What was full as bad was, that Joachime at last, only for the sake of removing his documentary piles of complaints and imperial grievances, allowed him her fingers, without giving him the least reason for it. He could, therefore, show no title of possession, and, in case of need, would have had no one who could protect him therein.
There is, however, a well-grounded rule of right or Brocardicon[[244]] for men: that everything grows firmer with women, when one builds upon it, and that a little stolen favor legitimately belongs to us, so soon as we sue for a greater. This rule of right bases itself upon the fact that maidens always abate with us, as one does to Jews in trade, the half, and give only a couple of fingers when we want the hand. But if one has the fingers, then arises, out of the Institutions, a new title, which adjudicates to us the hand: the hand gives a right to the arm, and the arm to everything that is appended to it, as accessorium. Thus must these things be managed, if right is to remain right. There will, in fact, have to be a little manual written by me, or some other honest man, wherein one shall expound and elucidate to the female sex with the torch of legal learning the modos (or ways) acquirendi (of winning) them. Otherwise many modi may go out of use. Thus, e. g., according to civil law, I am rightful proprietor of a movable thing, if it was stolen thirty years ago (in fact, it should be further back, and I should not be made to suffer for it, that one began the stealing later); so, too, by prescription of thirty minutes (the time is relative) everything belonging to a fair one lawfully falls to me, which (of a movable nature—and everything about her is movable) I may have purloined from her, and therefore one cannot begin soon enough to steal, because before the theft the prescription cannot begin to take effect.
Specification is a good modus. Only one must be, like me, a Proculian,[[245]] and believe that a strange article belongs to him who has imparted to it a different form; e. g. to me, the hand which I have put into another shape by pressure.
The late Siegwart said: Confusio (mingling of tears) is my modus. But commixtio (mixture of dry articles, e. g. the fingers, the hair) is now with almost all of us the modus acquirendi.
I was going once to treat the whole thing according to the doctrine of the Servitudes,[[246]] where a woman has a thousand things to suffer (though all these servitudes are entirely extinguished by the consolidation[[247]] of marriage); but I do not myself any longer rightly retain the doctrine of the Servitudes, and would much rather examine any one in them than be examined myself.—
I return to the Medicus. Since, then, he knew that a kissed hand is a warrant to the cheeks,—but the cheeks the sacrificial tables of the lips,—these of the eyes,—the eyes of the neck;—accordingly he would have proceeded exactly according to his text-book. But with Joachime, as with all antipodes of coquettes, no favor paved the way for another, not even the great one for the small one; you passed from one antechamber to another,—and what said my hero to this? Nothing but "Thank God that for once there is one better than she seemed, who, under the appearance of being our plaything, plays with us, and makes her coquetry the veil of virtue!"
He felt now, as often as her name was mentioned, a soft warmth breathe through his bosom.
FROM THE END OF THE ECCLESIASTICAL YEAR (Dec. 1) TO THE END OF THE CIVIL (Dec. 31).
Flamin, whose patriotic flames found no air in the session-chamber, and stifled himself first, grew shyer and wilder every day. It was something new to him, that it took whole boards and commissions to do what one person might have done,—that the limbs of the state (as is also the case, indeed, with the limbs of the body) are moved by the short arm of the lever, so as to do less with greater power, and a board, particularly, resembles the body, which, according to Borellus,[[248]] spends 2,900 times as much strength on a leap as the load which it has to lift requires. He hated all great people, and never went to see any: the page Mat did not even get visits from him. My Sebastian made his visits to him seldomer, because his leisure and his calms of dissipation fell exactly upon Flamin's working hours. This separation, and the eternal sitting at Schleunes's,—which Flamin, from not being acquainted with Joachime's influence, was obliged at all events to ascribe to Clotilda's, for future visits to whom Victor must be creating a pretext by his present ones,—and even the Prince's favor towards the latter, which in Flamin's eyes could not be any result of his spirit of freedom and his sincerity;—all this drew the intertwined bonds of their friendship, which had made life to them hitherto a four-handed piece of music, further and further asunder; the faults and the moral dust which Victor could once brush off from his darling he hardly dared to blow off; they behaved towards each other more delicately and attentively. But my Victor, to whose heart Fate applied so many tongues of vampyres, and who was compelled to shut up in one breast the bitterness of lost love and the woe of failing friendship, was made by it all—really merry. O, there is a certain gayety of stagnation and grief, which is a sign of the soul's exhaustion, a smile like that on men who die of wounds in the diaphragm, or that on the shrivelled, drawn-back lips of mummies! Victor plunged into the stream of amusements, in order, under it, not to hear his own sighs. But often, to be sure, when he had all day long been sprinkling over ruined follies comic salt, which full as often bites the hand of the sower and makes it ache, and when he had not been able all day long to refresh himself with any eye, to which he would have dared to show a tear in his own,—when, thus weary of the present, indifferent to the future, wounded by the past, he had just passed by the last fool, the Apothecary, and when from his bow-window he looked out into the night hanging full of worlds, and into the tranquillizing moon, and upon the eastern clouds over St. Luna,—then were his swollen heart and his swollen eyeball sure to burst, and the tears which night concealed to stream down from his balcony on the hard pavement. "O, only one soul," cried his innermost being with all the tones of melancholy,—"give but one soul, thou eternal, loving, creative nature, to this poor, languishing heart, which seems so hard and is so soft, which seems so joyous and yet is so sad, seems so cold and yet is so warm!"
It was well that, on such an evening, no chamberlain, no man of the world, stood in the balcony, just as poor Marie—on whom her former life has been precipitated like a crushing avalanche—came to desire his breakfast-orders; for he would get up, without wiping away a drop, and advance kindly to meet her, and grasp her soft, but red and hard-worked hand, which from fear she did not draw back,—although from fear she did turn away her face, hardened into stone against hope,—and say, as he softly stroked her eyebrows horizontally, with a voice rising from a heart full of the deepest emotion, "Thou poor Marie, tell me—I am sure thou hast little comfort—is it not so? There seldom comes any longer into thy gentle eyes anything that they love to see, unless it is thy own tears? Dear girl, why hast thou no courage before me? why dost thou not tell me thy woe? Thou good, tortured heart,—I will speak for thee, act for thee: tell me what weighs on thee, and if ever of an evening thy heart is too heavy, and thou mayest not venture to weep down below, then come up to me ... look at me now frankly ... truly I will shed tears with thee, let them say what they will and be hanged." Although she held it to be uncourteous to weep before so distinguished a gentleman, nevertheless, it was impossible for her, by a forcible bending away of her face, to thrust aside all the tears which his voice, full of love, drew in rivers from her eyes.... Take it not ill of his over-boiling soul, that he then pressed his hot mouth to her cold, despised, and unresistingly trembling lips, and said to her: "Oh, why are we mortals so unhappy, when we are too soft-hearted?"—In his chamber she seemed to take all as jest,—but all night long she heard the echo of the humane man;—even as jest, so much love would have been a comfort to her; then her past flowers once more crystallized in the window-frost of her present wintry-time; then she felt as if she were to-day, for the first time, unhappy.—In the morning she said nothing to any one, and towards Sebastian she was merely more devoted, but not more courageous; only, at times, she would concur with the dispenser down below, when he praised him, and say, but without further explanation, "One should cut up one's own heart into little bits, and sacrifice it for the English gentleman."