The sect of the 4th of May could measure itself with its rival, for it also made out a college of three members. Its adherents were Appel (Apollonia, the youngest daughter), who acted as cook, and whose culinary reputation and certificate of good bakery would suffer by it, if the guest should come before the bread rose; she could well conceive what a soul must feel who should stand before a guest with her hands full of skewers and needles, beside the flat-iron of the window-curtains, and without having even the frisure of her hat, or of the head which was to be under it, so much as half ready. The second adherent of this sect, who ought to have had most to say against Tuesday,—although he said least, because he could not talk and had only recently been baptized,—was to be carried to church on Friday for the first time; this adherent was the godchild of the guest. The Chaplain knew, to be sure, that the moon sent round her godfather-bidder, Father Riccioli,[[11]] among the savans of earth, and got them into the church-book of heaven as godfathers to her spots; but he thought it was better for him to take a godfather within a circumference of not more than fifty miles. The Apostles'-day of the churching and the Festival-day of the arrival of the distinguished godfather would then have beautifully coincided; but now the plaguy fine weather was bringing godfather along four days too soon!
The third disciple of Friday was, at bottom, the heresiarch of this party, the Court-Chaplain himself: the parsonage wherein Horion was to have his temporary court residence was all full of rats,—a regular ball-room and plaza de armas of the same,—and of these the Chaplain wanted first of all to clear his house. Few court-chaplains, with hectic in their bodies and rats in their houses, ever made so much stench on that account as did this one in St. Luna against the beasts. It would have taken very few clouds of it to smoke all the court-dames out of Europe. Did not our hectic patient burn as much of the hoof of his nag as he had sawed off from it? Didn't he even take one of the sharp-toothed creatures themselves prisoner, and smear him with gudgeon-grease and train-oil, and then let the arrested subject go, that he might as a pariah trot up and down through the holes, and constrain by his ointment rats of higher caste to emigrate? Did he not go to work by the wholesale, and actually take a buck to board, of which he wanted nothing except that he should stink and displease the tailed monks? And were not all these remedies as good as useless?... For the deuse take rats and Jesuits! Meanwhile, I will at least offer people here on the very third page the moral, that against both of these pests, as against toothache, mental troubles, and fleas, there are a thousand excellent recipes which have no effect.
We will now, in a body, make our way farther into the parsonage, and concern ourselves as minutely about the family history of the Eymanns as if we lived only three houses distant from them. Horion,—the accent must fall on the first syllable,—or Sebastian, by abbreviation Bastian, as the Eymanns called him,—or Victor, as Lord Horion, his father, called him, (for I give him now one name and now another, just as my prose-prosody requires,)—Horion had, through the Italian Tostato, who was a peripatetic Auerbach's court for that whole region, and was hurrying on to St. Luna, caused the little oral lie to be palmed upon his dear friends at the parsonage, that he was coming on Friday: he wanted, first, to give them a real surprise; and, secondly, he wanted modestly to tie the hands, which on his account would be scouring, brushing up and serving up; and, thirdly, he regarded an oral lie as at least more trivial than a written one. To his father, however, he wrote the truth, and fixed his entrance into the parsonage for the 1st of May, or Tuesday. His Lordship had his abode in the residence city of Flachsenfingen, where he applied to the Prince at once moral blinders and eye-glasses, and guided his vision while he sharpened it; but he was himself blind, though only physically. For that reason his son had to bring an oculist with him from Göttingen, who should operate upon him in the Chaplain's house on Tuesday. When he caused his Victor to be made Doctor of Medicine, many Göttingen people, to my knowledge, wondered that so high-born a youth should put on the Doctor's head-piece,—that Pluto's helmet, which makes, not, like the mythological one, the wearer, but others indeed invisible,—and thrust on his finger the Doctor's ring,—that ring-of—Gyges, which only to others imparts invisibility: but was, then, the condition of his father's eyes unknown or an insufficient apology to the people of Göttingen?
