I cannot say that he here turned deadly pale, or fainted, or began to rave. Praise be to every manly soul who has drunk the icy whey of stoicism for only half a spring, and does not fall down paralysed and frozen, like a woman, before the chill spectre of penury. In an age which has had all its strongest sinews cut through except the universal one, money, any diatribe, even the most extravagant, against riches, is nobler and more useful than the most accurately just depreciation of poverty. For pasquinades on gold dirt are agreeable to the rich, reminding them that though their riches may take to themselves wings, true happiness does not depend thereon; while the poor derive from them not bitterer feeling merely, but also the sweeter satisfaction of conquering the same. All that is base in man—thoughts, fancies, what we look on as being examples—all join in one chorus in praise of gold; why should we desire to deprive poverty of her true reserve force, her chevaliers d’honneur, philosophy and beggars’ pride?
The first thing Siebenkæs opened was not his mouth, but the door, and then the pewter cupboard in the kitchen, from which he carefully and with a good deal of gravity took down a bell-shaped tureen and three pewter plates, and put them on a chair. Lenette could no longer stand by in silence; she clasped her hands and said in a faint voice of shame, “Merciful Providence! is it come to selling our dishes?”
“I’m only going to turn them into silver,” he said; “as kings make church bells into dollars, so shall we make our bell-dishes into coin. There’s nothing you need be ashamed about in converting trash of table ware, the coffins of beasts, into currency, when Duke Christian of Brunswick turned a king’s silver coffin into dollars in 1662. Is a plate an apostle, do you think? Great monarchs have taken many an apostle, if he happened to be a silver one, Hugo of St. Caro and others as well, divided them (as it were) into chapters, verses, and legends, sent them to the mint, and then dispatched them off all over the world in that analysed form.”
“Ah! stupid nonsense,” she answered.
Some few readers will probably say “What else was it?” and I ought long ago to have apologized, perhaps, for the style of speech, so incomprehensible to Lenette, which the advocate makes use of.
He justified it satisfactorily to himself by the consideration that his wife always had some DISTANT idea of what he was talking about, even when he made use of the most learned technical expressions, and the farthest-fetched plays upon words, because of its being good practice, and of his liking to hear himself do it. “Women,” he would repeat, “have a distant and dim comprehension of all these things, and therefore don’t waste, in long tedious efforts to discover the precise signification of these unintelligibilities, precious time which might be better employed.” This, I may observe, is not much encouragement for Reinhold’s ‘Lexicon to Jean Paul’s Levana,’ nor for me personally either, in some senses.
“Ah! stuff and nonsense” had been Lenette’s answer. Firmian merely asked her to bring the pewter into the sitting-room, and he would talk the matter over sensibly. But he might as well have set forth his reasons before a woman’s skin stuffed with straw. What she chiefly blamed him for, was that by his contribution to the shooting-club purse he had emptied hers. And thus she herself suggested to him the best answer he could have made. He said, “It was an angel that put it in my head; because on St. Andrew’s Day I shall regain everything that I turn into silver now, and repewterise it immediately. To please you, I shall keep not only the tureen and the plates I get as prizes, but all the rest of the pewter ware, and put it all into your cupboard. I assure you I had made up my mind before to sell all my prizes.”
What was to be done, then? There was no help for it. This banished and expatriated table ware was lowered in the darkness of evening into old Sabel’s basket—and she was celebrated all over the town for transacting this sort of commission agency or transfer business, with as discreet a silence as if she were dealing in stolen gold. “Nobody gets it out of me,” she would say, “whose the things are. The treasurer, who’s dead and gone poor man—you know I sold everything he had in the world for him—he often used to say there was never the equal of me.”
But, my poor dear young couple, I fear this Sabbath[[40]] or “Descent of the Saviour into Hades” is but little likely to help you long, in that antechamber of hell which you’ve got into. The flames are gone from about you to-day, certainly, and a cool sea-breeze is refreshing you, but tomorrow and the day after the old smoke and the old fire will be blazing at your hearts! However, I don’t want to put any restrictions upon your trade in tin. We’re quite right to have a good dinner to-day though we know perfectly well we shall be just every bit as hungry to-morrow again.
So the next morning Siebenkæs begged that he might be allowed to be all the quieter that day because he had been obliged to talk so much the day before. Our dear Lenette, who was a live washing-machine and scouring-mill, and in whose eyes the washing bill and the bill of fare had much of the weight of a confessor’s certificate, would sooner have let go her hold of everything in the world—her husband included—than of the duster and the besom. She thought this was merely his obstinate persistency, whereas it was really her own, in blowing the organ bellows and thundering away upon her pedal reed stops right behind her author’s back during the morning hours, whose mouths had two kinds of gold in them for him, namely gold from the golden age, and ordinary metallic gold. She might have played with a thirty-two feet stop out in the afternoon as long as she liked, but she wasn’t to be got out of her usual daily routine. A woman is the most heterogeneous compound of obstinate will and self-sacrifice that I have ever met with; she would let her head be cut off by the headsman of Paris for her husband’s sake, very likely, but not a single hair of it. And she can deny herself to almost any extent for others’ good, but not one bit for her own. She can forego sleep for three nights running for a sick person, but not one minute of a nap before bed-time, to ensure herself a better night’s sleep in bed. Neither the souls of the blest, nor butterflies, though neither of them possess stomachs, can eat less than a woman going to a ball or to her wedding, or than one cooking for her guests; but if it’s only her doctor and her own health that forbid her some Esau’s mess or other, she eats it that instant. Now men’s sacrifices are all just turned the opposite way.