Poor Marie! my own innermost heart repeats after the Doctor, and adds besides: Perhaps at this very moment, just such an unhappy woman, just such an unhappy man, is reading me. And I feel as if; now that I have struck the funeral bells of their past sad hours, I must also write them a word of consolation. But for one who has to be ever striding across new gaping ice-chasms of life, I know no resource but my own: the moment things grow bad, fling all possible hopes to the Devil, and with utter renunciation fall back upon thyself, and ask, How now, if even the worst should come, what then? Never reconcile thy fancy to the next misfortune, but to the greatest. Nothing relaxes one's spirits more than the alternation of warm hopes with cold anguish. If this method is too heroic for thee, then seek for thy tears an eye that shall imitate them, and a voice that shall ask thee why thou art thus. And reflect: the echo of the next life, the voice of our modest, fairer, holier soul, is audible only in a sorrow-darkened bosom, as the nightingales warble when one veils their cage.
Often did Sebastian worry himself about this, that he could here exert so little his noble powers in behalf of humanity; that his dreams of preventing evil and accomplishing good through the Prince remained fever-dreams, because, e. g., even the best men at the helm of the state filled offices entirely according to circumstances and recommendations merely, and held offices, whether those of others or their own, never as obligations, but as mining-curacies. He was troubled about his uselessness; but he consoled himself with its necessity: "in a year, when my father comes, I set myself free and rise to something better," and his conscience added, that his own personal uselessness was serviceable to the virtue of his father, and that it was better to be, in a wheel, with all one's fitness for a pendulum, a tooth, without which the machinery would stop, than to be the pendulum of a toothless wheel.
In such cases he always asked himself afresh: "Is Joachime, perhaps, like me, better, tenderer, less coquettish than she seems? and why wilt thou condemn her on the strength of an outward appearance, which is, to be sure, the same as thine own?" Her conduct seldom confirmed these favorable suppositions, nay, it often absolutely refuted them; nevertheless, he went on to expose himself to new refutations and to desire confirmation still. The necessity of loving drives one to greater follies than love itself; every week Victor let himself abate one perfection more from the female ideal, for which, as for the unknown god, he had already for years had the altar set up in his brain. During this haggling the whole of December would have slipped away, had it not been for the first day of Christmas.
On that day, when he saw through every window laughing faces and gardens of Hesperides, he too would fain be joyful, and flew amidst the church-chorals to Joachime's toilet-chamber, in order there to make himself a Christmas pleasure. He had brought her for a present, he said, a bottle-case of liqueurs, a whole cellar of Rataffia, because he knew how ladies drank. When, at last, he drew his gantry full of bottles out of his—pocket: it was a miserable little box full of cotton-wool, in which stood imbedded neat little bottles of sweet-smelling waters, almost as long as wrens'-eggs. What is neat always pleases girls—as well as what is splendid. He delivered a long discourse to Joachime upon the temperance of her sex, who ate as little as humming-birds and drank as little as eagles: with a few show-dishes and a smelling-bottle he would feast an army of the female sex five thousand men strong, and there should still be something left. The physicians observed that they who had borne hunger longest had been women,—even in the middle classes the whole bee-flora on which these saints lived consisted of a colored ribbon, which they wore as sash or scarf, by way of a nourishing poultice and portable soup, and to which they attached nothing further, except at most a lover. Joachime, during the eulogy, drew out a bottle, because she thought it wax. Victor, by way of refuting her—or for some other reason—pressed it tightly into her hand, and fortunately crushed it. A mining-superintendent of my disposition would hardly introduce the crushing of a bottle, not big enough to cover one of Eymann's cucumbers with, into his Dog-Post-Days,—because he loves to serve up things of importance,—did not the bottle itself acquire an importance from the fact that it cut the softest hand upon which the hardest jewel ever yet threw lustre, till it ran blood. The Doctor was startled,—the patient smiled,—he kissed the wound, and these three drops fell like Jason's blood, or like a blood rectified by an alchemist, as three sparks into his inflammable veins, and the blood-coal of love assumed three glowing points;—nay, a little more, and he would have obeyed her, when she playfully commanded him (in order to spare him a greater embarrassment than he had) to revive the antiquated fashion of the Parisians, of writing to ladies with rose-colored ink, and here on the spot to despatch three lines to her in her own blood. Thus much is, at least, certain, that he told her he wished he were the Devil. To the last-named personage, as is well known, the warranty-deed or rather partition-treaty of the soul is despatched with the blood of the proprietor as fist-[[249]]pledge and consideration. Blood is the seed of the Church, the Catholic Church says; and here we are speaking of nothing less than the temple of the fair.
So it was—and so it stood—when the Court of the Princess was announced for to-day. This was, in the first place, plaguily awkward for him, because this evening was spoiled; and, secondly, it was agreeable to him, because Joachime was obliged to-day to put away the hat which he and she so loved. Since, as is customary, ladies had the robes and frisures prescribed to them by the Princess, in which they must celebrate in her presence the court-day, i. e. the incendiary Sunday of their freedom: accordingly, she could not to-day keep on the crape-hat which she so loved, and Victor too, but not on her; for it was just the mate of that which Clotilda had worn when, during the concert, she covered her moist eyes with the black-lace veil, which from that time always hung down over his bereaved eyes.
I will describe the Court-day.
The main object of the Court in setting forth at six o'clock in the evening was, to drive home again at ten o'clock in a right sulky mood. I can, however, deliver this ten times as copiously:—
At six o'clock Victor, with the rest of the communion of brethren and sisters under orders, drove to the Paullinum. He envied, or rather blessed, the weaver, the boot-polisher, the wood-cutter, who had at evening his jug of beer, his prayers, his Johnny-[[250]]cakes and his trumpeting children; likewise their wives, who already had foretaste of the morrow, namely, of the marbled, speckled dresses which were to array them for the second holiday. In the May-colored atmosphere and zodiac stood the Princess as a sun, full as unhappy as her unhappy planets; only dream (thought he) can make a king happy or a poor man unhappy. When he saw how they all, after a scanty frog-rain of words; and after refreshments, i. e. beatings and exhaustions, were harnessed, one post-team after another, according to the Court almanac and directory, to the card-tables,—to every board came the same motley set of old faces,—he wondered first of all at the universal patience; on a negro of the gold coast of the court (he swore to himself) if one only considers what he has to hear and to endure, the ears and the skin are certainly, as in the case of roasted sucking-pigs, the best parts. Here the lion must beg that animal to let him have his skin for a domino, which has usually borrowed his of him. Here among these forms bent up by small souls (as leaves also crook up when leaf-lice live on them) no great, no bold thought can be carried: like wheat which is beaten down, they can yield only empty grains.
Before the sitting down at table, that part or segment of the—halo[[251]] encircling the Italian sun, which was not invited, drove home, disgusted at the tediousness of play, and still more disgusted that certain persons in particular were honored with the tediousness of a seat at the table.
Joachime, in whom the retiring Agnola found little satisfaction, went away with them, but not the Doctor, nor her brother Mat either, who had the honor of making, behind the chair of the Princess, in the column of march formed by herself, her chamberlain, a page, and a court lackey, exactly the central point; he stood, as every one knows, immediately behind the chamberlain, and was the only one who looked like a legible lampoon upon the tout ensemble. About the table, during[[252]] which there was little said, at most in a very low tone by two neighbors, here also there shall be nothing said.