Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces; / or, the Wedded Life, Death, and Marriage of Firmian Stanislaus Siebenkaes, Parish Advocate in the Burgh of Kuhschnappel.

by Jean Paul

I wish Schulrath Stiefel had given a thought or so to the St. Andrew’s shooting-match, and looked out of his window at his Orestes; however, he went on with his reviewing.

Now, when these processional caterpillars had crept together again at the shooting-ground, as upon a leaf—when the eagle hung in his heavenly eyrie, like the crest of the future’s armorial bearings—when the wind instruments, which the troop of “wandering minstrels” had scarce been able to hold firmly to their lips, blared out their loudest now that the band was halted, and as the procession, with martial tramp and rattle of grounded rifles, came with a rush into the empty echoing shooting-house, everybody, strictly speaking, was more or less out of his senses, and mentally intoxicated; and that although the lots were not even drawn, far less any shot fired. Siebenkæs said to himself, “The whole thing is stuff and nonsense, yet see how it has gone to all our heads, and how a mere unbroken faded flower-wreath of pleasant trifles, wound ten times about our hearts, half chokes and darkens them. Our thirsty heart is made of loose, absorptive mould; a warm shower makes it swell, and as it expands it cracks the roots of all the plants that are growing in it.”

Mr. von Blaise, who smiled unceasingly upon my hero, and treated the others with the rudeness becoming authority, ordered the lots to be drawn which were to decide the order in which the competitors were to shoot. The reader cannot expect Chance to stop the wheel of Fortune, thrust in her hand, and, behind her bandage, pull out from among seventy numbers the very first for the advocate; she drew him the twelfth, however. And at length the brave Germans and imperial citizens opened fire upon the Roman eagle. At first they aimed at his crown. The eagerness and zeal of these pretenders were proportioned to the importance of the affair: was there not a royal revenue of six florins attached to this golden penthouse when the bullet brought it down—to say nothing whatever of other crown property, consisting of three pounds of tow and a pewter shaving-dish. The fellows did what they could; but the rifle placed the crown of the eagle, not, alas! on our hero’s head, but upon that of No. 11, his predecessor, the hectic Saxon. He had need of it, poor fellow! seeing that, like a Prince of Wales, he had come into possession of the crown debts sooner than of the crown itself.

At a shooting contest of this kind nothing is better calculated to dissipate everything in the shape of tedium than to have arrangements made for “running shooting” (as it is called) being carried on by those who are waiting their turn at the birdpole. A man who has to wait while sixty-nine other people slowly aim and shoot before his turn comes round, may find a good deal to amuse him if, during that time, he can load and aim at something of a less lofty kind—for instance, a Capuchin general. The “running” or “swing” shooting, as carried out at Kuhschnappel, differs in no respect from that of other places. A piece of canvas is hung up, and floats to and fro; there are painted dishes of edibles upon it, as on a table-cloth, and whoever puts a bullet through one of these paintings obtains the original—just as princes choose their brides from their portraits, before bringing home the brides in person; or as witches stick pins into a man’s image in order to wound the prototype himself. The Kuhschnappelers were, on this occasion, shooting at a portrait on this canvas, which a great many persons considered to represent a Capuchin general. I know that there were some who, basing their opinion chiefly upon the red hat in the portrait, considered it to represent a cardinal, or cardinal-protector, but these have clearly, in the first place, got to settle the point with a third party, which differed from both of those above mentioned, holding that it portrayed the whore of Babylon—that is to say, a European one. From all of which we may form a pretty accurate estimate of the amount of truth contained in another rumour—which I contradicted in the first hour of its existence—namely, that the Augsburg people had taken offence at this effigy-arquebusading, and had written, in consequence, to the attorney-general representing that they felt themselves aggrieved, and that it was an injustice to one religion if, within the bounds of the holy Roman empire, a general of a religious order should be shot to shivers, without a Lutheran superintendent general being also shot to shivers at the same time. I should certainly have heard something further about this, if it had been anything but mere wind. Indeed, I have a shrewd suspicion that the whole story is no more than a false tradition, or garbled version of another story, which a gentleman of rank belonging to Vienna recently lied to me at table. What he said was, that in the more considerable towns of the empire, where the spirit-level of religious toleration has established a beautiful equilibrium between Papists and Lutherans, many had complained, on the part of the Lutherans, of the circumstance that although there were equal numbers of night-watchmen and censors (that is, transcendental night-watchmen), keepers of hotels, and keepers of circulating libraries of each communion, yet there were more Papists hanged than Lutherans; so that it was very clear, whether the Jesuits had to do with it or not, that a high and important post such as the gallows was not filled with the same amount of impartiality as the Council of State, but with a certain bias towards the Catholics. I thought of contradicting the story, in the most distinct terms, in the ‘Literary Gazette’ of December last, but Government declined to pay the expense of the insertion.

