Such satires made the Prince right merry and incredulous. Dr. Culpepper, on the contrary, stood upon his dignity, and would have drawn his sword against a satirist who had talked of the slow decimation of physicians, and by a swifter one have completely refuted him. I advise every one who wants to be anything in the world (that is anything different from what he is) to appear among men as a funeral-bidder,—with women, as a godfather-bidder.—The Prince in the sickly spring held himself, for two reasons, to be possessed with the gout again: first, because I have never yet known a nervous weakling who, when I had talked a disease out of him in summer, did not the next sickly winter get it into his head again; secondly, because January calculated that he had fallen on his knee before ladies often enough to feel the traces of his adoration still lingering in the shape of gonagra or knee-gout.
So stood matters, when a little accident made our Victor happy again. Only I must say beforehand that, independently of that, he was not at all unhappy: for a lover never worries himself about anything, certainly not about a court; he has on Cupid's bandage, and willingly forgives Fortune and Justice theirs. And the moral Easter-eve bonfire melted—just as superstition ascribes to the physical one a peculiar power—all the ice wherewith they dammed up Victor's blood into the lymph of joy; the Easter-wind—which, according to the weather-prophets, continues till Whitsuntide—set his old joy-flowers in motion, and wafted forth from them the pollen of future ones; the snow dissolved on the hot spring awaking from its winter sleep, and the first flowers and the thousand buds gave all hearts energies and hopes and love. O when Victor looked out of doors toward the green-growing path which, with fresh sap-colors, (for in spring the foot-paths grow green first,) would fain lure and lead him out of the midst of the after-grass heath to the Eden of Maienthal,—and then when he turned round glowing and thirsting, and ran over into the sketched Maienthal, into the borrowed views, and there climbed every colored mountain, and encircled every dotted-out garden with his fingers and fancies,—then he did not think himself that a little accident could make him still more joyous.—And yet it did.
It is not well done of me that I always—and it is a thing I have become very much accustomed to in this biography—call that an accident which is a direct great-grandchild by blood of former chapters, and which really must come. For the crape hat—that was the accident—must indeed come, because it was bespoken. It was, however, the—original itself. Besides, in so small a time no hat could have been made by the nimblest master-builder of finery; and yet Sebastian never would have thought, had not traces of powder and opened lace-lattices compelled him, to distinguish the old hat from a new one. In short, Clotilda had given it to Agatha, who could not conceal from her for whom she was taking the copy, before the third Easter-holiday, for the purpose of letting her copy it, and after the aforesaid day had written to her to send her the copy and pass off the original upon the Medicus for the imitation, (as in the case of the wax-statue,)—and why, perhaps?—O, of that her friend had a sweet consciousness; she was sorry that she could not give a shy, delicate heart anything, not a sound, nor a glance, nor a joy, nor a reminiscence of the fairest evening, except its mere autumnal after-flora, mere silk-flowers sewed together in imitation of that flower of joy, the taffeta shadow of a taffeta-shade.... No, she did violence to herself, in order to give the mute darling at least more than a copy of the shadow. O, if the loving, closed heart of a good woman should open before a man, how much controlled tenderness, how many veiled sacrifices and dumb virtues, would he see reposing therein!
—One must, at any rate, with the German Diet and its cross-benches; make no mystery of the fact, that Victor would not accept the ninth Electoral hat, or in fact the eighth and last, on condition of parting with the crape hat.... What can the thickest, heaviest crowns, said he, which have been exhibited to me in my travels, weigh in the one scale,—even supposing one should throw in also several tiaras and doges' caps with bows and papal hats,—if Clotilda's crape hat weighs down the other? As the reader has quite as much intelligence as I, let him decide the question.—This hat gave him an inexpressible longing for Maienthal, and was to him a dedicatory copper-plate which (as by an investitura per pileum) first presented Clotilda to him; he stood before this crown as an heir to the crown—every minute drew his coronation-chariot—with two big drops of joy, which the happy eye could not hold, and said slowly, gently shaking his head: "No, kind destiny gives me too much.—Ah, how can I deserve this soul from heaven?—I will merely say to her, I am thine! and by and by, some day, Thou art mine!" And when his fancy actually opened behind the crape-latticework the two great eyes which had once concealed behind it the tears of a rejected heart, and when he let the remote voice discourse again out of shadowy threads behind this nunnery-grating, then he could no longer restrain himself from writing,—so that he might thus go to Maienthal,—as he sat opposite the hat, his first letter to her, which I shall certainly get from the dog by to-morrow evening's post.—
I believe I have not yet said that Agatha handed him the hat, and that she invited him—it is now towards the end of April—to the birthday of her father on the 4th of May. Victor thought on the melancholy 4th of May of the year '92, and grew still more full of yearning for the friend who was torn from him.
Before closing the chapter, I will only say to the younger Clotildas, the Vice-Clotildas, the illegitimate Clotildas, and the Counter-Clotildas, who have me and my chapters in their laps: Be cool. You cannot possibly carry the coldness of virtue too far, unless you absolutely set no limits to it. I will, on your account, dress up this doctrine in wise sayings and witty sentences, that it may be the better adapted to fans and albums.
Love, like the seed of the Auricula, must be sown on snow; both are warmed through by ice itself, and then spring up so much the more vigorously.—You must never give yourselves as a mere present, but as a lady's acknowledgment of thanks to her knight.—You receive and deserve exactly as much respect as you demand, and you can, though you should be alloyed as much as you pleased, take your mint-die or coin-stamp out of your pocket and coin yourselves therewith as a lady d'or for one gentleman, or as a miserable little fat-mannikin[[58]] for another.—A rake indicates in a company, like a measurer of the purity of the air, by the different degrees of his boldness, the different degrees of female merit, only in inverse relation....
Even if it did not belong to the female point of honor, one must still desire, merely for the sake of having one trouble more,—because, my sex thinks on this subject entirely with me, who desire a daughter from no recruiting-house of sons-in-law, where at least the parents have not something against me;—and let it hereby be known (therefore I do not insert it in the newspaper) that I expect of parents, who in their auction-room of daughters, in their love-inoculation-hospital, have one or two subjects to dispose of, and to whom a Mining-Superintendent, Justice, Music-Master, and Biographer—such may be my few offices—is no too contemptible match,—that I [I repeat] expect of such parents, that (if they mean the thing seriously) they will at least forbid me the house or frequent correspondence:—that enlivens sons-in-law.
