Knef's answer is wretched: "By your well-born's favor, dated the 6th instant, I see that the public has taste and some refinement, which does not surprise me, since the same is treated like gold-leaves, which are beaten out thin and fine, first within a book of parchment, and then between two of sheep-skin leaves, and thus, in like manner, by being passed from one book to another, and therein through the force of the press-bar, is made as fine as cavalier-paper.[[56]] If the public keeps on reading in this way a year or two, it may at last be more clever than Germany itself. Touching the improbabilities in our work, several such are of course desirable, because without them a biography or a romance gives miserable satisfaction, since it wants the charm by which the German hospital-ship and ship of fools, full of original romances, proves so attractive to us, ... which ship, as secretive-gland of disagreeable works, may justly be called the liver of the Republic of Letters, and the bookstore the gall-duct. But in reference to improbabilities, I am myself only too apprehensive that even the few on which we rely may in the end disappear. I am, &c."
The wag, as one may easily see, would fain pull the wool[[57]] over my eyes and those of the reader. For me, however, it is a magnificent document in evidence that I have done my part by writing to the rogue.
There are certain persons who, if in the evening they were very warm and friendly, the next morning are very gloomy and cold,—like Maupertuis's half-suns, which burn only on one side and disappear from us when they turn towards us the earthly half,—and if they were cold, the next time they are warm. Flamin forgot the next morning both the warm evening and the night-chill. Today is the festival of churching! Over there with Sebastian he launched out like a German police-puritan and purist, with fire-devils[[58]] and musketry against churching,—against infant-baptismal festivals,—against felling trees for Christmases and Whitsuntides,—against holidays, and against all the merry-makings of mankind.
Nothing in our century so enraged Victor as its haughty crusade-preachings against unfashionable follies, whereas with unfashionable vices it makes contracts of subsidy. He took a long breath to start with, and then showed that the good of a state, as of a man, consisted not in riches, but in the use of riches, not in its commercial, but in its moral worth, that the sweeping out of the ancient leaven and most of our institutions and pandects and edicts had for their object only to enhance princely incomes, not morality, and that one wanted to have vices and subjects, like the old Jews, bring their offerings only in one city, namely, the residence city,—that humanity, from time immemorial, had cut its nails only on its bare hands, not on its covered feet, which often themselves decayed on that account,—that economical and sumptuary laws were still more needful to princes themselves, at least to the highest classes, than to the lowest,—that Rome owed to her many holidays much of her patriotism.... Flamin had no eye for the little pearl-print of domestic joy, for infusory-flowerets of pleasure; on the contrary, his soul kept step with a Brutus when he strode majestically up to Pompey's statue, and with a sigh over fate drove the scissors of the Parcæ into the greatest heart of earth, which confounded its worth with its right. Victor had room in his heart for the most unlike feelings.
I cannot repeat often enough, that to-day is the churching. I will sketch it for posterity; not, however, with that curtness with which a newspaper-writer condenses the funeral of a king into three sheets, but a little more circumstantially. For the stately initial letters of this day the Parsonage had quite other reasons in petto than one has ever yet, to my knowledge, been pleased to disclose to our age: three interested parties wished to deceive each other,—at least, two did a third.
In the first place, the Lady of the Parsonage wished to deceive our hero, who did not know that to-day was the birthday of his father, and that that personage—whom she had taken the liberty of inviting—was coming today for the space of five minutes. In the morning, she set her two daughters to boiling yarn, in order that they might confess nothing to Victor,—at least, not the truth; for it is a well-known superstition that yarn boils whitest when one lies soundly over the operation. Hence we should be the more watchful when women lie, and inquire whether they mean, by their poetical deceptions, to burn anything else white except yarn. Her beloved Victor—that was her plan—should to-day present to her husband, whose cradle-festival[[59]] also fell on to-day, the usual congratulation, and afterward halve it, and carry it on to his Lordship, who was to arrive with his own birthday.
