternoon ; we'Jl take a strong cup of coffee, 
 and go and take a walk and enjoy ourselves : it is not a 
 Sunday, but it is the day which all the Catholics in the 
 town keep holiday on as the feast of the Annunciation, and 
 the weather is really too magnificent. We'U go and sit ia 
 the big upstairs room at the Kifle Club-house, as it wouldi 
 be a little too warm outside perhaps, and we can look 
 down from the windows and see all the heterodox people 
 promenading in their best clothes — and our Lutheran 
 Stiefel among them, who knows ? " 
 
 Either I am more in error than I often am, or this was a 
 most agreeable surprise to Lenette. Coffee, in the morning 
 the water-of-baptism and altar-wine of the fair sex, is their 
 love-philter and their waters-of-strife in the afternoon (the- 
 latter, however, only as regards the absent); but what 
 a wondrous mill-stream for the setting in motion of the 
 machinery of the ideas must an afternoon cnp of coffee on a, 
 common working-day be for a woman such as Lenette, who 
 rarely had any on other than Sunday afternoons ; for before 
 the days of the blockade of the continent it cost too much 
 money. 
 
 A woman who is really very much delighted needs but 
 a very short time to put on her black silk bonnet and take- 
 her big church-fan, and (contrary to all her ordinary 
 manners and customs) be quite ready and dressed for a 
 walk to the Eifle Club-house, even going the length of 
 making the coffee during the process of dressing, so as to- 
 be able to take it, and the milk, with her in her hand. 
 
 Our couple set forth at two o'clock in the happiest pos- 
 . sible frame of mind, carrying with them warm in their 
 pockets what was to be warmed up later on in the after- 
 noon. 
 
 Even at two o'clock, early as it was, the western and 
 southern hills lay all beflooded with the warm evening, 
 glow with which the low December sun was bathing them,. 
 
286 JEAN PAUL FKIEDKICH EICHTER. [bOOK III. 
 
 white great glaciers of clouo), ranged about'tlie sky, east 
 their cheerful lights over the landscape. All about this 
 ■world there, beamed a beautiful brightness, which cheered 
 and lighted up many a dai k and nai row life, 
 
 SiebenksBS pointed out the eagle's perch to Lenette while 
 they were still at Eome distance from it — the alpenstock 
 ■or boat-pole which had so recently helped him out of his 
 most imminent difficulties. When they i cached the Club- 
 house he took her and showed her the shooter's-stand where 
 he had shot himself with his rifle up to the dignity of bird 
 emperor, and oiit of the Frankfort-Jew's-quatter of duns, 
 liberating at his coronation at least one debtor^ namely, 
 Mmself. They had room and to spare to " spread them- 
 selves out " (so to speak) upstairs' in the members' hall — he 
 at a writing-table by the right-hand window, and she with 
 her work at another on the left. 
 
 How the coifee gave warmth to this December festival 
 may be imagined, but not described. 
 
 Lenette put on one stocking of her husband's after 
 another — put them on her left arm, that is, while her right 
 wielded the darning-needle ; and as she sat, with a stocking 
 generally quite open at the bottom, she was, as regarded 
 •one of her arms at all events, like a lady with the long, 
 fashionable Danish mittens, with holes for the fingers. 
 However, she did not raise these arm-stockings of hers 
 high enough to be seen by the people walking in the upper 
 walks, but kept nodding down her " your very humble 
 and obedient servant " from the open window to numbers 
 of the most genteel she-heretics as they passed, wearing 
 her own works of art upon their heads, in honour of the 
 Annunciation- feast ; and more than one sent an obliging 
 salute up to her roof-thatcher. 
 
 The strictest religious and political parity being esta- 
 blished by law in Kuhschnappel, it was natural thai 
 Protestants of position should also go a- walking on this 
 ■Catholic holiday. However, the advocate was perhaps 
 enjoying himself quite as much as his wife ; he went on 
 writing his 'Devil's Papers,' and at the same time feasting 
 his gaze upon the high places, the sommites of the land- 
 scape, if not of Kuhschnappel society. 
 
 When he first entered the room he had a most asreeable 
 
CHAP. IX. J FLOWEK, FEUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 28? 
 
 reception from a child's truinpet, left there by accident ; 
 the paint -was not quite all licked away from it, and it was 
 the smell of this paint, more even than the squeak of the 
 trumpet, which pleased him so very much, by recalling 
 the vague delights of Christmases of the past ; so thEct 
 pleasure was heaped upon pleasure. He could rise from 
 his satires and point out to Lenette the great rooks' ne.sts 
 in the leafless trees, and the bare tables and bencbes in the 
 arbours, and the invisible guests who had occupied seats of 
 the blessed there on summer evenings, and still remem- 
 bered the time, looking forward to a repetition of it ; and 
 lie could draw her attention to the fields, where, late as it 
 ■was in the year, volunteer gardeneres&es were gathering 
 salad for him, namely, ooi'n salad or rampion, which he 
 wight have some of for supper if he had a mind. 
 
 And now he sat at his window, with his eyes fixed upon 
 the hills, all flushed with the evening red, the sun growing 
 larger as it sunk towaids them. Beyond these hills lay 
 the lands where wandered his Leibgeber, sporting away 
 his life. 
 
 " How delightful it is, wife," he said, " that what parts 
 me from Leibgeber is not a mere wide level plain, with 
 nothing but a hillock or two cropping up here and there 
 on it, but a grand, lofty wall of mountains, behind whicli 
 he stands as if behind the giating of a monastery." This 
 sounded to her almost as if her husband was glad that 
 this barrier stood between them ; she herself had but little 
 liking for Leibgeber, and considered him to be ,a sort of 
 coin-clipper to her husband, who cut all his angles sharper 
 than they were by nature ; however, in dubious cases like 
 this, she was always glad to ask no questions. What he 
 had meant was exactly the reverse of what she supposed ; 
 he had meant that it is good, if parted from those we love, 
 that it should be by holy hills, because they are, as it were, 
 lofty garden-walls, behind which we picture the flowerj' 
 thickets of our Edens; wheieas, on the other verge of the 
 broadest barnfloor of a level plain we only picture to 
 ourselves a repetition of it sloping the other way. AnJ 
 this applies to nations as well as to individuals. The 
 Luneburg moors or the Marklands of Prussia will not draw 
 even an Italian's lodging gaze towards Italy ; but when a 
 
288 JEAN PAUL FKIEDEICH EICHTEE. [bOOK IH. 
 
 Martman in Italy sees the Apennines, his heart yearns to 
 his German loved ones behind them. 
 
 As Firmian looked upon that sunny mountain-barrier 
 between two severed spirits, there was that in his eyes- 
 which much resembled tears ; but he only turned his chair 
 a little away, that Lenette might ask no questions ; he was 
 well aware of his old ingrained habit of getting angry when 
 anybody asked what brought tears to his eyes, and he 
 strove with it. Was he not, in fact, tenderness personified 
 to-day, only acting his comedy in the palest middle-tints 
 before his wife, because he was delighting in the fresh- 
 growth of this enjoyment of hers, of which he was himself 
 the origin. It is true she did not discover the existence of 
 this, his feeling of delicate consideration for her^ but just 
 as he was quite content when no one but himself (least of 
 all, she) perceived that he was poking fun at her (in th& 
 most delicate manner), so was he content that she should 
 be in utter ignorance that he was causing her a little 
 happiness. 
 
 At last they left the spacious room, the sun now robing 
 them in purple hues ; and as they went he drew Lenette's 
 attention to the liquid, golden splendour shining upon 
 the roofs of the greenhouses, and he hung himself on to the 
 sun — at that moment cut in two by the mountain-range — 
 that he might sink, with it, to his far-away friend. Ah t 
 how strong is love in distance — be it distance of space, or 
 of time, of the future or the past — ay, or that greater dis- 
 tance still — beyond this world! And so the evening 
 might very well have ended in an altogether delightful 
 manner, had not something intervened. 
 
 For some particularly ingenious evil spirit or other had 
 taken the Heimlicher von Blaise, and so set him down, 
 promenading in the open air, that the advocate murt needs 
 come within shooting range and hailing distance of him 
 just on a feast of the Annunciation for good folks only. 
 When the guardian went through the proper forms of 
 salutation — accompanying them with a smile such as, 
 fortunately, can never be seen on a child's face — Siebenkses- 
 returned his salutes politely, although with a mere clutch- 
 ing and jerking at his hat — which he didn't take off. 
 Lenette tried to make amends for this, by doubling the 
 
CHAP. IX.] FLOWER, FRUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 289 
 
 profundity of ter otv n tow and curtsey ; but as soon as 
 practicable she administered to her husband a gaiden 
 lecture, or, rather, a garden paZin;/ lecture, on his always, 
 as if on purpose, irritating his guardian whenever he had 
 an opportunity. " Indeed, love," he said, " I couldn't 
 help it. I really meant nothing of the kind to-day, of all 
 days in the year." 
 
 The truth of the matter, indeed, is, that Siebentass had 
 sometime before complained to his wife that his hat, 
 ■which was of softish felt, was getting a good deal spoiled 
 by having to be so often taken off to people in the streets, 
 and that he could think of nothing better than to protect 
 it with a coat of mail in the shape of a stiff cover of green 
 oilskin, so that when packed up in this pudding- roll he 
 might go on daily employing it in those offices of out-door 
 politeness which men owe one to anotlier, without ever 
 having to take hold of the hat itself at all. Well, the first 
 walk he took after assuming this double hat, or hat's hat, 
 was to a grocer's, where he disembowelled the inner one 
 from its envelope and swopped it away for six pounds of 
 coffee, which warmed the four chambers of his brain better 
 than the hare-skin had ever done ; he then went tran- 
 quilly home, with only the coadjutor hat on his head, un- 
 detected, and thenceforward bore the empty case through 
 the streets with a secret joj^ that, in a sense, he now really 
 took off his hat to nobody — with other entertaining fancies 
 bearing on the subject of his sugar-loaf. 
 
 Of course, when he forgot — and on that day in particu- 
 lar, it was perhaps excusable that he did so — to support 
 his hat-case with the necessary framework of artificial 
 rafters, it was really almost an impossibility to take this 
 mere shell of a hat right off for purposes of salutation. 
 The most he could do was just to touch it courteously, like 
 an officer returning a salute ; and thus, against his will, 
 play the part of a rude and ill-bred individual. 
 
 And it so happened that just on this very day get it off 
 he could not. 
 
 It was so ordained, however, that matters should not 
 even rest here (as regarded our couple's promenade), but 
 one of the above-mentioned ingenious evil spirits changed 
 the scene of the drama with such nimbleness, that we 
 
 11. u 
 
290 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH EICHTEK. [BOOK III. 
 
 have a fresli combination before our eyes before "we 
 know where we are. Just in front of onr wedded pair, 
 a master tailor of the Catholic confession was taking 
 his walk, most sprucely attired in honour of the Feast 
 of the Annunciation, like all the rest of his pro- and 
 coN-fession. As ill luok would have it, this tailor, 
 being in a narrow walk, had (whether for fear of mud, or 
 in the delight of his soul over his holiday) so elevated 
 his coat-tails that the vertebral extremity, the os cocoygis, 
 or (shall we call it) insertion of the spinal cord, of 
 his waistcoat, was clearly exhibited ; in other words, 
 the hachground of his waistcoat, which, as we know, is 
 generally executed in colours more subdued than those 
 used for the brighter and more prominent foreground on 
 the chest of the wearer. " Hy ! Mr. 1" cried Lenette; 
 " what are you doing with a lot of my chintz on the back 
 of you?" 
 
 The truth was that this tailor had put aside and taken 
 possession of so much of a nice green Augspurg chintz (sent 
 to him by Lenette, on her becoming a queen, to make her 
 a new body) as he considered proper and Christianly honest, 
 calculating on the principle of " no charge for wine 
 samples," and this trifle of a sample had just barely 
 sufficed to form a sober background to his pea-green waist- 
 coat ; and he had contented himself with so dim a reverse 
 side for this waistcoat in the confident expectation that 
 it would never be seen. However, as the tailor went on 
 with his walk (after Lenette had shouted her query at 
 him), as utterly unmoved as if it had nothing on earth to 
 do with him, the little spark of her anger became a blazing 
 flame, and, regardless of all her husband's winks and 
 whispers, she cried aloud, " Why, it's my very own chintz, 
 that I got all the way from Augspurg ; do you hear, Mr. 
 Mowser, you've stolen my chintz, you blackguard, you ! " 
 Then, and not till then, the guilty chintz-robber turned 
 round with much sangfroid, and said, " Prove that, if you 
 please ! But, mind, I'll chintz you, if there be such a thing 
 as law in all Kuhschnappel." 
 
 At this she burst into a conflagration. Her husband's 
 prayers and entreaties were but as wind to her. " Ey ! 
 you riff-raff," she snapped out. " But I'll have what's 
 
CHAP. IX.J FLOWEK, FRUIT, AND THORN PIECT^S. 291 
 
 my own — you villain ! " she cried. The only reply the 
 tailor vouchsafed to this attack was this — he simply 
 lifted his coat-tails with both hands high ahove the en- 
 dorsed waistcoat, and, bending a little forward, said, 
 "There!" after which he strode slowly on, keeping at 
 the same focal distance from her, so as to bask in her 
 warmth as long as possible. 
 
 Siebenkses was the most to be pitied on this rich feast 
 day, when, in spite of all his juristic and theological 
 exorcisms, he could not cast out this devil of discord — 
 ■when by good luck his guardian angel suddenly emerged 
 from a side path, Peltzstiefel to wit, taking his walk. 
 Gone, so far as Lenette was concerned, were the tailor, the 
 quarter-ell of chintz, the apple of discord, and the devil 
 thereof; the blue of her eyes and the blush on her cheek 
 fronted Stiefel as bright and as fresh as the blue of the 
 evening sky and the blush on its sunset clouds. Ten ells of 
 chintz and half that number of tailors with waistcoat-backs 
 of it into the bargain, were to her, at that moment, feathers 
 light as air, not worth a word or a farthing; so that 
 Siebenkses saw on the instant that Stiefel's coming was as 
 that of a regular Mount of Olives all full of mere olive- 
 branches of peace ; although ibr discord devils hailing from 
 another quarter there might without difficulty be pressed 
 from the olives on said mountain an oil which could not be 
 poured on any fire of matrimonial difference which Stiefel's 
 would be the bucket to put out. If Lenette was a tender, 
 delicate, white butterfly', silently hovering and fluttering 
 about Peltzstiefel's flowery path, out of doors — when she 
 got him into her house she was an absolute Greek Psyche ; 
 aiid, in spite of all my partiality for her, I am bound, under 
 pain of having all the rest discredited, to insert in this 
 protocol a clear statement (much as I regiet to do so) to 
 the effect that on this particular evening she gave one the 
 idea of being nothing but i-ome clear-winged translucent 
 soul free from all trammels of body — which, at some 
 former time, while as yet in the body, had stood in some 
 love-relationship to the Schulrath, but now hovered about 
 him with upraised pinions, and fanned him with fluttering 
 downy plumes, and which at length weary of hovering, 
 and pleased to rest once more on the loved perch of a body. 
 
 u 2 
 
292 JEAN PAUL FKIEDEIOH RICHTEE. [BOOK III. 
 
 settled upon Lenette's, there being no other feminine one 
 at hand, and there folded its wings to rest. Such seemed 
 Lenette. But why was she thus to-day ? Stiefel's igno- 
 rance and delight at it were great; Pirmian's very small. 
 Before I explain it, I will say, " I pity thee, poor husband, 
 and thee, too, poor wife. For why must the smooth flow 
 of the stream of your life (and of our own) be always 
 broken by sorrows or by sins, and why cannot it fall 
 into its grave in the Black Sea, without having to pass 
 over thirteen cataracts, like the river Dnieper ? However, 
 the reason why Lenette on this day in particular exhibited 
 all her heart toward Stiefel, almost bared of the cloister 
 grating of the breast, was that she was, just on this 
 day, so keenly suffering under her misery — her poverty. 
 Stiefel was full of genuine, solid treasures ; Pirmian's 
 were all lacquered. I know that her Siebenkaes, whom 
 before marriage she had loved with the calm and cool 
 regard of a wife, would have found that she would have 
 come to love him after marriage with the warm affection 
 oi 3. fiancee, if he had only been able to give her the bare 
 necessaries of life. There are hundreds of girls who bring 
 themselves to believe that they love the man to whom 
 they are engaged, whereas it is not till after marriage 
 that the play becomes a reality — and that for good reasons, 
 both metallic and physiological. In a well-filled room 
 and kitchen, filled with a comfortable income, and twelve 
 household labours of Hercules, Lenette would have been 
 quite true to the advocate, though an entire philosophical 
 society of Stiefels had sat down all round her, and would 
 have said and thought, every hour of the day, " No 
 more, thank you — I am helped;" but as things were, in 
 a house and kitchen so empty as hers, the chambers of 
 a woman's heart grow full ; in one word, no good comes 
 of it. For a woman's soul is by nature a beautiful fresco 
 painted on rooms, table-leaves, dresses, silver salvers, and 
 household plenishing in general. A woman has a large 
 stock of virtue, but few virtues ; she needs a confined 
 sphere and social forms, and without these flower-sticks 
 the pure white flowers trail in the dust of the border. A 
 man may be a citizen of the world, and if he has nothing 
 else to put his arms round he can press the entire earthly 
 
CHAP. IX.J FLOWEE, FKDIT, AND THORN PIECES. 293 
 
 ball to his tosom, although he can't put his arms round 
 much more of it than will make him a grave. But a citizene»» 
 of the world is a giantess, and goes through the world 
 with nothing hut spectators, and is nothing hut a charac- 
 ter on the stage. 
 
 I ought to have described the whole of this evening much 
 more circumstantially than I have done, for it was upon 
 this evening that the wheels of the vis-a-via phsston of 
 wedded life began to smoke, as a consequence of the 
 friction they had recently been subjected to, and threatened 
 to break out into a blaze of the fire of jealousj'. Jealousy 
 is like Maria Theresa's small-pox, which allowed that 
 princess to pass with impunity through thirty hospitals, 
 full of small-pox patients, but attacked her beneath the 
 Crowns of Hungary and Oermany. Siebenkaes had had 
 on that of Kuhschnappel (the Bird-one) for a week or two 
 now. 
 
 After this evening Stiefel, who took an increasing 
 delight in sitting basking in the rays of the still rising 
 Sun of Lenette, came oftener and oftener, and considered 
 himself the peace-maker, not the peace-breaker. 
 
 It is now my duty to paint with the utmost minutise of 
 detail the last and most important day of this year, the 
 31st of December, with its background and foreground all 
 complete, and with all accessories. 
 
 Before the 31st of December arrived, of course Christmas 
 came, a time which had to be gilt, and wMoh turned 
 Siebenkses's silver age (after the Eoyal shot) info a brazen 
 and a wooden age. The money went. But, worse than 
 that, poor Finnian had fretted, and laughed, himself into 
 an illness. A man who has all his life, upon the upper 
 wings of Fantasy and the lower wings of good spirits, 
 skimmed lightly away over the tops of all the spread-net 
 snares and the open pitfalls of life, does, if once he chances 
 to get impaled upon the hard spines of the full-blown 
 ' thistles (above the purple blossoms and the honey- vessels 
 of which he used to hover) beat in a terrible way about 
 him, hungry, bleeding, epileptically — a glad, happy man 
 finds in the first sunstroke of trouble well-nigh his 
 death-blow. To the polypus of anxiety daily growing 
 in Siebenkses's heart add the effects of the work and cx« 
 
29 i JEAN PAUL FEIEDKICH EIOHTEK. [bOOK III. 
 
 citement of authorship. He was very anxious to get done 
 with his ' Selections from the Devil's Papers ' at the 
 earliest moment possible, so as to live on the price of them 
 and carry on the law-suit besides. So that he sat through 
 entire nights almost (and chairs as well). And in this 
 way he wrote himself into an affection of the chest, such 
 as the present author brought upon himself, and that, as 
 far as he could make out, simply by excess of bountiful 
 I generosity towards the world of letters. He was attacked, 
 i ju&t as I was, by a sudden pausing of the breath and of 
 the action of the heart, succeeded by a blank disappearance 
 of the spirit of life, and then by a throbbing rush of blood 
 up to the brain ; and this came on most frequently while 
 he was sitting at his literary spinning-wheel and spool.* 
 
 However, not a soul offers either of us one single 
 farthing, by way of indemnification, on account of it. It 
 would appear to be ordained that authors are not to go 
 down to posterity in the body, but only in the form of 
 portraits or plaster-casts ; as delicate trout are boiled 
 before being sent away as piesents, people don't put in 
 the laurel-sprig (which is stuck into our mouths as lemons 
 are into the wild boar's) until we have been killed and 
 dished. It would be a gratification to my colleagues and 
 to me if a reader whose heart we have moved (as well as 
 its auricles) were only to say as much as, " This sweet 
 emotion of my heart was not produced without a hypo 
 chondriac "palpitation of theirs." We brighten and 
 illuminate many a head which never dreams of thinking. 
 " Yes, I have to thank them for this, it is true, but what 
 is their reward ? Why, pains in their own heads — kephal- 
 algia and neuralgia in various forms ! " Ay, he ought to 
 interrupt me in the middle of a satire like this, and cry, 
 
 * Particularly on cold bright winter mornings and evenings. I (and 
 j Siebenkffis for the same reason) have been troubled with this complaint 
 tor more than twenty yeais, and I have had an attack of it on this 
 coldest of Christmas eves, just as I was describing it. It is nothing 
 I but a passing paralysis of the nerves of the hmgs — particularly of the 
 nermis vagus — and In course of time (for you see even twenty years have 
 not been enough), leads to that pulmonary apoplexy which Leville in 
 Paris, and recently Hohnbaum, have held to be a new form of the 
 disease, and wliicb, perhaps, after the precedent of " Miller's Asthma," 
 may receive the name of '■ Siebcnlisesian," or " Jean Paulish apoplei/1" 
 
CHAP. IX.] FLOWEE, FKOIT, AND THOKN PIECES, 295 
 
 " Great as is the pain which his satires cause me, they cause 
 Am far more ; luckily, my pain is only mental ! " Health 
 of body only runs parallel with health of mind ; it turns 
 aside and departs from erudition, from over-much imagina- 
 tion, and from great profundity. All these as little indicate 
 health of mind as corpulence, a runner's feet, a wrestler's 
 arms, indicate health of hody. 1 have often wished that 
 all souls were bottled into their bodies as the Pj'imont 
 w^ater is put into its flasks. The best strength of it is 
 allowed to escape first, because, otherwise, it would break 
 the bottle ; but it would seem that it is only in the case of 
 colleges of cardinals (if we are to credit Gorani), cathedral 
 chapters, &o., that this precaution is adopted, and that 
 /toV extraordinary power of ability, which would other- 
 wise have burst their bodies up, is, as a preliminary 
 measure, let off a good deal before they are put into bodies 
 and sent upon earth ; so that the bottles last quite well for 
 seventy or eighty yeais. 
 
 With a sick mind, then, and a sick heart, without 
 money, Siebenk^s begun the last day of the year. The 
 day itself had put on its most beautiful eummer-dress — one 
 of Berlin blue ; it was as cerulean as Krishna, or the new 
 sect of Grahamites, or the Jews in Persia. It had had a 
 fire lighted in the balloon-stove of the sun, and the snow, 
 delicately candied upon the earth, melted into winter- 
 green, like the sugar on some cunningly-devised supper- 
 dish, as soon as the hills were brought within reach of its 
 warmth. The year seemed to be saying good-bye to Time 
 as if with a cheerful warmth, attended with joyful tears. 
 Firmian longed to run and sun himself upon the moist, 
 green sward ; but he had Professor Lang, of Baireuth, to 
 review first. 
 
 He wrote reviews as many people offer up prayers — only 
 in time of need. It was like the water-carrying of the 
 Athenian, done that he might afterwards devote himself 
 to the studies of his choice without dying of hunger. But 
 when he was reviewing, he drew his satiric sting into its 
 fcheath, constructing his criticisms of material drawn only 
 from his store of wax and his honey-bag. " Little authors," 
 h said, "are always better than their works, and great 
 oneB are worse than theirs. \V hy should I pardon moral 
 
296 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH EICHTEE. [bOOK III. 
 
 failings — e.g. self-conceit — in the genius, and not in the 
 dunce? Least of all should it be forgiven the genius. 
 Unmerited poverty and ugliness do not deserve to be 
 ridiculed; but they as little deserve it when they are 
 merited — though I am avi'are Cicero is against me here — 
 for a moral fault (and consequently its punishment) can, of 
 a certainty, not be made greater by a chance physical con- 
 sequence, which sometimes follows upon it, and sometimes 
 does not. Can it? Does an extravagant person who 
 chances to come to poverty deserve a severer punishment 
 than one who does not ? If anything, rather the reverse." 
 If we apply this to bad authors, from whose own eyes their 
 lack of merit is hidden by an impenetrable veil of self- 
 conceit, and at whose unoffending heart the critic dis- 
 charges the fury which is aroused in him by their (offend- 
 ing) heads, we may, indeed, direct our bitterest irony 
 against the race, but the individual will be best instructed by 
 means of gentleness. I think it would be the gold-test, the 
 trial-by-crucible, of a morally great and altogether perfect 
 scholar to give him a bad, but celebrated book to review. 
 
 For my own part, I will allow myself to be. reviewed by 
 Dr. Merkel throughout eternity if I digress again in this 
 chapter. Firmian worked in some haste at his notice of 
 Lang's essay, entitled ' Preemissa Historise Superintenden- 
 tium Generalium Bairuthi non Speoialium — Continua- 
 tione XX." It was quite essential that he should get hold 
 of a dollar or two that day, and he also longed to go and 
 take a walk, the weather was so motherly, so hatching. The 
 new year fell on the Saturday, and as early as the Thursday 
 (the day before the one we are writing of) Lenette had 
 begun the holding of preliminary feasts of purification 
 (she now washed daily more and more in advance of actual 
 necessities) ; but to-day she was keeping a regular feast of 
 in-gathering among the furniture, &c. The room was 
 being put through a course of derivative treatment for the 
 clearing away of all impurities. With her eye on her 
 indem expurgandorum, she thru&t everything that had 
 wooden legs into the water, and followed it herself with 
 balls of soap ; in short, she paddled and bubbled, in the 
 Levitical purification of the room, in her warm, native 
 element, for once in her life to her heart's full content. 
 
CHAP. IX.] FEUIT, FLOWEK, AND THOKN PIECES, 297 
 
 As for Sietenkaes, lie sat bolt-upright in purgatorial firo, 
 ialready beginning to emit a smell of burning. 
 
 For, as it happened, he was rather madder than usual 
 that day, to begin with. Firstly, because he had made up 
 his mind that he would pawn the striped calico-gown in 
 the afternoon, though whole nunneries were to shriek 
 their loudest at it, and because he foresaw that he would 
 have to grow exceedingly warm in consequence. And this 
 resolve of resolves he had taken on this particular day, 
 because (and this is at the same time the second reason 
 why he was madder than usual) — because he was sorry that 
 their good days were all gone again, and that their music 
 of the spheres had all been marred by Lenette's funereal 
 Misereres. 
 
 " Wife ! " he said, " I'm reviewing for money now, recol- 
 lect." She went on with her scraping. "I have got 
 Professor Lang before me here — the seventh chapter of 
 liim, in which he treats of the sixth of the Superintendents- 
 General of Bayreuth, Herr Stockfleth." She was going to 
 stop in a minute or two, but just then, you know, she 
 really could not. Women are fond of doing everything 
 " by and bye " — they like putting a thing off just for a 
 minute or two, which is the reason why they put off even 
 their arrival in this world a few minutes longer than boys 
 do.* " This essay," he continued, with forced calmness, 
 "ought to have been reviewed in the 'Messenger' six 
 months ago, and it'll never do for the ' Messenger ' to be 
 like the ' Universal German Library' and the Pope, and 
 canonise people a century or so after date." 
 
 If he had only been able to maintain his forced calmness 
 for one minute longer, he would have got to the end of 
 Lenette's buzzing din ; however, he couldn't. " Oh ! the 
 devil take me, and you, too, and the ' Messenger of the 
 Gods' into the bargain," he burst out, starting up and 
 dashing his pen on the floor. " I don't know," he went on, 
 suddenly resuming his self-control, speaking in a faint, 
 piteous tone, and kitting down, quite unnerved, feeling 
 something like a man with cupping-glasses on all over 
 him. — " I don't know a bit what I'm translating, or whether 
 I'm writing Stockfleth or Lang. What a stupid arrange- 
 * BuiTon. 
 
298 JEAN .PAUL FEIEDEICH EICHTEK, [BOOK III. 
 
 ment it is that an advocate mayn't be as deaf as a judge. 
 If I were deaf, I should be exempt from torture then. Do 
 you know bow many people it takes to constitute a tumult 
 by law ? Either ten, or you by yourself in that washing 
 academy of music of yours." He was not so much inclined 
 to be reasonable as to do as the Spanish innkeeper did, who 
 charged the. noise made by his guests in the bill. But 
 now, having had her way, and gained her point, she was 
 noiseless in word and deed. 
 
 He finished his critique in the forenoon, and sent it to 
 Stiefel, his chief, who wrote back that he would bring the 
 money for it himself in the evening, for he now seized 
 upon every possible opportunity of paying a visit. At 
 dinner Firmian (in whose head the sultry, fcetid vapour of 
 ill-temper would not. dissolve and fall), said, " I can't 
 understand how you come to care so very little about 
 cleanliness and order. It would be better even if you 
 rather overdid your cleanliness than otherwise. People say, 
 what a pity it is such an orderly man as Siebenkaes should 
 have such a slovenly kind of wife ! " To irony of this sort, 
 though- she knew quite well it was irony, she always 
 opposed regular formal arguments. He could never get 
 her to enjoy these little jests instead of arguing about 
 them, or join him in laughing at the masculine view of 
 the question. The fact is, a woman abandons her opinion 
 as soon as her husband adopts it. Even in church, the 
 women sing the tunes an octave higher than the men that 
 they may diifer from them in all things. 
 
 In the afternoon the great, the momentous, hour ap- 
 proached in. which the ostracism, the banishment from 
 house and home, of the checked calico gown was at last to 
 be carried out — the last and greatest deed of the year 1785. 
 Of this signal for fight, this Timoiir's and Muhammed's 
 led battle-flag, this Ziska's hide, which always set them 
 by the ears, his very soul was sick : he would have been 
 delighted if somebody would have stolen it, simply to be 
 quit of the wearisome, threadbare idea of the wretched 
 rag for good and all. He did not hurry liimself, but intro- 
 duced his petition with ail the wordy prolixity of an M.P. 
 addressing the house (at home). He asked her to guess 
 what might be the greatest kindness, the most signal 
 
CHAP. IX.J FLOWEE, FEUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 299 
 
 favour wMcli she could do him on this last day of the old 
 year. He said he had an hereditary enemy, an Anti- 
 Christ, a dragon, living under his roof ; tares sown among 
 his wheat by an enemy, which she could pull up if she 
 chose ; and, at last, he brought the checked calico gown 
 out of the drawer, with a kind of twilight sorrow : " This," 
 he said, "is the bird of prey which pursues me; the net 
 which Satan sets to catch me ; his sheep-skin my martyr- 
 robe, my Cassim's slipper. Dearest, do me but this one 
 favour— send it to the pawn-shop !" 
 
 " Don't answer just yet," he said, gently laying his hand 
 on her lips ; " let me just remind you what a stupid parish 
 did when the only blacksmith there was in it was going 
 to be hanged in the village. This parish thought it pre- 
 ferable to condemn an innocent master-tailor or two to the 
 gallows, because they could be better spared. Now, a 
 woman of your good sense must surely see how much 
 easier and better it wonld be to let me take away this 
 mere piece of tailor's stitch-work, than metal things 
 which we eat out of every day ; the mourning calico won't 
 be wanted, you know, as long as I'm alive." 
 
 " I've seen quite clearly for a long while past," she said, 
 " that you've made up your mind to carry off my mourning 
 dress from me, by hook or by crook, whether I will or 
 no. But I'm not going to let you have it. Suppose I 
 were to say to you, pawn your watch, how would you 
 like that?" Perhaps the reason why husbands get into 
 the way of issuing their orders in a needlessly dictatorial 
 manner is, that they generally have little effect, but rather 
 confirm opposition than overcome it. 
 
 " Damnation ! " he cried ; " that'll do, that's quite 
 enough ! I'm not a turkey-cook, nor a bonassus neither, 
 to be continually driven into a frenzy by a piece of 
 coloured rag. It goes to the pawn-shop to-day, as sure as 
 my name's Siebenka3s." 
 
 " Your name is Leibgeber as well," said she. 
 
 " Devil fly away with me, if that calico remains in this 
 house ! " said he. On which she began to cry, and lament 
 the bitter fortune which left her nothing now, not even 
 the very clothes for her back. When thoughtless tears 
 fall into a seething masculine heart, they often have the 
 
30C JEAN PAUL FEIEDBICH EICHTEE. [BOOK III. 
 
 effect which drops of water have when they fall iipoD 
 bubbling molten copper ; the fluid mass bursts asunder 
 with a great explosion. 
 
 " Heavenly, kind, gentle Devil," said he, " do please 
 come and break my neck for me. May God have pity on 
 a woman like this ! Very well, then, keep your calico ; 
 / keep this Lenten altar-cloth of yours to j'ourself. But 
 may the Devil fly away with me if I don't cock the old 
 deer's horns that belonged to my father on to my head this 
 very day, like a poacher on the pillory, and hawk them 
 about the streets for sale in broad daylight. Ay. I give 
 you my word of honour it shall be done, for all the fun it 
 may afford every soul in the place. And I shall simply 
 say that it is your doing; I'll do it, as sure as there's a 
 devil in hell." 
 
 He went, gnashing his teeth, to the window, and looked 
 into the street, seeing vacancy. A rustic funeral was 
 passing slowly by ; the bier was a man's shoulder, and on 
 it tottered a child's rude cofBn. 
 
 Such a sight is a touching one, when one thinks of the 
 little, obscure, human creature, passing over from the foetal 
 slumber to the slumber of death, from the amnion-mem- 
 brane in this life to the shroud, that amnion-membrane of 
 the next ; whose eyes have closed at their first glimpse of 
 this bright earth, without looking on the parents who now 
 gaze after it with theirs so wet with tears; which has 
 been loved without loving in return ; whose little tongue 
 moulders to dust before it has ever spoken ; as does its 
 face ere it has smiled upon this odd, contradictory, incon- 
 sistent orb of ours. These cut buds of this mould will 
 find a stem on which- great destiny will graft them, these 
 flowers which, like some besides, close in sleep while it is 
 still early morning, will yet feel the rays of a morning 
 sun which will open them once more. As Finnian looked 
 at the cold, shrouded child passing by, in this hour, when 
 he was ignobly quarrelling about the mourning dress 
 (which should mourn for Mm) —now, when the very last 
 drops of the old year were flowing so fast away, and his 
 heart, now becoming so terribly accustomed to these 
 passing fainting fits, forbade him to hope that he coula 
 ever complete the new one — now, amid all these pains 
 
CHAP. IX.] FLOWEE, FRUIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 30 1 
 
 and sorrows, he seemed to hear the unseen river of Death 
 murmuring under his feet (as the Cbineso lead rushing 
 brooks under the soil of their gardens), and the thin, 
 brittle crust of ice on which he was standing seemed as if 
 it would soon ciack and sink with him into the watery- 
 depths. Unspeakably touched, he said to Lenette, " Per- 
 haps you may be quite right, dear, after all, to keep your 
 mourning dress ; you may have some presentiment that I 
 am not going to live. Do as you think best, then, dear; 
 I would fain not embitter this last of December any 
 more ; I don't know that it may not be my last in another 
 sense, and that in another year I may not be nearer to 
 that poor baby than you. I am going for a walk now." 
 
 She said nothing; all this startled and surprised her. 
 He hurried away, to escape the answer which was sure to 
 come eventually ; his absence would, in the circumstance.", 
 be the most eloquent kind of oratory. All persons are 
 better than their outbreaks (or ebullitions) — that is, than 
 their had ones; for all are worse than their nohle ones, 
 also — and when we allow the former an hour or so to dis- 
 sipate and disperse, we gain something better than our 
 point — we gain our opponent. He left Lenette a very 
 grave subject for cogitation, however, — the stag's horns 
 and his word of honour. 
 
 I have already once written it. The winter was lying 
 on the ground all bare and naked, not even the bed-sheet 
 and chrisom-cloth of snow thrown over it ; there it lay 
 beside the dry, withered mummy of the by-gone summer. 
 Firmian looked with an unsatisfied gaze athwart unclothed 
 fields (over which the cradle-quilt of the snow, and the 
 white crape of the frost, had not yet been laid), and down 
 at the streams, not yet struck palsied and speechless. 
 Bright, warm days at the end of December soften us with 
 a sadness in which there are four or five bitter drops more 
 than in that belonging to the afier-summer. Up to twelve 
 o'clock at night, and until the thirty-first day of the 
 twelfth month, the wintry, nocturnal, idea of dissolution 
 and decay oppresses us ; but as soon as it is one in the 
 morning, and the first of January, a morning breeze, 
 speaking of new life, moves away the clouds which were 
 lying over our souls, and we begin to look for the dark, 
 
S02 JEAK PAUL FEIEDEXCH EICHTER. [bOOK III. 
 
 pure, morning blue, the rising of tiie star of morning and 
 of spring. On a December day like this the pale, dim, 
 stagnant world of stiffened, sapless, plants about us op- 
 presses and hems us round ; and the insect-collections 
 lying beneath the vegetation, covered with earth ; and 
 the rafter-work of bare, dry, wrinkly trees ; the December 
 sun hanging in the sky at noon no higher than the June 
 sun does at evening ; all these combined shed a yellow 
 lustre as of death (like that of burning alcohol) over the 
 pale, faded meadows ; and long giant shadows lie ex- 
 tended, motionless, everywhere — evening shadows of this 
 evening of nature and of the year — like the ruined re- 
 mains, the burnt-out ash-heaps of nights as long as them- 
 selves. But the glistening snow, on the other hand, spread 
 over the blooming earth under us, is like the blue fore- 
 ground of spring, or a white fog a foot or two in depth. 
 The quiet dark sky lies above, and the white earth is like 
 some white moon, whose sparkling ice-fields melt, as we 
 draw nearer, into dark waving meadows of flowers. 
 
 The heart of our sorrowful Pirmian grew sadder yet as 
 he stood upon this cold, burnt-out hearth-place of nature. 
 The daily-recurring pausings of his heart and pulse were 
 (he thought) the sudden silences of the storm-hell in his 
 fcreast, presaging a speedy end of the thunder, and dissolu- 
 tion of the storm-cloud, of life. He thought the faltering 
 of his mechanism was caused by some loose pin having 
 fallen in among the wheels somewhere; he ascribed it to 
 polypus of the heart, and his giddiness he felt sure gave 
 warning of an attack of apoplexy. To-day was the three 
 hundred and sixty-fifth Act of the year, and the curtain 
 was slowly dropping upon it already: what could this 
 suggest to him save gloomy similes of his own epilogue — 
 of the winter solstice of his shortened, over-shadowed life ? 
 The weeping image of his Lenette came now before his 
 forgiving, departing soul, and he thought, " She is really 
 not in the right ; but I will yield to her, as we have not 
 very long to be together now. I am glad for her sake, 
 poor soul, that my arms are mouldering away from about 
 her, and that her friend is taking her to his." 
 
 He went up on to the scaffold of blood and sorrow where 
 Jiis friend, Heinrich, had taken his farewell. From that 
 
GHAF. IX. J FLOWER, FKUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 303 
 
 eminenoe, as often as his heart was heavy, his glance ■would 
 follow Leibgeber's path as far as the hills ; but to-day his 
 eyes were moister than before, for he had no hope that he 
 would see the spring again. This spot was to him the hill 
 which the Emperor Adrian permitted the Jews to go up 
 twice in the year, that they might look towards the ruins 
 of the holy city and weep for the place wherein their steps 
 might tread no more. The sun was now ussenibling the 
 shadows which were to close in upon the old year, and as 
 the stars appeared — the stars which rose at evening now 
 being those which in spring adorn the morning — fate 
 snapped away the loveliest and richest in flowers of the 
 lianfl-branches from his soul, and from the wound flowed 
 clear water. " I shall see nothing of the coming spring," 
 he thought, " except her blue, which, as in enamel-paint- 
 ing, is the first laid on of all her colours." His heart — one 
 educated to be loving — could always fly for rest from his 
 satires and from dry details of business-duty, sometimes, 
 too, from Lenette's indifference and lack of sympathy, to 
 the warm breast of the eternal goddess ^Nature, ever 
 ready to take us to her heart. Into the free, unveiled, and 
 blooming out-door world, beneath the grand wide sky, he 
 loved to repair with all his sighs and sorrows, and in this 
 great garden he made all his graves (as the Jews made 
 them in smaller ones). And when our fellows forsake and 
 wound us, the sky and the earth, and the little blooming 
 tree, open their arms and take us into them ; the flowers 
 press themselves to our wounded hearts, the streams mingle 
 in our tears, and the breezes breathe coolness into our 
 sighs. A mighty angel troubles and inspires the great 
 ocean-pool of Bethesda ; into its warm waves we plunge, 
 with all our thousand aches and pains, and ascend from 
 the water of life with our spasms all relaxed and our health 
 and vigour renewed once more. 
 
 Firmian walked slowly home with a heart all concilia- 
 tion, and ej'es which, now that it was dark, he did not 
 take the pains to dry. He went over in his mind every- 
 thing which could possibly be adduced in his Lenette's 
 excuse. He strove to win himself over to her side of the 
 question by reflecting that she could not (like him) arm 
 herself against the shocks, the stumbling-stones, of life, by 
 
304 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH E7CHTEK. [bOOK Ifl. 
 
 putting on the Minerva's helm, the armour of meditation,, 
 philosophy, authorship. He thoroughly determined (he 
 had determined the same thing thirty times before) to be. 
 as scrupulously careful to observe in all things the outside. 
 ipolitesses of life with Jier as with the most absolute stranger;* 
 nay, he^ already enveloped himself in the fly-net or mail- 
 shirt of patience, in case he should. really find the checked, 
 calico untranslated at home.. This is how we men con- 
 tinually behave — stopping our ears tight with both hands,, 
 trying our hardest to fall into the siesta, the mid-day sleep, 
 of a little peace of mind (if we can only anyhow manage 
 it) ; thus do our souls, swayed by our passions, reflect the 
 sunlight of truth as one , dazzling spot (like mirrors, or 
 calm water), while all the surrounding surface lies but in 
 deeper shade. 
 
 How differently all fell out ! He was received by Peltz- 
 stiefel, who advanced to meet him, all solemnity of deport- 
 ment, and with a church-visitation countenance fuU of 
 iuspection-sermons. Lenette scarcely turned her swollen 
 eyes towards the windward side of her husband as he came 
 in at the door. Stiefel kept the strings tight which, held, 
 the muscles of his knit face, lest it might unbend before 
 Firmian's, which was all beaming soft with kindliness, 
 and thus commenced :. " Mr. Siebenkses, I came to this 
 house to hand you the money for your review of Professor 
 Lang; but friendship demands of me a duty of a far more 
 serious and important kind, that I should exhort you and 
 constrain you to conduct yourself towards this poor unfor- 
 tunate wife of yours here like a true Christian man to a 
 Irue Christian woman." " Or even better, if you Hke," he 
 
 ' The husband should always play the lover by rights — and the 
 Jover the husband. It is impossible to describe the amount of soothing 
 influence which little acts of politeness and innocent flatteries exercise 
 upon just the very people who usually expect, and receive, iione^- 
 wives, sisters, relations — and this even when they quite understand 
 what this politeness really amounts to. We ought to be applying this 
 emollient pomade to our rude rough lips all day long, even if we have 
 only three words to speak, — and we should have a similar one for our 
 hands, to soften down their actions. I trust that I shall always keep 
 my resolution never to flatter any woman, not even my own wife, but 
 I know I shall begin to break it four months and a-half after my 
 letrnthal, and e-o on breaking it all my life. 
 
CHiVP. IX.J FLOWER, FRUIT, AND THOBN PIECES. 305' 
 
 said. " What is it all about, wife?" She preserved an' 
 embarrassed silence. She had asked Stiefel's advice and 
 assistance, less for the sake of obtaining them than to have 
 an opportunity of telling her story. The ttuth v^as, that 
 when the Schulrath came unexpectedly in, while her burst 
 of crying was at its bitterest, she had really just that very 
 moment sent her checked, spiny, outer caterpillar-skin (the 
 calico-dress, to wit) away to the pawnshop ; for her husband 
 having pledged his honour, she felt sure that, beyond a 
 doubt, he would stick those preposterous horns on his head 
 and really go and hawk them all over the town, for she 
 well knew how sacredly he kept his word, and also how 
 utterly he disiegarded " appearances," — and that both of 
 these peculiarities of his were always at their fellest pitch 
 at a time of domestic difficulty like the present. Perhaps 
 she would have told her ghostly counsellor and adviser 
 nothing about the matter, but contented heiself with 
 having a good cry when he came, if she had had her way 
 (and her dress) ; but, having sacrificed both, she needed com- 
 pensation and revenge. At first she had mei ely reckoned 
 up difficulties in indeterminate quantities to him; but 
 when he pressed her more closely, her bursting heart over- 
 flowed and all her woes streamed forth. Stiefel, contrarily 
 to the laws of equity (and of several universities), always 
 held the complainant in any case to be in the right, simply 
 because he spoke first; most men think impartiality of 
 heart is impartiality of head. Stiefel swore that he would 
 tell her husband what he ought to be told, and that the- 
 calico should be back in the house that very afternoon. , 
 
 So this father-confessor began to jingle his bunch of 
 binding-and-Ioosing keys in the advocate'.s face, and re- 
 ported to him his wife's general confession and the pawning 
 of the dress. When there are two diverse actions of. a 
 person to be given account of — a vexatious and an agreeable, 
 one — the effect depends on which is spoken of the first ; it 
 is the first narrated one which gives the ground-tint to the 
 listener's mind, and the one subsequently portrayed only 
 takes rank as a subdued accessory figure, f irmian should: 
 have heard that Lenette pawned the dress first, while he 
 was still out of doors, and of her tale-bearing not till after- 
 wards. But you see how the devil brought it about, as it 
 
 II. X 
 
30(5 JEAN PAUL FKIBPKICH EICHTEE. [BOOK III.; 
 
 really did all happen. " What ! " (Siehenkaes felt, if not- 
 exactly thought) " What ! She makes my rival her confi- 
 dant and my judge ! I bring her home a heart all kind- 
 ness and reconciliation, and she makes a fresh cut in it at 
 once, distressing and annoying me in this way, on the very 
 last day of th? year, with her confounded chattering and 
 tale-telling." By this last expression he meant something 
 which the reader does not yet quite understand ; for I have 
 not yet told him that Lenette had the bad habit of being — 
 rather ill-bred ; wherefore she made common people of her- 
 own sex, such as the bookbinder's wife, the recipients of 
 her secret thoughts — the electric discharging-rods of her 
 little atmospheric disturbances ; while, at the same time, 
 she took it ill of her husband that, though he did not, 
 indeed, admit serving-men and maids and "the vulgar" 
 into his own mysteries, he yet accompanied them into theirs. 
 Stiefel (like all people who have little knowledge of the 
 world, and are not gifted with much tact, — who never 
 assume anything as granted in the first place, but always 
 go through every subject ab initio) — now delivered a long, 
 theological, matrimonial-service sort of exhortation con- 
 cerning love as between Christian husband and wife, and 
 ended by insisting on the recall of the calico (his Necker, 
 80 to say). This address irritated Firmian, and that 
 chiefly because (irrespectively of it) his wife thought he 
 had not any religion, or, at; all events, not so much as 
 Stiefel. " I remember " (he said) " seeing in the history 
 of France that Gaston, the first prince of tlie blood, having 
 caused his brother some little difficulties or other of the 
 warlike sort on one occasion, in the subsequent treaty of 
 peace bound himself, in a special article, to love Cardinal 
 Eiehelieu. Now I think there's no question but that an 
 article to the effect that man and wife shall love one another 
 ought to be inserted as a distinct, separate, secret clause, in 
 all contracts of marriage ; for though love, like man himself, 
 is by origin eternal and immortal, yet, thanks to the wiles of 
 the serpent, it certainly becomes mortal enough within a 
 short time. But, as far as the calico's concerned, let's all 
 thank God t\\a,ithat apple of discord has been pitched out of 
 the house." Stiefel, by way of ofiering up a sacrifice, and 
 burning a little incense before the shrine of his beloved 
 
CHAP. IX.] FLOWEE, FBUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 307 
 
 Lenette, insisted on the return of the calico, and did so very 
 firmly ; for Siebenkses's gentle, complaisant readiness to yield 
 to him, up to this point, in little matters of sacrifice and 
 eervice, had led him to entertain the deluded idea that ha 
 possessed an irresistible authority over him. The husband, 
 a good deal agitated now, said, " We'll drop the subject, if 
 you .please." " Indeed, we'll do nothing of the kind," said 
 Stiefel ; " I must really insist upon it that your wife has 
 lier dress back." " It can't be done, Herr Sohulrath." " I'll 
 advance you whatever money you require," cried Stiefel, 
 in a fever of indignation at this striking and unwonted 
 piece of disobedience. It was now, of course, more impos- 
 sible than ever for the advocate toietirefrom his position; 
 he shook his head eighty times. " Either you are out of 
 your mind," said Stiefel, " or I am ; just let me go through 
 my reasons to you once more." " Advocates," said Sie- 
 benkaes, " were fortunate enough, in former times, to have 
 private chaplains of their own ; but it was found that there 
 was no- converting any of them, and therefore they are now 
 exempt from being preached at." 
 
 Lenett^ wept more bitterly — Stiefel shouted the louder 
 on that account ; in his annoyance at his ill success, he 
 thought it well to repeat his commands in a ruder and 
 blunter form ; of course Siebenkses resisted more firmly. 
 Stiefel was a pedant, a class of men which surpasses all 
 others in a bare-faced, blind, self-conceit, just like an un- 
 ceasing wind blowing from all the points of the compass 
 at once (for a pedant even makes an ostentatious display 
 of his own personal idiosyncrasies). Stiefel, like a care- 
 ful and conscientious player, felt it a duty to thoroughly 
 throw himself into the part he was representing, and 
 carry it out in all its details, and say, "Either'' "Or" 
 Mr. Siebenk^s ; " either the mourning gown comes, or 1 
 go, aut-aut. My visits cannot be of much consequence, it's 
 true, still they have I consider, a certain value, if it were 
 but on Mrs. Siebenk^s's account." Finnian, doubly 
 irritated, firstly at the imperious rudeness and conceit of 
 an alternative of the sort, and secondly at the lowness oi 
 the market price for which the Eath abandoned their 
 society, could but say, "Nobody can influence your deci- 
 sion on that point new but yourself. I most certainly 
 
 X 2 
 
308 JEAN PAUL FKIBDKICH EICHTEE. [bOOK IIF, 
 
 cannot. It will be an easy matter for you, Herr 
 Scliulrath, to give up our acquaintance — though there is 
 no real reason why you should — but it will not be easy 
 for me to give up yours, although I shall have no choice." 
 Stiefel, from whose brow the sprouting laurels were thus 
 so unexpectedly shorn — and that, too, in the presence of 
 the woman he loved — had nothing to do but take his leave ; 
 but he did it with three thoughts gnawing at his heart — 
 , his vanity was hurt, his dear Lenette was crying, and her 
 / husband was rebellious and insubordinate, and resisting 
 his authority. 
 
 And as the Schulrath said farewell for ever, a bitter, 
 bitter sorrow stood fixed in the eyes of his beloved 
 Lenette — a sorrow which, though the hand of time has 
 long since covered it over, I still see there in its fixity ; 
 and she could not go down stairs, as at other times, with 
 her sorrowing friend, but went back into the dark, un- 
 lightsd room, alone with her overflowing breaking heart. 
 
 rirmian's heart laid aside its hardness, though not its 
 coldness, at the sight of his persecuted wife in her dry, 
 stony grief at this falling to ruin of every one of her little 
 plans and joys ; and he did not add to her sorrow by a 
 single word of reproach. "You see," was all he said, 
 •' that it is no fault of mine that the Schulrath gives up 
 cur acquaintance; he ought never to have been told any- 
 thing about the matter, — ^however, it's all over now." She 
 made no reply. The hornet's sting (which makes a triple 
 stab), the dagger, thrown as by some revengeful Italian, 
 was left sticking firm in her wound, which therefore could 
 not bleed. Ah ! poor soul ; thou hast deprived thyself of 
 so much ! Firmian, however, could not see that he had 
 I anything to accuse himself of ; he being the gentlest, 
 the most yielding of men under the sun, always ruffled all 
 the feathers on his body up with a rustle in an instant at 
 the slightest touch of comjpulsion, most especially if it con- 
 cerned his honour. He would accept a present, it is true, 
 but only from Leibgeber, or (on rare occasions) from others 
 in the warmest hours of soul communion ; and his friend 
 and he both held the opinion t^iat, in friendship, not only 
 was a farthing of quite as much value as a sovereign, but 
 that a sovereign was worth just as little as a farthing, and 
 
CHAP. IX.] FLOWEK, FEUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 309 
 
 that one is bound to accept the most splendid presents 
 just as readily as the most trifling ; and hence he counted 
 it among the unrecognised blessings of childhood that 
 children can receive gifts without any feeling of shame. 
 
 In a mental torpor he now sat duwn in the arm-chair, 
 and covered his eyes with his hand ; and then the mists 
 which hid the future all rolled away, and showed in it a 
 wide dreary tract of country, full of the black ashy ruins 
 of burnt homesteads, and of dead bushes of underwood, 
 and the skeletons of beasts lying in the sand. He saw 
 that the chasm, or landslip, which had torn his heart and 
 Lenette's asunder, would go on gaping wider and wider; 
 he saw, oh ! so clearly and cheerlessly, that his old 
 beautifal love would never come back, that Lenette would 
 never lay aside her self-willed pertinacity, her whims, the 
 habits of her daily life; that the narrow limits of her 
 heart and head would remain fixed firmly for ever ; that 
 she would as little learn to understand him, as get to love 
 him ; while, again, her repugnance to him would get the 
 greater the longer her friend's banishment endured, and 
 that her fondness for the latter would increase in propor- 
 tion. Stiefel's money, and his seriousness, and religion, 
 and attachment to herself combined to tear in two the 
 galling bond of wedlock by the pressure of a more com- 
 plex and gentle tie. Sorrowfully did Siebenkses gaze into 
 a long prospect of dreary days, all constrained silence, and 
 dumb hostility and complaint. 
 
 Lenette was working in her room in silence, for her 
 wounded heart shrunk from a word or a look as from 
 a cold fierce wind. It was now very dark, she wanted 
 no light. On a sudden, a wandering street-singing 
 woman began to play, a harp, and her child to accom- 
 pany her on a flute, somewhere in the house downstairs. 
 At this our friend's bursting heart seemed to have a 
 thousand gashes inflicted on it to let it bleed gently away. 
 As nightingales love to sing where there is an echo, so our 
 hearts speak loudest to music. As these tones brought 
 back to him his old hopes, almost irrecognisable now, — as 
 he gazed down at his Arcadia now lying hidden deep, 
 deep, beneath the stream of years, and Siw himself down 
 in it, with all his young fresh wishes, amid his long lost 
 
310 JEAN PATJL FRIEDRICH EICHTEE. [BOOK HI. 
 
 friends, gazing with happy eyes round their circle, all con- 
 fidence and trust, his growing heart hoarding and cherish- 
 ing its love and truth for some warm heart yet to be met 
 in the time to come : and as he now burst into that 
 music with a dissonance, crying, " And I have never 
 found that heart, and now all is past and over," and as 
 the pitiless tones brought pictures of blossomy springs 
 and flowery lands, and circles of loving friends to pass, as 
 in a camera obscura, before him — him who had nothing, 
 not one soul in all the land to love him ; his steadfast 
 spirit gave way at last, and sank down on earth to rest as 
 quite overdone, and nothing soothed him now but that 
 which pained. Suddenly this sleep-walking music ceased, 
 and the pause clutched, like a speechless nightmare, 
 tighter at his heart. In the silence he went into the room 
 and said to Lenette, " Take them down what little we have 
 left." But over the latter words his voice broke and failed, 
 for he saw (by the flare of some potash-burning which 
 was going on opposite) that all her glowing face was 
 covered with streaming, undried tears, though when he 
 came in she pretended to be busily wiping the window- 
 pane dimmed by her bieath. She laid the money down 
 on the window. He said, more gently yet, " Lenette, you 
 will have to take it to them now, or they will be gone." 
 She took it ; her eyes worn with weeping met his (which 
 were worn with weeping too) ; she went, and then their 
 eyes grew well-nigh dry, so far apart were their two souls 
 already. 
 
 They were suffering in that terrible position of circum- 
 stances when not even a moment of mutual and reciprocal 
 emotion can any longer reconcile and warm two hearts. 
 His whole heart swelled with overflowing affection, but 
 hers belonged to his no more ; he was urged at once by 
 the wish to love her, and the feeling that it was now im- 
 possible, by the perception of all her shortcomings and the 
 conviction of her indifference to him. He sat down in the 
 window seat, and leaned his head upon the sill, where i fc 
 rested, as it chanced, upon a handkerchief which she had 
 left there, and which was moist and cold with tears. She 
 had been solacing herself after the long oppression of the 
 day, with this gentle effusion, much as we have a vein 
 
CHAP. IX. FLOWER, FEUIT, AND THOKN PIECES. 311 
 
 opened after some severe contusion. When lie touclied 
 the handkerchief, an icy shudder crept down his back, like 
 a sting of conscience, but immediately after it there came 
 a burning glow as the thought flashed to his mind that her / 
 weeping had been for another person than himself altogether. 
 The singing and the flute now began again (without the 
 harp this time), and floated in the rising, falling waves, 
 of a slow-timed song, of which the verses ended always 
 with the words, " Gone is gone, and dead is dead." 
 Sorrow now clutched him in her grasp, like some mantle- 
 fish, casting around him her dark and suffocating folds. 
 He pressed Lenette's wet handkerchief to his eyes hard, 
 and heard (but less distinctly), " Gone is gone, and dead 
 is dead." Then of a sudden his whole soul melted and 
 dissolved at the thought that perhaps that halting heart 
 of his would let him see no other new year save that of 
 the morrow, and he thought of himself as dying; and the 
 cold handkerchief, wet with his own tears now as well as 
 hers, lay cool upon his burning brow, while the notes of 
 the music seemed to mark like bells each stroke of time, 
 so that its rapid flight was made distinguishable by the 
 ear, and he saw himself asleep in a quiet grave, like one in 
 the Grotto of the Serpents, but with worms in place of the 
 serpents, licking off the burning poison of life. 
 
 The music had ceased. He heard Lenette moving in 
 the next room and getting a light ; he went to her and 
 gave her her handlterchief. But his heart was so pained 
 and bleeding tliat he longed to embi'aoe some one, no 
 matter whom ; he was impelled to press his Lenette to 
 his heart, his Lenette of the past if not of the present, his 
 suffering, if no longer his loving, Lenette ; at the same 
 time he could not utter one word of affection, neither had 
 he the slightest wish to do so. He put his arms roiiod her 
 slowly, unbent, and held her to him, but she turned her 
 head quickly and coldly away as from a kiss which was 
 not proffered. This pained him greatly, and he said, : 
 "Do you suppose I am any happier than you are your- ' 
 self?" He laid his face down on her averted head, pressed 
 her to him again, and then let her away ; and this vain 
 embrace at an end, his heart cried, " Gone is gone, and 
 dead is dead." 
 
312 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH EICHTEE. [bOOK III. 
 
 The silent room in which the music and the words 
 had ceased to sound was like some unhappy village 
 from whence the enemy has carried off all the beils, 
 and where there is nothing but silence all the day and 
 night, and the church tower is mute as if time itself 
 were past. 
 
 As Pirmian laid him down on his bed, he thought, " A 
 sleep closes the old year as if it were one's l3,st, and ushers 
 in the new as it does our own lives; and I sleep on 
 towards a futui'e all anxietj% vague of form, and darkly 
 veiled. Thus does man sleep at the gate behind which 
 the dreams are barred ; but although his dreams are but 
 a step or two — a minute or two — within that gate, he 
 cannot tell what dreams await him at its opening ; whether 
 in the brief unconscious night beasts of prey with glaring 
 eyes are lying in wait to dash upon him, or smiling 
 children to come trooping round him in their play ; nor if, 
 when the cloudy shapes beyond that mystic door come 
 about him, their clasp is to be the fond embrace of love, 
 or the murderous clutch of death." 
 
 CHAPTEE X. 
 
 A LONELY NEW- YEARS DAY — THE LEARNED SCHALASTER — 
 
 WOODBN-LEG OE APPEAL — CHAMBER POSTAL DELIVERY THE 
 
 11th of FEBRUARY, AND BIRTH-DAY OF THE YEAR 1786. 
 
 I REALLY cannot wish my hero a happy new year on a 
 new year's day when, on his awaking in the morning, he 
 rolls his swollen eyeballs heavily in their sockets towards 
 the dawn, and then buries his ^vorn and stupefied head 
 deep again in his pillow, as he does now. A man who 
 scarcely ever sheds a tear is always attacked in this way 
 by physical, as a consequence of moral, pain. He lay in 
 bed much later than usual, thinking over what he had 
 done, and what he had now to do. He awoke, feeling 
 much cooler towards Lenette than he had done when ho 
 went to bed. ^^'hen two hearts can no longer be brought 
 
CHAP. X.] FLOWER, FKUIT, AND THORN PIECEf!. 313 
 
 together by the influence of some mtitual, warm emotion, 
 ■when the glow of enthusiasm no longer links them together, 
 still less can they mingle and unite when the glow has 
 passed away, and chilly reserve has resumed its sway. 
 There is a certain half-and-half state of partial reconcilia- 
 tion in which the vertical index of the jewel-halanco, in 
 its glass-case, is turned by the lightest breath from the 
 tongue of a third person ; to-day, alas ! the scale on Fir- 
 mian's side sunk a little, and that on Lenette's went down 
 altogether. He prepared himself, however, and dreaded 
 at the same time, to give and to return the new year 
 greetings. He took heart, and entered the room with his 
 usual hearty step, as if nothing had happened. She had 
 let the coffee-pot turn into a refrigerator rather than call 
 him, and was standing with her back to him, at the drawer 
 of the commode, tearing hearts to pieces, to see what was 
 inside them. The hearts in question were printed new 
 year's wishes in verse, which she had received, in happier 
 days, from her friends in Augspurg ; the kindly wishes 
 were hidden behind groups of hearts clipped out and twined 
 together in spiral lines. As the Holy Virgin gets behung 
 with " assignat " hearts of wax, so do other virgins with 
 paper ones ; for with these fair maidens all warmth and 
 enthusiasm gets the name of " heart," much as map-makers 
 fancy that the outline of burning Africa has a considerable 
 resemblance to a heart. 
 
 Firmian could well divine how many a longing sigh the 
 poor soul had heaved over so many a ruined wish and 
 hope, and all her mournful comparisons of the present 
 time — with those smiling days gone by — and all that sor- 
 row and the memory of the past spake to the gentle, 
 tender heart. Alas ! since even the happy greet the new 
 year with sighs, the wretched may well be allowed a tear 
 or two. He said his " good morning " gently, and had he 
 received a gentle answer, would have gone so far as to add 
 Ms wishes to the stock of printed ones ; but Lenette, who 
 had been oftener hurt, and more deeply too, on the previous 
 day, than he had, snarled back at him a cold and hasty 
 reply. So that he could not offer any wishes ; she offered 
 none ; ar.d thus stonily and thus miserably they went 
 elbowing one another through the gate of the new year. 
 
314 JEAN PAUL FKIEDEICH EICHTEE. [bOOK III, 
 
 I must say it ; he had been looking forward for some- 
 thing like eight weeks to the happiness of this new year's 
 morning — to the blissful union of their hearts — to the 
 thousands of loving wishes which he would offer- — to their 
 close embraces and happy silences of lips upon lips ! Ah ! 
 . how different it all was ; cold, deathly cold ! On some 
 other occasion, when I have more paper, I must explain at 
 full length why and wherefore his satirical vein served 
 the purpose of a ferment, a leaven or yeast, or, say a kind 
 of irrigating engine to that sensitive heart of his of which 
 he was both proud and ashamed at once. The royal burgh 
 of Kuhschnappel itself had more to do with it than anj'- 
 thing else. Upon this town, as upon some others in Ger- 
 many, the dew of sensibility has never fallen (as if these 
 places were made of metal), whilst their inhabitants have 
 provided themselves with hearts of bone, on which, as on 
 frozen limbs, and witches bearing the stigmata of the devil, 
 it is impossible to inflict wounds of any consequence to 
 speak of. Amid a population possessed of this sort of 
 frigidity, one is, of course, inclined to pardon — and even 
 go out of one's way in search of — a little warmth, even of 
 an exaggerated kind, — wheieas a man who had been living 
 about 1785 in Leipzig, where nearly all hearts and arteries 
 were injected full of the spirit of tears, might have been 
 disposed to carry his humorous indignation at that cir- 
 cumstance a little too far, in the same way that cooks dish 
 up watery vegetables with more pepper in wet weather 
 than in dry. 
 
 Lenette went three times to church that day, not that 
 there was anything extraordinary in that. It is not so 
 much with respect to the church-goers that the words 
 " three times " in this connection, alarming as they are, 
 horrify one. The church-goers may sometimes, perhaps, 
 be all the better for going so often ; but it is for the sake 
 of the unfortunate clergj' who are obliged to preach so 
 many times in one day, that they may think themselves 
 lucky if all that happens to them is that they go to the 
 devil and don't lose their voices into the bargain. The 
 first time a man preaches, he certainly moves himself more 
 than anybody else, and becomes his own proselyte ; but 
 when it comes to the millionth time or so of his laying 
 
CHAP. X.] FLOWEE, FRUIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 315 
 
 down the moral law, it must he much the same with him as 
 with the Egerian peasants, who drink the Egerian waters 
 every day, and consequently cease to be susceptible to 
 their derivative qualities, however visitors maybe affected 
 by them. 
 
 At dinner our melancholy pair sat silent, except that the 
 husband, seeing the wife preparing to go to the afternoon 
 service at church, which she had not been in the habit of 
 attending for some time, asked her who was going to preach. 
 " Most probably Schulrath Stiefel," she said, although he 
 usually preached only in the morning, but just now the 
 evening preacher couldn't preach, he had received " a chas- 
 tisement from God — he had put out his collar-bone." At 
 another time Siebenkses would have had a good deal to say 
 as touching the latter clause of her sentence ; but on the 
 present occasion (circumstances being as they were), all he 
 did was to strike his plate with one of the prongs of his 
 fork, and then hold it up to one of his ears, while he 
 stopped the other ; this droning bass, this humming har- 
 mony, bore his tortured soul away upon the waves of music, 
 and this echoing sound-board, this vibrating bell-tongue, 
 seemed to be singing to him (by way of new year's greet- 
 ing), " Hearest thou not the distant bell ringing at the 
 close of thy chill life's high mass ? The question is, shalt 
 thou, when next new year's day comes, be able to hear; or 
 lying, by that time, crumbling into dust?" 
 
 After dinner he looked out of window, directing his 
 gaze less to the street than to the sky. There, as it 
 chanced, he saw two mock suns, and almost in the zenith 
 the half of a rainbow with a paler one intersecting it. 
 These tinted stars began strangely to sway his soul, 
 making it sad, as if he saw in them the reflected image 
 of his own dim, pale, shattered life. For to man, when 
 swayed by emotion, Nature is ever a great mirror, all 
 emotion too ; it is only to him who is satisfied and at rest 
 that she seems nothing but a cold, dead window between 
 him and the world beyond. 
 
 When he was alone in the room after dinner, and the 
 jubilant hymns from the church, and the glad song of a 
 canary in a neighbour's room came upon his weary soul 
 like the movement and the tumult of all the joy of his 
 
316 JEAN PAUL FKIEDEIOH EIOHTEE. [BOOK III. 
 
 yoTitli, now 'buried alive in the tomb ; and -when the bright 
 magic sunshine broke into his chamber, and light clond- 
 ehadows slid athwart the spot of light upon the floor, 
 questioning his sick, moaning heart in a thousand melan- 
 choly tropes, and saying, " Is it not thus with all things ? 
 Are not your own days fleeting by like vapours through 
 a chilly sky, above a dead earth, floating away towards 
 the night?" — he could but open his swelling heart by 
 means of the soft-edged sword of music, that so the nearest 
 and heaviest of the drops of his sorrow might be set free 
 to flow. He struck a single triad chord upon his piano, 
 and struck it once again, letting it gradually die away ; 
 the tones floated away as the clouds had, the sweet har- 
 mony trembled more slowly and more slowly, grew fainter 
 and fainter, and ceased at last ; silence, as of the grave, 
 was all that was left. As he listened, his breath and his 
 heart stopped, a faintness came over Mm which extended 
 fo his very soul; and then — and then — as floods wash the 
 dead from out of the churches and the graves, in this 
 morbid hour of dreams, the stream of his heart came flow- 
 ing again, and bearing upon its billows a new corpse from 
 out the future, torn all unshrouded from its earthly bed ; 
 it was his own body; he was dead. He looked out of 
 window towards the comforting and reassuring light and 
 star of life, but the voice within him cried on still, " Do 
 not deceive thyself; before the new year's wishes are said 
 again, thou wilt have departed hence." 
 
 When a shivering heart is thus all shorn of its leaves 
 and standing bare, every breeze that touches it is a freez- 
 ing blast. With what a soft, warm, gentle touch Lenette 
 would have had to touch it so as not to startle it. A heart 
 in this condition is like a clairvoyante, who feels a chill 
 as of death in every hand which touches from beyond the 
 charmed circle. 
 
 He determiaed to join the corpse-lottery (as it was 
 called) that very day, so as to be able at all events to pay 
 the toU or tax on his departure for the next world. He 
 told Lenette so, but she thought this was only another 
 of his harpings on the subject of the mourning dress. 
 Thus cloudily passed the first day of the year, and the 
 first week was even more rainy. The garden-hedge and 
 
CHAP. X.] FLOWEK, FKOIT, AND THORN PIECES. 317 
 
 fencing round Lenette's love for Stiefel were completely cut 
 down and pulled up now, and the love was to be clearly 
 seen of every passer-bj'. Every evening at the time when 
 the Schalrath used formerly 1o come, vexation and regret 
 graved a deeper furrow on her round young face, which 
 as time went on turned wholly into a piece of carving 
 fretted by the hand of grief. She found out the days 
 when he was to preach, so that she might go and hear 
 him, and whenever a funeial passed, she went to the win- 
 dow to see him. The bookbinder's wife was her " corres- 
 ponding member," from whom she constantly drew fresh 
 discoveries concerning the Schulrath, and repeated the old 
 ones with her over and over again. What an amount of 
 warmth the Schulrath must have gained by reason of hia 
 focal distance, and her husband have lost on account ot 
 his proximity will be at once apparent ; just as the earth 
 derives least warmth from the sun when they are nearest 
 together, i.e. in winter ! Moreover another event came just 
 then to pass which increased Lenette's aversion. Von 
 Blaize had secretly circulated a report that Siebenkses was 
 an atheist and no Christian. Eespectable old maiden 
 ladies and the clergy, form a charming contrast to the 
 vindictive Eomans under the Empire, who often accused 
 the most innocent people possible of being Christians, in 
 order that they might obtain a martyr's crown. The old 
 maids and parsons aforesaid rather take the part of a man 
 who is in a position of this kind, and deny that he is a 
 Christian; and in this they contrast, likewise with the 
 Eomans and Italians of the present day, who always say 
 " there are four Christians here," when they mean " four 
 men." In St. Eerieux, near Besancon, the most virtuous girl 
 used to be presented with a lace veil of the value of five 
 shillings by way of a prize ; and people like Blaize are fond 
 of throwing a prize for virtue of this kind, namely, a moral 
 veil, over the good. This is why they are fond of calliag 
 thinking men infidels, and the heterodox wolves, whose 
 teeth help to smooth and polish, — which is the reason why 
 wolves are engraved upon the best steel blades. 
 
 When Siebenkass first told his wife this report of Blaize's 
 (that he was no Christian, if not, indeed, altogether an 
 infidel), she didn't pay very much attention to it, inasmuch 
 
318 JEAN PAUL FEIEDKICH lilCHTER, [bOOK III. 
 
 as it seemed out of the question such a thing could be true 
 of a man to whom she had united herself in the holy state 
 of matrimony. It was not until sometime afterwards that 
 she remembered that, one month when there had been a 
 long period of dry weather he had spoken disparagingly 
 (without the least hesitation), not only of the Roman 
 Catholic processions (for she did not think they weee ot 
 very much use herself), but concerning the Protestant's 
 prayers for rain, inquiring, " Do the processions, miles 
 long, in the Arabian deserts, which go by the name of 
 caravans, ever lead to the production of a single cloud in 
 the sky, let them pray for rain as hard as they choose ?" 
 And " Why do the clergy get up processions only for rain 
 or fine weather ? why not to get rid of a severe winter, 
 when at all events those who took part in the processions 
 would feel a little warmer; or, in Holland, for bright 
 sunny weather and the dispersion of fog ; or against the 
 aurora-borealis in Greenland ?" " But what he wondered at 
 most," he said, "was why those converters of the heathen, 
 who pray so often, and with so much success for the sun 
 when he's only behind a cloud or two, should not suppli- 
 cate for him in circumstances of infinitely greater import- 
 ance — in the polar regions, namely, where for months at a 
 time he never appears even when the sky is altogether 
 cloudless ? Or why," he asked in the last place, " do they 
 take no steps to petition against the great solar eclipses 
 (which are seldom very enjoyable occurrences), suifering 
 themselves to be outdone by savage nations in this respect, 
 for as the latter do howl and pray them awaj' ?" Many 
 speeches, in themselves innocuous at first, nay sweet, 
 acquire poisonous properties in the storehouse of time, as 
 sugar does when kept; for thirty years in a warehouse.* 
 These few words, candidly spoken out in the course of 
 common conversation, took a great hold upon Lenette now 
 that she sate under Stiefel's pulpit (made of apostles all 
 carpentered up together), and heard him offering up one 
 prayer after another, for, or against,(as the case might be), 
 sickness, government, child-birth, harvest, &c., &c. ! How 
 dear, on the other hand, Peltzstiefel grew to her ; his 
 very sermons became, in the most charming manner, 
 ' Sander, on " The Great and Beautiful in Nature." 
 
OHAr. X.] FLOWEK, FRUIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 319 
 
 regular love-letters to her heart. And indeed clericality 
 does, at all times, stand in a very close relation to the 
 feminine heart ; that's why " hearts " formerly meant th-s 
 clergy on German playing cards. 
 
 Now what all this time did Stanislaus Siebenkses think 
 and do? Two contradictory things. If a hard w^ord 
 escaped him, he was sorry for the feeble, forsaken soul, 
 whose whole rose-border of enjoyment had been hoed up, 
 whose first love for the Schulrath laj* languishing in sorrow 
 and famine ; for the thousand charms of that imprisoned 
 nature of hers would have opened in all their beauty to 
 some heart she loved, which Ms was not. " And can I not 
 see," he said further, " how impossible it is that the pin's 
 or needle's point can act as a lightning conductor to the 
 sultry, lightning-charged clouds of her life, in the same 
 way that the pen's point does for mine. One can weite a 
 good deal of one's mind, but one can't stitch very much off 
 it. And when I consider what swimming-belts and cork- 
 jackets for the deepest floods I am prepared with, in the 
 shape of the self-contemplation of the Emperor Antoninus 
 and in Arrianus Epictetus, of neithoi- of whom sJie knows 
 even the binding, let alone the name (to say nothing of 
 my astronomy and psychology) ; and what splendid hands 
 at the fire engine-pumps they are to me when I blaze up in 
 a conflagration of anger as I did just now, while she has 
 to let her anger burn itself out, verily I ought to be ten 
 times more gentle with her, instead of being ten times 
 more irritable." If it happened, on the other hand, that 
 he had not given but had received a few hard words, he 
 thought of her warm longing for the Kchuliath which she 
 could so readily increase and magnify in secret during her 
 wholly mechanical work, to any extent; and of the con- 
 tinual yielding of his own too soft heart ; a thing for which 
 his strong-souled Leibgeber would have scolded him, while 
 his wife would have done so for the contrary defect, which 
 she was not likely to encounter in her stiff unyielding 
 Stiefel, judging by the recent unceremoniousness of style 
 in which he, the other day, gave his notice of the calling 
 in of his capital of Eegard. 
 
