58. CYCLE.
Happy Albano! thou wouldst not have remained so, hadst thou, on the birthday of the Minister, heard what he then proposed!
Already, for a considerable time, had Froulay been full of noticeable, stormy signs, and might any moment, one must needs fear, let the thunderbolt fly from him; that is to say, he was gay and mild. Thus, also, in the case of phlegmatic children, does great liveliness threaten an eruption of the chicken-pox. As he was a father and a despot,—(the Greeks had for both only the one word, despot,)—so was it expected of him, as connubial storm-maker,[138] that he would provide the usual storms and foul weather for his family. Connubial storm-material for the mere troubling of marriage can never be wanting, when one considers how little is required even for its dissolution; for instance, among the Jews, merely that the woman scream too loud, burn the dinner, leave her shoes in the place for the man's, &c. Beside all this, there was much in the present case about which there was a good chance to thunder; e. g. Liana, upon whom one might visit the misdemeanor of the brother, because he obstinately stayed away and begged for no grace. One always loves to let his indignation loose upon wife, daughter, and son at once, and would rather be a land-rain than a transient shower; one child can more easily imbitter than sweeten a whole family.
But Froulay still continued the smiling John. Nay, did he not—I have the proofs—carry it so far, that when, on one occasion, his daughter, in taking leave of the Princess, fell upon her neck,—instead of representing to her, with flashing eyes, how one must only accept, not reciprocate, familiarities with superiors, and must take care not to forget one's self precisely then, when they do forget themselves,—and instead of sternly asking whether she had ever seen him, in his warmest love toward the Prince, offend against the Dehors,—instead, I say, of doing this, and hailing and storming the while, did he not merely break out that once into the fair words: "Child, thou art too affectionate toward thy distinguished friend; ask thy mother; she knows, too, what friendly liaisons are"?
Only Liana—although so often deceived by these calms—was full of unutterable hope and joy at the domestic peace, and believed in its permanence, especially as the paternal birthday was so near, that Olympiad and normal period upon which and by which the house reckoned so largely. During the whole year the Minister had been looking out for this day, in order, in the morning, when the congratulations came, not to forget to make believe he had forgotten it, but to be astonished on the subject,—all owing to business, he said; and at evening, when the guests came,—on account of business he never dined, he said, to astonish them. He was alternately the worshipper and image-breaker of etiquette, ministerial and opposition party thereof, as his vanity dictated.
Liana importuned her brother, till he promised to do something to please his father; he composed, for the purpose, a family-piece, in which he introduced the whole confession-night between himself and Albano, only he converted Albano into a sister. Liana gladly studied this part also for the birthday, although she had to deliver the blooming vest.
The Minister, contrary to expectation, accepted the vest, the Captain and his hand-bill for the evening's performance, graciously; for he was wont, on former occasions, like some other fathers, to growl the louder the more his children stroked him. He danced away like a Polack right merrily with his family, and stuck the rod[139] behind the fur. Nothing worse at this moment revolved in his head than the question, where it would be best to open the amateur theatre, whether in the Salon de Lecture or in the Salon des bains domestiques; for the two halls were entirely distinguished from one another, and from the other chambers, by their names.
The day came. Albano, whose invitation Charles had to extort, because the Minister, out of pride, hated his pride, brought with him, unfortunately, in his soul, the tone which Liana had given him the last time to carry home with him. His hope had hitherto lived upon this tone. O blame him not for it! The airy nothing of a sigh bears often a pastoral world or an orcus on its ephemeron's-wing. Everything weighty may, like a rock, be placed on a point, whereupon a child's finger can set it in rotation.
But the tone had died away. Liana knew no other way than that, in the visiting congregation,—of whose moral pneumatophobia,[140] after all, she was not aware in its full extent,—one should hide every religious emotion behind the church fan. Boxes, pit, and farthing gallery were, almost at the usual play-hour, set off and filled out with Gratulantes, all fit to be canons. The German gentleman was made particularly prominent by the rich and insolent ostentation of his circumstances. Of the visiting-company-lane it can, in passing, only be observed, that in it, as in the antiphlogistic system, oxygen[141] played the chief part, which, however, was given out less by the lungs than by the heart.
