An absurd billet! When Victor heard that Agatha was the third Grace, there was a great hole torn in the curtain of the theatre in which Matthieu played Flamin's friend and Agatha's—first lover. Nothing is more annoying than a nest in which there sit none but brothers or none but sisters: the nest must be shaken up into a mixed and motley gradation,—that is to say, of brothers and sisters, packed in layers, so that an honest pastor fido can come and ask after the brother when he is only on the look-out for the sister; and so, too, must the girl who loves a brother absolutely and by stronger necessity have a sister whose friend she is, and who may be hook and handle to the brother. Our Turkish decorum required, therefore, that Matthieu should point his opera-glass at Flamin to see Agatha; and that Clotilda should visit the latter, since Flamin, as a man without ancestors, but of honor, could not possibly force his citizen's-visits upon the house of a chamberlain. Clotilda came often, and thereby involved herself in a contradiction, which I have till now been unable to solve, with the womanly refinement of her character.
Flamin dipped Matthieu's likeness into a quite different dyeing-copper from that the mother used: he was a jolly genius, and nothing worse. He personated everything in the world, and no one could personate him. He could imitate and travesty all the players of the Flachsenfingen troupe, and the boxes too. He understood more sciences than the whole court; yes, and more languages, even to the voices of the nightingale and the cockerel, which he mimicked so perfectly that Petrarch[[44]] and Peter would have run away. He could do with women what he chose, and every court dame excused herself by the example of her neighbor; for it used to be part of the ton in Flachsenfingen to have one's fidelity once put to the proof. They say love for him began to be knit, like a stocking, at the calf, but it is utterly false. It is therefore no wonder that, with such uninterrupted moderation in courtly pleasures, he grew stronger and healthier than the whole burnt-out, evaporated court, only he was too caustic, and too philosophic, and almost too roguish.
Victor and the reader and I have still, after all, only an indistinct, blurred crayon-drawing of Matthieu in our heads. My hero was somewhat pleased with him, as every eccentric man is with an eccentric one; it was a fault of his, that he pardoned too easily those of energy, even moral ones. With redoubled curiosity did he now take his way to the palace, or rather to its great garden, which joined thereto its semicircle of green beauties. He put in at the harbor of an embowered alley, and was delighted at the way in which the pierced shadow of the arbor, around whose iron skeleton tender twigs wound-like soft hair around hair-needles, glided dazzlingly over his body. Side by side with his arbor another parallel one passed along. He followed some scattered black paper snippings as way-marks. The fluttering of the morning wind tossed down from a twig a little leaf of fine paper, which he picked up to read. He was still on the first line, "Man has two minutes and a half, one in which to smile once, ..." when he ran against an almost horizontal queue, which was a black club of Hercules, compared with mine or the reader's plaited capillary tube. The queue was projected by a head crooked downward, which, peering in a listening attitude out of a niche in the arbor, was cutting a female profile, the original of which in a by-avenue was talking with Agatha. At the rustle of Victor's approach, the person, whose half-face was being stolen through the niche, turned round with surprise, and saw the proprietor of the Cyclops-queue with the profile-scissors, and also the hero of the Dog-post-days. The proprietor, without saying a word, thrust his artistic hand through the bush-work, and reached out to her her shadow or shadow-cutting.[[45]] Agatha took it, smiling; but the nameless one seemed to assume toward the cutter of forms and faces that seriousness which, on female faces, is nowise distinguished from contempt but in its ambiguousness, because his scissors awoke too strong a suspicion of his having been listening. Victor could perceive nothing of the nameless one yet except her stature, which, although bent forward a little, still surpassed the ordinary height. The face-cutter turned about with two flashing black eyes toward Victor, received him very politely, knew his name, told his own,—Matthieu,—and had, at his eighth pace, already had four good ideas. The fifth was, that he, unsolicited, introduced my hero to the couple in the side-arbor. The leafy nunnery-grating came to an end; a female form stepped forth, and Victor was so struck by it, that he, who knew little about embarrassments, or was made only more quick-witted by them, began his introductory sermon without the exordium, and that was—Clotilda. When she had said three words, he listened so to the melody instead of the text, that he understood not a word of what she was saying....
I have here, lying beside me, on the snow-white ground of vellum, the very silhouette which Matthieu had taken of her with the scissors. My correspondent will have me depict Clotilda as uncommonly beautiful. Otherwise, he says, a hundred things in this history are incomprehensible; and therefore he sends me (because he cannot trust my fancy) at least her profile. And that is to be, even during my writing, steadily looked at all the time,—so much the more, as it might seem actually to have been cut from the very face[[46]] of another loveliest female angel that ever flew out of an unknown paradise down to this earth: I mean the Fräulein von * * *, [at present maid-of-honor] in Scheerau; I am not sure whether all my readers know her.
Victor felt as if his blood had been driven outward, and with warm touches described its circles on the external skin. At last Clotilda's cold eye, of which not the intoxicated pride of beauty, but the sober, retiring pride of innocence belonging only to the female sex, was mistress, and her nose, which betrayed too much reflectiveness, brought his new Adam to his legs again, upon which the old Adam had already set himself up. He congratulated himself that he was Flamin's friend, and consequently had some claims upon her attention and her society. Nevertheless he continued to feel all the time as if everything she did occurred now for the first time in the world; and he watched her as one does a man who has been operated on for blindness from his birth, or an Omai,[[47]] or a Li-Bu. He kept thinking, "How could sitting down ever become her,—or the handing of a fruit-dish, or the eating of a cherry, or stooping down to read a note?" I am a still worse ninny beside the above-mentioned court dame.
