And here Siebenkæs, 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 earth, a count to be a demigod, and an emperor as a whole one;—but a single one of the deadly sins committed 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 she heard that a paper escarpment and cheval de frise 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.”[[28]]
“We don’t employ these words, Madame Siebenkæs, if we care to speak grammatically,” said Stiefel; “irregular verbs such as ‘kriechen, trügen, lügen,’ though they are verba anomala, and as such have ‘kroch, log, trog,’ and so on in the imperfect tense, are still always inflected quite regularly in the present by the best German grammarians—although the poets permit themselves a poetical license in such cases, as, I am sorry to say, they do in most others—and therefore we say, if we care to be grammatically correct, ‘lügt, trügt, kriecht,’ &c., at the present day, that is.”
“Don’t find fault with my dear Augspurger’s Lutheran inflections,” said Siebenkæs; “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 would you like me to get for supper? Tell the gentleman that you know I mean no offence, whatever words I use. And I wish you would ask his reverence, Firmian 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 deliberately as follows:—“We have only to look at the case of Leah, who was conducted to Jacob’s tent under the pseudonym of Rachel 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 snuffers from her, saying “it was his duty.” Siebenkæs 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 Dulcinea; 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 and authors than himself. For instance, his own anger he called professional zeal; his pride, the dignity due to his office; his passions, sins of weakness; and on this occasion love appeared to him disguised as mere philanthropy. 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.
“Bayreuth, 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! Siebenkæs, I do adjure you, let me, let me, follow up this idea which has struck me and 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 Puffendorf 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 patrimonium Petri, Pauli, Judæ 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, or rather it did occur to him some centuries ago, when he 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 small a thing it is that I desire! All that I wish I had been the old Adam (in fact, the oldest Adam) for, is 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.