He stayed day after day, as, besides, the butter-week[[187]] of the marriage must go by first. He had already marriage-medals in his pocket. But he never could see Clotilda except a second at a time; and, according to Bonnet, one needs half a second for a clear idea,—according to Hooke, a whole one, in fact. Therefore, before he could form a complete conception of this still goddess, she was always gone.
At last more serious arrangements were made, not for departure, but for forming the purpose of it.... The sweetest minutes of a visit are those which once more postpone its close; the sweetest of all, those in which one already has cane or fan in hand, and yet does not go. Such minutes now encircled our Fabius of love; softer eyes said to him, "Hurry not!" warmer hands drew him back, and the mother's tear asked him, "Wilt thou rob me of my Flamin so soon as to-morrow?"
"By no means," he answered, and kept his seat. Did not, I ask, the Chaplainess thrust for his sake her lingual executioner's sword into its sheath, because there was nothing he so hated as loud or silent defamations of a sex which, more unhappy than ours, sees itself maltreated by two sexes at once? For he often took maidens by the hand, and said: "Woman's faults, particularly evil reports, moodiness, and sensitiveness, are knot-holes, which in the green tree please us even into the honeymoon[[188]] as fine marble-veined circles, but which, in the dry, in the marriage-furniture, when the plug has shrunk and fallen out, gape open as ugly holes." Agatha now screwed her sewing-cushion to his writing-table and kissed him, whether he chose to look pleasant or sullen; Even the Chaplain sought to sweeten for him, if not the last days, which he dreamed away at his house, yet at least the last nights, for which purpose he needed nothing but a drum and a foot. The most fiery nocturnal witch-dances of the mice the Chaplain interdicted with his heel, that they might not wake up his guest; that is to say, he kept up against the foot-board of the bed from time to time a moderate cannonading, which knelled into the ear-trumpets of the dancers the more in proportion as it startled the ears of humanity. Against the Euler's knight's-moves of the rats he took the field with only a mallet, wherewith, breaking in like a day of judgment on their pleasure-parties and hunting-parties, he merely thumped once or twice on a drum, extemporized out of the bed-quilt.
Matthieu was invisible, and, as courtiers mimic princes in everything, was parodying the nuptial days of his prince at least by little nuptial hours of his own. The powder which issued out of cannons and the cornucopias of the firework-makers, the vivat which was prayed from pulpits and shouted from taverns, and the expenses one incurred for all this, were, I think, so considerable, that the greatest prince need not have been ashamed to illustrate therewith his marriage and his—ennui. Coldness has forever a speaking-trumpet, and sensitiveness an ear-trumpet. The arrival of an unloved princely corpse or bride is heard of at the polar circles; on the contrary, when we inferiors fill our graves or our arms with loved beings, there fall only a few, unheard tears, disconsolate or blissful.
Flamin pined for the session-table, whose labors were now soon to begin, and he could not comprehend this delay.... At last, for once, and with all seriousness, the day of departure was fixed, the 10th of August; and I am sure Victor would not have been on the 14th still in St. Luna, had not the Devil on the 8th brought along a Tyrolese.
It is the same fellow who day before yesterday made his entry among us at Scheerau, with a wax retinue which he had got together, half from the imperial states and half from among the literati, and with the wax hands of these twin brothers of man took money from our purse. It is stupid, that Spitz did not bring me the present dog's-day the day before yesterday; I could myself have asked the churl, who embossed, in St. Luna, Victor and the Chaplain in wax, what was the real name of Victor, and of Eymann, and of St. Luna itself. The result is, that I am still, with an allowable and biographical curiosity about this carpenter of men, who surrounds us with awful reflections of our little being, following on his heels.
Victor must, therefore, again tarry; for he had himself and the Chaplain baked in wax, in order to give, in the first place, to the latter, who had a childish fondness for all casts, dolls, and puppets, and, secondly, to the family, who longed to quarter the waxen mock-Victor in his vacated chamber, a greater pleasure than to himself. For he had a horror of these flesh-colored shadows of himself. Even in childhood, among all ghost-stories, those of people who had seen themselves crept with the coldest hand over his heart. Often at evening, before going to bed, he surveyed his trembling body so long, that at last he detached it from himself, and saw it standing thus alone beside his self and gesticulating as a strange form; then he would lay himself down, quaking, with this strange form, in the grave of sleep, and the darkling soul felt itself like a Hamadryad, grown over by the pliant fleshy bark. Hence he felt deeply the difference and the long interval between his self and its bark, when he looked for some time on another's body, and still more deeply when he contemplated his own.
He sat opposite the embossing-stool and the embossing-tools, but fixed his eyes on a book again, so as not to see the corporeal form, in which he carried himself round, distant and duplicated. The reason why he nevertheless could endure the reduplication of his face in the glass can only be, that he regarded the supernumerary in the glass either merely as a superficial portrait without cubic contents, or as the only archetype with which we compare other duplicates of our person.... Upon these points I can never speak, myself, without a certain tremor....
The wax-copy of Victor, to express his majority, was arrayed in a toga virilis, an overcoat which the original had cast off; likewise the chamber which the living one vacated was cleared out. The Chaplain proposed to himself to place this cheap edition of Horion in the window when the better one was gone, in such a manner that all the school youth, who learned from the chorister manners and mores, should doff their hats to it when they came tearing out of the school-house.
Now at last!—For Mat came. The wrung-out cheeks of the latter, and his whole body, which had been under the lemon-squeezers of night-feasts, gave evidence that he did not lie when he said the princely bridegroom looked even eight times wretcheder, and was prostrate with the gout. He added in his bitter way, which Victor little liked, that these pale great people had in fact no blood except the little they cupped from their subjects or what stuck to their hands, as insects carry no red blood about with them, save what they have sucked from other creatures. This reminded Victor of his medical duties to this prince. Either Mat's wasted form,—for immoral night-life makes features and complexion still more repulsive than the longest confinement to the sick-bed,—or the recollection of his Lordship's warnings, or both, made him quite as odious to our court-physician as the latter through his court-doctorship had become to him: this secret poison of Matthieu's, however, manifested itself, not by an abated, but by an increased, almost ironical courteousness. On the contrary, Mat and Flamin seemed to be more familiar with one another than ever.