However, although those who occupied themselves with the “swing” shooting did only have a Capuchin to aim at, the said swing shooting was every bit as important a business as the shooting at the standing mark. I must point out (in this connection) that there were edible prizes attached to the divers bodily members of this said general of his order, which had their attractions for riflemen of a reflective turn of mind. An entire Bohemian porker was the prize appointed for him who should pierce the heart of the Capuchin pasha—which heart, however, was represented by a spot no bigger than a beauty-patch—so that he who should hit this little mark would have need of all his skill and nerve. The cardinal’s hat was easier of attainment, for which reason it was worth only a couple of jack. The honorarium of the oculist who should succeed in inserting new (leaden) pupils into the cardinal’s eyes consisted of an equivalent number of geese. As he was portrayed in the full fervour of prayer, it was well worth anyone’s while to send a bullet through between his hands, seeing that this would be tantamount to knocking the two fore-quarters out of a cantering, smoked pig. And each of the cardinal’s feet rested upon a fine hind-quarter or ham. I do not hesitate for a moment—whatever the imperial burgh of Kuhschnappel may say to it—to record, with the utmost distinctness, that no portion of the whole lord-protector was more poorly endowed, or had a scantier revenue and salarium allotted to it, than his navel; for there was nothing to be got out of that, with however good a bullet, but a Bologna sausage.

The advocate had failed in his designs upon the crown; but fortune chucked him the cardinal’s hat to make up for it—the cardinal’s hat with two pike inside it. But some puissant necromantic spell of invulnerability turned all his bullets aside from the eagle’s head, and from the general’s too. He would fain have sent one eye, at any rate, out of the face of the harlot of Babylon, but he could not manage that either.

Now the prize-lists—which are correct, seeing that they were made out by the secretary, under the eyes of the president, Herr von Blaise—state with distinctness that the head, the ring in the beak, and the little flag, fell into the hands of numbers 16, 2, and 63.

The sceptre was now being aimed at; and Siebenkæs would have been very very glad, for his dear little wife’s sake (waiting for him now, as she was, with the soup), to have sent that, at least, flying out of the eagle’s talons, and to have fixed it, by way of a bayonet, on to his rifle.

All the numbers who had tried their best to break off this golden oak-branch had shot in vain, except the worst—the most to be dreaded of all—his own predecessor and landlord. He aimed, and shot—and the gilded harpoon quivered. Siebenkæs fired—and the eel-spear came tumbling down.

Messrs. Meyern and Blaise smiled, and uttered congratulations; the blowers of instruments, crooked and straight, blew, in honour of the advent of this new bird-member, a blast both loud and shrill (like the Karlsbad people, when a new bath-guest arrives), looking closely and carefully at their music as they did so, though they had played their little fanfares far oftener than the very night-watchmen. All the infantas—I mean all the children—began a race for the sceptre, but the buffoon dashed among them, and scattered them; and, taking up the sceptre, presented that emblem of sovereignty to the advocate with one hand, holding in the other his own emblem of sovereignty, the whip.