 In this frame of mind, one day when his spirit was heavy 
 with anger, he put to her, as she was starting again to gc 
 
320 JEAN PAUL FRIEDKIOH KICHTEE. [bOOK IH 
 
 to the Schulrath's evening sermon, the simple little ques- 
 tion, why it was she used formerly to go so seldom to th» 
 evening service, and now went so often ? She answered 
 that it was because the evening preacher, Mr. Schalaster, 
 always used to preach in the evenings, but that since he 
 had put out his collar-bone the Schulrath had taken his 
 duty. Heaven forbid that she should go to the evening 
 services when Mr. Schalaster "s collar-bone was well again. 
 By slow degrees he drew out of her that she considered 
 this young Mr. Schalaster a most dangerous disseminator 
 of false doctrine, a man who by no means adhered to 
 Luther's bible, but believed in Mosheh, and in Jesos 
 Ohristos, Petros and Paulos, and, in fact, osd all the 
 Apostles in such a manner as to be an offence to all 
 Christian folks ; nay he had gone the length of naming 
 the Holy Jerusalem in such an extraordinary way that 
 she couldn't so much as say it after him ; it was soon after 
 this that he had put out his collar-bone, but far be it from 
 her to judge the m".n. "No, don't, dear," her husband 
 said, " perhaps the young gentleman maybe a little near- 
 sighted, or he mayn't know his Greek Testament so well 
 as he ought, the it's in it are sometimes a good deal like 
 o's. Ah ! how many Schalasters there are who do in their 
 several sciences and doctrines, say Petros for Petrus, and 
 where there's not the slightest occasion, and nothing in 
 the shape of a stumbling-block in the path, breed dissen- 
 sion among mankind by means of consanguineous vowels." 
 On this particular occasion, however, Schalaster drew 
 our couple a little nearer together again. It was a satis- 
 faction to Siebenkses ' to iind that he had been a little 
 mistaken up to this point, and that it was not only love 
 to Stiefel which had taken her to evening church, but that 
 regard for purity of doctrine had something to do with it 
 as well. The distinction was fine, it is true ; but in time 
 of need one catches at the minutest fragment of comfort ; 
 /7/nd Siebenkses was delighted that his wife wasn't qwite so 
 'ieeply in love with the Schulrath as he had been sup- 
 posing. Let no one hear speak despairingly of the delicate 
 gossamer web which supports us and our happiness. If 
 we do spin and draw it out of ourselves, as the spider 
 does hers, yet it bears us pretty firmly up, and, like the 
 
CHAP. X.J FLOWEE, FBUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 321 
 
 epider, we hang safe and sound in the middle of it, while 
 the storm-wind rooks both our web and us uninjured to 
 and fro. 
 
 From this day Siebenkaes went straightway back to 
 Lis only friend in the place, Stiefel, whose little mistake 
 he bad forgiven from his heart long long since — half 
 an hour after it happened, I believe. He knew that the 
 sight of him would be a consolation to the exiled evange- 
 list in his Patmos-chamber, and that his wife would find 
 a consolation in it too. Yea, he carried greetings which 
 had never been intrusted to him backwards and forwards 
 between the two. 
 
 The little scraps of news of the Schulrath, which he would 
 let drop of an evening, were to Lenette as the young green 
 shoots which the partridge scratches up from beneath the 
 snow. At the same time, I am not concealing the fact that 
 I am very sorry both for him and for her ; although I am 
 not such a wretched partisan of either as to withhold my 
 love and my sympathy from two people who are mutually 
 misunderstanding and making war upon each other. 
 
 Out of this grey sultry sky, whose electrical machines 
 were being charged fuller and fuller every hour, there 
 broke, at last, a first harsh peal of thunder — -Firmian lost 
 his law suit. The Heimlicher was the catskin rubber, the 
 foxtail switch, which charged the Inheritance Chamber, 
 the goldsmith's pitch-cake of Justice, full of pocket- 
 lightning. But the suit was adjudged to be lost on the 
 simple ground that the young notary, Giegold, with whose 
 notarial instrument Siebenkaes had armed himself, was 
 not as yet duly matriculated. There cannot be very 
 many persons unaware that in Saxony no legal instrument 
 is valid unless drawn up by a notary who has been duly 
 matriculated, while, at the same time, documentary evi- 
 dence can be of no greater force in another country than 
 of that which it possessed in the country where it was 
 drawn up. Firmian lost his suit, and his inheritance along 
 with it. However, the latter remained untouched, for, 
 perhaps, nothing can keep a sum of money safer from the 
 attacks of thieves, clients, and lawyers, than the fact of its 
 being the subject of a lawsuit — ^nobody can touch it then. 
 The sum is clearly specified in all the documents, and 
 
322 JEAN PAUL FRIEDBICH KICHTEK. [bOOK III, 
 
 these documents -would have, themselves, to be got out of 
 the way before the money could be got at. Similarly, the 
 good man of the farm rejoices when the weevil has papered' 
 his cornrioks all over with white, because then the com 
 which has not had the heart of it eaten out by the spinner 
 is safe against the ravages of all other corn worms. 
 / A lawsuit is never more easily won than when it is 
 
 / lost — one lodges an appeal. After payment of the costs, 
 ordinary and extraordinary, the law concedes the leneficitim 
 wppellaiionis (benefit of appeal to a higher tribunal), 
 although this benefit-farce cannot be of much avail to 
 anybody who has not had certain other benefits conferred 
 upon him beforehand. 
 
 Siebenkses had the right to appeal ; he could with 
 ease adduce evidence of his name and wardship through a 
 duly matriculated Leipzig notary. All he wanted was 
 the worktool — the weapon for the fight, which was also 
 
 ( the subject of it — to wit, money. During the ten days 
 which the appeal (foetus-like) had wherein to come to 
 maturity, he went about sickly and thoughtful. Each of 
 these decimal days exercised upon him one of the persecu- 
 tions of the early Christians and decimated his hours of 
 happiness. To apply to his Leibgeber, in Bayreuth, for 
 money, the distance was too long and the time too short ; . 
 for Leibgeber, to judge by his silence, had probably leapt 
 over many a mountain on the leaping-pole, the climbiug- 
 
 , spurs, of his silhouette-clipping. Firmian cast everj'thing 
 
 ' to the winds, and went to his old friend, Stiefel, that he 
 might comfort himself and tell all the story. Stiefel fumed 
 at the sight of marshy bottomless paths of the law, and 
 pressed upon Siebenkass the acceptance of a pair of stilts 
 whereon to traverse them, namely, the money necessary 
 for the appeal. Ah ! this to the disconsolate, longing, 
 Sohulrath was almost tantamount to another clasp of 
 Lenette's beloved, clinging hand ; his honest blood, coagu- 
 lated by all these days of mere icy cold, thawed once more 
 and began to flow. It was through no cheating of his 
 sense of honour that Firmian, who preferred starving 
 to borrowing, at once accepted Stiefel's money, looking 
 upon each dollar as a little stone wherewith to pave the 
 path of the law, and so pass over it unbemired. His 
 
CHAP. X.] FLOWEK, FKBIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 323 
 
 principal idea was that lie ■would soon be dead, and that, 
 at all ev(ints, his helpless widow would have the enjoy- 
 ment of his inheiitance. 
 
 He appealed to the Supreme Court and ordered another 
 instrutntot to' be drawn up in Leipzig. 
 
 These fresh nail-scratches of fortune, on the one hand, 
 and Stiefel's kindness and money, on the other, laid up a 
 fresh accumulation of oxygenous, or acidifying, matter in 
 Lenette, and, at the same time, the acid of her ill-humour 
 became (as acids in general do) stronger in a time of frost, 
 and on this subject I shall here communicate 'the few 
 meteorological observations which I have to make. 
 
 They are as follows : — Since the misunderstanding with 
 Stiefel, Lenette was mute the whole day long, recovering 
 from this lingual paralysis only in the presence of stran- 
 geis. I presume there must exist some physical cause for 
 the phenomenon that a woman is frequently unable to speak 
 except in the presence of strangers, and we should be able 
 to discover the reason of the converse phenomenon, that a 
 mesmerized subject can converse only with the mesme- 
 rizer or with persons who are en rapport with him. In St. 
 Kilda everybody coughs when a stranger arrives in the 
 island, and although coughing is not exactly speaking, per- 
 haps, yet it is a preliminary whirring of the wheels of the 
 mechanism of speech. This periodic or intermittent dumb- 
 nehs, which, perhaps, like the non-periodic or continued 
 form of the complaint may be the result of the suppies- 
 sion of (surface) outbreaks, is nothing new to the medical 
 world. Wepfer mentions the case of a paralytic woman 
 wiio could say nothing except the Lord's Prayer and the 
 Creed ; and cases of dumbness are of frequent occurrence 
 in matrimonial life, in which the wife can say nothing to 
 the husband beyond a word or two of the extremest 
 necessity. There was a fever-patient at Witteaberg who 
 couldn't speak a word the whole day long except between 
 12 and 1 o'clock; and we meet with plenty of poor dumb 
 women who are only in a condition to speak for about a 
 quarter of an hour in the course of the day, or can just 
 manage to get out a word or two in the evening, and aro 
 obliged to have recourse to duwh-iells yiy way of helping out 
 their meaning, using for that purpose plates, keys, and doors , 
 
 v2 
 
324 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER. [BOOK III. 
 
 This dumbness, at last, so worked upon poor Siebenkaes 
 tbat he caught it himself. He mimicked his wife as a 
 father does bis children for their good. His satiric 
 humour often had a good deal the appearance of satiric 
 i'ZZ-humour ; but this was done with the sole view of 
 keeping himself at all times perfectly calm and cool. 
 When chamber-wenches distracted him most utterly as he 
 was in the depths of his auctorial sugar-refinery and beer- 
 brewery, by converting (with Lenette's assistance) hia 
 room into a regular herald's chancellery and orator's 
 tribune, he could always bring his wife, at all events, 
 down from the platform by striking three blows on his 
 desk with his bird-sceptre (this was by virtue of an 
 arrangement which he had come to with her on the 
 subject). Also, on the many occasions when he would 
 find himself sitting over against these talking Cicero- 
 heads, powerless to frame an idea, or to write a line, and 
 regretting the loss (not so much to himself as to the innu- 
 merable mass of persons of the highest condition and 
 intelligence) of the thousands of ideas which were thus 
 abstracted by these adepts in the art of talk — ^he could 
 give a ti'emendous thump with hia sceptre-ruler, upon the 
 table, such as one gives to a pond to make the frogs cease 
 croaking. What pained him most with regard to this 
 ' robbery of posterity was the thought that his book would 
 go down to it shorn of its fair and due proportions as a 
 consequence of all this fugitive chatter. It is a beautiful 
 thing that all authors, even those who deny the immor- 
 tality of their own souls, seldom have anything to say 
 against that of their names. As Cicero declared that he 
 would believe in the second life, even were there none, they 
 cleave to a belief in the second, eternal, life of their names, 
 however their critics may demonstrate the contrary. 
 
 Siebenkaes now most distinctly intimated to his wife, 
 that he should not speak any more at all, not even con- 
 cerning matters of the utmost necessity, and this because 
 he simply could not and would not be distracted or chilled 
 in the fervour of composition, by long angry discussions con- 
 cerning talking, washing, or the like, neither be induced 
 to lose his temper with her about such matters. Any 
 given matter of perfect indifference can be spoken of in ten 
 
CHAP. X.J FLOWER, FBUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 323 
 
 different tones /and mistones, and, therefore, with the' view 
 ot not depriving his wife of whatever enjoyment she might 
 derive from speculating as to the tones in which things 
 were capable of being said, he gave her to understand that 
 for the future he would speak to her only in writing. 
 
 I am ready, here, with an explanation of the fullest de^ 
 tioription as to this proceeding. That grave and earnest 
 person, the bookbinder, wasexeicisedin his mind, all through 
 the ecclesiastical year, by nothing to such an extent as by 
 the conduct of his " Eascal," as he styled his son, a bit of 
 a mauvais sujet, who was a better hand at reading a book 
 than at binding one — always clipping the edges askew, or 
 cropping them too closely, or doubling or halving the 
 dimensions of the damp sheets by screwing the press too 
 tight. Now these were matters of a sort which his father 
 could by no means endure, and he lost his temper over 
 them to such an extent that he would not speah to this 
 child of the devil and his realm, not so much as a syllable. 
 Such sumptuary laws and golden rules connected with 
 bookmaking, therefore, as he had to communicate to his 
 son he delivered to his wife, in her capacity of post- 
 mistress, and she (using her needle by way of rod of 
 office) would them get up in her distant comer of the 
 roona and transmit the commands of the father to the son, 
 who would be planing away at no very great distance. 
 The son, who had to deliver all his questions and answers 
 to the postmistress in the same manner, approved of this 
 arrangement most thoroughly ; his father's tongue gave 
 much less trouble than before. The father got into the 
 habit of this system and ceased to treat of anything by 
 word of mouth, no matter what. He even got to trying to 
 express his views concerning his son's proceedings by 
 means of looks, darting burning glances at him, like a 
 lover, as he sat opposite to him. An eye full of glances, 
 however (notwithstanding the fact that there are ocular 
 letters, as well as palatals, labials, and glossals), is at best 
 but a box of confused pearl type. But as, by good fortune, 
 the invention of writing, and the institution of the post- 
 office have enabled a man, who is drifting round the North 
 Pole on a slab of ice, to communicate with another who is 
 Bitting in a palm-tree amidst parrots in the torrid zono 
 
326 JEAN PAUL FEIEDKICH EICHTEE. [bOOK III 
 
 —this father and son (when, thus divided, thej' sat oppoeita 
 to one another at the -work-table) were provided with a 
 means of sweetening and lightening their separation by 
 help of an epistolary correspondence carried on across the 
 table. Business letters of the utmost importance were 
 conveyed from one to the other unsealed, and in complete 
 safety, for the mail bags, the mail-packet of this penny- 
 post, consisted of a pair of fingers. The interchange of 
 letters and coTiriers between these two silent powers took 
 place over roads so smooth, and by such an admirable 
 system of " Poste aux Anes " without interruption and free 
 from all delay, that the father could, without difficulty, 
 receive a reply on a subject of importance from his corres- 
 pondent within one minute of its despatch (such was the 
 facility of communication), in fact, they were quite as near 
 to one another as if they had been next door neighbours. 
 I would here beg any traveller who may visit Kuh- 
 schnappel before I do so to saw off the two corners of the 
 table, of which the one served as Bureau d' Intelligence to 
 the other, put both these bureaux in his pocket and exhibit 
 them to the curious in some great city or company— or to 
 me in Hof. 
 
 Siebenkffis partially copied the bookbinder's system. 
 He cut out brief letters of decretal in anticipation, to be 
 ready for the occasions when they should be required. If 
 Lenette put an unforeseen question to which there wasn't 
 an answer in his letter-bag, he would write three lines and 
 pass them across the table. Such notes of hand or orders 
 in council as had to be renewed daily, he ordered the return 
 of in a standing requisition, so as to save paper, and not be 
 obliged to write a fresh order on this subject every day ; 
 for he merely passed this particular paper back across the 
 table again. But what said Lenette to all this? I shall 
 be better able to answer this question after relating what 
 follows here. There was only one occasion on which he 
 spolce in this deaf and dumb institution of a house of his ; 
 it was while he was eating salad out of an earthenware- 
 dish, which had poetical as well as pictorial flowers on it 
 by Way of ornament. Lifting the salad with his fork, he 
 disclosed to yifew- the little carmen which bordered this 
 dish, and which ran as follows : — 
 
OHAP, X.J PLOWEE, FRUIT, A.ND THOKN PIECES. 327 
 
 " Peace feeds, but strife 
 Consumes our life." 
 
 Whenever he lifted up a forkful of his salad, he was in 
 a position to read one oi: the other foot of tltis didactio 
 poem ; and he did so aloud. 
 
 " Well, and what said Lenette to all this?" we inquired 
 above. Not a word, I answer. She wasn't' going to let 
 Ills sulks and silence diminish hers in the slightest degree, 
 for in the end it seemed clear to her that he was holding 
 his tongue out of sheer ill-temper, and she wasn't going to 
 be outdone by him in that respect. And, in fact, he cairied 
 matters further and further every day, continually passing 
 new broken tables-of-the-law across the table to her, or 
 carrying them round to her side. I shall not catalogue 
 the whole of them, but merely quote a few specimens, e. g. 
 ' The Forty-eight-pounder Paper' (he gratified himself by 
 continually inventing new titles for these missives), of 
 which the contents were : " Stop the mouth of that tall 
 sewing creature there, who sees perfectly well how'busy I 
 am with my writing, or I shall seize her by that throat 
 with which she's baiting ,me." 
 
 " The ' Official Gazette ' paragraph:-' — "Let me have a 
 little drop of some of your dirty wash- water; I want to 
 get the ink off these raccoon paws of mine." " The Pas- 
 toral Letter:" — ^" I want to get a glance or so at 'Epictetus 
 on what Man has to endure,' could I find a moment of some 
 sort of peace ; don't disturb me." " The Pin-paper :" — " I 
 happen to be in the middle of a satire, of the hardest and 
 severest nature, on the subject of women ; take that screech- 
 ing bookbinderess down stairs to the hairdresseress, and 
 yell away there as sprightlily as ye have a mind." " Tor- 
 ture-bench Note," or rather "Folio:" — " I have held out, 
 this forenoon, through well-nigh as much as is possible ; 1 
 have fought my course through besoms, feather-dusters, 
 women's bonnets, and women's tongues. Is there no hope 
 that, now that evening is falling, I may have a little, brief 
 hour of peace, in which to trj' to get some slight idea of the 
 sense of these terrible Acts of Parliament before me here ?" 
 Nobody can convince me that it was any blunting of the 
 stings of these viiiiting cards of his (whiph he left upon her 
 so very ifrequently), that he occasionally; translated writing 
 
328 JEAN PAUL FRIEDEICH EICHTER. [^OOK III. 
 
 into speech, and when other people were present, jested 
 with them concerning cognate subjects. Thus he said on 
 one occaaion to Meerbitzer, the hairdresser, in Lenette's 
 presence, " Monsieur Meerbitzer, it's incredible what my 
 housekeeping costs in the course of the year. Why, that 
 wife of mine, there as she stands, gets through hahf-a-ton 
 of food or so by herself alone, and" (when she and the 
 barber both beat their hands together above their heads) 
 " so do I, too." He showed it to Meerbitzer, printed in 
 Schotzer's boot, that every one does consume about that 
 quantity of sustenance in the course of the year ; but did 
 anybody in that room fancy such a thing was possible ? 
 
 Ill-will towards a person is a kind of catalepsy of the 
 mind, and so is sulking ; and in this mental catalepsy, as 
 in the bodily, every limb remains immovably fixed in the 
 position which it chanced to be in when the attack came 
 oil. Moreover, mental catalepsy has this feature in com- 
 mon with corporeal — that women are more subject to it 
 than men. Consequently the only effect upon Lenette of 
 her husband's little joke (which had the outward semblance 
 of being a piece of ill temper, although it was in reality 
 only carried on with a view to the complete maintaining 
 of his own calmness and self-control) was to redouble her 
 stiffness and chilliness. Yet how very little she would 
 have minded it had she but seen Stiefel even once in the 
 course of the week, and had not the cares connected with 
 those house-expenses of hers (which melted down and 
 swallowed up all the pewter-plattery of the eagle's perch) 
 decomposed and dried up the very last drop of happy warm 
 blood in her wretched heart. Ah ! sorrow-laden soul ! 
 But, as things were, there was no help for her, nor any 
 for him whom she so terribly misunderstood. 
 
 Poverty is the only burden which grows heavier in pro- 
 portion to the number of dear ones who have to help to 
 bear it. Had Firmian been alone, he would scarcely have 
 so much as glanced at tlie holes and ruts in the streets of 
 life ; for destiny lays down little piles of stones for us every 
 thirty steps with which we may fill the holes up. And he 
 had a haven of refuge, a diving-bell, to fly to in the strongest 
 gale tnat might blow — in the shape of his watch (to say 
 nothing of his glorious philosophy), which he could always 
 
CHAP. X.J FLOWEB, FKUIT, AND THOKN PIECES. 329 
 
 "turn into cash. But that wife of his, and all her funereal 
 music and Kyrie Eleisons, and a thousand things besides, 
 and Leibgeber's inexplicable silence, and his growing 
 ill-health — the continual immixture of all these impure 
 matters into the breeze of his life converted it into a sultry, 
 unnerving sirocco blast — a wind which creates in a man a 
 diy, hot, sickly thirst, which often makes him put that into 
 his breast which soldiers put into their mouths to cure 
 bodily thirst, namely, cold powder and lead. 
 
 On the 11th of February, Firmian sought relief. 
 
 On the 11th of Februaiy, Euphrosyne's day, 1767, Le- 
 uette was born. 
 
 She had often mentioned this to him, and oftener yet to 
 her sewing- customers. However, he would have forgotten 
 all about it but -for the Superintendent-General Ziethen, 
 who had printed a book in which he reminded him of the 
 11th of February. The superintendent had given due 
 ■notice, in this work of his, that on the 11th of February, 
 1786, a segment of South Germany would be sent down, 
 •iby an earthquake, into the realms below, like so much corn 
 laid by a summer storm. As a consequence, the Kuh- 
 Bchnapplei's would have been lowered, upon the dropped 
 coffin-cords or lowered drawbridges of sinking soil, into 
 hell by entire companies at a time, instead of going there 
 as single envoyea, as theretofore was the usage. However, 
 nothing came of all this. 
 
 On the day before the earthquake, and before Lenette's 
 birthday, Firmian repaired to the lifting-crane — the spring- 
 board of his soul — namely, the old height where his Henry 
 had taken his farewell. The forms of his friend and wife 
 £tood, dim and vague, before his soul's sight. He thought 
 upon the circumstance that since his friend had left him there 
 had been about the same number of ruptures and divisions 
 in his married life as, according to Moreri, took place 
 in the Church from the time of the Apostles dovm to 
 Luther's days, namely, 124. Labourers, innocent and 
 simple, silent and happy, were smoothing the spring's path. 
 He had passed by gardens where they were clearing the 
 moss and the autumn-leaves away from the trees — ^by 
 beehives and vine-stooks being transplanted, ojean^d, 
 pruned — by osiers being trimmed and dressed. The sun 
 
;330 JEAN PAUL FEIEUEICH EiegiTEE. [BOOK III. 
 
 tehone bright and warm over the landj all rich with buds; 
 and suddenly he was struck by one of these sensations 
 which often come upon imaginative men — and this is why 
 these are somewhat apt to be a little fanciful and visionary 
 ■ — it seemed to him as if his life, dwelt, not in a bodily 
 heart, but in some warm and tender tear, as if his heavyr 
 laden soul were expanding and breaking away through 
 some ohink in its prison, and melting into a tone of musia 
 — a blue sathsx wave. 
 
 " I mjUst and will forgive her, on her birthday," cried 
 
 I his gpfteped heart and soul; " I have, little doubt that I 
 have been too hard upon her all this time." He resolved 
 .that he would have the Schulrath into the house, and the 
 ealico-gown beforehand, and make her a birthday present 
 of the pair, and of a hew sewing-cushion. He grasped his 
 watch-ohain and pulled out that Elijah's and Faust's 
 mantle, which was to bear him away over all his ills 
 by being converted into cash. He went home with every 
 corner of his heart glowing with sunshine, artfully made 
 his watch stop, and told Lenette he must take it to 
 Ihe watchmaker's to be repaired (and indeed its move- 
 ments hitherto had been like those of the planets above us, 
 a forward movement at the beginning of the terrestrial or 
 «look-day, afterwards stationary, and latterly retrograde). 
 In this fashion he concealed his projects from her. He took 
 the watch himself to the market-place and sold it, though 
 
 I he knew very well he would never be able to write with 
 comfort imless it was ticking on his table (like the noble- 
 man mentioned by Looke, who, could only dance in one 
 particular room, in which there was an old box standing). 
 Also, in the evening, the redeemed, checked shirt-^of-blood, 
 or seedbag of evil weeds, was clandestinely introduced 
 into the house. Towards evening Firmian went to the 
 Schulrath, and with all the warmth of his eloquent heart 
 told him of his resolve and everything connected with it. — 
 the birthday, the return of the calico, his request to Mm to 
 come and see them again, his own imminent death, and 
 his resignation to everything. Warm breath of life was 
 breathed, into Stiefel, long languishing in absence and 
 love (which, together, had gnawed him into paleness, as 
 lime does the shadows of a fresco), when he heard that on 
 
CHAP. X.] FLOWEE, FRUIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 331 
 
 the morrow the beloved voice of his Lenette, longed for 
 during all this weary time (alie '09uld hear his, ty-the-by; 
 in church, of course), would otice more stir the chords of 
 his being. 
 
 I must here just glance at a defence, for a moment, 
 as well as an accusation. The former relates to my hero, 
 who seems rather to have rumpled his honour's patent of 
 nobility to a greater or less extent, by having made this 
 request to Stief'el; but, then, we niust consider that his 
 intention in making it was to do a great kindness to his 
 suffering wife, and a small one to himself. The fact is, 
 that the very strongest and roughest of men cannot hold 
 out in the long run against the everlasting feminine 
 sulking and undermining. For the sheer sake of a Httle 
 peace and quietness, a man who may have swOm a thou- 
 sand oaths before marriage that he would have his own 
 way in that condition of life, comes, in the long run, to let 
 his wife have hers. The remainder of Siebenksea* conduct 
 I have no need to defend, since 'tis not possible to do so, 
 but only' necessary. The accusation to which, I alluded is 
 against my own fellow-labourers, and it is — that they differ 
 so widely in their romances from this Biography and from 
 real life, in describing the ruptures and reconciliations of 
 their characters as being possible, and as iactuaUy occur- 
 ring, in periods of time so brief that one might stand by 
 and time them with a stop-watch in one's hand. But 
 a man does not break with a person he loves all in an 
 instant; the rendings alternate with little re-bindings 
 with bands of silk and flowers, tiU at length the long 
 alternation between seeking and shunning ends in com- 
 plete eeparation, and it is theuj and not till then, that we 
 wretched creatures are at our wretchedest. The same is 
 generally true of the tmion of souls ; for though at times 
 an unseen infinite Ann seems suddenly to press us upon 
 some new heart, yet we have always long Tenown this 
 heart, in the Gallery of the Saints of our longing devo- 
 tion- — aiud often taken the picture down, uncovered, and 
 adored it. It became impossible to Firmian (sitting in 
 the evening in his lonesarde ehair of anxiety and sus- 
 pense) to keep all that love of his waiting with any sort 
 of patience for the morrow. The very restraint which 
 
832 JEAN PAUL FBIEDEICH RICHTEE. [bOOK III. 
 
 was Tipon him made his love wax warmer ; and when his 
 old familiar fear — that he would die before the equinox 
 came round — fell upon him, it terrified him more than it 
 was wont; hut not the thought of death. What shook 
 him was the idea of Lenette's difficulties, and how she 
 would ever find the money requisite for the performance 
 of the final trial, the anchor-proof* of his humanity. As 
 it chanced, he had plenty of money among his fingers 
 at this -very moment. He sprang up and ran that very 
 / evening to the manager of the corpse lottery, so that, at 
 ' all events, his wife should be entitled to a capital of fifty 
 florins at his death, and be able to cover his body de- 
 cently over with a little earth. I don't know the exact 
 8um he paid ; but I am quite accustomed to embarrass- 
 ments of this description, which novel-writers, who can 
 invent any sum they please in a case of this sort, have 
 no idea of, but which are exceedingly troublesome to a 
 I writer of actual biography, who does not put down any- 
 ■' thing which he is not in a position to substantiate by 
 documentary evidence, and a reference to records. 
 
 On the morning of the 11th of February, that is to say 
 on the Saturday, Firmian entered his room, feeling very 
 tender-hearted (for every illness and weakness softens our 
 heart — loss of blood, for instance, and trouble), and all 
 the more so because he was looking forward to a kindly, 
 peaceful day. We love much more warmly when vsre are 
 looking forward to making somebody happy than we do 
 half an hour after, when we have done it. It was as 
 windy this morning as if the gales were holding tourna^ 
 ment, or riding at the ring, or as if ^Eolus were shooting 
 his winds out of air-guns. Hence many people thought 
 either that the earthquake was beginning, or that a few 
 people here and there had hanged themselves for fear of 
 it. Firmian met a pair of eyes in Lenette's face, from 
 which, even at that early hour, there had fallen a warm 
 blood-rain of tears, on this first of her days. She had not 
 in the slightest degree guessed at his tenderness towards 
 ■her, or at that which he had in his mind. She had had 
 no thought of anything of the kind ; her only idea had 
 
 * The anchor proof consists in casting the anchor forcibly down upon 
 A deep herd bottom. 
 
GHAP. X.j FLOWER, FKUIT. AND THOKN PIECES. 33$ 
 
 been, "Ah, me! since my poor father aad mother have 
 been, dead and gone, there is not a soul that ever re- 
 members I have a birthday." Something or other was 
 evidently pre-occiipying her. She looted once or twice, 
 very inquiringly, into his eyes, and seemed to be making 
 up her mind to something ; so he put off for a time the 
 outpouring of his full heart, and the unveiling of his two- 
 fold birthday-present. At last she came up to him slowly, 
 with the colour in her face, tried in a troubled way to 
 get his hand into hers, and said, with downcast eyes, in 
 which, as yet, there were no tears, " We will be friends 
 again to-day. If you have hurt me, and given me a little 
 pain, what I want is to forgive you from my heart. Do 
 you the same to me." This address rent his warm breast 
 in twain, and at first all he could do was to be dumb, and 
 clasp her in this silence to his o'er-fraught heart, saying, 
 after a time, " Forgive thou me only ! for, ah ! I love thee 
 far more than thou lovest me." And here, at the thought 
 of bygone days, the heavy tear-drops rose from the 
 depths of his laden heart, and flowed, silent and slow, as 
 the deep streams flow. She gazed at him much astonished, 
 saying, " We are going to be friends, then, are we, to-day? 
 and it is my birthday. But, ah, me ! it is a sad, sad 
 birthday, too." It was only at this point that he remem- 
 bered his birthday-present. He ran and brought it — that 
 is to say, the cushion, the calico-dress, and the news that 
 Stiefel was coming in the evening. At this she began to 
 shed tears, and said, "Ah! did you really do all this 
 yesterday ? And you remembered that this was my birth- 
 day ? Oh I it was so kind of you, and I do so thank yoti 
 for it ; particularly — ^particularly — for the delightful — 
 cushion. I never thought you would remember anything 
 about my wretched birthday at all 1 " His manly, bean 
 tiful soul, which kept no watch upon its enthusiasm (as 
 women's do), told her everything, including the fact that 
 he had joined the corpse-lottery the day before, so that 
 she might be able to put him under ground at less ex. 
 pense. Her emotion became as strong and as visible as his 
 own. " No, no," she cried at length, " God will preserve 
 you ; but, then, there's this terrible day ; who knows if 
 we shall ever see another morning. Tell me, what doe« 
 
334 JEAN PAUL FKIBDEICH EICHTEK. [BOOK III. 
 
 Mr. Stiefei thinks about the earthquake?" " Doii't dis- 
 tress yourself on that score," said Fiiinian ; "he says there 
 won't be anything of the kind." 
 
 Eeluctantly he let her away from his glowing heart. 
 Until he went out into the free air (for writing was utterly 
 impossible) he gazed continually upon her bright, shining 
 face, whence all the clouds were quite cleared away. He 
 practised upon himself an old trick he had (which I have 
 learnt from him) ; when he wished to love some dear- 
 person very dearly, and forgive him everything, he looked 
 long on his facej For we (that's to say he and I) see in a 
 human face, when it is old, the finger-board, the counting 
 board, of all the bitter pains and sorrows which have 
 passed so rudely over it ; and when it is young, it is like 
 a bed of flowers on the slope of a volcano, whose next 
 eruption will split it into shivers. Either the future or 
 the past is written on every face — making us gentle and 
 tender, if not sad. 
 
 Firmian would have been delighted to have held his 
 new-found, restored Lenette to his heart all the day long ; 
 at all events till evening came ; but her house-work and 
 other occupations were so many bars' rest in this music, 
 and her lachrymal ducts were sources of appetite, as well 
 as of tears. And she bad not the courage to question him 
 concerning the metallic source of his gold-bearing stream, 
 upon whose gentle waves she was floating now. But her 
 husband gladly divulged the secret of the sale of his 
 watch. , The actual estate of matrimony was to-day to 
 him what the pre-nuptial period is always — a ci/inbale 
 d'amour — having a sounding-board at each of its faces 
 which doubles, not the strings of the instrument, but the 
 tone of those it has. The entire day was like a piece cut 
 out of the full moon, unclouded by the slightest haze, or 
 rather out of the Second world, into which the people of 
 the moon themselves proceed. Lenette, in her morning 
 glow, was like the (so-called) Moss of Violet Stone — the 
 lolite — which gives out the perfume of a miniature-bed 
 of violets, if you but rub it till it gets a little warm. 
 
 At evening finally appeared the Eath, all a-shake with 
 agitation. He looked just the least bit haughty, but 
 when he tried to wish Lenette many happy returns oi 
 
CHAP. XI.J TLOWER, FltUIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 335 
 
 ihe day, lie could not do it for tears, which were in his 
 throat quite as much as in his eyes. His embarrassment 
 served to conceal hers; hut at length the opaque mist 
 cleared away from among them, and they were able to 
 look at one another. And then they were very happy; 
 Firmian forced himself to be so ; the other two required 
 no constraining. 
 
 The heavy storm-clouds, then, ceased for a time to hang 
 and sweep so low, as they had been doing of late, over 
 their comforted, softened hearts. The boding comet of 
 tlie future was shorn of its sword, and weut sweeping 
 on, far brighter and whiter, into the blue expanse of 
 heaven, passing athwart more brilliant constellations. 
 And there came into their evening a brief letter from 
 Leibgeber, of which the joj -bringing lines bedeck and 
 adorn our hero's evening, as well as our next chapter. 
 
 Thus did the quick, transient, quivering Flower-pieces of 
 Fantasy mature in the brains of our triple alliance (as in the 
 reader's own) into actual and living flowers of joy — as the 
 fever-patient takes the flowers patterned upon his waving 
 bed-curtain to be real and tangible forms; In truth, this 
 winter night, like one of summer, would hardly quite cool 
 down and die out on their horizon, and when they parted 
 at midnight they said, "We have all had a very happy 
 time." 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 leiboeber's disquisition on fame — firmian's "EVENIUa 
 
 PAPER." 
 
 In my last chapter I practised a deception on the reader 
 out of pure goodwill towards him; however, I must let 
 him remain undeceived until he has read the following 
 letter of Leibgeber's : — 
 
 "My Firmian Stanislaus, " Vaduz, February 2, 1786. 
 
 " In May I shall be in Bayreuth, and you must be 
 there too. I have nothing else of any consequence to write 
 to you now — however, this is quite important enough, 
 
336 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH KICHTEK. [BOOK IIU 
 
 namely, that I order you to arrive in Bayrentli upon the 
 first day of the month of gladness, because I have some- 
 thing of the most extraordinarily mad and important kind 
 in my head concerning you, and that as sure as there is a 
 heaven above us. My joy and your happiness depend on 
 your making this journey. I would reveal the whole 
 mystery to you in this letter if I were certain that it would 
 fall into no hands but your own. Come ! Tou might travel 
 in company with a certain Kuhschnappler, of the name of 
 Bosa, who is coming to Bayreuth to fetch his bride home. 
 But if (which God forbid) this Kuhschnappler be that 
 Meyem, of whom you have written to me, and if the said 
 goldfish is about to come swimming here to freeze (rather 
 than to warm) his pretty bride with his dry, wizzened arms 
 (as in Spain they put serpents, something like him, round 
 bottles to cool them), I shall take care, as soon as I get to 
 Bayreuth to give her a very distinct idea of him, and shall 
 maintain that he's ten thousand times better than the 
 Heresiarch Bellarmin, who committed adultery a great deal 
 oftener during his career — two thousand two hundred and 
 thirty-six times, to wit. I have the most anxious and 
 heartfelt longing to behold the Heimlicher von Blaise; 
 were he but a little nearer at hand I should — (seeing that 
 there's always something sticking in that throat of his 
 which he has some difficulty in getting down, such as an 
 inheritance, or somebody else's house and land), — I say, I 
 should give him a good hard thwack every now and then 
 in the small of his back (by way of a cure) and await the 
 outcome — I mean, of the mouthful. I myself have been 
 limping about the world in all directions, with my sil- 
 houette scissors, and am now taking a little rest in Vaduz 
 at a studious, bibliothecarian Count's, who really deserves 
 that I should like him ten times better than I do. But, 
 you see, my fondness for ymi is fully as much as my heart 
 can hold ; and (to speak in general terms) the human race, 
 and this green cheese of a world which it keeps on gnawing 
 at, seem to me more and more rotten and stinking every 
 day. I must saj- to you, ' Fame may go to the devil ! ' I 
 think I shall decidedly dip down, disappear, and get out 
 of the way altogether, almost immediately, run right into 
 the thick of the crowd, and come to the surface every week 
 
CHAP. XI.] FLOWEK, FRUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 337 
 
 tinder a new name, so that the fools slian't know who I am. 
 Ah I there were a few years, once on a time, when I really 
 did wish to be something — ^if not a great author, at least a 
 ninth elector — to be mitred, at any rate, if not belaurelled 
 — if not (now and then) to be a pro-rector, certainly (and 
 very often) to be a dean. At that period of my life I should 
 have been exceedingly delighted had I suffered the most 
 atrocious tortures from gallstones, because I should have 
 been able to erect (with those eliminated from my system) 
 an altar or temple in my own honour, higher than the 
 pyramid mentioned by Euysh in his ' Cabinet of Natural 
 Science ' as having been constructed of the forty-two gall- 
 stones of a certain noble lady. Siebenktes, in those days 
 I could have gotten me a beard of wasps (as Wildau used 
 to have one of bees) — a stinging beard of wasps, for nothing 
 else but to become famous thereby. ' I quite admit ' (said I, 
 at the period in question) ' that it is not accorded to every 
 eon of earth (neither should he expect it), as it was to Saint 
 Eomuald (as Bembo mentions in his life of him), that a 
 city shall beat him to death, merely to be enabled to filch 
 his holy body by way of a relic ; but he may, I think, 
 without being unduly conceited, entertain a desire that a 
 few hairs, if not of his fur-coat (as of Voltaire's, in Paris), 
 yet, at all events, of his head, may have the good luck to 
 be plucked out as a souvenir by people who have a certain 
 opinion of him. (Here I chiefly allude to the reviewers.)' 
 
 " At the time in question I thought as above set forth, 
 but now my views are far more enlightened. Fame is a 
 thing altogether un .vorthy of fame. 1 was once sitting, on 
 a cold, wet evening, on a boundary-stone, considering myself 
 carefully, and I said, ' Now, is there really anything in the 
 wide world that can be made of you? What is it? Have 
 i/ou any chance of becoming (like the deceased Comeliuf 
 Agrippa) Secretary of State for "War to the Emperor Maxi- 
 milian, and Historiographer to the Emperor Charles the 
 iFifth? Will YO0 ever hoist yourself up to the position of 
 Syndic and Advocate of the city of Metz. Physician in 
 Ordinary to the Duchess of Anjou, and Professor of Theo- 
 logy in Pavia ? Do you find that the Cardinal of Lorraine 
 is as anxious to stand godfather to your son as he was to 
 Agrippa's ? And would it not be ludicrous if you were to 
 
 II. z 
 
338 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH BICHTER. [bOOK III. 
 
 give out (and give yourself airs about it) that -a Margrave 
 in Italy, and the King of England, the Chancellor iMfercu- 
 rius Galinaria, and Margarita (a Princess of Austria), had 
 all wished to have you in their service in the same year? 
 Wouldn't it be ludicrous, and a lie into the bargain, to say 
 nothing of the utter impossibility of the thing, seeing that 
 all these people exploded into the sleeping-powder of deathso 
 many years before you flashed up in the shape of the priming 
 and detonating powder of life ! In what well-known work 
 (let me ask you) does Paul Jovius style you a portentosum 
 ingenium ? What author reckons you among the elarissima 
 siii smculi lumina? If it had been the case thut. you stood in 
 extraordinary credit with four cardinals and five bishops 
 — with Erasmus, Melancthon, and Capellanus-^wouldn't 
 Schrockh and Schmidt have mentioned it, en passant, in 
 their " History of the Eeformation " ? Even supposing that 
 I were actually reposing side by side with Cornelius 
 Agrippa under his great grove of shrubbery of laurels, the 
 same lot would be mine and his ; we should both rot away 
 in obscurity beneath the thicket, and it would be centuries 
 before anybody came to lift the branches and take a look 
 at lis.' 
 
 " It would do me -no more good were I to go about the 
 matter more knowingly, and have myself belauded in the 
 ' Universal German Library.' I might stand for many a 
 long year, with my wreath of bays round my hat in that 
 chill pocket-Pantheon, in my niche amongst the great 
 literati lying and sitting round me on their beds of 
 state — we might all (I say) wait begarlanded there, all 
 alone together in that Temple of Fame of ou-'s for many a 
 long year before a single soul came and opened the door, 
 and- looked in at us, or entered and knelt down before 
 me ; and our triumphal car would be nothing but a wheel- 
 barrow, on which our temple, with all its riches, should 
 be whirled occasionally to a public auction. Yet I might, 
 perhaps, soar above all that, and make myself immortal, 
 could I but indulge a demi-hope that my immortality 
 would reach the ears of any but those who are themselves 
 as yet in this mortal life. But can it afford me the smallest 
 gratification when I am compelled to perceive that it is 
 exactly to all the most renowned and celebrated of people, 
 
CHAP. XI.j PLOWEE, FRUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 339 
 
 over whose faces the laurel is growing, year hy year, in 
 their co£SnB (as the rosemary does over humbler dead), 
 -that I can never be anything but an unexplored Africa— 
 particularly to Shem, Ham, and Japhet ; to Absalom and 
 his father ; to both the Catos, the two Anthonys, Nebu- 
 chadnezzar, the Seventy Interpreters, and their wives ; t« 
 the seven wise men of Greece; even to mere fools, such as 
 Taubmaiin and Eulenspiegel ? When a Henry IV., and 
 the four Evangelists, and Bayle (who knows all the lest 
 of the learned), and the charming Ninon (who knows them 
 better still), and Job, the .bearer of sorrows — or, at all 
 events, the author of Job — don't know that there ever was 
 such a thing as a Leibgeber on the face of the earth : when 
 I am, and must ever remain, to a whole bye-gone world 
 {i.e., six thousand years replete with great and grand men 
 and nations), a mathematical point, an invisible eclipse, a 
 wretched je ne sais quoi, I really do not see how posterity 
 (in which there mayn't be so very much after all), or the 
 next six thousand years, can do anj'thing to speak of by 
 way of compensation. 
 
 " Besides, I cannot tell what description of glorious 
 heavenly hosts and archangels there are upon other world- 
 balls, and on the little spheres in the milky way — that 
 paternoster bead-chaplet of world-balls — seraphs, com- 
 pared to whom T cannot be looked upon as anything but 
 a sheep. We souls do, it is true, progress to a consider- 
 able extent, and ascend to loftier levels. Even here upon 
 earth the oyster-soul develops into a frog-soul, the frog- 
 s' juI into a cod-fish, the cod-fish into a goose, thence to a 
 sheep, an ass^aye, or even an ape — and ultimately into a 
 Bush Hottentot (for we can suppose nothing higher than 
 that). But a peripatetic climax of this kind begins to 
 cease inflating one with pride when the following reflection 
 occurs to one. Among the vaiious individuals which 
 compose a species of animals (among whom there musl 
 certainly occur geniuses, good, sound, common-sense intel- 
 ligences, and absolute blockheads), we find that we remark 
 and take notice only of the latter, o:-, at most, of the 
 extremes. No species of animals (considered collectively) 
 is close enough to our retina to admit of onr perceiving its 
 delicate middle tints and gradations: and thus must it be 
 
 ' z 2 . ■■ ■ 
 
340 JEAN PAUL FEIEDKICH KICHTBR. [bOOK III. 
 
 with US when some spirit, sitting in heaven, looks at us 
 in the mass. He is so far away, that he will find some 
 trouble (very vain trouble, too) in drawing a proper dis- 
 tinction between Kant, and his shaving looking-glasses^ 
 tlie Kantists ; between Goethe and his imitators ; and will 
 see little or no difference between members of faculty and 
 dunces, professors' ]ecture-rooms and lunatic asj'lums ; for 
 little steps are wholly lost to the sight of one who is 
 standing on the uppermost of them. 
 
 " Now this deprives a thinker of all pleasure and cou- 
 rage ; and, Siebenkaes, hang me if I ever sit down and 
 grow one bit famous, or give myself the trouble either to 
 build up or to pull down any learned or ingenious system 
 whatever, or write anything at all of greater length than 
 
 " Thy (not my) Self, 
 
 "L. 
 
 " P.S.— I wish it would please God to grant me a second 
 life after this, that I might have the opportunity of dealing 
 with a few realities in the next world ; for this one is really 
 ;dtogether too hollow and stupid ; a wretched Nuruberg 
 (,oy ; nothing but the falling froth of a life ; a jump through 
 the hoop of eternity; a rotten, dusty, apple of Sodom, 
 which, splutter as much as I will, I can't get out of my 
 mouth. Oh !— " 
 
 To readers who think the above piece of humour not sufS- 
 ,-jiently serious, I shall prove, in another place, that it is too 
 serious, and that it is only an oppressed heart which can jest 
 in this fashion; that it is only an eye which is in much 
 too feverish a condition — with the fireworks of life darting 
 round it like the flying fire-flashes which precede amaurosii 
 — which is capable of seeing and picturing such fever-forms. 
 
 Firmian understood it all, at the time in question at all 
 events. But I must go back to the 11th of February', in 
 order to half-deprive the reader of his sympathising enjoy- 
 ment of the re-union of the trefoil of friends which then 
 took place. Lenette's trembling petition that her husband 
 would pardon her, was but the forced hot-bed fruit of Ziehen's 
 earth-diaking prophecy. She thought that she herself, and 
 the ground. she stood upon, were about to be let down ; and 
 
CHAP. XI.] FLOWER, FUUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 341 
 
 it was at the near approach of death (whom she thought she 
 already saw wagging his tigers tail) that she held out to her 
 husband a hand of Christian peace. For (and to) that beau- 
 tiful soul of his (rfjserabodied) hers wept tears of love anri 
 of rapture. But very probably she, to some extent, con- 
 fused her happiness with her love — satisfaction with 
 fidelity ; and (it may be suspected) the eagerness with 
 which she was looking forward to enwrapping the Schul- 
 rath, that very evening, in a warm and tender — gaze, 
 found outward expression in the shape of an unusual 
 degree of affection for her husband. It is here most es- 
 sential that I should communicate to all and sundry pei- 
 sons one of the most valuable of all my maxims; in 
 dealings with even the very best woman in the world, it 
 is of the utmost importance that we should make exces- 
 sively certain, and discriminate with the utmost accuracy, 
 what it is which she really wants (at the time being), and 
 particularly whom — (this is not always the person who is 
 thus discriminating). There is in the female heart such a 
 rapid coming and going, and fluctuation, of emotions of 
 every kind ; such an effusion of many-tinted bubbles which 
 reflect everything, but most particularly whatever chances 
 to be nearest, that a woman, under the influence of emotion, 
 shall, while she sheds a tear for yon out of her left eye, 
 go on thinking, and drop another for your predecessor or 
 successor (as the case may be) out of her right. Also a 
 feeling of tenderness for a rival falls half to a husband's 
 share ; and a woman, even the most loyally faithful, weeps 
 more at what she thinks than at what she beai s. 
 
 'Tis very stupid that so many masculine persons among 
 us are stupid precisely on this point ; that a woman thinking 
 (as she does) more of other people's feelings than of her 
 own, is, in tliis matter, neither the deceiver nor the de- 
 ceived ; what she is is the deception itself — the optical 
 deception and the acoustic. 
 
 But Firmians seldom make well-digested reflections of 
 this sort concerning elevenths of February until the 
 twelfth. Wendeline was in love with the Schulrath ; that 
 was the fact of the matter. Like all women of any sense 
 (in Kuhsohnappol), she had believed in the supierintendent- 
 general, and in the kick he had administered to the earth. 
 
342 JEAN PAUL FRIEDEICH KICHTER. [BOOK III. 
 
 nntii Peltzstiefel, in the evening, unhesitatingly pronounced 
 the idea of such a thing to be simply impious, when she 
 abandoned the prophetic superintendent and gave in her 
 adhesion to the incredulous worldling, Firmian. We all 
 know* that he had every bit as much of the masculine 
 failing of overdoing consistency as she )iad of the feminine 
 one of carrying inconsistency too far. It was foolish, there- 
 fore, in him to think that he was going to regain, by 
 means of one grand effusion of the heart, an affection em- 
 bittered by so many small effusions of gall. The grandest 
 benefits, the loftiest manly enthusiasm, are incapable of 
 uprooting, all in an instant, a feeling of ill-will which has 
 rooted itself all over a person's heart with a thousand 
 little spreading fibres. The affection which we have de- 
 prived ourselves "of by means of a long-continued, gradual 
 process 6i chilling, is (mly to be regained by an equally 
 lengthy process of warming. 
 
 Jna word, it became evident in the course of a day or 
 two that things were just as they had been three weeks 
 belore. Lenette's love had flourished and grown to such 
 an extent, by reason of Stiefel's absence, that there was 
 not room for it, any longer under its bell-glass — it was 
 shiioting out leaves beyond the edge of it into the open- 
 air. The Aqua Toffana of jealousy at last permeated every 
 vessel in Firmian 's body, flowed into his heart, and gnawed 
 it slowly in pieces. He was but the tree on which Lenette 
 had inscribed her love for another, and was withering by 
 reason of the incisions. He liad so hoped that the Schulrath, 
 recalled to them on Lenette's birthday, would have healed 
 air 'wounds, however deep ; or at all evants cicatrized them 
 over : whereas, what he really had done was to open them 
 all wider than ever — all unconscious as he was of it. Ah ! 
 what' pain this was to the wretched husband 1 He grew 
 poorer and weaker, and more miserable — both outwardly 
 and inwardly — as the days went by, and gave up all hope 
 of ever seeing the First of May and Bayreuth. February, 
 March, and April passed over head — all heavy, dripping 
 clouds, without a single break of blue sky or blink of 
 evening-red. 
 
 On tjhe 1st of April he lost his law-suit for the second 
 time ; and on the 13th (Maunday Thursday) he finished, 
 
CHAP. XI.] FLOWER, FRUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 343 
 
 for ever, Ms ' Evening Paper ' (this was the name lie gave 
 to his diary, heoause he wrote it of an evening), meaning 
 to consign that, along with his ' Selections from the Devil's 
 Papers ' (as far as they were completed) into' Leibgeber's 
 most faithful hands (at Bayreuth), in place of his body, so 
 soon to vanish and be resolved into its elements. For, he 
 thought, those hands would fa?ner ciasp his soul (which 
 was in the papers) than his poor meagre body — of which, 
 du reste, Liebgeber always possessed a second unaltered 
 edition (a perfect facsimile copy, so to speak) at all times 
 at hand, in the shape of his own. I have no hesitation 
 in here quoting, without emendation, the whole of this con- 
 cluding page of the ' Evening Paper ' — Firmian's ' Swan 
 Song,' which — which went off by the following post. 
 
 " Yesterday, my law-suit was wrecked on the shoal of the 
 Court of Appeal of the second instance. The defendant's 
 counsel, and the Court.brought to bear upon me an old Sta- 
 tute, of force in Kuhschnappel as well as in Bayreuth, which 
 enacts that a deposition made before a notary is not valid 
 — depositions having to be made before the Court. These 
 two hearings of my case render the uphill path to the 
 third a little easier. For my poor Lenette's sake I have 
 appealed to the Lower House, my kind Stiefel advancing 
 me the necessary cash. Truly, in applying to the oracles 
 of Justice we have to fast and mortify, just as much as 
 was de rigueur in consulting the heathen oracles of old. I 
 have reason to Hope that I shall be able to effect my escape 
 from the clutches of the knaves of the State ;* or (shall I 
 say), from these game-keepers and their couteaux de chasse, 
 and hunting-spears or swords of Themis. I think I shall 
 get through their hunting-tackle of legal proceedings, the 
 toils, nets, and gins of their Acts of Parliament — not by iny 
 purse (which is fallen away to the thickness of an insect's 
 feeler, and could be drawn, like a leather guetie, through 
 the smallest mesh in any of their legal nets) — but with my 
 body, which, as it approaches the topmost of their nets 
 will be turned into dust of death, and will then fly free 
 through and over every trap they can set. 
 
 * Servants -werp; called "knaves" of old, and deserve the nania 
 pretty often at the present day. 
 
?>44 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH EICHTKE. [bOOK III. 
 
 " I desire to lift my hand away from this, my evening 
 paper, to-night for the last time, ere it becomes an absolute 
 martyrology. If one could give away his life as a gift, I 
 should be very happy to give mine to any dying person 
 who would care to accept it. At the same time, let 
 nobody suppose that because there chances to be a total 
 eclipse of the sun above my head, I think, for a moment, that 
 there m.ust be one in America as well ; or that I imagine 
 the Gold Coast must be snowed up for the winter because 
 a snowflake or two happen to be falling in front of my 
 own nose. Life is warm and beautiful ; even mine was so 
 once. If it must be that I am to melt away, even before 
 these snowflakes, I beg of my heirs, and of all Christian 
 people, that they will not publish any part of my selection 
 from the ' Devil's Papers,' except that which I have copied 
 out fair, which extends as far as the ' Satire upon Women ' 
 (inclusively). And as regards this diary of mine, in which 
 one or two satirical fancies crop out here and there, I beg, 
 also, that not a single one of these may be put into print. 
 
 " Should any curious inquirer into the history of this 
 day-and-night-book of mine be anxious to discover what 
 the heavy weights, the nests, the clothes hung out to dry 
 upon my branches, really consisted of, that they should so 
 bend my top shoot and my branches.down (and all the more 
 curious to know it, inasmuch as I have written humorous 
 satires) — (though, indeed, my sole object has been to nourish 
 and support myself by help of these satire prickles of mine, 
 absorbent vessels, to me, like those of the torch-thistle), I 
 beg to inform him that he seeks to know more than I know 
 myself, and more than I mean to tell. For man and the horse- 
 radish are most biting when grated ; and the satirist is 
 sadder than the jester, for the same reason that the Urang- 
 Utang is more melancholy than the ape, namely, because he 
 is nobler. If this paper does really reach your hands, my 
 Henry, my beloved, and you wish to hear somewhat con- 
 cerning the hail which has kept falling deeper and deeper 
 upon my young seed-crop — count not the melted bait 
 stones, but the broken stalks. I have nothing left to give 
 me joy, save your affection — everything else is battered 
 down into ruin. Since, for more reasons than one,* it is 
 • Lack of money and of health. 
 
OHAP. XI.] FLOWEE, FKUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 345 
 
 most unlikely that I shall ever come to you at Bayreuth, 
 let us part, on this pa^e, like spirits, giving each other 
 hands of air. I detest the sentimental, but Fate has well- 
 nigh grafted it on to me at last, in spite of myself, and 
 I swallow great spoonsful of that satiric Glauber's salt, 
 which is generally so good a remedy for it— as sheep, who 
 have caught the rot from feeding in damp meadows, ai e 
 cured by licking salt. I say I swallow great spoonsful, 
 about the size of my prizes at the bird-shooting, without 
 the least perceptible effect. But, on the whole, it matters 
 little. Fate, unlike our Sheriffs' Courts, does not wait 
 until we are well before she inflicts her sentence. My 
 giddiness and other premonitory symptoms of apoplexy, 
 give me to understand, with sufficient clearness, that I 
 shall soon be subjected to a good Galenian blood-letting,* 
 by way of lemedy for the nose-bleedings of this life. I 
 cannot say that I am particularly glad of it, or anxious 
 for it. On the contrary, I am annoyed with people who 
 demand that Fate shall at once iinswaddle them (for we 
 are swaddled in our bodies, the nerves and arteries being 
 the swaddling-bands) — ^as a mother does her infant just 
 because it cries, and has a little pain in its stomach. I 
 should be glad to remain swaddled for a while to come 
 among the rest of the ' Children of the Kope,'| particu- 
 larly as I cannot but fear that, in the next world, I shall 
 be able to make little or no use of my satirical humour.. 
 However, I shall have to go. But when that comes to 
 pass, I should like to ask you, Henry, to come some day 
 to this town, and make them uncover your friend's quiet 
 face, which will scarce manage to put on the Hippocratic- 
 mien again. Then, my Henry, when you gaze long upon 
 the grey, spotty, new moon- face there, and think that 
 very little sunshine ever fell thereon — no sunshine of 
 love, of fame, or fortune — ^you will not be able to look 
 up to heaven, and cry out to God, 'And now, at last, 
 after all his soitows and troubles. Thou, God, hast 
 annihilated him altogether ; when he stretched his arms, 
 in death, towards Thee, and that world of thine, Thou hast 
 broken him in sunder as he lies there — poor soul ! ' No, 
 
 • One contiuued until fainting supervenes. 
 
 t Persons condemned by the secre- tribunals were so styled. 
 
346 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRIUH EICHTEK, [BOOK III. 
 
 Htory, when I die, you will Le compelled to believe in 
 Immortality. 
 
 "Now that I have finished this 'Evening Paper' of mine, 
 I am going to put out the light, for the ftiU moon is 
 shedding broad, imperial sheets of brightness into the 
 r<x)m. Then, as there is no one else awake in the house, 
 I will sit down in the twilight stillness, and, while I gaze 
 at the moon's white magic amid the black magic of night, 
 and listen to great flocks of birds of passage as they come 
 flying hither from warmer lands through the blue, clear 
 moonlight — while I am passing away into a sister country — 
 I will stietch my feelers out from my snail's shell once more 
 before the last frost closes it up for ever. Henry, I want 
 to picture to myself to-night, clearly and brightly, all 
 that is now over and past; the May of our friendship — 
 eveiy evening when we were too much moved by emotion 
 and could not but fall into each other's arms — my hopes, 
 6u old and grey now that I hardly know them to be mine 
 — five old, but bright and happy, springs which I still 
 remember — my dead mother, who, when she was dying, 
 gave me a lemon, which she thought would be put into 
 her coffin, and said, ' Ah, I wish it were going into my 
 bridal garland.' And I will picture to myself, also, that 
 moment, now so near, of my own desath, when thy image 
 will rise before the broken sight of my soul for the last 
 time — -whstt I shall part from thee, and, with a dark, 
 inward pang, which can no more bring a tear into my 
 cold and glazing eyes, sink away from thy shadowy form 
 into the dark, and from amid the thick and heavj' clouds 
 of death, call to thee with a faint and hollow cry, ' Henry, 
 good-night ! good-night I Ah, fare thee well ! for I can 
 
 End of the 'Evening Papee.' 
 
CHAP. XII.J FLOWER, FKUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 347 
 
 CHAPTEE XII. 
 
 THE FLIGHT OUT OF EGYFf THE GLORIES OF TRAVEL — THK 
 
 UNKNOWN — BAYREUTH — BAPTISM IN A STORM — NATHALIE 
 
 AND THE HEEMITAGE THE MOST IMPORTANT CONVERSATION 
 
 IN ALL THIS BOOK AN EVENING OF FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 Once, in the Easter week, when Firmian came home from 
 a half-hour's pleasure-trip full of forced marches, Lenette 
 iifcked him why he had not come back sooner, hecause the 
 postman had heen with a great, enormous packet, and had 
 said that the husband must sign the receipt for it himself. 
 In a small establishment like Siebenkaes' an occurrence 
 such as this ranks umong the world's greatest events, or 
 the principal revolutions in its history. The moments of 
 waiting lay on their souls like cupping-glasses and drawing 
 plasters. At length the postman, in his yellow uniform, put 
 an end to the bitter- sweet hemp beating of their arteries. 
 Firmian acknowledged the receipt of fifty dollars, while 
 Lenette asked the postman who had sent th6m, and where 
 they came from. The letter commenced thus : — 
 
 " My dear Siebenkaes, 
 
 " I have received your 'Evening Paper' and ' Devil's 
 Selections ' all safely. ' The rest by woid of mouth. 
 
 " Postscript. 
 " But listen! If the future course of my waltz of- life 
 is a matter of the slightest iijterest to jou — if you care in 
 the least degree about my happiness, my plans, or ideas 
 —if it is anything to you but a matter of tbe supremest 
 indifference that I frank you as far as Bayreuth, providing 
 you with board, lodging, and travelling expenses — all on 
 account of a project whose yarn the spinning-mills of the 
 future must either manufacture into gin-snaies and gallows- 
 ropes (for my life), or else into rope-ladders and best bower 
 anchor-cables — if this, and other matters more momentous 
 still, have the smallest power over you, Firmian, for 
 heaven's sake, on with a pair of boots and start ! " 
 « » « * m » 
 
 "And, by thy holy friendship!" said Siebeukses, "1 
 
348 JEAN PAUL FRIEDKIOH EICHTER. [BOOK III. 
 
 will on with a pair, though the bolt of apoplexy should 
 flash out of the blue sky of Swabia, and strike me down 
 beneath a cherry-tree in full blossom. Nothing shall 
 pi'event me now ! " 
 
 He kept his word, for in six days from thence we find 
 him, at eleven o'clock at night, ready for his journey, with 
 clean linen on his back, and in his prickets— with a hat- 
 cover on his head (secretly freighted and stuffed with an 
 old soft hat) — his newest boots (the antediluvian pair, 
 relieved from duty, being left behind in garrison) — and a 
 tower-clock, borrowed from Peltzstiefel, in his pocket — 
 and fresh bathed, shaven, and kempt, standing by his wife 
 and friend — both of whom kept their eyes fixed, with a 
 gladsome, courteous watchfulness upon the departing 
 traveller only, and did not, for the time being, look at all 
 at one another. He took his leave of the pair while it 
 was still night, being minded to pass the rest of it in his 
 arm chair (of many sorrows), and be off about three 
 o'clock, while Lenette should still be snoring. He com- 
 mitted to the Schulrath the office of treasurer-in- chief of 
 the widow's fund to his grass-widow, and the manager- 
 ship, or, at least, the " leading business," of his miniature 
 Covent Garden full of Gay's Beggar's Operas, the 
 theatrical journal whereof I am here writing for the 
 edification of a full half of the world. " Lenette," he said, 
 " when you want any counsel, apply to the counsellor' 
 here ; he is going to do me the favour to come and see you 
 very often indeed." Peltzstiefel made the most solemn 
 promises to come every day. Lenette did not go down 
 stairs to the door with the Schulrath when he went 
 away, as she usually did, but remained above, and draw- 
 ing her hand out of her replenished money-bag (the starved 
 stomachic coats of which had hitherto been rubbing 
 together), snapped it to. It is not of sufficient import- 
 ance to be recorded that Siebenkses asked her to put out 
 the light, and go to her bed, and that he gave her charm- 
 ing face his long pariing kiss, and said good night, and 
 took the tender farewell, almost within the Eden-gate of 
 the land of dreams with that redoublement of fondness 
 with which we take our leave of those we love, and 
 greet them when we come back to them again. 
 
CHAP. XII.J FLOWER, FRCIT, AND THORN PIBCKS. 349 
 
 The watcliman's last call at length drew him from liis 
 sleefiing chair out into the starlight, breezy morning; but, 
 first, lie crept once more into the bed-r<jom to the rose- 
 maiden dreaming there, warm and happy, pulled the 
 window to (for there was a cool air from it falling upon 
 her unprotected breast), and would not suffer his lips to 
 touch her in an awakening kiss. He gazed at her by 
 the light of the stars and early blush of dawn, till he 
 turned his eyes away (fast growing dim) at the thought, 
 *' perhaps I may never see her again." 
 
 As he passed through the sitting-room, her distaff seemed 
 to look at him as if it were a thing of life ; it was wrapped 
 in broad bands of coloured paper (which she had put uii it 
 because she had not got silk) ; and there washer spinning- 
 wheel, too, which she used to work at in the dark morn- 
 ings and evenings when there was not light enough for 
 eewing. As he pictured her to himself woiking indus- 
 triously at them while he was away, every wish of his 
 heart cried out, " Ah, poor darling ! may all go well with 
 her, always, whether I ever come back to her or not." 
 
 This thought of the last time grew more vivid still when 
 he was out in the open air, and felt a slight giddiness 
 produced, in the physical part of his head, by agitation 
 and broken sleep, as well as natural regret at the sight 
 of his home receding from view, and the town growing 
 dimmer, and the foreground changing into background, 
 and the disappearance of all the paths and heights on 
 ■which he had so often walked a little life into his be- 
 numbed heart, frozen by the past winter. The little leaf 
 whei'eon, like a leaf roller, or miner-worm, he had been 
 crawling and feeding, was falling now to earth behind him, 
 a skeleton leaf. 
 
 But the iirst spot of foreign, unfamiliar soil, as yet 
 unmarked by any " Station of his Passion," drew, like a 
 .<erpent-stone, an acrid drop or two of sorrow-poison out 
 of his heart. 
 
 And now the solar flames shot higher and higher up 
 upon the enkindled morning clouds, till, at length, 
 hundreds of suns rose in an instant in the sky, in the 
 streams and pools, and in the dew-cups of the flowers, 
 while thousands of varied colours went flowing athwart 
 
35Ct JEAN PAUL FEIEDRKJH tllCHTEE. [BOOKI. II. 
 
 the face of earth, and one bright whiteness broke from 
 the sky. 
 
 Tate plucked away most of the yellow, faded leaves 
 from Firraian's soul, as gardeners remove those of plants 
 in spring. His giddiness diminished rather than other- 
 wise as he went on ; the walking did it good. As the 
 BUB. rose in heaven, another, a super-earthly sun, rose 
 in his soul. In every valley, in every grove, on every 
 rising ground, he broke and east away a ring- or two 
 of the chrysalis-case of wintry life and trouble (which 
 had been clinging so tightly to him), and unfolded his moist 
 upper and nether wrings, and let the breeze of May waft 
 him away, on four outspread pinions, up into the bright 
 air among the butterflies, but higher than they, and over 
 loftier flowers. 
 
 And then with what a burst of power the life within him 
 began, under this new impetus, to boil and seethe, as, issuing 
 from a diamond-mine of a valley all shade and dew- 
 drops, he walked a pace or two up through the heaven- 
 gate of the spring It was as if some great earthquake had 
 upheaved a new-created flowery plain, all dripping from 
 the ocean, stretching f(irther than the eye could reach, all 
 rich ill youthful powers and impulses. The fire of earth 
 glowed beneath the roots of this great hanging garden, 
 and the fire of heaven flamed above it burning the colours 
 into the trees and flowers. Between the white mountains, 
 as between porcelain towers, stood the bright tinted, 
 flowery slopes like thrones for the fruit goddesses. And 
 all over the face of this great camp of gladness, the cups 
 of the flowers and the heavy dewdrops were pitched, like 
 peopled tents. The earth teemed with young broods, and 
 sprouting grasses, and countless little hearts ; and heart 
 after heart, life after life, burst forth into being from out the 
 warm brooding-cells of Mother Nature— burst forth with 
 wings, !or silken threads, or delicate feelers — and hummed, 
 and sucked, and smacked its lips and sang And for 
 every one of these countless honeysucking trunks a cup 
 of gladness had long since been filled and ready. 
 
 In this great market-place of this living city of the 
 sun, so full of glory and sounding life, the pet child of 
 the infinite Mother stood solitary — gazing, with bright 
 
CHAP. XII. J TLOWEE, FKUIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 351 
 
 and happy eyes, deligMed, around him into' all its innu- 
 meiahle' streets. But his eternal Mother woie her veil 
 of immeasurahle immensity, and it was only the wannth 
 which pierced to his heart which told him that he was 
 lying upon her breast. Firmian reposed from this two 
 hours' intoxication of heart in a peasant's hut. The 
 foaming spiiit of a cup of joy like this went quicker to 
 the heart of a sick man such as he than to those of the 
 commoner run of sufferers. 
 
 When he went out again the glory had sobered down 
 into brightness, and his enthusiasm into simple happiness. 
 Every red ladybiid fluttering on its way, every red 
 church-roof, and every sparkling stream as it glittered and 
 glistened with dancing stars, shed joyous lights and 
 brilliant colours upon his soul. When he heard the cries 
 of the charcoal burners in the wood, the resoimding crack- 
 ing of whips, and the crash of falling trees, and then, when 
 coming out into the open, he saw the white chateaux and 
 roads standing out against the dark-green background like 
 constellations and milky ways, and above the shining 
 cloud specks in the deep blue sky ; while lights flashed 
 and darted everywhere, now down from trees, now up 
 from streams, now athwart saws in the distance — there 
 was no such thing as a foggy corner left in his soul, nor 
 a single spot in it all unpenetrated by the spring sun- 
 shine : the moss of gnawing, corroding care, which can 
 grow only in damp shade, fell from his bread-trees and 
 trees of liberty out here in the glad, free air, and his soul 
 could not but join in the great chorus of flying and 
 humming creatures which was rising all round him, sing- 
 ing, " Life is beautiful, and youth is lovelier still ; but 
 spring is loveliest of all." 
 
 The bygone winter lay behind him like the dark, 
 frozen South Pole ; the royal burgh of Kuhschnappel like 
 some deep, dreary school-dungeon with dripping walls. 
 The only spot in it over which broad, gladsome sunbeams 
 were intertwining was his own home, and he pictured to 
 himself Lenette in that home as commander-in-chief, free 
 to talk, cook, and wash at her own sweet will, and with 
 her liead (^nd hands, too) full all day long of the delight 
 that was coming in the evening. He was glad from the 
 
352 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH EICHTEE. [BOOK 111. 
 
 very depths of his heart that, in that little egg-shell of 
 hers, that sulphur-hut and chartreuse, she should enjoy 
 the glory and brightness which that angel Peltzstiefel 
 would bring with him into her St. Peter's prison. " Ah ! 
 in God's name," thought he, " may she be as happy as I 
 am — nay, and happier, too, if that be possible." 
 
 The more villages he came to, with their troupes ot 
 strolling players (of inhabitants), the more did life in 
 general seem to assume a theatrical guise — his past 
 troubles were transformed into leading parts in the drama, 
 or Aristotelian problems — his clothes into stage costumes 
 — his new boots became xihurna — and his purse a theatre 
 treasury — while a delicious stage-recognition was await- 
 ing him in the arms of his beloved Henry. 
 
 About half-past three in the afternoon, in a Swabian 
 village, whose name he did not inquire, his whole soul 
 melted of a sudden to tears, so that he was completely 
 astonished at the unlooked-for and rapid attendrissement. 
 His surroundings at the time would have rather led him 
 to anticipate a contrary effect. He was standing by an 
 old thorn-tree, rather crooked, and dead at the top ; the 
 village women were on the green washing their clothes, 
 which glistened in the sunlight, and throwing down 
 chopped eggs and nettles to feed the downy, yellow gos- 
 lings ; a gentleman's gardener was clipping a hedge, while 
 a herd-boy was summoning his sheep (clipped already for 
 their part) round the thorn-tree, with his cornemuse. It 
 was all so youthful, so pretty, so Italian ! The beautiful 
 May had half (or wholly) unclad everything and every- 
 one — the sheep, the geese, the women, the shepherd-min- 
 strel, the hedger, and his hedge. . . . 
 
 Why was he thus moved to tenderness in this gladsome 
 und smiling scene ? Partly because he had been so happy 
 all day, but chiefly by the shepherd bassoonist calling his 
 flock together with that stage instrument of his beneath 
 the thorn. Firmian had helped a shepherd of this sort, 
 with a crook and a reed-pipe, to drive his own father's 
 sheep home hundreds of times when he was a boy ; and 
 the tones of the Sane des Vacliea brought back in an instant 
 his own rose-coloured childhood — it arose from out its 
 dew of the morning, its bowers of budding blossoms and 
 
CHAP. XII.J FLOWEE, FRUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 353 
 
 sleeping flowers, and stood before him in iieavenly gu'se, 
 and smiled in all its own innocence dressed in its thousand 
 hopes, saying, " Behold me ! see huw lovely T am ; we 
 used to play together, you and I ; how much I used to 
 give you I — grand kingdoms, broad meadows, and gold, 
 and a great, endless Paradise beyond the hills. But it 
 seems you have nothing left now. And how pale yon are, 
 and worn ! Come and play with me again !" 
 
 Who is there amongst us to whom Music has not brought 
 back his childhood a thousand times ? She comes and says, 
 "Are not the rosebuds blown yet which I gave you?" 
 Yes, yes, tliey are blown ; they were white roses, though ! 
 
 The evening made his joy-flowers close, folding their 
 petals together above their nectaries ; and an evening dew 
 of melancholy fell ever heavier and thicker upon his soul 
 as he went on his way. Just before sunset he came to a 
 village; I am sorry to say I cannot remember whether it 
 was Honbart, or Houstein, or Jaxheim ; but of this I am 
 pretty certain, that it was one of the three, because it was 
 near the Eiver Jagst, and in Anspach, on the borders of 
 EUwangen. His night-quarters lay smoking down in the 
 valley before him. Before going on into them he lay 
 down on the hill-side beneath a tree, whose branches were 
 the cathedral chancel of a choir of singing creatures. 
 Not far from him gleamed the trembling tinsel of a piece 
 of water, glittering in the evening sun; and above him 
 the golden leaves and the white blossoms rustled like 
 grasses waving over flowers. The cuckoo (always her 
 own sounding-board and multiplying echo) talked to him 
 from the tree-top in mournful tones of sorrow ; the sun 
 was gone ; the shadows were throwing thick veils of crape 
 over the brightness of the clay. He asked himself, " What 
 is my Lenette doing now ? Of whom is she thinking ? 
 Who is vidth her ?" And here there fell about his heart, 
 like a band of ice, the thought, " Ah ! but J have no loved 
 one whose hand I can clasp ! " 
 
 After drawing to himself a vivid picture of the tender, 
 delicate, beautiful, woman whom he ha^ so often invoked, 
 but never met — to whom he would have given and sacri- 
 ficed — oh ! so gladly — so much ! — not only his heart and his 
 life, but his every wish, his every whim — he went down the 
 
 u. ' 2 a 
 
354 JEA.N PAUL FEIEDKICH EIOHTEB. [BOOK III. 
 
 hill with streaming eyes, which he strove in vain to dry ; 
 hut, at all events, any kind womanly heart (among the 
 readers of this tale) which has loved in vain, or to its own 
 detriment, will forgive him these burning tears, knowing, 
 from sad personal experience, how the soul seems to 
 journey on through a desolate wilderness, where the 
 deathly Samiel wind blows ceaselessly, while lifeless forms 
 lie scattered around, dashed to earth by the blast, their 
 arms breaking from their crumbling trunks when the 
 living touches them in act to clasp them to his own warm 
 heart. But ye, in whose clasp so many a heart has grown 
 cold, chilled by inconstancy or by the frost of death — ye 
 should Qot mourn so bitterly as do those lonely souls who 
 have never lost, because they have neYer found ; who yearn 
 for that immortal and eternal love of which even the mortal 
 and transient reflex has never been vouchsafed to bless 
 them. 
 
 Firmian carried with him into his night-quarters a 
 tranquil, though a tender, heart, which healed itself in 
 dreams. When he looked up from his slumbers, the con- 
 stelladons, set in his window as in a picture-frame, 
 twinkled lovingly before his bright and happy eyes, and 
 beamed upon him the astrological prophecy of a happy 
 morrow. 
 
 He fl.uttered, with the earliest lark, up out of the furrow 
 of his bed, with as many trills as he, and quite as much 
 energy. That day, fatigue plucking the bird-of-paradise 
 wings from his fancy, he could not quite get out of the 
 territory of Anspach. The day after, he reached Bam- 
 berg, leaving on the right hand Nurnberg — that and its 
 Pays Coutumiers and Pays de Droit ecrit. His path led 
 him from one paradise to another. The plain seemed to 
 be one great mosaic of gardens ; the hills seemed to crouch 
 closer to the earth, as if to let men the more readily climb 
 up upon their backs and humps. The groves of deciduous 
 trees were like garlands, twined and placed to adorn Na- 
 ture on some great festal day ; and the setting sun often 
 glowed through the trellis-work of some leafy balustrade 
 on a hill-side, like a purple apple in some perforated fruit- 
 vase. In one valley one longed to take one's mid-day 
 sleep ; in another, one's breakfast ; in this stream, to see the 
 
CHAP. XTI.J FLOWER, FHUIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 355 
 
 moon reflected when she sfood in the zenith ; to see her 
 rise behind this gioup of trees; to see the sun rise out of 
 that green trelli.sed bed of trees at the Streitberg. 
 
