Look not now, my friends, at the dismal moment when for the last time he takes Clotilda's hand, and severs his heart from hers, and yet only says, "A happy journey, Clotilda, a peaceful life, Clotilda, joy be with thee, Clotilda!"
—And at a distance from the village he fell on his knees beside the blind one, with a mute prayer for the mourning heart which he had now lost for the last time.—
Not until four o'clock in the morning did he arrive with the blind-one, without weariness, without tears, and without thoughts, at Flachsenfingen.
[40. DOG-POST-DAY.]
The Murderous Duel.—Apology for the Duel.—Prisons regarded as Temples.—Job's-Wails of the Parson.—Legends of my Biographical Past.—Potato-Planting.
As I am on the point of entering upon the fortieth day with the observation, "The history of the duel is still full of regular ciphers, and is a true unfigured thorough-bass,"-a piece of the forty-third comes to hand and figures the bass and puts the vowel-points to the Hebrew consonants. To this young forerunning[[162]] of the forty-third chapter one is indebted for the fact that I can relate the shooting-history with better spirits.
It will not be guessed who boiled up the most furiously at Clotilda's engagement,—namely, the Evangelist. He was vexed with the bold faithlessness of the Chamberlain, whose courtliness he had hitherto managed by coarseness, and so much the more because a human mixture of imbecility and flattery like Le Baut exasperates us unspeakably, when it passes over from flatteries to insults. Still more was he who set on Flamin himself set on by the widow of the Chamberlain, who stirred into his elementary fire soft oil and some matches; she hated Clotilda because she was loved, and our hero because he did not, like the Evangelist, set the step-mother above the step-daughter. A woman who has gone to the death for a man, i. e. into a short sleep (which is death to the good), namely, into a swoon,—as this very widow did in the Eighth Post-Day,—must be expected of course to hate this man, if he will not let himself be loved. The Evangelist, who had hitherto taken the love of Victor and Clotilda only for the accidental gallantry of a moment, and who had also looked upon the flying attachment to his sister Joachime as nothing more serious, was devilishly mad at the mis-shot in the first case, and at the royal shot in the second; and he determined to avenge himself and his sister, whom he loved more than his father, on both.
Joachime was additionally and bitterly enraged with Victor, because she believed herself and her love to have been hitherto abused as a mere cloak for his love to Clotilda. I have stated above that Matthieu, after the Eymann visit, made his to Flamin. When the Councillor had disclosed to him the interview with the Parson and his decisory oath, Mat formed his resolution and threw much upon the Chamberlain: "This fellow was a small sharper and a great courtier,—he had perhaps had more to do than the lover had with Clotilda's excursion to the baths of Maienthal,—he, and not so much Victor, sought to make out of his daughter a lark's net for the Prince's heart and a gradus ad Parnassum of the Court." Flamin was right down glad that his vengeance had got another object besides him with whom he had sworn to his father not to quarrel. Meanwhile he did not conceal from the Councillor (to be impartial) that the Apothecary proclaimed everywhere, from exasperation against Sebastian, that the latter had gotten the plan of this marriage as a stepping-stone to promotion entirely from him, from Zeusel. Flamin, in such bone-fractures of the breast, always resorted at once to the chalybeate (steel-cure) of the sword, the lead-water of bullets; and the cautery of the sabre; and as the duel with Victor, one of noble extraction, had spoiled him, he would also in the first heat have proposed it to the three-buttoned[[163]] fellow, when Mat ridiculed the incompetent plebeian. Flamin cursed in vain fury his defect of ancestry, which hindered him from letting himself be shot by one ancestrally endowed; nay, he would have been capable—as he kindled quickly and yet cooled slowly—for a mere verbal insult from a nobleman (as one actually did on a certain occasion)—of becoming a soldier, then an officer and a nobleman, merely for the sake of afterward summoning the canonical and challengeable defamer before the muzzle of his pistol.
But the faithful Matthieu,—whose spotted soul turned a different side to every one, like the sun, which, according to Ferguson, on account of its spots, revolves on its axis, so as to give all the planets equal light,—he understood the business; he said, he would in his own name challenge the Chamberlain, and in fact to a masked duel, and then Flamin in the disguise could take his part, while he himself stood by under the name of the third Englishman, and the two others as seconds.