The Lost Manuscript: A Novel

by Gustav Freytag

"It is so vexatious to find oneself mastered by selfish feelings."

He again went to his work and when Ilse gently opened the door she saw him busy writing. Toward evening, however, when she looked after his lamp and announced the arrival of the Doctor, he was sitting leaning his head on his hand in moody thought. She stroked his hair gently but he scarcely noticed it.

The Doctor did not take the affair so much to heart; but was very angry, both at the secret dealings of the other and at the magnanimity of his friend, and a lively discussion ensued.

"May you never regret this frank action on your part!" exclaimed the Doctor. "The man will coin money from your silver. Believe me, he will play you a trick."

"After all," concluded the Professor thoughtfully, "it is not worth while to excite myself about it. Should he, by any improbable and unforeseen accident, really have come into possession of something new, he has a right to all the materials at hand--both to what I have collected and to my assistance, so far as it is in my power to give it. If he is only exercising his critical acumen on the existing text, all he may be able to accomplish will be insignificant as compared with our childlike expectations."

Thus imperceptibly and harmlessly did this cloud arise on the academical horizon.

A month had passed, and the Professor had often met his colleague. It could not be deemed strange that Struvelius never let the name of Tacitus pass his silent lips; nevertheless, the Professor watched the conduct of his colleague with concern, for he thought he noticed that the other avoided him.

One quiet evening Felix Werner was sitting with Ilse and the Doctor at the tea-table, when Gabriel entered and laid a small pamphlet, wrapped in a common newspaper, before the Professor. The Professor tore off the cover, glanced at the title, and silently handed the pamphlet to the Doctor. The Latin title of the book, translated, was this: "A Fragment of Tacitus; Being a Trace of a Lost Manuscript. Communicated by Dr. Friedobald Struvelius, etc." Without saying a word the friends rose and carried the treatise into the Professor's study. Ilse remained behind, startled. She heard her husband reading the Latin text aloud and perceived that he was compelling himself to master his excitement by slow and firm reading. The story of this fatal writing must not be withheld from the reader.

Older contemporaries of the period in which tobacco was smoked in pipes, know the value of the twisted paper-lighter, an invention which was commonly called a fidibus; they know the normal length and breadth of such a strip of paper which our fathers formerly used to make out of musty old records. Such a strip, certainly not of paper, but cut from a sheet of parchment, had fallen into the hands of the author. But the strip had previously undergone a hard fate. Two hundred years before it had been glued by a bookbinder on the back of a thick volume, to strengthen the binding, and he had for this object covered it thickly with glue. On the removal of the glue there appeared characters of an old monk's writing. The word Amen and some holy names made it certain that what was written had served to promote Christian piety. But under this monk's writing other and larger Latin characters were visible, very faded, indeed almost entirely defaced, from which one could, with some difficulty, distinguish the Roman name Piso. Now, Professor Struvelius had, by perseverance, and by the employment of certain chemicals, made it possible to read this under-writing, and from the form of the characters he saw that it was a work of antiquity. But as the parchment fidibus was only a piece cut from an entire sheet, it naturally did not contain complete sentences, only single words, which fell on the soul of the reader like the lost notes of distant music borne by the wind to the ear: no melody could be made from it. It was that which had attracted the author. He had ascertained and filled in the disjointed words and guessed at the whole of the remaining leaf. By the wonderful application of great learning, he had, from a few shadowy spots of the fidibus, restored the whole page of a parchment writing, as it might have read twelve hundred years ago. It was an astonishing work.

The most distinctly written of the characters on this strip of parchment, though scarcely legible to the common eye, was the name of Pontifex Piso--literally translated. Peas the Bridgemaker. The parchment strip appeared very much concerned about Peas, for the name occurred several times. But the editor had shown from this name, and from fragments of destroyed words, that the strip of parchment was the last remains of a manuscript of Tacitus, and that the words belonged to a lost portion of the Annals; and he had at last proved from the character of the shadowy letters that the strip of parchment did not belong to any extant manuscript of the Roman, but that it was a part of one quite unknown, which had been destroyed.