 When he arrived the next day at Streitberg, where all 
 those delights could be indulged in at once, he might easily 
 have seen the top of the spire of Bayrenth put on the 
 blushing tints of the evening Aurora — unless he was a 
 much worse walker than his historian ; however, he did y 
 not care to do so. He said to himself, " I should be an 
 ass were I to so rushing, all dog-tired and dried up as I 
 am, upon the first hour of a delicious reunion and meeting 
 of this sort; neither he (Leibgeber) nor 1 would get a 
 wink of sleep ; and what should we have time to talk 
 about at this hour in the evening ? No, no, better wait, 
 and get there the first thing in the morning, about six 
 o'clock, and so have the whole day before us for our mil- 
 lennium." 
 
 Accordingly he passed the night in Fantaisie, an arti- 
 ficial pleasure, rose, and flower-valley, half a mile from 
 Bayreuth. I find it a very hard and difScult matter to 
 reserve the erection of my paper model of this Seifersdorf 
 miniature valley (which I should so much like to intro- j 
 ■duce at this point), until I find a roomier place for it than 
 the present ; however, I can't help it, and should I not find 
 such a place, there is sure to be ample space in the blank 
 pages at the end of the book. 
 
 Firmian started, then, in company with a body of bats 
 and beetles — the advanced guard of a beautiful bright 
 day — and bringing up the rear (so to speak) of the people 
 of Bayreuth, who had just finished their Sunday and Feast J 
 of the Ascension (it was the 7th of May) : and he walked 
 so late that the moon, in her first quarter, was casting 
 deep, strong shadows of the blossoms and branches upon 
 the greensward. Thus late in the evening, then, Firmian 
 climbed a height from whence he could look down, with tears 
 of joy, to Bayreuth — where the beloved brother of his soul 
 was waiting for him and thinking of him — as it lay softly 
 veiled in the bridal night of spring, and broidered over with 
 shining flakes of Luna's radiance. I can affirm in his name 
 with a " Verily " that he nearly did what I should have 
 done myself ; that is to say, I, with a heart welling up in 
 
 2 A 2 
 
356 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH EIOHTEK. [BOOK III. 
 
 such a warm sort of manner as Ms was, and on a niglit all 
 so adorned and pranked out with gold and silver, should 
 have made but one hound into the Sun Hotel, and into 
 my Leibgeber's arms. However, he went back again into 
 his odour-breathing Capua (Fantaisie), and there, in the 
 brief intervening spaf^e of time between his return and 
 supper and evening prayer time, he met^beside a dried- 
 up water-basin or fish-pond, peopled by a race of deities 
 transformed into stone — he met with nothing less than 
 an exceedingly charming adventure. I proceed to give an 
 account of it.' 
 
 Beside the wall which surrounded the little lake in 
 question, there was a ladj' standing ; she was dressed all 
 in black except her veil, which was white ; she had a 
 bouquet of faded flowers in her hand, and was turning it 
 over with her fingers. She was looking towards the west, 
 that is to say, away from him, and seemed to be con- 
 templating partly the confused mass of stone Suisseries, 
 and the coral-ieef of sea-horses, tritons, and so on, and 
 partly a temple, in artificial ruins, which was close by. 
 As he passed slow^ly on he saw, by ; , side glance, that she 
 threw a flower, not so much at as over him, as if this sign 
 of exclamation were meant to rouse a pre- occupied person 
 from his reverie. He looked round a little, just to show 
 th,\t he was really awake and observant, and went up to 
 the glass-door of the artificially-ruined temple, in order 
 to linger a little longer in the vicinity of this enigma. 
 Inside the temple, facing him, there was a mirrored pillar, 
 which reflected all the foreground and middle distance 
 (including the fair unknown) in the green perspective of 
 a long background. Firmian saw, in the mirror, the lady 
 throw her bouquet at him bodily, and then roll an orange 
 (which would not fly so far vs the flowers) towards his 
 feet. He turned round with a smile. A soft voice cried 
 m an eager, hasty way, " Don't you know me ?" He said, 
 " No ; ' ana ere he had added, more slowly, " I am a 
 stranger," the unknown Lady Abbess had drawn near to 
 him, and lifted the Moses veil rapidly from her face, and 
 asked, in a louder tone, "Don't you, now?" And a female 
 head which might have been sawn from the shoulders of 
 the Vatican Apollo (only softened by some eight or ten 
 
CHAP. XII.J FLOWEB, FUUIT, AND THOEU PIECES. 357 
 
 feminine traits, and a narrower brow) glowed upon him 
 like some bust illumined by the flare of a torch. But, on his 
 repeating that he was a stranger, and when she examined 
 him more closely, and without her veil, and let her gauze 
 portcullis down again (which movements took altogether 
 about as long as one beat of the pendulum of an astro- 
 nomical clock), she fumed away saying, " I beg your par- 
 don," in a tone which expressed more womanly annoyance 
 than embarrassment. 
 
 A very little thing would have set him off to follow her 
 in a mechanical sort of manner. He immediately set 
 about adorning all Fantaisie with plaster-casts of her head 
 (instead of the stone goddesses) — of her head, which had 
 but three pleonasms in the face of it — too much colour in 
 the cheeks, too much curve in the nose, and too much wild 
 fire (or rather material for kindling it) in the eyes. " That 
 is the sort of head," he thought, " which would be well in 
 its place in an opera-box, beside the sparkling one of some 
 royal bride (ay, and hold its own there), and might contain 
 all the wisdom it might deprive — other people of." 
 
 One carries a magic adventure such as this into one's 
 dreams with one, for it is like a dream itself. The month 
 of May now stuck in little flower sticks to all Firmian's 
 drooping, trembling, joj'-flowers (as she had done to Na- 
 ture's), and lightly bound them to them. Ah ! with what 
 brightness do even little joys beam upon the soul when it 
 stands on some spot all darkened by clouds of sorrow — 
 as stars shine out in the empty sky when we look up at it 
 from a cellar or deep well. 
 
 On the exquisite morning which followed, the earth rose 
 with the sun. Siebenkaes had his friend of all time in his 
 head and heart more than the unknown of yesterday ; 
 although, at the same lime, he took care that his path 
 should lead him by the ocean, and the shell out of which 
 that Venus had arisen — for mere curiosity's sake — which 
 led to no result. And so he waded away through the 
 moist radiance and cloudy vapour of the glittering silver- 
 mine, teaiing down in his passage the gosinamer- wreaths 
 iill behung with seed-pear!s uf dew which hung upon the 
 flowers; brushing (in his eagerness to reach his Olympus 
 of yesterday) the chilled butteiflies and dew-drops from 
 
358 JEAN PAUL FETEDRICH EICHTER, [bOOK III. 
 
 off the branches, all a-flutter with tlie inRect swarms (the 
 key-boaid of a harmonica framed in flowers). He climbed 
 to his place in the great " Auditorium all delight at 
 length. Bayreuth lay behind a glowing drop-curtain of 
 mist. The sun (in his character of " king " of this drama) 
 stood on a hill-top, and looked down at this many-tinted 
 curtain, which took fire and blazed, while the morning 
 breezes caught and bore away its fluttering, sparkling, 
 tinder fragments, and scattered them over the gardens and 
 the flowers. And soon nothing save the sun was shining; 
 nothing round him now except the sky. Amid this radi- 
 ance SiebenkiBS made his entry into his dear friend's camp 
 of recreation and head-quarter city, whereof all the build- 
 ings looked as if they were a glittering, solider sort of 
 air-and-magic castles fallen down from the ffither. It was 
 strange, but, on noticing certain window-curtains drawn 
 in (which the street breeze had been toying with), he 
 could scarcely help feeling certain that it was the " Un- 
 known " of yesterday who was doing it, although at that 
 time of the morning (it was barely eight o'clock) a Bay- 
 [ reuth lady would have as little got through her flower- 
 sleep as the red mouse-ear, or the Alpine hawksbeard.* 
 His heait beat quicker at every street. It was quite a 
 pleasure to him to lose his way a little, as to some extent 
 delaying and adding to his happiness. At length he 
 attained his perihelion — that is to say — reached the Sun 
 (Hotel), where was the metallic sun which had attracted 
 to it Ais comet, as the astronomical sun does comets in 
 general. He inquired the number of Iieibgeber's room ; 
 they said it was number 8, at the back of the house, but 
 that he had gone that day on a trip into Swabia, unless he 
 was still upstairs. Foitunately there just then came in 
 from the street an individual who testified to the correct- 
 ness of the latter hypothesis, and wagged his tail at sight 
 of Siebenkffis — Leibgeber's dog to wit. 
 
 To storm up the stairs, to burst open the door of joy, to fall 
 upon the beloved breast, was the work of a single instant ; 
 and then the barren minutes of life passed unseen and 
 unheard by the close, silent union of two human creatures, 
 
 • The former plant opens after eight in the morning, the latter at 
 eleven. 
 
CHAP. XII.J FLOWEB, FRUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 359 
 
 who lay clinging together on the waters of life, like two 
 shipwrecked brothers floating, embracing and embraced, on 
 the chill waves, with nothing left them save the heart 
 they die upon. . . . 
 
 As yet they had not said a word to one another. Fir- 
 mian, whom a longer continuance of troubles had made / 
 the weaker of the two, wept without disguise at sight of 
 the face of his newly recovered friend. Heinrich's features 
 were drawn as if by pain. They both had their hats still 
 on. Leibgeber, in his embarrassment, could think of 
 nothing to hold on to except the bell-rope. The waiter 
 came running in. "Oh! it's nothing!" said Leibgeber; 
 " except, by the way, that I shan't go out now. Heaven 
 grant," he added, ." that we may get fairly into the thick 
 of a long talk ! Drag me into one, brother !" 
 
 He had no difficulty in beginning one with the pragmatic 
 detailing of the Nouvelle du Jour — or rather de la Nuit — 
 in short, the town (or, more properly speaking, the 
 country) news of what had taken place on the previous 
 day in the vicinity of the veil of the beautiful Je ne sais 
 quoi. 
 
 " I know her " (Leibgeber answered), " as I know my / 
 own pulse ; but I don't intend to say anything whatever ' 
 about her just now. I should be obliged to sit still and 
 wait here for such a time. Put the whole thing off till 
 we are sitting in Abraham's warm bosom in the Hermitage, 
 which is the second heaven of Bayreuth, next to Fan- 
 taisie, — for Fantaisie is the first heaven, and the whole 
 country is the third." 
 
 They then made an ascent into heaven in every fresh 
 street they came to, and also in every subject of conversa- 
 tion which they fell upon. " You shall knock my head 
 off its stalk like a poppy," said Leibgeber, on Firmian's 
 betraying (I. regret to say) as great a curiosity as the 
 reader's own to know the secret, " before I transform my 
 mysteries into yours, either to-day, Dr to-morrow, or the day 
 after that. Thus much I will tell you, that your ' Selec- 
 tions from the Devil's Papers ' (your ' Evening Journal ' 
 contains matter more morbific) are perfectly divine, and 
 very heavenly indeed, and not at all bad, and by no 
 means without beauties ; but, on the whole (let us say), 
 
360 JEA.N PAUL FRIEDEICH EICHTEB. [BOOK III. 
 
 passable enougli." Leibgeber then told bim how delighted 
 he was with the woik, and how it surprised him that he, a 
 lawyer in a little country town, with nobody in it but a 
 parcel of shopkeepers and juristic souls, with a sprinkling 
 of higher officialities, should have managed to rise in these 
 satires to such a freedom and purity of art; and, indeed, 
 when I first read the ' Selections from the Devil's Papers,' 
 I said, myself now and then, " I am sure I couldn't have 
 written anything of the kind in Hof in Voigtland, and 1 
 liave written one or two pretty good things there, too." 
 
 Leibgeber placed a crown on the top of the laurel 
 wreath by declaring that it was much easier for him to 
 laugh at the world aloud, and with both lips, than under 
 his breath and with the pen, and this in accordance with 
 well-tried rules of art. Siebenkses was beyond himself 
 with delight at his friend's praise. But let no one grudge 
 a pleasure of this sort to our advocate, or to any other 
 worker who, in solitude, and without a single soul to give 
 him a word of praise, has gone steadfastly forward along 
 the path of art which he has honestly chosen, unsup- 
 ported, unassisted by the smallest encouragement of any 
 kind, whom, at last, on reaching the goal, the fragrance 
 of a leaf or two of laurel from a friend's hand, penetrates, 
 strengthens, and recompenses, with an aroma as of Arabj' 
 the Blest. If even the far-famed and the self-satisfi^ed stand 
 in need of a little of the warmth which is derived from 
 other people's opinions, how much more the diffident and 
 the unknown ! Ah ! lucky Firmian ! to what a distance 
 in the far south-south-west did the passing thunder-storms 
 of thy life now go drifting a.-wa,j. When the sun fell upon 
 them, nothing of them was to be seen but a gentle fall 
 of rain. 
 
 At the table d'hdte he observed with delight, in the case 
 of Leibgeber, how wonderfully a constant intercourse 
 with men and cities loosens the tongue — though, at the 
 same time, the heart puts on the bridle which has been 
 taken from the lips. Leibgeber thought nothing of talk- 
 ing about himself, and this in the most humorous 
 manner, before aU sorts of grand councillors of state and 
 chancery officials dining at the Sun — a thing which he, 
 a cabined, cribbed, confined parish advocate would scarce 
 
CHAP. XII. J FLOWEK, FRUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 361 
 
 have dared evei. after a good bottle of wine. As the 
 discourse which he delivered on this occasion pleased 
 the parish advocate, I shall build it into this histoty, and 
 place over it the superscription — 
 
 Leibseber's Dinner SPEEcrr. 
 
 " I think I may venture to pay that of all the Chris- 
 tians and persons of name and title seated at this table, 
 not one was made into one with such wcnderful diffi- 
 culty as I was. My mother, a native of Gasconj-, 
 was on her way to Holland, by sea, from London, where 
 she had left my father as diocesan of a German com- 
 munity. Bur, never since there has been such a thing 
 on the face of the earth as a councillor of the Ger- 
 man empire, did the German Ocean rage and insurge 
 so teiriiically as upon the occasion in question when it 
 was my mother's lot to he crossing it. Pour all hell, 
 hissing lalses of brimstone, boiling copper, splattering 
 devils, and all, into the cold ocean, and observe the 
 crackling, the roaring, and the seething of the hell-flames 
 and ocean-waves contending, till one of these hostile ele- 
 ments swallow up the other, and j'ou have a faint (but, 
 at dinner-time, a suificient) idea of the infernal storm , 
 in which I came upon the sen, and into the world. ^ 
 When I tell you that the main braces, the topsail sheets, 
 and the main topgallant staj's (to say nothing of the cross- 
 jack braces and fore topgallant halj ards, which were in 
 a worse state still) — and when, moreover, the mizen 
 topsail, and the foretop mast staysail rigging, and the 
 flying jib (to say nothing of the spanker) — when things 
 so accustomed to the sea as these (I say) felt as if their 
 last hour was come, it was a real ocean miracle that a 
 creature so tender as I was at that time should have 
 managed to commence his first. I had about as much 
 Jlesh on my body then as I have fat now, and may have 
 weighed, at the outside, about four Kumberg pounds, 
 which (if we may credit the authority of the best ana- 
 tomical theatre.s) is at the present moment about the weight 
 of my brain alone. Besides which, I was the merest of 
 beginners. I had seen absolutely nothing of the world, 
 except this infernal gale. I was a creature, not so much 
 
362 JEAN PAUL PETEDEICH RICHTEE. [bOOK ITI. 
 
 of few years as of none at all (though, everybody's life 
 commences som.e nine months sooner than the parish 
 registers indicate), excessively tender and delicate — 
 having been (in opposition to all the rules of hygiene) 
 kept mnoh too warm, swaddled, and coddled during these 
 very first nine months in question, when I ought rather 
 to have been undergoing a preparation of some kind to 
 enable me to bear the chill atmosphere of this world. And 
 thus, quarter-grown, a tender flower-bud, liquidly soft as 
 first love, when I made my appearance during a storm 
 such as was raging (I added one or two feeble squeaks, 
 with some difficulty, to its roar), what was to be expected 
 was, that I should be extinguished altogether, even before 
 it calmed down. People didn't like the idea of my going 
 without something in the shape of a name — without some 
 little vestige of Christianity of some kind — out of this 
 woild, which i.s a place whence we do carry away even less 
 than we bring into it with us. But the grand difficulty 
 experienced was that of standing godfather, in a rolling, 
 plunging vessel, which pitched everything and everybody 
 higgledy-piggleHy that wasn't made fast. The chaplain 
 was (luckily) lying in a hammock, and he baptized down 
 out of thence. My godfather was the boatswain, who held 
 me for five whole minutes ; but inasmuch as he couldn't, 
 without help, stand steady enough to enable the chaplain 
 to touch my brow with the water without missing me, 
 he was held by the barber's mate, who was made fast 
 to a marine, who was made fast to a boatswain's mate, who 
 was made fast to the master-at-arms, who sat upon the 
 knee of an old bluejacket, who held on to him like grim 
 death. 
 
 " However, neither the ship nor the child (as I after- 
 wards ascertained) came to any detriment ; but j-ou all 
 see, do you not, that, hard as it is for any one amid the 
 storms of life, to become, and continue, a Christian, or to 
 get a name — be it in a directory, in a literary gazette, in 
 a herald's college, or upon a medal — ^j-et there are few 
 who have had the same difficulty as I have had in acquir- 
 ing the mere first elements of a name — the groundwork, 
 the binomial root, of a Christian name, whereon, at a sub- 
 sequent period, the oiher great name might be engrafted-- 
 
CHAP. XII.J FLOWEE, FEUIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 3G3 
 
 and to get hold of afaint smattering of Chri.-tianify, as much 
 as a catecliumen and candidate as j-et in a speechless and 
 sticking condition might be capable of. There is but 
 one thing more diiEcnlt to make; the greatest princes 
 and heroes can only doit once in their lives — the mightiest 
 geniuses — even the three electors of the Church, the 
 Emperor of Germany himself, with all their united 
 eflforts, can't do more, were they to sit for years, stamping 
 in the mint with all the latent improvements in coining 
 machinery." 
 
 The whole of the company entreated him to explain 
 what this was that was so hard to frame. 
 
 " 'Tis a crown prince," he answered, quietly ; " even a 
 reigning sovereign finds it no easy matter to produce an 
 appanaged prince — but, let him try as he will, even in 
 the best days of his life, he can never produce more than 
 one specimen of a crown prince ; for a Seminarist of that 
 sort is none of your accessory- works, but the prime mover, 
 the regulator, the striking and driving-wheel of the whole 
 nation. On the other hand, gentry, counts, barons, 
 chamberlains, staif-officers, and, above all, common people 
 and subjects of the altogether every-day sort — to he brief, a 
 scurvy crew of that description — a generatio (equivoea — can 
 be brought into being by a prince with such wonderful ease 
 that he creates these lusus naiurm and virgin swarms, or 
 protoplasmaia, in considerable numbers even in his earlier 
 days, although in riper years he may not manage to turn 
 out an heir to his throne. Yet, after so much preliminary 
 drill, so many trial-shots, one would have taken one's oath 
 the other way ! " 
 
 End of Leibgeber's Table-Talk. 
 
 In the afternoon they paid a visit to that verdant, plea- 
 sure place, the Hermitage, and the alley leading thither 
 seemed to their happy hearts to be a path cut through 
 some beauteous grove of gladness. That young bird of 
 passage, Spring, was encamped all over the plain around, 
 her unladen floral treasures scattered about the meadows, 
 and floating down the streams, while the birds were drawn 
 up into air upon long sunbeams, and the world of winged 
 
364 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH KICHTEK. [BOOK III. 
 
 creatures hovered all about in intoxication of bliss amid 
 •the exquisite scents shed abroad by kind Nature. 
 
 Leibgeber determined to pour out his heart and his 
 ■secret at the Hermitage that day, and (by way of pre- 
 liminary) a bottle of wine or so to begin with. 
 
 He begged and constrained Siebenkaes first of all to 
 deliver a diary-lecture concerning his adventures by land 
 and by water up to the present time. Firmian complied, 
 but with discretion. Over his stomach's barren year, 
 ■over his hard times, over the (metaphorical) winter of 
 his life (upon whose snow he had had to make his nest, 
 ioebird-like), an^ over all the bitter northerly wind, 
 which drives a man to bury himself in the earth (as 
 isuldiers do) — over all these he passed lightly and quickly. 
 I myself must approve of him for so doing ; firstly, be- 
 cause a man would be none who should shed a bigger 
 tear over wounds of poverty than a j'oung lady drops at 
 the piercing of her ears, for in both cases the wounds 
 become points of suspension for jewels ; i^ecoudly, because 
 Siebenkffis would not cause his friend the slightest pain 
 ■on the score of their change of names, the main source of 
 all his hunger-springs. However, his friend knew, and 
 sympathised with him sufficiently to consider that his 
 pale, faded face and his sunken eyes constituted a sufficient 
 almanac month-emblem of his frost-month or winter- 
 picture of the snowed-up tracts of his life-road. 
 
 But when Siebenkffis came to speak of the deep and 
 •secret wounds of his soul, it was all he could do to keep 
 back the drops of blood-water which pressed to his eyes ; 
 I mean the subject, of Lenette's hatred and love. But 
 •while he drew a ver3' indulgent picture of her little love 
 tor him, and her great love for Stiefel, he used much 
 brighter colours for ihe historical piece which he painted 
 of her admirable behaviour to the Venner, and of that 
 gentleman's wickedness in general. 
 
 " As soon as you have done," said Leibgeber, " jou must 
 allow yourself to be informed that women are not fallen 
 angols, but falunq ones. By all the heavens ! while we 
 stand patient, like sheep being shorn, they stick the shears 
 oftener into our ^kins than into our wool. I should think 
 of the fair sex if I wore to cross the bridge of St. Angelo 
 
CHAP. XII.J FLOWER, FEUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 365 
 
 at Rome, for there are twelve statues of angels there, 
 holding the implements of the Passion, each a different 
 one ; one has the nails, another the reed, another tha 
 dice, and similai'ly each woman has a peculiar torture- 
 instrument of her own to apply to us poor lambs. Whom, 
 think you, fur instance now, is the Palladium of yesterday, 
 your unknown beauty, going to tether to her bed-post 
 with the nose-ring of a wedding-ring ? But I must tell 
 you about her. She is altogether glorious : she is poetic ; 
 full of romantic, enthusiastic admiration for the British, 
 and for intellectual people in general (consequently for 
 ine), and lives with an aristocratic English lady, a sort 
 of companion to Lady Craven and the Margrave at Fan- 
 taisie yonder. She has nothing, and accepts nothing ; is 
 poor and proud, daring to rashness, and pure as the day ; 
 and she signs heiselt ' Nathalie Aquiliana.' Do you know 
 ■who's going to be her husband ? A horrible, burnt-out, 
 used-up wretch — a feeble, puny creature, whose egg-shell 
 was chipped a week or two oefore its time, and who now 
 goes cheeping about our toes like a chicken with the pip ; 
 a fellow who copies Heliogabalus (who put on a new ling 
 every day) in the matter of wedding-rings ; a hop-o'-my- 
 thumb whom I could sneeze over the JSorth Pole (and I 
 should like very much to do it), and whom I have the less, 
 need to give jou any description of, inasmuch as you hav& 
 just given me one of him yourself : when I tell j'ou his 
 name, j'ou will see that you know him pretty well. Thi& 
 magnificent creature is going to be married to the Venner 
 Eosa von Meyern ! " 
 
 Firmian fell, not from the clouds, but right into them. 
 To make a long tale short, this Nathalie is the Heimlicher's 
 niece, of whom Leibgeber wrote some account in our first 
 volume. " But, listen," continued Leibgeber, " I will let 
 myself be hewn and hacked into crumbs smaller than those 
 of Poland — into clippings not big enough to cover a 
 Hebrew vowel — if this affair comes to anything ; for I 
 am going to put a stop to it." 
 
 Since Leibgeber (as we know) was in the habit of talking 
 to the lady every day (his spotless soul and his bold mind 
 having unspeakable attractions for her), all he had to dc 
 in order to break the marriage off, was simply to repeat to 
 
36G JEAN PAUL rHIEUKICH IIICHTEE. [bOOK III. 
 
 her what Siebenkses had told him conceining her bride- 
 groom elect. It was his intimacy with her, and his re- 
 semblance to Siebenkses which had led to her mistaking 
 rirmian for him on the evening of his arrival. 
 
 The majority of my readers will urge against me and 
 Xeibgeber the same objection which Siebenkaes brought 
 forward — that Nathalie's love and marriage for money 
 were quite out of harmony with her character, and her 
 disregard for riches. But, in one woid, all she had ever 
 as yet seen of that gaudy flycatcher, Mr. Eos-a, was his 
 Esau's hand, that is to sa}', his writing, i. e. his Jacob's 
 voice ; he had only written her a few irreprehensible, 
 sentimental letters of assurance (pin-papers, stuck full of 
 Cupid's darts and stitching-needles), and so given guarantee 
 ■of the documentary nobility of his heart. . . . The Heim- 
 3icher, moreover, had written to his niece, saying, on St. 
 Pancrasius' day (May 12th, that is in four days' time), 
 the Venner would come and present himself, and if she 
 refused him, let her never call herself his niece again, 
 and starve in her native village for all he cared. 
 
 But, speaking as a man of honour, I i-eally have never 
 had above three of Eosa's letters in my hands for two or 
 three minutes, and in my pocket for about an hour ; and 
 they were really not so veiy bad — far more moral than 
 their author. 
 
 Just as Leibgeber said he would assume the office of 
 consistoiy, and divorce Nathalie from Eosa before their 
 marriage, she came driving up, with one or two lady friends, 
 and got out of the carriage; but instead of going with 
 them to where the company were assembling, she went 
 away alone, by a solitary side walk, to the so-called 
 Temple. In her haste ^she had not noticed her friend 
 Leibgeber sitting opposite the stables. I ought to explain 
 here that when the Bayreuthians go to the Hermitage they 
 have been in the habit, ever since the days of the Mar- 
 grave, of sitting in a little wood, all breezes and cool 
 shade, in front of the extensive farm-buildings and stables, 
 but having the loveliest of prospects just at their backs, 
 which they could easily substitute for the blank wall 
 upon which they feast their gaze, by merely getting up 
 and going a little way out of the wood on either side. 
 
CHAP. XII.] FLOWER, FKUIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 367 
 
 Leibgeber told Siebenkaes he could take him to her in a 
 moment, as she would be sure to sit down in the temple 
 (as she! usually did) to enjoy the enchanting view of the 
 city towers and the hills, as they lay in the light of 
 the evening sun beyond the shrubberies. He added that, 
 unfortunately, she cared too little about appearances ; and 
 would go to the summer-house all by herself, greatly to the 
 distress of the English ladj', who, after the manner of her 
 countrywomen, didn't like going anywhere alone, and 
 wouldn't trust herself to go near even a gentleman's 
 clothes cupboard without an Insurance Company and 
 Bible Society of women with her to protect her. He said 
 he had it on good authority that a British lady never per- 
 mitted the idea of a man to enter her head without at once 
 surrounding it with the number of ideas of women, neces- 
 sary to bridle and restrain him, should he begin behaving 
 (in the four chambers of her brain) with that amount of 
 freedom which he might employ if at home there. 
 
 They found Nathalie in the open temple, with some 
 papers in her hand. " I bring you our author of the 
 ' Selections from the Devil's Papers,' " said Leibgeber, 
 " which I see you are just reading ; will you allow me to 
 introduce him to you ? " After a passing blush at having 
 mistaken Siebenkses for Leibgeber, in Fantaisie, she said 
 to him, very kindly and pleasantly, " It would take very 
 little to make me mistake you for your friend again, Mr. 
 Siebenkses ; and you seem almost exactly alike in mind, 
 as well as in body. Your satire is often exactly like his ; 
 it is only your graver ' Appendices ' which I was just read- 
 ing, and which I like very much, that seem to me as if 
 they hadn't been written by him." 
 
 I have not at present time io make — (for Leibgeber's 
 unauthorized communication to one friend of the papers of 
 another) — excuses occupying long pages of print to readers 
 who may insist upon extreme delicacy in matters of this 
 description. Suffice it to say that Leibgeber took it for 
 granted that every one who liked Mm would join with him 
 in liking his friends, and that Siebenkas (and even Na- 
 thalie) would see nothing in his unhesitatingly communi- 
 cating these papers, but a mere passing on of a friendly 
 circular letter, pre-supposing, as he did, the existence 
 between them of a triple elective affinity. 
 
368 JEAN PAUL FKIEDKICH EICHTEE. [BOOK III 
 
 Nathalie scanned the pair — particularly Leibgeber, whose 
 big dog she was stroking — with a kindly and observant 
 luok of comparison, as if she were trying to find out dis- 
 similaritiHS between them ; for, in fact, Siebenkses seemed 
 to her to be scarcely as like his friend as she had thought. 
 He was taller and slighter, and younger in the face ; iDiit 
 this was because Leibgeber, whose shoulders and che^t 
 were more strongly built, bent his strange, earnest face 
 more forward when he talked, as if he were speaking into 
 the earth. He himself said he never Jmd looked really 
 young, not even at his baptism — as his baptismal certificate 
 would prove — and wasn't likely to grow much younger 
 now till he arrived at his second childhood. But when 
 Leibgeber straightened his back somewhat, and Siebenkaes 
 bent his a little, they looked very much like one another ; 
 however, this is more a hint fur the drawer-up of their 
 passports than unytbing else. 
 
 Let us felicitate the Kuhschnappel lawj-er on this oppor- 
 tunity of enjoying a few minutes' conversation with a lady 
 of position, and of such manj'-sided cultivation as even to 
 be capable of appreciating satires. All he wished was that 
 a phcBnix of this sort — such as, hitherto, he had only seen 
 a pinch or so of the ashes of in actual life, or a phoenix- 
 feather or two preserved in a book — might not take wing 
 and disappear instanter ; but that he might be lucky enough 
 to listen to a long talk between her and Leibgeber, as well 
 as help to spin it out himself. But suddenly her Bayreuth 
 friends came hurrying up to say that the fountains were 
 just going to play, and there wasn't a moment to be lost. 
 The whole partj% therefore, went towards the waterworks, 
 Siebenkaes' whole care being to keep as close as he could to 
 the noblest of the spectatresses. 
 
 They stood by the basin, and looked at the beautiful 
 water artifices, which, no doubt, have long since played 
 before the reader, either on the spot, or in the pages of the 
 various writers of travels, who have expressed themselves 
 on the subject of them at sufficient length, and in adequate 
 terms of laudation. All kinds of mythologic demigod-ical 
 demibeasts spouted forth streams ; and from out this world, 
 peopled with water-gods, there spouted a crystal forest, 
 whose descending branches, liana-like, took root again in 
 
JHAP. XII.J FLOWEK, FRUlTj AND THORN PIECES. 369 
 
 the earth. They enjoyed fur a long while the sight of this 
 talkative, intercommingling water- world. At length the 
 fluttering, ever-growing water-forms sank down and died ; 
 ithe transparent lilj'-stems grew shorter and shorter, as they 
 watched them. "Why is it, I wonder? "said Nathalie 
 to Siebenkses, "that a waterfall lifts up one's heart; but 
 this dying-down of these springing jets, tljis visible sinking 
 .away of these grand streaming beams of water, always 
 makes me sad and anxious ? We never see any such falling 
 in of high things in real life." 
 
 Siebenkses was thinking out the apt and comprehensive 
 reply to this true and just expression of Nathalie's feeling, 
 •when all at once she jumped into the water to rescue, with 
 as little delay as possible, a child who had fallen in, a few 
 .steps away from her; for the water wus there about waist- 
 deep. Before the men who were present had so much as 
 JJiougM about it, she had done it ; and she was right, fur in 
 this case rapidity without reflection was the good and true 
 thing. She lifted the child out, and gave it to the women ; 
 but SiebenkiBS and Leibgeber took her hands, and lightly 
 raised the fiery creature (all blushes, of body and of soul) 
 on to the bank. " What does it matter?" she said, with 
 a smile, to the alarmed Siebenkses, " I shall be none the 
 worse," and hurried away with her friends (who were all 
 shocked into speechlessness), having first begged Leib- 
 geber to come next evening, with his friend, to Fantaisie. 
 " That of course I shall do," he said ; ""but first of all, I am 
 coming to see you by myself early in the morning." 
 
 The crying need of onr two friends was nbw to be alone 
 with one another. Leibgeber, under the new excitement, 
 could scarce wait to attain the birch wood, where he meant 
 to continue their previous conversation regarding Sie- 
 benkses' domestic and conjugal affairs. With respect to 
 Nathalie, he briefly pointed out to his astonished friend 
 that what so much delighted him in her was just the un- 
 hesitating, downright straightforwardness which marked 
 all her thoughts and actions, and her manly cheerfulness, 
 athwart which the world, and poverty, and chances and 
 accidents of every kind merely passed floating away, like 
 light, shining summer clouds, never darkening her day. 
 "Now as regards you and your Lenette/' te went on 
 
 11. 2 b 
 
370 JEAN PAurii FEIEDKICH EICHTEE. [BOOK III. 
 
 (when they reached the solitude of the little wood), as 
 quietly as if he had been talking continuously up to that 
 instant, " if I weie in your place, I should take an alter- 
 ative, and get rid of the hard gall-stone of matrimony for 
 good and all. You will never really be able to bear the 
 pain of the bonds of wedlock, though you scrape and scratch 
 away at them for years to come with all your finest hair- 
 saws and bone-saws. The Divorce Court will give one 
 grand cut and tear — and there you are, free of one another 
 for ever and ever." 
 
 The idea of a divorce terrified Siebenkses, although he 
 saw very clearly that it was the only possible breaking- 
 point for the storm-clouds of his life. He was far from 
 grudging to Lenette either her freedom, or the marriage 
 with Stiefel, which would infallibly result ; but he felt 
 quite sure that, however much she might wish for it, she 
 never would consent to an enforced separation, on account 
 of her strong regard for appearances, — also that on their 
 road to this parting both she and he would have to pass 
 many a bitter hour of heart-strain and nerve-fever, — and 
 that they could hardly afford to pay for a betrothal, much 
 less for a divorce. 
 
 It was likewise an accessory circumstance, that it was 
 more than he could bear to think of the sight of the 
 poor innocent soul, who had shivered at his side through 
 so many a cold storm of life, going away for ever from his 
 home, and from his arms — ay, and with that handkerchief in 
 her hand, too ! 
 
 All these considerations, with many stronger, and many 
 weaker, he laid before his friend, finishing up with this 
 final one : '' I assure you, moreover, that if she went away 
 fiom me, bag and baggage, and left me by myself in that 
 empty room (as in a grave), and in all the blank, cleared- 
 out spaces, where, when all's said and done, we have sat 
 together through sn many kindly happj^ hours, and seen 
 the flowers growing green about us— she never could pass 
 l)y niy window (while she bore my name, at all events, 
 though no longer mine), but something within me would bid 
 nie throw myself down, and dash myself in pieces at her feet. 
 Would it not be ten times better," he continued in an 
 altered lone, " to wait till I fall down upstairs in the room 
 
CHAP. XII.J FLOWEE, FEUIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 371 
 
 (or -wliat does my giddiness mean), and be taken out of 
 tlie window, and out of the world, in a better fashion? 
 Friend Death would tate his long erasing knife, and 
 scrape my name (and other blots into the bargain) out of 
 her marriage-lines." 
 
 Contrary to all expectation, this seemed to make Leib- 
 geber merrier and livelier than ever. " Do so ! " he said ; 
 "it's tho very thing! Die by all means! The funeral | 
 expenses can't possibly come to anything approaching the 
 costs of the other kind of separation ; and besides, you belong 
 to the Burial Society." Siebonkees stared at him in asto- 
 nishment. 
 
 He went on in a tone of the utmost indifference : " Only I 
 must tell you it will do neither of us much good, if you 
 dawdle a long time at your saddling and bridling, and take a 
 year or two about your dying. I should think it much more 
 to the purpose were you to be off to Kuhschnappel as soon 
 as ever you can, take to your sick-bed and death-bed 
 directly you get there ; and die as quickly as ever you can 
 manage it. And I'll give you my reasons. For one thing 
 your Lenette's year of mourning would be out just before 
 Advent, so that she would require no dispensation, if she 
 wanted to marry Peltzstiefel before Christmas. It would 
 suit me very well, too, for I could then disappear in the 
 crowd, and I shouldn't see you again for some considerable 
 time to come. Besides, it is anything but a matter of 
 indifference to yourself, for of course the sooner you're 
 appointed Inspector the better." 
 
 " This is the very first of your jokes, dear old Henry,'' 
 said Siebenkaes, " of which I don't understand one single 
 •word." 
 
 Leibgeber, with a disturbed countenance, whereon a 
 whole history of the world was legible, and which indi- 
 cated, as well as gave rise to, the greatest possible anti- 
 cipation of something of immense importance to come, 
 pulled a letter from his pocket and handed it to Siebenkaes 
 in silence. It was a letter of appointment by the Count / 
 von Vaduz, constituting Leibgeber Inspector of the Chief I 
 Bailiwick of Vaduz. He next handed him a letter in 
 the count's handwriting. While Firmian was reading the 
 letter, Leibgeber brought out his pocket-diary, and calmly 
 
 2b2 
 
372 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH EICHTEll. [bOOK III. 
 
 muttered to himself, " From the quarter-day after Whit- 
 sunday, it says, does it not? to the time when I am to 
 enter upon my office ; that is to say, from to-day — St. 
 Stanislaus' Day. Ah I only think of that — how odd it 
 seems — from St. Staniblaus' day one, two, three, four — 
 f<m.r weeks and a half." 
 
 Firmian, much pleased, was handing him back the letter, 
 but he wouldn't take it, but piei-sed it back to him, saj-ing, 
 " I read it long ago, long before you did. Put it in your 
 pocket." 
 
 And here Heinrich, in a burst of solemn, impassioned, 
 humoristic enthusiasm, knelt down in the middle of a 
 long narrow path, which looked between the trees of the 
 thick grove like some subterranean passage (the weather- 
 cock of the distant steeple ended off ihe perspective of it 
 as if with a turnstile) — knelt down facing the west, and 
 gazed through the long green hollow way upon the even- 
 ing sun, sinking earthward like some brilliant meteor, its 
 broad beams darting down upon the long gieen path, like 
 forest- water gilt by the spring; he gazed fixedly at it, and 
 his eyes all bliaded (and lighted up) by its sheen, he began 
 to speak as follows : — 
 
 " If there be a good spirit near me, or a guardian angel 
 of mine or of his, or if <% spirit surviveth still thine ashes, 
 oh ! my old, Tdnd,, loving father, so deep in thy grave, then 
 draw near, oh ! thou dim and ancient shade, and grant to 
 thy stupid, silly son (still limping about here in this flut- 
 tering, ragged shirt of a body) this one, one favour, the 
 first and the last, and enter into Firmian 's heart, and 
 (while giving it a good sound shaking) address it as fol- 
 ' lows : ' Die, Firmian, for my son's sake, though it be but 
 in jest and in appearance only. Throw away your own 
 name, go in his (which was yours before) to Vaduz as 
 Inspector, and give yourself out to be him. My poor son 
 here (like that Jcmjou de Normandie whereon he is sticking, 
 which circles round the sun upon strings of sunbeams) 
 would fain go whirling about ujpon said Joujou himself for 
 a little while longer. Before all you parrots the ring of 
 eternity is still hanging, and you can hip on to it and 
 rock upon it if you will. But he does not see the ring ; 
 don't deprive the poor Poll-parrot of the pleasure of hop- 
 
CHAP. XII.] FLOWEK, FKUIT, AND THOKN PIECES. 373 
 
 ping about on the perch of this earth till, when he has wound 
 his life's thread some sixty times about its reels, the reel 
 gives a ring and a snap, the thread breaks, and all his fun 
 is over and done ! ' Oh ! kind spirit of my father, stir up 
 my friend's heart this daj% and guide his tongue, that it 
 may not say ' No,' when I ask him, ' Will you do all this.' " 
 Blinded by the evening sun, he ielt for Firmian's hand, 
 crying, " Where's your hand, dear friend ? and do not 
 say 'No.'" 
 
 But Firmian, quite carried away by emotion (for this 
 sudden outburst of Leibgeber's long pent-up excitement 
 was most contagious), speechless, and all in tears, ]ike 
 an evening shade, knelt down before his friend and fell on 
 his breast, and said in a low tone (for he could do no 
 otherwise), " 1 am ready to die for you a thousand deaths, 
 any death j'ou please ; only say what death I can die for 
 you. All I ask is, tell me plainly what you would have 
 me do. I swear to you beforehand that I will do what- 
 ever you tell me ; I swear it by your dear father's soul. I 
 ■will gladly give my life for you, and j-ou know I have 
 nothing but that to give." Heinrich said, in a most 
 unusually subdued voice. Let's get away in among the 
 Bayreuthians. I certainly have an attack of hydrothorax 
 this afternoon, or else a hot mineral spring inside mj- 
 waistcoat; 'pon my word, any ordinary heart ought to 
 have a swimming-belt on, or a scaphander, in a vapour-bath 
 of this kind." But up at the table under the trees, among 
 the people come to keep the Whitsuntide fair, the great 
 holiday and festival of spring — up there among people all 
 happy and enjoying themselves, emotion was easier to 
 conquer. Here Heinrich quickly unrolled the ground- / 
 plans and elevations of his castle in the air, the building 
 grants of his Tower of Babel. To the Count von Vaduz 
 (whose ears and heart opened and expanded to him hun- 
 grily) he had given his sacred word of honour that he 
 would return to him as Inspector. But his idea was that 
 his dear coadjutor and substitute, cum spe succedendi, Fir- 
 mian, should take his place and personate him : Firmian, 
 who was such a tautology of him in mind and body, that 
 both the count, and the theory of distinctive difierences 
 itself, would have been puzzled to tell one of them from 
 
374 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH lilCIITEE. [BOOK IH. 
 
 i,he other. Even in the worst of years the Inspectorship 
 brought in an income of 1200 thalers ; that is to say, the 
 exact amount of Firmian's whole inheritance (now sealed 
 up with the law's leaden signet); so that when Siebenkses 
 I re-assumed his old name of Leibgeber, he would regain 
 just what he had lost by changing it. " For," said Leib- 
 geber, " now that 1 have read your ' Devil's Papers,' I can't 
 endure or swallow the notion of your lying fallow any 
 longer in Kuhschnappel ; sitting there in solitude, like a 
 pelican (or an unicorn, or an unknown hermit) in the 
 wilderness. Now, will it take you as long to think about 
 the matter as it takes the Chief Clerk of the Chancellery 
 there to shake the ashes out of his pipe, when I tell you 
 that, though you are a fellow who could fill any and every 
 ofSce in the world splendidly, there's only one calling I 
 can follow — that of a Grazioso ; for though I know more 
 than most people, I can't put my knowledge to any prac- 
 tical use except satirising, and my language is a parti- 
 coloured Lingua Franca, my head a Proteus, and I myself 
 a delightful compilation of the devil and his grandmother. 
 Besides, if I could do anything else, I wouldn't. What, am I, 
 in the very flower of my days, to stamp and neigh, like a 
 state draught-horse, a government prisoner in the donjon- 
 keep, the shoeing travis of some miserable office counting- 
 house, with nothing to look at but my saddle and bridle 
 hanging on the stable-wall, and the loveliest Parnassuses 
 and Tempo valleys wooing the free feet of the sons of the 
 Muses just outside ! In the veiy years when my milk of 
 life is inclined to throw out a little cream— (and the years 
 when » fellow sours and turns to curds and whey come on 
 so fast) — shall I go and throw the rennet of an appoint- 
 ment into my morning milk ? Now, as for you, you have a 
 different song to sing altogether ; you are half a man of 
 ofiSce already, and you are married into the bargain. Ah ! 
 it will beat all ' Bremish Contributions to the Pleasures of 
 Wit and Understanding ; ' it will be a business far beyond 
 every existing comic opera, and every funny novel that 
 ever was written, when I go back to Kuhschnappel with 
 you, and you make your will and depart this life. And 
 then when, after we have paid you the last honours, you 
 jump up again (in a good deal of a hurry) and take 
 
CEAP. XII.] FLOWEK, FEUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 375 
 
 yoursRlf off to receive greater honoTirs still ; not to enter 
 into the bliss of the depHited so inuoh as to become a 
 hond fide live Inspector ; not to appear before a tribunal, 
 but to take your seat upon one yourself. Joke upon joke 
 wherever we turn ! I can't quire see all the consequences 
 ■of it j'et, or only in a very half-and-half .''ort of way; the 
 burial club will have to pay your afflicted widow (you can 
 pay them back again when you're in cash). Death will 
 lop off your ring-finger, all swollen with the betrothal 
 ling. Your widow will be able to mijrry anybody she 
 pleases (yourself if she likes), and so will you." 
 
 Here, all of a sudden, Leibgeber slapped his leg forty 
 times running, and cried, "Ey! E}'! Ey ! Ey! Ey! 1 
 can hardly wait till you're fairly dead and off the hooks ; 
 only think of this, your death may make two women 
 widows instead of one. I will persuade Kathalie to insure 
 herself a pension of 200 dollars a year, payable on your , 
 death, in the Eoyal Prussian Provident Widows' Fund * J 
 ^you can pay them it back again as soon as vou get your 
 money). When your widow that is to be gives the Vennor 
 thesack, you must privately provide her with a sack of bread- 
 fiuit. And supposing you really could never pay them back, 
 and were to die in sober earnest, I should take care that 
 their treasuiy was none the worse for it as soon as I was in 
 funds again." For Leibgeber lived in a constant myste- 
 lious state of intermittent fever between riches and poverty 
 ((which he has nevtr explained), or, to use his own ex- 
 pression, between the inspiration and expiration of that 
 breath of life (Aura Vitalis) called money. Any other but 
 this man, who played his game of life with such a dashing 
 boldness, whose blazing fire for the true, the right, and the 
 unselfish, had gleamed upon the advocate for so many a 
 year as if from a lighthouse-tower, would have startled 
 SiebenksBS, particularlj- in his capacity of lawyer, or have 
 made him very angry, instead of over-persuading him. 
 P)ut Leibgeber thordughly saturated him, nay, burnt him 
 through and through with the etherial playfulness of his 
 ihumour, and hurried him resistlessly on to the commissicin 
 
 "• It is explained in a long note in the original, that slie c<>ul(] ilc 
 this even brfore being mairiuJ. 
 
376 JEAN PAUL FEIEDKICH EICHTEE. [bOOK III. 
 
 of a mimic deception, which had no aim of selfish tintruth- 
 fulness or deceit. 
 
 Firmian, however, notwithstanding his intoxication of 
 mind, retained sufficient control over himself to think, at 
 least, of the risk which "Leibgeher would run in this trans- 
 action. " Suppose," said he, '' anyhody should come across 
 / my dear real Heinrich (whose name I Kteal) in the vicinity 
 of me, a coiner of false names, what then ? " 
 
 " Nobody ever will," said Heinrich, " for as soon as you 
 have re-assumed your own canonical name of Leibgeber, 
 and given up ' Firmian Stanislaus,' which was conferred 
 upon me at such a stormy baptismal font (and Heaven 
 grant you may do so ! ), I shall, under names altogether 
 unheard of — (perhaps, indeed, that I may have the gra- 
 tification of being able to keep 365 name-days in the 
 J coui'se of the year, I shall take every name in the calendar, 
 one after the other) — I shall throw myself off the dry 
 land (under these names or some of them) into the great 
 ocean, and propel myself with my dorsal, ventral, ami 
 caudal fins (and any others I may have besides), through 
 the waves and the billows of life towards the thick, muddy 
 / sea of death ; so that 'twill probably be many a day before 
 we meet again." 
 
 / He gazed fixedly towards the sun, then sinking in glory 
 'beyond Baj-reuth ; his motionless eyes shone with a moister 
 sheen, and he continued, more slowly, thus : " Firmian, 
 the Almanac says this is St. Stanislaus' Day; it is your 
 name-day, and mine, and the death-day of that wandering, 
 migrate I y name, becau.se you will have to give it up after 
 your mock death. I, poor devil as I am, would fain be 
 serious to-day — for the first time this many a Ling year. 
 Go you home, alone, through the village of Johannes; I 
 shall go by the alley ; we'll meet again at the inn. By 
 Heaven ! everything is so beautiful here, and so rose- 
 coloured, that one would think the Hermitage was a piece 
 of the sun. Don't be very long, though I " 
 
 But a sharp pang of pain shot, with swelling folds, athwart 
 Heinrich's face, and he averted that image of sorrow and his 
 blinded eyes — (which were full of radiance, and of water, too) 
 — and marched rapidly off past the spectatoi s, looking as if at 
 something very far away with a face of apparent attention. 
 
CHAP. XII.] FLOWKB, FKUIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 377 
 
 Firmian, alone, with tearful eyes, fronted the gentle sun- 
 light dissolving into varied tints over the face of the green- 
 hued world. Close beneath the sun-fire the deep gold-mine 
 of an evening cloud was falling in drops upon the hill-top» 
 which lay under it; the wandering shifting gold of the 
 evening sky lay, all transparently, upon the yellow-green 
 huds and red and white hill-tops, whilst a great, grand, 
 immeasurable smoke, as if of an altar, cast a strange, magic 
 reflection — all shifting, distant, transhiceiit hues — athwart 
 the hills. The hills and the happy earth, reflecting the 
 sun as it sank, seemed to be receiving him in their arms, 
 and taking him into their embrace. But at tho moment 
 when the sun dipped wholly beneath the earth, there came 
 (as it were) the angel of a higher light into this gleaming 
 world (which seemed, to Firmian's teftiful eyes, to tremble 
 like bome flickering fiery meteor of the air) ; this angel 
 advanced, flashing like day, into the midst of the night- 
 torch-dance of the living, w^ho, at his coming, turned pale, 
 and halted still. But, as Fii-mian dried his eyes, the sun 
 set, the earth grew stiller and paler yet, and night, dewj- 
 and wintry, came forth fiom the woods. 
 
 But that melted heart of his longed for its fellows, and 
 for all whom it knew and loved ; it throbbed insatiate in 
 this lonely prison-cell, our life : it yearned to love all 
 humanity. Ah! the soul which has had to give up much, 
 or has lost much, is too, too wretched on such an evening 
 as this. 
 
 In a blissful, tranced reverie, Firmian went his way 
 through the blossomy fragrance, among the American 
 flowers which open to the sky of our night, through the 
 closed meadows (chambers of sleep), and under dew-drop- 
 ping flowers. The moon stood on the pinnacle of the 
 heavenly temple in the midday effulgence which the sun 
 cast up to her from the deeps beneath the earth and her 
 evening-blushes. As Fiimian passed through the leaf- 
 hidden village of Johannes (where the houe^eM were all 
 scattered about in a great orchard), the evening bells from 
 the distant hamlets were lulling the slumbering spring to 
 sleep with cradle-S)ngs. ^olian harps, breathed on by 
 zephyrs, seemed to be sending forth their tones from out 
 the evening-red, their melodies flowed softly on into the 
 
378 JEAN PAUL FKIEDEICH lUCHTEK. [BOOK III. 
 
 wide realm of sleep, and there took the fovm of dreams. 
 Firmian's heart, moved to its very centre, yearned for love — 
 and for very longing he felt impelled to press his flowers 
 into the white hands of a prettj' child in Johannes — ^just 
 that he might touch a humai) hand. 
 
 Go, dear Firmian, with that softened heart of yours, to 
 your deeply-moved friend, whose inner being, too, stretches 
 its arms out towards its likeness; for, to-day, you are no- 
 where so happy as together. 'When Firmian entered their 
 common chamber (which was dark save for the glow of the 
 red twilight in the west), Heinrioh turned to meet him; 
 they fell silently into each other's arms and forgot all the 
 tears which burned within them, even those of joy. Their 
 embrace ended, but their silence did not. Heinrich threw 
 himself on his bed, in his clothes, and covered himself up. 
 Fiimian sank upon the other bed and wept there, with 
 closed lids. After an hour or two of excited fancy, heated 
 by visions and by pangs of pain, a soft light fell upon his 
 burning eyelids ; he opened .them, and there hung the pale, 
 giowiijg moon over against his window. He rose up; 
 but when he saw his Iriend standing pale and motionless, 
 like a shadow cast by the moon upon the wall — and sud- 
 denly there came up from a neighbouiing garden (like a 
 nightingale's voice awaking), Eust's melody to the words — 
 
 " 'Tis not for this earthly land 
 Tli .t friendship weaves her holy band " — 
 
 lie fell back under the load of bitter memoiy ; an emotion, 
 too great to bear, a spasm, closed his sad eyes, and he said, 
 Ln hollow accents, 
 
 " Heinrich ! oh believe iu immortality. How can we 
 love, if we perish ! " 
 
 " Peace, peace ! " said Heinrich. " To-day I am keeping 
 my name-day, and that is enough ; for man, certainly, hag 
 sio birth-day, and, consequently, no death-day either." 
 
CHAP. XIII.J FLOWEK, FKUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 379 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 A CLOCK OF HUMAN BEINGS — A COLD SHOULDEtl — THE VENKER. 
 
 When, in my last chapter, I spoke of ladies who were 
 given to bvevity of sleep, and awoke six hours before their 
 sisters at the Antipodes, I think I did well not to cram 
 into my twelfth chapter (among the numerous events so 
 tightly packed there) a model of a certain clock, composed 
 of men and women, which I invented a considerable Time 
 ago, but to reserve it for this thirteenth chapter, wliero I 
 shall now introduce it, and set it up. I believe this 
 humanity clock of mine was suggested to me by Linnaeus' 
 flower clock at Upsal, whose wheels were the earth and 
 the sun, and the figures on its dial were flowers, whereof 
 one always awoke and opened later than another. I was 
 living at the time in Scheerau, in the middle of the market- 
 place, and had two rooms. From the front room I was 
 able to see all the market-place and the palace buildings, 
 while my back room looked into the Botanical Gardens. 
 Whoever maybe living in these looms now is in possession 
 of a delightful, ready-tuned harmony between the flower 
 clock in the garden and the mankind clock in the market- 
 place. 
 
 At 3 A.M. the yellow meadow goatsbeard awakes — also 
 brides — and then, too, the stable-boj' begins rattling and 
 feeding the horses under the lodger. At 4 (on Sundays) 
 awake the little hawksweed, and ladies who are going to 
 the Holy Communion {chiming clocks these may be called) 
 and the bakers. At 6, kitchen-maids and dairy-maids 
 awake, and buttercups ; at 6, sowthistles and cooks. By 7, 
 a good many of the wardrobe women of the palace, and the 
 salad in the Botanical Gardens, are awake, as well as several 
 tradeswomen. At 8, all their daughters and the little 
 yellow mouse-ear — all the colleges and the leaves of flowers, 
 piecrust, and law-papers, are open. At 9, the female aris- 
 tocracy begin to stir, and the marjgolds, to say nothing of 
 a number of young ladies from the country, in town on a 
 visit, glance out of their windows. At 10 and 11, the 
 Court ladies, the whole staff of lords of the bedchamber, 
 
380 JEAN PAUL PEIEDEICH EICHTEE. [bOOK III. 
 
 the green colewort and pippau of the Alps, and the Prin- 
 cesses' reader, arouse themselves from their morning slum- 
 ber ; and (so hrighlly is the morning sun breaking in 
 through the many-tinted silken curtains) the whole Court 
 curtails a morsel or so of its sleep. At 12, the frince ; 
 at 1, his consort, and the carnation in her flower-vase — 
 have their eyes open. What gets up at later hours in the 
 afternoon — about 4 o'clock, say — is nothing but the red 
 hawksweed and the night watchman (a cuckoo clock), and 
 these two are but evening dials, or moon clocks. From the 
 hot eyes of the poor devil who opens them only at 5 (voth 
 the jilup), we turn our own away in sorrow; he is a sick 
 man, who has taken some of it (the jalap), and only passes 
 from fever-fancies of being griped with hot pincers to 
 genuine, waking spasms. 
 
 I could never tell when it was 2 o'clock, because I, and 
 a thousand other stout gentlemen and the yellow mouse- 
 ear, were alwaj's asleep at that hour ; though I awoke, with 
 the regularity of an accurate repeater, at 3 in the afternoon 
 and at 3 in the morning. 
 
 Thus may we human creatures serve as flower clocks to 
 higher intelligences when our petals close upon our last 
 bed, or as sand-glasses when our sands of life are run so 
 far out that they are turned over into the other world. 
 On such occasions, when seventy of man's years have ended 
 and passed away, thes-e higher intelligences may say, 
 " Another hour already ! Gruod God ! how lime flies ! " 
 
 And this digression reminds me that it really does fly ! 
 Firmian and Heinrich lived on in great cheerfulness of 
 spirit towards the jocund morning which was so close at 
 hand, though the former could by no means take root upt)n 
 any chair or room-floor all the forenoon ; for in his mind's 
 eye, the curtain kept alwaj-s rising upon the opera huffa 
 e seria of his mock death, and displaying its burlesque 
 situations. And at present (as was always the case, in- 
 deed) the presence and example of Leibgeber heightened 
 his sense of humour and power of expressing the same. 
 Leibgeber, who had gone through all the stage-business 
 and scene-shifting of the sham death in an exhaustive 
 manner weeks ago (in fancy), was thinking little about it 
 no\v. The pioblera occupying him at present was how to 
 
CHAP. XIII.] FLOWER, FKUIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 381 
 
 extract the wick (lliat is to say, the bride) out cf Eosa's 
 ■wedding-torch, all painted and moulded as it was. Hein- 
 rich was at all times forcible, free, and bold, furious and 
 implacable as regards anything unjust ; and his righteous 
 indignation often had much the appearance of vengeance, 
 as here in Eosa's case, and in that of Blaise. Firmian was 
 more kindly; he spared and pardoned, often, indeed, ai 
 the (apparent) expense of honour. He could never have 
 plucked Nathalie's epistolary lover out of her bleeding heart 
 with Leibgeber's forceps and knife. His friend, at leaving 
 for Fantaisie that day, had to promise the gentlest of 
 behaviour, and, for a time, silence on the subject of the 
 Eoyal Prussian Widows' Fund. It would, of course, have 
 made a terrific, bleeding wound in Nathalie's feeling of 
 rectitude had the most distant hint been uttered of such a 
 matter as metallic compensation for a spiritual loss such 
 as that involved in her separation on moral grounds from 
 the immoral Venner. She deserved to conquer (and was 
 well able to do so), with the prospect of her victorj-- 
 ;educing her to poverty. 
 
 Heinrich did not come back till it was somewhat late, 
 .md his face was a little troubled, though it was a happy 
 tiice too. Eosa was discarded, and Nathalie pained. Ihe 
 English lady was at Anspach with Lady Craven, eating 
 her butter — (for she made butter as well as books). When 
 he had read out to Nathalie all that was written on Eosa's 
 black board and sin-register (which he did gravely, but 
 perhaps louder than was necessary, and with sciupulous 
 truth), she rose up with that grand grace which is a cha- 
 racteristic of enthusiasm of self-sacrifice : " If you are your- 
 iself deceived in this as little as you are capable of deceiving, 
 and if I may believe your friend as I do you, I give you 
 my sacred word that I will not allow myself to be per- 
 suaded, or constrained, to anything. But the subject of 
 this conversation will be here himself in a few days, and 
 I owe it to him as well as to my own honour, to hear bim, 
 as I have given my letters into his hands. Oh ! it is 
 hard to have to speak so coldly ! " As the moments passed, 
 the rose red of her cheek paled to rose-white. She leant 
 it on her hand, and as her eyes grew fuller, and tears 
 dropped at last, she said, strongly and firmly, " Be in 
 
382 JEAN PA0L FBIEDEICH EICHTEK. [BOOK III. 
 
 no anxiety, I shall keep my word ; and then, cost what 
 it may, I will tear myself from my friend, and go back to 
 my poor people in Schraplau. I haYe lived quite long 
 enough in the great world, though not too long." 
 
 Heinrich's unusual seriousness had overpowered her. 
 Her confidence in his truth was immovable, and that 
 (strange reason!) just because he had never seemed to 
 fall in love with her, or to pass beyond the condition of 
 friendship, and so did not measure her affection by his 
 own. Perhaps she would have been angry with her 
 bridegroom's married attorney (i.e. Firmian), had he not 
 had three or four of the best possible excuses ; to wit, his 
 general mental resemblance to Leibgeber, and his phy- 
 siognomical resemblance to him (which his paleness puri- 
 fied and refined at this juncture). 
 
 Her yesterday's request to Leibgeber to bring Siebenkaes 
 with him in the evening was now repeated (to the former's 
 joy), though her heart was aching in every comer. But 
 let none take umbrage at her half-mourning for the 
 Venner (now setting and near the horizon), or her eiTO- 
 neous estimate of him ; for we all know that women 
 (Heaven bless them!) often think sentiment and integrity, 
 letters and actions, tears and honest warm blood, to be 
 equivalent one to another. 
 
 In the afternoon Leibgeber took Siebenkres to her as a 
 sort of syllogistic figure in support of his argument, or 
 set of rationes decidendi (for the Venner was a collection of 
 rationes dvhitandi). Aquiliana received Siebenkaes with a 
 blush, which came and went in an instant ; and then with 
 the least dash of hauteur (result of modesty !), yet with all 
 the kindness and good-will which she owed to his interest 
 in her future. She lived in the English lady's rooms. 
 The flowery valley lay without, like a world before its 
 sun. One advantage connected with a rich pleasure- 
 garden of this sort is that a stranger advocate finds that 
 he can attach the floating spider-threads of his talk to 
 the branches of it, until they have been woven into the 
 finished art-work of a glittering web, which can float in 
 the free air. Firmian could never emulate these clever 
 men of the world, who only need a listener to be able to 
 begin spinning a conversation ; who, like the tree-frogs, 
 
CHAP. XIII.J KLOWER, FRUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 385 
 
 can cling firmly to anything tliey cliance to hop on to, 
 however smooth and polished it may be; yea, who can 
 even keep afloat in a space devoid of air, and all objects 
 whatever (which a tree-frog cannot). A man of Siebenkaes' 
 free and independent soul cannot, however, long remain 
 embarrassed by his nnfamiliarity with his surroundings ; 
 he must speedily recover his freedom by virtue of his 
 innate superiority to cTiance, external circumstances ; and 
 his unassumed and unassuming simpleness soon amply 
 compensates for his lack of the great world's artificial and 
 assuming simplicity. 
 
 Yesterday he had seen this Nathalie in the happy 
 exercise and enjoyment of all her powers, and of nature 
 and friendship, smiling and enchanting, and crowning the 
 delightful evening with an act of brave self-devotion. 
 Alas! how little remained to-day of all these joj'S, so 
 tender and so bright. In no hour is a lovely face loveliei' 
 than at that immediately succeeding the bitter one, when 
 tears for the loss of a heart have passed over it; for the 
 sight of the loveliness in its sorrow, during that hour itself, 
 would be too sad to bear. For this beautiful creature, 
 who hid the sacrificial knife deep m her heart, where it 
 had been plunged, and gladly let it smart there, that but 
 the wound's bleeding might be delayed, Siebenkres would 
 gladly have died — in a way moi-e serious than had been 
 intended — could it have been of any service to her. Is it 
 a thing so strange that the bond between them grew closer 
 and stronger as the sand run down in the hourglass, when 
 we consider that, swayed by an unwonted three-sided 
 seriousness (for even Leibgeber was overtaken by this 
 feeling), their hearts, at sight of the gala-beauty of the 
 spring, were filled with tender, longing wishes? — that 
 Siebenkaes, with his pale face, worn, and stamped with all 
 the traces and marks and signs of recent, bygone, trouble 
 and pain, shone, this day, with a soft and pleasing sheen, 
 as of evening sunlight, on her sight, all weakened by her 
 tears? — that she thought with pleasure on his (rather 
 singular) merit of having, at all events, embittered some 
 of her faithless suitor's infidelities — and that every note 
 he touched was in the minor mode of his tender nature, 
 because he was seeking to atone for, and cast into shade. 
 
3S4: JEAN PAUL FKIEDEICH EICHTER. ^BOOK IH, 
 
 the circumstance that it had fallen to his lot to lay -waste 
 at one fell stroke so many of this innocent, unknown 
 <!reature's hopes and joys- -that even his greater share of 
 mtfdest, respectful reserve, became him, and set him off by 
 ■contrast with his counterpart, the bolder and more out- 
 spoken Heinrich? With all these charms of accidental 
 ■circumstance (which win the female world far sooner than 
 charms of a bodily kind), Firmian was endowed in Nathalie's 
 eyes. In Ms eyes she had attractions greater still, and 
 altogether new to him : her cultivation and acquirements ; 
 her manly enthu^iasm, her delicate refinement; her (most 
 flattering) way of treating Mm — (none of her sex had ever 
 before glorified him with anything like it, and this par- 
 ticular species of charm plunges many a man who is un- 
 used to female companionship, not only into rapture, but 
 into matrimony), — and (two crowning delights) the facts 
 that the whole affair was fortuitous and out of the common, 
 and that Lenette was the exact antipodes of her in each 
 and every respect. 
 
 Alas ! poor starved, hungering Firmian. There are 
 always a gallows, and a notice-board marked " No tho- 
 roughfare," on the banks of the streamlet of your life, even 
 now that it has become a pearl-bearing brook. Your 
 marriage ring must have pinched you a good deal, and 
 felt very tight in a w^arm temperature like this, as, in- 
 deed all rings feel tight in a vs^arm bath, and loose in a 
 cold one. 
 
 But either some naiad of a diabolical turn of mind, or 
 Rome ocean god who loved a jest, took always the greatest 
 ■delight in perturbing and disturbing the sea of Firmian's 
 life, and stirring up the sand at the bottom of it just when 
 its waters were sparkling and glowing enchantingly with, 
 phosphorescent sea creatures, or some electric matter or 
 other, and his ship leaving a long shining wake behind 
 her in it. For just as the glory and the beauty of the 
 garden outside were growing moment by moment, and 
 embarrassment vanishing away with equal rapidity, the 
 painful memory of the late bereavement fading out of 
 remembrance; just when the pianoforte (or, say, the 
 pianissimo fortissimo), and the songs, duets, and trios 
 were being opened and got ready: in fine, just as the 
 
CHAP. XIII.] FLOWEK, FEUIT, AND THOKN TIECES. 385 
 
 honey-cells oftlieir orangery of happiness, their permitted 
 flesh-pots of Egypt, and deep communion cup of love were 
 all ready to their lips, who came with a pop into, the 
 room hut a certain hluebottle fly on two legs, who had 
 often flown into Firmian's cup of joy before now. 
 
 The Tenner, :Eosa von Meyern, made his appearance on 
 , the scene, lovelily attired in saffron sUk, to pay his bride 
 his privileged ambassadorial visit. 
 
 ' Never in all his career did this young gentleman arrive 
 .otherwise than too soon or too iate; just as he was never 
 serious, but either lachrymose or jocular. , The three 
 faces were now each a long duodecimo edition of them- 
 selves ; Leibgeber's was the only one which was not 
 stretched on the wire-drawing press, but it was dyed a 
 fine red by his inborn detestation of fops and maiden- 
 . hawks of every kind. Everard had come primed with 
 one idea (taken from Stolberg's ' Homer '), which was,, to 
 ask Nathalie, on his entrance, whether she were a goddess 
 or a mortal (in the manner of Homer's heroes), since, Jie 
 could only pretend to contend with the latter race. But 
 at sight of the masculine pair whom the Devil levelled 
 at his head like a double-barrelled gun, everytliing inside 
 it turned to cheese and curd, immobile ; twenty kisses 
 wouldn't have enabled him to get his great idea a-flow 
 again. , • It was five days before he got what- little there 
 was inside the bones of his head into such a fair way 
 of recovery as to make shift to deliver himself of this 
 idea to a distant relation of my own (how else should 
 I have known anything about it ?) in a tolerable degree 
 of preservation. At all times nothing so paralysed him 
 in female society as the presence of a man; he would 
 have stormed an entire convent of women sooner than have 
 laid, siege to a single couple of novices (to say nothing of 
 a canoness), had but a single wretched man been alongside 
 them. 
 
 A standing troupe of players, such as I now see before 
 my pencil, never performed in Fantaisie. Nathalie was lost 
 in amazement (little polite), and in a quiet comparison 
 of this original edition with her epistolary ideal. The 
 Venner, who took for granted that the result of hef observa- 
 
 II. 2 c 
 
S86 JEAN PAUL PEIEDKICH EICHTEK. [bOOK III. 
 
 lione was just the opposite of what it really was, would have 
 been delighted had he had it in his power to be a manifest 
 contradiction, an antipodes to himself. I mean, he would 
 fain have shown himself both cold and angry at finding 
 her in the society of this couple, and also confidential and 
 tender, so that this beggarly pair might be filled with 
 envy and vexation at the sight of his harvest and vintage. 
 And inasmuch as he was quite as greatly (only much 
 more agreeably) struck with, and surprised at her ap- 
 pearance, as die wi(h his, and as he had time enough 
 before him for revenge and punishment, he chose rather 
 to adopt the line of bragging and vaunting with the 
 view of seasoning and blessing the visit of these two 
 lawyer fellows with a good spice of envy. Moreover, he 
 had the advantage of them in possessing a light horse- 
 artillery body, and he could mobilise his army of physical 
 charms quicker than they coTild. Siebenkass was thinking 
 of nothing nearer at hand than — ^his wife. Before Eosa's 
 arrival he had been browsing on the idea of her as on a 
 meadow of bitter herbs, for the rough, chapped bark of the 
 conjugal hand was by no means capable of touching his 
 self-love with the delicate, etherial, gentle, snail-antenncB 
 touch of this unmated beauty's eiderdown fingers. But 
 now the idea of Lenette became a pasture of sweet and 
 succulent verdure ; for his jealousy of Bosa (domiciled in 
 two different quarters) was less awakened by Lenette's 
 behaviour to him than by Nathalie's relations with him. 
 The grimness of Heinrich's glances increased amain ; they 
 wandered up and down over Eosa's summer hare-skin of 
 yellow silk with a jaundiced glare. In an irritable impulse 
 to be doing something or other, he fumbled in his waist- 
 coat pocket, and got hold of the profile of Herr von Blaise 
 which he had clipped out (as we may remember) on the 
 occasion when he stamped the glass wig to pieces (and with 
 respect to which profile the only thing which had been 
 distressing him for a twelvemonth past was that it was 
 in his pocket, and not affixed to the gallows, where he 
 could have stuck it with a hairpin the evening he went 
 away). He pulled it out, and tousling it between his 
 fingers, he glided nimbly backwards and forwards between 
 
CHAP. XIII.] FLOWER, FKUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 387 
 
 Nathalie and Eosa, murmuring to Siebenkees (with his eyes 
 £xed on the Venner), " A la silhouette." * 
 
 Everard's self-love divined these flattering (and involun- 
 tary) sacrifices of the self-love of the other two, and he went 
 ■on firing oif at the embarrassed girl (with ever-growing 
 superciliousness, directed to Siehenkses's address) frag- 
 ments from the story of his travels, messages from his 
 friends, and questions concerning the arrival of his letters. 
 The brethren, Siebenk^s and Leibgeber, sounded a retreat, 
 but did so like true males ; for they were the least bit 
 annoyed with poor, innocent Nathalie, just as though she 
 could have marched up to this sponsus and letter bridegroom 
 of hers the moment he came into the room, with a saluta- 
 tation such as, " Sir, you can never be lord of mine, even 
 were you nothing worse than a scoundrel, idiot, fright, 
 prig, man-milliner," &c. But must we not, all of us (for 
 I don't consider myself an exception), smite upon our bony, 
 sinful breasts, and confess that we spit fire the moment 
 modest girls refrain from spitting it instantly at those 
 whom we may have nigrified or excommunicated in their 
 presence; that farther we insist upon their discarding 
 wicked squires instantaneously, although they may not 
 be in such a hurry to receive them — that they should care 
 as little what forced marches and honourable retreats their 
 cottiers and dependents may have to make, as we fief- 
 holders do ourselves ; and that we are offended with there 
 when they have an innocent opportunity of being false 
 even when they do not avail themselves of it? May 
 Heaven improve the class of persons of whom I have just 
 been treating. 
 
 Firmian and Heinrich roamed for an hour or two about 
 the enchanted valley ; it was full of magic flutes, magic 
 withers, and magic mirrors. But they had neither ears 
 nor eyes. What they found to say concerning events 
 heated their heads to the temperature of balloon furnaces. 
 and Leibgeber blew a fanfare of mere satiric insults out of 
 the reverse end of Fame's trumpet at every female Bay- 
 reuthian he met taking her evening walk. He announced 
 
 • The Silhouette took its name from the Controller-Geueral sc 
 called. In Paris, an empty, blank physiognomy is called a face "i la 
 silhouette." 
 
 2c2 
 
388 • JEAN PAUL PRIKDEICH KICHTER. [BOOK HI. 
 
 • 
 it afr his opitiion fbat women were the imsafest sMps in 
 which a man could embark on the great open ocean of life 
 — slaveships in fact, Or bucentanrs (or shuttles * which the 
 Devil weaves his nets and gins with) — and the more so- 
 that, like other ships of war, they are so often and sO' 
 scrupulously washed, sheathed on the outside with poisonous 
 copper, and have about the same amount of bunting and! 
 tarry tackle (ribbons) flying about them. Heinrich had gone- 
 to Nathalie's, indulging the (highly improbable) anticipa- 
 tion that she would at once unhesitatingly accept and act 
 upon his friend's deposition of evidence in his capacity of an 
 eye- and ear-witnesis concerning Eosa's canonical impedi- 
 menta (or ecclesiastical marriage disabilities), and it was. 
 Ms disappointment on this score which was so gnawing ' 
 upon hi^ mind. 
 
 But just, as Firmian was discussing and expatiating- 
 apon the Venner's lisping and indistinct mode of speaking 
 (his words seemed to curl about the top of his tongue with no- 
 power of expression in them), Heinrich cried out, " Hallo I 
 there the dirt-fly goes ! " It was the Venner, floundering 
 as a pike does in the net he has been brought to market 
 in. As the woodpecker (naturalists call most gaudy-plu- 
 maged birds woodpeckers) winged his flight closer by them, 
 they saw, as he passed them, that his face was a-glow with 
 anger. Doubtless the cement which had attached him to- 
 Nathalie was broken and dissolved. 
 
 The two friends waited a little while longer in the 
 shady walk, hoping that they might meet her; but at 
 length they made their way back to town, meeting, as they 
 went, a maid of hers, who was taking the following letter 
 to Leibgeber : — 
 
 " You and your friend were, alas ! quite right, and all 
 is now at an end. Please to let me rest, and reflect for a 
 I time in solitude over the ruins of my little future. Whett 
 people's lips are wounded and stitched, they are not allowed 
 to talk, although it is not my lips but my heart that bleeds, 
 and that for your sex. Ah ! I blush when I think of all 
 the letters I have written, which it has been such happiness 
 to me to write — and, alas ! under such a delusion ! — ^yet I 
 
 ♦ Which are called " -weavers' ships " in Germau. 
 
«HAP, XIII. j FLOWER, FRUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 389 
 
 liave no real reason to do so after all. You have yourself 
 «aid that innocent pleasures should give us as little cause 
 to be ashamed as hlaokberries, although, when the en- 
 joyment is past, there may be a black stain on the lips. 
 But, at all events, I thank you from my heart. As I must 
 have been disenchanted one day, it was kind that it was 
 ■not done by the wicked sorcerer himself, but by you and 
 your most honest and truthful friend, to whom please to, 
 •offer my very kind regards and remembrances. 
 
 " Yours, 
 
 " A. Nathalie." 
 
 Heinrich had expected the letter to be one of invitation, 
 '^' for " (said he) " her empty heart must feel a cold void, 
 ilike a finger with its nail cut too short." Firmian, whom 
 anatriniony had taught, and furnished with barometer, 
 scales and meteorological tables for observance of women,, 
 Iknew enough to be of opinion that a woman must, iii the 
 very hour when she had dismissed one lover (on purely 
 jnoral grounds) be a little over-cool towards the person 
 who has persuaded her thereto, even were he her second 
 lover. And (I take leave here to add, myself) for the very, 
 same reasons she will exceed in warmth towards this second 
 ammediately afterwards. 
 