When the curtain rose, and Roquairol made that night of forgiveness and ecstasy pass by again in a still more glowing form than it had actually had; when this dreamy imitation seemed the first appearance of the actual reality, how hotly and deeply did he burn himself thereby into his friend's soul! (Good Albano! This art of being his own revenant, his own ghost, his mock- and mimic-self, and of counterfeiting the splendid edition of his own life, should have left thee smaller hopes!) The Count must needs, in this most grave society that ever sate around him, break out into an unseemly weeping. And why did Charles put Albano's words, of that memorable night, into the mouth of Liana, so bewitchingly interesting in her emotion, and thus make his love, wrought upon by so many charms, grow even to anguish?
The German gentleman himself gave to Liana, that white swan, floating, tinged with rosy redness, through the evening glow of Phœbus, several loud, and to the Count annoying signs of approbation. The Minister was chiefly glad that all this happened in his honor, and that the point of the last act was still going to throw a very special epigrammatic laurel-wreath on his crown.
He got the wreath. The pair of children were very favorably criticised by the Erlangen literary gazette[142] of spectators, and by the belles-lettres review, and covered over with crowns,—with noble martyrs' crowns. The German gentleman had and used the public right of ushering in the Coronation, and the Coronation-car. Base man! why should thy beetle's-eyes be permitted to creep gnawingly over the holy roses which emotion and sisterly love plants on Liana's cheeks? But how much gayer still was the old gentleman,—so much so that he flirted with the oldest ladies,—when he saw the knight bring out magnificently into full daylight his interest in Liana, not fantastically or sentimentally, but by still and steady advances and marked attention, by jokes and glances and sly addresses, and at last by something decisive! That is to say, the German gentleman drew the old man into a cabinet, and both came back out of it vehemently animated.
The lovely Liana, withdrawn into her own heart, fled from the upas-tree of the laurel away to her comforting mother. Liana had preserved, in the midst of the stormy mill-races of daily assemblées, a low voice and a delicate ear, and the tumult had driven her inward, and left her almost shy.
The fair soul seldom guessed anything, except a fair soul: she so easily divined her like; with such difficulty her counterpart. Bouverot's advances seemed to her the usual forward and side steps of manly courtesy; and his knightly celibacy did not allow her entirely to understand him. Do not the lilies of innocence bloom earlier than the roses of shame, as the purple color, in the beginning, only dyes pale, and not till afterward puts on the red glow, when it lies before the sun? She kept herself this evening near her mother, because she perceived in her an unwonted seriousness. When Froulay had taken off from his head the birthday garland, wherein were planted more thorns and stalks than flowers,—when he had taken off the crown of thorns, and stood in his night-cap amidst his family,—he addressed himself to the business whereupon he had been thinking all the evening. "My little dove," said he to his daughter, borrowing a good expression from the Bastile,[143]—"my little dove, leave me and Guillemette alone." He now laid bare his upper teeth by a characteristic grin, and said he had, as he hoped, something agreeable to communicate to her. "You know," he continued, "what I owe to the German gentleman." He meant not thanks, but money and consideration.
We love to dwell upon it as a matter of great praise in the family of the Quintii,[144] that they never possessed gold: I adduce—without arraying a thousand other families of whom the same is to be sworn—only Froulay's. Certain families, like antimony, have no chemical affinity whatever with that metal, however much they might wish it; certainly Froulay wished it: he looked very much to his interest (to nothing else), he willingly (although only in cases of collision) set conscience and honor aside; but he got no further than to great outlays and great projects, simply because he sought money, not as the end and aim of his ambition, but only as the means of ambition and enterprise. Even for some pictures which Bouverot had purchased for the Prince in Italy he still owed that individual the purchase-shilling which he had taken out of the treasury. By his bonds as if by circulars, he stood in widely-extended connections. He would gladly have transposed his marriage contract into a bond, and had, with his lady, at least that most intimate community—of goods; for, under present circumstances, divorce and bankruptcy stood in neighborly relations to each other; but, as was said, many men, with the best talons,—like the eagle of the Romish king,[145]—have nothing in them.
