The sheep had to do it with their bleating and bells. When the belfry-bell of Great Kussewitz, with the accompaniment of sheep-bells, wafted into his opening ears an evening prayer set to music,—when into his opening eyes the red outline of the departed sun which had illuminated his to-day's paradises entered, and the evening glow, whose gold leaves the evening wind breathed upon the clouds,—when the air, bedewed like his nosegay, refreshed his bosom,—then was to-day's sultry afternoon rolled back a whole week; Victor had dropped upon a new island of the blest; new-born and rejoicing, he crept back out of his piece of travelling property. "O mad me!" he said; "but I do not rejoice extraordinarily in the fact that half an ounce of grains of sleep can eat away clean out of man a whole glowing world, and that the turning over of the body is the sinking of his paradise and his hell."
On the high road two sedan-bearers went jogging off at a short gallop between the supporting poles of their leather die.[[112]] He made after them,—their load, he thought, must be far lighter to them than a whole country and its sceptre, both which, however, a regent knows how to balance, as a juggler does a sword, dancing, on the nose, on the teeth, everywhere. They bore, however, the heaviest thing in the world, beneath which cities, thrones, and continents have often broken down.
"What are you moving round with at such a rate?" he asked. "With our most gracious Lord!" It was January,—it is, however, quite in accordance with the æsthetic and artistic tricks wherewith an author so extraordinarily excites the expectation of his readers, that I do not divulge what it was of January that sat in the bounding litter, until I utter the next word.
It was his image. The bust always travelled ahead before the bride, in order to arrive in season at her bedchamber, and hang itself up by a nail to the wall. On the whole sentimental journey the cubic contents of the bride had slept only in chambers, on which the superficial area of the bridegroom hung down like a garden-spider all night long....
As I do not mean in any manner to cut myself of, by the barrier-treaty which I have concluded with my cousin the reader, from the right of making, beside the Intercalary Days, extra-leaves, extra-leaflets, and pseudo-extra-leaves, inasmuch as I have, the rather, by certain secret and separate articles, which I have made merely in my own head, as the Pope does certain cardinals, reserved to myself the privilege, I will now exercise the right which my self-made By-Recess offers me on the spot.
EXTRA LEAFLET UPON THE ABOVE BUST-PIECES.
"I maintain," said I, in the billiard-room at Scheerau, at a moment when I was not striking, "that dukes, margraves, and other graves, and many of high nobility, would be stupid, if in our day,—or, in fact, in future days,—when the crown grows bald before the chin gets a beard,—when many a face wants no requisite for spectacles except the bridge,—when particularly the man of rank is glad to be, instead of a cast, at least an outline, of a man,—they would not be wise, I recapitulate, if they celebrated no better marriage than a true one,—that is, no pictured—one; if their busts were stamped on nothing better—that is, on no breast—than on the pewter covers of beer-pitchers, so that they could intoxicate people in no other way than this latter; and if they, who uniformly act by plenipotentiaries, on imperial benches, in session-chairs, in bridal beds (marrying by ambassadors), should conceive that in the last-mentioned case there were any truer and more innocent chief commissary than their own picture on an ell of canvas." ... As we just then played in mass, and I happened to be king, and in my fiery state went on to say, "What the Devil! we kings understand how to substitute skilfully enough, for the plastic arts in virtue and in marriage, the delineative arts; and not merely in billiards does a king stand quite idle with his sceptre-cue!"—then the fire of my speech might well seem far from strange.
End of the Extra Leaflet on the above Bust-pieces.
At the house of the Count of O— (so was called also a famous officer in the Seven Years' War, and by Shakespeare the world, and the whole territory of an old lady; and, according to Bruce, with the Hebrews this vowel was a particular favorite; but this is, after all, unprofitable learning here) the Princess and the painted bridegroom alighted. Victor would not, with his to-day's dress and his to-day's heart, mingle in the tumult of the world; and yet he would gladly have seen all.
As he approached Kussewitz, a little red and white house peered forth to meet him,—red as a squirrel-cage, and smiling as a summer-house. He stepped up to it and to its gleaming windows, but immediately stepped back again; he would not hinder an old human couple, for whom the bell had been the organ, from finishing their prayer. When he entered, with his face exalted by the reflection of to-day's transfiguration, an old man turned a silver head, which stood like a mild moon over the evening of his life, and a face of smiling wrinkles, toward the guest. Only a hypocrite—that stockjobber of virtue—is not, after praying, more gentle and complacent. The old woman was the first to lay aside the look of devotion. Victor, with his victorious simplicity, asked a night's lodging. To grant it to him was what only such contented people as these could do; to request it was what none could do, except one who, like him, shunned landlords, because their cold, selfish sympathy and love, coming and going with every guest, was too repulsive to his warm soul. Secondly, he was attracted by the cleanliness which even the slut loves in strangers' houses, and which, in them, is a proof of contentment and of—childlessness. Thirdly, he wanted to remain to-day incognito, and out of the thronged streets, with his soul so consecrated by Nature.