 " Ah ! poor Nathalie ! " Firmian wished , unceasingly — 
 " May the flowers and blossoms be court-plaister for the 
 wounds of your heart; may the soft aether of spring be 
 ;a milk-cure for your oppressed panting bosom." It seemed 
 unspeakably sad to him that an innocent creature like 
 this should be thus tried and punished, as though she were 
 guilty, and be compelled to draw the purifying air of her. 
 life from poison plants, and not from wholesome ones. , 
 
 The next day all Siebenkaes did was to write a letter 
 /in which he signed himself Leibgeber), informing the 
 Count von Vaduz that he was unwell and as grey and 
 yellow as a Swiss cheese. Heinrich had left him no 
 peace until he did this. " The count," said he, " is 
 accustomed, in my person, to a fine, blooming, sturdy In- 
 spector ; but, if he is properly prepared for the thing by 
 ;a letter, he will really believe you to be me. Luckily we 
 are neither of us men who would be asked to unbutton 
 
390 JEAN PAUL FEIEDKICH RIOHTEK. [bOOK III. 
 
 in amy custom-house ; notpdy would fancy there was any- 
 thing inside our waistcoats but skin and bone." * 
 
 On the Thursday Siebenkaes, standing at the hotel-door, 
 saw the Venner, in an Electoral habit, with a full-dress- 
 parade head, and a whole Earth's vineyard in his face, 
 driving to the Hermitage between two young ladies. When 
 he carried this news upstairs, Leibgeber swore — (and also 
 cursed) — to the effect that the scoundrel wasn't worthy of 
 the society of any young lady, unless her head was a 
 Golgotha and her heart a gorge (or cuT) de Paris. He was 
 quite bent on going to see Nathalie then and there, and 
 telling her the news, but Firmian prevented him by main 
 force. 
 
 On the Friday she herself wrote to Heinrich as follows : — 
 " I have mustered up courage to revoke my prohibition, 
 and beg that you and your friend will come to-morrow to 
 beautiful Fantaisie, when (it being Saturday) it wiU be 
 depopulated. I keep my arms about Nature and Friend- 
 ship ; there is no room in them for anything besides. Do 
 you know, I dreamt last night that I saw you both in one 
 coffin — there was a white butterfly fluttering above you, 
 and it grew larger and larger till its wings were like 
 great white shrouds ; and then it covered you both over 
 and hid you with them, and there was no motion beneath. 
 My dear, dear friend arrives the day after to-morrow — and 
 to-morrow, you. And then, I must bid you all adieu. 
 
 "N. A." 
 
 The Saturday in question occupies the whole of the next 
 chapter, and I can form some sort of idea of the reader's 
 eagerness to be at it from my own; and all the better, 
 seeing that I have read (to say nothing about writing) 
 the said chapter already, which he has not. 
 
 * In Bngelhardszell, for instance, the Austrian custom-house olBiei-a 
 unbutton paunches to see whether they be fat or — cloth. 
 
CHAP. XIV.] FLOWEE, FEUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 391 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 A lover's dismissal — FANTAISIB — THE CHILI) WITH THE 
 BOUQUET — THE EDEN OF THE NIBHT, AND THE ANGEL AT 
 THE GATE OF PARADISIS. 
 
 It was not tlie deeper blue of the sky (which, on the 
 Saturday, was as rich and pure as in winter, or by night) 
 — nor the thought of actually standing in the very pre- 
 sence of the sorrowing soul whom he had driven &oin 
 Paradise with the Sodom apple of the serpent (Venner) 
 — nor his own feeble health — nor memories of his own 
 domestic life ;— it was none of these matters taken singly, 
 but the combination of all these semitones and minor 
 intervals together which attuned our Firmian to a melting 
 maestoso, and gave to his looks and thoughts (for his after- 
 noon visit) much such a kind and degree of tenderness as 
 he expected he should find in Nathalie's. 
 
 What he did find was precisely the reverse. In and 
 about Nathalie there reigned such a noble cold, serene 
 gladsomeness as you may find upon the loftiest mountain 
 peaks ; the cloud and the storm are beneath, while around 
 there rests a purer, colder air, but a deeper blue, too, and 
 a paler sunlight. 
 
 It cannot, of course, surprise me that you are on the 
 tenter-hooks of anxiety to hear the account she is going 
 to give of her rupture with Everard. But her account of 
 it was so brief — it might have been written round a Prus- 
 sian dollar — so that I must supplement it with mine, 
 which I have taken from Eosa's own written record of it. 
 The fact is, the Venner, five yeais afterwards, wrote a 
 very passable novel (if we may credit the praise bestowed 
 upon it in the ' Universal German Library '), into which 
 he artfully built the whole of the rupture with Nathalie — 
 (that severance between soul and body) ; at all events, 
 this is the conclusion to which sundry hints of Nathalie's 
 would point us. The said novel, accordingly, is my 
 fountain of Vaucluse. Emasculate intelligences, such as 
 Eosa's, can only reproduce experiences ; their poetic /aefe«e« 
 are nothing but adopted children of the actual. 
 
392 JEAN PAUL FEIEDKICH EICHTER. [BOOE III. 
 
 To be brief, what took place was as follows. Scarce 
 ■were Firmian and Heinrich gone out among tJie trees, 
 ■when the Venner brought up his reserve of vengeance, 
 and asked Nathalie, in a tetchy manner, how it was that 
 she could tolerate visitors of such a poor and plebeian 
 sort. The haste and the coldness of the departed pair 
 had already set Nathalie on fire, and this address made her 
 blaze forth in a flame upon her yellow-silken questioner. 
 " A question such as that," she answered, " is very little 
 short of an insult ; " and she ; immediately added one of 
 her own — for she was too warm and too proud to dissem- 
 ble in the slightest, or to hold other than the straightest 
 caurse with him. "You call at Mr. Siebenkses's pretty 
 often yourself, do you not ? " " Oh !" said this empty 
 braggart, " I call on his wife (to speak the simple truth) ; 
 ie is merely my pretext." " Keally," said she, making her 
 syllables last as long as her look of scorn. Meyem, amazed 
 at this behavour, so very unlike the tone of the antecedent 
 epistolary correspondence (he gave the twin cronies the 
 credit of it) — Meyem, whom her beauty, his own money, 
 and her poverty and dependence upon Blaise (to say 
 nothing of his position of betrothed bridegroom), had now 
 inspired with the utmost audacity — Meyem, this brave and 
 courageous lion, undertook, without a moment's hesitation, 
 a task which nobody else would have ventured upon, 
 namely, that of humiliating and bringing to her proper 
 senses this irate Aphrodite, by reading to her the cata- 
 logue of his Cicisbean appointments, and, in general 
 terms, unfolding before her the long perspective of the 
 hundreds of gynaeccea and jointure-houses open to him. 
 " It is such an easy matter to worship false goddesses and 
 open their temple doors, that I am charmed to be restored 
 to the worship of the true feminine godhead, through my 
 Babylonish captivity to you." 
 
 Ail her orushed heart sighed forth, " Ah ! then it is all 
 trae — he is a ■wicked wretch, and I am miserable indeed." 
 But she kept silence, outwardly, and went and looked out 
 of the window, in anger. Her soul was one of those whose 
 seats are the knight's upper dais of womankind ; it was 
 ever eager to do rare, heroic acts of self-devotion and self- 
 sacrifice ; indeed, a fondness for remarkable and out-oi- 
 
CHAP. XIV.J FLOWEH, FEUIT, AND THOKN PIECES. 393 
 
 the-way greatness was the only littleness about it. And 
 now, when the Venner tried to make amends for his brag- 
 gadocio by a sudden jump into a light and sportive tone 
 ia,. tone which, in minor warfares with the ordinary fair 
 sex, heals breaches much quicker and better than a more 
 serious one) — and proposed a walk in the pretty park to 
 her, as being a spot better adapted for a reconciliation — , 
 this noble soul of hers spread wide its pure white pinions 
 and soared away from out the foul heart of this crooked 
 pike with his silver scales for ever ! And she drew near 
 to him and said (all a-glow, but dry-eyed wholly), " Mr. 
 von Meyern, I have quite decided — we are parted for 
 ever. We have never known each other, and our acquaint- 
 ance is at an end. I will send you back your letters 
 to-morrow, and you will have the goodness to return mine 
 to me." Had he employed a more serious tone, he might 
 have kept hold of this strong soul for some days — perhaps 
 ■weeks — longer. Without looking at him anymore, she 
 opened a casket and began arranging letters. He tried, 
 in a hundred speeches, to flatter and pacify her; she' 
 answered never a word. His heart boiled within him, foi 
 he gave the two advocates the blame for all this. At 
 length he thought he would humble this deaf mute (as 
 •well as make her alter her determination), by saying, as he 
 now did, " I don't know what your uncle in Kuhschnappel 
 ■will say to all this. He appears to me to set a much 
 greater value upon my sentiments towards you than you 
 do yourself ; indeed, he seems to consider our marriage as 
 essential to your happiness as I think it to mine." This 
 was a burden heavier than her back, so sore bent down 
 by Fate, could bear. She shut up the casket hurriedly, 
 sat down, and rested her bewildered head upon her trem- 
 bling arms, shedding burning tears, which her hands 
 strove in vain to hide. A reproach of our poverty uttered 
 by lips we have loved, darts like red-hot iron into the 
 heart, and scorches it dry with fire. Eosa, whose ven- 
 geance, now wreaked, gave place to the most eager love, 
 (in hopes that her feelings were of the same selfish type as 
 his own), threw himself on his knees before her, crying, 
 " Oh [ forget it all ! What are we breaking with one 
 another for, if we come really to think about it ? Your 
 
394 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH KICHTEE. [bOOK III. 
 
 precious tear-drops wash it all away. I mingle mine with 
 them in rich abundance." 
 
 She arose with haughty port, leaving him on his knees, 
 " My tears," she said, " have not the smallest reference to 
 anything connected with you. I am poor, and I would 
 not be rich. After the base, ignoble insult you have put 
 upon me, you fshall not stay and see me weep. Have the- 
 goodness to leave the room." So that he retired ; and— 
 when one considers the weight of the sacks he had to carry 
 — sacks of every kind (including one full of muzzles) — 
 he really did it in a surprisingly brisk and lively manner, 
 holding his head pretty high. His command of his temper 
 and his apparent good humour strike one the more (for 
 I may give him what praise he deserves), that be retained 
 them and took them home with him, and this on an after- 
 noon when, with the two finest and longest levers in all 
 his collection he had utterly failed in touching the smallest 
 point in Nathalie's heart, or the auricles thereof. One of 
 these levers was his old one, which he had tried upon 
 Lenette — that of gradually twisting himself in, corkscrew 
 fashion, in spiral serpentine lines of petty advances, ap- 
 proaches, attentions and illusions ; but Nathalie was neither 
 weak nor light enough to be penetrated thus. The other 
 lever was one from which something might really have 
 been expected in the way of effect — though it actually had 
 less than even the first. It consisted in showing his old 
 scars (like an old warrior), and rejuvenating them into 
 wounds ; in this manner he bared his suffering heart, 
 pierced by so many a false love, and which (like a dollar 
 with a hole in it), had hung as a votive offering upon so 
 many a shrine. His soul put on Court mourning (of 
 sorrow) of all degrees, whole and half, in hopes of being, 
 like a widow, more enchanting in black. The friend of a 
 Leibgeber, however, could be softened by manly sorrow.'* 
 onlj' — the womanly sort could but harden her. 
 
 Meanwhile (as we have said), he left his fiancee without 
 any pity for her self-sacrifice indeed, and equally with- 
 out the slightest indignation at her refusal of him. He 
 merely thought, " She may go to the devil ;" and he could 
 scarce sufficiently congratulate himself that he had so 
 easily escaped the incalculable annoyano* of having to 
 
CHAP. XIV.] FLOWER, FEUXT, AND THOKN PIECES. 395 
 
 endure life with a creature of "the kind from one year's 
 end to another, and to pay her the necessary respect through- 
 out an infernal, long matrimonial life. On the other hand, 
 his bile was mightily stirred against Leibgeber, but more 
 particularly against Siebenkses (whom he suspected of 
 being the real judge of his Divorce Court), and he laid 
 the foundation of several gall-stones in his gall-bladder, 
 and of a slight "bilious yellow tint in his eyes, with hating 
 the advocate, which he could not do enough. 
 
 We return to the Saturday. Nathalie derived her calm- ^ 
 ness and serenity partly from her own strength of mind, 
 but also in good measure from the pair of horses (and of 
 rose maidens) w^ith whom Bosa had been seen driving 
 to the Hermitage. A woman's jealousy is always a day 
 or two older than her love. Moreover, I know of no 
 excellence, no weakness', shortcoming, virtue, womanliness, 
 manliness, in a woman which does not tend rather to en- 
 kindle than to appease jealousy. 
 
 Not only Siebenkaes, but even Leibgeber (anxious to 
 breathe some warmth upon her freezing soul, all stripped 
 of its warm plumage), was this afternoon serious and 
 cordial, not (as he usually did) dressing his rewards and 
 punishments up in irony. Perhaps, too, her gratifying 
 (and flattering) readiness to obey him tamed him down 
 to some extent. Firmian had, in addition to the reasons 
 above set forth, the more powerful ones— that the English 
 lady was expected home the next day but one, and her 
 coming would put a stop to all this garden pleasure, or 
 interfere with it at all events — that he who knew well, 
 from his . own experience, what the wounds of a lost love 
 were, had a boundless compassion for hers, and would 
 gladly have given his own heart's blood to make up for 
 the loss of hers — moreover, accustomed all his life to bare, 
 mean and empty rooms, he felt a keen enjoyment in being 
 in the richly-furnished, bright and tasteful chamber he 
 was now in, and naturally carried over a portion of this to 
 the account of their inhabitant and hermit. 
 
 The maid-servant, whom we have seen this week 
 already, came in just then, with tears in her eyes, falter- 
 ing out that she was going to confession, and hoped she 
 had done nothing to displease her, (fee, &o. " Anything 
 
396 JEAN PATJL FEIEDEICH EICHTBR. [bOOK III. 
 
 to displease me ?" cried Nathalie; " most certainly not-^ 
 and I know I can say the same in your mistress's name ;" 
 and went out of the room with her and kissed her, unseen, 
 like some good genius. How beautiful are pity and kind- 
 ness to distress, in a soul which has just risen up in might 
 to resist oppression. 
 
 Leibgeher took a volume of Tristram Shandy ' from the 
 English lady's library, and lay down with it on the lawn 
 -under the nearest tree, with the view of making over to 
 Siis friend the undivided fruition of this anise, marchpane 
 and honeycomb of an afternoon of talk, which to him was 
 saerely so much every-day household fare. Moreover, all 
 that day when he made any sign of jesting, Nathalie's eyes 
 ■would implore him, " Please do not, for just this one day. 
 Do not take pains to point out every pock-pit which Fate 
 has left upon my inner soul to him — 'spare me for this once." 
 And lastly (which was his principal reason), it would be 
 much easier for Firraian to tell this sensitive Nathalie (now 
 upon one-eighth pay) all his project of making her his 
 appanaged widow, his heiress in jest — to tell it to her 
 ■wrapped in a triple shroud, written in distorted characters. 
 
 Siebenkses looked upon this undertaking as a sort of 
 ■day's work at fortification making, a journey across the 
 Alps — round the globe — into the grotto of Antiparos, a 
 discovery of the longitude ; he had not the slightest notion 
 Jiow even to begin to set about it. Indeed, he had pre- 
 viously told Leibgeber that, if his death were but a real 
 one, nobody would be more ready to talk to her about it, 
 but that for a sham death, he really could not sadden her ; 
 so that she would have to consent, altogether by some 
 chance, and unconditionally, to become his widow. " And 
 ■is my death a thing so very improbable after aU ? " he 
 said. " Of course it is," answered Leibgeber. "If it 
 were not, what would become of our death in jest. The 
 lady will e'en have to make the best of it." It would 
 appear that he dealt with women's hearts in a farshion 
 somewhat colder and harder than Siebenkaes, in whose 
 opinion (hermit connoisseur as he was of rarities in the 
 .•shape of strong female souls) a delicate, suffering one like 
 ithis could not .Tae too tenderly treated. However, I do 
 fflot set up to judge between the two friends. 
 
HHAP. XIV.J FLOWEE, FRUIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 39T 
 
 When Leibgeber had gone out -with Yorick, Sieben- 
 kses went and stood before a fresco representing the saiif 
 Yorick, and poor Maria with' her flute and her goat. For 
 the chambers of the great are picture-bibles, and an 
 = orbis pietus, — they sit, eat and walk in picture exhibitions, 
 which makes it all the harder a matter for them that two, 
 at least, of the greatest expanses in nature — the sky and 
 the sea — cannot be painted over for them. Nathalie went 
 up to him, and at once cried out, " What is there to see in 
 that to-day ? Away from it !" She was just as open and 
 unconstrained in her manner with him as he could not 
 manage to be with her. She displayed the warmth and 
 beauty of her soul in that wherein we (unconsciously) 
 nnveil, or iinmasJc (as the case may be), ourselves more 
 completely than in anything — namelj', her mode of be- 
 stowing praise. The illuminated triumphal aqrch which 
 she erected over the head of her English lady-friend,, 
 elevated her own soul so that she stood at that gate of 
 honour as conqueror, in laurel wreath, and glittering 
 collar of the Order of Goodness and "Worth. Her praises 
 were the double chorus and echo of the other's excellence ; 
 she was so warm and so earnest ! Ah ! maidens, fairer are- 
 ye a thousand times when ye twine bridal-wreaths and 
 laurel garlands for your companions than when ye plait 
 them crowns of straw, and bend them collars of iron. 
 
 She told him how fond she was of British men and 
 women, both in and out of print, although she had never 
 seen any until the previous winter. " Unless," she said, 
 with a smile, "our friend outside may be considered 
 one. 
 
 Leibgeber, out on his grass mattress, raised his head 
 and saw the couple looking down at him with faces of 
 regard ; and the shimmer of love shone forth in three pairs 
 of eyes. One single moment of time thus clasped three- 
 sister souls together in one tender embrace. 
 
 The maid coming back from confession about this junc- 
 ture in her white dress — ('twas heavy-wing cases rather 
 than light butterfly wings to her)— with a trifle of pretty- 
 tinted ribbon about it here and there ; Firmian looked at 
 this absolved one for a minute or two, and then took up. 
 her black' and gold hymn-book, which she had laid down- 
 
398 JEAN PAUL FEIKDEICH EICHTER. [bOOK III. 
 
 in her haste, finding inside it a whole pattern-card of silks, 
 l>«sides peacock's feathers. Nathalie, who saw a satirical 
 expression, dawning on his face, drove it away in an 
 instant. " Your sex attaches just as much value to adorn- 
 ment as ours. Look at your Court dresses, the Coronation 
 robes at Frankfort, and uniforms and official costumes of 
 all kinds. Then, the peacock was the bird of the old 
 knights and poets, and if you make vows upon his 
 feathers, or wear garlands of them, we may surely wear 
 them, or at all events marlc (if not reward) songs with 
 them." Every now and then a barely polite expression of 
 astonishment at what she knew escaped the advocate in 
 spite of himself. He turned over the leaves of the festival 
 hymns, and came upon gilt figures of Our Lady, and found 
 a picture wherein were two parti-coloured blotches (sup- 
 posed to. represent two lovers), and a phosphorescent heart, 
 which the male blotch was offering to the female with the 
 words : 
 
 " And is to thee my fond love all unknown ! 
 How my heart burns is here full plaialy shown " 
 
 — ^the whole surrounded by a tracery of leaf work. Firmian 
 loved family and society miniature pictures when (as in 
 this case) they were exceedingly poor as works of art. 
 Nathalie saw and read this ; she took the book in haste, 
 jsnapped the clasp to, and then, when she had done so, 
 said, " You have no objection, have you ?" 
 
 Courage towards women is not inborn, but acquired. 
 Firmian had had familiar experience of very few ; where- 
 fore this natural awe made him look upon every feminine 
 body — particularly if of any standing in society — as a 
 kind of sacred Ark of the Covenant whereon no finger 
 might be laid ; (for though it is proper to rise superior to 
 considerations of rank where men are concerned, it is other- 
 wise with women), and upon every female foot as that on 
 which a Queen of Spain stands, and every female finger as 
 a Franklin point emitting electric sparks. If in love with 
 him, I might have likened her to an electrified person, 
 feeling all the sparks and mock pains she emitted. At 
 the same time, nothing could be more natural than that 
 his reverent timidity should diminish as time went on. 
 
■CHAP. XIV.] FLOWER, FKUIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 399 
 
 and that at length (at a moment when she was looking 
 the other way) he should take courage to deftly snatch 
 hold of the end of one of the ribbons in her hair between 
 his fingers — and she never be aware of it. It may have 
 been by way of preliminary studies towards the execution 
 of this feat that he had previously once or twice tried the 
 ■effect of taking up into his hands things which had been a 
 good deal in hers — such as her English scissors, a broken 
 pincushion, and a pencil-case. 
 
 Taking heart of grace hereupon, he thought he would 
 venture to take up a bunch of wax grapes (which he 
 imagined to be made of stone, like those upon butter- 
 boats). He gripped them, accordingly, in his fist as in 
 a wine-press, crushed two or three of them to pieces, and 
 then profiiered as many petitions for mercy and pardon as if 
 he had knocked over and broken the porcelain Pagoda of 
 Nanking. " There's no harm done," she said, laughing. 
 ^' We all find plenty such berries in life — with fine ripe skins 
 — no intoxicating juice — and as easily broken — or easier." 
 
 He was in terrible dread lest this glorious, many-tinted 
 rainbow of happiness of his should melt away into even- 
 ing dew, and it disconcerted him that he no longer saw 
 Leibgeber reading upon the flowery turf. Outside, the 
 world was brightened into a land of the sun — every tree 
 was a rich, firm-rooted joy-flower — the valley a condensed 
 universe, ringing with music of the spheres. Never- 
 theless he had not the courage to proffer his arm to this 
 Venus for a stroll through the sun, i.e. the sunny Fan- 
 taisie ; the Venner's fate, and the fact that there was a 
 late harvest of a few visitors still walking about the gar- 
 dens, rendered him bashful and mute. Of a sudden 
 Leibgeber knocked at the window with the agate-head oi 
 his stick, crying, " Come over to dinner. My stick-head 
 is the Vienna lantern.* We are sure not to get home 
 before midnight." He had ordered a dinner in the c.\,fe. 
 Presently he cried out, " There is a pretty child here 
 asking for you." Siebenkses hurried out, and found it 
 
 • We have all read In the newspapers that at the Vienna balls a 
 paper lantern is carried through the rooms, with the inscription 
 •" Supper ready," This may be called Vienna lanteroiu^. 
 
400 JEAN PAUIi FRIEDEICH EICHTEE. [bOOK IH» 
 
 was the very child into whose hand he had ;pressed hi» 
 flowers on the evening when, after the great feast-eve at 
 the Hermitage, he had been soaring along on the wings 
 of fancy through the village of Johannia.- "Where is 
 your wife, sir ? " asked the child ; " the lady who took 
 me out of the water the day before yesterday ? I have 
 some beautiful flowers here that my godpajia aent me tO' 
 give her. Mother will come and give her best thankB^ 
 too, as soon as she can, but just now she's in bed very 
 unwell." 
 
 Nathalie, who had heard what the child said, came down, 
 and said, with a blush, " Is it I, darling? Give me your 
 flowers, then." The child, recognising her, kissed her 
 hand, the hem of her dress, and, lastly, her lips, and 
 would have recommenced this round of kisseg, when Na- 
 thalie, in turning the flowers over, came upon three silken 
 counterfeits amidst its living forget-me-nots and red and 
 white roses. To Nathalie's questions as to whence thes& 
 costly flowers came, the child answered, " Give me a 
 kreuzer or two, and I'll tell you." This was done, and 
 she added, "I got them from my godpapa, and he is a 
 very, very grand gentleman ;" then ran away among th& 
 bushes. 
 
 This bouquet was a veritable Turkish Selam-and-Flower 
 riddle to them all. Leibgeber accounted with ease for 
 the child's sudden marriage of Nathalie and Siebenkses, by 
 the circumstance that the advocate hi»d been standing 
 beside her at the water-side, and people, who liad seen 
 no one so constantly with her as himself, had been mis- 
 led by the bodily likeness between them. 
 
 Siebenkaes's mind, however, ran more on the machine- 
 master, Eosa (so fond of setting his patchwork life-scenes 
 for every woman to play her part before), and the re- 
 semblance these silk flowers bare to those which the 
 Venner had once redeemed from pawn for Lennette in 
 Kuhschnappel struck him at once ; yet how could he 
 sadden this gladsome time, and spoil the pleasure of re- 
 ceiving these votive-flowers, by giving words to his sus- 
 picions ? Nathalie insisted upon a distribution of this floral 
 inheritance, inasmuch as each of the three had taken part 
 in the rescue, and Siebenkass and Leibgeber had, at ali 
 
CHAP. XIV.J FLOWER, FRUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 401 
 
 ■events, rescued the rescuer. She kept the white silk 
 roses for herself, allotted the red ones to Leibgeher (who 
 would not have them, but asked for a proper, real, living 
 rose instead, which he immediately put in his mouth) ; to 
 Siebenkaes she gave the silken forget-me-nots, and one or 
 two living, perfume-breathing ones as well (souls, as it 
 were, of the artificial ones). He took them with rapture, 
 ■and said the tender real ones should never wither for him. 
 Nathalie here took a brief temporary leave of the. pair, but 
 Firmian could not find words to express all his gratitude 
 to his friend for the means he had adopted to prolong this 
 little day of grace which orbed his whole life Toand with 
 a, new heaven and a new earth. 
 
 No King of ;Spain ever took as little out of some six, 
 or so (at the outside), of the hundred dishes which, by the 
 laws of the realm, are daily served at his table, than 
 Siebenkaes did that day out of one. Historians, worthy of 
 ■credence, inform us, however, that he managed to drink a 
 very little — a little wine it was — and that in a considerable 
 hurry — for he could not be happy enough that day to 
 ^tisfy Leibgeber. The latter, not apt to be easily swayed 
 'by heart and feeling, was all the more delighted that his 
 beloved Firmian should at last have a pole star of happi- 
 ness shining in the zenith point of the heavens above hie 
 head, beaining down genial warmth upon the blossoming 
 time of his few scattered flowers. 
 
 The rapid rate at which his duplex enjoyment kept on 
 moving enabled him to steal a march upon the sun, and 
 he arrived once more at the villa, whose walls were now 
 tinted red by his beams, while the glory of evening was 
 gilding its windows into fire. Nathalie, on- the balcony, 
 was like some sunlit soul, just ready to take wing after 
 the departing sun, hanging with her great eyes upon the 
 shining, quivering world rotunda all full of church-music 
 — and on the sun flying downward from this teinpie, like 
 ^ome angel — and at the holy, luminous tomb of ,nigiit into 
 which earth was sinking. 
 
 When they came under the balcony (Nathalie bee coning 
 them to come up to her) Heinrich handed him his stict, 
 ■saying, " Keep that for me. I have enough to carry 
 without it — if you want me, blow the whistle.' As re- 
 
402 JKAN PAUL FKIEDKICH EICHTEH. | BOOK III. 
 
 garded his morale and physique, our good Henry had the 
 kindest and softest of human hearts within his shaggy, 
 Bruin breast. 
 
 Ah ! happy Firmian, happy in spite of all your troubles. 
 When now you pass through the door of glass and on to 
 the floor of iron, the sun confronts you, and sets for a 
 second time. Earth closes her great eye, like some dying 
 goddess ! Then the hills smoke like altars — choruses call 
 from the woods — shadows, the veils of day, float about 
 the enkindled, translucent tree-tops and rest upon their 
 many-tinted breast-pins (of flowers), and the gold-leaf of 
 the evening sky throws a dead-gilt gleam towards the 
 east, and touches with a rosy ray the vibrating breast «f 
 the hovering lark, far up evening beU of Nature. Ah ! 
 happy Firmian, should some glorious spirit from realms 
 afar wing its flight athwart earth and her spring tide, and, 
 as he passes, a thousand lovely evenings be concentrated 
 into one burning one — it would not be more Elysian than 
 this, whereof the glow is now dying out around you as 
 the moments fly. 
 
 When the flames of the windows paled, and the moon 
 was rising heavily behind the earth, they both went back 
 into the twilight room, silent, and with foil hearts. Firmian 
 opened the pianoforte and, in music, went through his 
 evening once more. The trembling- strings were as 
 tongues of fire to his full heart ; the flower-ashes of his 
 youth were blown away, and two or three youthful minutes 
 bloomed back into life. 
 
 But as the music poured its warm life-balsam upon 
 Nathalie's swollen heart in all its constraint (for its wounds 
 were only closed, not healed), it melted and gave way, 
 the heavy tears which had been burning within it flowed 
 forth, and it grew weak and tender, but light. Fii-mian, 
 who saw she was passing once more through the gate of 
 sacrifice towards the sacrificial knife, stopped the sacrificial 
 music, and tried to lead her away from the altar. Just 
 then the first beam of the moon alighted, like a swan's 
 wing, upon the waxen grapes. He asked her to come 
 out into the silent, misty, after-summer cf the day, the 
 moonlit evening. She placed her arm in his without 
 saying yes. 
 
CHAP. XIV.J FLOWEK, FBUIT, AND THORN riECES. 403 
 
 What a spavMing, gleaming world ! Through the 
 branches, through the fountains, over the hills and over 
 the woodlands, the flashing molten silver was flowing, 
 which the moon was fining from out the dross of night. 
 Swiftly shot her glance of silver athwart the rippling 
 wavelet, and the glossy, shining, gently-trembling apple- 
 leaves, pausing to rest upon the marble pillars and birch-tree 
 stems. Nathalie and Firmian paused upon the threshold 
 of the magic valley (it gleamed like some enchanted cavern, 
 where night and light were playing, and all the founts of 
 being — which by day cast up sweet odour, melody of songs 
 and voices, feathery wings, translucent pinions — seemed 
 sunk in voiceless slumber deep into some silent chasm). 
 They looked up to the mountain, the Sophienberg, with 
 its summit flattened as by the weight of years ; a great 
 mist Colossus was veiling all its Alp-like peak; next at 
 the pale-green world, lying asleep beneath the shimmering 
 radiance of the far-off silent suns, gleaming depths of 
 silver star-dust, flowing faint and far before the ever- 
 brightening rising moon ; and then at one another, with 
 hearts full to the brim of holy friendship, such a gaze as 
 only two blest angels, new created, free and gladsome, 
 bend in rapture on each other. " Are you as happy as 
 I ?" he asked. " No," she answered, involuntarily pressing 
 his arm, " that I am not ; for, on a night like this should 
 follow, not a day, but something far lovelier and richer — 
 something that should satisfy the heart's thirst, and staunch 
 its bleeding for ever." "And what should that be?" he 
 asked. " Death," was her answer. She lifted her streaming 
 eyes to his and said, " You think so, too, do you not r 
 Death for me." " No, no," he added quickly, " for me, if 
 you will, not for ymi." To break the course of this over- 
 powering moment, she added hurriedly, " Shall we go 
 down to the place where we first met, and where, two 
 days too soon, I became your friend ; * and yet it was not 
 too soon. Shall we?" 
 
 He obeyed her; but his soul was still a-swim among 
 his precious thoughts, and as they went down the long, 
 hollow, gravel-way, besprent with the shadows of the 
 
 * Alas 1 that the English word " fiiend " is such a poor representative 
 of the German oiiginai. Yet I cannot hit upon any other. — Tr. 
 
 2d2 
 
404 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH EICHTEE. [BOOK III.. 
 
 islirubs, and moonliglit rippling over its white bed (flecked 
 ■with shadows for stones), he said, " Yes, in an hour like 
 this, when death and sleep send forth their brothers to us, 
 a soul, like yours may think of death.* But I have more 
 cause than you, for I am happier. Oh ! of all guests at 
 Joy's festival-banquet. Death is the one whom she loves 
 best to see ; for he is himself a joy, the last and highest 
 lapture upon earth. None but the common herd can asso- 
 ciate humanity's lofty flight of migration into the distant 
 land of spring with ghosts i and corpses here below on 
 earth ; as when they hear the owls' voices when they are, 
 going away to warmer countries they take them for the 
 cries of goblins. But, oh ! dear, dear, Nathalie, I cannot 
 and will not bear to think of what you say as in any shape 
 connected with you. No, no, so rich a soul must come 
 into full bloom in a far nearer, earlier spring than that 
 beyond this life ! Oh, God ! it must ! " They had reached 
 a wall of rock over which a broad cascade of moonlight 
 was falling ; against it leant a trellis of roses, whence 
 Natalie gathered a spray, all green and tender, with two 
 young rose-buds just beginning to swell, and, saying " Tou 
 will never blow," she placed it on her heart, and. said 
 (looking at him with a strange expression), " While they 
 are young they scarcely prick at alh" 
 
 And when they got down to the stone water-basin — ^the 
 sacred spot where they first met — and could as yet find no 
 words to utter what was in their hearts, they saw some 
 one come up out of the dry basin. Though they smiled, 
 it was a smile full of emotion— in all three cases: — for this 
 was their Leibgeber, who had been lying in wait for them 
 in hiding, with a bottle of wine, among the imaged water- 
 gods. A certain something there had been in his troubled 
 eyes, but it had been poured out by way of libation to this 
 spring night from our cup of joy. " This port and haven . 
 of your first landing here," said he, "must be properly 
 consecrated, and you, (to Nathalie) must join in the pledge. 
 I swear by Heaven that there is more fruit hanging on its 
 blue dome to-night within reach than ever hung on any 
 green one." They took three glasses, pledged one another, 
 
 • Death sends sleep, Heayen the dream. 
 
CHAP. XIV.] FLOWER, FEUIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 405 
 
 and Baid (some of them, I imagine, in somewhat subdued 
 tones), " To friendship ! may it live for ever : may the 
 spot where it commenced he always green ! May every 
 place blossom where it has grown, and, though all its 
 flowers may fade, and its leaves fall and vrither, may it 
 live on for ever and for evermore ! " Nathalie was obliged to 
 turn her eyes away. Heinrich laid a hand upon the agate 
 head of his stick (but only because his friend's hand which 
 was holding it was over the top of it, that he might give 
 the latter a warm and hearty pressure), and said, " Give it 
 me ; you shall have no clouds in your hand to-night ; " 
 for nature had graven cloud-streaks on the agate in her 
 subterranean studio. Any heart — not Nathalie's only^ — 
 must have been touched by this bashful cloaking of the 
 warm token of friendship. " Are you not going to stay 
 ,with us?" she asked somewhat faintly, as he was leaving 
 them. " I'm going up to the landlord," he said, " to see if 
 I canget hold of a flute or a horn, and if I do I shall come 
 out and musicise over the valley, and play the spring- 
 time in." 
 
 When he was gone his friend felt as if his youth had 
 gone with him. Suddenly he saw, high above the whirling 
 may-beetles and the breeze-born night-butterflies, and 
 their arrow-swift pursuers, the bats, a great train of birds 
 of passage winging their way through the blue, like some 
 broken cloud, coming back to our spring. Then flashed 
 upon his open heart the memory of his lodgings in the 
 market-town, and the time when he saw a similar flight 
 of (earlier) birds of passage, and thought that his life 
 would soon be at an end. These recollections, with all 
 their tears, brought back the belief that he was soon to 
 die ; and this he must tell Nathalie. He saw the wide 
 expanse of night stretched over the world like some great 
 corpse but her shadowy limbs quiver under the moonlit- 
 branches at the first touches of the morning breeze awaking 
 in the east. She rises towards the coming sun as a dis- 
 solving vapour, an all-embracing cloud, and man says 
 "It is day." Two crape-covered thoughts, like hideous 
 spectres, fought within Firmian's soul. The one said, " He 
 is going to die of apoplexy, so he never can see her more." 
 And the other said, " He is going through the farce of a 
 
406 JEAN PAUL FRIEDEICH EICHTEE. [bOOK III. 
 
 pretended death, and then he never must see her more." 
 Overhorne by the past as well as by the present, he took 
 Nathalie's hand, and said, " You must pardon my being so 
 deeply moved to-night. I shall never see you more. You 
 are the noblest of your sex that I have ever met, but we 
 shall never meet again. Very soon you must hear that 
 I am dead, or that my name, from one cause or other has 
 passed away, but my heart will still be yours, be thine. 
 Oh ! that the present, with its mountain-chains of grave- 
 hillocks, but lay behind me, and the future were come, 
 with all its open graves, and I stood on the brink of my 
 own ! For I would look once more on thee, then throw 
 myself into it in bliss." 
 
 Nathalie answered not a word. She faltered suddenly in 
 her walk, her arm trembled, her breath came thick and 
 fast. She stopped, and, with a face as pale as death, said, 
 in trembling accents, "Stay here on this spot; let me 
 sit alone for a minute on that turf-bank. Ah! I am so 
 headlong!" He saw her move trembling away. She 
 »ank, as if overwhelmed with some burden, down upon a 
 bank of turf. She fixed her blinded eyes upon the moon 
 (the blue sky around it seemed a night, the earth a 
 vapour) ; her arm lay rigid on her lap ; she did not move, 
 except that a spasm, distantly resembling a smile, played 
 about her lip ; her eyes were tearless. But to her friend, 
 life at that moment seemed a realm of shadows, whose 
 outlines were floating and blending in endless changes of 
 confusion ; a tract all hollow, sunken mine-shafts full of 
 mists in the likeness of mountain-spirits, with but one 
 single opening of outlet to the heavens, the free air, the 
 spring, the light of day ; and that outlet so narrow, so 
 remote, and far above his head. 
 
 There sat Kathalie in the white crystal shimmer, like 
 some angel upon an infant's grave ; and, suddenly, the 
 tones of Heinrich's music broke in, like bells pealing in 
 a storm, upon their souls as they paused, all stunned (like 
 Nature before the thunder breaks), and the warm river of 
 melody bore away their hearts, dissolving them the while. 
 Nathalie made an affirmative sign with her head, as if she 
 had come to some conclusion : she rose and came forward 
 from th«> green, flowery grave like some enfranchised, 
 
CHAP. XIV.] FLOWEE, FBUIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 407 
 
 glorified Bpirit ; she opened her arms wide, and came 
 towards him. Tear after tear came coursing down her 
 hlushing face, bnt as yet her heart could find no words ; 
 sinking under the world which was in her heart, she 
 could totter no further, and he flew to meet her. She 
 held him back that she might speak the first, her tears 
 flowing faster and faster, but when she had cried, " My 
 first friend, and my last — for the first and las'": time,'' she 
 grew breathless and dumb, and, overburdened with sor- 
 row, sank into his arms, upon his lips, upon his heart. 
 
 " No ! no ! " she murmured ; " Oh ! Heaven, give me but 
 the power to speak. Firmian ! my Firmian ! Take all 
 my happiness away with you — all that I have on earth. 
 But never, by all you hold most sacred, never see me 
 more in this world. Now " (she added very softly), " you j 
 must swear this to me." She drew her head back, and the 
 tones of Heinrich's music flowed between and around them 
 like the voice of sorrow. She gazed at him, and his pale 
 care-worn face wrung her heart with agony; with eyes 
 dim with tears, she implored him to swear that he would 
 never see her more. 
 
 " Yes, noble, glorious soul," he answered, in trembling 
 tones ; "yes, then, I swear to thee I will never see thee 
 more." Mute and motionless, as if smitten by the hand 
 of death, she sank with drooping head upon his breast ; 
 and once again, like one dying, he said, " I will never 
 see thee more." Then, beaming like some angel, she raised 
 her face, worn with emotion to him, saying, " All is over 
 now ; take the death kiss, and speak no more." He took 
 it, and she gently disengaged herself from his arms. But 
 as she turned away, she put back her hand and gave him 
 the green rosebuds with the tender thorns, and saying, 
 " Think of to-night," went resolutely away (trembling, 
 nevertheless), and was soon lost in the dark-green alleys, 
 where but few beams of light struck through. 
 
 And the end of this night every soul that has loved can 
 picture for itseK without the aid of any words of mine. 
 
408 JEAN PAUL FKIEDEICH EIOHfEB. [BOOK lit. 
 
 riBST rEDIT PIECE. 
 
 LETTER OP DE. VICTOR TO CATO THE ELDER, ON THE CONVERSION 
 OF I INTO TBOf, EE, SHE, YE, ANDTBEY; OR, THE FEAST OB 
 KINDNESS OF THE 20tH MARCH. 
 
 Flaclisenflngen, 1st April, 1795i- 
 
 My DEAR Cato the Elder, 
 
 A breaker of his word like you — who made such iu 
 solemn promise to come to my feast, and yet did not como- 
 — will have to he punished hy having his mouth — not. 
 stitched up (which is what savages do to word^breakers,) 
 for that would be a loss only to your hearers — but made: 
 to water. When I shall have painted a fall and faithful 
 picture of our peace-festival of the soul for you, I shall 
 stop both my ears against the curses which you will 
 pour out on your evil genius. At this feast we all philo- 
 sophised, and we were all converted, except me, who cotild 
 not be reckoned a convert, inasmuch as I was myself the 
 converter of the heathen. 
 
 Our flotilla of three boats^the third we were obliged 
 to take in deference to the timidity of the ladies) — got 
 under way about one o'clock in the afternoon of the 20th of 
 March, ran into the stream, gained the open water, and 
 soon after one we were well in sight of the very anther- 
 filaments and spider's-webs on the island. At a quarter-past 
 two we landed — the professor, his wife, and a girl and boy 
 — Melchior — Jean Paul — the Government Counsellor, Ela- 
 min — the lovely Luna — (off goes the first of your curses 
 here !) — the undersigned, and his wife. 
 
 Some Burgundy was then disembarked. At the com- 
 mencement of spring (which was to take place that day at 
 38 minutes past 3 o'clock) we meant to enter upon a 
 " stream of life," coloured and sweetened after a most 
 superlative sort. With the island, Cato, many of us were 
 quite enraptured, and nearly all of us wished we had piaid 
 a visit to this beautiful bowling-green in the Bhine — this 
 pleasure camp amid tLe waves — long before. Luna, elder 
 Cato — if I mistake not thou hast seen, certainly once at 
 
CHAP. XIV.J FLOWEK, FKUIT, AND THOKN PIECES. 409" 
 
 tte very least, that tender soul, wliich ought to dwell in 
 (and heighten the tint of) a white rose in place of a 
 hody — Luna shed tears, half of delight (for they were 
 half of sorrow for everybody who was not there), half of 
 delight not so much at the families of alders upon the 
 rounded hank, or the Lombardy poplars lying trembling 
 in intoxication of bliss in the gentle air which breathed 
 about them, or the sunny green paths, as at all this: 
 together (in the first place), and at the spring sky and 
 the Ehine (which was showing that sky a picture, as it 
 were, of its antipodean sky somewhere over America), and 
 at the peace and gladness of her soul — but (above all) at 
 the Alp in the centre of the island. 
 
 The Alp will be sketched, if an opportunity ofiers, ini 
 this letter. I at once asked Luna where you were. She 
 said, "At the Frankfort Fair." Was she right? 
 
 When a party arrives at a place it is not, like the Anguis 
 Fragilis, to be broken into ten twitching fragments by 
 every touch of chance. Even the ladies kept with us, for 
 I had deprived them of all opportunity of doing anything 
 in the shape of household labour, by the arrangements I 
 had made for the dinner. This Barataria Island was going, 
 to be an intellectual Place d'Armes and theatre of war 
 that day. I love disputation. Intellectual bickerings- 
 further and heighten the happiness of congenial society, 
 just as lovers' quarrels are a renewal of love, and fisticuffs 
 a necessity of Marionette operas. Certain people are like 
 the Moravians, among whom the confessor and penitent 
 change places, each laying a picture of his soul before the 
 other, his own police-notice of an absconded criminal — his 
 own advertisement in the " Hue and Cry " ; and I am like- 
 them. Any blemish or shortcoming which I discover in 
 myself or other people I immediately publish over half 
 the town in a universal German gazette, as ladies do the 
 witnesses' depositions of evidence concerning strangers. 
 For the last three weeks, dear Cato, my soul has been 
 glowing in the brightest sunlight of peace and love, cast 
 upon me by the deceased chief Piqueur (a man who had 
 not a trace of either the one or the other about him) — and 
 now I cannot rest till I entail this precious legacy upois 
 all of you. 
 
410 JEAN PAUL FRIBDRICH KICHTBR. [BOOK ni. 
 
 As Lieutenant de Police of tLe island, I possessed the 
 power of issuing police regulations with respect to the 
 conversation permissible thereon, and I directed the thread 
 of our talk towards the Piqueur in question. But the 
 wajsps came buzzing out of their nests ; the first of them 
 being your brother, Melchior, who drove his sting into 
 the Piqueur's avarice, saying that people who didn't bestow 
 their plunder upon the poor till they were in their own 
 eofiSns, were like pikes who eject their (swallowed) prey 
 when caught themselves ; they should rather do as Judas 
 Iscariot did — cast their pieces of silver into the church 
 before their hanging. The next wasp was your second 
 brother, Jean Paul, who said, " Misers are the only people 
 who haven't had enough of life when they die. Even 
 when they are in the very grip of Death's baud, they 
 would fain grasp hold of money with their own. Like 
 cap-mushrooms, when they are broken off, they cling ter- 
 ribly to the earth's surface with their bleeding moiety." 
 
 " Ah ! " said I, " everyone is a thorough miser as re- 
 gards something or other, I am sorry to say. I cannot 
 now be so hard upon a man who confines himself to morti- 
 fying and chastening Mmselfas I used to be. Where is the 
 extraordinary difference between one of your learned anti- 
 quary mint-assayers who distils, evaporates, and injects 
 all the pleasures of his life into the rust of a collection of 
 coins — and a miser who counts and weighs the specimens 
 in Ma cabinet like so many votes at an election ? Not, 
 in reality, so great a difference as there is between our 
 opinions of the two." I thought I had a fine chance of 
 turning deftly to the subject of the Piqueur at this point, 
 but the entire company called out to me to tell them 
 what o'clock it was. In my capacity of Viceroy, I had 
 disarmed all the islanders of their watches at the landing- 
 place (as if they had been so many swords), that they 
 might pass their day in a blissful eternity, where time was 
 not. The only one allowed to keep his was Paul — and 
 this was because it was one of the new Geneva sort, whose 
 hands always point to 12 o'clock, only telling the real 
 time when one touches a spring. 
 
 It was now past three. In l£irty-eight minutes, spring, 
 that pre-heaven upon earth — that second paradise — would 
 
CHAP. XIV.] FLOWEE, FHUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 411 
 
 make her grand processional progress over the ruins of 
 ilte first. Already the clouds were all cleared away from 
 the sky, spring breezes played coolingly ahout the sun, 
 tbiuning in the blue ; on a vine-clad hill by the Bhine 
 shore, a solo-singer from the great choir of spring — a 
 nightingale — sent on in advance of her — was pouring out 
 her song in a smooth-grown thicket of pruned cherry- 
 tiees ; through the open trellis -work of the boughs 
 we could see the notes vibrate in the feathers of her 
 throat. 
 
 We climbed up the artificial Mount St. Gothard. It was 
 set round with turf-banks and leafy niches ; an oak stood 
 on its summit by way of crown. Man (day-fly, as he is, 
 playing above a ripple of time) cannot do v<rithout 
 watches and date-indicators on the banks of the time- 
 etream. Although every day is a birthday and a new 
 j-ear's day, he must have one of his own into the bargain. 
 Thirty-eight minutes struck in us. And down from the 
 waves of throbbing blue above us came floating a broad 
 breath of breeze, rocking tha swelling grapes and the bare 
 grafts, the delicate young branchlets, and the strong, 
 sharp-pointed winter-corn, and lifting the soaring pigeons 
 higher in their flight. The sun, above Switzerland, 
 looked, in blissful intoxication, at his own face reflected 
 in the sublime glittering ice-mirror of Mont Blanc, part- 
 ing (unaware) day and night into equal halves, as if with 
 two arms of fate, and throwing down equal portions to 
 every land and every ej-e. We sang Goethe's " Hymn to 
 the Spring." The sun sent us down (like dew) from 
 the hill-top to the valley — the earth swelling loose fell 
 rustling at our feet ; and wine (Lethe of life) hid from our 
 sight the misty banks within which it rolled its way — 
 miiroring only heaven and flowers. Clotilda siid (not to 
 us, but to her Luna) — (and here, dear Cato, I am drunk 
 with remembering; and I beg, accordingly, to invite you,- 
 at once, for the 10th of April), " Ah ! dearest, how beautiful 
 the world is sometimes. We ought not to think so 
 poorly of it. Are we not like Orestes in the 'Iphigenia' — 
 fancying we are in exile, though we really are in our own 
 native land." 
 
 With every downward step from the hill we sank back 
 
412 JEAN PAUL FBIEDEIOH KTOHTEK. [bOOK III. 
 
 into the workaday marsh-meadow of life. "What the- 
 hotter are we," cried Melchior, quite angrily, " for all this- 
 splendour in and around us, when to-morrow a single 
 passionate earthquake may hurl down an avalanche of 
 snow-masses upon all' that is warm and blooming in us ? 
 It is the April of the human heart — not the April of the 
 universe — ^that causes me such vexation. We are always 
 at our hardest just after an attendrissement — and moved to 
 tears just after some murderous rage — as earthquakes set 
 warm springs flowing. Now I know quite well that, 
 to-morrow, at the sitting of the council, I shall attack and 
 oppose everybody and everything. Pitiable ! pitiable I 
 And you are not a whit better, riamin." 
 
 " Not a whit," said Plamin, with touching candour. 
 Luna and my wife took the Professor's wife between them 
 (each taking one of her children in her lap), and sat down 
 .upon the green nether slope of the hill, on the sunny side 
 ;of the nightingale. We, however, were too restless to sit 
 down. " Alas ! " (said Jean Paul, walking up and down, 
 with his hands folded and hanging, and his hat thrown 
 away, so that his eyes, at all events, might be higher and 
 freer). " Alas ! is any one a whit better ? We take a vow 
 of universal love to our fellow men whenever we are deeply 
 touched — ^when we have buried some one, or have been 
 thoroughly happy, or have committed some grand trans- 
 gression, or looked long and closely at Nature, or are in- 
 toxicated with love, or some earthly form of intoxication : 
 but we are really only perjurers, not philanthropists, as w© 
 fancy ourselves. We long and thirst for the love of others 
 : — but it is like mercury, it feels and looks like fountain 
 water, and flows and glitters like it^ — but it is cold, dry, 
 and heavy in reality. It is just those very people upon 
 whom Nature has bestowed most gifts (and who, conse- 
 quently, should not covet other people's, but be content 
 with distributing their own), who, like princes, demand the 
 more from their fellow men the more they have to give 
 them, and the less they do give them. Dissensions are the 
 more bitterly painful, the more alike the souls are between 
 whom they take place, just as discords are harsher the 
 nearer they approach the unison. We forgive without 
 reason because we have found fault without reason, for a 
 
CHAP. XIV.] FLOWEE, FRUIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 413 
 
 riglitful and righteous anger imist, of necessity, be ever- 
 lasting. Nothing is a stronger evidence of the miserable 
 subordination of our reason to our ruling passion than the 
 fact that we place such a flat every-day matter as time 
 among the cures for hate, grief, love, &c. ; our impulses 
 are to forget to conquer, or to grow tked of doing so — our 
 wounds are to be sanded over with the Margrave's sympa- 
 thetic powder of drift-sand out of Time's sand-glass ! Too 
 miserable a business altogether ! But can anything make 
 ^ better of it ? Certainly, least of all my complaints of it ! " 
 
 " The fact is," said the serene, gentle, Professor (who 
 only uses a very few pedantic tints in his style of painting), 
 *' feelings of love to our fellow men * are useless without 
 reasons." " So are reasons without feelings," said Paul. 
 
 " Consequently," continued the Professor (for I could 
 not manage to get my Piqueur brought to bear anyhow, 
 but had to keep him idly in reserve), " the two have to be 
 •combined like genius and criticism — of which the former 
 can. produce only master-pieces and scholar-pieces, the 
 latter only something of an everyday sort between the two. 
 What I think is,, that our lack of love arises, not from our 
 coldness, but from a conviction that others do not deserve 
 it. The. qoldeet of men would acquire a greater warmth of 
 feeling for their fellows if they acquired a higher opinion 
 of them." 
 
 " But," asked Clotilda, " must we not forgive even the, 
 wrong done by our enemies ? The rigTit is not matter for 
 forgiYcness." 
 
 "Of course it is not," he answered, but would let hini- 
 self , be no further diverted from his point. " The only 
 •ugliuess and. hatefulness which we can truly experience 
 hatred for is that of a morcd sort." 
 
 * In all this diacussion what we are talking of is not that practical 
 love of our fellow men, and of oui enemies, which expresses itself in 
 ■action, and in refraining from revenge (and which must be easy to 
 every properly constituted person), but that feeling of misanthropy, or 
 of philanthropy (as the case may be), over which the moral sense has 
 ■but little power — of inward love, as distinct from actions ; of secret 
 indignation with sinners and fools. It is easier to sacrifice one's self 
 for people than to love them — easiier to do good to our enemies than to 
 forgive them. The longing of love, as well as its seldomness, have had 
 hut one painter — F. Jakobi : we do not need a stcond. 
 
414 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH EICHTEK. [BOOK III. 
 
 " In opposition to that -view of the question," said Jean 
 Paul, " I might adduce the fierce combats of animals, and 
 nurseries in a state of war ; for in neither of these cases is 
 there any idea of immorality of the enemy, although hatred 
 of him exists. But were I to adduce these cases, I could 
 answer myself —at least, so so. If we directed our hatred 
 against things other than the immoral, we should be just as 
 angry with the hanging branch which strikes us in the face 
 as with the person who broke it so that it should be so placed 
 as to do so. The rage of a chastised child is quite a different 
 thing from the alarmed instinct of self-conservancy — the 
 feeling of avoidance of nitric acid, or of bodily hurt. The 
 former has in it a duplex sense of dislike, the two com- 
 ponents of which are most dissimilar ^the one referring to 
 the cause, the other to the effect. We must distinguish 
 between beings which are capable of moralitj^, and such 
 as are not, in kind — not in degree; those incapable of 
 morality can never be made capable of it by the mere 
 lapse of time, or step by step. Whence, if children at any 
 period of their age were utterly non-moral beings, it would 
 follow that they could never, at any period, begin to become 
 moral beings. In brief, their anger is nothing other than 
 a dim sense of other people's injustice. As to the animals, 
 I don't know what else to say than that there rmist be in 
 them something analogous to our moral sense. Those who 
 (like us) believe them to have immortal souls, must, as a 
 matter of course, concede them some beginnings — some 
 pre-existent germs of morality — although these may be 
 overpowered and kept in the background by their animal 
 natures even to a greater extent than (for instance) con- 
 science is in sleep, drankenness, or insanity. But alas ? 
 all this is night within night! And I hope this obscu- 
 rity will be considered some excuse. Professor, for the 
 manner in which I have obstructed and built out ycmr 
 light." 
 
 " Now," he went on, " since hatred only concerns itselt 
 with mwal defects, how strange it is that we never hate 
 ourselves, even for the gravest moral defects." 
 
 " I think," said Tlamin, that one does sometimes feel the 
 deadliest hatred of one's self, for over-haste." 
 
 "And then," said Jean Paul, "your argument would 
 
CHAP. XIV.J FLOWEK, FRUIT, AKU THORN PIECES. 415 
 
 apply just as well to love — at least it would half apply. 
 Oome, let's hear what you've got to say to that?" 
 
 '' We never hate ourselves," I said. " We despise and 
 ^ty ourselves, when we have done wrong. Although — I 
 must add this — we hate all men, our ownselves excepted, 
 for vices. Can this be right?" " Self-hatred," went on 
 the Professor, " is not possible, for hatred is nothing but 
 the wishing of evil to the object of it — i. e., a desire to 
 punish, not for hettering's sake, but for panishing's. But the 
 most repentant of sinners never can wish himself made the 
 subject of a chastening of this kind ; and even if he could, 
 such a wish would be merely a disguised desire for bettering 
 — i. e., for greater happiness. But to a transgressor other 
 than ourselves we hardly can concede rapidity of conversion, 
 not, at all events, until he has gone through a proper ex- 
 piation. What distinguishes our feeling concerning other 
 people's errors from our feeling concerning our own is a 
 sham self-love. The very minutest particle of hatred 
 desires the unhappiness of its object ; that is what I have 
 got to prove now." 
 
 His own wife here interrupted him with the words, 
 "My heart tells me, as plainly as possible, that I could 
 never wish any serious misfortune to happen to my 
 bitterest enemy — such as money troubles, or anything 
 about her children. I could not bear even the idea of a 
 tear being brought to her eyes on my account." 
 
 " No, I suppose not," he went on. " The better nature 
 within us never wishes its antipode a broken leg, would 
 not leave him without a strip of lint, or a wish for his 
 recovery. But I know that that same ' better nature ' does 
 take a delight in his minor skin-wounds — his being put to 
 confusion, his sleigh slipping down hill backwards, his 
 losing his hair. The gentlest of souls hides, at the back of 
 its tender sympathy with great troubles, its unlender satis- 
 faction with small ones, such as call for condolence (a 
 smaller thing than sympathy'). The tenderest of people, 
 people incapable of inflicting the smallest wound imagin- 
 able on their enemy's skin, are delighted to make a thousand 
 deep ones in his heart." " Ah ! " said Luna, " how can 
 that be possible ? " "I don't think it would be pos- 
 sible," Clotilda answered her, " if the pain of the som 
 
416 JEAN PAUIj FEIEDElCn EICUTEE. [bOOK III. 
 
 had as definite a physiognomy, and as real tears, as that o;f 
 the body." 
 
 ''Exactly," said the professor; "that is j-ust where it-is. 
 To make ourselves feel more gently towards the wicked 
 ■we have only to think of them as delivered w^hoUy over 
 into our hands. For what harm would one do them then ? 
 The moment they aclcnowledged their fanU we would stay 
 the rack, and bid the torture cease. What redoubles our 
 indignation, and renders it everlasting, is the very im- 
 possibility of inflicting any punishment." 
 
 " Yes, that is quite true," said Melchior. " The oftener 
 I read of these two live guillotines of their age. Alba and 
 Philip (whose lips were shears of the Parcse), or of thoae 
 two other mowers of mankind, Marat and Eobespierre, the 
 deeper does the aquafortis of anger etch their condemnar 
 tion into my heart, although death has drawn up their 
 Acts of Amnesty." 
 
 " And yet, after all," I put in (leaving the Piqueur in 
 the rear for the present), " if anybody would deliver over 
 the King and the Duke to you and me here this afternoon, 
 and a couple of caldrons of boiling oil into the bargaitt, 
 I feel quite certain I couldn't throw one of them in — at 
 any rate till the oil had stood a long time in the cold. I 
 should let them off with a good flogging — say 100 lashes, 
 or so. Ah ! what a cast-iron sort of fellow were lie who 
 should not soothe, and comfort with cooling, heialing 
 touch (had he the power) a heart breaking with anguish, 
 a face whereon the worm of suffering was ploughing its 
 tortuous track ! At the same time (1 continued, rapidly ; 
 for I was determined to bring in my Piqueur somehow oy 
 other), where emotion is concerned, the memory of past 
 errors is not the smallest safeguard against new ones." 
 
 " You see, you won't allow me to speak," the Professor 
 broke in. " I still owe you a tremendous number of 
 proofs, and I am most anxious to acquit the debt. Our 
 hatred, being an emotion, always turns every ac<«o« into a 
 wliole life ; every attribute into a personality (or, to speak 
 more accurately, because our only mode of seeing any per- 
 sonality is by its reflection in the mirror of its attributes) 
 converts one attribute into the sum of them. It is only in 
 ■the case of liking — of friendship — that we find it easy to 
 
tJUAP. XIV.] FLOWEK, FEUIT, ANO THOKN PIBOES. 417 
 
 separate the attribute from the personality. Hatred can 
 not do it. Nay, in the case of liking, the converse trans- 
 formation takes place — that of the personality into the 
 attribute. We hate as if the object of our hatred had 
 never possessed any virtues, or inclination to them — 
 neither pity nor truthfulness, love of the young, one 
 single good hour, anything whatever. In brief, since it 
 is with the individuality of the person whose pimishment 
 we are decreeing that we are angry (not with its character- 
 istic of the moment), we make him out to be a wholly 
 wicked being. Yet such a being is not conceivable. The 
 voice of conscience speaking in that being would be of 
 itself one goodness in him, even though it spoke in vain ; 
 the pain of that conscience would be another ; each joy 
 and each impulse of his life another." 
 
 " Ah ! how delightful," said Luna, " that there is nobody 
 80 utterly bad; nobody whom one would have to hate 
 altogether." 
 
 " You see," he continued, " it cannot be the me of a 
 person that we hate ; for the me is still the same me when 
 it improves, and wins our regard." 
 
 In the warmth of our discussion we were losing sight 
 altogether of one of the two concave mirrors which distort 
 other people's moral distortions for us even more wildly 
 than they are distorted to begin with — I mean, our own 
 egotism. Often, when I have seen and heard women 
 squabbling in the market-place (women of whom one was 
 just as good as the other, and with just as good an opinion 
 of herseK), and one hurling her invectives with delight, 
 like a red-hot stone, at the other's head, which seethed 
 and swelled in waves of anger around that stone, while 
 a third woman kept calm and cool in the midway-path 
 between, I have been ashamed of the human race — 
 ashamed that the self-same reproach, or immorality, 
 which ought to produce exactly the same effect upon all 
 the three, should make too strong an impression on the 
 one, too weak a one on the other, none whatever on 
 the third. 
 
 Paul pointed to the second of these distorting mirrors — 
 our bodily senses. For these render the vinegar of hatred 
 doubly bitter by throwing into its fermenting-vat these 
 
 U. 2 E 
 
418 . JEAN PAUL FKIEDBICH EICHTER. [bOOK IIT, 
 
 parts of the enemy wliicli ihey take cognizance of-rliis 
 clothes, movements, gestures, tones, &c. 
 
 Here we reached the Gordian knot which only I could 
 cut with the Piqueur. "Who is to save us from these 
 bodily senses?" I inquired (with a certain amount of 
 hopeful expectancy). Melchior answered, " I do not allow 
 them to influence my philanthropy, at aU events. They 
 are the straw which feeds the flame under that ascending, 
 windbag balloon, the heart." 
 
 Jean Paul thrust me back from the Gordian knot. " I," 
 he said, " have an admirable sweetener at all times iui 
 readiness to apply when a sinner embitters my senses- I 
 take him, and (like a victorious enemy) strip all the 
 clothes off him, not leaving him so much as his hat or his 
 wig. When once I've got him standing there before me, 
 cold and wretched as any corpse (I mean, of course, iik 
 imagination), I begin to feel sorry for the scoundrel. But 
 this is not enough. I have got to sweeten myself a good- 
 deal more than this ; so I proceed to slit him up with a 
 long, slicing cut from top to bottom into three cavities (as. 
 if he were a carp), so that I can see his heart and brain 
 pulsating. The mere sight of a red human heart (Danaid's 
 bucket for happiness — safe storehouse of so many a sorrow)^ 
 makes my own soft and heavy ; and I have often not for- 
 given a street robber till the Professor has been shewing 
 us his heart and brain in the anatomical theatre. ' Thou; 
 unhappy, sorrowful heart,' I have always found myself 
 thinking, with deep, sympathetic emotion, ' how many a- 
 blood-billow has gone surging through thee, glowing and 
 freezing in the same moment.' But if all this process 
 failed to have its effect, I should proceed to extremities-, 
 and smite my enemy dead ; then take the naked, fluttering, 
 trembling soul — like an evening moth — out of its brain- 
 chamber chrysalis, and, holding up the quivering night- 
 creature between my forefinger and thumb, gaze at it 
 without a trace of rancour left in me." 
 
 " To picture one's enemy to one's self as unclothed, or 
 disembodied," said I, "so as to be able to put up with 
 him, as though he were dead (perhaps that is the chief 
 reason why we love the dead), is just the operation 1 
 perform too. I often try to soften the unpleasant effect 
 
CHAP. XIV.] FLOWER, FRUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 419 
 
 ■which some repnlsive physiognomy produces upon me by 
 thinking of it as scalped, and with its skin folded back." 
 
 ■And now I determined, seriously and in earnest, that 
 the sceptre and throne insignia of the conversation, should 
 no more depart from my hands. Wherefore I commenced 
 as follows : " But who is to provide us with the time and 
 the power, not only to remember, but to act upon, this 
 precious and reliable principle, or rule of conduct, right in 
 the thick of this world's Pyrrhic war-dance, and the rapid- 
 evolutions of our emotions ? Who is to stoke the aether- 
 flame of philanthropy wilih a sufficient supply of com- 
 bustible matter, seeing that there are such hosts of people- 
 continually drowning it out, smothering it up, and build- 
 ing it in! Who is to make tip to us for the lack of a 
 gentle, quiet temperament ? Who, or what ? " 
 
 Just as I was going to fix the Piqueur on to this lance- 
 shaft by way of point, the cold dinner was brought, and 
 the Professor's wife went to fetch her children. For the 
 dinner had to be over before sunset ; because, like a fresh 
 ■supply of green firewood, it would drown out the flame of 
 enthusiasm for a time, and break the tinity of its vertical, 
 purple fire pyramid. The company, therefore, waited in 
 vain for me to go on with what I had to say. I shook my 
 head, expressing, by nods, that I should do so whien wo^ 
 were all together again, and sitting down. 
 
 While we were at dinner I was able to set up my speak'- 
 ing machine, and set it a-going at my ease. 
 
 '"I asked you once or t-wice before dinner," I com- 
 menced, "who can invigorate and quicken our principles 
 of love to our fellows, and set them fully to work ? I 
 answer, the chief Piqueur can ; only I'm afraid I've made 
 so many false starts, and baulked in so many of my runs 
 before making this grand jump of mine, that I have led 
 you to entertain far greater expectations concerning it 
 than it (or I) may be able to fulfil. A day or two before 
 the stump-end of the chief Piqueur's life-candle fell 
 down and went guttering out in its candlestick-socket, he 
 sent for me to the side of his bed of suffering and begged 
 me — not to prescribe for him, but — to make a thorough 
 inspection of his house. He drew my bead down close to 
 Lis wretched pillow, and said, ' You see, doctor. Death has 
 
 2 e2 
 
420 JEAN PATH FEIEDEICH EICHTEE. [bOOK III. 
 
 got his hunting-knifo at my throat. But I'm not sorry to 
 go, and what little I leave behind me in the shape of 
 worldly gear goes all to the poor. It's but little that I 
 have ever thought of scraping together for myself, and that 
 is a comfort to think op now. It's for the ipoor that I 
 have screwed and saved, pinched and pared ; and when a 
 man has done that it's a pleasure to him to make his will ; 
 he knows it will be paid back again elsewhere. But there's 
 one hard stone at my heart still. You see I have neither 
 chick nor child belonging to me, and when the breath is 
 out of my body, the old woman who keeps my room in 
 order will be in the house by herself. She's an honest 
 body enough, but as poor as a church mouse, and pretty 
 sure to help herself to something before the seals are put 
 on my efifects. Now, doctor, you are a man who are just 
 as good to the poor as I am myself; you often prescribe 
 for them gratis ; I want to ask you to go through the house 
 with the notary (I don't trust Mm a bit more than I do 
 the old woman), take an inventory of what there is, and 
 have a regular notarial instrument drawn up concerning 
 my property. I've left the whole of it to the Poor-house 
 and the Institution for Destitute Gamekeepers. The 
 notary must begin with my breeches under the pillow 
 here, because my purse is there.' 
 
 " A man whose stubble Death is in the very act of turn- 
 ing up with his plough, has, upon me, a more powerful 
 claim than that of the first request — that of the last. I 
 came the next day, bringing with me the notary, and also 
 my dislike to the dying man and his distrustful suspicions. 
 With gay indifference I helped to protocol the effects in the 
 sick-room — his shooting-jacket, worn into shining patches 
 by his Did game-bag — his old guns and knives — even such 
 matters as a leather over-shoe for his thumb, and a long 
 mummy bandage for his nose, which he had worn on 
 occasions when he had hurt himself in these members 
 with his gun. 
 
 " As we went through the other silent chambers — 
 empty snail-shells of his shrivelled, dried -up life — my 
 frozen blood began to thaw within me, and to move in 
 warm, light mercury-globules. But when I came to the 
 lumber-room, with the notary, and turred over tlie rag- 
 
CHAP. XIV. J FLOWEE, FRUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 421 
 
 fair of his old night-shirts — (caterpillar cases and blood- 
 sbirts of his feverish nights, in which I seemed still to see 
 him groaning and thirsting) — and his Paihehrief* and his 
 name copied from thence with all its flourishes on to his 
 pointer's collar — and the picture of his pretty mother 
 with him as a smiling infant in her lap — and his wife's 
 bridal garland of wire, covered with green silk — (Oh ! for 
 goodness' sake do not interrupt me with talk — I've had 
 enough of that. Heaven knows). When I took in my 
 hands these opera-costumes, these theatrical properties, 
 in which the sick player down-stairs had performed his 
 prdbe-roJle "f of a Harpaxus for the benefit of the poor — not 
 only did the poor fellow's moral emptiness of treasury, and 
 miserable rate of monthly salary, strike me with pain, but, 
 moreover, I wished him no heavier suffering, no severer 
 pwnishment, than he would wish for himself, were he really to 
 recent in good earnest before his plunge into the depths of the 
 soil. No, not so much, for the matter of that. Therefore, 
 my dislike to him was gone. For I put myself in his 
 place — not outwardly only, as people generally do, fancy- 
 ing themselves in another person's physical place with 
 their own souls, their own wishes, habitudes, &c. — but 
 inwardly — in his mind, his youth, wishes, sufferings, 
 thoughts. 
 
 " ' Poor Piqueur' I said, "as I went down-stairs ; ' I have 
 no more satiric pleasure now over your gnawing suspicion, 
 your errors, your self-shooting covetousness, your hungry 
 avarice. You have got to live through a long eternity 
 with that self, that " me " of yours, the best way you can, 
 just as I have with mine. You have got to rise with that 
 self of yours at the Eesurrection, and go about with it, and 
 look after it, and care for its welfare. And, of course, you 
 can't but be fond of yourself, just as I am of myself, and put 
 up with all that self s defects and shortcomings whether 
 you will or not. Go in peace then into the other world, 
 where the broken glasses of your harmonica of life will be 
 replaced with fresh-tuned ones — in the great home of all 
 the spirits ! ' 
 
 * A paper, printed with symbols, &c., in which the present for n 
 godchild is wrapped, 
 t Part which a player selects as a specimen of his powers. 
 
422 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH EICHTEE. [bOOK III. 
 
 " The old woman met us on the stairs crying oat that 
 the man was dying. I went to his bed-side, looked upon 
 his cold, yellow, senseless form, and saw that he would 
 very soon throw off his last stage-dress, his body. Next 
 day the tolling bell announced that he had returned to the 
 dust — gone back into the ground — that stage dressing-room, 
 of souls and flowers. (And we are rung off and on to that 
 stage, as well as others.) 
 
 " Meanwhile I made an experiment with my modified 
 and mildened system of treatment, upon the poor notary 
 devil;- the day after I tried it on the jurists who came 
 from the college. (Jean Paul ! communicate youi- idea to 
 us by-arid-bye— do not interrupt me just now) — ^I did this, 
 I say, and found that I was able to establish a heart-peace 
 even with the plebeians among them — who dishonour 
 their calling — the only really free one in all the body 
 politic. For in the cases of these lawyers, and those of my 
 own medical- colleagues from whose breasts I have been 
 so often in such a hurry to cut off, and melt do-wn, the 
 medals of honour which they have cast for themselves, I 
 have had merely to take away the roof from over their 
 heads, lift the rafters from their walls, and bare their 
 houses to the four winds of heaven. Then I could look 
 in and see everything there — their housekeeping, -their 
 unoffending wives, their sleep (i.e., mock-death), sick- 
 nesses, sorrows, birth-days, and funeral-days, and this 
 reconciled me to them ! Of a truth, to love a man, I have 
 only to think of his children, his parents-^-the love he 
 feels and inspires. One can easDy perform this philan- 
 thropic transmigration of soul at any moment, without 
 help of the balloon of phantasy, or the diving-bell of prd- 
 found reflection. Good heavens ! it does seem hard (and a 
 shame and disgrace into the bargain) that it should hav« 
 taken me thirty years of my life to understand properly 
 what it is that self-love is really driving at-^my own and 
 everybody else's — what it wants is, to be surrounded with 
 mere repetitions of its own ' me.' It insists upon every 
 infant on earth being a parson's son (as I am) — that 
 everybody shall have lost, and gained, noble friends — that 
 everybody shall be an m.d., and have studied at G6tti::.gen 
 — that his name shall be Sebastian, and that he shall be 
 
«HAP. XIV.] FLOWEE, FRUIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 423 
 
 an overseer of mines, and write his life in forty-fiv« dog- 
 post-days — in brief, that this world shall contain a thou- 
 sand million Victors instead of one. I beg that everybody 
 may send spies into his soul, to look carefully about them 
 and see whether it be not the case that there are thousands 
 ■of instances in which what we hate a man for is, either 
 that he is as fat as a prize pig, or as lean as a stick of 
 ■vermicelli — or that he is a district secretary, or, a Eomaa 
 Catholic watchman in Augspurg, and wears a coat white 
 on the one side, and green on the other — or that he eats 
 !his veal with melted butter ; * (or, at all events, hate them 
 more for these reasons ; for when we are indifferent to 
 people, all their external characteristics, beautiful or ugly, 
 merely increase our indifference). People are so deep sunk 
 in their dear selves that everybody yawns at the merm, 
 of everybody else's favourite dishes, but expects them to be 
 interested when lie reads out Ma to them." 
 
 That feathered echo, the nightingale, was singing to 
 us phrases of the music of the spheres, to us inaudible 
 until thus repeated to us by her. But I had my rapid 
 descent from my Mont Cenis to finish, and could but give 
 utterance to my applause (of the bird and her music) by a 
 hasty nod. "Heavenly ! Elysian ! I've been hearing it 
 •every now and then. But, one thing more. Since my 
 sentimental journey in other people's souls, I have been 
 happier and fatter than I used to be, in ball-rooms, ante- 
 rooms, and large assemblages (hot lark-spits which roasted 
 all the fat out of a Swift). This enduring of transgressors 
 includes a greater enduring still of fools and dunces, 
 although . the great world makes war on these three 
 tolerated sects in just the contrary ratio. 
 
 'f The amnesty thus granted to humanity makes the 
 ■duty of loving more easy to perform ; moreover, it renders 
 the deep blissfulness of friendship and love more justi- 
 fiable ; for the glow, the fire of the latter often vitrifies 
 and calcines the heart towards the rest of mankind. And 
 this is the reason why the last and best fruit. . . ." 
 
 Clotilda looked inquiringly here, as if begging to be 
 
 * A Frenchman vowed he could not abide the English: "Faroe 
 flu'ils versent du beurre fondu sur.leur veau loti." 
 
424 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH EIOHTEE. [bOOK IH. 
 
 allowed one word of remonstrance with me for forgetting 
 to put myself in the place of those whose transformation 
 I was thus extolling. I reddened, and paused. " This," 
 ohserved Jean Paul, " is the reason why a concert-room 
 audience cries out the loudest against noise or disturb- 
 ance just during the loveliest adagios — when people are 
 most deeply touched — and swear and weep at the same 
 time." 
 
 " I cannot help heing ashamed of an experience of my 
 own," said Clotilda. " The other day I cried so at reading 
 Silly's letters (in Allwill's Papers) that I was obliged to 
 put the book down. Then I went to the casino with 
 my head full of what I had been reading — and I dare 
 not tell you what hard opinions I entertained, several 
 times that very evening, of several people of my ac- 
 quaintance. I expected of them that they should all be 
 in exactly the same mood of mind as myself — although, 
 of course, they had not just come from reading Silly's 
 letters." 
 
 " That is exactly what I was coming to," concluded I. 
 " The last and best fruit, which ripens late in a soul ever 
 warm, is tenderness towards the hard — patience with the 
 impatient — kindly feeling for the selfish — and philan- 
 thropy towards the misanthropic." 
 
 It is a very odd, thing, beloved Cato, but Jean Paul 
 has just come and told me a murder-tale of human ini- 
 quity, which goes hissing through my heart like a red-hot 
 iron. All my theories stand bright and clear as stars around 
 my soul, but I can do nothing save look inactively down 
 upon the billows in which my blood is foaming, heated by 
 this subterranean earth-fire, and wait until - they cool 
 down and subside. Alas ! we poor, poor mortals ! Jean 
 Pa,ul, who knew the story the day before yesterday, and 
 had consequently all that time to put the cooling process 
 in practice in advance of me, is going to take charge oi 
 the picture exhibition of our insular flower-pieces in my 
 stead, and add a postscript to this. "Which is well, for 
 to-day I really could not do it. By the 10th of April the 
 air will have cooled ; then you are sure to be coming, as 
 the French election meetings begin then. We must keep 
 the " settling weeks" of your great feast and fairtide hero' 
 
CBAP. Xir.J FLOWER, FRUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 425 
 
 Alas ! in what a disquiet condition have I to stop writing 
 to you. You will go on reading, but not 
 
 Your 
 
 Victor. 
 