He continued: "Now, perhaps, this géne will cease. Have you hitherto made any observations upon him?" She shook her head. "I have," he replied, "for a long time, and such as were really consoling to me,—j'avais le nez bon quant à cela,—he has a real liking for my Liana."
The Minister's lady here could draw no inference, and begged him, with disguised astonishment, to come to the agreeable matter. Comically on his face did the show of friendship wrestle with the expectation that he should be under the necessity immediately of being exasperated. He replied: "Is not this an agreeable matter? The knight means it in earnest. He wished now to be privately espoused to her; after three years he retires from the order, and her fortune is made. Vous êtes, je l'espere, pour cette fois, un peu sur mes interêts, ils sont les vôtres."
Her maternal heart, so suddenly and deeply wounded, wept, and could hardly be concealed. "Herr von Froulay!" said she, when she had composed herself a little; "I do not disguise my astonishment. Such a disparity in years, in tastes, in religion."[146]
"That is the knight's affair, not ours," he replied, refreshed by her angry confusedness, and, like the weather, in his coldness threw only fine, sharp snow, no hail. "As to Liana's heart, I beg you just to sound that." "O, that innocent heart? You are mocking!" "Posito! so much the more gladly will the innocent heart reconcile itself to make her father's fortune, if she is not the greatest egotist. I should never love to constrain an obedient daughter." "N'epuiséz pas ce chapitre; mon cœur est en presse. It will cost her her life, which already hangs by such frail threads." This allusion always struck the fire of wrath from his flint. "Tant mieux," said he; "then it will never go further than an engagement! I had almost said—Sacre! and who is to blame for that? So it fares with me at the hands of the Captain too,—in the beginning my children promise everything, then they turn out nothing. But, madam," he said, swiftly and venomously collecting himself; and, instead of compressing his lips and teeth, merely pinching moderately the auditory organs of a sleeping lap-dog; "you alone indeed know, by your influence upon Liana, how to dress and redress everything. Perhaps she belongs to you by a still prior claim than to me. I am not then compromitted with the knight. The advantages I detail no further." His breast was here already warmed under the vulture-skin of rage.
But the noble lady now indignantly rose, and said: "Herr von Froulay! hitherto I have not spoken of myself. Never will I counsel or countenance or consent to it,—I will do the opposite. Herr von Bouverot is not worthy of my Liana."
The Minister, during this speech, had several times unnecessarily snapped-to the snuffers over the wax candles, and only beheaded the point of the flame; the fixed air of wrath now colored the roses of his lips (as the chemical does botanical ones) blue. "Bon!" he replied, "I travel; you can reflect on the subject,—but I give my word of honor, that I never consent to any other match; and though it were (whereupon he looked at the lady ironically) still more considerable[147] than the one just projected,—either the maiden obeys or she suffers, decidéz! Mais je me fie à l'amour que vous portéz au pere et à la fille; vous nous rendréz tous assêz contens." And then he went forth, not like a tempest, but like a rainbow, which he manufactured out of the eighth color only, namely, the black, and that with his eyebrows.
After some days of resentment with the mother and the daughter, he rode, as Luigi's business-agent, to Haarhaar to see the princely bride. The oppressed mother confided to her oldest and only friend, the Lector, the sad secret. The two had now a pure relation of friendship toward one another, which, in France, in consequence of the higher respect for women, is more common. In the first years of the ministerial forced marriage, which dawned not with morning dew, but with morning frost, perhaps the hawk-moth[148] Cupid fluttered after them; but by and by children drove away this sphinx. The wife is often forgotten when she becomes the mother. She, therefore, with her characteristic cool and clear strength, took all that was ambiguous in her relation to Augusti forever out of the way; and he made her firmness more easy by his own, because he, with more love of honor than of women, grew not more red at any kind of braided-work than at that of a basket,[149] and erroneously believed that a man who receives it, has as much to be ashamed of as a woman who does.
