"Your Highness!
"The Devil is in the Consistory: it might be a Lutheran Penitentiaria for all the Commandments, and is so only for the sixth. What an honest Consistorial administration has been able to scrape together lies there on the table. The pile might be as broad again, if the Consistory had sense enough to say, 'Who buys? fresh, new letters of indulgence for everything!'—It has shown, that, beyond certain degrees of relationship, it can grant bulls of dispensation as well as the Pope: why will it not, then, apply its indulgence to any nearer degrees? It would be able to dispense from great as well as from small, if it really set about it, and just as well from fast-day penances as from mourning, and thrice publishing, that erotic fast-time. By Heaven! if a single man, like the Pope, can be the spiritual washing-machine of whole continents, and can clean souls in bundles in the year of jubilee, then surely we all in the College may serve for the washing-machine of a single country. If that is not done, then we take—for we mean to live—sin-money and perquisites for the few things which we have graciously to wink at; and if in Sparta the judges worshipped the goddess of Fear, so with us the parties revere this fair ens.[[212]]—Had we only, at least, power to absolve from five or six great sins,—only, e. g., from a murder,—then could we allow divorces and expeditings of marriages, (these wholly opposite operations we perform successfully, just as the Karlsbad water at the same time dissolves the stone in the bladder and petrifies what is dipped into the well,) and do it for half the money."
Then, after a long pause,—"Your Excellency, it is, after all, impracticable, because the Devil has the secular counsellors mixed in among the ghostly; a half-profane session-table cannot by any cabinet-making process be made over into a holy chair; there is, therefore, nothing to be wished—except a good digestion[[213]]—but a spirit of concord, that clerical and secular counsellors may properly feed upon the parties around which they sit, saving a couple of bones, that shall fall to us scribes and messengers. So have I often seen on the carcass of a dead horse starlings and ravens at once, in a motley row, sitting amicably together, and pecking away and devouring."—
My correspondent assures me that by these addresses the Court-Physician effected more with January than the Court-Chaplain by his. Many parties got their money, and some judges a most gracious letter, from the Prince's own hand.
Before I arrive with our disguised span in the suburbs of St. Luna, one or two things are still to be mentioned. To January's soul more knee-pedals were attached than to a pianoforte, which the favorite's knee, while it seemed to bend itself, moved at its pleasure. He was always the son of the present moment, and the reflection of his company. If he read in Sully, then he did not neglect for a week at a time the Regency-College, and sent for the President of Finance. If he read in Frederick II., then he was for furnishing the imperial contingent and himself commanding it, and went forenoons to the parade. He contemplated with pleasure the ideal of a good government, whether in print or in a speech, and often attempted approximations to it, reformations, investigations, and compensations, for whole weeks,—with the exception of retrenchments, which, after all, are the only merit a prince can earn without the help of others. During the whole crusade he was a true Philosopher Antoninus, and stood ready everywhere to reward and to punish and to enact; he felt, too, that he could make it practicable, if one only did not absolutely require him to labor and to abstain; under that the other part also went to the Devil.
In the beginning, he was pleased with the sentimental journey; when it was over, he was so again; but in the midst of it, all that was pressed out after the first runnings grew more and more bitter, and he wished for himself, instead of the country bill-of-fare, his dietetic dial-plate. Then, too, he had accustomed himself so much to valor, that, for want of it,—i. e. of his body-guard,—he was, so to speak, timid; hence, on one occasion, in the dark, at the tavern, he was while in bed, about to run through a young weaver with his cane-sword, because the weaver had confounded at night the princely bed with one of more peaceful contents. For the rest, all the rays of his favor now converged to a focus upon the single man of rank, the only courageous and confidential friend whom he had,—his Victor.
But my hero had everywhere something to enjoy,—at least, the thought of St. Luna; everywhere something to eat,—at least, when they came to a fruit-tree; everywhere something to read,—and though it were only charms against fires on the house-doors, old calendars on the walls, exhortations to charity on the alms-boxes; everywhere something to think of,—of the travelling pair, of the four acts of Nature's seasons, which are annually given over again, of the thousand acts in man, which never return; and everywhere something to love and to dream of,—for this was the very road which Clotilda had so often gone over on her journeys between Maienthal and St. Luna, and the friend of her rich heart found on this classic avenue nothing but great remembrances, magic passages, and a long, quiet, homelike bliss....
"St. Luna!" cried January, delighted at the mere thought of seeing once more a man of the world,—Le Baut. The mask of an emigrant was a thought he had himself hit upon, the better to draw out the Chamberlain, with whom he meant finally to give himself out as an hereditary foe of the Prince. Had there been in Le Baut's soul a higher nobility than the heraldic, or had Victor but known that the Chamberlain would recognize the Prince at the first glance, and that he would be able to do so for the very reason that the genuine suspended Consistorial Messenger had probably before this whispered the whole secret in the ear of the city of Flachsenfingen, he would have dissuaded him from the noble masque.
Sebastian, as we have mentioned, stayed back and in the open air, probably out of shame at his part, and evidently from a longing to look upon Clotilda's sunny face, which for so long a time had not risen upon him, in a scene more convenient and congenial to his heart. "And the parents will be glad to see me again," he thought beside, "when they have something to thank me for,"—namely, Clotilda's place at court. More than once did he start, as he stood watching there behind the blanket of the dark, to hear his name called out of the Parsonage, and, in fact, with such love and such longings for his answer that he could almost have given one. But it was only the people of the Parsonage talking with his little godson, and saying to him, "Dearest good Sebastian! Just see here: what have I got for you?" How the veiled paradise of to-day's spring lay in old relics around him! How he envied the shadowy heads in the palace, which he saw moving about the lights, and the old Parson's pug-dog, who would fain wag him in to the Parsonage-inmates, and who continued in there to perform his part on the stage of so sweet a past! But when some thistles round the palace reminded him of the mosaic ones on the floor within-doors, then was the envier to be envied, and, with the fairest dreams that were ever traced over the ground of his dark life, he went back to the Apothecary's.
The next day January followed, delighted with the parents, enraptured with the daughter, because they were so fine and she so fair. It cost my hero nothing but a word to move the step-father to the intercession for the appointment of the step-daughter, which our hero and the father had so often longed to see; and it cost the step-father, too, only a word with the Princess to get his and their petition granted.... Clotilda became maid-of-honor.