 POSTSCETPT BY JEAN PAUL. 
 Dear Brother. 
 
 Our Victor's virtuous indignation will soon be over 
 and past. The reason why he, and I too, now, have made 
 a written confession of the cure of our disposition to cen- 
 sure our fellows, is, that we may be compelled to be exces- 
 sively ashamed of ourselves if ever we chide for more than 
 a minute, or hate for more than a moment. This all 
 embracing love demands a sacrifice, which is made with' 
 greater hesitation than one would expect — the sacrifice of 
 the pleasure of being satisfied with one's self — which 
 anger adds to the contemplation of other people's fault» 
 (and satire to the contemplation of other people's follies) — 
 by way of a sweetening ingredient, and whose place is 
 taken by a pure and unalloyed regret at the frequency 
 with which the disease shifts its seat, and at the chroni- 
 city of the bleeding of the wounds and scars of helplesS' 
 man. 
 
 However, for the present, what I would fain do is to steer 
 our floating island, and its blessed twilight, close up ta 
 your view. 
 
 The sun was sinking towards the cloud Alps, and glowing, 
 white over France in the west as if it should shortly drop 
 down on its plains as a gleaming shield of freedom, or fall 
 into its billowy ocean as a wedding-ring between heaveii 
 and earth. The shades of evening were already overflow- 
 ing the first two steps of the hill, and the darkening Bhine 
 ^emed to be passing an arm of night around the earth.^ 
 We ascended our little steps as the sun descended his great 
 ones, seeming, as we ascended, to rise from his burning 
 grave with the face of a saint at the Eesurrection. The 
 hill lifted up our eyes and our souls. Eemembering my 
 shortcomings I took Victor's hand, and said, " Ah ! deac 
 Victor ! could it but come to pass that one could make a 
 
426 JEAN PAUL FEIEDKICH KICHTEK. [BOOK HI. 
 
 treaty of peace with all mankind, and with one's own self — 
 if one's shattered heart could absorb and retain, from out the 
 leaven of the hating and hated world, nothing hut the 
 sweet, mild, life-sap of love — as the oyster, amid mud and 
 slime, takes nothing save bright pure water into his house. 
 Ah ! if one but knew that such an event were about to 
 oome to pass of a truth, an evening of happiness such as 
 this would refresh and fill one's thirsting breast (all cracked 
 with thirst and dryness) — would still the everlasting sigh." 
 Victor answered (not looking round, but keeping his glow- 
 ing and beglowed face — which his loving heart suffused 
 with a brighter tint — turned to the sun, now burning 
 half sunk in the earth), " Perhaps," he said, " that time 
 may come; a time when we shall all be happy when a 
 human being smiles — even should he not deserve it — whert' 
 we shall speak kindly to every one — not by way of a 
 mere sacrifice to the laws of polite society, but for very 
 love — and there will be no difficulties, no complications, 
 for hearts which will no longer have any inward annoy- 
 a.nce to conceal. To-day the spring sun rests upon the 
 world like the eye of a mother, and shines warm upon 
 •every heart, the wicked as well as the good. Yes, thou 
 Eternal One, we here now give our hands and our hearts 
 to thy whole creation, and no longer hate anything which 
 thou hast made." We were overpowered, and we em- 
 laraced with tears, and no words, in the first darkening of 
 the night. Over the sun's burial place stood the zodiacal 
 light, a red grave pyramid, flaming unmoved up into the, 
 silent deep of blu'^. ' . 
 
 The City of God which hangs displayed on high above 
 our earth, built on the aich of the Milky Way, appeared' 
 from out the endless distances with all its shining sun- 
 lights. 
 
 We came down from the hOl — each spot of earth was a 
 hill just then ; an unseen hand lifted our souls on high 
 above the dark vapour-cLrcle, and they looked down as if 
 from alps, seeing nothing save gleaming peaks of other 
 mountain ranges — for all the mean, all that was not the 
 high, all graves, petty goals, and life careers of humanity, 
 were veiled in heavy mist. 
 
 We lost each other amongst the paths, but in our hearts 
 
CHAP. XIV.] FLOWEK, FRUIT, AifD THOEN PIECES. 427 
 
 we were all togetlier. We met again, but the silence in 
 our souls was not broken, for eacli heart beat just as did 
 all the others, and there was no difference, save the being 
 alone, between a prayer and an embrace. 
 
 The scattered flames of our emotion had gradually 
 merged into one glowing sun sphere, as the ancients 
 believed that the fluttering after-midnight fires thickened 
 ere morning into a sun. * 
 
 ■ Btft I, a stranger, alas ! in this paradise stood beneath 
 the leafless branches, sad, and alone, beside the dark-blue 
 Ehine stream where the stars were mirrored — it glided, 
 with gently heaving wavelets, over the German soil, 
 Ijinding two great republics f together, like some heavenly 
 band ; and to me it seemed as though the thirst, the 
 fire, of a breast no broader even than mine could be 
 quenched with nothing less than the waters of this great 
 river. Alas! we are all like this. In the transient clafep 
 «f our little grandeurs and blisses, we long to rest, and die, 
 upon something great. We long to cast ourselves into the 
 depths of the heavens when we see them glitter and sparkle 
 above us — or down upon the many-tinted earth, when her 
 flowers and grasses wave — or into the endless river, flowing 
 as if from out the past onwards into the future. 
 
 Our ladies and the children had gone away — departing 
 in silence from this anchorage of hours so happy — I saw 
 them as they floated over the wavelets, singing like swans, 
 and dropping spring flowers into the ripples, that they 
 might float back as souvenirs to us upon our island shore. 
 The children were sleeping softly in their arms, between, 
 the glories of the heaven and of the earth, lulled by the 
 arms, the songs, and the ripples. 
 
 When it was 12 o'clock, and the first morning of spring 
 was come, Victor summoned us all to the hill, we knew 
 not wherefore. All around and beneath us was the musio 
 of the rush of the Ehine, and through it came gliding clear 
 the bright spring-melody of the nightingale ; the stars of 
 the twelfth hour sank, drop by drop, into the darkened 
 grave of the sun, and went paling out among the grey 
 ashes of the western clouds. Suddenly a straight, beautiful 
 
 ♦ 'Fomp. Mel. deS. O.' i. 18. •» Switzerland and Holland. 
 
428 JEAN PAUL FRIEDEICH KICHTEE. [bOOK III. 
 
 flame shot up in the west, and music came palpitating 
 through the darkness. 
 
 " Do you not think of your France," said Victor, " the 
 first hour of day is breaking for her this 2l8t of March — 
 the day when the six thousand primary assemblies form 
 themselves, like stars, into one constellation, that one law 
 may brrst into being from out a million hearts." 
 
 As I looked up to the sky, the Milky Way struck me 
 as being the beam of the balance of hidden destiny, in 
 whose weighing-pans (which are worlds) the broken, 
 shattered, bleeding nations are weighed out for eternity. 
 Theser destiny scales waver up and down as yet, because 
 it was only a century or two ago that the weights were 
 put into them. 
 
 We drew closer together, and (inspired by the night 
 and the music) said, " Thou, poor country ! may thy sun 
 and thy day rise higher ere long, and cast away the blood- 
 shirt of its morning red. May the higher genius w^ipe 
 away the blood from thy hands, and the tears from thine 
 eyes ! Oh ! may that genius build, support, and guard 
 for ever the Grand Freedom Temple which is vaulted over 
 thee like a second heaven : but also comfort every mother 
 and every father, every child and every wife — and dry all 
 eyes which weep for the beloved, crushed hearts which 
 have bled and fallen, and now lie under that temple as 
 basement stones." 
 
 What I am going to say now can only be said to my 
 brother, for nobody else would pardon it. Victor and I 
 got into a boat, which was made fast with a rope to the 
 bank, and which was drifting about with the current. 
 We worked ourselves back to the bank, and then let the 
 boat drift northwards again upon the ripples. In our 
 souls (as in the world without us) sadness and exaltation 
 were strangely blent : the music on the bank came and 
 went — tones and stars rose and fell. The vault of heaven 
 showed in the Ehine like some shattered bell, and up 
 above us the dome of the temple wherein dwelleth Eternity 
 lay in calm and motionless rest, with all its unchanging 
 suns. From the eastward the spring breathed upon us, 
 and the tree skeletons in the churchyard of the winter 
 felt the presage of a near resurrection. Of a sudden 
 
CHAP. XIV.J FLOWER, FEUIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 429 
 
 Victor said— "It feels to me as though the river here 
 were the stream of Time — our fluctuating life is carried 
 along upon the waves of both towards the midnight." 
 Here my brother called to me from the island, " Brother, 
 come into harbour and sleep ; it is between one and two 
 o'clock." 
 
 This fraternal voice, coming to me athwart the music 
 •of the wavelets, suddenly brought a new world — perhaps 
 the under-world — into my open soul. For a lightning 
 ■flash of memory gleamed in a moment over all my dim 
 being, reminding me that it was on this very night two- 
 «,nd-thirty years ago that I had made my entry upon this 
 overclouded earth, shrouded with daily nights — and that 
 this hour, between one and two o'clock, in which my 
 ■brother was calling me into haven and to sleep, was the 
 hour of my birth (which so often deprives man of both). 
 
 There come to us moments of twilight in which it 
 seems as though day and night were in the act of dividing 
 — as if we were in the very process of being created or 
 annihilated ; the stage of life and the spectators fly back 
 out of view, our part is played out, we stand far off, 
 in darkness and alone, but we have still got on our theatre 
 •dress, and we look at ourselves in it, and ask, " What is 
 it that thou art, now, my me ! " When we thus ask our- 
 selves this, there is, beyond ourselves, nothing of great or 
 of firm — everything has turned to an endless cloud of 
 night (with rare and feeble gleams within it), which 
 keeps falling lower and lower, and heavier with drops. 
 Only high up above the cloud shines a resplendence — 
 and that is God ; and far beneath it a minute speck of 
 light — and that is a human " Me "! 
 
 The heart is made of heavy earth, and therefore it 
 cannot long endure such moments. I passed on to those 
 sweeter seasons in which the full, tear-intoxicated heart 
 neither can, nor will, do aught but simply weep. I 
 had not the courage to drag my dear Victor Jown from 
 the sublime region in which he was to my trifling petti- 
 nesses — but I asked him to remain beside me for a little 
 time in this stillness which lay so silently upon the dark 
 stream as it went flowing toward midnight and the south, 
 Then I leant and pressed myself fondly to his side— and 
 
430 JEAN PAUL FEIBDEICH EICHTER. [BOOK III^ 
 
 my little tears fell unseen into the great river — as though, 
 it had been the great stream of Time itself, into whicb 
 all eyes drop their tears, and so many thousand hearts- 
 their blood-drops — for all which it neither swells nor 
 flows the faster. 
 
 I thought as I gazed at the Khine, " And thus, too, the 
 dancing, billowy current of Life goes flowing on its course 
 from out its source — hidden like the Nile's. How little, 
 as ; yet, have I done, or enjoyed ! Our deserts, and our 
 enjoyments, what petty things they are ! Our metamorphoses 
 are greater ; our heads and our hearts go into the ground 
 irrecognisable — altered a thousandfold — like the head of 
 the man with the iron mask.* Ay ! and did we but 
 change ! but we change so little in the earth, or even in 
 ourselves. Every moment is to us the goal of all that 
 have come before it. We take the seed of life for the 
 harvest of it — the honey-dew on the ears for the sweet- 
 fruit — and we chew the flowers, like cattle ! Ah ! thou 
 great God ! what a night lieth around our sleep ! we fall 
 and rise with closed eyelids, and fly about blind, and- in 
 a deep slumber." f 
 
 My hand was hanging into the water, and the cool 
 ripples buoyed it up and down. I thought, " How straight 
 and immovable the little light within us bums, amid the 
 blasts of Nature's storm ! Everything around me con- 
 tends and clashes together with gigantic might. The 
 stream seizes upon the islands and the cliffs — the night- 
 wind comes upon the river, and stalks across it, thrusting 
 its wavelets back, and wages its strife with the forests—^ 
 even up there in the tranquil blue, worlds are working 
 against worlds — the eternal, endless mights flowing and 
 rushing, like rivers, one against another, they come 
 together in whirl and roar — and on the face of that eternal 
 whirl the little worlds float eddying round the sun-vortex ; 
 nay, those shimmering constellations themselves rising 
 zenithwards with that grand and gentle peace and calm — 
 
 * Which was so altered in appearance after his death by innume- 
 rable wounds, that they masked it as effectually as the iron one had 
 done. 
 
 t There is a kind of sea-bird which sleeps on the wing, or floats up 
 and down ; and the motion of the sea is often what awakes it. 
 
CIJAP. XIV.J FLOWEE, FEUIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 431 
 
 what are they but mountain ranges of raging sun-vol- 
 canoes, stretching into infinity beyoni the reach of mind 
 to ; follow. And yet the human spirit lies at rest amid 
 this storm, peaceful as a quiet moon above a windy night. 
 In me, at this moment, all is gentle peace. I see my own 
 ijttle life-brook running iby me, falling, with all the rest, 
 into the river of Time. The clear-eyed soul looks through 
 the, raging blood-rivers which are flowing round it, and 
 Ijhrongh the storms which darken and obscure it, andE 
 sees, beyond them all, quiet meadows, gentle, peaceful 
 waters, moon-shimmer, and a lovely, beautiful, tranquil, 
 placid, peaceful angel slowly wandering there." Yes, 
 yes; within my soul there was a quiet Good Friday—^ 
 ,,wind-still, rain-free, and mild — neither cold nor over- 
 warm — ^though shrouded in a tender cloud. 
 
 But a clear consciousness of rest is speedily the undoing 
 thereof. I saw, floating near the island, three hyacinths 
 which Clotilda had dropped into the wavelets as she went 
 away. " Now, in this, thy birth-hour," I said to myself, 
 " the ocean of eternity is washing thousands of little hearts- 
 on to the stony shore of this world ; how will it be with 
 them one day when their birthday feast comes round ? 
 And what are your countless brothers who, with you, came 
 thirty-two years ago into this vapour-ball, thinking now ? 
 Perhaps some terrible sorrow makes them think with bitter- 
 ness of their first hour. Perhaps they sleep now — as I have 
 slept — and must again — only deeper, deeper." And then 
 8,11 my younger and older friends, now sleeping that deeper 
 sleep, fell heavy upon my broken breast. 
 
 " I know, I think," my Victor said, " what you are- 
 reflebting on so silently, and regretting so mutely." I 
 answered " No/' and then I told him all. 
 
 Then we went quickly back, and I put my arms about 
 my other brother, and my heart went out in longing 
 towards thee. At length we took our departure from this 
 building-place of a more peaceful system of doctrine for 
 our hearts — this quiet island ; and the lofty hill — grand 
 pedestal of the vases of our joy-flowers, chancel of the 
 great temple, light-house tower in our haven of rest — 
 seemed to gaze long after us, the hanging garden of ous 
 souls lying upon it in starry light. 
 
432 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH EIOHTEE. [BOOK III. 
 
 And as we came to the store, Hespenis, as star of the 
 morning (spark which springs and shines so near the 
 sun), rose up above the morning mists, and earlier than 
 even the Aurora of rnoming, proclaimed his sire's approach. 
 And as we thought that he shines, too, as the star of evening 
 upon our nights here below, and yet adorns the east, and 
 the after-midnight hours with the first of the glittering 
 pearls of dew, each said to his gladsome heart, " And so 
 shall all the evening stars of this our life shine upon us as 
 «tars of morning at a future day." 
 
 Think thou, too, of morning, my brother, when thou art 
 looking upon the even ; and when a sun is setting for 
 thee, turn thee about and thou mayest see a moon rising 
 in the east. The moon gives warrant that the sun is 
 shining still — as Hope says, there still is happiness. But 
 Kiome now soon to thy Victor — and to 
 
 Thy Brother, 
 
 J. P. 
 
 EKD OF BOOK lU. 
 
BOOK lY. 
 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 
 KOSA VON METEEN— TONE-ECHOES AND AFTER BREEZES FROM' 
 THE LOVELIEST OF ALL NIGHTS — LETTERS OF NATHALIE ANy 
 FIRMIAN — TABLE-TALK BY LEIBGEBEE. 
 
 If on some dewy, warm and starry night of spring the 
 miners in some salt mine were to have their great pent- 
 house-roof of earth lifted away from over their heads, and 
 find themselves thus, of a sudden, brought out from their 
 confined, candle-lit cellar into the wide, dim, sleeping-hall 
 of nature — out of their subterranean stillness in among the 
 breezes, the perfumes, the whisperings of the spring — these 
 miners would be exactly in Firmian's case, whose here- 
 tofore prisoned, silent, and serene soul the night just past 
 had driven out of its prison with might, darkening it withi 
 new sorrows and joys, and a whole new world. Heinrich 
 maintained a most speaking silence concerning the night 
 in question, and, on the other hand, Firmian betrayed a 
 mute hunting after speech. Strive as he might to fold 
 those wings of his (which had been stretched all moist from, 
 under their wing-covers on that foregoing night for a 
 first time), they would not fold quite short enough to go 
 back under them again. Matters got to feel very oppres- 
 sive and sultry for Leibgeber after a time. On that 
 previous night they had come back in perfect silence to 
 Bayreuth and to bed, and he wearied at the thought of all- 
 the demi-shades and demi-tints which would have to be 
 got ready on the palette before so much as four bold touches 
 could be given to the picture of the night. 
 
 Perhaps there is nothing more regrettable than that we 
 do not all have the hooping-cough at one and the same 
 time — or are not all sufiering the sorrows of Werther — or' 
 are not all twenty-one. or sixty-one — or have not all hypo^ 
 
 Q. 2f 
 
434 JEAN PAUL FKIEDBIOH EICHTEE. [bOOK IV, 
 
 chondria — or are not all spending our honeymoons — or 
 indtilging in games of banter. How charming it ■would 
 foe (were we all choristers singing in the same coughing- 
 tntti) to find everybody else in just the same condition aa 
 ourselves — and put up with them therefore, and forgive 
 in them that in which they were just like us! But as 
 things really are — now when the one coughs to-day, and 
 the other not till to-morrow (the simultaneous company- 
 coughing in church always excepted); when one has to 
 be taking dancing-lessons while another is saying his 
 prayers in the conventicle; when one father's daughter 
 is being held up at the font while the other's son is being 
 lowered into his little grave ; — now, when destiny is always 
 striking on the hearts about us chords quite unrelated to 
 ifche key of our own, or, at any rate, superfluous sixths, 
 major sevenths, minor seconds; — now, as things are, in 
 this universal lack of unison and harmony, what can be 
 expected but a screeching cat-charivari — and, if we can't 
 ihave a little melody, we must be content with a little 
 cerpeggio-ing up and down. 
 
 By way of a fever for conversation, or pump-handle 
 wherewith to force a drop or two up from the heart, Leib- 
 geber caught hold of Pirmian's hand, and embraced it 
 softly and warmly with all his fingers. He put one or 
 two unimportant questions concerning what walks and 
 expeditions they should think of for the day. But he had 
 not foreseen that this hand-clasp would be the means of 
 landing him in deeper difficulties of embarrassment, — for 
 he found that it was now incumbent on him to keep a 
 control on his hand as well as on his tongue — and he 
 wouldn't let Firmiaii's hand drop all in a moment, like a 
 {hot potato, but found it necessary to let it out of his clasp 
 (Igr a gradual diminuendo. This species of careful watch 
 over his feelings was a process which made Leibgeber 
 l)lush with shame, and drove him nearly frantic; and, 
 indeed, he would have thrown even this description of 
 mine of it into the fire. I am given to understand that he 
 never could bring himself to utter the word " heart" even 
 to women — who always have their heart (namely the word) 
 on. their tongues, like a kind of globus hystericus. He said, 
 *' It is the bullet-screw of their real hearts, — the button 
 
CHAP. XV.J FLOWEE, FEDIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 435 
 
 on their fanfoil ; and, to me, it is a poison bolus, a pitch- 
 hall for the Bel of Bahel." 
 
 So his hand escaped, on a sudden, from its close arrest ; 
 he seized his hat and stick, and cried : " I see yon are just 
 as great a goose as I am myself: instanter, dnstantiua, 
 instantissime, in three words, did you talk to Tier ahout the 
 Widows' Fund ? Yes or no — not another syllable. I go 
 out at that door this instant !" Siebenkees brought out all 
 his items of news on this subject as rapidly as possible, so 
 as to be quit of each and all of them for ever. " She is 
 certain to agree to it. I said nothing to her about it. 
 I can NOT. But you can quite easily. And you must. I 
 am going no more to Fantasie. And we shall have a grand 
 time of it this afternoon, Heinrich ! The music of our 
 lives shall be of a sounding sort. The pedals of the joy- 
 notes are all ready on our haips to be pressed down ; and 
 •we'll press them !" Heinrich, partly recovering his equa- 
 nimity, said, as he went out, " The Cremona strings of 
 the human instrument are made of living membrane, the 
 breast is only the sounding boards and the head is the 
 damper." 
 
 Solitude lay around our friend like some beautiful 
 country— all the echoes, driven away from him, . and 
 wandering, lost and astray, could find their way back to 
 him now athwart it. And on the crape-veil, woven of the 
 twelve past hours, which had laid itself over his life's 
 loveliest historical picture, he could tremblingly trace that 
 picture's lines with crayon-pencil, and trace, and trace 
 them over again, a thousand and a thousand times ! But 
 a visit to the beautiful Fantasies — blooming richer and 
 fairer as the hours went by — this he must deny himself; 
 for he must not be a living hedge, to fence and bar Nathalie 
 from that Valley of Blossom. He must pay for bliss with 
 privation. The charms of the town and neighbourhood 
 had still their bright, many-tinted skins — but their sweet 
 kernels were gone. Everything was to him as some dessert 
 dish which had, in the older time, had coloured sugar 
 sprinkled over it, which was now, somehow, turned to 
 coloured sand. All his hopes— all the flowers and fruit of 
 his life (as is the case with our higher ones)-^now grew 
 and matured beneath the ground, like those of the sub- 
 
 2f2 
 
4S6 JEAN PAUL FEIEDRICH EICHTER. [bOOK IV. 
 
 terrajiean vetch; * I mean, in the sham grave into which 
 he was going. How little he had — and yet, how much t 
 His feet were upon prickly rose branches, and all round 
 the Elysian fields of his future he saw thorny bushes, 
 bristly undergrowth, and a wall built, beginning at his- 
 grave. His Leipzig rose valley was dwindled into the 
 one green rosebud- twig, which had been transplanted, 
 unblown, from Nathalie's heart to his. And yet, how 
 much he had. A forget-me-not, from Nathalie, for all his 
 life to come (the silken ones she gave him were but tha 
 hulls of that whose blossom was immortal and eternal) ; a 
 springtime in his soul at last, at last after all these many 
 springs — to be so beloved, for the first time by a woman as 
 an hundred dreams and poets had pictured to him that men 
 might be beloved. To pass, in an instant, at a single step, 
 from his dingy lumber room of old law papers and books 
 into the fresh, green, flowery, golden age of love, — for the 
 first time, not only to gain a rare and priceless love like 
 this, but to take away with him such a parting kiss, like a 
 sun into all his coming life, to light and warm it through 
 and through for ever ! This was bliss for one who had had 
 his cross to bear in former days. But, more than this, he 
 was free to let himself be borne along upon the beauteous 
 waves of this river of Eden without care or constraint, 
 inasmuch as Nathalie never could be his, nor should he 
 ever see her more. In Lenette he had loved no Nathalie 
 as in the latter no Lenette. His wedded love was a prosaic 
 summer day of sultry hay-making, but this was a poetic 
 spring night of starlight and flowers, and his new world 
 was like the name of the spot where it was created — • 
 Eantaisie. He did not deceive himself as to the fact that, 
 as he was going to die before Nathalie, he was loving, in 
 her, merely a departed spirit, and that as a departed spirit 
 — nay, while yet in this life, of a truth, for him, a pure and 
 glorified risen soul; and he freely put the question to 
 himself whether there were any reason why he should not 
 love this Nathalie (thus departed into the past, for him) 
 as truly and fondly as any other, departed long since into 
 a yet remoter past— the Heloise of an Abelard or St. Preux, 
 
 * This vetoli has some of its flowers and fruit above ground, but most 
 of them under it ; though the latter are vrhite.^LiNKSus. 
 
OHAP. XV.] FLOWER, FEUIT, AND THOSN PIECES. 43'i 
 
 or a poet's Laura, cr a Werther's Lotte for whom his dying 
 ■was not even to be as real as Werther's. 
 
 With all his efforts, he could not manage to say more tc 
 Leibgeber than, " She must have been very, very fond oi 
 you, this rare, exceptional soul — for it is only to my re- 
 semblance to you that I can ascribe her heavenly kindness 
 to me — who am so little like other men — and have nevei 
 been oared for by women." Leibgeber — and he himsell 
 as soon as he said it — laughed at this almost idiotic state- 
 ment ; but what is any and every lover, during his May 
 month, but a dear, genuine, simple sheep ? 
 
 Leibgeber soon came back to the hotel with the news 
 that he had seen the English lady on her way to Fantaisie 
 Firmian was very glad of it. She rendered his resolvf 
 i:o shut himself out of the entire circle of delight easier tc 
 execute. For she was the Count von Vaduz's daughter 
 and consequently must not see him (Siebenkses) at present 
 'having to believe him hereafter to be Leibgeber. Hein- 
 Tich botanised, however, the whole day on the flowery 
 slope of Fantaisie, with the view of discovering and ob- 
 ■serving the flower goddess, rather than the flowers, with his 
 botanical glasses (to wit, his eyes). But no goddess ap- 
 peared. Alas! our poor wounded Nathalie had so marej 
 reasons for keeping aloof from the ruins of her loveliest 
 hours — for fleeing the scene of conflagration (now over- 
 grown with flowers) where she might encounter him whom 
 she meant to meet no more. 
 
 A few days after this, the Venner Eosa von Meyerr 
 honoured the company at the table d'hote in the ' Sun' 
 ■with his .... If the author's calculations as to dates dc 
 not wholly mislead him, he was at dinner there on thai 
 ■occasion himself. But I have only an indistinct recollec- 
 -tion of the two advocates, and none at all of the Venner— 
 because coxcombs of his description are an uninteresting 
 species of animals, and there are whole game-preserves 
 and zoological gardens full of them to be met with at al 
 ■times. I have more than once met with characters, in the 
 body, whom I have subsequently taken careful wax casts 
 of from the crowns of their heads to the soles of their boots 
 and then exhibited them about the country in my col 
 iectioB of wax-work figures. But I wish I always kne^ 
 
438 JEAN PAUL FKIEDKICH EICHTER. [BOOK IV. 
 
 beforehand exactly wliich of the people whom I happen t» 
 be dining or travelling with chances to be the one who is 
 going to have his portrait painted in this way. I should 
 note down, and store up a thousand trifling, minute pecu- 
 liarities, and lay them down in my epistolary cellars. As 
 it is, I sometimes find myself obliged (and I confess it 
 freely) to set to work and coolly lie a number of matters of 
 minor importance — for instance, that a thing takes place 
 about six o'clock, or about seven — if I happen to be wholly 
 without documentary evidence on the point. Wherefore 
 it is a moral certainty that if three other authors had sat 
 down, on the same morning with me, to give the world an 
 account of Siebenkaes's wedded life derived from the same 
 historical sources as mine, that we four, however great 
 our devotion to truth, would have produced family histories 
 containing much the same amount and description of in- 
 accuracy as we find in those which the four Evangelists 
 have given us ; so that our tetrachord would have stood 
 in need of a good tuning with a tuning-pipe in the shape 
 of a " Harmony " of our Gospels. 
 
 • Meyern dined at the 'Sun,' as we have said. He told 
 Siebenkffis with a triumph, which was not without a dash 
 of menace, that he was going back to Kuhschnappel next 
 day. He was vainer than ever — probably he had offered 
 his hand to some fifty of the fair sex of Bayreuth, as though 
 he had been the giant Briareus, with fifty wedding-rings 
 on his hundred hands. He was as greedy of the fair sex 
 as cats are of marum verum ; which is why both are sur- 
 rounded with metallic guards by their possessors. When the 
 clergy rivet poachers of this description, alive, to one par- 
 ticular animal of their chase by means of a strong wedding- 
 ring, and the animal of the chase in question drags them 
 through every thicket till they are scratched and bled to 
 death, philanthropic weekly-papers would say that it is too 
 severe a punishment ; and it is so, no doubt, for the poor 
 animal of the chase. 
 
 Oti the following day Eosa really did send to ask whether 
 Siebenkses had any message to send to his wife, as he was 
 going back to see her. 
 
 Nathalie was invisible still. All that Firmian saw of 
 her was a letter for her which he saw shaken out of the 
 
CHAP. XV.] FLOWEE, FEUIT. AND THORN PIECES. 439 
 
 post-bag when he went (as he did every day) to see if 
 there was one from his wife. Lenette did not require more 
 hours to write a letter than Isocrates did years for a pane- 
 gyric on the Athenians — ^no more, but just the same nixmber, 
 namely about ten. Judging by the handwriting and the 
 seal, the letter for Nathalie was from the (step), father of 
 his country, Herr von Blaise. " Thou darling girl," 
 thought Firmian, " with what deliberation he will pass 
 the burning focus of his burning-glass (formed of the ice 
 of his heart) over every wound of thy soul ! How many 
 secret tears wilt thou weep — and no one to count them ; 
 ,and thou hast no hand now to dry them and hide them, 
 except thine own !" 
 
 One exquisite, blue afternoon he went alone to the only 
 pleasure garden which was not barred against him — the 
 Hermitage. Memories met him every where — all painfully 
 Bweet memories. At every spot he had lost, or renounced, 
 something of life or heart — had become a hermit, in ac- 
 cordance with the place's name. Could he forget the great, 
 dim glade where, beside his kneeling friend, and before 
 the setting sun, he had sworn to die, and part from his 
 wife and from all the world he knew ? 
 
 He left the joy-place, turned his face to the setting sun 
 (which almost hid, in its brightness, the prospect from his 
 sight), and strolled in circles round the town. With a 
 deeply moved heart he gazed after the gently radiant 
 luminary as it sank, amid the glowing cloud-embers, towards 
 that distant spot where his widowed Lenette would be 
 standing in her silent room, with her face lighted up by 
 the evening red. "Ah! dear, good Lenette," the voice 
 within him cried, " why can I not press thee to this fall, 
 tender heart, here in this paradise, in bliss ? I should love 
 thee better here, and forgive thee easier." 
 
 Tes, of a truth, it is thou, kind Nature — never ending 
 Love, who changest, in us, distance of body into nearness 
 of soul. It is thou who, when we are utterly happy in 
 .some distant spot, bringestto us from afar, in fancy, the 
 . beloved forms of those whom we have had to leave — ^they 
 come like beautiful music, or like happy years— and we 
 stretch out our arms to the clouds that go soaring over the 
 hills beyond which lie the dwellings of those whom we 
 
440 JEAN PAUL PKIEDRICH KICHTER, [bOOK IV. 
 
 love the best. Our severed hearts open to those distant 
 ones as the flowers which open to the sun unfold their 
 •petals even on days when there are clouds between them. 
 
 The splendour died away, leaving the blood-like track 
 ■of the sunken sun in the blue ; the ear^h with her gardens 
 seemed to stand out brighter and clearer. Then suddenly 
 JFirmian came on the green Tempe Vale of Fantaisie, lying 
 'before him all loveliness of sight and of sound, tinted with 
 the red of the evening clouds and with the white of 
 blossoming boughs. But over it stood an angel with" a 
 gleaming cloud streak for sword, saying, "Here entei" 
 -thou not ! Knowest thou not the Eden from whence thou 
 hast gone out ?" 
 
 Firmian turned him about, and there, in the gloaming 
 of spring, leaned upon the wall of the first of the Bay- 
 reuth houses he reached on his homeward way ; so that 
 the wounds of his ej'es might have a chance to grow 
 whole — that he might not meet his friend bearing scars 
 which would have to be " explained." Leibgeber was not 
 in, however, but there was something there of a very 
 unexpected kind — a Ifetter from Nathalie to him. 
 
 Ye who have keenly felt — or deeply regretted — that 
 there is a Moses-veil, an altar-railing, a prison-grating, 
 made both of body and earth — stretched out for ever and 
 aye, between one soul and another — ye cannot well blame 
 this poor, deep-touched, solitary firend, that he took up 
 the cold paper unseen, and pressed it to his burning lips, 
 and to his trfembling heart. For of a truth, every body — 
 ^ven the human body, is, from the soul's point of view, 
 merely the sacred reliquim of an invisible spirit ; and not 
 <inly the letter, which you kiss, but the hand which wrote 
 it, too, is, like the lips, whose kiss you think, assures you — 
 (but it is a deceptive assurance) — of the closeness of your 
 union, your flowing or fusing into one, only the sacred out- 
 ward and visible sign of a something higher and dearer ; 
 and these deceptions differ only in their sweetness. 
 
 Leibgeber came in, opened the letter, and read it aloud : 
 
 " To-morrow morning at five o'clock, I shall be turning 
 my back upon your beautiful town. I am going to Schrap- 
 lau. But I cannot leave this lovely valley, oh dear friend, 
 •without once again giving you the assurance of my un- 
 
CHAP. XV.] PLOWEK, FRUIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 441 
 
 'Changing friendship, and conveying to you my thanks 
 and wishes for yours. I should ' so have liked to say 
 good-bye to you in a more living manner ; but my long 
 leave-taking from my English friend is not yet over, and 
 I have now Tier wishes to combat (as I had my own before) 
 before I can bury myself in, or rather, wing my flight to 
 Tny village solitude. This beautiful spring has sorely 
 wounded me, and that with joys as well as with sorrows. 
 But (if I may go so far afield for a comparison), my heart, 
 like Oranmer's, is left for those I love, unconsumed amid 
 the ashes of my funereal pyre. May all go well ! well ! 
 with you — better than can ever be the case with me, a 
 woman. Fate cannot take much from you, nay, nor give 
 you much either. There are smiling eternal rainbows 
 playing around all the waterfalls for you ; but the rain- 
 clouds of a woman's heart must drop for many a long day 
 ■ere they are brightened by the sad, yet cheering tints of 
 the Iris which memory casts upon them at length. Tour 
 friend is with you still, no doubt. Press him warmly to 
 your heart, and tell him, all that yours wishes, and gives 
 him, mine wishes him ; and never will he, or you, whom 
 he loves, be forgotten by me. Always 
 
 " Your Nathalie." 
 
 During the reading of this, Firmian stood with his face 
 ■pressed to the window, and lifted towards the evening 
 sky. Heinrich, with a true friend's delicacy of perception, 
 took the answer out of his lips, and said, looking to him, 
 " Yes, this Nathalie is good and kind, in very truth, and 
 a thousand times better than thousands of other people 
 are ; but I will let myself be driven over by her carriage, 
 and crushed beneath the wheels of it, if I don't wait for her 
 at four o'clock in the morning, get into the carriage, and sit 
 ■down beside her. Ay, verily ! I will get her to lend me both 
 her ears, and I will fill them full — or my own are longer 
 than any elephant's, though he does use his for fly-flappers." 
 
 " Yes, do, dear Henry," said Firmian, in the most cheer- 
 ful tones he could force from his oppressed throat. "I 
 shall give you three lines to take in your hand, just that 
 you may have something to give her, since I am never to 
 tee her again." 
 
442 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH EICHTEE. ^BOOK IV. 
 
 There is a certain lyric intoxication of heart, during 
 ■which people never ought to write letters, because, in the 
 course of fifty years or so they may, perhaps, fall into 
 the hands of people who are without either the heart 
 or the intoxication. However, Firmian wrote, and did not 
 seal ; and Leihgeber did not read. 
 
 " / bid you farewell, too ! But J cannot say ' Don't for- 
 get me.' Ah ! forget me ! But leave me the forget-me- 
 not which you gave me — to keep for evermore. Though 
 Heaven is past and over, death has yet to come. And 
 mine is now very near, and it is for this reason alone that 
 I, and my dear Leibgeber even more urgently, have a 
 favour to beg of you ; but such a strange favour. Nathalie, 
 do not refuse. Your soul's sphere is far, far above that of 
 the feminine souls which are shocked and frightened at 
 everything out of the commonplace track. Tou can dare, 
 and can venture, nor need you fear to risk that great heart 
 of yours (and happiness) on any cast. And now, as I 
 spoke to you on that night, for the last time, this is the 
 last time I shall write to you. 
 
 " But Eternity remains for thee and me ! 
 
 " F. S." 
 
 His sleep was nothing but dreams all night, that he 
 might be sure to awaken Leibgeber in the morning. But 
 as early as three o'clock, the latter, in his capacity of 
 letter-carrier, and Maitre des Hequetes, was posted under 
 a great linden-tree, whose hanging beds, thronged with a 
 sleeping world of inhabitants, overhung the alley by which 
 Nathalie was to come. Firmian, in bed, enacted Henry's 
 part along with him, in fancy, thinking to himself, " Now 
 she is bidding the English lady good-bye ; now she is 
 getting into the carriage; now she is passing the tree, 
 and he is taking her horses by the bridle." He phan- 
 tasised himself into dreams which stabbed his heart 
 with pictures of. her repeated refusals of his petition. 
 What a quantity of dark and cloudy weather is bom of 
 one single, bright, starry night, in the physical world 
 as well as in the moral. At last he dreamed that she 
 stretched her hand to him, from her carriage, with tears in 
 her eyes, and the green rose-twig on her breast, and said. 
 
CHAP. XV.] FLOWER, FRUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 44li 
 
 in low sweet tones, " I must say no ! Could 1 live long, 
 if you were dead ? " She pressed his hand so warmly that 
 he awoke. The pressure was there, and lasted, and before- 
 him was the beaming daylight, and his beaming friend, 
 who said, " She has agreed, while you've been snoring here.'" 
 He had been within a hair's breadth of missing her. 
 She had not taken so much time to dress and depart as 
 others do to amdress and arrive. A rose-branch, wet with 
 dew, whose leaves pricked sharper than its thorns, was 
 on her heart, and the long parting had tinted her lids with 
 red. She was delighted to see him, though a little 
 frightened, and anxious to hear. He gave her Firmian's 
 open letter, to begin with, by way of credential. Her 
 eager eyes shone out once more through two tear-drops, 
 and she asked, "What am I to do?" "Nothing," said 
 Leibgeber, in an artful manner, half jest, half earnest, 
 " except allow the Prussian Treasury to remind you of 
 his death twice a-year, as if you were his widow." She- 
 answered, "No!" pronouncedly, on one note, behind 
 which, however, there was only a comma, not a full stop. 
 He once more went through his petitions, and his reasons, 
 adding, " Do it, at least, for my sake, if for no other 
 reason. I can't bear to see him baulked of a wish, or dis- 
 appointed in a hope. He is a bear whom that bear- 
 leader, the State, keeps dancing all the winter, without a 
 wink of winter sleep, whereas I seldom take my paw out 
 of my mouth, but suck away continually. He kept 
 awake all last night, so as to make sure of calling me in 
 time, and he is counting the moments anxiously at home 
 now." She read the letter again, syllable by syllable. 
 He did not ask for a final answer, but spun out a talk oni 
 other subjects — the morning, her journey, the village of 
 Schraplau. The morning had already raised her pillar 
 of fire beyond Bayreuth, the town kept adding pillars of 
 smoke; in a few minutes he must out of the carriage and 
 back. " And so, fare you well," he said, in the softest of 
 tones, with one foot on the carriage-step ; " may your 
 future grow brighter and brighter, like the day about us. 
 And now, what last word am T to carry to my good, dear 
 beloved Firmian ? " (I shall make a remark in a minute 
 or two.) She lowered her travelling-veil like the drop 
 
•444 JEAN PAUL FKIEDEICH BICHTER. [BOOK IV 
 
 curtain of a drama whicli is done, and said in low and 
 -etifled accents, " If I must, I must ; so let this be, also. 
 But you are giving me another great sorrow to take with 
 me on my way." Here lie jumped down, and the carriage, 
 bearing this poor soul — poor now in so many ways — 
 rolled on with her over the shattered ruins of her youthful 
 life. 
 
 If be had got a " No " instead of this hard wrung-out 
 ■" Yes," he would have caught her again on the other side 
 ■of the town, and been her fellow-traveller for another 
 fragment of her journev-. 
 
 I said above, that I should "make a remark;" it is 
 this : that the friendship or love which a woman has for a 
 man is fed by that which she sees existing between him 
 and his friends, and grows visibly in consequence — con- 
 verting it, polyp-fashion, into its own substance. It was 
 for this reason that Leibgeber, by instinct, had given 
 such warm expression to his. In the case of us, masculine 
 lovers, again, this sort of electric coating, or magnetic 
 armature of our love with the friendship of our beloved 
 ■object with other women is most uncommon. What 
 pleases us, is to see her shrinking from everybody else, 
 growing hard and frozen to them on our account, handing 
 ■them nothing but ices and cold pudding, but serving u» 
 with glowing goblets of love. This process of making the 
 heart, like wine, more fiery and strong, and generous, by 
 •freezing it at the boiling-point, may please a short-sighted 
 selfish soul ; but never a clear-seeing, kindly, loving one. 
 At all events, the author declares that, whenever he has 
 caught a glimpse — in a mirror or in water — of the reverse 
 side of the Janus-head, of which the other side has been 
 smiUng in love upon him, frowning in dislike upon the 
 rest of the world, he has made a face or two of the same 
 disliking sort on the spot — at the Janus^iead. For the 
 mere contrast's sake, a girl should never slander, find fault, 
 or dislike, at all events, while she is a lover ; when she ia 
 a married woman, the mistress of a house, and has chil- 
 dren, and cows, and servants, of course no reasonable man, 
 or husband, can possibly object to a moderate amount of 
 -bad temper, and a little scolding now and then. 
 
 Nathalie had acceded to the strange proposal for jnany 
 
CHAP. XV.] FLOWER, FEUIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 445^ 
 
 reasons ; just because it was a strange one ; and then th& 
 ■word "widow" woiild, to her romantic heart, be con- 
 stantly weaving a mourning-band of sorrow, binding her 
 ami rirmian together, and winding in charming andi 
 fanciful wreaths round the events, and the vows, of the 
 night of their good-bye. Besides, to-daj-, she had been 
 gradually ascending from one emotion to another, and had 
 reached a height where her head began to reel. Moro- 
 over, she was boundlessly unselfish, and consequently 
 never troubld herseiflf to think whether a thing had tht 
 abearance of selfishness or not. And, lastly, she cared 
 less about appearances in general, and the conclusions- 
 people drew from them than, perhaps, a young lady ihould, 
 care. 
 
 Leibgeber, now that all his goals were reached, emitted 
 a long, gladsome zodiacal light ; and I'irmian did not 
 darken it with the full depth of his mourning night - 
 shadow, but only with the half-tints thereof. At the 
 same time, he felt he could not visit either of Bay- 
 reuth's pleasure-places, Eremitage or Fantaisie, which 
 were Herculaneum and Portici to him now. Yet he must 
 pass by the latter on his homeward way, and disinter 
 many things that were buried. He did not care to delay 
 his return much longer ; not only was the moon set now, 
 which had shed a new silvery radiance upon all the white 
 flowers and blossoms of the spring, but Leibgeber, be- 
 sides, was a death's head memento mori, always saying, 
 in the most unmistakable manner — though with neither 
 lips nor tongue — "It must be borne in mind that thou 
 hast got to die, in Kuhschnappel, in jest." Leibgeber's. 
 heart burned for the world without, the flames of his 
 forest-conflagration were eager to dart and play uncon- 
 trolled over alps, islands, capital cities ; the "Vaduz water 
 reservoir of acts of parliament — paper lit-de-parade and 
 lit-de-justice — would have been to Mm a heavy, suffocat- 
 ing, feather-bed, such as people in a hopeless state of 
 hydrophobia used to be smothered by out of compassion.. 
 In fact, a small town could as little endure him as he 
 could endure a small town. Indeed, even in Bayreuth — 
 a larger place — there were sundry Commissaires de Justice 
 at the tahle d'hote at the ' Sun ' Hotel, who told me with 
 
446 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH EICHTBR. [bOOK IV. 
 
 their own lips, that when Leibgeher spoke his table- 
 speech (reported in Chapter XII.) on the subject of Crown 
 Princes, they thought it was a deliberate satire on a par- 
 ticular Margrave then reigning ; whereas all his satires 
 were really directed against the human race in general, 
 not against individuals. Again, how thoughtlessly he con- 
 ducted himself during the poor eight days which he spent 
 in our good town of Hof im Voigtlande. Are there not 
 credible " Varisker " (as according to some authorities 
 the inhabitants of Voigtland were called in Cesar's time 
 • — though others consider " Narisker " to have been the 
 word), who have assured me that he bought bergamot 
 pears in the open market-place, near the court-house, 
 and cakes at a baker's stall, in his best suit of Sunday 
 clothes? And are there not Nariskers of the fair sex, 
 who, having observed his proceedings thereafter, are 
 ready to depose that, though stall-feeding is a matter of 
 universal enjoinment, he nevertheless ate this food-offer- 
 ing in the open air like a prince, and on the march, like 
 a Eoman army ? There are witnesses, who waltzed with 
 him, to testify that he went to masked balls in a robe 
 de ckamhre and a cocked-hat and feathers, and that he 
 had worn both all the previous day in earnest, before 
 putting them on in the evening in jest. A Narisker not 
 without some braius, and possessing a good memory, who 
 was not aware that I had' the fellow under my historical 
 hands, repeated the following somewhat audacious utter- 
 ances of Leibgeber's. 
 
 "Every man is a born pedant. There are very few 
 who are hung in chains after they are dead ; but almost 
 «very_one is hung, iu most accursed chains, before death ; 
 and, therefore, in most countries, ' Freeman ' means pro- 
 voet-marshal. Or hangman. Jest, as such, ought to be 
 I serious ; therefore, as long as one is only in jest, it is 
 wrong to jest in the slightest degree. He held, that 
 the spirit which brooded, creating, over the ink of colleges 
 was (as many Fathers of the Church held that to be which, 
 according to Moses, moved upon the face of the waters) 
 wind. In his eyes, worshipful councils, conferences, depu- 
 tations, sessions, processions, &o., were not, at bottom, 
 wholly without a spice of comic salt, looked upon as grava 
 
CHAP. XV.] FLOWER, PETJIT, AND THOKN PIECES. 447 
 
 parodies of stiff and empty seriousness, more especially as 
 in general there was tut one member of tlie conclave (or 
 perhaps his wife) who really voted, decided, or ruled, the 
 mystic corpMS itself, sitting at the green table, ohieflprfor 
 the joke of the thing; just as, in flute clocks, though 
 there is a flute-player screwed on outside whose fingers 
 work up and down upon the flute, which grows out of 
 his mouth, and children are beyond themselves with de- 
 light at the talent of the wooden imposition, every clock- 
 maker knows that it is inside that the wheels are which 
 act on the hidden pipes with their pinions." I answered 
 that these sayings showed that Leibgeber was of a rather 
 audacious and ironical turn of mind. It is, perhaps, to be 
 desired, that everybody were in a position to do what 
 the author does in this place, namely, beg all Nariskers 
 to have the goodness to point to any single word or deed 
 of his which can be called satirical, or not exactly adapted 
 to fit on to the cap-block of a pays coutumier. If he is not 
 speaking the truth, he begs that he may be contradicted 
 without the slightest hesitation. 
 
 The winnowing-fan which blew Siebenkses out of Bay- 
 reuth on the following day, was a letter from the Count 
 von Vaduz, in which he expressed his friendly regret oa 
 account of Leibgeber's cold-fever and tallowy appearance, 
 at the same time begging him to hasten his entry upon 
 the duties of his office. This letter was to Siebenkaes 
 as a wing-membrane wherewith to hasten his flight to his 
 seeming cocoon-grave, in order to issue forth from it a 
 young full-fledged inspector. In our next chapter he 
 turns him about, and quits the beautiful town. In what 
 remains of this, he is taking private lessons in sUhouette 
 clipping from Leibgeber, whose role he is to succeed to 
 by dying. The master-cutter, and scissorial-mentor did 
 nothing, in this connection, worthy of being handed 
 down to posterity by me save one thing, as to which I 
 do not find a word in my documents, which was told mo 
 by Mr. Feldmann, the keeper of the hotel, who was carv- 
 ing at table when it occurred. It was only that a stranger 
 who was dining there clipped out a profile of Leibgeber, 
 among others; while Leibgeber, seeing what he was 
 about, clipped out, under cover of the table-cloth, a sU- 
 
448 JEAN PACL FEIEDEIOH EICHTEE. [BOOK TV. 
 
 touette of this supernumerary copyist's ovm Lead and 
 sliOTilderSj and when the latter handed him his, Leibgeber 
 returned the compliment, saying "aZ Pari /" thus paying 
 him in his own coin. This stranger made airs of -various 
 kinds, as well as silhouettes, but succeeded best witb the 
 pMogiatic sort, which he made with his lungs, without any 
 difficulty to speak of, and in which he throve and took on 
 colour, as plants do ; this sort of air can be breathed, and' 
 is designated by the name of " wind," to distinguish it 
 from the other phlogistic gases which can not be inhaled. 
 When this phlogistic wind-maker (who gave admirable 
 lectures from town to town, on the other gases, from that 
 portable professorial chair, his body) had departed witL 
 his cutter's wages, Heinrich contented himself with the 
 following remarks. 
 
 " Thousands of people ought to travel and teach both at 
 once. He who limits himself to three days can certainly 
 (as a species of private tutor extraordinary) in that time 
 read excellent lectures on every kind of subject which he 
 knows little or nothing about. Thus much I see already, 
 that there are brilliant comets — shining wandering stars 
 — revolving round me and others, and throwing flying 
 lights upon us concerning electricity, gases, magnetism, in 
 short natural science in general ; but this is but a small 
 matter. May this duck's wing choke me if these rostrum- 
 carriers, and travelling professors (travelling scholars they 
 are not), might not lecture upon science of every kind^ 
 with great advantage, at all events, upon the minuter 
 branches. Could not one, for instance, travel and read 
 lectures upon the first century after Christ's birth, or the 
 first millenary before it (which is no longer), I mean, tell 
 ladies and gentlemen all about it in a lecture or two,, 
 a second undertaking the second, a third the third, an 
 eighteenth our own? I can quite imagine travelling 
 medicine-chests for the soul of this kind. But as far as I 
 am concerned, I should by no means stop at this point 
 — I should advertise myself as a peripatetic private 
 tutor in branches of the minutest possible order ; e. ^., 
 in electoral courts, I should give lessons concerning the 
 obligations to be entered into by the nominees to govern- 
 ment appointments ; in all and every place I should 
 give exegetical instruction conceniing the first verse ot 
 
OHAP. XV.] FLOWER, FRUIT, AND THORN PIEOES. 449 
 
 ■the first book of Moses — the lirahen, the devil (who may, 
 perhaps, be more or less the same as the other), on 
 Hogarth's tail-piece, in connection with Vandyke's head- 
 pieces, on coins and in portraits ; on the true distinction 
 between the Hippocentaur, and the Onocentaur, which is 
 more like that between genius and German criticism than 
 anything else ; on the first paragraph of Wolf, or even of 
 Putter; on the funeral bier of Louis (XIV.) the be-gran- 
 dised, and the public rejoicings under it ; on the academic 
 licences which a passing lecturer may allow himself tc 
 take, in addition to that of pocketing his fee — the greatest 
 of which is often that of shutting the lecture- room door, 
 (to make a long story short) on everything, in fact. If w^e 
 go on in this way (I can't help being struck), that when 
 circulating high schools have got to be as common as 
 village schools — when savants ply backwards and forwards 
 like live shuttles between the towns (and they have 
 b^un to do so already), attaching Ariadne threads (of 
 talk, at all events; everywhere, to everything, with the 
 view of weaving them into something or other — if we go 
 on on this road, I say, when each sun of a professor — on 
 the Ptolemaic system, moves about among the dark orbs 
 (fixed upon necks), which surround him, and casts his light 
 upon each in turn (a state of things wholly opposed to the 
 Copemican system, according to which the sun stands 
 still on the professorial rostrum in the centre of the orbits 
 of the revolving planets or students) — if we go on (I say 
 once more, on this road), one may be pretty sure that 
 the world will really come to be something at last; a 
 learned world, at the very least and lowest — philosophers 
 will obtain the true philosopher's stone — gold ; what 
 fools will obtain will be the philosophers, and know- 
 ledge of every kind : and moreover the restorers of science 
 will get set upon their legs. All soil would then be 
 classic soil — so that people would of necessity have to 
 plough, and fight on, classic soil. Every gallows hill 
 would be a Pindus, evety prince's throne an oracle-cave of 
 Delphi — and I should be obliged to anyone who should 
 show me such a thing as a single ass in the whole of Ger- 
 many, then. This is what would necessarily happen if all 
 the world were to set out upon learned, and instructive, 
 
 II. 2 G 
 
450 JEAN PAUL FEIEDKIOH EICHTEE. [BOOK IV. 
 
 journeys — that portion of it being, of course, necessarily 
 excepted which would be obliged to stay at home if there 
 were to be anybody to listen and pay (like the point de 
 vue, in military ' evolutions,' for which the adjutant is 
 generally told off)." 
 
 Here he suddenly jumped up, and cried, " I wish to 
 Heaven I could go to Bruckenau ; * there, on the bath tubs, 
 should be my professorial chair, and seat of the Muses. 
 The tradesman's, the country gentleman's wife or daugh- 
 ter should lie, like a shell fish, in her closed basin and 
 relic-casquet, with nothing sticking out but her head (just 
 as is the case in her ordinary costume), her head which it 
 would be my business to instruct. What discourses, a la 
 St. Anthony of Padua, should I not hold with the^e tender 
 tench — or sirens — though they might better be described 
 as fortresses protected by moats, or wet ditches. I should 
 sit lecturing and 'teaching upon the wooden holsters ot 
 their glowing charms (phosphorus-like, kept in water !) 
 But this would be nothing compared to the benefits I 
 should bestow upon society were / to have mj/self cooped 
 into an etui, or scabbard of the kind, and then be het 
 a-going like a water-organ, and, like some water-god, 
 devote my pedagogical talents to the edification of the 
 class of students sitting on my tub-lid ! True, I should 
 have to make my illustrative gestures under the warm 
 water, because the only part of me out of my sheath would 
 be my head (like the hilt of a dagger), with nay master's 
 cap on it. But the loveliest of doctrine, — luxuriant rice- 
 ears, and succulent aquatic plants sprouting in the water 
 ■ — a play of philosophic water-works, and so forth, should 
 be emitted from the bath, and sseud away all the beauties 
 
 * At page 163 of the ' Poeket-Book for Watering Places, and Visitors 
 to them,' it is stated that while the ladies are lying bolted into their 
 baths, young gentlemen sit on the covers and entertain them while they 
 are under water. Against which arrangement Beason certainly can 
 urge no valid objection, for the wood of the baths is quite as thick as 
 silk ; and when all is said, Everybody is, if covered at all, always in 
 some covering inside of which he or sue is altogether devoid of corer- 
 ing— though perhaps Fancy, and Imagination may urge this objection, 
 that a bed-quilt a quarter of a yard thict would not be quite so becoming, 
 or close-fitting a ball-dress as a gauze. If once the Innocence of the 
 imagination be offended, there is no other to spare; the senses can 
 neither be innocent nor the contrarv. 
 
CHAP. XVI.] FLOWEE, FRUIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 451 
 
 (whom, in fancy, I see thronging round my quaker's and 
 Diogenes' tub) besprinkled with learning and instruction 
 of the most superlative description. By Heaven ! I ought 
 to be off to Bruckenau this instant, not so much as a 
 watering-place guest as in the capacity of a private tutor." 
 
 CHAPTER XVI. 
 
 THE HOMEWARD JOUENEY, WITH ALL ITS PLEASUEES — THE 
 AREIVAL AT HOME. 
 
 FiKMiAN took his departure. He was sorry to leave the 
 hotel, which had been a roj'al "Sans Souci " and " mon 
 repos " to him, and turn his face away from its comfortable 
 chambers towards his own bare comfortless rooms. To 
 him who had never known any of the comforts — the soft 
 paddings, so to speak, of this hard life of ours — who had 
 never had any other Jack but the boot-jack, it had been 
 an enormous pleasure and enjoyment to have the power of 
 ringing that leading actor, John the waiter, up from his 
 coulisses with such facility, and that too with plates and 
 glasses in his hand, out of which said actor enjoyed 
 nothing, only Siebenkses and the public so doing. Just 
 at the door of the hotel, he made to Mr. Feldmann, the 
 landlord, the following eulogistic address, which shall 
 be made him once more in print by me, by way of an 
 additional blazon to his coat of arms, the moment it gets 
 through the press. " There is only one thing which your 
 guests have to desire, that they have not got, and that is 
 the most important of all things — time. May your sun 
 reach the sign of the crab, and remain in it." Several 
 Bayreuthians who were standing by thought this was a 
 miserable satire. 
 
 Henry went with Firmian some thirty paces beyond 
 the Eeformation church, as far as the church-yard, and 
 tore himself away from him with less difiSculty than usual, 
 for he expected to see him again in a few weeks' time — on 
 his death-bed. He would not go as far as Fantaisie with 
 him, wishing to allow him to sink, in silence and un- 
 disturbed, and lose himself in the enjoyment of the magic 
 
 2 G 2 
 
452 JEAN PAUL FEIEDRICH EICHTEK. [bOOK IV, 
 
 echoes of tte spirit-harmonies of that night of bliss where- 
 with all the garden would he vocal. 
 
 Alone, then, Pirmian entered into the valley as into 
 some holy temple, all sacredness and awe. Every thicket 
 seemed, to his eyes, glorified with super-earthly light, the 
 stream, a stream flowing out of Arcadia, and the whole 
 valley- a Vale of Tempe, transported thither and unveiled 
 to view. And when he came to the dear and holy spot 
 where Nathalie had prayed him to " think of that night," 
 it seemed to him that the sun was shedding a heavenlier 
 brightness ; and that the hum of bees in the blossoms was 
 music of spirit-voices wafted on the air, and that he must 
 needs prostrate himself and press his heart upon the 
 dewy sward. Upon this trembling sound-board he once 
 more retraced the old path by which he had walked with 
 Nathalie, and, now in a rose espalier, now from some stream- 
 let, now from the balcony, now from some leafy nook or 
 trembling stem, string after string, breaking from silence, 
 gave forth once more its old lovely tone. His enraptuied 
 heart swelled, even to pain ; a moist transparent shimmer 
 was over his eyes, and dissolved into a great tear-drop. H is 
 e3'es, drunken with weeping, distinguished nothing save 
 the brightness of the morning and the whiteness of the 
 flowers ; details were hid by the flowery vail of dreaming, 
 in whose lily perfume his soul sank down, soothed to a 
 restful sleep. It was as if hitherto, in the enjoyment of 
 being with his Leibgeber he had only felt half the real 
 strength of his love for Nathalie ; with such a new might 
 and breeze of heaven did that love come breathing upon 
 him in this solitude with ethereal tire. A world all j-outh 
 burst into blossom in his heart. 
 
 Of a sudden the bells of Bayreuth came ringing into this 
 world, striking for him the hour of his farewell to it ; and 
 there fell on him that anxious sadness with which we 
 linger, too long, beside a place where we have been happy, 
 when the time has come when we must say Adieu. He 
 went upon his way. 
 
 What a brightness fell upon all the hills and meadows, 
 with the thought of Nathalie, and that imperishable kiss ! 
 The green world, which had been but a series of pictures 
 for him, as he came, was now all speech and languau-e. 
 
CHAP. XYI. I FLOWER, FEtTIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 453 
 
 There was a light-magnet of happinesfs all day long in the 
 dimmest corner of his being ; and when, in the thick of 
 distractions, conversations and the like, en route, he cast 
 a sudden glance into himself, he found a coutinual sense of 
 blissfulness within him. 
 
 How often he turned back to the Bayreuth hills, beyond 
 which he had lived real days of youth, for the first time 
 m his existence ! Behind him Nathalie was journeying 
 on towards the east, and breezes from that quarter — airs 
 which had breathed gently around the distant, lonely one 
 — came wafting back to him, and he drunk the sether- 
 stream like the breath of one beloved. 
 
 The hills sunk low on the horizon ; his paradise was 
 whelmed in the blue of heaven. His west and Nathalie's 
 east (lowed asunder, and parted wider, faster and faster as 
 the moments sped. One beautiful plain receded, flying 
 behind him, after another ; and he hastened past the flower- 
 decked limbs of Spring as she lay outstretched on eaith, 
 alternating between looking and enjoying, as in early days 
 gone by. 
 
 Thus he came at evening to the village in the valley 
 by the Jaxt, where on his journey to Bayreuth, he had 
 passed in review, with tears, his loveless days ; but he 
 came with a new heart, full to the brim with love and 
 happiness; and tears flowed this time too. Here where, 
 amid the melting magic lights of evening, he had asked 
 himself, "What womanly soul has ever loved you as your 
 old dreams have so often pictured to your heart you might 
 be loved by one," and had given himself so sad an answer; 
 here he could think on that Bayreuth night, and say, 
 " Yes ! Nathalie has loved me ! " And then . the old 
 sorrow rose again, but glorified, from the dead. He had 
 made to her a vow of invisibility here on earth ; he was 
 now journeying on towards his own death ; he was to 
 die, and never see her more. She was gone before him — 
 had died first, as it were; she had merely taken away with 
 her into the long, dim, coming years of her life the grief 
 of having loved and lost, twice. "And I look into my own 
 life here, and weep, away from her," he said, wearily, and 
 closed his eyes undried. 
 
 Another world altogether opened npon him in the morn- 
 
454 JEAN PAUL FEIEDKICH EICHTER. [bOOK IV. 
 
 ing — not a new world by any means — the old, old familiar 
 one. Just as if the concentric magic circles whioli sur- 
 rounded Nathalie and Leibgeber reached no further than 
 the little Valley of Longing on the Jaxt, and could include 
 nothing beyond it. Every step towards home translated 
 the poetry w^hich had come into his life to poetic prose. 
 The Imperial market-town (that frigid zone of his life) 
 was nearer to him ; his torrid zone, over which the faded 
 petals of his ephemeral joy-flowers were fluttering still, 
 was far away behind him. 
 
 But, on the other hand, the pictured imagery of his 
 domestic life kept growing clearer and brighter, taking the 
 form of a picture-bible, while the paintings of his month of 
 bliss died away into a dark picture gallery. I think the 
 weather, which was rainy, had some connection with this. 
 
 Towards the end of the week the weather, as well as 
 penitents and churchgoers, puts on other shirts and 
 clothes. 
 
 It was Saturday, and cloudy. Damp weather affects the 
 walls of our brains as it does the walls of our rooms; the 
 paperings of both imbibe the moisture, and get curled up 
 into clouds, until the next dry day smooths both out 
 again. Under a blue sky, I long for eagles' pinions ; 
 under a cloudy one, I only want a goose's wing to write 
 with. In the former case we are eager to be off and out 
 into the wide world ; in the latter, all we want is to sit 
 conifortably down in our arm-chair. In short, clouds, 
 when they drop, make us domestic, citizenish, and hungry, 
 while blue skies make us thirsty, and citizens of the world. _ 
 
 These clouds of this Saturday formed a kind of palisade 
 about the Eden of Bayreuth. Every big drop which fell 
 on the leaves made him think longingly of the wifely, 
 wedded heart, which was his lawful property (and which ■ 
 he was soon to lose), and of his poor little lodging. At last 
 when the ice-floes of the rugged clouds melted into grey 
 foam, and the setting sun was drawn like a sluice, out of 
 this suspended mill-pond, and it poured dovm in con- 
 sequence, Kuhschnappel came in sight. 
 
 Discordant, jarring fancies clanged in contention with- 
 in him. The commonplace, narrow-minded, provincial 
 town, seemed, when contrasted with freer and more liberal 
 
CHAP. XVI.J FLOWEK, FKUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 455 
 
 places and societies, so crowded and crushed togetter, po 
 official in style, and full of Troglodytes — with doggrel, 
 and table-verses by way of poetry — that he felt it wuukl 
 he a satisfaction to drag out his green trellis-bed into the 
 market-place in broad daylight, and go to sleep beneath 
 the very windows of the local " quality," without minding 
 a brass-farthing what the upper council might think, oi 
 the lower council either. The nearer he came to the stage 
 he was to die upon, the more difficult did this first role 
 of his (and last but one) appear to him. 
 
 Away from home we are bold and daring : we resolve, 
 and undertake; at home, we pause and hesitate, and delay. 
 
 Yes, and the smoke and smells of the mean streets gnawed 
 into him, matters which, of themselves unaided, so sorely 
 affect and depress us that there are very few indeed who 
 can raise their heads wholly beyond these effluvia. For 
 in man there nestles an accursed tendency towards still- 
 sitting ease and comfort; like a big dog he lets himself 
 be poked and pinched a thousand times before he takts 
 the trouble to get up, rather than growl. Once fairly 
 on his legs, however, he is not in a hurry to lie down 
 again. The first heroic deed (like the first earned dollar, 
 according to Eousseau) costs more than the next thousand. 
 The prospect of the long, difficult, tedious and risky 
 financial and surgical operation of a stage death stung 
 our Siebenkaes on the domestic bolster. 
 
 But the nearer he drew to the gallows-hill (that mouse- 
 tower of his old, narrow life), the quicker and the clearer 
 did the thoughts of the heart-oppressing stamping-mills 
 of past days, and of his approaching salvation, vibrate in 
 alternation in his mind. He kept thinking that he would 
 have to suffer care, anxiety, and struggle of all sorts, as of 
 old, because he kept losing sight of the open sky of his 
 future, just as we go on suffering the pain and fear of a 
 painful dream for some time after we have awakened 
 from it. 
 
 But when he saw the house where dwelt his Lenetto, 
 whose voice he had not heard for so many a day, the pain 
 all vanished from his heart, the trouble from his eyes, 
 nothing being left in them but affection and its warmest 
 tears. 
 
456 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH EICHTER. [BOOK IV. 
 
 " Ab ! am I not going to tear myself, so soon, from lier 
 for ever, and make her shed tears of delusion, and woimd 
 lier with the terrible wounds of a funeral and mourning ? 
 and then, poor darling soul, we shall see each other no 
 more ! " he thought. 
 
 He quickened his pace. He squeezed close past the 
 shop windows of his co-commandant, MeerWtzer, with his 
 head thrown back, and his eyes fixed upon the up-stairs 
 windows. Meerbitzer was in the house, splitting the 
 Sunday wood ; and Firmian signed to him not to give 
 note of his presence by any sort of sentry-challenge. The 
 old associate- czar signed back to him, with outstretched 
 fingers, that Lenette was alone in the room up-stairs. The 
 old familiar ripieno voices of the house, the querulous 
 scolding of the book-binder's wife, the damper-pedal effect 
 of the eternal prayer and curser, Fecht, met him like so 
 much sweet provender, as he climbed the stairs. The 
 waning moon of his movable pewter property shone 
 silvery and glorious upon him from the kitchen, every- 
 thing fresh from its font of regeneration ; a copper fish- 
 kettle, which poisoned no vinegar as long as it was un- 
 mended, glowed upon him through the kitchen smoke like 
 the sun in a November fog. He opened the door of the 
 sitting-room gently ; he saw no one in it, but heard 
 Lenette making the bed in the bed-room. With a whole 
 iron foundry hammering in his breast, he made a long, 
 noiseless stride into the room, which was all in apple-pie 
 order, with its Sunday shirt of white sand on already 
 (upon which the bed-making river goddess and water 
 nymph had expended all her aquatic arts in the produc- 
 tion of a highly-finished masterpiece). Ah ! everything 
 was so full of rest and peace, so tranquilly reposing after 
 the whirl and turmoil of the week. The rain stars had 
 risen upon everything, except his ink bottle, which was 
 quite dry. 
 
 ' His writing-table was, so to speak, manned by two or 
 three large heads, which, being cap-blocks, had on their 
 Sunday bonnets, already, which would be transferred from 
 1 hem in their capacity of Guratores Sexus, next morning, to 
 the heads of the ladies of the members of council. 
 
 Ho pushed the bed-room door wider open, and there, 
 
cHAP. XVII.J FLOWEK, FRUIT, AND THOllN PIELJES. 457 
 
 after this long separation, he saw his dear wife, standing 
 with her back to him. 
 
 Just then he fancied he recognised Stiefel's fulling-mill 
 steps coming up stairs ; and, that he might pass his first 
 minute on her heart unseen by a stranger eye, he said 
 twice, softly, " Lenette !" 
 
 She started round, crying "Oh good gracious! is it 
 you ?" He had clasped her in his arms, before she got 
 these words out, and rested on her kiss, saying, " Good 
 evening, good evening, and how are you, and how have 
 you been ?" 
 
 His lips stifled the answers. But suddenly she pushed 
 him back and struggled out of his arms, while two other 
 arms clasped him swiftly, and a bass voice said, " Here am 
 I as well ; you are welcome back, praise and thanks he to 
 God." It was the Schulrath. 
 
 Poor, fevered human creatures that we are ! driven back 
 and lepnlsed asunder by our own lackings, and those of 
 others, yet continually drawn together again by never- 
 ceasing longings, in whom one hope of finding love falls 
 away to dust after anothei', whose wishes come to nothing 
 but memories. Our feeble hearts are at all events glowing 
 and right full of love in that hour when we come back and 
 meet again ; and in that other hour when we part, 
 disconsolate, — as every star seems milder, larger, and 
 lovelier when it is rising, than when it is overhead. But 
 to souls which always love, and are never angry, these two 
 twilights (when the morning star of meeting, and the 
 evening star of parting shine) are too sad to bear, for tc 
 them they seem like nights. 
 
 CHAPTER XVII. 
 
 THE BUTTERFLY EOSA IN THE FOEM OF MINING CATEEPILLAE — 
 THOEN-OEOWNS, AND THISTLE-HEAUS OF JEALOUSY. 
 
 The last chapter was as brief as our delusions. It was 
 one itself, alas ! poor Firmian. After the first stormy 
 mutual catechisings, and particularly, after the giving 
 
458 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH EICHTBE. [bOOK IV. 
 
 and receiving of all the mutual news, he saw more and 
 more clearly that Lenette's invisible church, in which 
 Stiefel filled the part of soul's bridegroom, was become 
 very much of a visible one. It was as if the earthquake of 
 the recent happiness had rent in twain the veil of the 
 Holy of Holies, the inmost sanctuary, wherein Stiefel's head 
 fluttered by way of cherub. But, to speak the truth, I am 
 telling a He here, because it was Lenette's special object to 
 show and display a particular liking for the Schulrath, who, 
 in his delight thereat, went fluttering on from Arcadia to 
 Otaheite, and from thence to Eldorado, and from thence 
 to Walhalla, which was a certain indication, that, up to 
 this point, his good fortune, during Firmian's absence, had 
 been less. He related thai, "Eosa had broken with the 
 Heimlicher ; that the Venner, whom the latter had wanted 
 to utilise as a spinning machine, had turned into an engine 
 of war against him. The cause of all this had been the 
 niece in Bayreuth, whose engagement the Venner had 
 broken off, because he had caught her being kissed by 
 a gentleman there." 
 
 Firmian. grew red as fire, and cried " Miserable cock- 
 roach ! It was she who broke off her engagement w^ith 
 that wretched Ij'ing scoundrel, not Jie who broke off his 
 with her. Ah ! Herr Schulrath, be that poor lady's true 
 knight and champion, and run this wretched abortion of 
 a lie through and through wherever you came across it. 
 Prom whom did you get hold of this evil weed ?" Stiefel 
 pointed calmly to Lenette, saying, " Prom her ! " " And 
 where did you get hold of it ?" Firmian cried to her in 
 amazement. " Mr. Von. Meyem," she answered, with her 
 face all glowing red, " was here calling, and told it me 
 himself." " But .1 was fetched immediately," Stiefel in- 
 terrupted, "and I skilfully sent him about his business." 
 Stiefel then asked for a correct version of what had 
 happened. Pirmian thereupon, timidly, and with many 
 changes of tone, made -v highly favourable report of the 
 rose-maiden and her conduct of the matter (" rose- 
 maiden " in a threefold sense, on account of the roses in 
 her cheeks, of her victorious virtue, and the green rose- 
 buds she had given to him). But on Lenette's account he 
 awarded her a proxima accessit only, not the gold medal. 
 
CHAP. XVII.] FLO WEE, FRUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 459 
 
 He had to bind the Venner, by way of sacrificial ram, 
 to the horns of the altar in place of Nathalie, or, at 
 all events, harness him by way of saddle-horse to her 
 triumphal car, and relate without disguise how Leibgeber 
 had been the person who broke off the engagement, and, 
 as it were, dragged her back by the sleeve, as she was 
 making the first step into the Minotaur's cave — by means 
 of his satiric sketches of Meyern. 
 
 " But it was you, of course," said Lenette, mtJiout any 
 tone of interrogation, " who told Leibgeber all about him, 
 to begin with." 
 
 " Yes," said he. 
 
 We of the human race give to words of one syllable, to 
 "Yes," and "No," at all events, more intonations, and 
 shades of intonations, than the Chinese themselves. The 
 yes in question was a rapid, toneless, cold yes, being 
 merely meant for a " What then," or " Suppose I did." 
 She interrupted a digressive speech of Stiefel's with a 
 point-blank, target, bull's-eye question : 
 
 " When had you been with her ?" 
 
 At last Firmian, with his battle-telescope, saw hostile 
 movements of all kinds going on in her heart ; he made a 
 playful diversion, and said, " Herr Sohulrath, when did 
 you come to see Lenette ?" 
 
 " Three times every week at least, and, very often, 
 oftener than that ; always about this time of the evening," 
 he answered. 
 
 " Very well," said Firmian, in a kindly and playful 
 fashion. " I'm not going to be jealous, but be good 
 enough to remark — and my Lenette will please to do so 
 too — that J was with Nathalie, along with Leibgeber, twice 
 in all ; once in the afternoon, once in the evening, walking 
 about the grounds of Fantaisie. 
 
 "Well, Lenette?" 
 
 She parted her cherry lips, and her eyes were like Volta's 
 electric condensers. 
 
 Stiefel went away, and Lenette (from a countenance on 
 which there seemed two fires burning, tihe fire of anger and 
 a lovelier fire) flashed after him a spark of eye love, cal- 
 culated to blow up the whole powder-mill of a jealous 
 husband. The married pair were scarce alone, when, by 
 
460 JEAN PAUL FEIEDBICH lilCHTEE. [bOOK IV. 
 
 way of propitiating her, he asked her if that confounded 
 Venner had been plaguing her again ; nnd then the firework, 
 which had been fixed jeady on the scaffold of her face, went 
 hissing off. 
 
 " Oh ! of course you can't endure him. You are jealous 
 of him, on account of this beautiful, learned, intellectual, 
 Nathalie of yours. Do yoa suppose I don't know quite 
 well about yoii ai.d her going about a whole night among 
 the trees — and hugging and kissing ! A pretty story Ah 
 tie! I never would have believed it of you. No wonder 
 Mr. Meyern said ' Good morning ' to her, learning and all. 
 Oh yes ! you'll excuse yourself, no doubt." 
 
 " I should have talked to you about all that most innocent 
 affair," answered Eiimian, tranquilly, " while Stiefel was 
 here, if I had not seen quite well that you knew of it. Am 
 I annoyed because he kissed you while I was awaj' ? " 
 
 This iiritated her still more; firstly, because it was 
 impossible that Firmian could know of a certainty that it 
 was true — (and it was!\ — and secondly, because she 
 thought " You can forgive it very easily now that you care 
 more for another woman than you do for me." But then, 
 for the self-same reason (inasmuch as stie cared more for 
 another man than she did for Mm), she, of course, ought to 
 have found no difficulty in forgiving him too. But, as 
 usual, instead uf answering his question, she put one 
 herself: " Did I ever give anybody silk forget-me-nots, as 
 somebody did to somebody'^ Thank goodness ! mine are still 
 in my drawer." 
 
 Here two hearts contended within him — a tender heart, 
 which was pieiced by this unintentional association of 
 forget-me-nots so dissimilar — and a mans heart, which was 
 powerfully stirred and stung bj' this detestable defensive 
 and oifensive alliance with the fellow who, as was evident 
 now, had sent the innocent child, whom Nathalie had 
 rescued, to Fantaisie by way of a stalking-horse, behind 
 which to conceal and mask himself, and the toils he had 
 spun. As Siebenkses now, with an outburst of anger, con- 
 verted his judgment-seat into a stool of repentance for the 
 Venner, whom he stigmatised as a canker-worm of feminine 
 buds, a sparrowhawk, a housebreaker as i-Cgarded matri- 
 monial treasures, and a crimp, trepanner, and soul-stealer 
 
CHAP. XVII.J FLOWER, FRtTIT, AND THORN PIECES. 461 
 
 of rcated souls — vowing with the utmost warmth that it 
 was Nathalie who had soornfuUy sent Eosa to the right- 
 about, not Eosa who had rejected her : and as, of course, 
 ho interdicted her in the most peremptory terms from 
 everj'thing in the nature of dissemination or repetition of 
 the Venner's lying demi-romance, he turned his unfortu- 
 nate wife into a sour, pungent, Erfurt radish, from head 
 to foot. 
 
