My lady-readers will now want to hear what was cooked for dinner; but the documents of this Post-day, which reach me half by wheel and half by water, state, in the first place, that no one had any appetite,—which joy takes away more than grief,—except the three regiments, which slashed like veterans into the enemy,—that is, into the leavings of the table; secondly, that the meal was still leaner than the guest himself. We will, however, hereby invite all the reading-societies in a body to the immovable feast of the 4th of May, the Friday when, for the first time, Victor's arrival and his godson's churchgoing are suitably celebrated.
The Parson's wife extricated the beset darling in the afternoon from the musical circle of so many tones, and smuggled him away from under the eyes of her husband, whose Directress and Lady Mayoress she was, and led him to his chamber, that she might there, before him alone, distress and delight herself, and speak out her heart, like a mother. Long-suppressed sighs and antiquated tears now forced their way out of the opened motherly heart into another and tender one, which was, indeed, her son's best friend. She complained to him of Flamin's excitability, which Victor used always to allay; of his love for military life, while, after all, he was a scholar; and, finally, of the company he kept,—namely, he went roving round with a young page, one Matthieu, son of the Minister Von Schleunes, a dissolute, universally-beloved, universally-spoiled, bold, artful young scoffer, who, when his service allowed it, would spend his time either over yonder with the Chamberlain's people, or here with her son: "Heaven only knew what designs he had in his visits at a citizen's house." She rejoiced that Victor would bear off his old friend out of the traps and fangs of this rake. Victor pressed her hand with emotion, and said: "I could hardly think of sharing his heart with the best bond-fellow. Not so much as fall in love should he dare to, if it depended on me. Only me must he love, and one other person, who depicts him quite wrongly,—namely, yourself." He greatly mistrusted, also, her drawing of the sun-spots of Matthieu, because women seldom comprehend eccentric men, and because maidens, indeed, often love wild youths, but matrons (enlightened by marriage) always prefer gentle ones.
He easily drew the hearts of married women into his drag-net by a certain kindly gallantry towards them which a German saves for unmarried ones. Old ladies and old tobacco-pipes, however, easily cleave to men's lips. The younger pigeons he enticed to himself by his comic salt, as they catch turtle-doves by another kind. A bon-mot is to them a dictum probans; a pasquin, a magister sententiarum; and the critical calendar of scandal is to them a Kant's Critique of the Pure Reason, in an improved edition. With his medical doctor's ring, also, he fastened to himself female souls; as physician, he laid claim to corporeal mysteries, and then the spiritual easily follow these.
In the evening, when the woodland stream of the first jubilation had run out, three sober words were at length possible. The Parson, too, by this time, scolded less; for joy had made him rabid in the forenoon. Anger and the body are strengthened together, and therefore by pleasure. Hence in January and February, when dogs get the longer madness, men have the short one of wrath; hence convalescents grumble more at all about them, just as people do under strong mental excitements,—e. g. Dog-post scribes; hence, too, in the exhaustion following sick-headache, or a fit of intoxication, one is gentler than a lamb.
Towards evening, there already transpired something of consequence. Apollonia swept and dusted her blood-relationship and her guest with her whisks even sooner than the spiders and the dust. On the 4th of May was this day's arrival of the long-absent fugitive to be right properly celebrated. Flamin and Victor led the way through the Parsonage garden, whose memorabilia and curiosa are so edifying that the correferent[[35]] of these acts wishes he could, by the Dog-express, portray the garden to me more clearly. The Chaplain had stamped off many beds, not into rectangles, but had curved and twisted them into the shape of Latin characters, in double black-letter, to represent the initials of his family. His own (E) he had sowed with radishes; Apollonia's (A), with capuchin-lettuce;[[36]] Flamin's (F), with rape-cole; Sebastian's (S), with sweet-root, or Glycyrrhiza vulgaris (liquorice). Whoever was not present had left for him, at all events, a vacant place and almanac royal among squashes and Stettin-apples, round which was wrapped a perforated paper with the name cut out, which, after the peeling off of this wrappage, would appear green or red on the pale fruit. Victor, as he passed along by a C made of tulips, asked his Flamin the meaning of it. "Why dost thou ask?" he inquired; and the loquacious Parsonage-people, following after, drove away the answer.
Beyond the Parsonage-meadow stood—one had only to leap the brook—a hill, and thereon an old watchtower, in which there was nothing but a wooden staircase, and overhead nothing but a board covering instead of the Italian roof, both of which the Chamberlain had had made, that the people—not himself, for the unfeelingness of magnates labors for the feeling of minorites—might up there look round them a little. One could see from there the columnar architecture of the Creator, the Swiss mountains, standing, and the Rhine moving along with his ships. On the tower two linden-trees had grown aloft, twined together by nature, so as, sometimes, with their foliage, which had been hollowed out into a green niche and underlaid with a grassy bench, to fan, up there, a fevered islander. The loving party climbed the battlement, and carried up with them in their rural breasts a tranquillity which softly copied therein the still outer heaven that encircled these good hearts with its veiled suns. One lingering cloud gave a farewell glow, but it melted away before it burned out.
Now could the supplementary volumes of the Universal History of St. Luna be conveniently issued. Eymann could deliver his folio volumes of gravamina (grievances) upon the consistorial councils and the rats. All at once, Agatha, like her saintly namesake, was invoked down below by the organ-blower loci, who was valet-de-place of the village, and Parsonage-coachman. When certain authors say, "The coachman was blind, and the horse was deaf," they exactly reverse the case. The churl was deaf. He had in his mouchoir de Vénus—the handkerchief is, with the common people, at once letter-bag and envelope, because a letter is as important and rare a thing to them as a good one is to a reviewer—to-day discovered and unwrapped an epistle to Agatha, which he should have delivered yesterday with his Lordship's: but coachmen consider a master only as the mock-sun and second party to the horse, and the lady absolutely as no more than a parasite-growth of the stable; hence "immediately" means with them one or two or three days; and "to-morrow forenoon" meant, on the Ratisbon notification-programme of matters to be voted on, one or two or three years. Agatha, with more eagerness, hurried down, held the letter towards the lighter quarter of the west, and deciphered something, which, with sparkling eyes, she carried in a gallop up the stairs. "She is coming to-morrow!" she cried out to Flamin; for she seemed almost, in the person of every one of her friends, to love only the companion and friend of her other friends. The case was this: Clotilda, Le Baut's only daughter by his first wife (his Lordship's niece), was coming from the Girls' Institute in Maienthal, where she had been educated, back to her father.
"Do you take good care!" said the Chaplain's wife; "she is very beautiful."
"Then," said he, "I shall much rather take care not to take care."
"In fact," she continued, "all that is beautiful is now gathering around you" (here he tried to confuse and chastise her by a flattering look, but in vain). "The Italian Princess comes, too, on St. John's Day; and she is said to be as charming as if she were no princess at all, but only an Italian woman." There she did most princesses wrong; but a certain irony upon her own sex was the only fault of the Chaplain's wife, to whom, as to many other mothers, there were almost no step-sons and hardly anything but step-daughters.