"My dear Sir and adopted Father:"—
"I have not had hitherto spare time enough to lift my eyes up and see what moon we have. Verily, a court wants time for virtue. The Prince carries me about with him everywhere, like a smelling-bottle, and shows up his foolish Doctor. Erelong they will not be able to endure me: not because I am good for anything,—on the contrary, I am convinced they could bear the most virtuous man in the world quite as well as the worst, and that merely because he would be an Anglicism, an homme de fantaisie,[[201]] a lusus naturæ,—but because I do not talk enough. Business-people never trouble themselves about any conversational or epistolary style; but with court-people the tongue is the artery of their withered life, the spiral-spring and flag-feather of their souls; they are all born critics, who look at nothing but fine turns, expression, fire, and speech. This comes of their having nothing to do; their good works are bon mots,[[202]] their exchange business consists in visiting-cards, their housekeeping is a card-party, and their agriculture a hunting-party, and the minor service a physiognomy. Hence they must have other people's faults all day long in their ears as an antidote to tedious leisure, as the physicians inoculate with the itch to counteract stupidity; a court-establishment is the regular penny post-office of the smallest items of news, even about you commoners, when you happen to have done anything really ridiculous. It were to be wished that we had festivals, or card-parties, or plays, or assemblies, or soupers, or something good to eat, or some amusement or other; but that is not to be thought of. We have, to be sure, all these things, but only their names; the President of the Exchequer would shrug his shoulders, if we should undertake to be, four times in a year, so brilliantly happy as you are four times a month. As our week consists of seven Sundays, it follows that our amusements are only signs in the calendar, epochs of time, to which no one pays heed; and a festival is nothing but a play-room for the plans which every one has in his head, the boards on which he is to act his leading part, and the season for continuing the intrigue against victims of love and of ambition. Here there is, every minute, a stinging mosquito, and the thistle-seed of beautifully painted trouble flies round far and wide.
"There are many women here who are good, and disciples of Linnæus, and their eyes classify men botanically, according to his fine and simple sexual-system; they make a great distinction between virtuous and vicious love,—namely, that of degree, or at least of time; and the best often speaks on the subject like the worst, and the worst like the best. Meanwhile we have here female virtue and manly fidelity, in their way,—but no idea of them can be communicated to a parson; for these two jellies are so soft and delicate, that, if I should undertake to carry them down over all the steps of the throne to the parsonage, they would arrive there in such a spoiled and ruined state, that one would give them down below there the two opposite names,—for which, however, we ourselves have up here our special and corresponding objects. Your commoners would find our elderly men ridiculous in matters of love, as they would your daughters. But what often embitters for me this happy court-life is the universal want of dissimulation. For no one believes here what he hears, and no one thinks how he looks; all must, according to the regular laws of the game, like cards, have the upper side uniform, and put on an external stillness of face as a cover to the internal fire, as the lightning destroys only the sword and not the scabbard. Consequently, as a universal dissimulation is none at all, and as every one gives every other credit for poison, no one can deceive another, but only outwit him; only the understanding, not the heart, is taken in. Meanwhile, to speak the truth, that is not truth; for every one has two masks,—the general and the individual. For the rest, the colors which are used upon the scientific, refined, and philanthropic painting of the outer man are necessarily scraped off from the inner man, but advantageously, since there is not much on the inner man, and the study of appearance lessens reality: so have I often seen hares lying in the woods that had not an ounce of flesh or a drop of fat on their bodies, because all had been absorbed by the monstrous fur which had continued to grow after their death.