 Let us not fix our eyes too long, or too magisteriallj', 
 upon this heat-rash or purulent fever of poor Lenette's. 
 For my part, I am going to leave her alone, but make 'an 
 onslaught on her entire sex at once. I shall he doing so, 
 I trust, when I assert that women never paint with more 
 caustic colours (Swift's black art is but weak water-colour 
 in comparison) than when they have to portray the bodily 
 unlovelinesses of other women. Further, that the prettiest 
 of faces roughens and bristles into an ugly one, when it 
 expresses anger with the feminine recruiting officer more 
 than pity for the deserter. To speak accurately : Everj' 
 woman is jealous of all other women, because — not, per- 
 haps, her own husband (or lover, as the case may be), hut — 
 all other men are attracted by them, and are consequently 
 not true to her. Therefore every woman takes the same vow 
 concerning these vice-queens of this earth that Hannibal 
 took concerning the Komans, and keeps it just as religiously. 
 For which reason every woman has the power which 
 Fordyce says all animal bodies possess — that of making all 
 others cold ; and, indeed, every woman must of necessity 
 be an enemy and persecutor of a sex which consists 
 entirely of rivals. And it is probable that many — for 
 instance, nuns in their convents, and Moravians — call each 
 other sisters, or sister-souls, with the view of giving some 
 sort of expression to the nature of their sentiments for each 
 other; since sisters are just the very people who quarrel 
 the most. This is why Madame Bouillon's parties quarries 
 consisted of three men and only one woman. It may be 
 that it led St. Athanasius, Basilius, Scotus, and other 
 teachers uf the Church to entertain the belief that, with 
 the single exception of the Virgin Mary, i\l women would 
 rise as men at the Day of Judgment, in order that there 
 may be no anger, or envy, or bickerings in heaven. There 
 
462 JEAN PAUL FEIEDKICH EICHTEE. [BOOK IV. 
 
 is but one queen who is beloved, nourished and cherished 
 by many thousands of her own sex — the queen- bee of the 
 workeis (who are of the feminine gender, according to the 
 most recent observations. 
 
 I shall close this chapter with a sort of preliminary 
 word for Lenette. The foul fiend Eosa, by way of giving 
 like for like (or rather worse for like) had emptied whole 
 basketsful of the seed of evil-weeds into Lenette's open 
 heart, and unpacked compliments, to commence with, and 
 news of her husband ; then, afterwards, disparaging matter. 
 She had believed him all the more readily because it was 
 a clever, learned, and intellectual woman whom he was 
 nigrifying, breaking with, and offering up as a sacrifice. 
 What she most hated in Nathalie was her cleverness, her 
 learning, and intellectualness ; for it was the want of 
 those that had brought herself to such shame. Like 
 many women, she thought that the heads of Venuses were 
 not " the true article " (as some connoisseurs think is the 
 case with the Venus de Medici). What provoked her most 
 of all was that Firmian should take another woman's part 
 more than his own wife's — nay, at his own wife's expense ; 
 and that Nathalie, in her conceit and pride, had got ready a 
 sack to give such a nice, rich gentleman, instead of weaving 
 a net to hold him with. She was also very much annoyed 
 that her husband had admitted everj'thjng, as she con- 
 sidered his candour was only lordly indifference as to what 
 she might feel on the subject. 
 
 What did Firmian do ? He forgave. His two reasons 
 for doing so were good ones — " Baj'reuth " and " the 
 grave." The former had parted him from her so long ; the 
 latter was soon to part him from her for ever. A third 
 reason might perhaps be this: Lenette, as regarded his 
 love for Nathalie, was not so very utterly the reverse of 
 right. 
 
CHAP. XVIII.] FLOWEE, FRUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 463 
 
 CHAPTER XVIII. 
 
 AFTER SUMMER OF MAERIAGE — PEEPAUATIOSS FOE DEATH. 
 
 Although Sunday was come, and the Vicar's eyes were no 
 more open than his congregation's (because, like many of 
 the clergy, he kept his physical eyes shut while preaching). 
 Lay hero went to him to get his certificate of birth, because 
 this was wanted for the Brandenburg Widows' Fund. 
 
 Leibgeber had charged himself with the rest. Enough 
 of the subject — for I don't caie to say move about it than 
 I can help ; because some years ago— long after all Sie- 
 benkses's pecuniary affairs had been settled up to the last 
 farthing, and his debt to the Fund duly paid — the ' Im- 
 perial Gazette' publicly accused me of bringing discredit 
 ujion Integrity and Widows' Funds by the last book of 
 this story of mine, and considered it to be its (the ' Ga- 
 zette's ') duty to taka me pretty severely to task on the 
 siibject, according to its measure of ability. But are the 
 advocate and I the same person ? Does not everybody 
 know that my proceedings as regards my married life in 
 general, and the Prussian Widows' Fund in particular, 
 have been quite unlike those of Siebenkses in every 
 respect, and that to this very hour I have never departed 
 tliis life, either in jest or in earnest, in all these years 
 during which I have regularly paid a considerable annual 
 contribution to the institution in question ? Nay, do I not 
 mean — (and I need have no hesitation in saying so) — to 
 go on paying my yearly quotum for as many more years as 
 I can — so that, when I die, the fund may have got more 
 out of me than out of any other contributor ? 
 
 These are my views on the subject ; but I must do 
 Siebenkses the simple justice to state (to his credit) that 
 the views by which he was actuated differed very, very 
 little from my own. The only thing was, that, in Bay- 
 reuth, he had immolated his own truthful heart to the 
 stormy urgency of his friend, Leibgeber, which had imbued 
 and intoxicated him, in a moment of enthusiasm, with that 
 cosmopolitan spirit of his which, in the boundless soul- 
 transmigrations which, in the course of his never-ending 
 
464 JEAN PATJl; FlilEDRICH RICHTER. [UOOK IV. 
 
 Journeyirigs he passed through, had come to look upon life 
 too much as a mere game at cards, and stage-play — as a 
 Chicken-hazard, and Opera Buffa and Seria combined. And 
 as, besides, he Iknew Leibgeber's pecuniary circumstances, 
 and his contempt for money (and his own into the bargain), 
 he had undertaken a role which was anything but well 
 suited to him, and as to which he had as little foreseen the 
 torture of difBculty which it would cost him to act it, as 
 the penitential sermon which was to be preached from 
 Gotha concerning it. 
 
 At the same time it was a great piece of good luck that 
 it was only Becker's ' Gazette ' that found out about Na- 
 thalie's straw-widowhood, and not Lenette ! Heavens, if 
 the latter, with her silk " Porget-me " (for the " not " had 
 altogether disappeared from it), in her hand, had got wind 
 of Pii mian's adoptive marriage ! I neither desii e to judge 
 the fair sex, nor to be judged by them. But at this point 
 I would fain put to all my lady readers (and most parti- 
 cularly to one of them), two rather weighty and important 
 questions. 
 
 " Would you not bend down from your judge's seat and 
 hand my hero, if not a J?oz»er- wreath, an oafc-wreath, at all 
 events, for his good and kind behaviour to this feminine 
 coiiple ? Or (inasmuch as there are four female hands 
 vlaying a duet sonata on his heart), a bouquet for his 
 button- hole at the very least ? " Dearest lady readers, 
 you could not possibly have given a better verdict — although 
 my surprise at it is not so great as my gratification. My 
 second question nobody shall put to jon but yourselves. 
 Let each of you ask herself, " Suppose you had this fourth 
 book of my story put into your hands, and were Lenetto her 
 very self, and consequently knew to a hair all about tht 
 whole business from beginning to end ; what would you 
 thinh of your husband Siebenkass' proceedings ? What 
 would you do ? 
 
 1 will answer the question for you : " Weep, storm,* 
 chide, be very angry, not speak a word, break things, &c." 
 So terribly does selfishness falsify, corrupt and degrade 
 
 * The white-flowering sort woulil weep — the red-flowering sort 
 would btorm, as the pale moon indicates rainy weather, and the red 
 moon high wind. (Pallida hina pluit, ruhicunda flat.) 
 
CHAP. XVIII.J FLOWEE, FKUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 465 
 
 tlie most delicate moral feelings, coercing them into the 
 giving of two totally diverse verdicts upon one and the 
 same case. Whenever I am wavering, or in any hesita- 
 tion, concerning the worth of a character, or conclusion, I 
 always find it helps me to come to a. decision in a moment 
 if I represent it to my mind's-eye as coming wet from the 
 press in a novel or biography. If it seems right then, it is 
 certain to he right. 
 
 It was far better, and more becoming, for Graces to 
 dwell hidden in the Satyrs of old, and in Socrates, than tu 
 reverse the process, so that Satyrs should dwell hidden 
 within Graces. The Satyr who possessed Lenette butted 
 about him in all directions with horns of very consider 
 able sharpness. Her unreciprocated anger began t(j take 
 the shape of bneering banter, for her husband's present 
 meekness and gentleness were so strikingly in contrast 
 with his former Job's- disputations, that she came to the 
 conclusion that his heart was frozen altogether. In old 
 times he had wanted to be served by mutes (like a Sultan), 
 until his satirical foetus, his book, should be brought 
 to the light of day by help of the Eoonhuysian lever and 
 Caesarian operation of the penknife; even as Zacharias 
 was dumb until the child ceased to be so, and was born, 
 and cried simultaneously with him. Formerly, their mar- 
 ried life had been like most other people's ; for the majority 
 of wedded pairs are like those twin-daughters,* grown 
 together as to their backs, but- continually quarrelling 
 (though they could never look each other in the face), and 
 always trying to go towards opposite quarters of the globe, 
 till the one succeeded in forcing the other in the direc- 
 tion in which she wanted to go. Now, on the contrary. 
 Firmian allowed all Lenette's discords to jar on as long- 
 as they pleased, without the slightest trace of irritation. 
 A soft, peaceful light now fell upon all Jier angles, upon 
 her works of supererogation in washing, on the water- 
 sproutlings of her tongue; and the tint of the shadow 
 which her heart (made of dark earth, like everybody 
 else's) cast, as a matter of course, was very much lost in 
 the blue of heaven, as shadows cast in starlight are (ac- 
 
 * In the neighbourhood of Comom (Wiudisch's 'Geography o) 
 Hungary '). Buehau mentions a similar twin-birth in Scotland, 
 n, 2 H 
 
466 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH KICHTER. [BOOK IV. 
 
 cording to Mariette) as blue as the sky overhead. And 
 was there not always a grand, blue, starry sky spread out 
 above his soul, in the shape of death ? Every morning, 
 every evening, he said to himself, " Why should I not go 
 on always forgiving everything ! We have such a very 
 little while to be together now." Every opportunity of 
 forgiving did something to sweeten the bitterness of his 
 voluntary farewell ; and, as those who are going away, or 
 going to die, are eager to pardon, — the deep, warm spring 
 and fount of love in his heart was never chilled from 
 morning till night. He was fain to pass along the brief, 
 dark, alley of weeping willows, which led from his home 
 to his empty grave (a full one, alas ! as regarded his love), 
 leaning only on beloved arms ; and to rest on the mossy 
 banks by its side, between his friend and his wife, with a 
 beloved hand in each of his own. Thus it is that death 
 not only beautifies our bodies when the soul has fled (as 
 Lavater points out), but even in life the thought of death 
 gives new beauty to our lineaments, and new strength to 
 the heart, as rosemary both winds as a garland about the 
 dead, and revives the fainting by its cordial essence. 
 
 " There is nothing surprising to me in this," quoth the 
 reader. "Everybody in Firmian's position would have 
 felt just as he did ; at all events, I should." But, dear 
 reader, are we not all in Firmian's position? Does the 
 nearness or the remoteness of our everlasting good-bye 
 make any difference ? Ah ! inasmuch as, here below, we 
 are nothing but images, delusively firm, and red of colour, 
 standing on the edges of our holes, into which (like the 
 ancient princes) we totter, crumbling to dust, when the 
 unknown hand gives the mouldering images a shake — why 
 do we not say (like Firmian), " Why should I not forgive ? 
 We have so short a time to be together." We should 
 have four better fast-days, and prayer- and penitence- 
 days, than we usually have if we had but four days of 
 bitter, hopeless sickness to go through, one after the other, 
 every year ; because we should look down from our sick 
 bed (that ice-region of life beside the crater) with loftier and 
 sublimer glance upon the pleasure-gardens and pleasure- 
 forests of life as they shrunk and shrivelled away ; because 
 there our wretched racecourses would seem shorter, and 
 
CUAP. XVIli.J FLOWER, FEUIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 467 
 
 only the people larger, and we should there love nothing 
 but hearts, magnify and detect no other faults but our 
 own, and because we leave our sick beds with better re.«o- 
 lutions than we take to them with. For the first day 
 of convalescence of the body, after its winter of sickness, 
 is the blossoming time of a lovelier soul, which issues 
 forth as if transfigured from the earth's cold crust into a 
 mild warm Eden; longing to press all things to her 
 breast (feeble yet, and short of breath) — mankind, and 
 flowers, and spring breezes, and every other bosom which 
 has sighed for her upon her bed of pain. Like all the 
 newly risen from death, she longs to love all things through- 
 out an eternity ; and the whole heart is a warm and dewy 
 spring-time, rich in buds, beneath a youthful sun. 
 
 How Firmian would have loved his Lenette, had she not 
 constrained him to be always pardoning, instead of petting 
 and caressing her I Ah ! she would have rendered his 
 approaching death a terribly difficult task for him if she 
 had been like what she was in their honeymoon days ! 
 
 But their byegone Paradise was now yielding a harvest 
 of ripe Grains of Paradise (the old name for peppercorns). 
 Lenette piled fuel on the fi.re of her hell's ante-chamber 
 of jealousy, brewing there, for him, the draught of the 
 coming heaven of Vaduz. A jealous woman can be cured 
 by no kind of speech or treatment ; she is like the kettle- 
 drums, which are the most difiioult of all instruments to 
 tune, and the quickest to get out of tune when tuned. 
 A loving, tender look was, to Lenette, a blister ; for he 
 had looked at Nathalie with one like it. If he seemed 
 happy and glad, it was evident he was thinking of the 
 past. If he looked Mnhappy and sad, he was thinking ct 
 the past too, but with longing. He had to consider his 
 face in the light of an open warrant of caption, or bill- 
 poster and placard, of the thoughts which were behind it. 
 In short, her husband merely served her as fiddle rosin to 
 roughen her horse-hair with, in order to bow her viole 
 d'amour with it from morning till night. He dare not 
 allow himself more than an occasional word about Bay- 
 reuth, scarce so much as the name of it ; for if he did, she 
 knew whoui he was thinking of. Nay, he could not say 
 anything at all strong in disparagement of Kuhschnappe] 
 
 2 H 2 
 
468 JEAN PAUL FKIEDEICH EICHTEK. [bOOK I"V. 
 
 ■without raising a suspicion that he was comparing it with 
 Bayrenth, and thinking the latter much the better place 
 (for reasons well known to Tier). Wherefore (and whether 
 in earnest, or from consideration for her, 1 really do not 
 know) he restricted his laudations of Bayrenth merely to 
 the buildings there, not venturing to extend them to their 
 inhabitants. 
 
 There was only one object of praise concerning the 
 praising, whereof he ignored every idea of difficulty and 
 miscomprehension, and this was Leibgeber, his friend. 
 But- — thanks to Rosa's calumnies, and the fact of his 
 having aided and abetted in aU'airs at Fantaisie — it so 
 chanced that Leibgeber had come to be more unendurable 
 by her now than he had been in the old days, by reason 
 of his indecorous conduct, and his great dog. She knew, 
 moreover, that Stiefel had several times expressed grave 
 disapproval of him and his doings. 
 
 " My dear Henry will be here very soon now, Lenette," 
 said Firmian. 
 
 " And that horrible brute with him, I suppose, of 
 course?" she asked. 
 
 " I do think," he answered, " you might like my friend 
 a little better than you do ; if not because he is so very 
 like myself, at any rate, on account of the faithfulness of 
 his friendship. If you did, you wouldn't be so terribly 
 set against his dog; you used not to mind mine when 
 I had one. He must have some faithful creature to follow 
 him about on his everlasting journeys ; through thick and 
 thin, through good times and bad, as Saufinder does. 
 And he looks upon me as just such another faithful 
 creature, and is every bit as fond of me. But for that 
 matter, the wrhole faithful trio of us are not likely to 
 trouble Kuhschnappel very long." 
 
 Meanwhile, no amount of love enabled him to gain his 
 Kuii for love. It here strikes me that this was only a 
 most natural matter, and that the recent warm proximity 
 of the Schulrath had raised Lenette's temperature (of 
 love) to such a point that her husband's felt like a blast of 
 cold wind by comparison. The jealousy of hatred pro- 
 ceeds just like the jealousy of love. There is but one 
 sign for the cypher of nothing and the circle of infinity. 
 
CHAP. XVlII.J FLOWEE, FRUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 469 
 
 The time had arrived when Siebenkaes had to pave the 
 way, and give a colour to, his sham death, by a feigned 
 sickness of some sort ; but this voluntary bending over the 
 grave, and drooping towards it, gave his conscience a 
 pretext for trying to win back Lenette's embittered heart. 
 Thus it is that deceived, and deceiving, man always mag- 
 nifies and elevates his false shows, his cheateries, and 
 deceptions either into less ones than they really are, or into 
 beneficently intended ones. 
 
 The Greek and Eoman lawgivers invented dreams and 
 prophecies, which contained the ground-plans and eleva- 
 tions of their projects, as well as the building-conditions, 
 and building-materials of them. For instance, Alcibiades 
 lied forth a prophecy of the conquest of Sicily. Firmian 
 imitated this process, with alterations suitable to the cir- 
 cumstances of his case. He often said, in Stiefel's presence 
 (for Stiefel took a deep and tender interest in everything, 
 and, consequently, so did she), that he should soon be going 
 away for ever — that he should soon be playing in a game 
 at hide-aiid-seek, and hide himself so effectually that no 
 friendly tye should be able to find him again — that he 
 would soon slip behind the bed-curtain of the coffin-pall, 
 and vanish. He told them a dream (which, perhaps, was 
 no invention). He said, " The Schulrath and Lenette were 
 looking at a room in which a scythe was moving of its own 
 accord ;* then, in a while, Firinian's clothes were walking 
 about in the room, empty, without any body in them. ' He 
 must have other clothes on,' they both said. Then all at 
 once the churchyard passed along the street, with a fresh 
 grave in it, no grass on it as yet. But a voice cried, ' Seek 
 him not there ; it is over and past now.' And a second 
 (softer) voice cried, ' Eest — rest — Ihou art worn and weary. 
 And a third said, ' Weep not, if ye love him.' But a fourth 
 cried out, in terrible tones, 'Jest — jest — all human life and 
 death.' " Firmian was the first to shed tears ; his friend 
 was the next, and his angry spouse wept, with the latter. 
 
 But now he looked with eager longing for the coming 
 of Leibgeber, whose hand would lead him quicker and 
 more pleasantly through the dark foreground, and the hot, 
 
 ■" There was a superstition that the Headsman's sword moved, of 
 itself, before cutting off somebody's head. 
 
470 JEAN PAUL PEIBDEICH EICHTEE, [ BOOK IV. 
 
 reeking, sultry, breathless, ioiehell of lis artificial death. 
 For he himself was now too feeble and too tender to pass 
 through them alone. 
 
 And upon one particular, unusually lovely, August 
 evening he was so, more than ever before. There played 
 and rested on his face that glorified and celestial bliss of 
 self-devotion — that tearless depth of emotion and smiling 
 gentleness, which sometimes come to us when pain and 
 sorrow are — weary for the time, rather than over and past — 
 something like the blue sky when the brightness of the 
 rainbow falls in light athwart its radiant beauty. He 
 resolved to bid good-bye, in solitude, that day to all the 
 beautiful country which lay around the town. 
 
 The face of Nature was veiled (but not for his eyes, for 
 his soul only), in a thin, soft mist, which went hovering 
 before the breeze in ever-changing wreaths, like the tender 
 vapouriness — not amounting to a shrouding — which Ber- 
 ghem's and Wouvermanns' pencils have cast upon their 
 landscapes. As though to say farewell, he went and 
 touched, and gazed upon, every leafy tree beneath whose 
 branches he had been wont to read — each little darkling 
 brooklet, purling on its way beneath its thickets of forest- 
 roots, laved bare of earth by its ripples — each rocky crag, 
 all green and sweet of scent with moss and flowers — each 
 stair-way of rising hillocks which, in the days gone by, he 
 had climbed to see the sun set (or gone down to watch his 
 risings) many times instead of once — -and every spot where 
 wide creation had brought tears of rapture from his happy 
 heart. But everywhere — amid the long harvest corn-ears, 
 amid Creation's oft-repeated tale in Nature's brooding-oven 
 with all its swarming life, in the seed-nursery of the ripe 
 and endless garden — a hollow, broken voice cried out, in 
 long-drawn tones which mingled with, and sounded clea. 
 above, the bright, rejoicing, trumpet-clang of Nature's 
 ' Alexander's Feast,' " What are these dead men's bones 
 that move about amid this life of mine, defiling all my 
 blossoms ? " And to him it seemed as if, from out the 
 glory of the red West sky, a something sang to him, 
 " Wandering skeleton ! with strings of nerves clasped in 
 thy bony hand, thou playest not on thyself. The breath 
 of endless life is breathing on the .^olian harp, which 
 
CHAP. XIX. J FLO WEE, FECIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 471 
 
 answers back in music, and thou art played upon.'' But 
 soon this mournful error fell away from Mm, and lie thought 
 thus : "I am both playing and answering back in music. 
 I both fhinTs, and am thought. It is not the green bark that 
 holds my Dryad, my spiritus rector (the soul). The latter 
 holds the former. The life of the body depends as inti- 
 mately on the life of the soul, as that of the latter on that 
 of the former. Life and force are at work, with power, 
 everywhere. The grave hillock and the mouldering body 
 are each a world of powers at work. We change our stage, 
 but do not retire from it." 
 
 When he got home, he found the following letter from 
 Leibgeber for him : — 
 
 " 1 am on my way ; set out on yours. — L." 
 
 CHAPTER XIX. 
 
 THE APPARITION — HOMECOMING OF THE STORMS IN AU«UST, 
 OK THE LAST QUARREL — THE RAIMENT OP THE CHILDREN 
 OF ISRAEL. 
 
 One night, at about eleven o'clock, a tremendous blow 
 was heard to strike the roof- tree, as if two or three hundred- 
 weights of Alps had come down upon it, Lenette went 
 upstairs with Sophia to see whether it was the devil, or 
 only a cat. They came back with wintry faces, the 
 colour of flour, and as long as one's arm ; and Sophia cried 
 out, " Oh ! it's the Poor's Advocate (may the Lord have 
 a care of him!) — he's lying up yonder on the camp-bed, 
 like a corpse." The live Poor's Advocate, to whom this 
 tale was being told, was sitting in his room. He said 
 it could not be true, or he would have heard the noise 
 as well as the others. From this deafness of his, all the 
 women at once inferred what the occurrence really por- 
 tended—to wit, his death. The cobbler Fecht (who, by 
 right of royal succession, was night-watchman regnant that 
 uight), glad of an opportunity of showing the plnok that 
 was in him, armed himself with the watchman's spear- 
 staff (his entire artillery-park), but, when nobody was 
 looking, Btuck a black leather hymn-book in his pocket — 
 
472 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH EICHTEK. [BOOK IV. 
 
 by way of a species of saintly host — in case it should turn 
 out that it was the devil that was upstairs. On his 
 way up he repeated a good many fragments of the Even- 
 ing Service, which was more than could, perhaps, have 
 been required of him on that evening when, as Archon 
 of the Watch, his calling of the hours was, in fact, a 
 species of expanded Evening Prayei", distributed in small 
 modicums about the streets. He was marching bravely 
 up to the camp-bed, when, alas ! he too saw the white 
 powdery face before him, and, behind the bed, a hell-hound 
 with eyes of fire, watching the corpse in a grim and 
 ferocious fashion. He stood still instantaneously, as if 
 petrified — like a watchman carved out of alabaster, hard 
 boiled (so to speak), in a perspiration of terror, with his 
 weapon held out before him. He foresaw, beyond the 
 shadow of a doubt, that the moment he turned his back 
 to go flying down the stairs, the thing would clasp its arms 
 about him from behind, saddle him, and ride him down. 
 By the greatest good luck, a voice from downstairs here 
 fell into his heart like a cordial or courage-water, and he 
 heaved up his boar-spear with the view of striking the 
 thing dead, or, at all events, ganging the cubic contents of 
 it. But when, at this juncture, the snowy-looking thing 
 began to rise slowly up, as if growing— his head began to 
 feel as if he had on a bonnet of pitch, and somebody were 
 screwing this cap, and the hair inside it, tighter and 
 tighter every moment; and he could not keep hold of his 
 eel-spear because the top of it felt as heavy as if his 
 biggest journeyman was hanging to it. So he let his 
 sticking-iron go, and flew bravely from the topmost, three- 
 ledger-lined octave of the stair, like a flash of lightning, 
 down to the double-bass key or step. 
 
 "When he got down, he swore, in presence of the master 
 of the house and all the lodgers assembled, that he was 
 going to do his watchman's duty without his halberd, for 
 the ghost had got hold of that ; and, in fact, he quivered 
 like an aspen-leaf and his blood ran cold in his veins, 
 every time his eye so much as rested for a moment on the 
 Advocate's face. Firmian was the only one of the com- 
 pany who had the courage to go upstairs for the weapon. 
 When he got upstairs he foTjnd what he had expected to find, 
 
CHAP. XIX.] FLOWER, FEUIT, AND THORN PFEOES. 47.'^ 
 
 namely, his friend Leibgeber, who had whitened himself 
 with the powder out of an old Wig by way of gradually 
 paving the way and pTeparing people's minds for Sie- 
 benkses's artificial death. They quietly embraced, and 
 Henry said he would come upstairs, in an orthodox fashion, 
 next day. 
 
 When Firmian returned to his room, he said there 
 was nothing upstairs but an old wig; here was the swift- 
 footed spearman's spear, aild he counted here before him 
 two timid hares of the female sex and one of the male. 
 But the entire conventicle knew as well as possible what 
 all this meant. Nobody, with as many brains as a turnip 
 in his head, would give a halfpenny for Siebenkaes' life ; 
 and these ghost-seers tbaflked Heaven most devoutly that 
 they were thus frightened to death, since it was a proof 
 that, their own lives were in no immediate danger. Lenette 
 could not bring herself to sit up in bed all night, for fear 
 she should see her husband's likeness. 
 
 W hen morning came, Henry mounted the stair (with 
 his dog), in dusty boots. Siebenkaes felt as thotigh his hat 
 and his pockets must be full of flowers from the Bayreuth 
 Eden ; he was like a garden statue from the lost garden. 
 To Lenette, just for this very reason, this palm-tree from 
 Firmian's East India possessions at Bayreuth (we shall say 
 nothing of Saufinder), was nothing but a- prickly hoUy- 
 bush, and never less than now could she take any pleasure 
 in such a gooseberry-bush, such a thistle-head — beautifnl 
 as if fresh from Hamilton's pencil.* I must admit, how- 
 ever (and I say it right out, without going about the bush), 
 that his affection for Firmian made his mode of treating 
 Lenette (who was in the wrong and in the right in about 
 equal proportions) a little too resei-ved and cool. We 
 never hate a woman so heartily as when she is torturing 
 somebody who is very dear to us ; just as, on the other 
 hand, a woman is so grim to nobody as to the tormentor 
 of her pet female friend. 
 
 The scene which I have now got to describe in a minute 
 or two makes me feel, in the keenest degree, sensible of 
 the depth of the chasm which lies between the novel-writer 
 
 * Who distinguished himself by painting thistles as much as Swift 
 by writing them. 
 
474 JEAN PAUL FRIEDEICH BICHTEE. [BOOK IV. 
 
 (who can skip annoying matters, and sugar ujd anything 
 ne wislies for Mmself, his hero, or his readers) and the 
 , mere biographer, or writer of actual history, like myself, 
 who has to dish up everything in a strictly historical 
 form, without asking whether it has got to be sugared or 
 salted. If I formerly, then, excised and omitted the scene 
 in question altogether, I was perhaps to blame : but there 
 was nothing surprising in my doing so, seeing that in 
 these days I preferred delighting my readers to instruct- 
 ing them, and thought more about pretty colouring than 
 truthful drawing. 
 
 Leibgeber (and all belonging to him) had for some 
 time been wholly unendurable in Lenette's eyes, chiefly 
 for this reason (amongst others) that he, a man without 
 anything in the shape of an official title or appoint- 
 ment of any sort, should be on such very familiar and 
 intimate terms with her husband — a man who had held 
 the post of " Poor's Advocate " of Kuhschnappel for a 
 considerable time. Also that, like her said husband (by 
 him misled and perverted), he went about without a pigtail, 
 §0 that people pointed at the pair of them, and cried, 
 " Ey ! look at that nice couple !" or " Par nobile fratrum." 
 These sayings, and worse besides, Lenette could draw 
 from the most authentic of all sources of history. Of 
 course, it is true that, now-a-days, it requires about as much 
 courage to put on a tail as it then did to take it off. A 
 canon of a cathedral does not, now-a-days (as he did in 
 bygone times), find it incumbent on him to make himself 
 a pigtail, and pleasant society by help of it ; consequently 
 he has not got to catt it twice a year (as peacocks do their 
 tails) that he may legally earn his salary of two thousand 
 florins by appearing in the choir at vespers with close- 
 cropped hair; the latter he wears at the card- table now, as 
 well as in the pulpit. In the few countries where the pigtail 
 still obtains, it is more in the nature of a dutj'^-pendulum 
 and state-perpendicular than anything else ; and long hair 
 (which formed part of the royal insignia of the Frank 
 kings) is a badge of servitude in the case of soldiers, so 
 long as it worn tied up with a pigtail-ribbon, and not 
 flying unbound and loose. The Frieslanders weje long 
 in the habit of taking hold of the pigtail when swearing 
 
C;H.VP. XIX.] FLOWEK, FEUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 475 
 
 an oatli — calling this " tke Boedel Oath. ;" and to this day 
 in many countries the military or standard oath presup- 
 poses the existence of a queue. And as among the ancient 
 Germans a pigtail carried on a pole represented ^a parish, 
 of course a company or regiment (of which each soldier 
 has his own tail at the hack of his head) must he con- 
 sidered to represent a company-queue of patriotic union 
 and of German nationality. 
 
 Lenette now made little secret of it to her husband (and 
 Stiefel stood by her in the background), that she was very 
 little pleased, on the whole, with Leibgeber and his on- 
 goings. " My dear poor father " (she said, in Leibgeber's 
 presence), "was copyist to the Council, but he was always 
 just like other people in his dress, and everything else." 
 
 " Well, dear ! " Siebenk»s answered, " as he was a copyist, 
 of course he had always to be copying, with pens, or coats, 
 as the case might be. But my father loaded guns for 
 princes, and did not trouble his head about what else 
 might happen or not happen." Ere this, when opportunity 
 had offered, she had held up and measured the copying 
 clerk as against the gun-charger, distantly suggesting, as 
 it were, that Siebenkses had not had anything like so great 
 and distinguished a father as she had, and, as a conse- 
 quence, had not received the sort of superior education 
 which teaches people manners, and how they ought to 
 behave. This preposterous and ludicrous looking down 
 upon his genealogical tree so annoyed him always that he 
 often laughed at himself. At the same time, the little 
 by-blow at Leibgeber did not surprise him so much as her 
 remarkable bodily repugnance and antipathy to him. No- 
 thing would induce her to shake hands with him : "And 
 I'm sure," she said, "if he were ever to kiss me, it would 
 be any death." With all his laborious urgency and ques- 
 tions as to the reason of this, he could get no answer out 
 of her but that she " would tell him after Leibgeber was 
 gnne." Unfortunately, by that time he would be gone 
 himself, too, and in his coffin, i.e. on the road to Vaduz. 
 
 And even this extraordinary obstinacy (as of an un- 
 yielding bonnet-block) he could endure at a time when 
 one of his eyes warm.ed itself at his friend, while the otl er 
 pooled itself at his grave. 
 
476 JEAN PAUL FRIBDETCH KICHTEK. [BOOK IV. 
 
 At last something was superadded ; and as I am sure 
 that nobodj'- can narrate it more faithfully than I, I beg 
 that I may be believed. It was in the evening, before 
 Leibgeber went back to his hotel (the Lizard, if I le- 
 member), £tnd the deep black, half-orb of a thunder-cloud 
 had gathered silently in the West, shrouding the sun, and 
 mounting higher, and hanging more and more threaten- 
 ingly over the expectant world. The two friends were 
 talking of what a glorious thing a thunderstorm was, and 
 of the espousals of heaven and earth — the highest with 
 the lowest — of the "descent of heaven to earth" (as 
 Leibgeber put it) ; and Siebenk^s remarked how, properly 
 speaking, it was only one's " Fantasy " which pictured the 
 stprm, and " Fantasy " only which brought about the union 
 of the highest and the lowest. I wish he had followed 
 the advice of Campe and Kolbe, and used the home-grown 
 word " Fancy " (or " Imagination "), instead of the foreign 
 word " Fantasy ;" for that word-purist Lenette pricked up 
 her ears as soon as ever it passed his lips. She who had 
 nothing in her breast but jealousy, and nothing in her 
 head but the "Fantaisie " (at Bayreuth), put down to the 
 score of the latter every word that the two men w^ere say- 
 ing in eulogy of " Fantasy " in man ; for instance, how it 
 (namely, "the Markgrave's Fantaisie," thought Lenette) 
 blessed us through the beauty of its sublime creations — how, 
 but for the enjoyment of its lovelinesses, a Kuhschnappel 
 could not be borne with for a moment (of course, because 
 he thinks of that Nathalie of his, thought she) ; how it 
 clothes and adorns the bare spots of life with its beautiful 
 flowers " two or three silk forget-me-nots," said Lenette 
 to herself; and how it (the Ba3'reuth Fantaisie) gilds, not 
 only the pills of life, but also the nuts, nay, the raris apples 
 of beauty themselves. 
 
 Heavens ! what double meanings in every corner, and 
 on every side ! For how triumphantly Siebenkaes could 
 have refuted the error of confounding Fantasy with 
 Fantaisie, if he had merely shown how little of the poetic 
 Fantasy there was in the Fantaisie at Bayreuth, and how 
 (in the latter) French "taste" had trimmed, behung, and 
 begarlanded the lovely, romantic hills and valleys of 
 Nature's inventing with rhetoric edifices of flowers, 
 
CHAP. XIX.] FLOWER, FKUIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 477 
 
 periods, and anti thesis ; and that what Leibgeber said 
 about Fantasy's gilding the Paris apples of life, applied in 
 quite another sense to the Bayreuth Fanfaisie, because 
 there the French Christmas silver-foil would have to bo 
 scraped off from Nature's apples before they could be 
 bitten. 
 
 Scarce was Leibgeber gone out from the house, and off 
 into the storm (which, according to his custom, he enjoyed 
 in the open air), when Lenette's storm broke, ere the atmo- 
 spherical one did. " There, you see, I heard with my very 
 own ears," she said, "huw that Unbeliever and Kill-joy 
 there goes about coupling and marrying you in the Fan- 
 taisie at Bayreuth; and ihh is the fellow an honest woman 
 is expected to shake hands with, or touch with the tip of 
 one of her fingers." She let a few more peals of thunder 
 roll — but it is my duty to the poor woman (turned into a 
 fermenting vat by the addition to her of such a quantity 
 of mash) not to give too accurate a record of all her 
 fi othings. Meantime, all the acid matter in her husband 
 bega,n to effervesce in its turn. To find fault with hih 
 friend to his face, no matter what misunderstanding thi.s 
 might arise from (and he did not trouble himself to ask 
 what the misunderstanding was, inasmuch as none could 
 be any excuse) — was, in his eyes, a sin against the Hcdy 
 Ghost of his friendship. Accordingly, he thundered most 
 roundly in reply. It i some excuse for the husband, and 
 for the wife, too, for that matter, that the storm in the air 
 fanned the fuel in his head into a brighter blaze, so that he 
 strode up and down the room like a man demented, and in- 
 stantly, and on the spot, blew to the four winds of heaven 
 his resolve not to be put out with anything Lenette might 
 do till after he was dead ; for he would not, and could not, 
 suffer that " his last friend in life and death should be 
 wrongfully accused by the inheritress of his name, either 
 in his sayings or in his doings." It will give some idea of 
 the violence of his volcanic eruptions (all of which, for his 
 B ike, I mean to pass by in silence), if I say that, vieing in 
 loudness of thundering with the sky itself, he shouted--- 
 
 " Such a man as he!" and with the words, "you are 
 a female head, too, curse you!" administered a ringing 
 box on the ear to a bonnet-block, which had a grand hat, 
 
478 JEAN PAUL FKIEDKICH KICHTEE. [bOOK IV. 
 
 with feathers upon it. As this head was Lenette's favourite 
 Sultana of all the blocks — one which she often fondled — 
 nothing was to be expected but an outbreak as violent as 
 if he had given the box to her very self, just as Siebenkees 
 stormed at the insult to Ms friend). Nothing came, how- 
 ever, but a gentle shower of bitter tears. " Oh ! good 
 heavens! don't you hear what a terrible storm?" was all 
 she said. " Thunder here, thunder there ! " cried Sie- 
 benkies (who, once set rolling down from the lofty peak 
 where he had been reposing, went on, according to both 
 the moral and the physical laws of falling bodies, increas- 
 ing in velocity and momentum, until he reached the 
 bottom). " I wish the lightning would shatter all the 
 rag-tag and bob-tail in Kuhschnappel that dare to say 
 a syllable against my Henry." 
 
 As the storm grew fiercer she spoke more and- more 
 gently, saying, " Ah ! gracious, what a peal ! Oh, please 
 repent ! Suppose it were to strike you in your sin ? " " My 
 Henry is out in it," he said. " Oh that the lightning would 
 strike us both dead, him and me, with the same flash ! I 
 should be spared all this miserable business of dying, and 
 we should always be together then." 
 
 His wife had never seen him so angry, or so contemp- 
 tuous of life and religion, and consequently, could only 
 expect the lightning to fall on the Merbitzer's house, and 
 strike both him and her dead, by way of an " example." 
 
 And at this moment, a flash of such brilliance illumined 
 the heavens, and such a shattering peal of thunder followed 
 close upon it, that, stretching out her hand to him, she 
 said, " I will do anything and everything you wish me to 
 do ; only, for Heaven's sake, be a God-fearing man again ! 
 I will even give Leibgeber my hand ; yes, and a kiss too, 
 if I must — no matter whether he has washed his face after 
 the dog's licking it, or not — and I shall neither listen, nor 
 mind, when you say what a delightful, beautiful place the 
 silvery, flowery Bayreuth Fantaisie is." 
 
 Heavens ! how this lightning-flash illumined the depths 
 of two of Lenette's labyrinths for him, letting him see her 
 innocent confounding of Fantasy and Fantaisie (already 
 noticed), and Ms oion confounding of her strong, personal, 
 idiosyncratic repugnance to (what she considered) unclean- 
 
CHAP. XIX.J FLOWEE, FRUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 479 
 
 ness, with real dislike. The lattor was on this wise. 
 Inasmuch as her feminine proclivity for excessive cleanness 
 and beautifying and polishing w^ere more akin to the feline 
 race than to the canine (which cares little ahout either, 
 or abour. the feline race, for that matter), Leibgeber's 
 hand, after Saufinder's tongue had touched it, was to her 
 as a thumbscrew, and Esau's hand all Chiragra. Her 
 sense of cleanliness shrunk from touching it ; and as for 
 Henry's lips ! though ten days had elapsed since the dog 
 had jumped up to them with his, they would have been 
 considered the most fearful bugbears, and scarecrows, 
 which abhorrence could set up for her. Even time itself 
 was no lipsalve in her eyes.* 
 
 This time, however-, the discovery of the error did not 
 bring about peace (as it used to do in former times), but 
 only a renewal of the decree of separation. Tears came to 
 his eyes, indeed, and he gave her his hand, saying, " For- 
 give me ! It is the last time ! As the proverb says, ' The 
 storms come home in August.' " But he could neither 
 offer nor receive a kiss of reconciliation. This, his latest 
 falling away from his warm resolves to be patient, irre- 
 vocably proclaimed liow wide their inner separation had 
 become. What is the use of seeing one's errors, when the 
 causes of them are still in force? What is the good of 
 clipping a ripple or two away from the ocean, when there 
 are still clouds and billows? The crime against the 
 bonnet-block was what rankled most in his breast; it 
 became a Gorgon's head to him, continually threatening 
 and avenging. 
 
 He sought his friend with a renewal of affection, for he 
 
 * There is nothing more unreasonable, uncontrollable, and inexpli- 
 cable, than this feeling of repugnance to the tiuolean — this inconsistent 
 alliance between the will and the coats of the stomach. Cioero says, 
 " the modest do not willingly use the word ' modesty ' (a transcendental 
 form of disgust with the impure) — and those who feel the repugnance 
 in question deal with it in a similar manner, particularly as bodily and 
 moral purity are neighbours (which the chaste and cleanly Swift 
 exemplified in his own person). Even physical loathing (of which the 
 subject-matter is mental, more than physical), affects the moral sense 
 more than is supposed. Cross the street with undigested food, or antl- 
 monial wine, in your stomach, and you will feel a stronger distaste to 
 a score of faces (and for more books wheu you come home) than at 
 ordiDAry times. 
 
480 JEAN PAUL FKIEDKICH EICHTER. [bOOK IV 
 
 had suffered for him ; and with new eHgerness, that he 
 might arrange the place for his death with him. 
 
 "Of what dangerous malady do you think you would 
 prefer to give np the ghost," said Henry, commencing the 
 medical consultation. " Would inflammation of the lungs 
 be to your taste ? or inflammation of the bowels, or of the 
 uvula ; or would phi enitis be more in your line, or bron- 
 chitis ; or would you prefer a quinsy, a colic, the devil 
 and his grandmother? We have got all the requisite 
 ■miasmata and materia epidemica ready to our hands ; and 
 when we throw in the month of August — harvest-month 
 of reapers and doctors — by way of poison-powder, you 
 certainly never can get over it all." Pirmian answered : 
 " You are a sort of master-beggar with all kinds of ailments 
 for sale ;* blindness, palsy, and the rest. But for my part, 
 I am for apoplexy, that volti subito, that extra post of 
 death. I have bad more than my share of legal prolixities, 
 verbosities, and delays of all sorts." " Well," said Leib- 
 geber, " apoplexy probably is the summarissimum, of death. 
 At the same time, we must be guided by the best patho- 
 logical works, and make up our minds for tJiree attacks of 
 it. We can't go by Nature here, we must be guided by 
 the laws of medicine ; and by them, death has to forward a 
 set of three bills of exchange before one of them is accepted 
 and honoured in the next world. He knocks three times 
 with his auctioneer's hammer. I know too well, the 
 diict;ors are not the men to listen to reason on this point; 
 3 ou will have to make up your mind to the three apoplectic 
 strokes." " But what the deuce ! " said Siebenk»s, with 
 comic warmth, " If apoplexy gives me two pretty power- 
 ful strokes, what more can a doctor desire ? The only 
 thing is, I can't be attacked for the next three or four 
 days, because I must wait for a cheaper cofiSn-bnilder." 
 The right of coffin-building (it should perhaps be ex- 
 plained) goes its round in a migratory manner among the 
 carpenters, and one has got to pay these shipwrights of our 
 last ark whatever they demand, because the property we 
 leave behind us at death has to be given over as plunder 
 
 * A beggar in England who keeps a shop full of crutches, eye- 
 piaster, faL-e legs, &c., which every one who wants to be lame, bliuil, 
 &c., must be supplied with. ' Britt. Annal. 
 
CHAP. XIX.] FLOWEK, FRUIT, AND THOBN PIECES, 481 
 
 by our executors and administrators, to the undertaker, 
 (that excise officer of death) like the palace of a dead doge 
 or pope. 
 
 " There may be another advantage in this short reprieve, 
 too," said Leibgeber. " I have an old collection of family 
 sermons here, which I bought for somewhere about half 
 the amount of a police-court fine. I do not know any- 
 where else but in this work where such impressive 
 sermons are delivered — it is more especially in the binding 
 that they are preached. The binding is wood, you perceive, 
 and there is a live preacher in there, preaching as finely as 
 any preacher that can be found in a pulpit." This preacher 
 in the wooden boards of the old book in question, was the 
 beetle which goes by the name of the death-watch, wood- 
 borer, or Ptinus pertinax, because when he is touched he 
 keeps up the appearance of a sham death, torture him aa 
 you will — and because the little blows he strikes, which 
 are nothing but knocks at his sweetheart's door, are 
 supposed to be Death's knocks at ours. For which reason 
 any piece of furniture in which he was wont to knock 
 used to be thought a valuable article of commerce, cr 
 heirloom. 
 
 Leibgeber added that, as there was nothing he so de- 
 tested as a man who tried to outwit God and the Devil 
 (•from fear of death) by a sudden repentance, he was fond 
 of hiding this sermon-book amongst the furniture of a 
 Lell-fearing individual of this description, so as to give 
 him a good sound terrifying with the beetle's funeral 
 sermons (although the insect, for his part, was, in fact, 
 thinking solely of mundane matters during his preaching 
 — like many other preachers). " So, could I not put the 
 sermon-book, with its funeral preacher, in amongst ymir 
 books, that your wife might hear him, and think of death 
 — of yours, that is to sav — and so get more used to the 
 idea of it?" 
 
 " No, no," said Firmian, " she shall not suffer so much 
 for me before her time. She has suffered quite enough 
 already." 
 
 " Just as you please,'' said Henry ; " but my beetle and 
 j'ou would have gone together capitally. Yotr are going 
 to simulate death, just as the Ptinus pertinax does. 
 
 u. 2 I 
 
482 JEAN PAUL FKIEDEICH EIOHTEE, [BOOK IV 
 
 For the rest,, he was delighted that everything had 
 worked together so well, and that it was just a, year since 
 he had stamped upon Blaise's glass periwig, and insulted, 
 or blackguarded, him. Because (as we have seen) libels 
 of this sort are not actionable after the lapse of a year, 
 except libels by a,- critic — which (like the Eector in Eagusa) 
 only reign for a month — ^that is to say, the time during 
 which the journal in which they appear circulates in the 
 reading society. And a book — which may be said to hold 
 the rank of dictator in the realm of letters — cannot reign, 
 with all its influence, more than a Eoman dictator, namely, 
 six months — that is to say, from its birth-fair to its death- 
 fair — and, like Grub Street scribblers, it dies either in 
 spring or in autumn. 
 
 They went back_ into a new-dressed, freshly-arranged 
 room. Lenette did what she could to paint the cracks of 
 her housekeeping over with flowers (like the flaws in porce- 
 lain), and always opened pieces of music in which that 
 particular string (of an article of furniture), which chanced 
 to be broken, did not require to be touched. Firmian, on 
 this occasion, sacrificed a greater number of the good and 
 entertaining ideas (which struck him) than usual to her 
 efforts to place Spanish screens between the company and 
 the steppes and fallow-fields of her poverty ; and more 
 than Henry did even then. All women — even those with- 
 out brains — are the sharpest and most delicately-observant 
 of augurs and claiwoyante prophetesses concerning matters 
 which closely concern themselves. Lenette was an in- 
 stance. Stiefel was there in the evening — a good deal of 
 argument was going oh, and Stiefel openly declared that 
 he (with Salvian and, other able theologians) was of 
 opinion that the children of Israel (whose garments never 
 wore into the minutest hole during all the forty years they 
 passed in thp wilderness) always continued of exactly the 
 same size (so as always to fit their clothes exactly) with 
 the exception of children, in whose cases the clothes, which 
 had been cut to fit them out of the wardrobes of the 
 dead, grew with their bodies in length and breadth. " In 
 this way," he added, "all the difficulties of the great 
 miracle are got over easily, by means of lesser accessory- 
 miracles." 
 
CHAP. XIX. J FLOWEE, FETET, AND THORN PIECES. 4i3 
 
 Leibgeber answered i (with sparkling- eyes), "I kniew 
 that wMle I was yet in my taotter's womb. ' There was 
 not a hole in all the hosts of Israel, except those which 
 they brought with them out of Egypt^and these' never 
 got any. bigger. Even suppose anybody mfede a hole in his 
 cheek,, or in his coat, when he was mourning-^these' holes 
 stitched themselves together in a' triee^ of • their ' own 
 accord.:: "What a shameful and deplorable .thing it is, 
 though;; that the 'host of Israel should have been the -fiist, 
 and the last; aiimy whose uniform was a sortiof /delightful 
 over-body, which grew with the soul 'it enveloped — and 
 where the frock-coat developed into an electoral mantle, 
 and from a Microvestis to a Macrovestis I I see that eating 
 was cloth manufacturing (in the wilderness), manna was 
 English wool, and the stomach the loom. An Israelite 
 who fed himself up to the proper pitch was, by so doing, 
 yielding,, the produce of the land, and of the wilderness. 
 If I had. been in the recruiting-service in .those days, I 
 should simply have hung the recruit's jackets on tO' the 
 recruit's measure. But how go matters in ■ onr wilderness 
 here — ^which leads to Egypt, not to the promised land? 
 In our regiments, the privates grow every year, but the 
 coats do. not. Nay, the unifonns are made for dry 
 seasons only, and for lean men— in wet years the clothes 
 contract like hygrometers, and^ perspiration steals more 
 doth than the tailor does, or even the contractor. A 
 commanding officw who should expect his uniforms to 
 stretch — who should reckon upon a Periphrasis of them — 
 going by the example, not only of the IsraeliteSi but like- 
 wise of the clothes-moths, and the snails (who d& not ex- 
 pand to suit their shells, but whose shells expand to suit 
 them) — this commanding ofiScer, I say, would go out of his 
 mind — for his men would be fighting in the condition of 
 the athletes of old- — and the men' themselves would be in 
 a nice frame of mind on the subject." 
 
 This innocuous sermon (wholly addressed to the account 
 of Stiefel's piece of exegetio absurdity) Lenette supposed 
 was directed against her wardrobe. She was like the 
 Germans in general, who. search after some special satiric 
 kernel hidden in every rocket and firework serpent of 
 humour. Wherefore Siebenkaes begged him to pardon 
 
 2 I 2 
 
484 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH EICHTEB. [BOOK IV. 
 
 hie poor wife of his (over whose heart so many a sharp 
 sorrow besides was strewn) the inevitable and invincible 
 ignorance of her exegesis — or rather, to spare her the know- 
 ledge of it altogether. 
 
 At length a Kuhschnappel bath-keeper departed this 
 life, and fell under the plane of the costly carpenter. " I 
 have not a minute to waste over my apoplexy now," said 
 Firmian, in Latin ; " who is to be my warrant that nobody 
 shall die before I do, and so the cheap carpenter slip 
 through my fingers ? " So it was arranged that he should 
 be taken ill the following evening. 
 
 CHAPTEE XX. 
 
 APOPLEXY — THE PRESIDENT OF THE BOARD OF HEALTH — THE 
 NOTARY-PUBLIC — THE LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT — -THE 
 knight's move — REVEL, THE MORNING PREACHER — THE 
 SECOND APOPLECTIC ATTACK. 
 
 In the evening Henry drew up the curtain upon this 
 tragedy (full of comic gravedigger business), and discovered 
 Firmian lying on his bed speechless, with apoplectic head, 
 and all his right side paralysed. The only mode in which 
 the patient could bring himself to endure the torture of 
 the deception, and of the pain he was causing Lenette, 
 was by making a mental vow to send her the half of his 
 yearly income as inspector at Vaduz, anonymously, and by 
 remembering that by his death she would obtain happiness, 
 freedom, and her lover. The occupants of the house formed 
 a, circle about the apoplectic patient, but Leibgeber drove 
 them out of the room, saying, "the sufferer must hare 
 quietness and rest." It delighted him beyond expression 
 1o be able to go on uttering humourous lies without ces- 
 sation. He assumed the office of Imperial Hereditary 
 Doorkeeper, and shut the door in the doctor's face (whom 
 people insisted upon prescribing). " I am going to pre- 
 Boribe a little prescription for the patient myself," he said, 
 " but, little as it is, it will restore his speech for a time. 
 These cursed death-rivers, doctors' potions, Mr. Schulrath,' 
 
CHAP. XX.J FLOWEE, FEUIT, AND THOEN PIECES, 485 
 
 ' (for that gentleman had been fetched immediately) "are 
 like those rivers -which demand a dead hody every year." 
 So he wrote a recipe for a simple sedative powder, as fol- 
 lows, reading aloud as he wrote ; — 
 
 R Conch : Citratse Sirup : j. 
 Nitri Crystallisato gr. x. 
 
 D.S. "The Sedative Powder." 
 
 " But above all things," he added, in the most imperative 
 tones, " we must place the patient's feet in warm water." 
 
 However, everybody in the house knew well enough 
 that nothing would be of the slightest avail, as his death ; 
 had been but too unmistakably foretold by the floury face; 
 and Pecht felt a kind of sympathising satisfaction that he 
 had hit the mark. 
 
 Scarcely had the sick man swallowed the powder, than, 
 to the astonishment of the Death- Assurance Association in 
 his bedroom, he found himself able to speak, intelligibly, 
 if not very loud. The domestic Vehmgericht was not, 
 perhaps, altogether pleased with this. But our good 
 Henry had a pretext now for resuming his cheerful mien 
 He comforted Lenette by reminding her that " here below 
 pain was but an initiation ceremony to something higher 
 — the box-on-the-ear, or sword-aocolade whereby a man is 
 dubbed a knight." 
 
 The patient had a very fair night after his sedative 
 powder, and began to have some slight hopes of himself. 
 Henry would not allow Lenette (whose eyes were heavy 
 with tears and sleep) to sit up by his bed during the night. 
 He said he would prefer to be at hand himself, in case 
 there should be any danger ; of which, however, there 
 was no great risk, as they made their agreement together 
 (doing so in Latin, like princes) that Death, the fifth act of 
 this tragic interlude, (only one of the scenes of the tragedy 
 of Life,) should take place on the evening of the following 
 day. " Even till to-morrow," said Firmian, " is too long 
 to wait. I am so unspeakably grieved for my poor Lenette's 
 sorrow. Like David, alas ! I have to make a melancholy 
 choice between famine, war, and pestilence, and have no 
 way out of it but his. You, dear brother, are my Cain, 
 and send me on my journey, and believe in the world to 
 
4.86 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH EICHEE. [bOOK IV, 
 
 which you. despatch me not a bit more than 'he did.* 
 Before you prescrihed the sedative power which obliged me 
 to talk, I was really wishing, in my silent gloom, that the 
 jest might become earnest. For I must one day pass 
 through that underground portal which opens into the 
 fortress of futurity, in which we shall be safe. Ah .' it is 
 not the dying that is pai];iful, it is tlie ^parting — I mean from 
 those we love." Henry said, in reply, " Nature holds a 
 b:qoad AiChilles-shield before us *.o protect us from that final 
 bq.yonet-tbrust jpf life. On our death-beds we grow cold 
 morally before we do so physically, a strange courtierJike 
 I indifference towards all we are leaving creeps frostily 
 through the dying nerves. Sapient spectators say, 'See, 
 nobody but a Christian can die with such resignation and 
 trust.' Never mind, dear Firmian ; the two or three painful 
 burning minutes which you have to bear till to-morrow 
 arrives are a capital warm bath of Aix water for the sick 
 spirit. It has an infernal smell of rotten eggs now, no 
 doubt, but (that will go away completely as the bath 
 grows cool." 
 
 Next day Henry eulogised him as follows. "As Cato the 
 younger slept quietly the night before his death, (hist^ory 
 heard him snore,,) so j/om appear to have afforded these 
 debilitated, unnerved, and degenerate days a fresh example 
 of a similar magnanimity. If I were your Plutarch I 
 should record the circumstance." 
 
 " In sober seriousness, though," answered Firmian, " I 
 .should be, rather pleased if, several years hence, when 
 Death has presented his second of exchange, some literary 
 West, the historical painter, should honour this odd firsi 
 death of.miue by describing it for the press." This, we 
 see a bipgriaphical West has now actually done, but I beg 
 to be permitted to confess, without hesitation, that it has 
 afforded me sincere gratification to find among the docu- 
 ments this death-bed speech and wish, which I am so 
 completely carrying out. Leibgeber answered, "The 
 J esuits in Lowen once published a little book in which 
 
 * The Eabbis maintain that Cair kUIed his brother because the 
 latter dlsa^eedwith him when ho (Cain) denied the immortsOity of 
 the soul. So that the first murder was an auto-da-fi, and the first wsr 
 a religious one. 
 
CHAP. XX.] FLOWEE, PEUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 487 
 
 the terrible end of Luther was minutely described in 
 Latin. Old Luther got hold of the book and translated it, 
 as he did the Bible, merely adding at the end, ' I, Dr. M. 
 Luther, have read and translated this narrative myself.' 
 If I were you, when I translated my death into English, 
 I should write that at the end of it too." Do please write 
 it, dear Siebeniaes, as you are still in life — but translate 
 me, at all events. 
 
 Morning brings refreshing to the laid corn of humanity, 
 whether it be laid upon the hard bed of sickness, or on the 
 softer mattress of ordinary health; its breezes lift the 
 bowed heads of both flowers and men : but our sick man 
 remained prostrate. Things seemed distinctly worse with 
 him — he could not disguise from himself that he was 
 losing ground ; at all events he resolved to " set his house 
 in order." This first quarter of the hour of death which 
 the death bell tolled, smote like a sharp and heavy bell- 
 hammer upon Lenette's heart, whence the warm stream of 
 the old love burst forth in bitter tears. Firmian could not 
 bear the sight of this disconsolate weeping ; he stretched 
 his arms beseechingly, and the suffering creature laid 
 herself between them in gentle obedience, on to Hs breast, 
 their tears, their sighs, and their hearts mingled in the 
 warmest affection, and thus they rested in happiness 
 (though only upon wounds) at this brief distance from the 
 boundary-hill of parting. 
 
 For this poor soul's sake, then, he grew visibly better. 
 Another improvement in his condition was necessary, 
 moreover, to account for the happy frame of mind in 
 \vhich he executed his last will and testament. Leibgeber 
 expressed satisfaction that the patient was able to take 
 some dinner on the table-cloth of the bed-quilt, and swal- 
 low the contents of a sick man's soup-dish about the size 
 of a pond. " The good spirits," said Leibgeber to Peltz- 
 stiefel, " which our invalid is beginning to exhibit again, 
 give me very considerable hopes indeed ; though it was 
 evidently only to please his wife that he took the soup." 
 
 Nobody was fonder of lying, or lied oftener, out of satire 
 or humour, than Leibgeber • and no one more utterly de- 
 tested serious untruthfulness than he. He could tell a 
 thousand lies in fun, but not two in a case of seriou* 
 
488 JEAN PAUL PEIEDKICH EICHTEK. fBOOK JV. 
 
 necessity. For the former h.e liad at his finger's end every 
 possible deceptive trick of face and language ; for the latter 
 not one. 
 
 In the forenoon the Schulrath and Merhitzer, the land- 
 lord, were summoned to the bedside. " Gentlemen," began 
 the sick man, " I am thinking of having my last will this 
 afternoon — of declaring, at Nature's place of execution, the 
 three things which I desire — as the condemned in Athens 
 were allowed to do ; but what I wish to do at the present 
 moment is to open one of my testaments before I make 
 my second, or (to speak more accurately) the codicil of my 
 first. I wish my friend Leibgeber to pack up, and , kee}) 
 possession of, all my scribblings as soon as I myself am 
 stuck into my last addressed envelope. Further (and in 
 this I follow the precedent of the Danish Kings, the old 
 Dukes of Austria, and the noble Spaniards — of whom the 
 first were interred in their armour, the second in lion's 
 skins, the third in miserable Capuchins' gowns) — I wiU 
 and ordain that there shall be no hesitation about planting 
 me in the bed of the next world in the very self-same old 
 pod and shell in which I have vegetated in this ; in brief, 
 exactly as I am while now testating. This injunction 
 necessitates my making my third — that the woman who 
 comes to lay me out shall be paid, and at once sent about 
 her business, because all my life through I have had a most 
 special antipathy to two women — the woman who washes 
 us into life, and the woman who washes us out of it (though 
 in a bigger bath-tub) — the midwife and the woman who 
 lays out the corpse. She is not to lay a finger upon me, 
 nor is anybody except my Henry there." His hatred of 
 these servants of life and death may probably have pro- 
 ceeded from the same causes as my own, namely the impe- 
 rious and rapacious nature of the controlling power which 
 these she-planters and caterers for the cradle and the bier 
 exercise in squeezing us just in the two unarmed and 
 weaponless hours of our deepest gladness and our deepest 
 sorrow. 
 
 " I further will that as soon as my face has made the 
 signal of adieu, Henry shall roof it over and shield 
 it for ever with our long-necked mask, which I brought 
 down from the box upstairs. I also desire that, wheu J 
 
CHAP. XX.J FLOWEE, FEUIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 489 
 
 bake my departure from all the fields and plains of my 
 youtliful days, and hear nothing behind me but the rustle 
 of the haycocks of the aftermath, I may, at all events, 
 have my wife's silken garland laid upon my breast, by way 
 of game-counter to mark the joys I have lost. A man 
 can't go more suitably than with mock insignia, such as 
 that, out of a life which has dished him up such a number 
 of pasteboard pasties fuU of nothing but wind. Lastly, 
 I will that, when I am gone on my journey, nobody shall 
 clang after me from the church-steeple (like the people of 
 Carlsbad), for we sick and transient watering-place visitors 
 of life (like those of Carlsbad) are received and sent on 
 our way with music from the steeples, especially as the 
 Church's servants are more expensive than the Carlsbad 
 steeple-man, who only asks three pieces for blowing people 
 in and out." 
 
 At this point he asked that Lenette's profile-portrait 
 might be given him in bed, and he said, in a faltering voice, 
 " I should like my dear Henry and the landlord to leave the 
 room for a minute, and let me be alone with the Schulrath 
 and my wife." 
 
 When this was done he gazed fondly, a long while, in 
 silence, upon the little likeness. His eyes ran over with 
 sorrow like a broken river-bank. He gave the picture to 
 the Schulrath, paused, overcome by emotion, and said at 
 length : " To you, my faithful friend, and to you alone, 
 can I give this beloved portrait: you are Tier friend, as 
 well as mine. Oh God ! there is not a soul in the great, 
 wide world that will take care of my dear Lenette if ywi 
 forsake her. Don't cry so bitterly, my darling ; lie will be 
 everything to you. Ah ! dearest of friends, this helpless, 
 innocent heart will break in desolate loneliness of sorrow 
 unless you protect it and console it. Oh ! never abandon 
 it, as I am doing ! " 
 
 The Schulrath swore by the Almighty that he would 
 never leave her, and he took her hand and pressed it 
 (without looking at her) as she wept, and hung, with eyes 
 raining down with tears, upon the face of his friend, whose 
 voice was so soon to be mute for ever. But Lenette forced 
 him away from her husband's breast, and liberated her 
 hand, and sunk down upon the lips which had so deeply 
 
490 JEAN PAUL PBIEDKICH EICHTBR, [BOOK IT 
 
 touched her heart. Firmian clasped her with his left arm, 
 and stretched his right hand to his friend — thus holding 
 to his oppressed hosom the two things on earth that are 
 nearest heaven, friendship and love. 
 
 And it. is even this very matter which is an endless 
 source of comfort and delight to me in you deluded and 
 disagreeing mortals — ^that you all love one another heartily 
 and utterly when you only get a chance of seeing one 
 another divested of coverings and fogs — that when we fear 
 we are growing blind we are only growing cold — and that, 
 as soon as ever Death has raised our brothers and sisters 
 up clear of the clouds of our own errors, our hearts melt 
 into bliss and love when we see them soaring as beautiful 
 human creatures, no longer distorted by the mists and 
 concave mirrors of this world, up in the translucent »ther ; 
 and cannot but sigh forth, " Ah ! I should never have mis- 
 understood 'you if I had always seen you thus." This is 
 why every loving soul stretches its arms out to those 
 whom poets exhibit to our low-placed eyes, as geniuses, 
 in their cloud-built heaven ; though, could he let them sink 
 down upon our breasts, they would lose their beauteous 
 transfiguration in a few short days upon the dirty earth of 
 our necessities and' mistakes : as the crystal glacier- water 
 which refreshes, without chilling, must be caught in the 
 air as it drips from its ice-diamond, because it is made 
 impure by the air the moment it touches the earth.* 
 
 The Schulrath went out, but only to the doctor. This 
 distinguished Generalissimo of Friend Death (who did not 
 bear the title of " Councillor of the Supreme Board of 
 Health " for nothing, but for money) was very willing to 
 come and see the patient : firstly, because the Schulrath 
 was a man of means and consideration; and, secondly, 
 because Siebenk»s in his capacity of a member of the 
 Corpse Lottery (of which the doctor also was a correspond- 
 ing member and frere servant), ought not to be allowed to 
 die. For this burial-fund was, in one of its more import- 
 ant aspects, a species of Government Savings' Bank, or 
 Imperial Treasury for members of the better classes. The 
 sight of this Supreme Councillor of Health, advancing in 
 
 * Aocordinp; to de Ltic, in the third volume of his ' Little Joui-ncya 
 for Amateur Travellers.' 
 
GHAP. XX.J FLOWER, FEUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 491 
 
 battle-array, terrified Leibgeber to death. He! could not 
 :butfear that^tbe -advent of the doctor might make matters 
 take a more serious turn, so that Siebenkaes might transmit 
 to I posterity a celebrity like that of Moli&i^e, who died on 
 the stage while performing the part of the 'Malad'e linagi- 
 aaire.' The relation between doctor and patient seemed 
 to him as indeterminate as that between woodpeckers, or 
 bark-beetles, and trees ; inasmuch as it is 'still a moot 
 question whether the trees wither in consequence of these 
 creatures boring into them, and laying their eggs in them, 
 or if' (on the contrary) it is because the bark is worm-eaten 
 and the trunk dead, that the beetles come flying to the 
 trees. My opinion as regards beetles and wbodpeckers 
 (and doctors as well) is that each is alternately cause and 
 effect ; and that there is no such thing as a living creature 
 whose existence can possibly be taken as pre-supposing 
 decay, because, if so, at the creation of the world there 
 would have had to be a dead horse created for the blue- 
 bottles, and a rotten cheese for the mites. 
 
 Well, Dr. CElhafen (of the Supreme Board of Health) 
 marched straight up to the sick man (shooting past the one 
 who was not sick,: with angry rudeness), and instantly 
 swooped upon life's seconds'-hand, the jiiedical divining- 
 rod, the pulse. Leibgeber set the plough of satirical atoger 
 into the soil of his face, ploughed crooked furrows, 'and 
 determined upon a course of deep subsoil-ploughing. 
 
 " This," said the professor of the healing art, " is a 
 case of genuine nervous apoplexy, superveniiig on an un- 
 due determination of blood to the head, aad a plethora of 
 tiie vessels. There ought to have been medical attend- 
 ance at a much earlier stage of the case; the full, hard 
 pulse threatens a repetition of the attack. An emfetic 
 powder, which I shall prescribe, will, in thd circumstances, 
 produce the best possible effect." And with this he pulled 
 out some emetic billets-doux, wrapped up like bonbons. This 
 preparation was one which he kept for sale himself, hawk- 
 ing it about from house to house like a Jew pedlar. There 
 were few diseases to which he did not apply these emetics 
 of his by way of " means of grace," screwjacks, pump 
 handles, and purgatorial fire ; but he worked them mo-st 
 assiduously of all in apoplexy chest-inflammation, head- 
 
492 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH EICHTEE, [BOOK IV. 
 
 ache, and bilious fever. What he said was that he " began 
 by clearing the principal passages," and in so doing he 
 occasionally cleared the proprietor of said principal passages 
 out of this world, so that he found himself passing through 
 the final " passage " of all flesh. 
 
 Leibgeber kneaded his odd visage into a new form, and 
 said, " There seems nothing, Doctor.(Elhafen (my colleague 
 and protomedicua), to prevent our holding our concilium, or 
 consilium, or collegium medicum, here where we stand. I 
 cannot but think that my sedative powder had a good 
 effect, seeing that it restored apoplectico there the power of 
 speech, yesterday." The protomedicus took Leibgeber for 
 some quack, and without so much as letting his eyes touch 
 his colleague, said to Peltzstiefel, " Will you get them to 
 bring some warm water, and I will give him the powder 
 myself." " He and I will take it both together," burst in 
 Leibgeber, in anger ; " both our gall-bladders are acting at 
 present; the patient shan't, won't, and mustn't." 
 
 " Are you a regular practitioner. Sir?" asked the Coun- 
 cillor of the Supreme Board of Health, with contempt. 
 
 " I am a Jubilee Doctor, or Doctor Jubilant, and have 
 been so ever since I ceased being a fool. You no doubt 
 remember in Haller the case of the fool who thought his 
 head was off, until they cured him by putting a lead hat 
 on to him. A head roofed and insulated with lead has 
 about as distinct a sense of individuality as one cast in 
 that metal. I was very nearly in the same boat with that 
 fool myself, brother colleague. I had inflammation of the 
 brain, and did not find out so soon as I should have done 
 that it had been put out, and cured. To make a long tale 
 short, I faMcied that my head had peeled away (or shall I 
 call it ' exfoliated,' or 'desquamated'), just as one's feet 
 moulder and drop off, like crab's claws, when one takes 
 too much ergot. When the barber came in, and thre^v 
 down his purple tool-bag, or quiver, I said, 'My dear 
 Surgeon-General Spoerl, it may be perfectly true that flies, 
 tortoises, and adders have been known to go on living after 
 their heads were off, as I do, but there vasn't much on 
 them to shave. A man of your sense must see that it is as 
 impossible to shave me as to shave the Torso at Eome— 
 where were you thinking of soaping me, Mr. Spcerl? 
 
CHAP. XX.] FLOWER, FEUIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 493 
 
 Scarce was he out of the door when in came the wig-maker. 
 ' Another time, Mr. Peisser,' said I, ' unless yon propose to 
 curl the circumambient air around me, or the hair on my 
 chest, you can put your combs back into your waistcoat 
 pocket. Since twelve o'clock last night I have been 
 carrying on existence without either frieze or cornice, and, 
 like the tower of Babel, I have no cupola. But if you 
 will go and see whether you can find my head in the next 
 loom there, and put a queue and a toupee on to that caput 
 mortuwm of mine, I should have no objection to that, and I 
 don't mind wearing the head by a way of a quev,e--wig.' 
 By good luck in came the Eector Magnificus. He was a 
 doctor, and saw what distress I was in, when I smote my 
 hands together and cried, ' Where are my four brain cham- 
 bers and my corpus callomm, my anus cerebri, and my 
 uniform centrum (which, according to Glaser, is the seat 
 of the imagination) ? How can a Eump Parliament wear 
 spectacles, or use ear trumpets ? The reasons are obvious. 
 Is it come to this with the monaecius head of the world, 
 that it has no head left for a seed-vessel ? ' But the Eector 
 Magnificus sent to the University wardrobe for an old, 
 light-fitting, doctor's hat; he put it on me with a gentle 
 push, and said, ' The faculty never places a doctor's hat on 
 anything but a head ; it could not possibly put it on to a 
 nothing.' And this hat made a new head grow on to my 
 imagination, like a decapitated snail's. And ever since I 
 was cured myself, I have taken to curing other people." 
 
 The Board of Health councillor turned a basilisk's eye- 
 ball away from Leibgeber, and lowered himself downstairs 
 by the ribbon of his cane like a bale of merchandize, 
 omitting to pocket his emetic permit for the world to 
 come, which the patient had, consequently, to pay for. 
 
 But our good Henry had another war to wage with 
 Stiefel and Lenette, until Firmian threw himself between 
 them as mediator, with the assurance that he would have 
 sent the powder packing in any case, because it would 
 have been anything but good for an old pain in his heart 
 (alas ! he spoke figuratively), and two or three Gordian- 
 knots in his lungs (the " knots of the plot of his earthly 
 drama "). 
 
 But all this time, however good a face he might put on 
 
494 I.JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH EICHTEE. I BpOK IV. 
 
 matters, there was no concealing tlie fact that: he was 
 steadily growing worse. iThe ricochet of the apoplectic 
 shot was clearly imminent, and to be looked for. at any 
 moment. " It is time I made my will," he said. " I long 
 ardently for the Notary Public." ■ This functionary^- as is 
 well known, has. the drawing up of all last wills, and 
 testaments, according to the laws of Kuhschnappel., At 
 length he arrived, Bserstel by name, a shrivelled and dried- 
 up snail of a man, with a round, shy, listening button-face, 
 all hunger, anxiety, and attention. Many people thought 
 his flesh was merely smeared over his bones, like the new 
 Swedish carton pierre. " What is it your pleasure to have 
 written to-day. Sir ? " began Baerstel. " One of my, pretty 
 little codicils," said Siebenkses. "But before we begin 
 hadn't you better try me with a catch-question or two, as 
 is usually done with testators, to find out (without letting 
 me know what you are at, you understand) whether I am 
 all right in my head ?." " Do you know who I am^ Sir ? " 
 said Borstal. " You ; are Mr. Baerstel, Notary Public," 
 answered the patient. " Not only is that quite correct," 
 answered Brerstel, " but it renders it quite clear that you 
 are wandering very little, if at all, and we may proceed at 
 once to draw up your testament." 
 
 last will and testament of siebenkies, 
 pock's advocate. 
 
 " The undersigned, now yellowing and falling from the 
 tree with the rest of the August apples, desires, being thus 
 nigh to death, which looses the spirit from the thraldom 
 of the body, to execute a few more merry back-steps, side- 
 steps, and Sir-Eoger-de Coverleys, three minutes befpre the 
 Basle dance of Death begins." 
 
 The notary paused, and asked in amazement, "Am I to 
 put this stuff, and more like it, down upon paper ?," , 
 
 " Imprimis, I, Firmian Siebenk^s, alias Heinrich Leib- 
 geber,,dQ hereby wUl and ordain that my, guardian the 
 Heimlichervon Blaise shall (and must) pay over, within a 
 year and day after my decease, to my friend, Mr. Leibgeber, 
 inspector in Vaduz,* the 12,000 florins of trust money 
 
 * That is, to himself. ^ He wishes his inheritance to be paid to him- 
 self, and not to his wife, because she might have married a rich husband 
 
CHAP. XX.J FLOWEK, FEUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 495 
 
 whereof he has godles^ly ;defraude4 me, his ward : the, said 
 Mr. Leibgp^e:^! iiaaKng over the same hereafter faithfully to 
 my heloved wife. In the event of the said Herr von Blaise 
 declining: so , to do, I here lift up my hand and swear, upon 
 my dyipg' bed, that after I have departed this- life ,I|Will 
 purstie him,, not legally, but spiritually, and will terrify 
 him by appearing to lum, either as. the devil or as a tall 
 white man, or by my vqice merely, according fis my cir- 
 cumstanqes, a.fter my decease, may permit." , , , 
 
 The notary's feathered arm hovered in air, and he ceased 
 not to shrink and sjifudd^r with terror. "All I am a&aid 
 of," he said,, " is that if I write do,wn things of this kind, 
 the Heiialioher will get hold of me.". But Leibgeber, ■w^th 
 face and body, barred, his retreat through that , hell-gate, 
 the door of the room. , 
 
 " Further, as reigning sovereign of the shooter's com- 
 pany, I, jwill and ordain that no war of succession shall 
 convert my testamept into a poT^der of succession for 
 innocent people. Further, that the republip of Kuhschnap- 
 pel (into the office of Gonfaloniere and Doge wh,ereof I was 
 balloted wij;Ji rifle bullets) shall (lyage no defensive war, 
 seeing that it cannot defend itself if it does — but offensive 
 wars only, with the .object of enlarging the boundaries 
 of its territories they , not being easy to protect.. And 
 that its members may, in their generation, be as wood- 
 economising as tjieir country and rpyal burgh's father fhas 
 been in his. Now-a-days, when forests are bume4' to 
 charcoal faster than they grow again, the only thing to be 
 done is to warm the climate a good deal, and turn it yito 
 a great brooding-oven,, kilji, and field-oven, so as tP save 
 the trouble, and obviate the necessity, of having stoves in 
 the houses. And this has been in some measure attended 
 to by careful Commissioners of Woods, and Forests, .who 
 have cleared away the forests as much as they pould,-il;hey 
 being full of late winter. "When one thinks how very beauti- 
 fully modem Germany contrasts with that which Tacitus 
 mapped, , warmed, as it, is by the mere cuttipg dpwn of 
 the forests, we have little difficulty in feeling convinced 
 
 in the interval ; besides, he would have leas trouble in knowing whether 
 or not the Heimlicher did what he told him, and could, if necessary, 
 carry out the threat which he is about to make. 
 
