"Ay, I must confess," said Victor, as on the day after Clotilda's arrival he ran round in his chamber, "I could look with more courage into a thunder-storm or a tempestuous sea than into that little face,—into a radiant heaven, three noses long." He got relief, however, by striking a detached fortissimo chord on the piano: then he could go to see Clotilda. Only on the way he said: "Nowhere is there so much jangling as within a man. What a devilish uproar in this five-foot Disputatorium about the smallest trumpery, till a bill grows into an act! A portable national convention in nuce,[[256]] that is what I am; I cannot take a step, without the right and left first haranguing on the subject, and the enragés and the noirs,[[257]] and the Duke of Orleans and Marat. The most detestable thing about this interior Ratisbon diet of man is, that Virtue sits therein with ten seats and one voice, but the Devil with one rump and seven votes."—
By these humorous soliloquies he sought to divert himself from the aspect of his confused, stubborn, cold-sore spirit, which was always lifting Joachime to the level of Clotilda. He was finally put in perfect tune again merely by the virtuous resolution not to conceal now his love for Joachime,—"not to be ashamed of her," he had almost thought to himself. "If I feign myself to be somewhat warmer toward Joachime and colder towards the other than I perhaps am, then the Devil must have his game in it, if I do not finally become so."
But the Devil had his game, and in fact a true game of Ombre[[258]] for four persons,[[259]] with a dummy:[[260]] this croupier[[261]] had made the original vault of playing out the face[[262]] of Clotilda with a wholly different color from what he had given her in Le Baut's palace. Victor found her, on meeting her again at Schleunes's, infinitely more beautiful than he had left her,—that is to say, more pale. As she was no nervous patient, never avoided the cold, even on December evenings walked out alone in the village, her cheeks were usually more like dark rosebuds than opened and whitened rose-leaves. But now the sun had become a moon: she had, in some sorrow or other, like the sapphire in the fire, lost nothing but color; instead of the blood, the soul, grown more still, lovely, and tender, seemed itself to look more nearly through the white crape curtain. All the blood which had receded from her cheeks flowed over into his, and rose like a magic potion into his head; meanwhile he tried to get into the latter the thought, "Probably it is more the quarrel with her parents, and less the affliction of being driven hither, that has made her sick."
When one has once proposed to himself to make believe cold, one becomes still more so when one finds reasons for not being so: Victor was made still colder by Clotilda's parents, who had come with her, and from whose faults the mantle seemed to him to be at once removed. Upon persons whom, for the sake of a third, one has esteemed too highly, one avenges himself, when the third no longer exerts the constraining influence, by a so much the greater depreciation of them. Then, too, he said to himself: "As she now seldom sees her brother Flamin, it would be a piece of simplicity to expose her to a minute's embarrassment by the announcement that I know the relationship." Poor Victor! Nevertheless, it was impossible for him even to charge his heart with so much electrical warmth—though he might rub it with cat-skins and beat it with fox-tails—as would be requisite in order that his pulse should beat full for Joachime, not to say feverishly; but this very thing decided him to conduct himself exactly as if heart and pulse were fuller. "It were ignoble," thought he, "if the good Joachime should be made to atone for it, that I once had other hopes and wishes than my hitherto newest ones." This sacrifice warmed him to a proper degree of regard; this regard gave him the manly pride, which defies with its love and its choice all the four quarters of the world; this pride, again, gave him freedom and joy,—and now he was in a condition to talk with Clotilda like a reasonable man.
All this inner history occupied, of course, twelve times as great a space of time as Mohammed's journey through all the heavens,—almost a good hour. But an accident threw itself into the midst of all his ideas. Namely, as the Minister's lady was a true female philosopher,—she knew that a couple of quartz crystals with some preparations and a drowned fœtus do not make a philosopher, but nothing short of a lecture-room full of natural curiosities, and a reading cabinet,—and as the Chamberlain Le Baut was a philosopher, for his cabinet was quite as large,—the collection was exhibited to the Chamberlain, which he had himself helped to enrich. One would suppose that they must have laughed at each other in their sleeves, and taken each other for fools; but they really held each other for philosophers; for with great folks the fruits of the tree of knowledge grow so into the window and into the mouth,—they have so much facility in gaining knowledge (and therefore a second in showing it),—they so seldom seek in the wells of truth anything else than their own knee-pieces made with water-colors, and to wade into the depths of this fountain would give them such a chill,—and yet, on the other hand, they converse with so many sorts of persons of information in all departments,—that they get a smattering of everything over the table, and by oral tradition, like the disciples of the ancients, become through the ears living cyclopædias. If, afterward, they actually know how to absolutely renounce that which they have never heard, what difference is there, then, between them and the poorest philosopher, except in consciousness?