The Lector could foresee that she would also, after her divorce,—which she postponed only for Liana's sake,—remain single, if only for this reason, in order not to deprive her daughter of an allodial estate, Klosterdorf, for the reservation of which she had now for one and twenty years exposed herself to the battering-ram and scythe-chariot and blunderbuss of the old Minister. Whether she was not even silently intending her dear Liana for a man so firm and tender, who differed from her in nothing but in a worldly coolness toward positive religion, is another and more delicate question. Such a reciprocal gift were worthy such a mother and friend, who must know from her heart, that combined feelings of tenderness and honor prepare for a loved soul a surer bliss than the love which genius offers, that alternation of flying heat and flying cold,—that fire which, like the electric, always twice destroys,—in the stroke and in the rebound. The Lector himself started not that question; for he never made rash, unsafe plans; and what one would have been more so than that of such a connection, in his poverty, or with such a father-in-law, in a country where, as in the Electorate of Saxony, a statute, so beneficial (for parents), can countermand even a marriage of many years' standing, which has been concluded without parental consent?
With moist eyes the Minister's lady showed him the new storm-clouds, which had again descended upon her and her Liana. She could build upon his fine eye for the world, upon his dumb lip and upon his ready hand for business. He said, as ever, he had foreseen all this; but proved to her that Bouverot, if only from avarice, would never exchange his knightly cross for the wedding-ring, whatever designs he might cherish with regard to Liana. He gave her to surmise, so far as a tender regard to her sore relations would tolerate, to what degree of readiness for compliance with Bouverot's wishes the very frailty of Liana's life might allure the Minister, in order to harvest it before it had done blooming. For Froulay could much more nimbly swallow demands against honor than injuries done to his vanity, as the victim of hydrophobia can much more easily get down solid morsels than fluids. Yet all this did not sound so immorally hard to the Minister's lady as readers of the middling classes might imagine; I appeal to the more sensible among the higher.
Augusti and the Minister's lady saw that something must certainly be done for Liana during the Minister's absence; and both wonderfully coincided in their project. Liana must go into the country this pleasant season,—she must muster up health for the wars that were in prospect,—she must be put out of the way of the knight's visits, which now the birthday would multiply fourfold,—even the Minister must have nothing to object to the place. And where can this be? Simply under the roof of the Director Wehrfritz, who cannot endure the German gentleman, because he knows his poisonous relation to the Prince. But of course there are first still other mountains to be climbed than that which lies on the way to Blumenbühl.
The reader himself must now get over a low one; and that is a short comico-tragic Extra-leaf upon
The Green-Market of Daughters.
The following is certain: every owner of a very beautiful or very rich daughter keeps, as it were, a Pitt under his roof, which to himself is of no service, and which he must put to its first use after it has long lain idle, by selling it to a Regent.[150] Strictly and commercially speaking, daughters are not an article of trade; for the parental grand adventurers no one can confound with those female dealers in second-hand frippery, and stall-women, whose transit-business one does not love to name; but a stock, with which one gains in a South Sea, or a clod, wherewith one transfers symbolically (scortatione) real estate. "Je ne vends que mes paysages et donne les figures par dessus le marche,"[151] said Claude Lorraine, like a father,—and could easily say it, because he had the figures painted in his landscapes by others;—even so in the purchase or marriage-contract only the knightly seats are supposed, and the bride who resides upon them is thrown into the bargain. Even so, higher up, is a princess merely a blooming twig, which a princely sponsor plucks off and carries home, not for the sake of the fruits, but because a bee-swarm of lands and people has attached itself thereto.