496 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEIOH EICHTEK. [BOOK IV. 
 
 that a time will come when, there being no more timber at 
 all, we shall arrive at such a temperature that the atmo- 
 sphere itself shall be our fur pelisse. The reason the present 
 superfluity is burnt to ashes as rapidly as possible is, that 
 the price of raft- wood may be raised, just as a million livres ' 
 worth of nutmegs were publicly burnt at Amsterdam in 
 1760, to prevent the price from falling. 
 
 " Moreover, as King of the Kuhschnappelian Jerusalem, 
 it is my desire that the senate and people thereof (senatus, 
 populusc[ue Kuhschnappeliensis) be not damned, but con- 
 trariwise blessed, particularly in this present world. 
 Further, that the town magnates may not devour the 
 Kuhschnappelian nests (houses) as they do the Indian 
 ones, and that the taxes, though they have to pass through 
 the four stomachs of the tax-gatherers,* may nevertheless 
 issue thence converted from milky chyle into red blood 
 (from silver into gold), and after circulating through the 
 laoteals and the thoracic duct, be impelled in due course 
 into the veins of the body politic. Further, I will and 
 appoint that the greater and the lesser council " 
 
 The notary would fain have stopped here, and shook his 
 head most energetically, but Leibgeber was playing with 
 the rifle with which the testator had elevated himself to 
 the throne of the marksman (whereas it is upon leaping- 
 poles consisting of other men's ramrods that thrones are 
 usually attained to), and Bssrstel wrote on in the sweat of 
 his brow. 
 
 "That the mayor, the treasurer, the Heimlicher, the 
 eight members of council, and the Serjeant of court, may 
 listen to reason, and reward no merit but that of other 
 people. And that the rascal Blaise, and the scoundrel 
 Meyem may daily lay castigatory hands upon each other, 
 as relations, so that there may at all events always be oile 
 to punish the other." 
 
 Here the notary jumped up, declared it took his breath 
 away, and went to the window to get a little air. And as 
 he saw that there was a pile of tanner's bark within easy 
 shot of the window-sill, his terror, shoving at him from 
 
 * Here follow, in the original, puna on the (German) medical names 
 of the four stomachs of the Buminantia, for which I am unequal to 
 finding equivalents. — Trans. 
 
CHAP. XX.] ' FLOWER, FKUIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 497 
 
 behind, impelled him up on to the sill in question. 
 Having taken this first step, before a testament witness 
 could seize him by the coat-tails, he made a second (and 
 long) one out into the open air, so as to be in a position to 
 reach that modelling-table the heap of bark. Being thus 
 a falling artist (not a rising one), he could do no better on 
 his arrival there Aan make use of liis face as a graving- 
 tool, plastic " form," and copying machine, and execute 
 therewith a faint bas-relief impression of himself upon the 
 heap of tan. His fingers worked busily as graving-tools, 
 making copies of themselves, whilst, as a matter of pure 
 accident, he countersigned this, his report of the incident, 
 w^ith hif notarial seal, which he had taken with him in his 
 descent. So easy is it for one notary to create another, 
 like a Count Palatine. But Beerstel left his co-notary and 
 the entire lusus naiurce behind him, thinking on his home- 
 ward way of matters of a wholly different kind. Stiefel 
 and Leibgeber, again, looked out of window, and (the 
 notary having vanished, bag and baggage,) gazed upon his 
 secoiid outward man as it lay outstretched before them upon 
 its anatomical theatre, smelling of Eussia leather. Con- 
 cerning which the author will not add another word of 
 his own, but only these of Henry's. 
 
 " The notary wished to seal the testament with a larger 
 seal than usual — one which nobody might forge — so he 
 sealed it with his own body, and there we see the sphra- 
 gistic impression all complete." 
 
 The will, such as it was, was duly subscribed by the 
 witnesses and by the testator, and anything but a demi- 
 military testament of this kind was scarcely to be expected 
 in the circumstances. Evening was now drawing on, — 
 the time when sick and sorry man turns him from the sun 
 (as does the earth he dwells on), and towards the twilight 
 evening star of the other world, — when the sick pass away 
 to the latter, and the well gaze at the former — and when 
 rirmian thought to give his wife the long kiss of parting, 
 and then begin slowly sinking. But unfortunately Deacon 
 Eevel (the assistant preacher) came rustling in in an 
 electrically stormy fashion. He came arrayed in his 
 ecclesiastical armour, gorget, sash, and all, to administei' 
 a befitting rebuke to the invalid (round whose neck he 
 
 II. 2 k 
 
498 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH EICHTBK. [bOOK IV. 
 
 had tied the hand of matrimony in a douhle knot) for 
 trying to evade payment of the confession fee^that toll 
 for the communion of the sick and sound on the high- 
 way between heaven and hell. As (on the authority of 
 Linnaeus) the ancient botanists — a Croll, Porta, Helvetius, 
 Fabricius — thought that certain, plants which had more 
 or less resemblance to particular illnesses were remedies 
 for these complaints, prescribing yellow plants, such as 
 saffron and turmeric, for jaundice, dragon's-blood and 
 catechu for dysentery,- cabbage-heads for headache (as 
 well as prickly things, such as fish-bones, for stitches in the 
 side), so, in the hands of able Gospel ministers, the spiritual 
 materia medica, such as sermons and admonitions, assume, 
 the appearance of the spiritual maladies for whose cure 
 they are administered — anger, pride, avarice, and so on. 
 Thus there is often no difference, but one of condition, 
 between the bed-ridden patient and his physician. This 
 was the case with Eevel. One of his great objects in life 
 was, in an age when people are so prone to defame the 
 Lutheran clergy by calling them mere Jesuits in disguise, 
 or monks, to give the most unmistakable proof, more by 
 deeds than by words, that he was, at all events, none of 
 tlie latter (who call nothing their own, and are not allowed 
 to possess property), and for that reason to be at all times 
 on the hunt, and on the snatch, after worldly possessions. 
 Hoseas Leibgeber did his best to make himself a barrier' 
 rope and turnstile for the parson, and stopped him on the 
 threshold, saying, " I fear it won't be of much use ; I tried 
 my oivn hand yesterday at converting and recoining him 
 flying, (if I may use the expression,) post-haste, volti suhito 
 citissime, but all that came of it tt^as that he threw it in my 
 teeth that I wasn't converted myself — and no more I am. 
 There are whole flocks of heretical singing-birds pecking 
 away at the summer rape-seed of my opinions." Eevel 
 answered (vacillating between a major mode and a minor), 
 "A servant of the Lord bides his time, keeps diligent 
 watch, and does the duty of his sacred calling, striving to 
 save souls — from atheism, as well as from other sin. The 
 event concerns the sinner, and the sinner only." 
 
 So this black storm-cloud, charged to the brim with 
 Sinai-lightnings, rolled on into the dim-lit chamber; the 
 
CHAP. XX.] FLOWEEj.FEUIT, AKD THOEN PIECES. 499 
 
 parson -waved his great, flapping gown-sleeve, like a 
 standard of- spiritual healing and rehabilitation, over the 
 atheist (as he thought him) stretched - on his bed, and 
 told him in a " sick-bed exhortation " (which is gene- 
 rally the very antipodes of a, funeral sermon) — in a 
 " sick-bed exhortation" (I say) such as may one day over- 
 take me and my reader under our last bed-cover, and 
 which I shall therefore avoid sending all the way from 
 Bayreuth to Heidelberg to be put in type, since it may 
 be heard en route going on in any sick-chamber. At the 
 same time he told him, in the said sick-bed exhorta- 
 tion to his face, like a plain-speaking, straight-forward 
 man, that he was a roast for the devil's table, just done to 
 a turn, and ready to be dished and served. The roast 
 (thus pronounced to be done to a turn), closed his eyes, 
 and endured it. But Henry, whom it pained to see the 
 parson pinching the ears and the heart whom he loved 
 with red-hot pincers, and who was furious at the thought 
 that it was done solely to frighten the sick man into the 
 Confessional — Henry seized his waving arm, and gently 
 reminded him — ■ 
 
 " I did not think it would have been very polite, Mr. 
 Kevel, to mention it before — but the patient's hearing is 
 a good deal impaired. You will find you will be obliged 
 to scream. He has not heard a syllable you have said up 
 to this point. Mr. Siebenkses, do you know who this is ? 
 You see how little he hears. Set to work now at convert- 
 ing me, over a glass of beer — I should prefer that very 
 much, and I hear a great deal better. I'm very much 
 afraid he has a touch of delirium, and, if he sees you at all, 
 thinks you are the devil — for it is with Mm that the dying 
 have to fence their last bout. It's a pity he didn't know 
 what you were saying. He would have been very angry 
 and annoyed — (for confess he will not) — and on the 
 authority of Haller, in the 8th volume of his ' Physiology, 
 a Jiroper amount of annoyance and vexation has often 
 been known to add weeks to a dying person's life. But, 
 after all, he is a Mnd of a true Christian, after a fashion, 
 when all's said, although he no more dreams of confessing 
 than any of the Apostles did, or the fathers either. "When 
 he is gone, you shall hear from my own lips how peace- 
 
 2 K 2 
 
500 JEAN PAUL PRIEDEIOH KICHTEE. [BOOK IV. 
 
 fully a true Christian passes away — no convulsions — ^iio 
 contortions — no agonies of death. He is as completely at 
 home in the world of spirits as the screech-owl is in the 
 village steeple — and just as the owl sits in the belfry 
 while the bells are ringing, I will be bound that our 
 Advocate will never stir when the death-bell tolls for him 
 — for he has acquired, from your sermons, the conviction 
 that he will go on living after he dies." 
 
 In the above speech there was some pretty hard hitting, 
 in the shape of jest, at Firmian's mock death, as well as 
 at his faith in immortality ; such jests, in fact, as none 
 but a Firmian could both understand and pardon. But 
 Leibgeber was, at the same time, making an attack, in all 
 seriousness, on those good people who believe accidental, 
 physical tranquillity in dying to be tranquillity of soul, 
 and bodily struggles to be storms of conscience. 
 
 Eevel contented himself with replying, " Tou are of 
 those who sit in the seat of the scorner — whom the Lord 
 will find. I have washed my hands." But as he would 
 have infinitely preferred ^ZZiMg' them, and, moreover, could 
 not succeed in transforming this child of the devil into a 
 confessing penitent, he took his departure, red and silent, 
 escorted downstairs by Lenette and Stiefel with many 
 deferential curtseys and bows. 
 
 Let us not make out Henry's gall-bladder (which is- 
 likewise his swimming-bladder, and, alas ! often his as- 
 cending globus Jiysterieus) to be any bigger than it really 
 is. Let us form a judgment, all the more favourable, of 
 this natural foible of his from considering than Henry had, 
 in the course of his previous career, seen spiritual frere» 
 terribles, and gallows preachers of this sort, strewing salt 
 upon the fdint, withered hearts on so many deathbeds ; 
 and because it was his belief (as it is mine) that of all the ■ 
 hours of a man's life his last must be the most indifferent 
 as regards religion, inasmuch as it the most unfruitful, 
 and no seed can sprout in it which will bear any fruit 
 of action. 
 
 During the brief absence of the courteous couple, Firmian 
 said, " Oh ! I am sick, sick, and weary of it all. I cannot 
 carry on the joke any longer. In ten minutes more I 
 intend to lie my last lie, and die — and would to God it 
 
CHAP. XX.] FLOWEE, FRUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 501 
 
 ■were not a lie. Don't let them bring in any lights, but 
 cover me up at once with the mask, for I see very plainly 
 that I shall not be able to control these eyes of mine, and 
 when the mask is on, I shall, at all events, be able to let 
 them weep as much as they like. Ah ! Henry, my good, 
 kind friend!" 
 
 The infusory chaos of Eevel's exhortation had made this 
 weary figurant and mimicker of Death tender and grave. 
 Henry — out of his delicate and loving solicitude — had 
 undertaken all the lying parts of the role, and enacted 
 those himself. He therefore (as the couple were coming 
 back into the room), cried out, in a loud, anxious voice, 
 " Pirmian, how do you feel now ? " " Better," said 
 Firmian, in a voice of emotion. " There are stars shining 
 in this world's night, though I, alas ! am clamped to the 
 ■dust, and cannot soar up to them. The bank of the lovely 
 spring-time of eternity is steep, and, close as we day-flies 
 are swimming to the shore of Life's Dead Sea, we have 
 not got our wings yet." Yes ! Death — sublime and glorious 
 after sunset-sky of our St. Thomas's Day — grand amen 
 of our hope, spoken to our ears from the other world — 
 would come to our beds in the likeness of a beautiful 
 giant, with a garland on his brow, and lift us gently up 
 into the aether, and rock us there to rest, were it not that 
 we go to him only as maimed, stunned creatures, who 
 are thrown into his giant arms. "What robs Death of 
 his glory is sickness ; the pinions of the soul when it 
 rises on its heavenward fl.ight are heavy, and stained with 
 blood, and tears, and mire. The only time when death is 
 a flight — not a fall — is when some hero is smitten by one, 
 single, mortal wound, when, as he stands like a spring- 
 world, all new blossom, and old fruit, the next world 
 suddenly flashes by him, like some comet, bearing him 
 (miniature world as he is) all unwithered, along with it 
 in its flight, to soar with it beyond the sun. 
 
 But this mental exaltation of Pirmian's would have 
 been an indication of reviving strength and returning 
 health to sharper eyes than Stiefel's. It is upon the 
 looker-on only — not upon the victim who is smitten down 
 — that the battle-axe of Death casts a flash of light. It 
 is with the death-bell as with other bells ; it is those 
 
502 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH EICHTEK. [BOOK IV 
 
 who, are at a distance who hear the solemn,, inspiring 
 boom and music — not those who are within the sounding 
 hemisphere. And as every bosom grows more sincere and 
 more transparent in the hour of death — like the Siberian 
 glass-apple, the kernel of which, when ripe, is coTered 
 only by a crystal case formed of sweet, transparent flesh — 
 so Firmian, in this dithyrambio hour — near as he was to 
 the bare edge of Death's sickle — could have gladly sacri- 
 ficed (that is, discovered) all the mystery and blossom of 
 his future, but that by so doing he would have broken 
 his word and grieved his friend. But nothing was left 
 him now, save a patient heart, dumb lips, and weeping 
 eyes. 
 
 Alas ! and were not all his ostensible farewells real 
 ones after all ? As he drew his Henry and the Schulrath 
 to his heart with trembling hands, was that heart not 
 oppressed by the mournful certainty of losing the Schul- 
 rath on the morrow, and Henry in a week's time, for ever ? 
 So that the following address which he made to them was 
 nothing but the plain truth, mournful though it was. 
 " Alas ! we shall be scattered asunder by the four winds of 
 heaven in a very, very little time. Ah ! human arms are 
 rotten bands. How short a time they hold ! May all be 
 well with you — and better than I ever deserved it might be 
 ■with me. May the chaotic stone-heaps of your lives never 
 come rolling down about your feet, or about your ears 
 — may spring overspread the crags and cliffs around you 
 with berries, and the freshest green ! Good night for 
 ever, dearly loved Schulrath, and you, my Henry ! " He 
 pressed the latter to his heart in silence, thinking how 
 near the veritable parting was. 
 
 But he should have avoided stimulating his heart into 
 feverish excitement by these pricks and stings of fare- 
 well, for he heard Lenette mourning out of sight behind 
 the bed, and (with a deep death-wound in his overflowing 
 heart) said, " Come, my beloved Lenette, and: bid me 
 good-bye;" and stretched out his arms in a wild manner 
 to receive her. She came tottering, and sank into them, 
 and on to his heart, while he was speechless under the 
 crushing weight of his emotions; till at length, as she 
 lay thei-e trembling, he said, in a low voice, " Ah ! poor, 
 
CHAP. XX.J FLOWEB, FKUIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 503 
 
 patient, faithful, tortured soul! how constantly and un- 
 ceasingly have I caused you sorrow ! Will you forgive 
 me? Will you forget me?" (A spasm of sorrow clasped 
 her closer to him.) " Ah ! do but forget me, and forget 
 jne quite; for heaven knows you have never heen happy 
 with me!" Their voices were lost in sohs, only their 
 tears cou;ld flow. A drawing, thirsting grief was grind- 
 ing at his weary heart, and he went on : " No, no ; with 
 me you have truly had nothing, nothing hut tears; but 
 there are happy days coming for you, when I shall he 
 gone from you." He gave her his parting tiss, saying, 
 " Live happy now, and let me he gone!" "But you are 
 not going to die," she cried again and again, with a 
 thousand tears. He put his arms ahout her, he gently 
 raised her fainting form from his breast, and said, very 
 solemnly, " It is over now. Pate has sundered us ; it is 
 over and past." 
 
 Henry gently led her weeping away ; and he cried him- 
 self, too ; and cursed his plot ; and signed to the Schulrath, 
 saying, " Firmian needs rest now." The latter turned his 
 face, swollen and drawn with pain, to the wall. Lenette 
 and Stiefel were mourning together in the other room. 
 Henry waited till the greater billows had subsided some- 
 what, and then quietly put the question : " Now?" Fir- 
 mian gave the signal, and Henry yelled out, "Oh! he is 
 gone!" like a man beside himself; and threw himself 
 down upon the motionless body (to prevent anybody from 
 touching it), with genuine, bitter tears at the thought of 
 the nearness of parting. An inconsolable couple came 
 bursting from the next room. Lenette would have thrown 
 herself upon her husband (whose face was turned away), 
 and she, cried, in agony, "I must see him; I must bid 
 my husband good-bye once more." But Henry told the 
 Schulrath (confidentially) to take hold of her, and support 
 her, and get her away out of the room. The two former 
 things he was able to accomplish (although his o«e» self- 
 control was only an artificial one, assumed with the view 
 of demonstrating the victory of religion over philosophy), 
 but get her out of the room he could not. When she saw 
 Henry take up the mask of death, " No, no," she cried ; 
 " I insist upon being allowed to see my husband once 
 
504 JEAN PAUL FBIEDBIOH BICHTER. [BOOK IV. 
 
 more." But Henry took tte mask, gently turned Fir 
 / mian's face (on wliioh the tears of parting were scarce yet 
 
 ' dry), and covered it up, thus hiding it for ever from 
 his -wife's weeping eyes. This grand scene lifted up his 
 heart ; he gazed upon the mask and said, " Death lays a 
 mask like this over all our faces ; and a time will come 
 when 1 shall stretch me out in death's midnight sleep as 
 he has done, and grow longer and heavier. Ah ! poor 
 Firmian! has that war game of yours been worth the 
 candles and the trouble? We are not the players, it is 
 true ; we are the things played with : and old Death sends 
 our heads and hearts rolling like balls over the green 
 billiard-table, and pockets them in his corpse-sack; and 
 every time one of us is pocketed there, the death-bell 
 gives a toll. It is true you go on living in a sense* (if 
 the frescoes of ideas can be detached from the walls of 
 
 . the body), and oh ! may you be happier in that postscript 
 life than in this. But what is it, this postscript life, after 
 all ? It will go out too ; every life, on every world-ball, 
 will burn out one day. The planets are licensed only to 
 retail liquor to be drunk on the premises. They can't 
 board and lodge us ; they merely pour us out a glass of 
 quince-wine, currant-juice, spirits ; but for the most part 
 gargles of good wine (which we must not swallow), or else 
 sympathetic ink (i.e. liquor prdbatorius'), sleeping-draughts, 
 and acids; and then, on we go, from one planet-inn to 
 another ; and so from millennium to millennium. Oh ! 
 thou kind heaven ; and whither, whither, whither ? 
 
 " However, this earth is the wretchedest village tap- 
 room of the lot ; a place where mostly beggars, rogues, 
 and deserters turn in, and which we have always to go 
 
 ; five steps away from to enjoy our best pleasures ; that is to 
 say, either into memory or into imagination. 
 
 " Ah ! peaceful being there at rest, may it fare better 
 with you in other taverns than here ; and may some 
 restaurateur of life open the door of a wine-cellar for you 
 in lieu of this vinegar-cellar ! " 
 
 • Leibgeber means, at once, the second life (in which he does not 
 believe), and Finnijin's cnnt'lnnntion of his j»-( scni life in Vaduz. 
 
CHAP. XXI.j FLOWEE, FKUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 505 
 
 CHAPTER XXI. 
 
 DK. CELHAFEN AND MEDICAL BOOT AND SHOEMAKING — THE 
 BUEIAL SOCIETY — A DEATH'S HEAD IN THE SADDLE — FRE- 
 DERICK II. AND HIS FUNERAL ORATION. 
 
 As a step preliminary to everything else, Leibgeber 
 quartered tbe sorrowing widow down stairs witb the 
 hairdresser, with the view of rendering the intermediate 
 state after death easier to the dead man. "You must 
 emigrate," he told her, " and keep out of the sight of these 
 sad memorials round us here, until he has been taken away." 
 Superstitious terror made her consent, so that he had nc 
 difficulty in giving the dear departed his food and drink. 
 He compared him to a walled-up vestal, finding in her 
 cell a lamp, bread, water, milk, and oil (according to 
 Plutarch, in ' Numa ') ; and added, " Unless you are more 
 like the earwig, which, when cut in two, turns about and 
 devours its own remains." By jokes like these he bright- 
 ened (or, at all events, strove to brighten) the cloudy 
 and autumnal soul of his dear friend, who could see 
 nothing all around him save ruins of his bygone life, 
 from i£e widowed Lenette's clothes to her work. The 
 bonnet-block, which he had struck on the day of the 
 thunder-storm, had to be put away in a corner out of his 
 sight, because he said it made Gorgon faces at him. 
 
 Next day, our good corpse-watcher, Leibgeber, had to 
 perform the labours of a Hercules, an Ixion, and a Sisy- 
 phus combined. Congress after congress, picket after 
 picket, came to see the dead man- and speak well of him — 
 for it is not until they make their exit that we applaud men 
 and actors, and we think people are morally beautified by 
 death as Lavater thought they were physically. But 
 Leibgeber drove everybody away from the death-chamber, 
 saying it had been one of his friend's last requests that he 
 should do so. 
 
 Then came the woman to lay out the corpse (Death's 
 Abigail), and wanted to begin washing and dressing 
 it. Henry tussled with her, paid her, and banished 
 her. Then (in presence of the widow and Peltzstiefel), ha 
 
506 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICfit KICHTEE. [BOOK IV. 
 
 had to pretend to he pretending to hide a bleeding heart 
 behind outward resignation. "But I see through him," 
 said Stiefel, " without the slightest trouble. It is because 
 he is not a Christian that he is striving to play the Stoic 
 and the Philosopher." Stiefel was here alluding to that 
 specious, empty, and frivolous hardness which is, exhi- 
 bited by Zenos of the world and of the court, who are like 
 those wooden figures which are made to look like stone 
 statues and pillars by being smeared over with a coating 
 of stone-dust. Also the share, or dividend, of the burial- 
 fund was got together (by being collected on a plate 
 from the members of that body), and this led to its coming 
 to the knowledge of our old acquaintance Dr, (Elhafen, 
 who was one of the paying members. He took occasion, 
 on his morning round of visits, to drop in at the house 
 of mourning, with the view of provoking his brother in 
 science to as great an extent as he could. He therefore 
 affected not to have heard a word about the death, and 
 began by asking how the invalid was getting on. " Ac- 
 cording to the latest bulletins," said Henry, " he is not 
 getting on at all — he has got on ; in a word, Herr Proto- 
 medicus OElhafen, he is gone. August, March, and De- 
 cember are months when Death sends out his pressgang 
 and gathers in his vintage." 
 
 " That lowering powder of yours," said the vindictive 
 Doctor, " seems to have lowered Ms temperature pretty 
 effectively; he's cool enough tiow, eh?" This pained 
 Leibgeber, and he answered, " I am sorry to say, he is. 
 However, we did our best with him. We yot your emetic 
 down his throat, but the only thing he got rid of was that 
 most terribly , morbific of all matters in man — his soul. 
 You, Mr. Prptomedicus, are judge in a criminal court, 
 having the power of life and death ; whereas, you see, I 
 am only an advocate, and possessed of a jurisdiction so far 
 inferior that I didn't dare meddle with anything, least of 
 all the fellow's life ; a nice face he would have made if 
 I had." 
 
 " Well, so he has made a face at it, and a long face, too 
 — the hippocratic face," answered the Doctor, not wholly 
 without wit. " I can't but believe you," answered Leib- 
 geber, in a gentle manner-. " I havB not the least doubt 
 
CHAR XXI.J . PLOWEK, FEXJIT, AUD THOEN PIECES. 507 
 
 you are perfectly right. We laymen, you see, have so 
 few opportunities of seeing those faces, whereas doctors 
 can study the hippocratic countenance in their patients 
 every day of their lives. And, of course, an experienced 
 doctor is always distinguished by a quickness of eye which 
 enables him to tell at a glance if a patient he going to 
 die — which is an impossibility to other people, who, not 
 being doctors in practice, have not many opportunities of 
 seeing people depart this life." 
 
 " A medical connoisseur of your cultivation and experi- 
 ence as a matter of course put mustard poultices to the 
 patient's feet ? Only, I presume, it was too late for them 
 to be of any use, was it ? " 
 
 " I did manage to hit upon the notion of trying that 
 trick of soling my poor friend's feet with mustard and 
 vinegar " (answered Leibgeber), " and paper-hanging the 
 calves of his legs with blisters; but the patient (at all 
 times rather fond of his joke, as you know), called that 
 sort of thing ' medical boot and shoemaking,' and called us 
 doctors ' Death's shoemakers,' who, when Nature has cried ' 
 to a poor fellow ' Look out ! Mind your head ! ' go and put 
 Spanish flies on to him by way of Spanish boots, mustard- 
 plasters by way of CoiZiJtj-m', and cupping-glasses by way 
 of leg-irons : as if a man could not make his appearance 
 in the next world without red heels consisting of mustard- 
 blister marks, and red cardinal stockings of plaster blisters. 
 And so saying, the deceased aimed a skilful kick at my 
 face and the plaster, and said the connoisseurs were like 
 stinging-flies, which always fasten upon the legs." 
 
 " He wasn't far wrong, I suspect, as regarded you. A 
 ' shoemaker of Death ' might perhaps put something on 
 just under that caput tribus insandbile of yours which 
 wouldn't fit so badly," said the Doctor, and made off as 
 fast as he could. 
 
 I have already said a few words concerning those 
 emetic powders of his, and I now wish to add what follows. 
 If he does send people to their long homes by means of 
 them, the chief difference between him and a fox * is that 
 (according to the ancient naturalist), the latter imitates 
 the distant sound of a man being sick to make the dogs run 
 * Plin. H. N., viu. 30. 
 
508 JEAN PAUL FEIE0EICH EICHTEE. [BOOK IV 
 
 to him, that he may attack them. At the same time even 
 those whose opinion of the members of the medical pro- 
 fession is the highest conceivahle must admit that there 
 are certain limits to their criminal jurisdiction. As by 
 European International Law, no army can shoot down 
 another with glass bullets, or poisoned ones, but only with 
 leaden ones — further, as no nation may put poison into 
 the enemies' food, or wells, but only dirt — so, although 
 the medical police allow a practising physician (of the 
 higher jurisdiction) the utmost freedom in the administra- 
 tion of narcotics, drastics, emetics, diuretics, and the 
 whole pharmacopoeia, in a word (so that it would be a 
 breach of the police regulations to attempt'to prevent him), 
 yet were the most celebrated of doctors, town or country, 
 within the limits of his jurisdiction to set to work and 
 give people poison-balls in place of pills, or ratsbane by 
 way of a strong emetic, the upper courts of justice would 
 take a pretty serious view of the matter — unless it were 
 for ague that he prescribed the mouse-poison. Nay, I 
 euspect that an entire medical collegium would scarce es- 
 cape some judicial inquiry if it were to take a sword and 
 run a man through with it (though it might open his veins 
 with a lancet at any hour of the day or night if it pleased), 
 or if it were to knock him down with a warlike but non- 
 surgical instrument. Thus we find in the criminal re- 
 cords that doctors who threw people into the water from 
 bridges have by no means got clear off — that being a dif- 
 ferent affair altogether from putting them into a smaller 
 bath, mineral or otherwise. 
 
 When the hairdresser heard that the corpse-lottery 
 money had safely arrived in its harbour of refuge, he 
 came upstairs and offered to curl his deceased lodger's 
 hair, make him a pigtail, and let his comb and pomatum 
 accompany him under the sod. Leibgeber was obliged 
 to be economical on the poor widow's account, for more 
 than half her feathers were plucked out of her already by 
 the innumerable insect-feelers, vultures'-talons, and boars'- 
 tusks of the domestics of death, and he said the most he 
 could do was to buy the comb and put it in the deceased's 
 waistcoat-pocket, so that he might do it himself after his 
 own taste. He said the same to the barber, and a,dded 
 
CHAP. XXI.] FLOWEE, FEUIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 509 
 
 that, of course, as hair goes on growing in the grave,, the 
 ■whole secret society (and fruit-hearing society) therein is 
 adorned with fine beards, like Swiss of the age of sixty. 
 These two oollaborateurs in hair (who revolve round the 
 same central-sphere like two of the satellites of Dranus)' 
 went off with abbreviated hopes, and elongated faces and 
 purses, the one wishing, in the excess of his gratitude, 
 that he had at that moment the shaving of the undertaker 
 Henry, the other wishing he had the cutting of his hair. 
 On the stairs they grumbled out, " It would be no wonder 
 if the dead man should not be able to rest in his grave, 
 but went about frightening people." 
 
 Leibgeber thought of the risk there was of losing the 
 reward of all this long process of deception, should any- 
 body go to have a look at the deceased gentleman while 
 he was in the next room (for whenever he was going further 
 he locked the door). So he went to the churchyard, took 
 a skull out of the charnel-house, and brought it home 
 Tinder his coat. He handed it to Siebenkaes, saying, " If 
 we were to shove this head in beneath the green trellis- 
 bed whereon defunctus is lying, and keep it connected 
 with his hand by means of a green-silk thread, it might 
 be brought into play (in the dark, at all events), as a 
 species of Belidor's globe of compression, or jawbone of an 
 ass as against Philistines, who have got to be frightened 
 away if they come disturbing the repose of the warm 
 dead." To be sure (had the most extreme necessity to do 
 so arisen) Siebenkses would have come to himself, revived 
 out of his prolonged insensibility, and repeated his apo- 
 plectic seizure for the third time — much to the gratification 
 of medical systems of theory. However, the death's head 
 ■was better than the fit. The sight of this garret-lodging 
 of a soul, this cold hatching-oven of a spirit, made Siebenkses 
 sad. He said, " No doubt the wall-creeper finds a quieter 
 and safer nest here than did the bird-of-paradise,* which 
 has flown away from it." 
 
 Leibgeber now chaffered with the servants of the Church 
 and School, and (with whispered curses) paid the necessary 
 surplice-fees and bridge-tolls, saying, " The day after to- 
 morrow we will lay the deceased to rest as quietly as we 
 • Which, like a greatei- Peyohe, makes its nest in skulls. 
 
510 JEAN PAUL FBIEDEICH EICHTEB. [bOOK IT. 
 
 may,, without fuss or ceremony." It was a matter of in- 
 difference to them ; all they cared ahout heingthepoobfeting 
 of the postftge which franks people into the next world, 
 which they were all glad enough to do — all except one old 
 and poor School-servant, who said he thought it a sin to 
 take a farthing from the poor widow, for he knew what 
 poverty was. But this was exactly what the rich could 
 not know. 
 
 In the morning, Henry went down to the hairdresser 
 and Lenette, leaving the key in the door — ^for, since the 
 recent ghost story, the lodgers who lived upstairs were 
 too frightened to put so much as their heads out of their 
 own, doors. The hairdresser, who was still annoyed that 
 he had not been allowed to curl the deceased^s hair, be- 
 thought him that it would at least be something if he 
 were to slip upstairs, and cut and carry off the entire hair- 
 forest. The demand for hair and firewood is in excess of the 
 supply (now that the former is made into rings and twisted 
 into letters), and we should never leave any dead person 
 a coffin or a single hair. Even the ancients sheared off 
 the latter for the altars of the subterranean gods; so 
 Meerbitzer crept on tiptoe into the room, and opened his 
 scissor-feelers. Siebenkses could easily look askew into 
 the room through the eye-holes of the mask, and from the • 
 scissors and general aspect of his landlord, he divined the 
 impending misfortune and ' Eape of the Lock.' He saw 
 that in his strait he could reckon more upon the bare head 
 under the bed than upon his own. The landlord, who, in 
 his timidity, had carefully left the door wide open behind 
 him to secure his retreat, drew near to the plantation of 
 human pot-plants, with intent to play the part of reaper 
 in the harvest-month — to combine the roles of beard-shearer 
 and hair-curler, and avenge them both. Siebenkses wound 
 up the thread as well as he could upon his covered fingers, 
 so as to roll out the skull ; but as the latter came much 
 too slowly, and Meerbitzer far too quickly, he was obliged 
 to come to his own assistance in the meantime (and this 
 because evil spirits so often hreaihe upon men, or inspire 
 them) by breathing out of the mouth-hole of his mask a 
 long night-breeze upon the landlord. Meerbitzer could 
 not explain to himself this most suspicions blast, which 
 
CHAP. XXI.J FLOWEE, FEUIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 511 
 
 blew real azote, and a deadly simoom-wind, upon him ; 
 and all his warm constituent principles hegan to shoot into 
 icicles. But, unluckily, the dead man had soon shot all 
 his breath away, and was obliged to re-load his air-gun 
 slowly. This suspension of hostilities brought the loct- 
 raper to himself, and to his legs again ; so that he made 
 fresh preparations to take hold of the nightcap-tassel, and 
 remove that gossamer (said nightcap) from the field of 
 hair. But just as he was in the act of taking hold of it, 
 he became aware that a something was beginning to move 
 under the bed ; he paused, and waited quietly (for it 
 might be a rat) to see what this noise would turn out to 
 be caused by. But, as he thus waited, it was all of a sud- 
 den borne in upon his mind that a round thing was rolling 
 up his legs, and coming higher and higher. In one instant 
 he made a clutch at it with his empty hand (the other 
 held the , scissors), and, powerlessly as a pair of callipers, 
 that hand rested on the ascending, slippeiy ball, which 
 kept pressing it up and up. Meerbitzer grew visibly stiff 
 in' the legs, and his blood ran cold; but a fresh upward 
 shove of his hand, and a glance at the ascending head, 
 administered to him (ere he was felled to earth, wholly 
 curdled to cheese), such a kick of terror that he flew like a 
 feather across the floor, and oiit of the door like a cannon- 
 ball shot straight at the bull's-eye by the cannon-powder 
 of fear. He landed in the room downstairs with the open 
 scissors in his hand, his mouth and eyes wide open, and a 
 pallid spot on his face, compared to which his hair-powder 
 and his shirt were court-mourning. Nevertheless, in this 
 novel situation (I am glad to say it to his honour) he had 
 the presence of mind not to say a word about what had 
 happened ; partly because ghost-stories cannot be related 
 till nine. days are over without the gieatest danger to the 
 narrator, partly because he could not well talk about his 
 hair-shearing and privateering on any day at all. 
 
 At one in the morning, Firmian told this tale to, his 
 friend with the same fidelity as I have endeavoured to 
 observe in recounting it to the reader. This gave Leib- 
 geber a useful hint to set a trusty body-guard over the 
 noble corpse ; and to this office, in the absence of chamber- 
 
512 JEAN PAUL FBIEDEICH KIOHTER. [bOOK IV. 
 
 lains and other court officials, he could appoint no other 
 than Saufinder. 
 
 On the last morning, which was to give our Siehenksea 
 " Notice to quit," arrived the casa santa of mankind, our 
 chamire garnie, our last seed capsule — the coffin — for which 
 we have to pay whatever is demanded. " This is the last 
 building grant of life," said Henry, " the carpenter's final 
 piece of cheatery." 
 
 At half an hour after midnight — when neither bat nor 
 night-watchman, nor beer-guest from the public-house, nor 
 night-light was any longer to be seen ; and only a field- 
 cricket here and there could be heard in the sheaves, and 
 a mouse or two in the houses — Leibgeber said to his sad 
 and anxious friend, " March, now ! Since you shuffled off 
 this mortal coil, and entered into eternity, you have not 
 known a moment of happiness or peace. All the rest is 
 my affair. Wait for me at Hof on the Saale. We must 
 see each other yet once more after death." Firmian fell 
 in silence on his burning face, and wept. In this twilight 
 hour he once more revisited all the flowery places of the 
 past, behind which he vas sinking as into a grave. His 
 softened heart took delight in depositing a parting tear 
 upon every piece of dress belonging to his sorrowing, be- 
 reaved Lenette — on every piece of her work — on every 
 trace of her housewifely hand. He pressed her betrothal 
 wreath of roses and forget-me-nots hard to his burning 
 bosom, and placed Nathalie's rosebuds in his pocket. Ana 
 thus — mute, oppressed, with stifled sobs, and like one cast 
 out by an earthquake from this earth on to the icy coasts 
 of a strange world — ^he crept down the steps after his 
 friend ; pressed his helping hand once more at the door ; 
 and then night built the funeral vault of her gigantic 
 shadow all over him. Leibgeber wept heartily as soon as 
 he was lost to view. Tears fell on every stone which he 
 pocketed, and upon the old block which he took in his 
 arms, to imbed in the coffin-shell so as to give it the due 
 weight of a corpse. He filled up that haven of our bodies, 
 and closed that ark of the covenant, hanging the coffin- 
 key, like a black cross, upon his breast. And now for the 
 irst time he slept in peace in the house of mourning. All 
 was done. 
 
CHAP. XXI.] FLOWEK, FBUIT, AND THOElH PIECES. 513 
 
 In the morning he made no secret of it, before the 
 bearers and Lenette, that he had placed the body in the 
 ■coffin with his own two arms, and not without consider- 
 able effort. She sighed to see her departed husband once 
 again, but Henry had thrown away the door-key of the 
 painted house in the darkness. He helped most diligently 
 in the search for it (he had it about him all the time), but 
 it was in vain, and many of the bystanders soon guessed 
 that Henry was only deceiving, anxious to spare the 
 widow's weeping eyes any further sight of the cause of 
 her sorrow. So they went forth, with the mock passen- 
 ger in the quasi coffin, to the churchyard which lay 
 glistening in dew beneath the fresh blue sky. An icy 
 thrill crept to Henry's heart as he read the words on the 
 gravestone. It had been lifted from off the flat, Moravian- 
 like grave of Siebenkses's great-grandfather, and turned 
 over, and on the smooth side glittered the newly-graven 
 inscription — 
 
 " STAN : PIBMUN BIEBENBLfflS, 
 
 Departed this life, 24th August, 1786." 
 
 This name had once been Henry's own, and on the 
 reverse side of the monument was his present name, Leib- 
 geber. Henry reflected that in a few days lie would fall 
 (with his name cast away from him) as a little brook into 
 the world's great ocean, and flow there without shores, and 
 be lost amongst strange and unknown billows. He felt as 
 though he himself with his old name, and his new, were 
 going down to the grave. So strangely mingled were his 
 feelings that he seemed to himself as if he were sticking 
 fast in the frozen stream of life, while overhead a burning 
 sun was beating upon the ice-field, and he was lying be- 
 tween the glow and the frost. In addition to this, the 
 
 " -Schulrath just then came running (with his handkerchief 
 to his eyes and nose), and, in stammering accents of sor- 
 
 • row, imparted the news which had just reached the town 
 — that the old King of Prussia had died on the 17th of the 
 
 ■ month. 
 
 The first thing that Leibgeber did was to look up to the 
 morning sun, as though Frederick's eye was beaming 
 jnoruiug fire from it over the earth. It is easier to he 
 II. - 2 1. 
 
514 JEAN PAUL FBIEDKICn EICHTEK. [BOOK IV. 
 
 a great king than a just one ; it is easier to he ad- 
 mired than justified. A king lays his little finger upon 
 the long arm of the monstrous lever, and, like Archimedes, 
 lifts ships and countries with the muscles of his fingers ; 
 hut it is only the machine that is great — and the machinist, 
 Tate — not he who works it. The voice of a king re-echoe& 
 like a peal of thunder amongst the numberless valleys 
 around him ; and every gentle ray he emits is reflected in 
 the form of a burning beam condensed into a focus, from 
 the countless plane-mirrors which are upon his throne^ 
 But Frederick could, at most, only be lowered by a throne, 
 by having to sit upon it. His head would only have been 
 greater without the close-binding crown (its crown of thorns) 
 and magic circle. And happy, thou great spirit, couldst 
 thou still less become ! For, although thou hadst broken 
 down within thee the Bastilles and the prison-walls of 
 all ignoble passions — although thou hadst given thy spirit 
 what Franklin gave to earth, namely, lightning-conductors, 
 musical glasses, and freedom — although no kingdom was to 
 thee so lovely as that of truth, and there was none which 
 thou so lovedst to enlarge — although thou didst permit 
 the emasculate philosophy of French encyclopaedists to 
 hide from thee eternity only, but not divinity, only the 
 helief in virtue, but not thine own — yet did thy loving 
 bosom accept nothing from friendship and humanity but 
 the echoes of their sighs — the flute. And thy«pirit, which, 
 with its great roots like the mahogany- tree, often shivered 
 the rocks it grew upon — thy spirit, in the fell battle ot 
 thy wishes with thy doubts, in the contest of thy ideal 
 world with the real one, and the one in which thou didst 
 believe, felt a painful discord which no mild faith in a 
 second softened to harmony. And therefore there was upon 
 thy throne no place of rest but that which thou hast now 
 attained. 
 
 Some men bring all hnmanity before our eyes at a 
 glance, as certain events bring our whole lives. There fell 
 upon Henry's breast strong splinters of the fallen moun- 
 tain whose crash he heard. 
 
 He placed himself before the open grave, and delivered 
 this speech more to invisible than to visible hearers : — 
 
 " So, then, the epitaph on the tomb is versio interlinearis 
 
CHAP. XXII.J FLOWEK, FKUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 515 
 
 of tMs small, small printed life of ours. The heart does 
 not rest until, like the head, it is set in gold .* Thou hidden 
 Infinite one ! make, for me, the grave a prompter's tube, 
 and tell me what I am to think of the whole theatre. 
 Indeed, what is there in the grave ? Some ashes, a few 
 worms, coldness, and night — by Heaven ! there is nothing 
 better above it either, except that one feels it. Mr. Schul- 
 rath. Time sits behind us, and reads the calendar of life so 
 cursorily, and turns over the page of month after month 
 at such a rate, that I can fancy this grave — this moat 
 here about our castles in the air — ^this fortress trench — 
 lengthening out and extending till it reaches my bed, and 
 I am shaken out of the bedclothes into this cooking-hole, 
 like a heap of Spanish flies. ' Go on,' I would say, ' Go 
 on. I shall come either to old Fritz, or to his worms — and 
 therewith Basta ! ' By Heaven ! one is ashamed of life 
 when the greatest of men no longer possess it. And so 
 Mia I" 
 
 CHAPTER XXII. 
 
 JOURNEY THROUGH FANTAISIE — EE-UNIOM ON THE BINDLOCHER 
 MOUNTAIN — BEENECK — MAN-DOUBLINS — GEFEEES — EXCHANGE 
 
 OF CLOTHES MUNCHBEEG — SOLO-WHI STLING — HOF THE 
 
 STONE OF GLADNESS AND DOUBLE-PARTING. 
 
 Henry now plied more wings than any seraph, that he 
 might fly up with his friend as soon as possible. He 
 packed up the latter's manuscripts in haste, and addressed 
 them to Vaduz. The sealed will and testament was lodged 
 with the proper authorities, from whom, also, the neces- 
 sary certificate of death was obtained to show the Prussian 
 Widows' Fund that it was not being defrauded. And then 
 he got fairly afloat, and flushed off, having first bestowed 
 some weighty grounds for consolation — as well as some 
 weighty ducats — ^upon the downcast straw-widow, who 
 mourned in the striped calico-dress, as was right and 
 proper. 
 
 * King's hearts are enshrined in golden cases. 
 
 2 L 2 
 
516 JEAN PAUL FKIEDEICH EICHTEE. [BOOK IV. 
 
 / Let us now overtake and accompany his departed friend, 
 even before he himself does so. During the first hour of his 
 night-journey, vague and disordered pictures of the past 
 and of the future struggled in Firmian's heart; and it 
 seemed to him as if, for Mm, there were no such thing as 
 
 [ a present, but that a wilderness stretched between the 
 past and the future. But the fresh, rich harvest month 
 of August soon gave him back the life he had (so to speak) 
 played away ; and when the gleaming morning was come 
 in earnest, the earth was lying all lighted up with a new- 
 fallen thunderstorm, now emitting lovely lightning only 
 from drops hanging on the corn-ears, as if over-silvered by 
 tne moon. It was a new earth ; he was a new creature, 
 just burst, with ripened pinions, through the egg-shell of 
 the coffin. Oh! a broad, marshy, overshadowed desert- 
 waste, where a long, long troubled dream had kept driving 
 Inm to and fro, had vanished with that dream, and he was 
 awake, and gazing deep into Eden. The last week (and 
 that last week especially) had stretched out to enormous 
 length those twisted convolutions of suffering which give 
 to our brief lives a false appearance of being much too 
 long (as we make the short walks of a garden seem longer 
 by laying them out in curves and sweeps). On the other 
 hand, his lightened breast, now free from all its old bur- 
 dens, was heaved by a great sigh, which was partly both 
 sorrow and joy. He had been too far into the Trophonius 
 cave of the tomb — had looked death too closely in the face 
 — and it seemed to him that all our country mansions, our 
 pleasure-castles and vineyards, were built and laid out upon 
 the verge of the crater of the volcano of the grave-hillock, 
 and that the next night they would be shaken into dust. He 
 felt alone, upheaved, a dead man come back to life, but 
 scarce alive ; wherefore every human face he met beamed 
 upon him like that of a new-found brother. " These are 
 my brethren whom I left on earth," said his heart ; and a 
 fruit-bearing love, warm like the spring, expanded all its 
 veins and fibres ; and it crept and grew round every other 
 heart with tender, clinging, ivy-like filaments. But the 
 one he loved best was still — too long — away ; and he went 
 on as slowly as he could, that so Leibgeber (of whom he 
 was in advance both in distance and time) might overtake 
 
CHAP. XXII.J FLOWER, FEUIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 517 
 
 bim before lie got to Hof. A hundred times, on his 
 journey, he almost involuntarily looked round for this 
 overtaking, as if it were already a thing to be actually 
 Been. 
 
 At length he came to the Fantaisie of Bayreuth, on 
 a morning -when the whole world gleamed and glittered 
 from the drops of dew up to the little silver cloudlets. 
 But stillness was over all. The breezes were asleep ; nor 
 had August, in air or in thicket, one single songster left. 
 It seemed to him as though, having left this mortal life, 
 he was wandering in a second, transfigured world, where 
 the form of his Nathalie might move by his side, with love 
 in her eyes — and, in words straight from the soul, no 
 longer fettered by earthly bonds, say to him, " 'H.eire you 
 looked up in gratitude to the starry night ; here I gave 
 you my wounded heart ; here we spoke our earthly parting- 
 vow; and here I came, often, alone, and thought of the 
 brief, bright vision." " And this is the spot," he said to 
 himself, when ho came to the chateau, " where she wept 
 her last tears when she said farewell to her lady-friend." 
 
 And now, again, it seemed that only she was the one 
 transfigured. (He seemed to his fancy to be the one left 
 behind.) Ho fdt that he should never see her more on 
 earth ; " but " (he said) " people must be able to love, though 
 they cannot meet or see each other." All his meagre future 
 was to be illuminated by transfigured and glorified dream- 
 pictures t)nly. But as the tree (according to Bonnet) is 
 planted as much in the air above it as it is in the earth 
 beneath it, and derives nourishment quite as much from 
 the one as from the other, so it is with every true 
 human-creature. And thus Firmian lived in the future 
 with more vivid life than in the past — only with fewer 
 of his root-fibres in the visible ground. The whole tree, 
 top-shoot, branches, and all, stood under the open sky, 
 drinking the free breeze of heaven with its every blossom 
 — where all he had to invigorate and cheer him were two 
 invisible friends — ^the one a woman, the other a man. 
 
 At length the thin, beautiful vapour of his dreams 
 thickened to a fog. Nathalie's sorrow for his death came 
 hovering over him, and his lonesomeness struck heavy on 
 his heart, which longed unutterably for some living being 
 
518 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH EICHTEK, [BOOK IV. 
 
 ■which should stancl there and love him with all its heart. 
 But this being was still behind him, doing its best to over- 
 take him — Henry, to wit. 
 
 " Mr. Leibgeber," the voice of some one coming np 
 after him suddenly cried, " stop a moment, please. Here 
 is your handkerchief; I picked it up down below there." 
 
 He looked round, and there was the girl whom Nathalie 
 had helped out of the water, coming running up with a 
 white handkerchief. But as he had his own in his pocket, 
 and the girl, gazing at him in astonibhment, said he had 
 dropped it near the basin about an hour before (though he 
 had not then had so long a coat on)— a gush of gladness . 
 streamed into his heart. Leibgeber had arrived, and had 
 been down by the basin. 
 
 He hastened to Bayreuth as fast as he could, all in, 
 a whirl, with the handkerchief in his hand. It was moist, 
 as if his friend's weeping eyes had rested on it. He 
 pressed it warmly to his own, but it would not dry them, 
 for he thought how Henry passed his life in solitude, ex- 
 emplifying the 1ruth of his own saying, "He who spares 
 his feelings, and puts armour upon them, keeps them most 
 delicately sensitive — just as the ^kin under the nails is the 
 easiest hurt of all." At the Sun Hotel, Firmian learned 
 from John the waiter that Leibgeber had actually arrived, 
 and was gone on about half-an-hour ago. Firmian ran off 
 after him, up and down the streets of Hof, blind and deaf, 
 in such tempestuous pursuit of his friend that he forgot 
 all about the moist handkerchief* 
 
 After a long while, he caught sight of him climbing the 
 long hill behind the village of Bindloch, a mountain-road, 
 in the true sense of the words, not to be either ascended or 
 descended at any great speed. Leibgeber was straining up 
 it as fast as he could, however, with the view of unex- 
 pectedly overtaking Firmian before he got to Hof, perhaps 
 in Miinchberg, or in Gefrees, if not in Berneck itself (which 
 is at no very great distance from Bayreuth). 
 
 But was not everything destined to turn out ten times 
 better? Did not Siebenkaes, at the bottom of the hill, 
 at last catch sight of him near the level place on the sum- 
 mit, and call out his name — which he did not hear ? Did 
 not Siebenkass then run at an extraordinary pace after his 
 
CHAP. XXII.j FLOWER, PEUIT, AND THOBN PIECES. 519 
 
 ascending friend (with the handkerchief in his hand), and 
 ■did not the latter chance to turn round, by accident, to 
 have a glance at the sunny landscape, and see all Bayreuth, 
 and— at long and at last — his friend hastening after him ? 
 And finally, did they not rush together, the one down the 
 hill, the other up (not like two hostile armies, however, 
 but like two wreathed and foaming goblets of joy and 
 friendship) ? 
 
 Henry speedily perceived that in his friend's breast there 
 was much of a powerful and dissolvent kind — belonging 
 both to past and to future times — at work, wherefore he 
 sought to appease and calm all the " Naiads of the rivers of 
 tears." 
 
 " Everything went off divinely, he said, " and every- 
 body is well. Now you are as free as I am. Your chains 
 are off — the world is before 3'ou — so in you plunge into it, 
 fresh and merry, like me, and begin to live your real life, 
 for the first time in your life." " You are right," said 
 Firmian, f\ this is like meeting you again after death. 
 Heaven is above us, peaceful and quiet, gladsome, serene, 
 and warm," For that very reason, he had not the courage 
 to ask after those he had left behind, particularly his 
 widow. Leibgeber expressed great joy that he had caught 
 him up four post-stations on that side of Hof, and all the 
 more that, this being so, they could be together for a good 
 long while before they must part in Hof (which latter was 
 the very point which he was anxious to establish and 
 emphasise;. 
 
 . He now commenced a series of jokes on the subject of 
 dying (with the view of preventing anything in the shape 
 of an expression of the emotions which they both felt), and 
 these jokes recurred like milestones, or stone-benches, all 
 along the turnpike-road to Hof; we have no May of 
 escaping them on the journey, unless we turn back. He 
 asked him if the diet had been sufficient which he had 
 given him, as the old Germans, Eomans, and Egyptians did 
 to their dead. He said that Firmian must be excessively 
 pious, inasmuch as he had risen from the dead when he 
 had barely shuffled off this mortal coil, confirming Lavater's 
 doctrine that there are two resurrections, a first for the 
 good, and a later one for the bad. Ee paid, further, that 
 
620 JEAN PAUL FKIEDRICH EICHTEE. [BOOK IV. 
 
 he could not have had a better Archimimus * after his 
 departure from this life than himself. Leibgeber's spirit 
 and body sprang rather than walked. " I am always in 
 high spirits, and free, while I am in the open air. Beneath 
 the clouds, I have no clouds. When we are young, the 
 raw north wind of life whistles only on our backs, and, by 
 Heaven ! I am younger than any reviewer." 
 
 They passed the night in Bemecfe, between the lofty 
 bridge-piers of mountains, through which once streamed 
 those seas which have overspread our globe with fields. 
 Time and Nature — grand and almighty — were reposing 
 side by side on the confines of two kingdoms — between the- 
 steep, lofty, memorial-pillars of creation — amongst firm 
 mountains, empty castles crumbling into ruin, rock-barriers 
 and stone-tumuli lying about the rounded green hills, like- 
 broken tables of the law of earth's first creation. 
 
 When they arrived here, Henry said, " The clergy betweerk 
 this and Vaduz must not find out that you have exchanged 
 time for eternity, or they will ask you for the surplice fees- 
 which every corpse has to pay in each parish which it passes 
 through. If we were in old Eome (and not in Bemeck),"" 
 said he, before the inn, " the landlord would never let you: 
 into his house except down the chimney. And if we were- 
 in Athens, you would be obliged to creep through a hoop- 
 petticoat just as if you were going into holy orders." ^ On- 
 an occasion of this sort, he never could cease from his wit- 
 ticisms, in which he differed (to his disadvantage) from- 
 me; and he said that metaphors and similes were like 
 gold pieces, of which Eousseau says that the first is harder 
 to get than the next thousand. 
 
 Therefore it was beyond his power not to be struck -with 
 an idea when, in the evening, he saw Firmian paring his 
 nails. " I can't understand," he said " (now that I see it 
 in your case), why Katherine Bieri — whose nails had -to 
 be cut 250 years after she was dead — couldn't have done 
 it just as well herself as you do after having given np the- 
 ghost." And when he saw him turn over on his left side 
 
 * The actor (among the Romans) who mimicked the deceased ia aU 
 his gestures and movements at his funeral. 
 
 t People who had been tcJien to be dead, and honoured with & 
 funeral, had to go through these ceremonies. — Potter. 
 
C3HAP. XXII.] FLOWEE, FEUIT, AND THOKN PIECES. 521 
 
 in ted, lie simplj' olDserved that be made his bed-quilt 
 rise and fall in the same manner as St. John the Evan- 
 gelist does his earthen one — the grave — to the present 
 hour.* 
 
 In the morning, it rained a little upon these flowers of 
 humour. As Leibgeber was laving that lion's breast of 
 his with cold water, Firmian noticed that he pushed aside 
 a little key, and asked what it opened. "It Mwfastens- 
 nothing," he said ; " but it fastened the leaden ceno- 
 taphium." f Firmian was obliged to lean out of window" 
 with his eyes, and dry them unobserved. Then (with his- 
 head still outside) he said, " Give me the key. It is the 
 wax-impression of a future one. I want to make it the 
 musio-key of my inner music. I shall hang it up, and look 
 at it every day ; and if ever my resolution to be better 
 should run down, I shall wind it up again with this watch- 
 key." He got it. Then Leibgeber chanced to look into 
 the mirror ; and he cried, " I seem almost to see myself 
 double, not to say triple. One of me must be dead, the 
 one in there or the one out here. Which of us in this 
 room is it that is the real dead man appearing to the other ? 
 Or are we only appearing to ourselves ? Heh ! you my 
 three me's, what say you to the fourth ? " — he asked, and 
 turned to the two-reflected images, then to Firmian — and 
 said, " Sere I am, too ! " 
 
 There was something in these sayings calculated to 
 cause a shudder for his future. Firmian, whose calmer 
 reason made him dread a dangerous growth of this meta- 
 morphic self-reflecting during the solitude of Leibgeber's- 
 wanderings, said, with tender anxiety, " My dear Henry, 
 if you are going to be always so much alone upon your 
 eternal journeys, I can't help fearing it will do you harm. 
 God himself is not alone. He beholds His universe." " I 
 can always triple myself, in the profoundest solitude, not 
 excepting that of the universe itself," answered Leibgeber, 
 strangely moved by the cofBn-key — and he went to the. 
 looking-glass, and pressed his eyeball sideways with his 
 
 * AugUBtin, Oommentar. ad Johann. xxi. 23. 
 
 t This name, or that of Twrmdus Honorarius, was given to the 
 t/mpty momiment which friends erected to a dead person whose bodj. 
 was not to be found. 
 
522 JEAN PAUL FKIEDKICH EICHTER. [BOOK IV. 
 
 inger, so as to see Iiis reflection double; "hnt ifou cau't 
 lee the third person there." Then he went on in a merrier 
 ;one, with the view of cheering JFirmian (who was not 
 nuch cheered by what he said, nevertheless), leading him 
 o the window. " But it is a far finer affair as regards the 
 itreet. I have a much larger company there. I put my 
 inger to my eye, and produce the twin of everybody, be 
 le who he may ; double the landlord, as well as his chalk- 
 icore. Not a president on his way to his meeting but 
 finds his fellow' and meets his match. I provide him 
 vith his Orang Utang, and the pair of them march past 
 ne, tete-a-tete. Does a genius want an imitator? I take 
 ny finger — and hey ! presto ! — a living facsimile of him on 
 he spot. Every learned collaborator has a collaborator 
 ;ollaborating with him. Associates have associates asso- 
 ciated with them. Only sons are made out in duplicate, 
 aecause, as yon see, I carry my plastic nature, author, and 
 smbossing-instrument — my finger to wit — always about 
 .vith me. And I seldom let a solo-dancer caper with fewer 
 ;han four legs ; he has to hang in air as a pair of men. But 
 t would amaze you to see how much I can make out of a 
 ingle fellow and his limbs by this sort of grouping. Try 
 ;o form some idea (by way of wind-up) of the crowds and 
 nasses of people I have when I double such things as 
 unerals and other processions, with doppelganger, and 
 itrengthen every regiment with an entire regiment of 
 iiigelmen, repeating and imitating everything. For (as 
 ,ve have been saying), like a grasshopper, I have my ovi- 
 jositing instrument — my finger — always with me. Erom 
 ill which, Firmian, you may at all events draw the conso- 
 ation that I enjoy more society than any of you — -just as 
 nuch again, in fact. And, moreover, it consists entirely of 
 people who afford me endless amusement without trouble 
 )r inconvenience, by aping their own gestures and pro- 
 ieedings." 
 
 Hereupon they looked each other in the face, full of 
 ioyful affection, and wholly freed from any unpleasant 
 ;races of their recent wilder mode of jesting. A third 
 person would have been almost terrified at their bodily 
 resemblance in this hour, for each was a plaster-of-Paris 
 3ast of the other; but their affection for each other mada 
 
JHAP. XXII.] FLOWER, FBUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 523. 
 
 their faces seem unlike to themselves. Each saw itji the 
 other only that which he liked, because it was not in 
 himself; and it was with their features, as with good 
 deeds, which inspire us with emotion and admiration in, 
 others, but not in ourselves. 
 
 When they were out in the air again, and on their way to 
 Crefrees, and the coffin-key, as well as their recent conver- 
 sation, continually brought to mind their parting (whose 
 death sickle bent closer around them with every milestone 
 on their road), Henry endeavoured to cast a rosy, beam 
 or two into Firmian's mist by putting into his hands an 
 aoourafe protocol of everything he had arranged and 
 agreed upon with the Count von Vaduz concerning his 
 duties. " The Count," he said, " would of course think 
 you had merely forgotten the conversation ; but it is 
 better thus. Like a negro slave, you have killed yourself 
 to obtain your freedom and reach the Gold Coast of your 
 silver coast ; and it would be damnable, indeed, if you 
 were to be damned now after your decease." " I can 
 never thank you enough, you dear friend," said Firmian; 
 " but you should not make things harder for me than they 
 are, and draw yourself back like a hand from tie clouds 
 the moment you have emptied yourself. Why is it that I 
 am not to see you again after we have said good-bye ? 
 Tell me." " First," he answered, " because people — the 
 Count, the Widow's Fund, your widow — might find out 
 that I was extant in two editions, and that would be an 
 accursed misfortune in a world where a fellow can hardly 
 be allowed to sit and sleep in peace in his first original 
 edition. Secondly, I intend to make my appearance in 
 several of the broad-comedy characters which there are so 
 many of to be played on this ship of fools of an earth ; 
 and as long as not a single devil among the audience 
 knows me, I shall not be ashamed of my parts. Ah ! I 
 could give you plenty more reasons into the bargain. 
 Besides, it delights me to come down with a flop, as if out 
 of the moon on to this earth ; and in among mankind, un- 
 known, uprooted, untrammelled ; a lusus naturce, a diabolus 
 ex machina, a monstrous moon-Uthopcedium, Firmian, it 
 is a settled thing. Perhaps in a few years' time I may 
 Bend you a letter now and then, more particularly as the 
 
524 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEIOH KICHTEE. [BOOK IT. 
 
 Galatians* placed upon the funeral pyre letters directed' 
 to the dead, as they might have put them in a post-oflSce.. 
 But it really is a settled thing now — positively." " I 
 should not give in to all this so quietly," said Siebenkass, 
 " if I did not feel convinced that I shall very soon see- " 
 you again. I am not like you. I look forward to two 
 meetings with you — one here below, one there above. 
 And would to God that I could bring you to die as you 
 did me, and we met afterwards on a Bindloch hill, but 
 were going to be longer iogether." 
 
 If these wishes chance to remind the readers of Schopper ' 
 in Titan, they may consider in what sense Fate often inter- 
 prets and fulfils our wishes. Leibgeber merely answered, ■ 
 " People must love, though they may not be able to see 
 each other ; and, when all's done, it is only Love that we 
 can love after all, and that we can each see in the other 
 every day." 
 
 In Gefrees, Leibgeber proposed that, as there was sucb 
 ample leisure (there being nothing to see in, or out of, the- 
 one street of the town), they should exchange clothes, and 
 that particularly in order that the Count of Vaduz (who had 
 not for 3'ears seen him in any other dress than the one he 
 now wore) should not iind anything to be struck with 
 about Siebenkass, but that everything about him should' 
 be exactly as it always had been, even to the nails on the- 
 heels of his shoes. The thought of being, in future, em- 
 braced (so to speak) by Henry's sleeves, and clasped and 
 warmed by all his external reliquia, fell like a broad ray 
 of warm February sun on Siebenkses's breast. Leibgeber 
 went into the next room, and, to begin with, threw his 
 short green jacket through the half-open door, crying, 
 " Come in, coat with skirts ! " then followed up with 
 necktie and waistcoat, and long trousers -with leather 
 stripes, saying, " Come in, breeches ! " and ended up -with 
 his shirt, and the words, " Here with the winding-sheet ! " 
 
 The shirt thus thrown in was, to Siebenkses, as an astro- 
 loger (or interpreter of signs), with respect to Leibgeber. 
 He saw that he had a higher motive in view in this 
 bodily transmigration into clothes than mere dressing for 
 
 * Alexand. ab Alex, iii, 7. 
 
■CHAP. XXII. j FLOWEK, FKUIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 525 
 
 a certain cliaracter at "Vaduz ; to wit, the taking up ot 
 bis abode in the shell, or cocoon, which had contained his 
 friend. Not in a whole volume of Gellert's or Klopstock's 
 ' Letters on Friendship,' not in a whole week of Leibge- 
 -berian days of self-sacrifice, did there seem anything so 
 beloved and delicious as in thus falling heir to his clothes. 
 He would not profane this surmise which made him so 
 happy by alluding to it in words, but he was confirmed 
 in it when Leibgeber came out transformed into a Sie- 
 benkffis, looked at himself in a satisfied manner in the 
 mirror, and then laid his three fingers, in silence, on 
 Pirmian's forehead. This was his highe/st token of love ; 
 wherefore, to my own and Firmian's great joy, I mention, 
 that he repeated this sign more than three times during 
 dinner (the conversation running on wholly indifferent 
 subjects). What different and interminable jokes would 
 he not have made upon this moulting at another time, and 
 under the influence of other feelings ! Merely to guess 
 At a few. How much he would have made of the rebinding 
 of their two folio volumes, so as to involve Herr Loch- 
 miiller (the landlord at Gefrees) in the deepest and most 
 diverting embarrassment, which that polite gentleman 
 could by no means have extricated himself from one 
 minute before this, my fourth book, came to his aid, which 
 at this moment is only in Bayreuth, and not even gone to 
 press 1 But Leibgeber did nothing of all this ; and even 
 of witticisms he only delivered himself of a few weak 
 ones; about their being changelings, about the sudden 
 ^French transition of people en longue robe into people en 
 robe courte. And he said he would uo longer call Sie- 
 benkses a transfigured being in boots, but one in shoes, 
 which was more befitting, as well as sounding somewhat 
 more sublime. It was with particular pleasure that he 
 saw how his dog, Saufinder — between the old bodies and 
 the new clothes, as if between two fires of love — could not 
 properly make out the matter in the least degree, and 
 often went from one to the other with a most uneasy face. 
 The concordat between the two parties — the shortening of 
 the one, and the lengthening of the other — puzzled the 
 creature, and he could make neither head nor tail of it all. 
 ■*' I like him twice as much as I did," said Leibgeber ;" 
 
526 JEAN PAUL FKIEDKICH RICHTER. [bOOK IV. 
 
 believe me. If he is faithful to you, that is not being 
 unfaithful to me." He could not possibly have said any- 
 thing more complimentary than this. 
 
 All the bleak way from Gefrees to Muenchberg, Firmian, 
 from gratitude, took the greatest pains to reflect back on 
 Leibgeber that sunshine of cheerfulness into which Henry 
 was continually trying' to lead him. It was no easy 
 matter, especially when bs saw him striding after him in 
 the long coat. He concentrated hinjself to an extreme 
 effort in Muenchberg, the last post-station before Hof, 
 where the corporeal aims with which they clasped each 
 other were, so to speak, to be cut off by a long separation. 
 
 As they were going along the road to Hof, more silent 
 than before, Leibgeber being first, and feeling refreshed 
 by the pine-covered mountain on his right, began (as he 
 usually did On his journeys) to whistle national airs, both 
 merry and sad, for the most part in minor keys. He said 
 he thought there were many worse town-and-street-fifers, 
 and that he performed on the foot-passenger's post-horn 
 which Nature had given him in a manner deserving of 
 some applause. To Firmian, however (now that their 
 parting was so near), these tones, which seemed to come 
 echoing back from Henry's long journeys of the past, and 
 forward from his coming lonely ones as well, were as a 
 kind of Swiss Banz des Vaches, which went to his very 
 heart ; and it was well he was walking last, for he could 
 scarce restrain his tears. Ah! take music away when 
 the heart is full and must not overflow ! 
 
 At length he brought his voice sufficiently under com- 
 mand to be able to say, without any apparent emotion, 
 "Are you fond of whistling as you go, and do you do it 
 often?" In the tone of this question there was a some- 
 thing as if the fluting was not quite so much of an enjoy- 
 ment to him as to the musician himself. "Always," 
 answered Leibgeber. "I whistle* away life, and the 
 world's stage, and all there is upon it — and all that sort 
 of thing — a great many matters in the past; and, like a 
 steeple-warder at Carlsbad, I whistle in the future. Do 
 
 * There ia a pun here in the original, where this expression meau 
 also " to hiss off" ( e.g. an actor from the stage). — Tbaks, 
 
CHAP. XXII.] FLOWEE, FKUIT, AND THOKN PIECES. 527 
 
 you dielike it ? Is my fuguing incorrect, or my whistling 
 a breach of the rules of pure composition?" " Oh! only 
 too beautiful," answered Siebenkaes. 
 
 And then Leibgeber began again, but with tenfold 
 power, and performed such a lovely and melting mouth- 
 organ voluntary, that Siebenkass came up to him with four 
 long strides, and, putting his handkerchief to his eyes 
 with his left hand, while he laid his right gently on 
 Henry's lips, he said in broken accents, " Henry, spare 
 me ! I don't know why, but every note of music moves 
 me too deeply to-day." The musician looked at him — 
 Leibgeber's whole inner world was in his eyes — then 
 nodded in a decided manner, and strode rapidly onwards 
 in silence, without looking round or letting his face be 
 seen. But bis hands, perhaps involuntarily, went on 
 making little movements, beating time in continuation 
 of the melody. 
 
 At length they arrived, oppressed and anxious, at the 
 Grub'Street or Mint-city where I am now seated, pasting 
 and colouring these assignats — this paper-money for halt 
 the world^namely, Hof.* It is by no means in my 
 favour, indeed, that at that time I knew nothing what- 
 ever of all these matters which half Europe is now being 
 made acquainted with through me. I was a good deal 
 younger then — sitting alone at home like a cabbage- 
 lettuce, with the best will in the world to close to a 
 head — which process of closing, in men as well as in 
 lettuces, is hindered by nothing so much as by the contact 
 of the neighbouring salad-plants. It is easier, pleasanter, 
 and more advantageous, for a youngster to go from solitude 
 into society (from the seed-bed into the garden), than the 
 converse — from the market-place into the comer. Unmi- 
 tigated solitude and unmitigated society are both bad : 
 • and, with the exception of their order of succession, nothing 
 is so important as their succession. 
 
 In Hof, Siebenkaes engaged two rooms at the inn, 
 thinking Leibgeber would hot part from him till the 
 morning. However, lie (whom his own pre-determination 
 to say good-bye, and his dread of saying ii, had fretted 
 and annoyed immensely for a considerable time) ha'l 
 
 ♦ I speak of 1796. 
 
528 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH EICHTEE. [BOOK IV 
 
 taken a raental vow that their two spirits should be torn 
 asunder that day, and that, immediately thereupon, ha 
 should be off into Saxony as hard as he could, though it 
 should want but a quarter of an hour to midnight; but, 
 at all events, before that particular day should come to a 
 close. He went into his room, smiling and pleasant, and 
 thought of the airs he had been whistling (which were 
 -still running in both their heads, if not in their hearts). 
 But he soon enticed him out of that empty deaf-mute of a 
 room into the diverting tumult and stir of the coffee- 
 room — not remaining long there, however, either — but as 
 the moon, in her first quarter, was standing like a lighted, 
 lamp just above a post in the market-place, he asked him 
 to go for a cruise round the town with him. So they 
 went, and climbed up the avenue", and looked down at the 
 gardens in the city-moat (which, perhaps, deserve to take 
 the pas over other artificial meadows, inasmuch as they 
 are more specially sown for cattle than others). I pre- 
 sume this was the reason why Leibgeber (who had been 
 in Switzerland) remarked late at night (when the country, 
 adorned and adopted by Nature, but disinherited Ly Art, 
 lay extended before him) that the people of Hof were like 
 the Swiss, whose whole country was a garden, except the 
 few gardens in it. 
 
 The pair went on drawing wider and wider parallels 
 around the town. They crossed a bridge, from which they 
 saw a gallows-hill overgrown with grass, which reminded 
 them of that other ice-region, with its crater, "where, 
 exactly a year ago, they had bidden each other good-bye 
 at night, but with the sweeter hope of an earlier meeting. 
 Two friends such as they are always struck with the same 
 ideas in the same circumstances. Each is — if not the 
 unison — at all events the octave, fifth, or fourth to the 
 other. Henry tried to rekindle a little light in his friend's, 
 dark house of sorrow and mourning by aid of the bird- 
 pole, which stood like a commandant's flag-staff, or a 
 burning stake, not far from the Supreme Criminal Court's 
 place of judicature. He said, "A shooter-king has his 
 Sinai, where he can both promulgate his laws and vin- 
 dicate them, close at his hand here, in a delightful manner, 
 beside his lever and leaping-pole, such as you heaved your- 
 
CHAP. XXII.] FLOWER, FBUIT, AND THOBN PIECES. 529 
 
 self Tip by to the dignity of Great Negus and Grand Mogul 
 of Kuhschnappel. Buffon's law — ^that every elevation has 
 another of equal height and similar composition opposite 
 to it — applies to a great number of eminences which cor- 
 respond to one another; gallows-hills and thrones, for 
 instance, in this case ; the two sides of the choir in 
 churches ; the fifth story and Pindus ; show-booths, and 
 the Chairs of Professors Extraordinary." 
 
 As Firmian did not speak, but remained sunk in sadder 
 similes, Henry, too, held his peace. He led him towards 
 another stone (for he was intimately acquainted with the 
 whole country), one with a prettier name, the " Stone of 
 Joy." At last, while they were toiling up the hill towards 
 this stone, Firmian took heart and said, " Tell me right 
 out — I am quite prepared — tell me at once, on your 
 honour, when are you going away from me for ever?" 
 " Now," answered Henry. On the pretence of its being 
 easier so to climb the hill-side, all flowers and perfumed 
 mountain-plants, they were holding each other by the 
 hand, and as they went they pressed hands sometimes, as 
 if from accidents of mechanical motion. But pain struck 
 great roots that waxed amain into Firmian's heart, roots 
 that split it asunder as the roots of trees split rocks. Fir- 
 mian laid himself down on the grey projecting rock, which 
 divided the green slope like a boundary-stone, and he drew 
 his departing friend down to his breast. " Sit down very 
 close beside me this once more," he said. As the manner 
 of friends is, each pointed out to the other everything he 
 saw. Henry showed him the camp of the town pitched all 
 about the foot of the hill, and looking as if fallen into a 
 deep sleep, nothing moving in it but some flickering lights. 
 The river went coiling along beneath the- moon round 
 the town like a great serpent with a sparkling back, 
 then stretched itself out through two bridges. The half- 
 shimmer of the moon, and the white transparent vapour of 
 the night, lifted the hills, the woods, and the earth, up to 
 the heavens; and the water on the earth was spangled 
 with stars like the blue night above, and the Earth, like 
 Uranus, had a doubled moon, as it wore a child in either 
 hand. 
 
 " In reality," Leibgeber began, " we can both always see 
 n. 2 m 
 
530 JEAN PAUL FEIBDKICH KICHTEE. [bOOK IV. 
 
 each other •wkenever we please. AH we have to do is 
 to look into a looking-glass. That is our moon-mirror." * 
 " No," said Tirmian, " we will fix on a time when we will 
 think of each other — on our birthdays — and on the day of 
 my pantomime death, and on this.'^ " Very well," said 
 Leibgeber, " these shall be our four quarter-days." 
 
 Of a sudden, the hand of the latter rested upon a dead; 
 lark, which had probably been shot. He clasped Firmian's 
 shoulders, and, raising him from the ground, said, " Stand 
 up; we' are men. What is all this fuss about? Pare you 
 well ! If ever I let you out of my head, or out of my 
 heart, may God dash me to atoms with a thousand thunder- 
 bolts. You are and shall be for ever in my bosom as 
 warmly as my own living heart. And so, good-bye, and 
 all good attend you ; and in all the Berghem Seapiece of 
 j'our life may there not be a single wave the size of a tear. 
 Farewell ! " They clung together, and wept heartily, and 
 Firmian did not answer as yet. His fingers stroked and 
 pressed his Henry's hair. At last he leaned his cheek 
 against the beloved eyes ; before his oion eyes the wide 
 abyss of njght shimmered, and his lips uttered (but with 
 no cadence in the tone), " 'Fare you well,' do you say to" 
 me ? Ah ! that I cannot, when I have lost my truest, my 
 oldest friend. The earth will always be as dark to me 
 as it is now around us here. Tt will be hard for me when 
 I am dying, and, in my feverish fancy, think I am only 
 pretending to die again, and stretch out my hand in the 
 darkn^Bs to feel for you, and say, "Henry, close my eyes 
 again, *!' cannot die withottt' 'you ! " Henry whispered,' 
 " Tell ine what else to say -to you, and then may God' 
 punish ihe if I utter another syllEible." Firmian stammered, 
 " Will you always like me, and shall I sfee you soon again ?" 
 " Not soon ; not for a long time," he answered, " and I 
 shaU never cease to love you." As he was starting to g6, 
 Firmian held him back. " We ■frill look at each other once 
 more," he said. And they bent back, their faces channelled" 
 
 * Whatever Pythagoras wrote with bean-juice on a certain mirror 
 could be read on the moon. — ' Call. Ehodogin,' ix. 13. When Charles V. 
 and Francia I. were fighting near Milan, evsrything that happened by 
 day at Milan could be read at night on the moon in Paris by meana of 
 a mirror of this sort.- — ' Agrippa de Ooc. Philos,* ii, 6. 
 