In the cabinet of books and natural curiosities lay the whole New-Year's freight of buzzing chafers, with golden wing-sheaths minus wings,—I mean the gilt Musen-Almanachs. Matthieu, that mimic of the actual nightingales, was the sworn foe of the human ones, namely, the poets. He said,—what would have suited better for a Review,—"He was a great friend of verses, but only in winter,—for when he went roaming so through the flower-beds of an Annual, he became, like one who walks through a poppy-field, drowsy enough, and could go to sleep. And just as the nights grew longer, and one therefore needed a longer sleep, it was a fine thing that the Annuals should appear, exactly at the beginning of winter, and that these flowers should bloom at the same season of the year with the mosses; in this way one could at least be lulled to sleep beside the brook that murmured in the verses, when there was no more murmuring or sleeping on the frozen meadow."—
Our Victor was as satirical as the Evangelist; he had in Hanover laughed as well as this fellow here,—e. g. he had complained that most Annual-minstrels unfortunately labored more for connoisseurs than for dull readers, and were well contented if they only got the former to sleep,—that a man who could not write prose should try whether he might not make a popular bard, as only those birds can sing who do not learn to talk,—that he could get through a good Annual at the quickest and most agreeable rate, if he only ran over the rhymes,—and that flat heads, like flat diamonds, to which no facettes can be given, became hearts, and instead of thoughts gave us tears, in which there swam not so much as the infusorium of an idea....
But he saw still one side more than Matthieu, namely, the noble side. It was his custom to turn this side forward precisely when another had been showing the bad side, and vice versâ. His opinion was, that the poets were nothing but intoxicated philosophers,—but whoever could not learn philosophizing from them, would learn it quite as little from the systematicians. That philosophy made only the silver-wedding between ideas, but poetry the first marriage; empty words there might be, but no empty sensations. That the poet, in order to move us, has only to take for his lever all of noble that there is on the earth,—Nature, Freedom, Virtue, and God; and the very magic-words, the magic-rings, the magic-lamps wherewith he sways us, react at last upon himself.
He delivered this opinion—when Matthieu had given his and Joachime her own, namely, that there were three or four leaves, at least, in the Musen-Almanachs which pleased her, namely, the smooth parchment leaves—much more briefly than we have put it;—the Minister's lady was of his opinion (for she herself was a versifex);—the Chamberlain said, "Every city and every prince did indeed adore the poets in appropriate temples,—namely, in the play-houses." Clotilda ventured now to join herself to the victors:[[263]] "When one reads a poet in January, it is as lovely as when one goes to walk in June. I cannot read either philosophers or learned men; there would, therefore, be left to me" (she meant to say, to her sex) "quite too little, if one should take from me the dear poets." "You would at most," said the Minister at last, "find your disciples in them; poets, like the saints, concern themselves little about the world and its knowledge; they can sing of the state, but not instruct it." "O thou grinning mummy!" thought Victor, "a precious stone which thou canst not work into the wall of the state-building is less to thee than a block of sandstone. If thou couldst only install every flaming soul sent into the world as a completion of the republican antiques, in the office of under-clerk, custom-house collector, or warden of the treasury (as the people of Grand Cairo transform their ruins into stables and horse-troughs)!" The noble Mat merely subjoined: "There was a painter in Rome who never talked with any one but by singing; and I knew a great poet who not even in common life could speak prose; but he could not do much beside, and had little of the world, but a great many worlds in his head. When he comes out in print, he will hardly play off more deception on his readers than any one has already played off on him, who chose to."—Victor saw, by Clotilda's downcast eye, that she observed, as well as he, that the Devil meant her Dahore: but he was silent; his soul was sad and embittered: he had, however, long since been hardened by court life to endure those whom he must needs hate.
During this disputation the noble Mat had, unobserved, cut out the whole group in black paper. "Ah!" said Joachime, "this is not the first time that he has given blackened likenesses of companies." But as Victor could never see silhouette-groups, without thinking of us fleeting shadows of mortals, of this dwindling and drying-up dwarf-life, of the night-pieces drawn upon life, and of the shadowy companies called peoples,—and as he was reminded of this not only by his melancholy, and not only by a wax-skeleton, by Madame Biheron,[[264]] which stood there among the natural curiosities, but still more by the pale form of Clotilda,—and as, casting a glance of comparison at the skeleton and the profile, she said softly to Victor, "So many resemblances might at another time make me sad,"—then was his full heart transpierced with a sharp pang at the thought of his eternal poverty, and at the certainty, "This great, beautiful heart will never stir for thine, and when her friend Emanuel is dead, thou art left forever alone"; and he stepped to the window, threw it open violently, drank in the north-wind, pressed his fist against his two eyeballs, and went back with his former expression of countenance to the rest of the company.