Days in Vaduz—Nathalie’s Letter—A New Year’s Wish—Wilderness of Destiny and the Heart.
[CHAPTER XXIV.]
News from Kuhschnappel—Woman’s Anticlimax—Opening of the Seventh Seal.
[CHAPTER XXV., AND LAST.]
The Journey—The Churchyard—The Spectre—The End of the Trouble, and of the Book.
PREFACE,
WITH WHICH I WAS OBLIGED TO PUT JACOB OEHRMANN, GENERAL DEALER, TO SLEEP, BECAUSE I WISHED TO NARRATE THE “DOG POST DAYS”[[4]] AND THESE PRESENT “FLOWER-PIECES,” &C., &C., TO HIS DAUGHTER.
On Christmas Eve of 1794, when I came from the publishers of the two works in question, and from Berlin, to the town of Scheerau, I went straight from the mail coach to the house of Mr. Jacob Oehrmann (whose law affairs 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 which had been my fellow-passenger (a “blind” one[[5]]), by the coach. In the shop itself, which was full 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 young 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 by 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, 13½ kreuzers, Zürich 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 envoyés, namely, commercial travellers—to them, I say, it makes little difference whether it be Berlin, Boston, or Byzance, that one happens to arrive from.