If a father, like our Minister, has not much, then he can pawn his children, as the Egyptians did their parents (namely, the mummies of them), as mortgages and hand-pledges or imperial pawns, which are not redeemed.
At present the mercantile order, which formerly dealt only in foreign products, has got possession of this branch of commerce also; methinks, however, they might find room enough in their lower vaults to be selfish and damned, without going up stairs to the daughter. In Guinea only the nobility can trade; with us they are cut off and debarred from almost all trade, except the small trade in daughters, and the few other things which grow on their own estates; hence is it that they hold so fast to this liberty of trade, and that the noblesse seem here to be a Hanse alliance for this delicate branch of business; so that one may, in some manner, compare the high standing[152] of this class with the higher one (in a literal sense) which marketable people in Rome were obliged to mount[153] in order to be seen.
It is a common objection of young and (so-called) sensitive hearts, that this sort of transaction very much constrains, or in fact crushes love; whereas nothing perhaps makes so good a preparation for it as this very thing. For when the bargain is once concluded and entered by the bookkeeper (the parson) in the ledger, then does the time truly come on when the daughter can consider and provide for her heart, namely, the fair season after marriage, which is universally assumed in France and Italy, and is gradually coming to be in Germany also, as the more suitable time for a female heart to choose freely among the host of men; her state then, like the Venetian, grows out of a commercial into a conquering one. The husband himself, too, is quite as little interrupted afterward as beforehand in his love by this short business transaction; all is, that now—as in Nuremberg every Jew is followed by an old woman—close upon the heels of our bridegroom a young one is seen. Nay, often, the nuptial tradesman conceives an inclination even for the article which he has carried home with him,—which is an uncommon piece of good fortune; and as Moses Mendelssohn, with his bundle of silken wares under his arm, thought out his letters upon the affections, so do better men, amidst their business, meditate love-letters on this branch of trade, and deal with the virgin—as merchants in Messina[154] do with the holy virgin—in Co.; but of course such profitable connections of love with business must always be rare birds, and are little to be counted upon.
The foregoing I wrote for parents who are fond of sporting with children's happiness; I will now out of their and my sport make something serious. I ask you, in the first place, about your right to prescribe for morally free beings their inclinations, or even the show of inclination, and by one act of despotism to stretch the poisonous leaden sceptre over a whole free life. Your ten years more of apprenticeship to life make as little distinction in the reciprocal liberty as talent or its want. Why do you not as well enjoin upon your daughters friendship for life? Why do you not, in the second marriage, exercise the same right? But you have even no right to reject, except in the age of minority, when the child has not yet any right to choose. Or do you demand, upon their leaving the paternal roof, as pay for training them up to freedom, the sacrifice of this very freedom itself? You act as if you had been educators, without having been yourselves educated; whereas you are merely paying off to your children a heavy inherited debt to your parents, which you can never pay back to them; and I know but one unpaid creditor in this respect, the first man, and but one insolvent debtor, the last. Or do you shield yourselves under the barbarously immoral Roman prejudice, which offers children for sale as white negroes of the parents, because the power allowed at an earlier period over the non-moral being slips over, unobserved from the gradualness of its development, into a power over the moral being?
If you may, out of love, force children to their happiness, so may they afterward, quite as well out of gratitude force you to yours. But what is, then, the happiness for which you are to throw away their whole heart, with all its dreams? Chiefly your own; your glory and aggrandizement, your feuds and friendships, are they to quench and buy with the offering of their innermost souls. Dare you own aloud your silent presuppositions in regard to the happiness of a forced marriage; for example, the dispensableness of love in wedlock, the hope of a death, the (perhaps) double infidelity, as well toward the connubial merchant as toward the extra-connubial lover? You must presuppose them sinners,[155] in order not to be yourselves robbers?