CHAP. XXII.j FLOWER, FKUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 531 
 
 by streams of emotion, and- looked ateacli other for the 
 last timei while the night-wind, like the arm of a stream, 
 mingled with the deep liver, and then rushed on united 
 with it in deeper, hijlows, while the great mountain-range 
 of creation trembled before the tearful eyes. • But Henry 
 tore himself away, made a sign with his hand as if to say 
 all was over, and took his flight down the hill. 
 
 After a little, Firmian was impelled after him — not 
 knowing why — by the goad of pain and sorrow. His 
 inner man, compressed by the tourniquet into insensibility, 
 did not feel the amputation of his lim'^ just then. They 
 both hurried along the same road, thougli^eparated by hills 
 and valleys. Whenever Henry stopped and looked back, 
 60 did Firmian. Alas ! after a sultry storm, such as this, 
 the waves all freeze to spikes of ice, and the heart lies 
 upon them transfixed. As Firmian went on broken- 
 hearted, by unknown, darkling paths, it seemed to him as 
 if all the death-bells on earth were tolling behind him, as 
 if the stream of life were running dry before him fast ; and 
 when he saw the blue of the sky cut across by a black 
 storm-tree * which lay upon the .stars like the bier of the 
 future, a voice seemed to cry, ".With this foot-rule of 
 vapour, Fate is measuring yoi), your world, and your love, 
 for your last coffin." \ 
 
 From the circumstance that the distance between him and 
 the other figure kept always the same, Henry at last became 
 aware that it was following him, and halted only when 
 he halted. So he made up his mind that he Would lie in 
 wait in the next village for the coming up of this form 
 •which was creeping after him., In the next village then, 
 T6pen.j( which lies deep in a valley), he awaited, iii'tte 
 broad shadow of a gleaming church, the arrival of this 
 unknown being which was on his track, - Firmian came 
 hastening along the fcijojtdr'white' street, dazed with sorrow 
 — blind in the moonlight — and stopped, as if frozen, close 
 by .Henry from whom he had, so recently been severed. 
 There they stood faeing feafllM>13ier/^ like two spirits above 
 their corpse;^, -each taking! th^' other for a ghost (just as' 
 the superstitious think the noises made by the buried - 
 
 ".' .' -1,,'...;, 't,c<l 'fij _'.-'. , ..->.. ' '. 
 
 ♦ A long cloud, with branch-like streaks, which bodes a storm. - 
 
 2 M 2 
 
532 JEAN PAUL FRIEDEICH EICHTER. [BOOK VT. 
 
 alive are caused hj spirits). Firmian trembled lest 
 Leibgeber should be vexed with him, and opened his arms- 
 and stammered out, "It is I, Henry," and went to him. 
 Henry gave a cry of pain, and threw himself upon the 
 faithful breast ; but his vow sealed his lips. And thus 
 these two miserable, or blessed beings, speechless, blind 
 and weeping, pressed their beating hearts close together 
 once more. And when this moment — ^wordless, full of 
 torture, full of bliss — was over and past, an iron, cold 
 one, tore them asunder, and Fate seized them with two- 
 almighty arms, and hurled the one bleeding heart to the- 
 south, and the other to the north; while the dejected, 
 bleeding corpses passed slowly and alone, along the 
 widening path of parting, in the night. 
 
 » « * « JK « 
 
 And why is it that my own heart breaks in twain with 
 such a pang ? Why should it be that, long ere I came ta 
 their parting, I could not keep my o-wn tears back ? Ah ! 
 my dear Christian, is it not because in this church those 
 who once lay upon your heart and mine are mouldering 
 into dust ? No, no, I am used to it now ; in the black 
 magic of our lives to see skeletons suddenly start up in 
 our friends' places ; that of every two who put their arms 
 about each other one has to die ; * that an unknown breath 
 blows the brittle glass which we call a human breast, and 
 a cry, which we know not of, shatters it in a moment. It 
 does not pain me now so much as of old, ye two brothers 
 'sleeping in the church, that the hard, cold hand of death 
 struck you away so soon from the honey-dew of life, 
 and that ye stretched your -wings and have vanished 
 away. Oh ! either your sleep is sounder than ours, or your 
 dreams are happier, or your awaking is blither. But 
 what agonises us in every grave-hillock is this thought. 
 " Alas ! beloved heart, hiw I would have loved you had I 
 known you were going to die ! " 
 
 But, since none of us can take a corpse's hand and say^ 
 " Pale one I at at all events I have sweetened thy transitory 
 life a little; I have, at any rate, never given that faded 
 heart of thine anything but love and happiness ; " and as 
 
 * There is a superstition that -when two children kiss -without being 
 able to speak, one of them must die. 
 
CHAP. XXIII.J FLOWER, FKUIT, AND THOKN PIECES. 533 
 
 when time, sorro-w, and the loveless winter of Ufe have 
 beautified our hearts, at length we must all go up, with 
 unavailing sighs, to the overthrown forms which are lying 
 beneath the landslip of the grave, and say to them, " Oh I 
 that, now that I am better and gentler, I have thee with 
 jne no longer, and can no longer love thee ! Oh ! that the 
 beloved breast is transparent and broken in, and no heart 
 in it which I would love more fondly, and gladden as I 
 never did before." What have we left but an unavail- 
 ing sorrow, a dumb repentance, and never-ending bitter 
 , tears ? 
 
 Yes, my Christian, we have something better left still — 
 -a wanner, truer, lovelier, love for every soul which we 
 have not yet lost. 
 
 CHAPTEE XXllI. 
 
 OAYS IN VADUZ — NATHALIE S LETTER — A NEW YEAR S WISH — 
 WILDERNESS OF DESTINY AND THE HEART. 
 
 We next meet our Firmian (promoted to higher rank on 
 his retirement from the world, as ofScers are on theirs 
 from the service, to that of Inspector, namely) in the In- 
 spector's quarters at Vaduz. He found he had to twist 
 his way through so many thickets of prickly-pear and 
 impenetrable thorn - hedges, that, amid his labours, he 
 almost forgot that he was alone — so utterly alone — in the 
 world. No one could endure and overcome solitude, if 
 it were not for the hope of companionship in the future, 
 or for the belief in invisible companionship in the present. 
 With the Count he had only to seem to be what he 
 really was, and then he was most like the unconventional 
 Leibgeber. He found the Count to be an old man of the 
 world, living alone, with neither wife, sons, nor female 
 servants — a man who filled up and adorned his grey years 
 with the arts and sciences, the last, and most lasting, 
 enjoyments of a life enjoyed to the end — and who cared 
 for nothing on earth (saving always the amusement ot 
 • jesting upon it) except his daughter, who (as we are 
 
-534 - JEAN PAUL FKIEDKICH EICHTEK. [BOOK IV. 
 
 aware) had been Nathalie's greatest friend in the starry 
 and flowery days of youth. 
 
 As he had devoted all his powers of body and soul, in 
 early life, to climbing to the tops of all the slipperiest mats 
 de cocagne of pleasure, and carrying off the prizes from 
 them, he had come down to earth with both sides of his 
 being a little wearied. His mental life was now a kind 
 of nursing, and lying in a tepid bath, which it required 
 a shower of cold water, to make him raise himself from, 
 and into which fresh warm water had to be constantly 
 being poured. The point of honour of keeping his word, 
 and the greatest possible happiness for his daughter, were 
 the only unbroken reins by which moral laws had ever 
 restrained him ; for he looked upon all their other cove- 
 nants more in the light of flower-chains, or strings o( 
 pearls — matters which a man of the world breaks and 
 mends often enough in his career. 
 
 As it is easier to imitate lameness than straight walking, 
 it was not difficult for Siebenkaes to enact the part of his 
 beloved Biable Boiteux. The Count was somewhat struck 
 with his white-painted face (which was natural to him), 
 and with his melancholy,, and a heap of nameless divei:- 
 gences (variations and aberrations) from Leibgeber. But 
 the Inspector accounted for these to his patron by saying 
 that he was so changed that he scarce recognised himself 
 —that he seemed to have become the changeling of his 
 former self since his illneps, and since he had seen his col- 
 lege friend Siebenkses depart this life in Kuhschnappel. 
 In brief, the Count could not but believe Vrhat he was 
 told ; who would think of 6uch an absurd story as the one I 
 am telling here ? And if the reader had been present in 
 the room himself, I am sure he would have believed tiie 
 Inspector in ■ preference to me, if it were for no Other 
 reason than that he remembered more of his old conver- 
 sations with the Count than the latter did himself. ('Tis 
 true he got this knowledge out of Leibgeber's diary.) 
 
 At the same time, as he had to speak, and act, in the 
 capacity of charge-d'affaires, or resident consul, and proxy 
 of 'his beloved licibgeber, there were two things which 
 he was, in a high degree, constrained to be — cheerful 
 and kindly. Leibgeber's humour had a greater power ol 
 
CHAP. XXI II.] FLOWER, FKUIT, AND THOKN PIECES. 535 
 
 colour, a greater freedom of drawing, and a more poetic 
 and citizen-of-the-world-ish, and ideal compass and range, 
 than Firmian's own * and this assumed brightness of temper 
 by and by became genuine. Moreover, his delicacy of 
 -feeling, and his friendship, kept constantly before his mental 
 ■vision, as on a Moses-cloudy-pillar on his path of life, a 
 shining, magnified image of Henry with a glory, and 
 a crown of laurel on his brow — and every thought within 
 him cried, " Be glorious, be godlike, be a Socrates, to do 
 hpnour to the spirit whose ambassador you are." And 
 which of us could assume the name of a beloved person, 
 and go and act unworthily ? 
 
 Nothing on earth is so often deceived — not even 
 women or princes — as the conscience. Our Inspector 
 tried to make Ms believe that his name had really been 
 Leibgeber m early days — just as he signed it now — and 
 that he really was helping the Count in his work. More- 
 over, who could be more ready than he to make a perfectly 
 clean breast of the whole story to the Count as soon as 
 ever the proper time came ? It was easy to see that a 
 humourous, juristic forgery, and pictorial illusion of this 
 sort would please him better than any amount of truths 
 founded upon reason, or responsa prudentum — to say nothing 
 of his gratification at findir.g he could have his friend, 
 humorist, and jurist, with two heads, two hearts, four legs 
 and arms — in duplicate, in short. Besides, the fact must 
 not be lost sight of that the lies he told were more un- 
 , avoidable lies than lies for the amusement of the thing — 
 inasmuch as he touched as seldom as he could upon 
 
 * "Therefore I foresee that Leibgeher's Pastoral Letters in these 
 ' Flower Pieces ' will, for moat of my readers, be insufferable letters of 
 denxmoiation or defiance. Moat Germans do understand a joke — ^It 
 cannot be denied of them — ^blit they do not aU imderstand badinage — 
 and few understand humour— least of all the Leibgeber sort. There- 
 fore, at first— because it is easier to alter a book than a public — I 
 thought of falsifying all his letters, and substituting pleasauter-flavoured 
 ones. However it can always be arranged that, in the second edition, 
 the falsified letters shall be inserted in the body of the work, and the 
 genuine ones given at the end as an Appendix." 
 
 This has not been found necessary. Heavens ! how can first editions 
 make such mistakes, and misunderstand such a number of readers — to 
 whom second editions afterwards offer the warmest and sincerest 
 apologies. 
 
536 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH EICHTEE. [BOOK IV. 
 
 Leibgeber's previous conversations and relations, and as 
 much, as possible on his own, which involved no breaches 
 of truth. 
 
 Thus it is with — not our Inspector only — but man in 
 general. He has an indescribable fondness for halves, 
 perhaps because he is a colossus and demi-god standing, 
 with out-stretched legs, upon two worlds. He parti- 
 cularly delights in half-romances, half-postage of sel- 
 fishness, half-proofs, half-scholars (smatterers in know- 
 ledge), half-holidays, half-spheres — and (consequently) 
 better halves. 
 
 Siebenkses's new labours of various kinds concealed his 
 own pains and sufferings from him for the first few weeks 
 (at all events, when the sun was not shining). But what 
 gave him his largest extra-ration of pleasure was the 
 Count's satisfaction with his legal knowledge, and careful 
 and accurate style of doing his work. Once, when the 
 Count said to him, " Friend Leibgeber, you are keeping 
 your promise like a man. Your ability and accuracy 
 over your work are deserving of aU praise, and I do not 
 conceal from you that I felt just the slightest shade of 
 a misgiving on this very head, notwithstanding my high 
 opinion of your other talents. For, like your Frederick II., 
 I consider talk and work to be two wholly distinct things ; 
 and as regards the latter, I look for the most accurate and 
 methodical attention to all its details in every one I have 
 to deal with." Firmian rejoiced within himself, as ho 
 thought, " At all events I have turned aside some little 
 matter of blame from my dear Henry, and gained a little 
 modicum of praise for him ; though he could have dope it 
 all much better himself, if he had chosen." 
 
 After a pleasure of self-sacrifice such as this, one always 
 wants to go on enjoying /resA pleasures of self-sacrifice, 
 and making new sacrifices, just as children, who, whenever 
 they are given anything, cannot cease giving. He brought 
 out his ' Selections from the Devil's Papers,' gave them toi 
 the Count, and told him plainly and openly that they were 
 his own work. " This is not a deception in the slightest," 
 he thought ; " though he supposes they are by Leibgeber ; 
 I have no other name now." The Count never wearied of 
 reading and praising these papers, and what particularly 
 
CHAP. XXIII, j FLOWEE, FKUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 537 
 
 {)leased him was, that, in the path of satire, he followed 
 the guidance of his own two compatriots, the British 
 Castor and Pollux of humour, Swift and Sterne. Siebenkses 
 listened to the encomiums on bis book with such delight 
 that he seemed exactly like a conceited author — whereas, 
 in reality, he was nothing but a lover of his Henry, who 
 had managed to conjure a few extra laurel-orowns on to 
 his image in the Count's mind. 
 
 This single jnjoyment of his was, of a truth, necessary 
 to him by way of consolation and cordial for a life which 
 was flowing on, beshaded and chilled between two steep 
 4)anks of legal business, week after week, month after 
 month. Alas I with the exception of the good Count's 
 talk (whose extraordinary kindness to him would have 
 made his heart beat even more warmly than it did, could 
 he have thanked him for it in another's name as well as 
 his own), — he heard nothing better than an occasional 
 murmur of the waves of his life. He found himself, every 
 day, in his old, disagreeable post of a critic, compelled to 
 read what he had to give judgment upon. Pormerly it had 
 l)een books — now it was lawyers. He saw into so many 
 empty heads, into so many empty hearts — saw such dark- 
 ness in the former, such blackness in the latter. He saw 
 how very much the common-herd (when it comes to the 
 Egeria-fountain of the juristic ink-bottle to benefit its cal- 
 ■adi), is like Carlsbad bath- guests, in whose case the hot- 
 ■springs bring all diseased matter to the surface of the skin. 
 He saw that most of the oldest, and worst, members of the 
 legal profession are, in only one beautiful respect, like 
 poisonous plants — namely, that they are not half so poi- 
 sonous, but more innocuous, while they are young. He 
 saw that a just judgment often did as much harm as an 
 unjust one, and that the one was appealed against just as 
 much as the other. He saw that it was easier, and, at the 
 Bame time, more distasteful, to be a judge than an advocate ; 
 although neither of them loses anything by an injustice — 
 for a judge is paid for a judgment reversed on appeal, just 
 jas an advocate is for a case which he loses. He saw that, 
 in dealing with defendants, the principle of grooms is 
 applied (who look upon the cuiTycomb as a good half of 
 the forage). And, finally, he saw that nobody fares worse 
 
538 JEAN PAUL FEIEDRICH EICHTEK. [bOOK IV. 
 
 in the affair tlian he who sees it, and that the devil is the 
 very last of all things that the devil takes. 
 
 Amid labours and views such as these, the tender fibres 
 of the heart contract, and the open arms of the inner man 
 are paralysed — the overweighted soul scarce has the strength 
 to love, let alone the time. When we love, and seek after 
 tilings, it must be at the expense of persons. If we work 
 too much, we must love too little. There was but one place 
 where poor Pirmian gave vent, once in the twenty-four 
 hours, to the longings and prayers of his tender soul — 
 namely, his pillow ; and its cover was the white handker- 
 chief waiting for his weeping eyes. A deluge (made of 
 tears) was over all his former world— nothing floating on 
 its surface but the two withered funeral-garlands of de- 
 parted days — -the flowers which Lenette and Nathalie had 
 worn on their breasts, like petrified medicine-flowers of his 
 sick soul. 
 
 Living so far away, and so wholly outside the elliptical 
 vault, he could hear as little of Kuhschnappel as of 
 Sohraplau — of Lenette and Nathalie not a word. He 
 merely learned, from the 'Messenger of the Gods and 
 Advertiser of German Programmes,' that he was dead, and 
 that the critical profession was thereby deprived of one of 
 its ablest and most zealous members. Thus our Inspector 
 was honoured by the necrologium sooner than any other 
 German scholar ever was — as soon, in fact, as the Olympic 
 ooriqueror Euthymus,* to whom, by a decree of the Delphic 
 Oracle, sacrifice and divine worship was adjudged during 
 his lifetime. I do not know which kind of ears — ^long ears 
 or deaf — the German trump of fame prefers to blow to. 
 
 And yet, in the depths of this ice-month of his love- 
 imploring heart, and in the wilderness of his loneliness, 
 Firtttian still had one living, resplendent flower — and that 
 was Nathalie's parting-kiss. Ah ! ye who waste and pine 
 because of our insatiableness, did ye but know how a kiss, 
 which is a first and a last, blossoms and blooms throughout 
 a life — imperishable double-rose of speechless lips and burn- 
 ing souls — ye would search for bliss more enduring — aye, 
 and find it too 1 That kiss sealed, in Firmian, and con- 
 
 • Plin. H. jST. vii. 48. 
 
CHAP. XXIII.] FLOWER, FRUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 539 
 
 firmed the spirit-lbond immortalising and eternisiDg love 
 at its loveliest and brightest hour of bloom. The speech- 
 less lips were still eloquent, to Mm. The spirit breathed 
 between them as of old ; and often as he saw, by night,. 
 behind the veil of iis closed, tearful eyelids, Nathalie 
 going away from him, with all her sacred sorrows, and 
 vanishing down the darkling path — he never had enough 
 of the parting, the anguish, and the love. 
 
 At last, when six months had passed, one beautiful 
 winter morning, when the white hills with their snow- 
 crystal woods lay bathed in the rose-blood of the sun, and 
 Aurora was stretching her pinions more widely as she 
 gently laid them down upon the glittering earth — ^there 
 flew a letter into Tirmian's empty hand, as if borne upon 
 the morning-breeze of a spring as yet among the things to 
 ibe. It was from Nathalie, who, like the rest of the world, 
 supposed him to be the Henry of former days. 
 
 " Deae Leibgebee, — I can restrain or control my heart 
 no longer. Every day it longs to break in pieces before 
 yours, and show you all its wounds. You were once my 
 lltiend, I know ; am I quite forgotten ? Have I lost you 
 too ? Ah I surely not ; it is only that you cannot speak to 
 me for sorrow, since your Firmian died upon your breast, 
 and still rests, vanishing into the frost of death, upon the 
 aching spot. Ah ! why did you persuade me to accept the 
 fruit that grows upon his grave — and, as it were, open that 
 - grave anew every year ? * The first day I received this 
 -ft'uit was bitter — bitterer than any other. You will see from 
 a little New Year's Greeting, which I addresFed to myself 
 (and which I en close), howl sometimes feel. One passage in 
 it refers to a white rose in my room, from which I managed 
 to gather a flower or two in December. My friend, now 
 grant me a request, the making of which is really my 
 object in writing this letter — my most earnest prayer for 
 sorrow, a bitterer sorrow than is mine even now — for this 
 will give me consolation. Tell me — for there is no one 
 else who can — and I know no other — tell me everything 
 about our dear one's last hours and moments; what he said 
 
 * She refers to the widow'ii pension. 
 
540 JEAN PAUt PEIEDEICH RICHTEE. [bOOK IV. 
 
 -and what he suffered ; how his eyes closed, and how his 
 life ended? All this, everything, though it wiU pierce 
 my heart, I must be told. What can it cost you and me but 
 -tears ? — and tears soothe suffering eyes. 
 
 " I remain, your friend, 
 
 " Nathalie A. 
 
 '" P.S. — If there were not so many causes to prevent me, 
 -I would go myseK to his resting-place and gather reHos 
 for my soul ; but, if you keep silence, I do not answer for 
 anything. I send you my congratulations on your new 
 appointment, and I hope I may be able to wish you joy 
 some day by word of mouth ; my heart may become so far 
 whole once more that I shall be able to come and pay 
 my dear friend a visit at her father's, and see you without 
 ■dying of sorrow, at the likeness you bear to your buried 
 ■friend, Mwlike you now." 
 
 * * * * » 
 
 I venture to translate * the pretty poem as follows : — 
 
 "My Nkw Year's Greeting to Myself. 
 
 "The New Year's gates are open, and Fate, standing 
 "between the sun and the burning morning clouds upon the 
 mound of ashes of the year which has fallen to dust, 
 deals out the days according to their lot. What dost thou 
 pray for, Nathalie ? 
 
 " Not for joy. Alas ! all the joys which have been in 
 my heart have left but black thorns there ; their rose-juice 
 soon was gone. The heavy thunder-cloud grows as the 
 sun-gleam brightens — and what shines upon us is the ray 
 reflected from the sword which the coming day will hold 
 to our happy hearts. No, no ; I pray not for joys ; they 
 •make the thirsting heart so void. It is but sorrow that 
 -can fill it full. 
 
 " Pale deals the days according to their lot. What dost 
 thou long for, Nathalie ? 
 
 " Not love. Oh ! those who press the thorny white rose 
 of love to their hearts draw blood from out them ; the 
 warm tears of bliss which fall into the blossom soon grow 
 
 * Because it was supposed to be in English verse. — TB.iN3. 
 
CHAP. XXIII.j FLOWEB, FEUIT, AND THOEN PIECES, 541 
 
 chill, and are dried up amain. Love, all gleam and bloom, 
 bangs on the morning sky of life, like some great rose-red' 
 Aurora in tbe heavens. Ah! do not enter that bright 
 glittering cloud — it is but mist and tears. No, no ; long 
 not for love; die of a lovelier sorrow. Sink into the 
 chill of death under a nobler poison-tree than is the lovely 
 myrtle. 
 
 " Thou art kneeling at the feet of Destiny, Nathalie ,- 
 tell him thy desire ! 
 
 "Neither do I desire more friends. No; we stand all, 
 side by side, on undermined graves — and when we have 
 so long held each other so fondly by the hand, and so long- 
 suffered together, our friend's empty mound breaks in, and 
 he turns pale, and sinks — and I am left alone, my life all 
 frozen, beside the fiUed-up grave. No, no ; but when at 
 last there comes the hour when the heart will die no more, 
 but has put on immortal being — and when friends stand* 
 side by side in the eternal world — ^then let the firmer 
 breast beat warm and high, then let the eye, which is ta 
 beam for ever, weep blissful tears, then let the lips, which 
 never more grow pale, murmur in rapture, ^Now come 
 to me, beloved soul, we will love noiH, for we shall nevei 
 have to "part again.' 
 
 " Oh 1 thou bereaved and widowed Nathalie ! what 
 would'st thou have on earth ? 
 
 " A grave, and patience ; nothing else beside. But 
 these deny me not, thou silence-keeping Fate ! Dry thou 
 mine eyes", then close them ! Still my heart, then break 
 it I — ^Yes, (me day, when the free spirit spreads her wings- 
 in a fairer heaven, and when the New Tear breaks upon a 
 purer world — ^when we all meet, and love, again — then. 
 shall I lay my longings, prayers, and wishes at thy feet, 
 But none for me ; for I shall be too blest." 
 
 m * * * * 
 
 In what words could I depict the inward speechlessness 
 and motionlessness of her friend, when he had read the- 
 paper, and still held and gazed at it, although he could no 
 longer either see or think. Oh ! the ice-floes of the glacier 
 of death spread wider and wider, and filled up one warm 
 Temp6 valley after another. The only bond by which our 
 solitary Firmian now held to humanity was the cord of hia- 
 
542 JEAN PAUL FRIEDEICH EICHTER. [^OOK IV. 
 
 <death-bell and coffin — his bed was but a broader bier — and 
 every joy seemed a theft from the wither«d, Jeaf-stripped 
 heart of another. And thus the stem of his life, like that 
 of many flowers,* went deeper and deeper down, its top 
 becoming its hidden root. 
 
 The abyss of a difficulty yawned on every side, and to 
 ■do anything was just as perilous as to do nothing. I shall 
 lay the difficulties, or resolutions, in their order as they 
 struck his mind, before the reader. In man, the devil flies 
 ^lp always sooner than the angel, — the evil intention comes 
 before the good one.f His first was non-moral, namely, 
 that he should answer Nathalie, and tell her what she 
 wished to hear — that is, should lie to her. We find the 
 Ijlack mourning coat as becoming, when others wear it for 
 us, as warm when we wear it for others. " But I shall melt^ 
 her heart " (said his) " into fresh anguish with a continu- 
 «,tion of wound and lie ; ah ! not even my , actual death 
 would be worth such pain and sorrow. Therefore I shall 
 keep utter silence." But then, she must think Henry an- 
 noyed, and that she has lost this friend too ; nay, she 
 might, in this case, travel to Kuhschnappel, and go to his 
 grave, and bear it as an additional burden upon her 
 oppressed and trembling soul. In both these cases there 
 was the risk of the third danger — that she should come 
 to Vaduz, and that he should then have to convert the 
 written lies, which he had spared her, into spoken ones. 
 There was but one way of escape that he, could see — ^the 
 most virtupus, but the steepest — he could, tell her the 
 truth. But with what danger to every relation of his life 
 this confession was fraught, even if Nathalie kept counsel 
 — also,, a yellow, cross light would fall upon Henry, in 
 Nathalie's eyes, especially as she had no means of kno.w- 
 
 * In the ranunculus, brown wort, the lower part of the stalk sinks 
 deeper into the ground every year, to replace the root as it rots away. 
 
 •f In enthusiasm, the converse order of tUnga prevailB. To learn' to 
 know what your firmly established principles of morality are, with more 
 certainty than you can from your resolves trad actions, you have only 
 to notice the joy or the sorrow which a moral claim, a piece of news, a 
 disappointment, calls up in you with lightning speed, but which, dis- 
 iappears again at once under the influence of reflection and self-control. 
 What great, rotting pieces of the old Adam one finds Sboiit one still, 
 now and then ! 
 
CHAP, XXIV,_ FLOWER, FRUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 543 
 
 irig anything as to the nobleness and generosity of his 
 aims' and deceptions. On the whole, there was least for 
 his heart to suffer on the precarious path of truth, and 
 ultimately he resolved to go by it. 
 
 CHAPTER XXIV. 
 
 KEWS FROM KUHSCHNAPPEL — WOMAN'S ANTICLIMAX — OPENING 
 OF THE SEVENTH SEAL. 
 
 It is a matter which often quite puts me beyond niyeelf 
 that, although we do, in the end, duly accept and honour 
 the bills which Virtue draws upon us, we ovi\j pay them 
 after such a vast number of days of grace and double- 
 usances — although neither the devil nor Constantinople 
 will hear of either the one or the other. Firmian urged 
 no further pleas of objection, except for delay. He merely 
 postponed, his confession, thinking that as Apollo is the best 
 consoler (Paraclete) of man, and as Nathalie had shown 
 the basilisk of sorrow its own image in the mirror of 
 poetry, the sight of itself would be sufficient to kill it. 
 Thus it is that all virtuous motions in us are weakened by 
 the friction of time and of our inclinations. 
 
 One sii^gle letter, however, sent all the scenery of his 
 theatre into confusion again. It came from Schulrath 
 Stiefel:— 
 
 "HoNOUEBD Sir, — ^You doubtless remember more than 
 too well the testamentary instruction which our mutual 
 friend, the late lamented Poor's Advocate, Sieb6nk»s, left 
 behind him, to the effect that Herr von Blaise should make 
 payment of the trust>-funds in his hands — and, indeed (as 
 you are aware), to your respected self in order that you 
 might remit it to the widow — which failing, it was the 
 testator's avowed intention to appear as a ghost. Be this 
 as it may, thus much is matter of notoriety in this town 
 and neighbourhood, that, for some weeks past," a ghost, in ' 
 the likeness of our lamented friend, has pursued the Herr 
 Heimlicher everywhere, who has, in consequence, become 
 
51-i JEAN PAUL FKIEDEICH EICHTER. [bOOK IV 
 
 SO ill and bedridden, that lie lias taken the Holy Sacrament, 
 and made np his mind to pay over the above-mentioned. 
 ; moneys in good earnest. I now beg to inquire of youi 
 whether you would wish to receive them in the first in.- 
 stance, or whether (as would be almost more natural) they 
 shall be paid at once to the widow. I have yet to mention 
 that — in accordance with the desire of the testator — I 
 ' sometime since married the former Mrs. Siebenkaes, and 
 that I expect very soon to be the happiest of fathers. She 
 is a most admirable wife and housekeeper. She is by no 
 means a Thalsea,* and would lay down her life for her 
 husband as gladly as he would lay down his for her j and 
 I often have nothing left to desire, but that my predeces- 
 sor, her good, never-to-be-forgotten first husband Siebenkaes^ 
 (who Tiad his little whims and eccentricities at times), could 
 be a spectator of the happiness in which his beloved Lenette 
 is now bathed. She weeps for him every Sunday as she. 
 goes through the churchyard, but at the same time she; 
 confesses that she is happier now than in fonner times.. 
 It grieves me much that it is only now that I have learnt,,, 
 from my wife, in what miserable circumstances the dear 
 departed found himself, as regarded his purse. How 
 eagerly, had I been aware of this, I should have taken 
 him and his wife by the arms, and assisted them as be- 
 comes a Christian 1 If the deceased, who now possesses, 
 more than any, or all, of us, can, in his glory, look down 
 upon us, I am sure he will forgive me. I would respect- 
 fully beg for an early reply to this letter. One cause of 
 the restitution of the trust-funds may also be, that the 
 Heimlicher (who is an honest enough man upon the 
 ■whole) is now no longer influenced by Herr von Meyem.. 
 They have completely fallen out, as all the town knows; and 
 the latter has broken off engagements with five ladies in. 
 Bayreuth, and is about to enter into the state of holy 
 matrimony with a native of KuhschnappeL 
 
 * The wife of Pinarius, under the government of Tarquinins- 
 Superhus, was the first woman to quarrel with her mother-in-law 
 (Plut. in Numa). German history will, perhaps, some day make 
 honourable mention of the first married woman who did not qnairer 
 with her mother-in-law ; at least a German Plutarch should set about 
 hunting her out. 
 
CHAP. XXIV.J FLOWER, FEXJIT, A^^D THOEN PIECES. 545 
 
 " My wife is as bitter against him as Christian love 
 permits, and says that when she meets him she feels like 
 a hunter who encounters an old woman in his path of a 
 morning ; for he was the cause of much needless vexation 
 between her and her husband, and she often tells me with 
 pleasure how cleverly you, esteemed Mr. Inspector, often 
 set this dangeroxis fellow down, and kept him in his place. 
 However, he does not dare to set foot in my house. I defer, 
 for the present, a more detailed request — as to whether 
 you would not feel inclined to 'fill our departed friend's 
 vacant place as Collaborateur in the ' God's Messenger of 
 German Programmes,' which (I may say without undue 
 boasting) is taken in, and looked upon with approval in 
 Gymnasia and Lycsea, from Swabia as far as Niirnberg, 
 Bayreuth, and Hof. There is rather a superfluity than a 
 lack of miserable Programme-scribblers ; and (let me say 
 it without flattery) you are the very man to wield the 
 satiric scourge over the heads of these frog-spawn in the 
 Castalian springs, as few others could. But of this more 
 on another occasion. My wife desires to add Jier most 
 cordial remembrances to her departed husband's highly- 
 esteemed friend ; and, hoping for a speedy answer, 
 
 " I remain, your most obedient humble servant, 
 
 " S. E. Stieb-el, Schulrath." 
 
 The human heart is shielded by great sorrows from the 
 impact of small ones — by the waterfall from the rain.* 
 Firmian forgot everything in remembering, suffering, and 
 crying out to himself, " Thus I have lo.st thee for ever, 
 wholly. Oh ! tJiou wert good always, it was I who was 
 not. Be happier than thy solitary friend ^vhom thou 
 mournest justly every Sunday." He now cast all the blame 
 of his bygone matrimonial lawsuits upon his own satirical 
 whimsies, and ascribed the failure of his crop of happiness 
 to his own ungenial climate. 
 
 But in this he was doing himself greater injustice than 
 
 * Allusion to a certain wateriall which daslics from its rock with a 
 5Weep so wide that one can walk under it, and this be protected fvcm 
 lain. — 'An Ariiel's Journey in the Alpe.' 
 
 II. 2 -s 
 
546 JEAN PAUL FBIEDEICH EICHTEE. [bOOK IV, 
 
 he had formerly done Lenette. I mean to make the world 
 a present of my thoughts on this snhject, on the spot. Love 
 is the Perihelion of the fair sex ; nay, it is the transit of 
 every one of those Venuses over the sun of the ideal world. 
 At the epoch of this " higher style " of their souls, they love 
 everything that we love, even the sciences, and the whole 
 hest world within the breast — and they despise what we 
 despise, even clothes and news. In this spring of theirs 
 these nightingales go on singing until the summer solstice ; 
 the wedding-day is their longest day. Then the devil runs 
 away with — not exactly everything, hut something every 
 day. The bast-hand of wedlock binds the poetic wings, 
 and the bridal-bed is (for the imagination, the phantasy); 
 an Engelsburg, and prison-cell, with bread and water. 
 During the honeymoon I hav6 often followed these poor birds 
 of paradise, or peacocks of Psyche, and in this moulting- 
 season of theirs picked up the glorious wing and tail- 
 feathers which they have dropped ; and then, when a hus- 
 band has fancied he has married a naked crow, I have held 
 out the bunch of feathers to him. Why is this? For this 
 reason : marriage overlays the poetical world with the 
 rind of the actual ; as (according to Descartes) our earthly 
 sphere is a sun covered over with a dirty crust, or bark. 
 The hands of everyday labour are unwieldy, hard, and full 
 of indurations, and find much difficulty in going on hold- 
 ing, or drawing the delicate threads of the woof of the 
 ideal. Hence it is that among the upper classes (where, 
 instead of work-rooms there are only little work-Ja«A;e/s, and 
 where the little spinning-wheels are turned on the lap with 
 the finger, and where love still endures after marriage — 
 often even for the husband) the wedding-ring is not so often, 
 as among the lower orders, a Gyges-ring, which renders 
 books and the arts of music, poetry, painting, and dancing 
 — invisible. Upon high places plants of all sorts, and 
 particularly female plants, have more vigour and aroma. 
 A woman has not, as a man has, the power of protecting 
 the outer side of her inner air-and-magic-castles against 
 rough weather. What then is she to hold to ? Her hus- 
 band. He ought always to stand beside the liquid silver 
 of the female spirit with a spoon, and keep skimming off 
 the scum which gathers on it, that the silver-glittering 
 
CHAP. XXIV.J FLOWEK, FEUIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 547 
 
 sheen of the ideal may always keep bright and shining. 
 But then there are two sorts of husbands — Arcadians, or 
 lyric-poets of life, who love for ever, like Eousseau, when 
 tiieir hair is grey — and these are not to be controlled or 
 comforted when they can. no longer see any gold on the 
 feminine anthology (bound with gilt edges) because they 
 have turned the leaves of the little book over one by one, 
 (as is the case with all gilt-edged books). Secondly, there 
 are shepherd -hi nfl-i and sheep-smearers, I mean master- 
 singers by profession, men-of-business, who thank God 
 when the enchantress turns, at last, like other witches, into 
 a grumbling house-cat, keeping down the vermin. 
 , Nobody has to , uffer more anxiety and alarm, combined 
 with tedium and ennui (and therefore I intend some day to 
 awaken the pity of my readers for this very condition, in 
 a comic biography) than a portly, energetic, pushing, pom- 
 pous, ponderous Basso of a " business-man," who finds 
 himself (like the elephants in Eome of old) constrained to 
 dance on the sl;ick-rope of love ; and whose deportment 
 and play of featii! j, in the circumstances, I think more 
 like those of a murmot than anything else, when the 
 warmth of a loom has awakened him from his winter's 
 sleep, and he finds he can't get properly into the knack 
 of moving. It is only with widows (who wish less to be 
 loved than to be married) that a weighty office-holder of 
 this sort can lit L^iii his romance at the place where all the 
 aovel-writers Jl..vo theirs off — namely, at the altar-steps. 
 A man, built aftei- this simplest of styles, would find a gi-eat 
 weight lifted from his heart if anybody would only love 
 his shepherdess /or liim till such time as he should have 
 nothing to do but go and be mai-ried ; and no one would 
 have greater pkasnre in taking up this burden, or cross, 
 from them than myself. I have often thought of announ- 
 cing in the public newspapers (except that I was afraid it 
 would be looked upon as a joke) that I was prepared to 
 swear Platonie, eternal love to any number of endurable 
 girls (whom men of business might not even have time to 
 love), and make them all the necessary love-declarations 
 as plenipotentiary of the bridegroom-elect — ^in a word, to 
 lead them on my arm, as substitutes sine spe succedendi, or 
 cavalier de societe, athwart the whole of the unlevel land of 
 
 2 N 2 
 
548 JEAN PATTL FKIEDEICH MCHTER. [BOOK IV. 
 
 ]ove, till, on the frontier, I should hand ovov my charge, 
 duly prepared, to the bridegroom ; which would he love- 
 making, lather than marrying, by ambassador. If, accord- 
 ing to this systema assistantim,' there should be any one who 
 would care to employ the writer even during the honey- 
 moon (when a certain amount of love may still be expected 
 to crop up), he must take care to establish all the necessary 
 conditions in good time, beforehand. 
 
 In SiebenlcKs's Lenette (from no fault of his) the ideal 
 isle of the blest had sunk away, miles deep, in an instant, 
 at the very marriage altar. The husband could in nowise 
 either help or hinder this. On the whole, dear Mr. Educa- 
 tion-Counsellor Campe, you really should not strike so hard 
 upon your writing-desk with your school birch-rod when- 
 ever a solitary she-frog croaks out something or other out 
 of the nearest marsh, which is capable of being sent to an 
 almanack. Ah me ! don't tear away from the good crea- 
 tures (who do put the loveliest dreams, all full of fantasy- 
 flowers, into this empty life of ours) the terribly short 
 dream of a delicate, sentimental love. They will be 
 awakened to reality only too soon without that, and neither 
 you nor I will be able to put them to sleep again, let us 
 write as much as we choose. 
 
 Siebenkffis wrote off that day a brief and hurried reply 
 to the Schulrath, saying " he was extremely glad that he 
 had stood to the will, and the laws, and enclosed him a 
 power of attorney to enable him to draw the money. Only 
 he entreated him, as a great scholar and man of letteis 
 (one of a class who often, perhaps, suppose they understand 
 matters of business better than they really do), to put the 
 whole affair into a lawyer's hands to be transacted, inas- 
 much as Jus is of little use without jurists — nay, often not 
 of very much even with them. To review ' Programmes ' he 
 had no time, let alone to read them ; and he sent his kind 
 regards to his wife." 
 
 It is not displeasing to me that (as I perceive) my 
 readers have all discovered of themselves that the ghost, or 
 supernatural bow-wow, and mumbo-jumbo,* who had got 
 
 * A bugbear, nine feet high, made of bark and straw, with which the 
 Mandingoea terrify and better their wives. 
 
CHAP. XXIV.] FLOWEE, FEUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 549 
 
 tte trust-money out of the Heimlicher's clutolies more 
 effectually than the whole posse- comitatus of the Court of 
 Exchequer, was none other than Heinrich Leibgeher, who 
 ■had availed himself of his resemblance to the departed 
 SiebenksBs to play the part of Bevenant. I need not, there- 
 fore, tell the reader what he knows already. 
 
 When one has at last managed to creep up a steep Alp 
 with the hands of a tree-frog, one very often finds that what 
 one looks down at from the summit is a fresh yawning abyss. 
 Pirmian saw a new one under his feet ; he had to aban- 
 don the resolution he had taken. I mean, he did not now 
 dare to say a word to Nathalie about his resurrection from 
 the charnel-house— his immortality after death. Alas! the 
 happiness of his Lenette, who (in the utmost innocence) 
 had two husbands, would then be hanging on the tip of a 
 tongue. The blame would be his, the misery Lenette's. 
 No, no (he said) ; Time will, by slow degrees, lay dust 
 upon my pale image in Nathalie's kind heart, and draw 
 the colours out of it. 
 
 In brief, he kept silence. The proud Nathalie kept 
 silence also. In this terrible position of matters, face to 
 face with the hard, eternal knot of the drama, he passed 
 his anxious hours upon the stage. The raven-flight of 
 cares and sorrows cast their flitting shadows over every 
 charm and beauty of the spring, and poisonous dreams fell 
 upon his sleep like mildew. Every dream-night cut the 
 fci'lling planetary-knot, and his heart along with it. How 
 would Pate rescue and recover him from this poison- 
 vapour, this azote-gas, of anguish and anxiety ? How 
 would it cure the finger-worm in his ring finger ? By 
 taking his arm off. One evening, to wit, shortly before 
 bedtime, the Count was as confidential with him as a man 
 of the world can ever be. He had something very plea- 
 sant to tell him, he said ; only he must be allowed to say 
 something beforehand, by way of a preface or introduc- 
 tion. It struck him — he went on to say, that, now that 
 his Inspector had entered upon his duties, he was no 
 lono'er quite so gay and full of humour as he had found 
 him to be of old, but rather (if he might speak openly) 
 downcast at times, and over-sentimental. Yet he had 
 formerly said himself (but this was the other Leibgeber) 
 
550 JEAN PAUL FKIEDKICH EICHTEE. [BOOK IV. 
 
 that lie would rather hear a man swear at a misohance 
 than lament over it ; and that one might have his feet 
 sticking in the winter, and his nose in the spring, and 
 smell a flower, though in the midst of snow. " I' forgive' 
 it at once, for perhaps I guess the reason of it," he added. 
 But his forgiveness was really not quite genuine. 'For, 
 like all the great, to him strength of feeling, even of a 
 loving sort — but still more, of a sorrowful — was an annoy- 
 ance ; and a strong handclasp of friendship was almost as bad 
 as a crunch on the toes. He demanded of pain that it should 
 pass before him with a smile — of wickedness and evil, that 
 they should pass him by laughing, or, at all events, laughed 
 at — as, indeed, the coldest men of the world are like the 
 physical man, whose highest temperature is about the 
 region of the diaphragm.* Consequently, the previous 
 Leibgeber — that storm-windy, but, at the same time, serene 
 blue sky — naturally suited the Count better than this so- 
 called Leibgeber. But how dift'erently from us whO' read 
 this little reproach quietly, did Siebenkees listen to it ! 
 These solar eclipses of his Leibgeber (which really were not 
 even so much as sun spots belonging to Mm, but merely appa- 
 rent shadows cast on him by Siebenksss, by reason of 
 the position he chanced to occupy) the latter reproached 
 himself with as so many deadly sins against his friend, 
 which he felt it absolutely necessary to confess and do 
 penance for. 
 
 As the Count now went on to say, " This melancholy of 
 yours can scarcely be caused altogether by grief at the 
 loss of your friend Siebenkees, because since his death you 
 have never spoken to me of him with such warmth as 
 when he was alive. Pardon me this frankness," — a fresh 
 pang at this shadowing of Leibgeber cut across his brow, 
 and it was with difficulty that he could allow his patron 
 to finish his explanation. " But this is not a shortcoming 
 in my eyes, dear Leibgeber : on the contrary, it is an ex- 
 cellence. We ought not to go on eternally mourning for 
 the dead ; if we grieve at all, it should be for the living. 
 And even the latter species of grief may come to an end 
 Vith you next week, for then I expect my daughter, and " 
 (he spoke here very deliberately) " her friend Nathalie with 
 * Walter's ' Physiology.' 
 
CHAP. XXIV.] FLOWEE, FKUIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 551 
 
 her. They have met en route." Siebentaes sprang hastily up, 
 stood speechless and motionless, held iis hand before his 
 eyes, not to hide them, but to keep the light out of them, 
 so that he might look through, and follow the course of, 
 the cloud-masses of thought which were piled one over 
 another and rolling in all directions, ere he should give 
 his answer. 
 
 But the Count — misconstruing him (as Leibgeber) in all 
 points, and ascribing his sentimental metamorphosis to 
 Nathalie's account, and the fact of his being deprived of 
 her — begged him merely to hear him out before speaking, 
 and to accept his assurance that he would be delighted to 
 do everything in his power to retain his daughter's lovely 
 friend always in the neighbourhood. Heavens ! what 
 thousandfold entanglement the Count made of a matter 
 so wholly simple ! 
 
 Here Siebenkees, stormed at from fresh points of the com- 
 pass, had to beg for a moment to think — for tliore were now 
 three souls at stake — but he had scarcely laK.u one or two 
 hasty steps across the room, when he stood firm again, and 
 said to the Count, and to himself, " Yes, I shall do what is 
 right." Then he begged the Count to give his word of 
 honour that he would keep inviolate a secret which he 
 would confide to him, and which neither related to, nor 
 would injure, himself or his daughter in the slightest 
 degree. " In that case why should I not ? " answered 
 the Count, to whom the discovery of a secret was as the 
 clearing away of a thick woodland before a fine view. 
 
 Then Firmian opened his heart, his life, and everything, 
 like a stream let loose and dashing into a new channel, not 
 yet to be measured with a glance. The Count several 
 times detained him by fresh misunderstandings, because 
 he had only preassumed, out of his own imagination, a love 
 on Nathalie's part for the real Leibgeber, and had never 
 heard from any one of her real love for Siebenkses. 
 
 And now the astonished Count, in his turn, astonished 
 the Advocate ; and, of all the many faces which in such a 
 case he might have put on — faces offended, angry, startled, 
 embarrassed, delighted, cold — he only showed the Inspector 
 an exceedingly contented one. It only particularly pleased 
 him, he said, that he had observed so many little matters 
 
552 JEAN PAUL PEIEDEIOH KICHTEB. [bOOK IV. 
 
 which rather vexed him, and that in certain points he had 
 not thought over-highly of Leihgeher ; but what delighted 
 him most was his good fortune at possessing, in this manner, 
 a dovhle Leibgeber, and the knowledge that the absent one 
 was not sorrowing for a dead friend. 
 
 Let no one be surprised at the Count's maintaining his 
 good-humour and serenity who has seen a bright order- 
 star sparkle on an aged, and extinguished, breast. When 
 our old man of the world beheld the little shuttle of this 
 chain of friends flying to and fro between love and sacrifice 
 on either side ; when he held in his hand the bright 
 Eaphael-tapestry of friendship which it wove, and looked 
 at it closely, there came to him the enjoyment of something 
 new, for the first time for many years. So that, up to this 
 point, he. had been sitting in his front box before a living 
 pomic-historical drama, of which he himself unravelled the 
 plot, and which could be performed all over again in his 
 head at any given moment. Moreover, his Inspector had 
 become a new being for him, full of fresh entertainment, 
 inasmuch as he had gone off the stage, changed his dress 
 and re-entered as the pseudo - deceased Siebenkass ; and 
 could, in the future, tell him as much as he pleased of the 
 narrator. In this way both the friends had become flat- 
 teringly-precious to him, by reason of the dependent interest 
 in him with which they had. interwoven the bond which 
 bound their souls. 
 
 He who has tasted the bliss of sticking to the truth can 
 understand the new delight with which Siebenk«s could 
 now pour himself out unrestrained concerning everything 
 — himself and Henry and Nathalie — inasmuch as it wae 
 not till now that he felt the full weight of the burden he 
 had got relieved of — that of working the light, jest-falsehood 
 of a moment into a yearly comedy, in 365 acts. With what 
 ease he explained to the Count that, before Nathalie's 
 arrival (whom he could neither undeceive, nor go on 
 deceiving), he must fly, and that straight to Kuhschnappel. 
 As the Count listened, he told him all the reasons urging 
 him to go ; longing to see his tombstone, and unhallowed 
 grave, so as to do penitence and expiation ; longing to see 
 Lenette, unseen, from afar, perhaps her child near ; longing 
 to hear from eye-witnesses a minute account of her happy 
 
CHAP. XXV.J FLOWER, FKUIT, AUD THORN PIECES. 553 
 
 married life with Stiefel (for Stiefel's letter had wafted the 
 flower ashes of bj'gone days into his eyes, and opened the 
 leaves of the sleeping-flower of his conjugal love) ; longing 
 to wander, romantically (erect now,- and with his burden 
 off), about the scenes of his. old oppressed life ; longing to 
 hear, in the market-town, something of his Leibgeber, who 
 had been there so recently ; longing to celebrate August, 
 the month of his death, in solitude — the month when it 
 had been with him as with the vino, whose leaves are taken 
 off in August, that the sun may shine moz'e warmly on the 
 grapes. 
 
 In three words, for why give many reasons — since when 
 once there is a will, there can never be any lack of reasons 
 — he set off. 
 
 CHAPTEE XXV., AND LAST. 
 
 THE JODKNEY — THE CHTJECHYAKD — THE SPECmE — THE END OF 
 THE TROUBLE, AND OF THE BOOK. 
 
 I SEE more clearly every day that I and the other 999,999,999 
 human beings,* are nothing but so much skin-and-bone 
 stuffed (like cooked chickens), full of a mass of incon- 
 gruities, contradictions, inconsistencies, irremediable in- 
 STifBciencies, and resolves, of which every one has its / 
 antagonist muscle (muse, antagonista). We do not contra- 
 dict other people half as often as ourselves. This last 
 Chapter is a fresh proof of it. Up to this point, the reader 
 and I have been labouring together with the sole object of 
 finishing this Book, and now that we see the shore, and 
 have all but reached it, we are both sorry for it. I shall, 
 at all events, be doing something — the most that I can — if 
 I conceal, and hide away (so to speak) the end of it, as < 
 we do the end of a garden, and say several things which 
 will help to lengthen out the work a little. 
 
 The Inspector sprang out into the open country, among 
 the corn-ears, fortified with a muscular, full breast — the 
 
 • There are one thousand millions of ua crawling on this sphere. 
 
55i JEAN PAUL FEIEDRICH BICHTEE. [bOOK. IV. 
 
 Alp of silence and deception no longer weighed upon him 
 as it had done. The avalanche which had overwhelmed 
 his life had melted to a third of its original size under the 
 sun of his present fair fortune. His electric Leyden-jar 
 coating with a better income, and even the fact of his 
 having a great deal more to do, had charged him with fire 
 and courage. His appointment was a mountain permeated 
 by so many veins of silver and gold, that even in this first 
 year of it he had found he was enabled to send sundry 
 anonymous contributions to the Prussian Widows' Fund, so 
 as to make amends for a good half of his fraud upon it, 
 and see his way to finally clearing it off altogether. I 
 should not lay this act of duty before the public gaze 
 were it not that Kritter, in Gottingen — who reckons that 
 this fund will be exhausted in the year 1804 — or even 
 calculators more moderate in their results, who think its 
 extreme unction will be received in 1825, might take 
 occasion, from these Mower-pieces of mine, to lay its 
 death wholly at the Inspector's door. If this -should prove 
 to be the case, I should very deeply regret having alluded 
 to the subject, in the remotest manner, in my Mower- 
 pieces. 
 
 He did not take his way by Hof or Bayreuth, or any of the 
 Did romantic journey-roads. He dreaded lest the hand of 
 Fate (which sows behind the clouds) might bring his phan- 
 tom-body before Nathalie's eyes. And yet he hoped a little 
 that this said hand might bring him just the least bit in 
 contact with his Leibgeber, since Jie had been so recently 
 cruising in these waters. As a matter of course, he had 
 embodied himself, en route, in the said Leibgeber's shirt, 
 iacket, and complete exterior — the same which he had 
 swopped with him in the inn at Gefrees — and this costume 
 was a mirror which continually showed him the absent 
 one's image. A " Saufinder," like Leibgeber's, who lifted 
 his head up to him in a forest-cottage, sent a throb of joy 
 through his heart ; but the dog's nose knew him as little 
 as did the dog's master. 
 
 And yet, the nearer he drew to the hills and woods, 
 behind whose Chinese churchyard-wall stood his two 
 empty houses — his grave and his old lodging — the tighter 
 did Anxiety draw her drag-net about his heart. It was 
 
CHAP. XXV.] FLOWER, FEUIT, AND THOKN PIE ES. 555 
 
 not the fear of being recognised ; this, hy reason of his 
 resemblance to Leibgeher (particularly in his present 
 dress), was an impossibility Nay, people would sooner 
 have taken him for his own wraith and Prophet Samuel 
 than for Siebenkses still in the body. But, besides love 
 and anticipation, there was a something which made him 
 anxious — a something which once hemmed in and op- 
 pressed myself when I came back among the Herculaneaa 
 antiquities of my own childhood. There clasped them- 
 selves once more around my breast the iron bands and 
 rings which had crushed it in my childhood — a time when 
 the little human creature is still tremblingly helpless and 
 comfortless in presence of the sorrows and sufferings of 
 life and death — when we stand between the footstool we 
 have cast away, the handcuffs and ankle-chains which we 
 have burst asunder, and the great sighing and singing 
 tree of philosophy which is to guide us to the free, open 
 battle-arena and coronation oitj' of this earth. In every 
 thicket round which Firmian had wandered in his poverty- 
 stricken, miserable winter-autumn, he saw the cast-off 
 skins of the snakes sticking, which in former days had 
 twined themselves about his feet. Eemembrance (that 
 after-winter of his hard, cruel days) fell into this lovelier 
 time of his life, and the combination of these dissimilar 
 feelings — the clasp of the old fetters, and the breeze of 
 freedom of the present — generated a third sensation, 
 which was bitter-sweet, as well as anxious and uneasy. 
 
 When it was twilight, he walked slowly and observantly 
 through the streets, which were strewn with scattered 
 ears of corn. Every child he met going home with the 
 supper-beer, every familiar dog, and every well-remem- 
 bered cling of a bell, was full of fossil-impressions of joy- 
 roses and passion-flowers, the originals of which were all 
 fallen to dust. As he passed the house where he used tc 
 live, he heard two stocking-looms clattering and rattling 
 there. 
 
 He took up his quarters in the Lizard Inn, which cannot 
 have been the grandest hotel in the town, inasmuch as the 
 Advocate ate his beef on a pewter-platter, which (to judge 
 by the marks and stigmata of a facsimile of his own knife 
 which it bore), seemed to have once been enrolled as a 
 
556 JEAN PAUL FKIEDBICHEICHTER. ^^BOOK IV. 
 
 soldier of his own pawned-plate-militia regiment. How- 
 ever, the inn had this advantage — that Pirmian could 
 occupy the little room, number seven, on the third story, 
 and there establish a star-observatory, or mast-h£ad crow's- 
 nest, which commanded Stiefel's study just opposite, at a 
 somewhat lower elevation. But his Lenette never came 
 
 \ to the window. Ah ! if he had seen her, he would have 
 
 ' knelt on the floor for sheer sorrow. Not till it was quite 
 dark did he see his old friend Stiefel, who came and held 
 a printed sheet — ^probably a proof of the ' German Pro- 
 gramme Advertiser ' — against the red western sky, ifebeing 
 too dark to see it inside. He was surprised to see the 
 Schulrath look so worn and bowed— and he had a crape on 
 
 I his arm too. " Can my Lenette's poor baby be dead ?" he 
 thought. 
 
 When it was quite late he crept, all trembling, to that 
 garden, whence we do not all return, and which is bounded 
 by the hanging Eden-Garden of the second life. In the 
 churchyard he was safe from the approach of spectators, 
 thanks to the ghost-stories by means of which Leibgeber 
 had forced his inheritance out of his guardian's clutches. 
 On his way to his own vacant, subterranean bed, he passed 
 by the grave on which (while it was black, it was grass- 
 grown now) he had placed the flower-garland which he 
 had meant to give Lenette a pleasant surprise with, though 
 it did only cause her an unexpected sorrow. At last he 
 came to the bed-curtains of that grave-siesta, his own 
 tombstone, and he read the inscription with a cold 
 shudder. " Suppose this stone trap-door were lying upon 
 your face," he said to himself, "building you in from the 
 wide heavens!" — and he thought what clouds, what cold- 
 ness, and night, reign around the two poles of life, as 
 about the poles of our earth — about the beginning and the 
 end of man. He considered it a very wicked thing to 
 have aped the last hour — the crape-streamer of a long, 
 dark cloud was over the moon, his heart was tender and 
 anxious ; when suddenly a something with colour in it, 
 
 ' near his grave, seized his attention, and caused a revulsion 
 in his soul. 
 
 For there, close beside it, was a fresh grave, quite recently 
 covered in, surrounded by a painted wooden-frame, not 
 
CHAP. XXV.] FLOWER, FKUIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 557 
 
 Tinlike a bedstead. And upon these painted boards Firmian 
 (as long as his streaming eyes allowed him) read what 
 follows : — 
 
 " Here reposes in God, "Wendeline Lenette Stiefel, born 
 Engelkraut of Augspurg. Her first husband was the 
 lamented Poor's Advocate, F. St. Siebenkees. On the 
 20th of October, 1786, she entered, for the second time, 
 into holy matrimony with the Schulrath Stiefel, of this 
 place, and after three-quarters of a year of a peaceful 
 union with him, she fell asleep in childbed, on the 22nd of 
 July, 1787, and lies here, with her little still-born daughter, 
 awaiting a joyful resurrection." 
 
 " Oh ! poor creature, poor creature ! " More he could 
 not tMnh. Now — now that her day of life was better and 
 warmer, the earth must swallow her, and she take nothing 
 with her but a hand roughened by labour, a face furrowed 
 with the death-bed sickness, and a contented, but empty 
 heart, which, hemmed down among the hollow-ways and 
 mine-shafts of this world, had seen scarcely any stars or 
 flowery meadows. Her troubles had gradually clouded 
 over her life so thickly and darkly, that no picturing 
 fancy could brighten and purify them by the oolour-play 
 of poesj', just as no rainbow is possible when the whole 
 sky is black with rain. " Why did I vex you so often, 
 and pain you, even by my death, and be so unforgiving to 
 all your little innocent crotchets?" he said, weeping bit- 
 terly. An earth-worm came twining out of the grave, 
 and he threw it forcibly away, as though it had come 
 straight from the beloved cold heart ; although that which 
 satiates this creature is what satiates us also at last — 
 Eakth. He thought of the child (mouldering to dust) 
 which laid its thin, withered arms about his soul, as if it 
 had been his own, and to which Death had given as much 
 as a God gave to Endymion— sleep, eternal youth, and 
 immortality. At length he tottered away from this place 
 of mourning with his heart wearied, not lightened, by 
 his tears. 
 
 A^'hen he went back to the inn, a woman with a harp 
 was singing in the public room (a boy accompanying her 
 on a flute) a song, of which the ritournelle was, " dead is 
 dead, and gone is gone." It was the same woman who 
 
558 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH KICHTEK. [bOOK IV. 
 
 Had been playing and singing on the New Year's eve 
 wlien his Lenette, now departed and at peace, had buried 
 her face in the handkerchief, weeping and desolate. Oh ! 
 the burning arrows of these music-tones went hissing 
 through his heart — the poor soul had no. shield. " I tor- 
 tured her terribly in these days " (he went on constantly 
 Baying). " Sow she sighed ! How she kept silence ! Ah ! 
 if you could but see me now from on high, now that you 
 are happier ! If you cotdd but behold this bleeding soul of 
 mine — not that you should forgive me, no, only that I 
 might have the consolation of suffering something for your 
 sake ! Oh ! how different would I be to yon now !" 
 
 And this is what we all say when we bury some one 
 whom we have tortured ; but on that very same evening of 
 mourning we go and dart the javelin deep into some other 
 breast which is still warm. Oh ! weaklings that we are, 
 strong only in resolves ! If that form, now resolved into 
 ils elements, whose mouldering wounds (which we our- 
 selves inflicted) we expiate with tears of penitence and 
 warm resolves to do better, were to come back to us to-day, 
 new-created, and in the brightest bloom of youth, it would 
 be but for the first week that we should clasp the new- 
 found soul, more fondly loved than ever, to our hearts ; 
 and then we should apply the old martyrdom instmments 
 to it again, just as of old. That we should do this, even 
 to our beloved dead, I deduce from the fact (to say nothing 
 of our rude unkindness to the living) that, in our dreams, 
 when those whom we have lost revisit us again, we act 
 over again everything which we now repent. I do not 
 say this to deprive any mourner of the consolation of 
 repentance, or of the thought that his love for the lost one 
 is purer and fonder than before, but to lessen the pride 
 which may be grounded upon the repentance and the class 
 of feelings. 
 
 Later in the night, when Firmian saw the face (gnawed 
 and sunken with sorrow) of his old friend (who had now 
 so little left to him), looking up to heaven, as if seeking 
 there among the stars his friend of whom he was be- 
 reaved, sorrow pressed the last tear from his anguished 
 heart, and in the madness of grief he cast the blame upon 
 himself of his friend's sorrow ; just as if the latter had not 
 
CHAP. XXV.] FLOWER, FRUIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 559 
 
 a great deal to thank Mm for in th.e first instance, before 
 setting about pardoning him. 
 
 He awoke in all the exhaustion of sorrow, i.e. in that 
 bled-away condition of the feelings which at last resolves 
 itself into a sweet melting-away and longing for death. J 
 For he had lost everything — even what was not buried. 
 He dared not go to the Schulrath for fear of being recog- 
 nised, or, at the very lowest, staking upon a most dan- 
 gerous chance the peace of mind of that most innocent 
 creature, who would never be able to reconcile it to either 
 his conscience or his sense of honour, that he had married 
 a woman whose husband was still alive. 
 
 But he could go and see Meerbitzer, the hairdresser, with 
 less danger of discovering himself, and could carry away 
 from him a great dowry of news. Moreover, the sickle of 
 Death had cut through all his other chains and knots, 
 together with his bonds of love. He would be doing nc 
 injury to any one but himself if he took off his mask of 
 death, and showed himself unmouldered to other people, 
 nay, even to the sorrowing Nathalie ; particularly as on 
 very beautiful evenings, and whenever he did any good 
 action, his conscience claimed the arrear-interest of the 
 unpaid debt of truth, refusing to grant any further letters 
 of respite. Also his soul swore, as a God swears to his 
 own self, that he would only stay there this one day, and 
 then never come back. 
 
 The Friseur knew in a moment, from the lameness, that 
 he could be nobody but the Vaduz Inspector, Leibgeber. 
 Like posterity, he decked his own lodger, Sicbenkses, 
 with the richest of rosemary-garlands, and declared that 
 these ragamuffins of stocking-weavers whom he had got 
 upstairs now were not to be spoken of in the same day 
 with poor lamented Mr. Siebenkees. The whole house 
 creaked when they rattled and stamped in their upstairs- 
 room. He then called attention to the circumstance that 
 the departed had taken his wife away to him within the 
 space of a year and day ; and dwelt on the fact that she 
 had never forgotten the Meerbitzer's house, but had often 
 looked in of an evening in her widow's weeds (which she 
 had been buried in according to her desire), and spoken 
 with them about all her various vicissitudes, and about 
 
560 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH EICHTEH. [bOOK IT. 
 
 her new life. " They lived together just like two children," 
 the hairdresser said, " Stiefel and she." This conversa- 
 tion, the house, and his old rooms, so noisy now, wero all 
 so many waste places of his ruined Jerusalem. A stocking- 
 loom now stood where his writing-table used to be, and so 
 on. All his questions about the past were so many con- 
 flagration-relics, collected for the fresh building of his 
 burnt-down pleasure - chateaux from out their Phoenix 
 ashes. Hope is the morning Aurora of joy, and memory its 
 red evening sky; but the latter is terribly apt to drop 
 down in grey dew or rain, with no colour left in it. The 
 blue day, which the red sky gives promise of, does, indeed, 
 break in brightness; but it is in another world, where 
 theie is another sun. Meerbitzer unknowingly cleft, deep 
 and wide, the split into which he grafted the sundered 
 flower-twigs of the bygone days on to Firmian's heart; 
 and when, finally, his wife related how, when Lenette had 
 taken the Communion of the Sick, she said to the evening 
 preacher, " I shall go to my Firmian when I am dead, shall 
 1 not?" Firmian averted his breast from this blind dagger- 
 thrust, and hurried out into the open air, that he might 
 not encounter any one to whom he should be constrained 
 to lie. 
 
 Yet he could not but long for some human creature, 
 even were one to be found nowhere else but beneath his 
 lowliest roof of all — in the churchyard. The electrically- 
 charged atmosphere of the evening brooded and hatched 
 melancholy longings of every kind ; the sky was over- 
 spread with scattered unripe fragments of a thunder-cloud, 
 and in the west horizon a muttering storm had begun, 
 scattering its lighted pitch-rings and full-charged clouds 
 down upon unknown lands. He went home ; lut as he 
 passed by the tall railings of Blaise's garden, he fancied 
 he saw a figure like Nathalie, dressed in black, glide into 
 the arbour. And then, for the first time, he turned his 
 mind to something which Meerbitzer had said about a 
 lady in mourning, who had come a few days before, and 
 wished to be shown all over the house, lingering par- 
 ticularly in Siebenkaes's old rooms, and maldng a great 
 many inquiries. That she should have come out of her 
 road on her way to Vaduz was by no means unlikely; 
 
CHAF. XXV.J FLOWER, FRUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 561 
 
 indeed, it was very consistent with her romantic turn of 
 mind, particularly as she had never seen SiebenkEea's forlner 
 home, and the Inspector had not answered her letter- — as 
 Bosa was married, and Blaise reconciled to her (since 
 he had seen the ghost) — and the month of Firmian's death 
 would naturally suggest to her a visit to his last resting- 
 place. 
 
 So that her friend could not but dwell all this evening 
 with feelings of painful fondness upon her memory — the 
 one unclouded' star which beamed on him from the over- 
 ca,st heaven of his bygone days. It was deep in the 
 gloaming now, a cooler air was stirring. A storm had 
 spent its force in other regions, and there remained only 
 some broken, lurid clouds, piled in the sky like glow- 
 ing, half-burned firebrands. He betook himself, for a last 
 time, to the place where death had planted the red carna- 
 tion, with its little buds snapped so untimely from its stem. 
 But within his soul, as without him, the air breathed less 
 sultrily now, and' fresher; tears had blunted the sharp 
 edge of the first bitterness of his sorrow. He felt, with 
 far more of gentleness, that the earth is only our car- 
 penter's YARD, not our BUiLDiNG-GEOUND. In the East, 
 where the stars were rising, a long blue streak shone 
 above the sunken thunder-clouds. The moon (light-magnet 
 of the sky) was lying, like a fount of light, upon the foil 
 of a cleft cloud, and the wide vaporous veil was melting 
 motionlessly away. 
 
 When Firmian, approaching the beloved grave, raised 
 up his downcast head, he saw a dark form resting there. 
 He stopped short, and gazed more piercingly. The form 
 was a woman's. Her face, frozen into the ice of death, 
 was fixed on him. As he drew nearer, he saw his dearest 
 Nathalie leaning overpowered against the painted railing 
 of the grave. The autumnal breath of death had tinted 
 her lips and cheeks with white ; her wide eyes were sight- 
 less, and nothing but the tear-drops which hung on her 
 lashes gave proof that she was in life, and had taken him 
 for the apparition of which she had heard so much. In the 
 excess of her romantic sorrow at his grave she had longed, 
 in the strength and loneliness of her heart, that his spirit 
 might appear to her ; and when she saw him approaching, 
 
 II. 2 
 
562 JEAN PA nil PRIEDRICH BTCHTEK. ' [bOOK TV. 
 
 she thought Heaven had granted her prayer, And then 
 the iron hand of chill terror turned this red rose to a 
 white one. But ah ! her friend was the more wretched 
 of the two. His tender, unshielded heart was crushed 
 motionless between the impact of two worlds which rushed 
 crashing together. In tones of utter distress he cried out, 
 "Nathalie! Nathalie!" Her lips quivered spasmodicaUy, 
 and a breath of life gave back a shade of brightness tn 
 her glance ; but the spirit was still there before her, and 
 she closed her eyes again, and said, witb a shudder, " Oh 
 God!" It was in vain that his voice called her back to 
 life ; when she looked up at the apparition her heart failed 
 her again, and she could only cry " Oh God ! " Firmian 
 seizing her hand, cried, " Angel of heaven, I am not dead ! 
 only look at me ! Nathalie, don't you know me ? Oh I 
 merciful God, don't punish me so terribly, don't let me he 
 the cause of her death ! " At length she slowly lifted her 
 heavy eyelids, and saw her old friend trembling beside 
 her, with tears of anxiety and terror. His tears were 
 happier, but more abundant, and he smiled sorrowfully 
 upon her as she still kept her eyes open, and said, " Na- 
 thalie, I am still upon this earth, in very truth, and suffer 
 as you do yourself; don't you see how I tremble on your 
 account? Take my warm, living hand. Are you still 
 afraid ?" " No," she answered faintly ; but she still looked 
 at him in an awe-stricken fashion, as at a super- earthly 
 being, and had not courage to ask for an explanation of 
 the riddle. He helped her to rise (gently weeping), and 
 said, " But, dear innocent one, come away from this place 
 of sorrow, where so many tears have been shed already. 
 For your heart mine has no secrets now. Ah ! I can tell 
 you everything, and I will tell you everything." He led 
 her out, above the quiet dead, through the back gate of 
 the churchyard. She leaned on his arm heavily and 
 languidly, shuddering again often as they climbed the 
 little height, and only the tears which joy, relief from 
 terror, grief, and exhaustion combined, had brought to her 
 eyes, fell like varm balsam upon her chilled and wounded 
 heart. 
 
 When, they reached the top of the height she sat down 
 to rest, and the black night-woods, railed round by white 
 
CHAP. XXV. J PLOWEE, FRUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 563 
 
 harvests, and cut across by the moon's silent sea of light, 
 lay before them. Nature had drawn out the " pianissimo 
 lute " organ-stop of midnight, and by Nathalie's side stood 
 one of her beloved dead, new-risen from the grave. He 
 told her now all about Leibgeber's entreaties; the short 
 story of his mock-death ; his residence with the Co'int ; 
 all the longings and tears of his long solitude ; his firm 
 determination rather to fly from her than to deceive or 
 wound her beloved heart, either by speech or in writing ; 
 and the disclosures he had made to her friend's father. 
 She sobbed at the account of his last moments and parting 
 from Lenette, as if it had all been real. -She thought on 
 many things as she merely said, "Ahl it was only for 
 other people's happiness that you sacrificed yourself. But 
 you will be able to have done with all this deception now, 
 and to make amends for it, will you not?" "I shall," 
 he said, " to the very utmost of my power ; and my heart 
 and my conscience shaU be free and clear once more. 
 Have I not even kept the vow I made to you — that I 
 should not see you again till after my death?" She smiled 
 gently. 
 
 They both sunk into a dreamy and blissful silence. At 
 last, seeing her lay a mourning-cloak butterfly * (disabled 
 by the night-dew) down upon her lap, the fact that she 
 ■was in mourning herself struck him for the first time, and 
 he hastily asked, " Tou are not in mourning for any one, 
 are you ?" Alas ! she had put it on for Aim. " Not now," 
 Nathalie answered, and, looking at the butterfly, she 
 said pityingly, " a few cbropg and a little chilliness have 
 henumbed the poor thing." Her friend reflected how 
 easily Fate might have punished Ms temerity by benumbing 
 the even more beautiful, black-attired creature by his side, 
 who had, moreover, had her full share already of shivering 
 in the night-frosts of life and the night-dew of tears. But 
 he could not answer her for love and pain. 
 
 They kept silence now, reading each other's thoughts, 
 lost, half in their hearts, half in the grandeur of night. 
 The wide aether had absorbed all the clouds (only those of 
 the sky, alas !) ; Luna bent down, with her saintly halo, 
 like a glorified Madonna, from the tranquil blue, to greet 
 • Vanessa Antiopa gets this name in Germany. — Trans. 
 
564 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH EIOHTEE, [BOOK IV, 
 
 her pale sister of the earth. The voice of the stream was 
 heard, as it flowed on its course unseen, hidden by a light 
 mist — like the stream of time, hidden from sight by the 
 haze of countries and nations. Behind them the night- 
 breeze had laid itself to rest upon a swelling, rushing bed 
 of com, bestreaked with blue corn-flowers ; and before 
 them lay the reaped harvest of the world to come — 
 precious stones (as it were) in their cofiSn-settings, cold and 
 heavy in death.* The pious and humble ones (forming an 
 antithesis to the sunflower and the mote in the sunbeam) 
 turned as moon-flowers to the moon, and played as moon- 
 beam-motes in her cool rays, feeling that there is nothing 
 under the starry sky so great as hope. 
 
 Nathalie leant on Firmian's hand, that he might help 
 her to rise, and said, " I feel quite able to go home now." 
 He kept hold of her hand, but did not rise nor speak. He 
 was gazing at the dry, prickly stalk of the old rose-twig 
 which she had given him. Unwittingly, and without 
 feeling what he was doing, he pressed the thorns into his 
 fingers. His laden bosom heaved with deeper, warmer 
 sighs; burning tears stood in his eyes, and the moon's 
 light trembled before them like a shower of falling light. 
 A whole universe lay upon his soul and upon his tongue, 
 and kept both motionless. 
 
 " Firmian," said Nathalie, "what would you have?" 
 He bent his fixed eyes widely opened upon her gentle 
 form, and pointed down to his grave in the valley. " My 
 house down there," be answered, " which has been empty 
 so long. For the bed on which we dream this dream of 
 life is terribly hard." 
 
 He lost command of himself, for she wept so terribly — 
 and her face, all heavenly kindness, was so near — and he 
 burst forth, with the bitterest and strongest emotion, " Are 
 not all my loved ones gone, and are not you going too ? 
 Ah ! why has torturing destiny laid the waxen image of 
 an angel upon all our breasts,f and lowered us into the 
 chill life ? Oh ! the soft image melts away, and there 
 is no angel. 1 Yes, ,you have appeared to me, it is true; 
 
 ♦ The purer precious stones are colder and heavier than the less 
 perfect, 
 f Waxen angels used to be put into the grave with the dec><l. 
 
CHAP. XXV.] FLOWEE, FRUIT, AND THOEN PIECES. 565 
 
 liut yow disappear, and time will cnish. to atoms your 
 image on my heart, ay, and my heart with it. For when 
 I have lost you, I shall be alone in earnest. But, fare you 
 well I I shcdl actually die one day, and then I shall appear 
 to you ; but not as I have done to-night. Ah ! nowheie 
 but in eternity, and then I shall say to you, ' Oh ! Nathalie, 
 I loved you there below with infinite, unending grief and 
 sorrow ; make amends to me here ! ' " She strove to answer, 
 but her voice broke and failed her. She raised her great 
 eyes to the starry sky, but they were full of tears. She 
 tried to rise, but her friend held her, with his hand 
 all thorns and blood, and said, " Can you leave me, 
 Nathalie?" 
 
 She arose here, sublime and grand, bent her head back, 
 looking upward to the sky, rapidly swept away the tears 
 from her eyes ; her soaring soul found words, and, clasping 
 her hands in prayer, she said, " Oh 1 Thou who art all 
 love, and lovest All, he has been lost to me, I have found 
 him again; eternity is here on earth; make Thou him 
 happy through me ! " And her head sank down ou his, 
 tenderly and languidly, and she said, 
 
 " We are going to he always together.'' 
 
 " Oh God ! " stammered Firmian ; " Oh angel ! you 
 are going to be always with me — in this world and the 
 next!" 
 
 " For ever, Firraian 1 " said Nathalie, softly. And our 
 friend's troubles were over and past. 
 
 TUM tiSV. 
 
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