"With pleasure!" said the Evangelist; "this week I have to do cabinet-service, but I can next week."
And it was precisely this week that Victor wanted it to be done.—So many sudden miscarriages confounded him to such a degree, that he, whose careless and innocent heart was always an open letter with flying seal, dissembled now towards his dear, good friend Flamin.—He wanted at least to investigate the maternal mole and its distinctness for himself, He therefore went to him, and found him bent over his writing, and with a glowing work-face. He conjured him to consider that recreation and holidays were indispensable to him, and urged it upon him that he should work, like a compositor, standing. Then he came gradually upon the subject of Flamin's full-blooded chest, and upon the question whether it could bear his exertions without stingings and oppressions. Then he arrived at the point, and proposed that Flamin should, at all events, have a Burgundy-pitch plaster applied as lung-conductor to his shoulder-blades; yes, he would himself do it for him now, and show him how all was to be prepared. He hoped, besides, to draw thereby a curtain around the apple-piece. But he dissembled so wretchedly,—for he always succeeded in his innocent intrigues with maidens, and comic disguises for satirical purposes, while his serious ones always miscarried,—that even Flamin heard him out, and dryly replied, he had already had on such a plaster for two days, and—Matthieu had advised, and himself applied it.
There was a fix.—Sebastian had nothing further left him than, with a singular sangfroid, which, on the St. Luna road, was mixed only with a few stings from the old thorny latelings of his withered Paradise, to go unaccompanied to the Chamberlain Le Baut, to say what was to be said, hardly to peep into the Parsonage, and quietly to trudge off again without a single—hope.
Dear Fortune! better beheaded than scalped,—better one disaster than ten miscarriages; I mean, break man upon thy wheel rather from above than from below upward!—
Victor, to be sure, knew as yet not a word of the turn he should give to the subject, in order to put two such court-emigrants as the Le Bauts, who knew nothing holier than the Latreia towards a prince, the Douleia towards his minister, and the Hyperdouleia towards his w—, out of humor with Clotilda's promotion; but he thought, "I will do what I can."
Clotilda's parents received him with so much civility,—i. e. with so much courtesy of the body, with so much powdered sugar on every feature, with so much sirup of violets on every word,—in short, he found the report which Matthieu had rendered to Flamin of their amiable disposition towards him so well grounded,—that he could have selected no better opportunity than this to dissuade them from the transplanting of their daughter, had they not begun to thank him for having been himself the very transplanter. They had learned or guessed all, and thanked him for his intercession, to which they probably attached more self-interested views than the daughter did. It would have been ridiculous, in Clotilda's presence, to advise her against Flachsenfingen, and dissuade from that for which they thanked him; still, however, he attempted something. He told the Chamberlain "his daughter deserved rather to have a court than to adorn one; nay, that he deserved at most in the whole matter—an excuse, as Clotilda would certainly prefer the society of her parents to the constraint of court; in that case, he would promise to put the index back again with the Prince, and rectify everything without disadvantage." The father took this expression for a strong deprecation of gratitude; the step-mother, for some piece of knavery or other; the daughter, for—words. She said, a little curtly, "I think it was easy to choose between disobedience and absence." For, unbending as she was to her step-mother, she willingly followed the hints of her father, whom, with all his weaknesses, and as the only soul on the earth attached to him, she tenderly loved. Victor, at last, though reluctantly, was forced to give it up; but why does man find it harder to resign himself to the future than to the past?—The coldness of the daughter was naturally not less (but sincerer) than the warmth of the parents.... And this coldness was precisely what refreshed his glowing brain. This cold, indifferent form was wrapped as a veil about the sublime and loving one, as it ever floated before him with that melancholy look which he could not endure. Without the consciousness of anything wrong, satisfied with his obedience to Emanuel's request, he withdrew, with his feelings oppressed by decorum, returning coldness with greater coldness.—He would have been a poor lover, if he had known what he wanted; for otherwise he never could have desired of Clotilda, even in case of her love for him, any extraordinary warmth towards a medicus whom her parents forced upon her (which injures a man even more than ugliness), who so impolitely took himself out of the garden without a birthday carmen, and who pressed her into the seven gilded towers of court-service, despite her reluctance, despite every probability of her future prison-fever.—But for the vacant freehold of his heart this very vexation was wholesome....
If my good reader ever has to take an eternal farewell of a too dear friend, let him take it twice.—The first we all understand, as a matter of course, when he sinks in the intoxication of sorrow, in the hemorrhage of heart and eyes, and when the beloved object burns itself with flames into the tender soul; but then he will never be able to forget the being thus torn from his heart. Therefore he must take a second farewell, which is colder even for the reason that passionate emotions admit no dal segno[[226]] of repetition; nay, (if he will take the wisest course of all,) he must endeavor, after the first tragic leave-taking, to see her in a public place (e. g. at a coronation), where she must appear cold. Her frosty face will then snow over her glowing one in his brain; and my good reader has, undoubtedly, collected together again wits enough to know what he reads in the Dog-Post-Days....
—Upon my word, if Jean Paul does not write industriously, then no one does; it has already struck one, and he took it for a quarter to twelve; my sister will already be folding her hands before the tucked-up smoking pike, which, like the serpent of eternity, has his tail in his mouth, and saying, incessantly, "It is all growing cold!"—"It must be so, after such glowing chapters," say I, "if thou meanest the reader and the author."—Already, while I still sit over the twentieth chapter, the post-dog is frisking round in the chamber with the twenty-first; and yet I will starve myself, unless I can still utter before dinner, like the seven wise men, seven golden sayings:—
1. When one who is stung by a bee or by fate does not keep still, the sting tears out, and is left behind.
2. Miserable earth, which three or four great or bold men can reform and agitate! Thou art a true stage: in the foreground are some fighting players and a few canvas-tents; the background swims with painted tents and soldiers!