He had a still more dangerous excuse. "Man," said he, "should be everything, learn everything, try everything,—he should labor for the union of the two churches[[268]] in his soul,—he should, if only for a couple of months, have been a city-musician,[[269]] grave-digger, gallows-pater,[[270]] an engineer, tragedy-manager, upper-court-marshal, an imperial vicar, deputy sheriff, a reviewer, a lady, in short, everything a man should have been for some days, in order that the hues of the prism might at last melt together into the perfect white."
These principles are the more dangerous with one like him, who, strung with the tense strings of the most dissimilar powers, easily gave every one's note, not from dissimulation, but because his social poetic faculty could transport itself deeply into another's soul; hence he gained, tolerated, and copied the most unlike persons, notwithstanding his sincerity. But I pity him, that he has everywhere so much to suppress, his seeing through the Prince, his state of heart toward Clotilda, his conciliatory intrigues towards Agnola, his knowledge of Flamin's relations, &c. Ah, reserve and dissimulation easily run together; and must not a constant dropping, when one stands directly under it, at last wear scars in the most solid character?
Nothing chills the noblest parts of the inner man more than intercourse with persons in whom one cannot take any interest. This hotel-life at court, this daily seeing people who never even say "I," whose relations one ignores as indifferently as their talents, unless some necessity seeks them,—this snatching only at the next moment, this racing by of the finest and most intellectual strangers and ant-swarms of visitors, who in three days are forgotten,—all this, which makes palaces like Russian ice-palaces, where even the stove full of naphtha flames is a lump of ice, and to which I need not at all add the comic salt, which, besides, chills all warm blood, as that of Glauber does hot water,—all this made his heart desolate, his days bald and burdensome, his nights distressful, his conduct too cold towards the good, too tolerant towards the bad.
In addition to this, his Emanuel was silent, and, like nature, shut up his flowers within himself. He whom nature nourishes and builds up, is not in so good a mood in winter as in summer. The earth had on her powder-mantle of snow, and her night-gown on all day; the trees had wrapped up their buds in fleecy hair-papers, and the twigs looked like hair-pins. Victor's soul was like nature: O may Heaven soon warm in both the flowers of spring!
As the pathological history of my Victor reminds me too painfully of the latent poisons in the human body, it shall soon come to an end. It pleased him that he became, by this fluttering round, more and more gallant and cold towards all women: the cord of love cuts less deeply into the bosom, when, plucked out into threads and floss, it flutters about everybody. He who, like his namesake, Saint Sebastian, looked like one stuck all full with (Cupid's) arrows, shot off arrows of another kind against the whole sex, though never against individuals. In this last circumstance his bitterness differed from Matthieu's, who could say of his own cousin, for example, who had lost her beauty by a late attack of small-pox: "Her beauty held out right valiantly against the small-pox, and brought off from this victory the most glorious scars, and all of them indeed, like those of Pompey's knights;[[271]] in front and in the face."
As assafœtida is used for haut gout, so does one season the finest savoir vivre by sundry bold incivilities. Bastian in the Tarantula-season was not to be embarrassed by anything: he went and came like a Parisian, without ceremony; he sought often bold, but advantageous postures of his body; during the play he made tours through the boxes as the Prince did through the coulisses; five times he carried matters so far (though with difficulty, and always only by means of setting before himself the example of the courtiers), that he listened indifferently, or absolutely looked away, when another was, telling him a story: all which things, if not essential, are nevertheless incidental to true politeness.
Nor will I let it be unnoticed in his praise, that he took to himself the regular exotic and satirical liberties of the Gallican Church toward several women at once, for in the presence of a single one he had still the old veneration of a noble heart. I will give at least one example of that. Once he was among five slanderesses (the company consisted of six females and a male person); the ugliest blackened all maidens, even those in print, e. g. the deceased Clarissa, whom she charged with not having in her intercourse with Lovelace been quite able to sauver les dehors de la vertu.[[272]] One can anticipate how the Königsberg school will receive it in their reviews, that he let himself down on one knee before the calumniatress, and said with some seriousness: "O Clarisse! voici votre Lovelace; retranchons quatre tomes, commençons comme les faiseurs d'Epopées par le reste."[[273]]
To be sure, he frequently during the Tarantula-season reproached himself for the Tarantula-season; and when the Gentile-fore-court of his heart grew so full of women, while in the Holy of Holies there was nothing but mute darkness, and when his brain became an entomological cabinet of court trifles, then, of course, he often sighed in his balcony: "O come soon, good father, that thy sinking son may soar out of this unclean March fog into a clearer life, before he has utterly stained himself, so as no longer even to frame this wish." And as often as he got sight, in Joachime's chamber, of the views of Maienthal,—which Giulia had had taken by the painter of Clotilda's portrait,—then in the midst of his jestings he turned his eye away from them with a sigh.—But he was not healed, until fate said, Now! Then all at once the theatre-key struck, which bids men come and act in the players' rehearsal of life;—the play itself is not given till the next life;—and then transpired something which I shall at once report in the following chapter, when I have done relating in this one how Victor stood with all the people about him.
With many, properly speaking, badly,—in the first place, with Clotilda. She resided, to be sure, at the Minister's; as maid of honor, she would have belonged in the Paullinum, only the Prince had so contrived it for the greater facility of seeing her; but she was always about the Princess, with whom she was soon linked in intimacy by a similarity of seriousness and a similarity of reserve. Her indifference to one who had with her a common friend and teacher inspired this Victor with a still greater, especially as he knew she must feel that, in this cold mountain- and court-air, only a single, though faded, carnation slip of her fair soul bloomed, namely, himself. Then, too, the obligation of decorum, to look upon her coldly, must become a habit. The worst thing for him was that she was indifferent towards him without ill-feeling, and cold towards him with respect. Others were quite furious about the "phlegmatic virtue of this Pygmalion's statue." The noble Mat called her often the Holy Virgin, or the Demoiselle Mother of God. It is made out very clearly by the Dog-documents, which I have opened, that some gentlemen of the Court, after various abortive attempts to explain to themselves a virtue irreconcilable with so much beauty, now on the ground of temperament, now of concealed love, and now of a coquettish coyness, ending at last, like the water at St. Clermont, in petrifying and becoming its own bridge over itself,—that these cunning gentlemen most felicitously fell upon the conjecture that Clotilda wore this mask over her face as a copy of the face of the Princess, for the sake of continuing in favor. Hence Clotilda's discreet virtue was judged by most with greater indulgence, while one could excuse it, as an intentional imitation of a similar fault in the Princess, even by the example of like imitations, as courtiers often aped the greatest external natural faults, nay, even the virtues of a prince. So thought at least the more reasonable portion of the Court.
Agnola was assiduous in testifying an ever increasing gratitude to our hero for January's visits, although, as I think, she could detect the faithless intentions of the Prince in the presence of Clotilda full as well as she might sometimes see into Victor's soul in the presence of Joachime.... In fact, I should have begged the reader long since to be on the look-out; I deliver the facts with excusable stupidity, though with historic fidelity; if, now, there are therein fine, knavish, significant, intriguing traits and hints, it is without my knowledge, and therefore I cannot point them out to the reader with an index-hand, or announce them with a fire-drum,[[274]] but he himself—as he understands court histories—must know what I mean by my hints,—not I.