His Lordship wrote to the Court-Chaplain that he and his son would come to-morrow. The Chaplain read over the Job's-post silently three times in succession, and thrust it back with comic resignation into the envelope, saying: "We have now ample hope that to-morrow our Doctor will certainly arrive with the rest;—fine tournaments and watering-place amusements do I anticipate, wife! when to-morrow comes in, and my rats in a body dance like children before him;—besides, we have nothing to eat; and then, too, I have nothing to put on, for not before Thursday can I extort from that Flachsenfingen wind-bag[[12]] a hair-bag,—and you laugh at it? Is not one of us in the very middle of April made an April-fool of?" But the Chaplain's lady fell on his shoulder with redoubled exclamations of delight, and ran right off to gather to this rose festival of her good soul the little brethren and sisters of the church of the children. The whole family circle now resolved itself into three terrified and three delighted faces.
We will seat ourselves only among the joyous ones, and listen while they, during the afternoon, work away as portrait-painters, drapery-painters, and gallery-inspectors, at the picture of the beloved Briton. All remembrances are made into hopes, and Victor is to bring nothing with him that is changed except his stature. Flamin, wild as an English garden, but more fruitful, refreshed himself and others with his delineation of Victor's gentle truthfulness and honesty, and of his head, and praised even his poetic fire, which he generally did not rate very high. Agatha called to mind his humorous knight's-leaps,—how he once took the drum of a passing dentist and drummed the village together for nothing before his theatre, because he had previously bought out the whole travelling apothecary's shop of this honest and true friend Hain,[[13]]—how he would often, after a child's baptism, post himself in the pulpit, and there be-preach two or three devout spectators in their work-day sward, till they laughed more than they wept,—and many another piece of waggery, whereby he would make no one ridiculous but himself, and set no one laughing but other people.
But women will never approve of it (only men can) when one, like Victor, belongs to the British subdivision of humorists;—for with them and courtiers wit itself is caprice;—they cannot approve that Victor should love to descend to carriers, clowns, and sailors, whereas a Frenchman would rather creep upward to people of ton. For women, who always respect the citizen more than the man, do not see that the humorist makes believe that all which these plebeians say he prompts them to, and that he intentionally exalts the involuntarily comic to what is artistically so,—folly to wisdom, the earth's madhouse to a national theatre. Quite as little does an official comprehend, or a cit, or a metropolitan, why Horion should so often make such a wretched choice of reading from among old prefaces, programmes, advertisements of travelling artists, all which he would peruse with indescribable gusto,—merely because he made believe to himself that all this intellectual sack of fodder, which belonged properly only to the rag-picker, he had himself prepared and filled, with satirical design. In fact, as the Germans seldom appreciate irony and seldom write it, one is forced to foist fictitiously a malicious irony upon many serious books and reviews, in order to get any of it at all. And that, indeed, is no more nor less than what I myself aim at, when in court-session I elevate in thought the court-house to a play-house, the advocate to a juristic Le Cain and Casperl, and the whole assembly to an old Greek comedy; for I never rest till I have made myself believe that I have caused the good people just to study out the whole case as a star-part, and am therefore really theatre poet and manager. Thus, in fact, do I merrily carry my dumb head as a comic pocket-theatre of the Germans through their most august institutions (e. g. the university, the administration), and exalt, in perfect silence—behind the dropped curtain of my face-skin—the comic of Nature to the comic of Art.
