It may be stated, that I suppressed the foregoing letter of Emanuel in the first edition, for the simple reason—for I had it in my hands early enough, as well as many other documents of this history, which nevertheless (for reasons) will never be published—that I feared it would be affecting; a susceptible soul finds, as it is, too many sorrows in this volume!—But for that very reason we will not leave out what there was, in the first edition, of the comic, and accordingly I proceed.
We readers will, with Victor, take leave of the Chamberlain, who, with his half upright eyebrows,—they incline to each other at the bridge of the nose in the form of the mathematical sign of the root,[[146]]—parts from us with true, obliging courteousness. I know, when we are gone, he will let us find justice, and will make too much out of us; for he never calumniates either from malice or from levity, and whom he calumniates, him he has a serious intention to destroy, because he would rather make one unhappy than paint him black.—When I saw him bend down so to us, I executed in thought a half-satire upon him, whereof the true and serious purport may be this: that men are actually created for the purpose of making themselves as crooked as the spiritus asper[[147]] is. I do not exactly build much upon this, that geometers have written: If the Gods assumed a form, it must be the most perfect, that of a circle; I might, to be sure, draw this conclusion from that, that a crooked back is at least an approximation to the divine form, because it is an arc of a circle,—but I do not care to; for the physical is child's play on this subject, and only of consequence in so far as it partly indicates the crooking and creeping of the soul, and partly (e. g. by the narrowing of the chest) promotes it. Even at court they would dispense with the external bending, if they could be sure that the inner and nobler crook of the disposition were there, without the sign; for as, according to Kant, the subjection and casting down of our self-conceit is a requirement of the purer and the Christian morality: accordingly one who has absolutely no moral excellences must with his self-consciousness thereof stoop still lower than to lowliness, which even the virtuous has; he must sink to that which I call a noble crawling. I confess I do not despise the practice which the little rules of breeding insure herein, and which besides undertakes to be nothing but virtue in trifles, the rules, namely, that one shall bow when one contradicts,—when one praises,—when one receives an insult,—when one offers one,—when one bows another down,—when one would just precisely play the Devil. But it is well that such a virtue of crooking has its own places of exercise, and does not depend on chance. At court a man with straight body and spirit would be cast out as dead, in the court sense, like a crab with a straight tail, which only a dead one carries. If formerly hermits chose lowly cells, in order not to stand upright, a man of the world does not need this; lofty banquet-halls, temples of pleasure, dancing-halls, press him down so much the lower, the higher they are themselves.—It were bad, if this so important virtue of bending downward presupposed a special strength of mind or body, which no one, indeed, can bestow on himself; but exactly the reverse is the case; it will have only weakness, which with horses is not so, for they can no longer let down the tail when its sinews are cut. If the Pharisees carried lead in their caps in order to make it easier for them to stoop,[[148]] the lead which one brings into the world with him, and which lies in the head, renders perhaps still greater services. Hence it is a fine arrangement, that great souls, for which, as for tall statures, stooping is disagreeable, fortunately (but for their punishment) never come to anything, whereas mediocre ones, who make nothing of it, flourish and put forth a goodly crown: thus have I often seen in the baking of bread, that every moderate loaf in the oven rose and arched beautifully, but the big one remained sitting there flat and miserable.—But we should be subjects for pity, if a virtue which constitutes the worth of the civilian, the virtue of becoming not merely like children, but like fœtuses, which double themselves up in the mother's body,—if this could only prosper in the highest place, as one must almost suppose, since the courtier after the fall goes upright again on his estate,—whereas the serpent before the fall and during the temptation did not creep.—But in all civil relations educational institutions for crooklings are provided; everywhere there stretches out in the air now a spiritual and now a secular arm, which gives us the regular crook, and still higher are the longest of all set, which reach over whole nations. The scholar himself bends over his writing-desk under the birth of introductions and courtly dedications and opinions. By the mere hoariness of old age the body as well as the spirit ripens to a bony humpback, and the lower clergy, because they are always looking downward into the grave, work themselves into the crooked posture.—I conclude with the consolation that bending does not exclude inflation, but includes it; just as the circle, of which one is a section, runs innumerable times around the swollen surface of the sphere....