Secondly, Sebastian and she wished to deceive the old Chaplain, who had forgotten that he had been born, which absence of mind had already occurred to him at his first birthday. Mankind keep the run of another's life better than of their own; truly we make altogether too little account of a history which once was ours, and which is the shell of hours that have flown away, and yet the drops of time through which we swim do only in the distance of memory form the rainbow of enjoyment. Men know when all emperors were born and all philosophers died; women know, by reckoning time, only this, when their husbands, who are their regents and classic authors, underwent both. Victor, whose delicate feeling was seared by too great attentions to himself, was glad that Eymann's shoulders must bear half of to-day's honor.
Thirdly, the Lord of the Parsonage wanted to play his deception as well as any one else, and in fact upon everybody. As this Festival-day was to him—like the three High Festivals of the Cloisters—at the same time shaving-day, on which the wisest heads make the foolishest faces, the barber must needs cut with the razor-lancet upon the skin of the soul-keeper, as upon the bark of a birch-tree, a memorial of himself; but the little blood that flowed out suggested to the Parson a cleverer thought than what the cupper left therein, which, however, secreted the nervous sap, that, according to the merest sciolists, is the grease of our mental motions, the gold solution of our most significant ideas, and the spirit of our spirit. This cleverer thought which I so much praise was, to have a vein opened in his left arm, to conceal it from the whole household, in the evening to congratulate his Lordship and everybody, and, at last, to strip up his sleeve and show the wound, like a Roman, and say, "Congratulate me, I pray, on the bleeding!" He executed his idea, and the shaver was obliged, to his amazement, to hack something else beside the chin. The wounded man escorted him even to the outer door, not so much from politeness, as in order that he might not hold forth to the whole domestic company on the subject, but keep the occurrence absolutely to himself, except in houses where there was a beard and an ear. For let an historian be ever so much the month-hand of the age, and consequently the newspaper-compositor its hour-hand, and accordingly a woman its second-hand, still, after all, the beard-trimmer is both, woman and second-hand.
As Flamin and Victor passed down into the sitting-prinking-summer and winter-room, from amidst none but glad faces protruded one sullen one, which belonged to the Parson, who was plunging about like one possessed: there were two things which he could not possibly nose out,—his Bible and his powder-puff. Three minutes before he had thus lamented: "Am not I and my wretched life then singled out for a true Passion-history? Let an urn of fortune be given me, from which anybody else would claw out, as if he were crabbing, whole kingdoms. So soon as the Archfiend sees it to be me, he drops his dung in; and I claw that out instead of crabs and kingdoms, and nothing more. It would have gone finely to-day, the Devil saw,—we should have had until four o'clock in the afternoon no fun, but dog's-work; but then we should have broken loose; then would have come the dinner in the summer-house, the congratulation and salutation and real jollity.... And for you all this is still waiting; but to me, if the puff and the Bible do not appear, just send some of the soot and ashes (the leavings of the evening-feast) that I may brush therewith Fox's [his horse's] bit, and in the evening I can weed radishes by the summer-house."
At this moment, he had to salute, with the dipped flag of his poll, his tasselled cap, the Briton just entering,—when the gesture shook out of the cap a hair-tuft, which, to be sure, was not the long-sought Bible, but was the puff, which had been given up for lost. That is to say, the thinking and reading world, to which one does not often disclose the weightier facts, must at least come at this one,—that the Court Chaplain, just as men are snatched from among men to overtop and master the rest, precisely so bound up the hairs which his comb plucked out, into a skin-fascicle or hair-union, in order to powder therewith the others that were left standing,—which now could not, of course, by this most exalted spirit and pentameter,[[60]] be well christened anything else than a hair-puff. Nevertheless, Eymann's face was longer than his cap; he let this syringe of the coloring powder of his head lie and cool there, and said, "If I don't ferret out the Bible, then I don't see how this tuft alone is to get me out of the scrape."