To return: the Chaplain's wife now related as much about Victor as all knew before. But this repetition of the old story is just the fairest charm of domestic discourse. If we can often repeat to ourselves sweet thoughts without ennui, why shall not another be suffered to awaken them within us still oftener? The good lady pictured to her children how gentle and tender, how delicate and womanly, her dear son was (for Victor always called her his mother),—how he relied upon her in all things,—how he was always sporting without ever teasing anybody, and always loved all human beings, even the greatest strangers,—and how she could open before him better than to any matron her oppressed heart, and how fondly he wept with her. A court-apothecary, with a heart of pumice-stone,—Zeusel he writes himself,—once even regarded this melting of the warmest soul as a case of lachrymal fistula, because he thought that no eyes could weep but diseased ones.... Dear reader, do you not feel now just as the biographer does, who can hardly wait for the entrance of this good Victor into the parsonage and the biography? Will you not offer to him the friendly hand, and say: "Welcome, unknown one! Lo, thy soft heart opens ours here on the very threshold! O thou man with eyes full of tears, dost thou, then, feel with us, that in a life whose banks are lined with affrighted ones clinging to the twigs, and despairing ones clinging to the leaves, that, in such a life, where not only follies, but woes also hedge us round, man must keep a wet eye for red ones, an aching heart for every bleeding one, and a gentle hand that shall, in sad sympathy, hold the thick, heavy chalice of sorrow for the poor man who must drain it, and shall slowly raise it to his lips? And if thou art such a one, then speak and laugh as thou wilt, for no one should laugh at men but he who right heartily loves them."
In the afternoon the Chief Chamberlain, Le Baut,—a fragrant leaf-skeleton,—sent his page, Seebass, to the Chaplain to beg that he would—for the palace lay near the parsonage across the way—remove the buck for a while, only until the wind should change, because his daughter was coming. "Esteemed Mr. Seebass!" answered the rat-controvertist, with emotion, "carry back my submissive compliments, and you see my distress. Tomorrow the Lord and his son and his oculist will gladden me with their presence, and the cataract is to be couched here. Now, at present, the whole house stinks, and the rats still carry on composedly their night-dance in the midst of the perfume; I assure you, Mr. Seebass, we can take assafœtida and stuff the parsonage with it up to the ridge-pole, not a tail shall we expel thereby; nay, it pleases them the more. I, for my part, am already preparing myself to see them to-morrow, during the operation, spring up on the very oculist and patient. Thus it fares with us all, please announce at the palace, but say that I was going to-day also to try an excellent rosewood-oil."
He fetched, therefore, a great sack of hops and dragged it up under the roof, in order there, in a literal sense, to lead the rats by the nose into the bag. Rats are notoriously as dead-set upon rosewood-oil as men are on anointing-oil, which, so soon as only six drops fall on the skull, makes one a king or bishop on the spot, which I see by the fact, that in the first case a golden hoop shoots round the hair, and in the second it actually falls off. The militia, that is, the Chaplain, sprinkled the sack with some oil, and laid it with its mouth stretched and fastened wide open to receive the enemy;—he himself stood in the background, concealed behind a similarly oiled stove-screen. His plan was, to start out when the beasts were once in the sack, and carry off the whole crew like bees in a swarming-bag. The few chamber-hunters who read me must have frequently used this kind of trap. But they may not have stumbled over it as the Chaplain did, who was caught with the fragrant stove-screen between his legs, and who lay unable to stir, while the enemy ran off. In such a situation a man is refreshed by the trill of a curse. So after the Chaplain had struck a few such trills and thrills, had betaken himself to the family, and said to them, en passant: If there were in the temperate zone a fellow who from his swaddling-clothes rode a mourning-steed, who was lodged in a second mouse-tower of Hatto, and in an Amsterdam house of correction, and in limbo,—if there were any such correctioner, in regard to whom the only wonder was how he continued alive,—he alone was the one, and no devil beside him ... after he had relieved himself of this, he left the rats in peace,—and was himself very much so.
In the night nothing memorable occurred, except that he kept awake and listened in every direction to hear if something with a tail might not be stirring, because he was minded to vex himself to his heart's content. As there was no sign of the beasts to be detected, not so much as a side-leap, he got out and sat on the floor, and pressed his spy's-ear to that. As good luck would have it, just then the movements of the enemy with their ballets and gallopades burst upon his ear. He started up, armed himself with a child's drum, and woke his wife up with the whisper: "Sweet! go to sleep again, and don't be frightened in your sleep; I'm only drumming a little against the rats; for the Zwickau Collection of Useful Observations for Housekeepers in Town and Country, 1785, recommends this course."