Victor determined now to make only visits that annoyed himself and pleased his neighbor. The first was an extraordinary tribute of a visit to the Princess (for his daily portioning-tax[[53]] of calls on her now ceased). To be sure, the thick hour-watch of old Bee-father Lind was every minute an alarm-clock to hold up before him his former foolhardy jokes, his watch-enclosure, and love-letter to Agnola. I cannot avoid the apprehension that the reader may make a slip, and not dream with what heart Sebastian went to the Princess;—O, with one full of dumb apologies and—exculpations, with a distended breast full of proud confidence, and yet full of sympathetic mildness. Whence came this?—It came from the fair soul which now, reconciled and filled up with another's love, could wish nothing more but friendship, and which was now too happy to be inexorable. But he found in her apartment two cold, refined faces, which it is quite as hard to apologize to as to forgive,—namely, her own and that of Count von O. from Kussewitz, in whose house her transfer had taken place. Victor blushed; the Count appeared not to have the least knowledge of him,—they were not introduced to each other,—but talked together as genially as if they had been (especially as it made no difference),—and so, with cold feelings, and with the greatest indifference about their own and each other's anonymousness, they politely separated. Only Victor afterward worried himself with doubts whether he had not sooner than Agnola called the unknown Count by that title.
For the rest, he now, for the first time since he had loved Clotilda, found the partition-wall between love and friendship with women to be very visible and very thick: before that he could see through the partition-wall well enough. A woman cannot choose for herself a firmer or purer friend than another woman's lover.
Victor must now also, and for still more urgent reasons, visit Joachime. The evil spirit, which, like the youngest councillors, always gives its voice first in man, made the motion that "he should indulge Joachime in the slight illusion of believing that he loved her."—As this did not pass, the filou[[54]] took another voice, and proposed that "he should punish her for her former ambiguity by the most unambiguous signs of his hatred."—But he followed willingly the good spirit which led him by the hand, and said on the way, "Go now to her,—disengage thyself from her without giving her any pain,—let thy hand glide gradually out of hers, and clear one finger after another, as maidens do with their natural hand, and assume the attitude neither of her enemy nor of her lover." He went to her house without any selfish consideration; for the latter would rather have prompted him to stay at home, and enjoy and turn over the leaves of the past and future, or else to quit the house and go to St. Luna, to sit down by Agatha beside the crape hat of Clotilda which she was studying.
In order, however, not to let his visit have too much weight in the eyes of Joachime, he proposed to himself to beg of her for some weeks the views of Maienthal, which hung in her room. O Maienthal, how much thou must have, if the very sketch of thee makes one so happy!—But his visit turned out singularly. He wished on the way that he might find in her toilette-chamber the fine fool and the fragrant fool and more stuff;—there was nothing there. She received him with a careless gayety, as if she were the Columbine[[55]] and the Medicus the clown. He, however, was going merely to execute the gradual weakening or diminuendo of his moral dissonances; therefore he became, by his constant looking off at his note-stand, and at the score of his inner harmony, somewhat stiff and awkward in his playing. Women easily distinguish the coldness of reason (if only by the very want of extravagance) from coldness of mood. Now he asked for the views. Joachime did not grow cooler, but warm, i. e. serious, and lifted up her watch in the hollow of her hand, and said, looking at it, "I give you as many minutes' grace as you have stayed away days, to excuse your staying away." Victor accepted without embarrassment—like every one who acts only according to one, either good or bad, principle—the allowed time for decision, and took the montre à régulateur from under the looking-glass, that Joachime might not cheat him. This cursed watch of the Princess grinned at him everywhere, like a percussion-ball and powder-mine under his feet. He wound it up just to have a chance to open this Nuremberg egg (as they used to call watches), and finally for once to examine whether the love-declaration, i. e. the punctum saliens of love, or the Cupid,—who also, according to Plato, came out of an egg,—was still in there. "I know well enough—he said to himself—it has been gone this long time, but I'll just try it."
There might have been, indeed, a question whether it was the same watch, as the one in Tostato's shop had no diamonds,—had there not come fluttering out from this Pandora's box, so soon as it was opened at the window, a little thin piece of paper half as big as a butterfly's wing, and as long as the stamen of a tulip.—The little leaf took flight at every breath of wind.—Joachime caught the thing,—read the thing,—found the declaration of love still there,—took it for one which he was just making to herself, by way of atoning for his absence, and which, for the sake of the wit (he might allude to its heart-shape), he had been trying to incorporate into the watch....