I would truly have written over this "Extra-leaf" that title as a heading,—so that the reader might have skipped it,—had I not wished that he should read it, by way of diverting himself, and of sharing more easily with my Victor his dismal hours. For every stroke of the clock is a death-bell sounding out a dead march for the wreck of his fairer hours.
The very evening he entered into Flachsenfingen, stories quite as ugly as probable came to his ears; Mat had told the Apothecary a good deal; but this time I give in to his reports.
That is to say, the Parson, so soon as he heard of the betrothal, had set out for the city in order to frustrate murderous deeds and duels on the part of his son. As during his dressing the whole of his travelling uniform did not lie at the very instant before his eyes, he threw off to his family light red-crayon-drawings of the bloody scenes and bloody scaffolds, upon which, he said, he reckoned, as he probably, on account of the detention in dressing, should arrive too late. The shrunk boot which Appel had dried a little at the fire could not be got on to the foot,—Eymann gasped,—pulled, "It is possible," said he, "that they are at this very moment letting fly at each other";—at last he let his arms fall back powerless, and sat calmly and firmly bolt upright, and waited silently for them to fire at him and question him. When nothing came, he said with fury: "Whatever Satan it may be that has got into my house, and has made my boots shrink up so, (I would undertake to get my foot into a leather queue, through a needle's eye, but not into one of them,) he has the murder of my child upon his soul.—Is there then no child of misery about here, that will just polish my heel for me with a little soft soap?"—While they were forcing in his foot, he saw Appel still busily ironing away at his shirt-bosom: "Enough, Appel! very good!"—said he,—"I really shall not unbutton myself." She glided away lightly on the flat, which was, as it were, the skate under her hand. "Daughter, thy father wants his shirt. The life of thy own brother is put in jeopardy by thee,—it is just as if thou wert giving him the finishing stroke!" She glided nimbly only once more on her hand-skate over the whole, and then handed it to him with pleasure.
On the way the chaplain sketched to himself a safe and sound plan of proceeding in the business. He would in the beginning make no disclosure of the engagement to Flamin,—then he was going to read to him only the penitential text upon the Maienthal duel,—then to extort from him the Urphede or solemn oath to keep quiet,—and only at the very last to come out with the report. While he was thinking over the plan and the danger, he ran himself into a hotter and hotter sweat of anxiety. Just as he had once, by a long drawing out of consequences, driven himself and a patient who had a slight buzzing in the ears to such a pitch, that they both expected the next minute apoplexy and paralysis of half one side: so, in the present instance, by a picturesque treatment of the details of an imaginary duel he at last removed from himself so thoroughly all doubts about one's having already transpired that he passed in through the city gate with the firm conviction that the Regency-Councillor was lying either in chains or on the bier. "Thank God that I see thee without wounds and without chains," was the expression that escaped from him on his entrance; and he had almost spoiled his whole business plan, or at least reversed it. Flamin understood him to refer to the first duel. Eymann could so much the more easily follow out the management of the case and phlebotomical table of rules which he had laid down, and, so to speak, fight a duel with the duel. The silent son had nothing to oppose to him—but light beer. While he was getting it, the Parson had pulled at the knobs of all the canes to see whether there were no sword-canes. A pistol-like tinder-box at a distance was a suspicious object to him. A double-barrelled gun on the wall near by, with its—stock aimed at him, took away much of his courage. Flamin excused his taciturnity on the ground of legal plethora and over-freighting of the brain, and pointed to the pile of criminal documents before him. When he was called upon to give him an extemporaneous abstract of them, and when of course the war-cries prison, blood-guiltiness, avenging sword, whizzed like a hissing rain of bullets round Eymann's ears; then did the agony which he aggravated by the more rapid douche of the pale ale expand itself so mightily within him that the double-barrelled gun had to be hung up in the chamber: "I get nothing by it," said he, "if it goes off and bursts, and the lock flies into my face, or if the stock actually kills me." Now he began in a compound fit of emotion and intoxication to weep and to exhort: that a man ought to think on the fifth petition in the Lord's prayer,—that a country clergyman could with ill-grace preach to his spiritual fold reconciliation, if he had a son in the city, who during the sermon was fighting a duel,—and that Flamin must never say he was his son, if he either got or gave the fatal shot in a duel. Nothing so easily drew the storm-wind of Flamin's anger out of its cavern, as a doleful voice and long religious edicts. "For God's sake," cried Flamin, "let that be enough now,—God shall punish me, I will be lost to all eternity, I swear to you, if I ever touch him even." This oath which escaped him was magnificent marshmallow-paste and soft ice-cream for the heated court-chaplain, who from forgetfulness of his order of business now adopted the opinion that the betrothal was already full well known to the Regency-Councillor. "Thinkest thou not, son," said he joyfully, "that such an oath refreshes and comforts an anxious father like the latter rain, especially as, since her betrothal to him, I have had absolutely nothing better to look for than murder and assassination? Am I right or not?"—Flamin flung up by a single question the cover from this murderous armed spectre of his heart,—and now he heard his father no more; pale, full of convulsions, he sat there in silence,—the back of the chair cracked under his pressure,—he twisted and tied his watch-chain round his fingers, and tore it off and mashed the remnant again round the bruised finger and crushed it to pieces,—in his glassy eyes stood two heavy, rigid, cold drops,—his heart shrank up empty and spiritless before an approaching and frightful death-chill, which, when a friendship is murdered in a bosom, always precedes the burning wrath thereby excited.—Ah, who of us does not pity the unhappy, forsaken soul?—Eymann went away deceived, and took this calm for mere calm, and the broken and choked voice for emotion.
And in this bloody state he was found by Matthieu, who had just come to announce to the Regency-Councillor, as if with twenty-four blowing postilions (from a note of the wife of the Chamberlain), Victor's victory over the whole of them. This fellow now first transformed the iceberg into a volcano, and made Flamin in his pent-up fury feel as if he could shatter to pieces one quarter of the world against another.
Victor heard nothing now for some days. Flamin locked himself up. Matthieu visited him often, but not the house of the Apothecary. The crowned pair arrived at last at the baths of St. Luna.
Thus all remained till the morning when Victor took leave of the Apothecary to go to Maienthal before the curtain of a heavy scene. Here the Apothecary could not deny himself the pleasure of depriving the Court-Physician of his, by imparting to him the (probably false) intelligence, that the Page had challenged the Chamberlain on account of his breach of promise with regard to Clotilda. Little or no importance is to be attached to the report, for the reason, if for no other, that the Apothecary wanted only to cough out his own praise and disguise it in the shape of a commendation of Victor, that the latter had known how, with such infinite finesse, to carry out his recent hints of undermining the Evangelist. The hints were, as will be recollected, the two propositions of becoming the lover of the Princess and the husband of Clotilda, in order to gain the Prince, and thus, as a swine does a rattlesnake, to swallow Mat with impunity. One must forgive the soul of Victor, gnawed by a worm's-nest of afflictions, for blazing up and attacking Zeusel with an eye full of the profoundest contempt, "I know not who would deserve to listen to such propositions,—unless it is he who can make them."
My correspondent leaves off abruptly and sadly with the words: "Late in the evening, Victor arrived with swollen eyes at Maienthal, to see whether on the next day his noblest teacher and greatest friend would wither away."—We can all conceive what must be the embrace of a loved one a few paces from his grave. The friend who threatens us with his death takes a painful hold of our soul, even if we doubt it. We can all imagine the wet eye which Victor must have cast on the still blooming scene of his withered rose-feast.—What consoles him is the improbability of the predicted death, since Emanuel is as well as usual, and since suicide is still more impossible with this pious spirit, who long since compared the suicide to the lobster, who cannot draw out the claw which he himself in his stupidity has jammed and crushed with its mate, but snaps it off.—May the reader bring with him to the description of the longest day,[[149]] which I am to make all alone under the exalting stillness of night, a heart like that of the East Indian, which like old temples is dumb and dark, but vast and full of holy images!