But for to-day such agitations had torn deeply into his heart. And when Clotilda, at a solitary second, said to him that the Parson's wife and Agatha were angry at his staying away, then was he, to whom at these names the whole beclouded past opened like a heaven, in no condition to give an answer.
When he returned home, Clotilda's voice, which he could of all her attractions least forget, kept incessantly speaking, and like the echo of a funeral-song, in his soul.... Reader, when that which thou lovedst has long vanished from the earth or from thy fancy, then will nevertheless the beloved voice come back and bring with it all thy old tears, and the disconsolate heart which has shed them!... But not merely her voice,—everything came thronging back in the darkness upon his fancy: her modest eye, which did not in court-like style sparkle and bid defiance and express desire, as did those of the others,—that watchful delicacy, which since his entrance on court-life no longer appeared to him, either in her or in his father, too great,—to this add the image of Joachime and his chaos of inconsistencies, and the remark that a man whom the most certain proofs have satisfied that he is not loved, still suffers afresh at a new one,—and then one can understand the commotions which sleep, that lull on life's ocean, had in his case to appease.—
"That was the last fever-shake," said he the next morning, relying upon his present heart, whose eruptions, like those of volcanoes, daily burnt out its crater more and more. He enjoined upon himself, therefore, a weekly flight from the too dear soul, with the design that the new resonance of his love might cease its vibrations in his heart, and all become still again within him.
But after a week he saw her again: verily, there sat the Devil again at the card-table, and played another color against him,—the red. Clotilda looked, not pale, but, though only slightly, red. This redness made a great blot on his inner man, and adulterated his inner coloring, as black does every color of the painter. For when he found her well again; it was not so much agreeable to him,—for he saw how few claims he any longer had upon her tranquillity,—how she did not so much as distinguish him in this warehouse of human waste-paper, and how stupid he had been in letting himself dream so secretly, so very secretly, that her previous paleness proceeded actually from her vain longing after such a one as he;—at the same time it was not disagreeable to him,—for he would have poured out all his heart's blood, if he could thereby have brought a single artery in her to its old course;—I say it was not so much either agreeable or disagreeable to him, as it was both, as it was unexpected, as it was a hint to—give himself to the Devil. His heart, and the image which had been too long therein, were absolutely crushed in two. "Be it so!" said he, and bit the convulsive lip with which he said it. For some days he cared not even to see Joachime. "Has she then an eye for nature and a heart for eternity?" asked he, and he knew well the answer.
Now came on a time for him, which was the precise opposite of the Sabbatical weeks,[[265]]—one may call them the race-weeks or the Tarantula-dancing-hours of visiting. It is a cursed time; man knows not where he stands. With Victor it fell just upon the winter-months, when, besides, the honeymoons of city and court occur. I will now portray them regularly.
Victor sought, namely, to drown deeper his unhappy, discordant heart,—not with the drum-roll of amusements; under this it would only bleed the more, just as wounds flow more strongly under the sound of drumming; but with—people; these were the blood-stanching screws which he applied to his soul. His body was now, like the Catholic reliquiary body of an Apostle, in all places; he spent the whole day in running to and fro, now with the Prince and now without him.
At last there was not a lady left in Flachsenfingen whose hand he had not kissed,—nor a toilet-table where he would have been satisfied. He made in the racing-weeks double-knots, French pas,—dotted sketches of patterns,—little plays,—charades,—receipts for canary-birds,—verses for fans,—a thousand visits,—and still more, morning notes....
These last, which he received and sent, were written in French and folded French-wise,—namely, crushed into the shape of hair-rollers. "They are," said he, "the hair-rollers of the fibres of the female brain,—the cartridges full of Cupid's powder,—the cocoons of loving butterflies": he spoke of the rise and fall of these female notes, and called them still further the proof-sheets of the female heart, and the outer-title-pages of the coquettish Edicts of Nantes. "I assert this," he added, "to distinguish myself from the page Matthieu, who denies it, because he actually contends, that at first one presses letters upon the fair sex, then things of more cubic contents, e. g. fans, jewels, hands, then finally one's self; just as the mails at first only took letters, then packages, finally passengers."—
He found those women daily more amusing who steal away from us people of understanding the heart out of the breast and the brain out of the head, and, to be sure, (as a certain nobleman did other stuff,) not from love for the stolen goods, but from love of robbery itself; the next morning, like the nobleman, they honestly send the goods back again to the owner. Their refinements,—his own,—his turns to escape theirs,—the attention which one had to bestow upon one's self,—the opportunity of bringing all emotions under the finest dissecting-knives, or solar and lunar microscopes,—the facility of taking away from the most sincere truths the sour taste and from the most agreeable the sickly-sweet,—all this made the toilet-tables of women, particularly of coquettes, to him Lectisternia[[266]] and tables of the gods. "By heaven," said the toilet-table-boarder or pensioner,[[267]] "a man is merely a Dutchman, at most a German, but a woman is a native Frenchwoman, or in fact a Parisian: man conceals his moral as he does his physical breast: thoughts and flowers, which do not fall through the racks of the four faculties, emotions which cannot be described in the acts or in a physician's report, one must really say only to a woman, and not to a man, especially one of Flachsenfingen"—or Scheerau.
By way of excusing himself for associating with coquettes on the footing of a general lover, he appealed to his motive,—that of merely wishing to become acquainted with their ways,—and to the excellent Forster, who in Antwerp knelt down, as well as any born Catholic, before Rubens's altar-piece of the Virgin Mary ascending to heaven, merely to examine her more nearly.