Tell me not that marriages of inclination often turn out ill, and forced marriages often well enough, as may be seen in the instance of the Moravians, the old Germans, and Orientals. Name me rather all barbaric times and nations, in which—for both indeed only reckon the man, never the wife—a happy marriage means nothing more than a happy husband. No one stands by near enough to hear and to count a woman's sighs; the unheard pang becomes at last speechless; new wounds weaken the bleeding of the oldest. Further: the ill-luck of fancy-marriages is chargeable upon your very opposition to them, and your war against the married couple. Still further: every forced marriage is, in fact, for the most part, half a marriage of fancy. Finally: the best marriages are in the middling class, where the bond is more apt to be love; and the worst in the higher, where it is more a mercenary motive; and as often as in these classes a prince should choose merely with his heart, he would get a heart, and never lose nor betray it.
Now, then, what sort of a hand is that into which you so often force the fairest, finest, richest, but rebellious one? Commonly, a black, old, withered, greedy fist. For decrepit, rich, or aspiring libertines have too much of the connoisseur, too much satiety and freedom, to steal any other than the most splendid creatures; the less perfect fall into the hands and homes of mere lovers and amateurs. But how base is a man, who, abandoned of his own character, backed merely by the despotic edict of a stranger, paying for his fortune with a stolen one, can now drag away the unprotected soul from the yearning eyes of a weeping love into a long, cold life, and clasp her to his arms as against the edges of frosty swords, and therein so near to his eye see her bleed and grow pale and quiver! The man of honor even gives with a blush, but he takes not with a blush; and the better lion, the beast, spares woman;[156] but these soul-buyers extort from constrained beings at last even the testimony of free-will.
Mother of the poor heart, which thou wilt bless by misfortune, hear me! Suppose thy daughter should harden herself against the misery which is forced upon her, hast thou not reduced her rich dream of life to empty sleep, and taken out of it love's islands of the blest, and all that bloomed thereon; the fair days when one roamed over them, and the perpetual happy retrospect of them when they already lie with their blooming peaks low in the horizon? Mother, if this happy time was ever in thy breast, then snatch it not from thy daughter; and if it was barbarously torn from thee, then think of thy bitter pang, and bequeath it not!
Suppose, further, she makes the kidnapper of her soul happy, reckon now what she might have been to its darling; and whether she does not then deserve anything better than to gratify a jailer, locked in with her forever by one shutting of the prison-door. But it seldom fares so well as this; thou wilt heap a double disaster upon thy soul,—the long agony of thy daughter, and the growing coldness of her husband, who by and by comes to feel and resent refusals. Thou hast cast a shadow over the time when man first needs the morning-sun,—namely, youth. O, sooner make all other seasons of the day of life cloudy; they are all alike, the third and the fourth and fifth decades; only at sunrise let it not rain into life; only this one never returning, irredeemable time darken not!
But how, if thou shouldst be sacrificing not merely joys, relations, a happy marriage, hopes, a whole posterity, to thy plans and commands, but the very being herself[157] whom thou constrainest? Who can justify thee, or dry thy tears, when thy best daughter,—for she is the very one who will be most likely to obey, be dumb and die, as the monks of La Trappe see their cloister burn down, without one of them breaking the vow of silence,[158]—when she, I say, like a fruit half in the sun and half in the shade, blooms outwardly, and inwardly grows cold and pale; when she, dying after her lifeless heart, at last can no longer conceal anything from thee, but for years bears round the paleness and the pangs of decline in the very orient of life; and when thou canst not console her, because thou hast crushed her, and thy conscience cannot suppress the name of infanticide; and when at last the worn-out victim lies there under thy tears, and the wrestling creature, so affrighted and so young, so faint, and yet thirsting for life, forgiving and complaining, with languishing and longing looks, with painfully confused and conflicting emotions, sinks with her blooming limbs into the bottomless flood of death,—O guilty mother on the shore, thou who hast pushed her in, who will comfort thee? But I would call every guiltless one, and show her the bitter dying, and ask her, Shall thy child also perish thus?