"It is so,—and therefore I also wrote to his Lordship," said he, "that thy French name, Jean Paul, brought thee under suspicion; and as thou, besides, didst not thyself know thy origin, and, in addition to that, thy foolish bit of life-road, which, as in an English garden, would not reach a mile in a straight direction"—
"The biographer," said I, "should, in fact, be his own."[[204]]—
"It is incomprehensible to me now how it was that I did not happen upon this in the first instance; for thy resemblance to Sebastian, which the fifth son of the Prince should also have, thou hast thyself long since remarked,—and thy Stettin box-picture on the shoulder-blade, which these gentlemen here all have about them, and which his Lordship himself beheld day before yesterday, during the bandaging."
"So! so!" said I, "it was for this, then, that your biographer got the falcon's hood, the wound in the back, the fine black steed, and the stranger in Hof was his Lordship?"—
In short, by all this his Lordship had fully convinced himself that I was the one whom he had so long sought; for he had previously long since received Fenk's communication through fifteen hands, inasmuch as it travelled from Hamburg, or rather from the land of the Hadeln, to Ziegenhain in Lower Hesse, then into the Principality of Schwabeck, then into the Duchy of Holzapfel, to Schweinfurt, to Scheer-Scheer, and still back again to * * and to * * *, and finally to Flachsenfingen, where he at last received it; there, in the Isle of Union, he had been concealed a long time, until the communication, the ending of October, which as it were underscored the maternal marls with red ink, and, most of all, the banishing from St. Luna of the three brothers who landed on the island, constrained him to travel off to Scheerau, or rather to Hof in Voigtland. Here, naturally, I was obliged to meet him, according to a concert with the Italian servant (i. e. with Dr. Fenk), on account of which he sent me from my island after the forty-fifth chapter, and whose repetition came to hand in the billet intercepted by the blind one, and now deciphered; and my old face, which he forthwith compared with a younger engraving of the fifth princely son, threw at once in the "Oat-lane" the most ample light upon everything.
So soon as he knew this, he left me to travel on alone, under my tin bee-cap and Moses's veil, and hurried forward to the Prince just one minute before it was too late. For Matthieu had betrayed all; and they were just on the point of sending to arrest the three twins, on the island where they had taken refuge, and our Victor at his mother's house, wherein he had already forgotten court and nobility for patients and sciences and bride, when his Lordship sent in his name to the Prince. The Prince was afraid of being persuaded by him, as Cæsar was of Cicero. His Lordship—whose soul, indeed, was a petrographic[[205]] chart of sublime ideas—confounded the measures of the Prince by a more daring and defiant boldness than these measures had reckoned on. He began with the intelligence, that he brought not merely one son to the Prince, but all; which last thing he had not promised, for the reason that he could not know how far fate would perhaps leave or lead him.—He forced the Prince to listen to a long and cold discourse, wherein he laid before him the plan of study for the five sons, and their development, history, and destiny; while he seemed to presuppose the proofs of their extraction, he however wove them elaborately into the inferences he drew from it. Thus, e. g., he said, no one had known about the important secret but her Ladyship and Clotilda and Emanuel, whose sacred documents, sealing all with death, he here presented him, together with others for the children; only a certain court-page had, during his blindness, stolen and abused one of five secrets. His Lordship did not pluck to pieces this snare of a soul, because, as he said, it was too insignificant for satisfaction, too black-dyed for punishment, and because he himself besides would soon depart out of these regions forever. In short, with his omnipotence he took such a hold of the Prince, and drew all veils so clean off from the past, that he almost compelled him, instead of condemning or acquitting, merely to deprecate and to exchange accusation and mistrust for gratitude. The single good thing, Lord Horion said in conclusion, which the Page had done, was, that, by his weed-sowing-machines, he had ripened and expedited the great and fair recognition precisely for a monthly period, when the festoon of the five shoulders (the maternal moles) were in full bloom. The Prince, in spite of the other party's iciness, was melted, for his paternal love was enriched with new treasures. Nevertheless, he mixed in with his thanks this delicate reproach against Victor's pretended nobility: "I am full of gratitude for you, although you deprive me too soon of the opportunity of showing it. Hitherto I have rejoiced that I could at least prove to the son how very much indebted, if not grateful, I was to the father. But you know my error." His Lordship—now made more pliant by victory—replied: "I know not whether good intentions and bad circumstances excuse me; but I could regard him only as worthy to be your body physician, whom I— acknowledged worthy to be my son."—The Prince embraced him cordially; his Lordship reciprocated it quite as warmly, and said: "On the 31st of October," (that is to-day, and he said it yesterday,) "he would seal his honest sentiments toward the Prince in a manner more decisive than words."—
Noble man! Thou consumest nothing on the earth beyond thyself, and art a storm-bird, through whose fat a wick of the lamp is threaded, and which is now burned out and carbonized by its own light,—I have a presentiment, as if thy fair soul would soon be on another, higher Isle of Reunion than this earthly one!
I write this on the' forenoon of the 31st of October, at ten o'clock, on the island.
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