The man stood looking down at himself sadly.
“Daniel, Daniel!” said Ulrik Frederik, smiling. “You didn’t come unscathed from the ‘fiery furnace’ last night. The German brewer must have made too hot a fire for you.”
The cripple began to scramble up the edge of the rampart. Daniel Knopf, because of his stature called Hop-o’-my-Thumb, was a wealthy merchant of some and twenty years, known for his fortune as well as for his sharp tongue and his skill in fencing. He was boon companion with the younger nobility, or at least with a certain group of gallants, le cercle des mourants, consisting chiefly of younger men about the court. Ulrik Frederik was the life and soul of this crowd, which, though convivial rather than intellectual, and notorious rather than beloved, was in fact admired and envied for its very peccadillos.
Half tutor and half mountebank, Daniel moved among these men. He did not walk beside them on the public streets, or in houses of quality, but in the fencing-school, the wine-cellar, and the tavern he was indispensable. No one else could discourse so scientifically on bowling and dog-training or talk with such unction of feints and parrying. No one knew wine as he did. He had worked out profound theories about dicing and love-making, and could speak learnedly and at length on the folly of crossing the domestic stud with the Salzburger horses. To crown all, he knew anecdotes about everybody, and—most impressive of all to the young men—he had decided opinions about everything.
Moreover, he was always ready to humor and serve them, never forgot the line that divided him from the nobility, and was decidedly funny when, in a fit of drunken frolic, they would dress him up in some whimsical guise. He let himself be kicked about and bullied without resenting it, and would often good-naturedly throw himself into the breach to stop a conversation that threatened the peace of the company.
Thus he gained admittance to circles that were to him as the very breath of life. To him, the citizen and cripple, the nobles seemed like demigods. Their cant alone was human speech. Their existence swam in a shimmer of light and a sea of fragrance, while common folk dragged out their lives in drab-colored twilight and stuffy air. He cursed his citizen birth as a far greater calamity than his lameness, and grieved over it, in solitude, with a bitterness and passion that bordered on insanity.
“How now, Daniel,” said Ulrik Frederik, when the little man reached him. “’Twas surely no light mist that clouded your eyes last night, since you’ve run aground here on the rampart, or was the clary at flood tide, since I find you high and dry like Noah’s Ark on Mount Ararat?”
“Prince of the Canaries, you rave if you suppose I was in your company last night!”
“A thousand devils, what’s the matter then?” cried Ulrik Frederik impatiently.