At last came Le Baut into the garden, after the first toilet, and his wife after the second. The Chamberlain—a short, supple, bedizened thing, that will pull off its hat before the Devil in hell when it enters there—received the son of his hereditary enemy in an uncommonly complimentary manner, and yet with a dignity, for which, however, not his heart, but his rank, gave him strength. Victor, for the mere reason that he imagined him an injured person, cherished a predisposition of good-will towards him. Although Le Baut's tongue was almost, like his teeth, false and inserted, and consequently the words were so, too, which were made up of dentals and linguals, still his neither coarse nor uncourteous flatteries—among which his attitudes and intentions also are to be counted—pleased our honest Victor, who could not hate fine flatterers, as being weak persons. The Chamberlain's lady—who was already in the years which a coquette seeks to conceal, although she had still more reason to conceal the preceding ones—received our well-disposed hero with the sincerest voice that ever yet issued from a false Judas's bosom, and with the most artful face, on which it seemed impossible that the deceptions of love could ever have found room for a glance.
The new company took away Victor's embarrassment at once. He soon remarked, indeed, the peculiar fighting- and dancing-positions of the circle towards each other. Clotilda seemed reserved and indifferent towards all, except her father. The step-mother was refined towards the Chamberlain, haughty towards her step-daughter, obliging towards Victor, and bore herself with an easy and subservient coquetry towards Matthieu, who, on his part, was, toward the wedded pair, alternately complimentary and ironical; towards Clotilda, cold as ice; and towards my hero, as courteous as Le Baut was to all. Nevertheless Victor was more joyous and free than any of them, not merely because he was under the free heavens,—for a room always lay upon him like a blockhouse, and a chair was like the stocks,—but because he was among fine people, who, despite the most angular relations, give to conversation four butterflies'-wings, that it may—in contrast to the clinging caterpillar, who impales himself on every thorn—fly without noise and in little curves over all prickles, and alight only on blossoms. He was the greatest friend of fine people and fine turns of expression; hence it was that he took so much pleasure in the society of a Fontenelle, a Crébillon, a Marivaux,—of the entire female sex, and particularly of the decently coquettish portion of it. Do not mistake me. Ah! upon his Flamin, upon his Dahore, on all great men who were exalted above the refined, cowardly, vacant microcosmologists of the great world, his whole soul hung glowing; but for that very reason did he seek out, with a view to greater completeness, the smaller men, as fringe and corner-trimmings, with so much zeal.
Four persons had at this moment four telescopes pointed at once at his soul: for himself, he took nothing of the kind into his hand, because he was too good-natured and too happy to be the spy of a heart; and only after the lapse of some days did he observe the image which any one with whom he had been in company left behind in his brain. He did not conceal himself, and yet he was seen in a false light: good men can more easily see into bad ones than the latter can into the former. He guessed others better than they guessed him. Only Clotilda deserves a word of defence for having, even until after dinner,—during which Le Baut, the greatest story-teller of this story-telling century, carried through his part,—regarded him as too malicious and satirical. But she could hardly do otherwise: a woman easily discerns the human, but hardly the divine (or devilish), nature in a man, with difficulty his worth, but easily his intentions, and his inner complexion more so than his contour. Matthieu gave occasion for her error, but also (as I shall presently report) for its retraction. This Evangelist,[[48]] who was a much greater satirist than his namesake in the New Testament, placed almost all Flachsenfingen on his private pillory, from Prince and Court down to Zeusel;[[49]] only the Minister (his father) and his many sisters he was compelled, unfortunately, to leave out, and likewise those persons with whom he happened at the moment to be talking. What was called calumny in him was at bottom an exaggerated Moravianism. For, as St. Macarius commands that one shall, out of humility, add twenty ounces of evil when one has five, but with regard to good, the reverse,—accordingly ingenuous, courtly souls, seeing that no one will use this modest language, endeavor to speak it in every one's name, and always ascribe to him whose humility they wish to represent fifteen ounces more of evil and less of good than he really has. On the contrary, in the case of present company, they find this mediatorial system of satisfaction unnecessary: hence the life of such court-nobles is wholly dramatic; for as, according to Aristotle, comedy paints men as worse, and tragedy as better, than they are, so do the nobles referred to bring forward in the former only absent, in the latter only present persons. I do not know whether this perfection will go to the length of atoning for a real fault of the Evangelist,—namely, that, like the Romans on the Lupercalia, he—too often made thrusts at the female sex. Thus, for instance, he said to-day, maidens and raspberries were wormy before they were ripe; female virtue was the red-hot iron which a woman (as was also the case in the old ordeals) had to carry from the font (the baptismal-day) to the altar (the wedding-day), in order to maintain her innocence, &c. Nothing fell upon Clotilda—and the same I have always found the case with the best of her sex—more keenly than satire upon her whole sex; but Victor was astonished at her art—very peculiar to her sex and to worldly experience at once—of concealing the fact, that she both—endured and despised.
The Evangelist's example brought it about that Victor, too, began to phosphoresce at all points of his soul; the spark of wit ran round the whole circle of his ideas, which, like Graces, clasped each other by the hand, and his electrical chime of bells outdid the Page's discharges, which were lightnings, and stank of brimstone. Clotilda, who was very observing, mistrusted Sebastian's lips and heart.
The young nobleman held him to be one of his feather, and in love with Clotilda; and that, on the ground that "the gayer or more earnest tone into which a man fell in company was a sign that a female electrical-eel had struck at his bosom." I must confess it,—Victor's effervescent soul never allowed him to hit that expression of respect for women which does not run into untimely tenderness, and for which he often envied cultivated people of the world; his regard unfortunately always looked like a declaration of love. The Chamberlain's lady accounted him as false as her Cicisbeo.[[50]] People like her cannot comprehend any other kind attentions than polite or artful ones.