"If one compares the substantial value of the throne and that of the low ground of the commonalty, the physical and moral exaltation of men appears to bear an inverse relation to that of their soil, just as the inhabitants of marshy lands are larger than mountaineers. But, nevertheless, those elevated people bear the state easily on butterfly-wings, survey its wheel-work with the hundred-eyed papilio's eye, and with a walking-cane defend the people from lions, or chase therewith the lions among the people, as in Africa the children of the herdsmen scare away with a whip the real lions of Natural History from the grazing cattle.... Dear Mr. Court-Chaplain, this satire began to pain me already on the former page; but here one is malicious, just as he is vain, without knowing when: the former, because one is obliged to take too much notice of others; the latter, because he is compelled to think too much of himself. No! Your garden, your sitting-room, are pleasanter; there, is no stony breast on which one crucifies the arms and veins of friendship like a tree trained on an espalier; there, one is not obliged, as I am, to be twice a day under the barber's hands, and three times a day under the hair-dresser's; there, one has leave at least to put on his polished boot. Write soon to your adopted son, for I still deny myself the festival of a visit to you. Are there many baptisms and burials? What is Fox[[203]] doing, and the deaf bellows-blower? At this very moment I hear the mortar, instead of your rat-drum, pounding down below. Farewell.
"And now at last I greet you, beloved mother! My hand is warm, and in my heart a pair of souls are beating; for now your face, full of motherly warmth, shines on all my satirical ice-peaks, and melts them into warm blood, which will throb for you and for you flow. How good it feels to love again! Your second son, Flamin, is well, but too busy, and at present in St. Luna.[[204]] Greet my sisters and all that love you.
"Sebastian."
++++[326=361
He reserved the letter in order to despatch the Regency-Counsellor, who wanted to take his person along with him, with a freight at least.
Meanwhile his and January's joint visits, with their stage entanglements, grew to quite other ones, even a ganglion of friendship between January and himself,—and at the same time gave this friendship increased notoriety. In St. Luna, in Le Baut's house, three times as much was made out of it as there was in it,—in the parsonage, nine times. To this was added a trifle, namely, a scuffle,—properly, two. I have the incident from Spitz,—Victor got it from Flamin,—he from Matthieu,—in whose noble historical style it can here be handed over to posterity. The Evangelist was never ashamed of a commoner, provided he could make a fool of him. Therefore he visited the court-apothecary without scruple. To the latter, who cordially hated the barrack-physician, Culpepper, on account of his coarse arrogance, and on account of the reason given in the note[[205]] below, Matthieu had long since promised to upset the Doctor. As the latter and the podagra had actually been banished by Victor from January's feet, the Evangelist gave the apothecary to understand that he himself would, without his hint and wishes, have contributed far less to the fall of Culpepper than he had done. Zeusel, especially as he had the successor of the barrack-physician in his house, came after some days to the billiard-table with the certain conviction that he, from his apothecary's-shop, had thrust under Culpepper's posteriors the invisible leg, and hurled him down from the steps of the throne. There were present, unfortunately, the barrack-physician himself, and the noble Mat. Zeusel came upon this stage with the festoons of three watch-chains, with a pair of breeches on whose knees some Arabesques were printed, with a double waistcoat and double neck-tie, and with double signs of exclamation in his face at the barrack-physician;—his money-purse lay exactly under the os sacrum, because he, like some Englishmen, had caused his breeches-pocket to be concealed in the region of the breeches buckle. He had with him as his chamber-moor his long, lean dispenser, who in the adjoining drinking-room encountered the very short dispenser of the second apothecary's-shop, or shop of the canaille. The short dispenser, out of malice, followed the tall one about everywhere, merely to vex him; but this time he had just come back from the country with some hens'-eggs which he had collected as fees from convalescent patients.
Matthieu, after an exegetic hint to Zeusel, took the liberty of being of Culpepper's opinion in regard to the Prince's gout. Culpepper, who would fain be an old German,—such old Germans can never dissemble when they are angry, though they can very well do so from self-interest,—fired away and said the English doctor was a complete ignoramus. Zeusel displayed with a broad smile, as with a printer's vignette, his contempt for the coarse man. The Medicus looked like the Equator, the apothecary like Spitzbergen. Now the tourney went on merely upon the subject of the gout. The second and umpire, Matthieu, gave it to be understood, that "Zeusel, to be sure, loved his prince and lord, but still he could wish that this love had had the best means and the wholesomest influences. "In bawdy-houses," said Culpepper, "that fellow there may have influence." When the apothecary, at these words, proudly and contemptuously straightened himself up, the Doctor slowly jammed him down on the chair and on his money-purse, and, bringing down his fist upon his shoulder, nailed the little coxcomb with his purse to the seat.