Every one can imagine how he felt about the matter.—He would have got through it very well, if he had dared to lie terribly, or if he could have ventured at least to imitate the few courtiers who, into the twenty-eight pounds of blood which irrigate their bodies, have not instilled twenty-eight drops of honest blood,—of which a single one may, as a liquor probatorius, leave behind in the remaining mass confounded precipitates. But his soul loathed this new bait to lure him to a lie. The reader cannot possibly yet know that Victor shot aside from the mark,—that is to say, that, on account of the remoteness of Joachime's suspicion, he did not guess it at all, but fell upon the nearer one, that Joachime had nosed out his whole whimsical trick upon the Princess. He was never capable of holding up another's body as a shield against the arrows which were aimed at his own,—a habit on the Court-Moriah, which, not, like the Old Testament plan, redeems an Isaac with a ram, but a ram with an Isaac; he was to-day least of all capable of sacrificing the Princess to save himself; but neither could he bring himself even to this, to sacrifice Joachime for the sake of saving her, i. e. to recoin the devil's-billet into a sweet-billet (billet-doux) to Joachime. The Satan in him screamed himself hoarse to get him only so far along, that he at least would lie by silent expression of countenance, and justify hers, wherein there began to be less and less appearance as if she supposed it directed to another lady.
He told her right out plainly what he was,—a fool. He narrated the whole business in Kussewitz. He concluded by saying that it was lucky for him that the Princess had not at all detected the crazy insertion into the watch.... As now he recited all this monotonously without a single flattery, out of which some sort of a new and improved edition of the insertion might possibly have been made, he was fortunate enough, at his departure, to leave the enlightened Joachime in a state which, after such magnetic passes, expresses itself with cultivated women in a fine, proud exaltation, and with uncultivated ones in the attempt to put the sculptor's last touch to a man, just as the Greek artists did to their models,—namely, with the finger-nails. Victor took his leave with two very different sorts of views, those of the future and those of Maienthal.—
She kept the billet. Not fear, however, but the bitter feeling that his former follies ended only in another's heart with an abortive hope, this trickled with bitter drops into the sweet, rejuvenating sensation of having acted right at his own expense. An emotion, a tear, is an oath before Heaven that one will be good;—-but a single sacrifice steels thy soul more than five tears of penitence and ten penitential sermons.
I have not the courage to guess why the Princess should have given the watch with the enclosure which she (even by the showing of her conversation with Tostato) must have read, into the hands of Joachime; but to the suspicious knaves whom I thought of when writing the chapter of her eye-bandaging and kiss, this is a windfall: the present of the watch confirms them entirely in their knavish creed; for they can now—despite all my efforts to the contrary—allege the gift as a sign of the Italian revenge which Agnola had proposed to herself to take upon her rival Joachime (to whom she must needs ascribe Victor's resistance) in the fact of communicating to her his declarations of love in other quarters.
Victor proposed to himself, as he took the greatest physical strides homeward, to take similar politic ones, and to confess plumply to the Prince: "It is not much over nine months since I troubled your Illustrious Highness's bride with a flimsy declaration of love, which she certainly cannot have ever read, and which now changes hands." But at present the opening of the affair of the watch-letter was impracticable: January was a little vexed at Clotilda's withdrawal; Victor had also for some time been less about him than usual, which certainly with an honest favorite ought not to be so, as, e. g., the famous Count von Brühel[[56]] watched, like a mother, around his master from morn to midnight. January seemed in this loneliness to think more of his children, and Victor had no tidings to impart to him from his Lordship. The main thing, moreover, was his spring sickliness, which made him again the credulous disciple of Dr. Culpepper and the gout. This doctor's trunk under a doctor's hat, whose brain-fibres were twisted to bass-strings, extolled his simplicities, merely by the solemn pomposity with which he delivered himself of them, beyond their value; of certain persons, e. g. physicians, financiers, economical-agents, even people of fine manners require stiff ones, and make more account of a pointed wig than of a hair-bag as big as a buckle or a Titus's-head.[[57]] Sebastian appeared to people much too waggish to allow them to think that he had learned anything. In the article of physicians—as in every main article of property or of life—the most distinguished vulgar think as the lowest, and prize men and lapdogs according to shaggy wildness of exterior. Besides, Victor had the fault of bringing himself and the physicians under suspicion of a thirst for glory, in that he praised them outright; e. g. "By their impressment of sailors and dead men they were a sort of buyers-up of souls for the next world, and served for nut-crackers to the good angels, who desired the kernel without the bodily shell, in order to transplant it. How often do we not obviate," he continued, "the most dangerous transfers of maladies by an easy transfer of the patient? I might appeal to the refugiés from this world, whether our sandbox and inkstand (the implements of our receipts) are not the sowing-machine and waterpot of the winter-crop of humanity; but the survivors shall speak and answer whether, for the benefices, the regiments, the estates in fee, the order-ribbons, which fall to them, they have not to thank our recipes and Uriah's-letters, and whether they or even kings would sit high and dry, without our frequent ditching and draining in the churchyard.—And yet, methinks, our renown in the way of healing and bringing to life is quite as great, if not greater; this glory—as well as the lists of mortality on which it is based—has remained for many centuries the same,—our theories, specifics, judgments, may change as they will."