Now they carried the lie into the village, that Flamin had availed himself of Matthieu's disguise, and in a similar one had attacked the Chamberlain, whom, for want of ancestors, he could not shoot in duel, and blown out with a pistol his lamp of life. The Regency-Councillor was, upon a slight, specious flight, arrested, and placed as a statue of a god alone in that temple, which, like the old temples, was without windows or furniture, and which the gods inhabiting them furnish, as Diogenes did his tub, with inscriptions, and which the common man calls merely a prison.—I will, however, first and foremost, call this and the following words an
EXTRA-LEAF.
The chapel or vestry of such a temple is further called a dog's hole or dungeon. The priests and fellows of this pagoda are the gaolers and constables. In fact, the times are no more when the great folk were indifferent to truths; now they rather seek out a man who has uttered weighty ones, and hunt after him, and (with more justice than the Tyrians did their god Hercules) make him fast in the aforesaid temples with chains and iron postillons d'amour, that he may there on this insulating-stool (Isolatorio) the better concentrate and accumulate his electric fire and light. When once such a Mercury is so fixed; and has for a sufficient length of time had, in common with the fixed stars, beside light, immobility also, then they can finally, if more has been made out of him by this process, get him even up to the tripod,—as they call the gallows,—for a hanging seal of truth, where he can shrink up into a regular, dried, natural specimen, because he may not otherwise be stuck as a useful example into the herbarium vivum of the philosophic martyrology. Such a hanging is a more dignified and profitable imitation of the crucifixion of Christ, than I have seen in ever so many Catholic Churches on Good Friday, and in fact not a whit less forcible than that which Michael Angelo, according to the tradition, arranged, who crucified re verâ the man who sat, or rather hung, to him for the Crucified. Hence in Catholic countries, beside the bloodless masses, there are sundry bloody ones; for such a quasi Christ, who is raised by a little hemp, not into the third heaven, but still into the tremulous heaven[[168]] (cœlum trepidationis), must—and for that reason they slay him—render to his doctrines by his death the service which the higher death of the Cross once rendered. And verily the dead still preach;—to die for the truth is a death not for one's country, but for the world;—the truth, like the Medicean Venus, is handed over in thirty fragments to posterity; but posterity will fit them together again to form a goddess,—and thy temple, eternal Truth, which now stands half under the earth, undermined by the burials of thy martyrs, will at last rear itself above the earth, and stand, made of iron, with every pillar in a precious grave!
End.
Cato rode after Matthieu, who had fled to Kussewitz, and laid before him, with French eloquence, Flamin's plan to die, and their own to save him. Mat approved all, but he believed nothing of it; he still staid over the limits. Yet he begged for himself the favor, not to take it ill of him, if he should requite Flamin's noble sacrifice with something which would be against their plan, but beyond their hopes. Would he perhaps mention to the Prince that his son lay in prison?
In three minutes the readers and I will go into the apothecary's shop to our hero, when we have waited only to be first informed that, as the riderless, bloody nag of the Chamberlain and the three twins with the lying Job's tidings of the murder came up to the window of the parsonage, the Court Chaplain was lathered and half shaved. He had therefore to sit still, and only say slowly under the razor: "O sorrow above all sorrows!—pray shave quicker, dear Mr. Surgeon,—wife, howl for me!" He waved his hand loosely in his suppressed agony, in order not to shake his arm and chin: "For God's sake, can't you scrape more speedily?—You have a poor Job under the razor,—it is my last beard,—they will march me and my household off to prison.—Thou unnatural child, thy father may be decapitated for thy sake, you Cain, you!" He ran to every window: "God have mercy on us! the whole parish has by this time got wind of it.—Dost thou see, wife, what a Satan we have together brought up and borne: it is thy fault.—What is the fellow listening there for? Shear off to your customers, Mr. Shearer, and don't go to blackening your spiritual shepherd anywhere, nor spread the news about."—At this moment came the gentle Clotilda, downcast and with her handkerchief in her hand, because she guessed what the heart of a disconsolate mother needed; namely, two loving arms as a band around the shattered breast, and a thousand balsam-drops of another's tears upon the splintered and swelling heart. She went up to the mother with open arms, and enfolded her therein with speechless weeping. The whimsical Parson fell at her feet and cried: "Mercy, mercy! none of us knew a word about it. I only heard of the murder just now while in the hands of the barber. I lament only for your sainted father and his relicts.—Who could have said ten years ago, good lady, that I should have raised a scamp that would shoot down my master and patron? I am a ruined man, and my wife too. I can no longer now for shame be Senior Consistorii.—I can send off no christening paper and present to his Highness, even though my wife should be taken in labor on the spot.—And if they behead my son, it will bring down my gray hairs with sorrow to the grave."—When Clotilda, without smiling, assured him, on her sacred word, that there was an infallible way of rescue,—by which she meant Flamin's princely extraction,—then the Chaplain looked on her with sparkling eyes and dumfounded mien, and kept calling her half aloud at intervals, "Angel of heaven!—Angel of God!—Archangel!"—But the two female friends retired eagerly into a cabinet; and here Clotilda poured the first vulnerary water into the widely rent soul of the mother, by asseverating and pledging the intervention of a redeeming mystery, and concerting with her on that account the journey to London.—This withdrawal was partly also wrung from her by her false position with the Chamberlain's lady, whose last windlass-maker, together with all the levers of her sunken fortune, had now been buried with her husband; and who, as she threw all the blame upon Clotilda's conduct, sought still more to afflict this mourning spirit by an intentional exaggeration of her own mourning. As Lady Le Baut, for the rest, liked nothing so much as prayer-books and freethinkers, she now compensated for the latter with the former.
Some of my readers will already have darted on before me, and have peered into Victor's balcony to find his grief hidden within four walls;—frightfully stands the solitude before him, unfolding to him a great black picture, with two fresh graves. In one great grave lies lost friendship; in the other, lost hope. Ah! he wishes the third, in which he might also lose himself. He had the sublime mood of Hamlet. The darkened Julius appeared to him like a galvanically quivering dead man. He wholly avoided the court; for his self-regard was far too considerate and proud to keep up a fleeting pomp with a stolen nobility, and the surreptitious privileges of a lord's son. Moreover, a slight chilblain was raised on his heart by the thought that his Lordship, according to the degenerate way of all statesmen and state-machinists, of managing men only as bodies, not as spirits; only as caryatides, not as tenants of the state-edifice; in short, merely as dancing-girls of Golconda,[[169]] who have their limbs yoked and tied together as a beast of burden to a single rider,—that his Lordship, I say, this otherwise exalted soul, had misused even his Victor too much as the tool of his virtue. But he forgave the man for it, whom, after all, he had nothing to reproach with, except that he had only the kindnesses of a father, without his rights.
As Victor no longer paid court to any one, naturally the Apothecary cared no more to pay it to him. The former smiled at that, and thought: "So should every good courtier act, and, like a clever ferryman, always leave that side of his boat which is sinking, and step over to the other." Zeusel stepped over to the favored Watering-place-doctor, Culpepper, to whose judgment they ascribed January's recovery, which was the effect of summer; and he prostrated himself to lick with his little snaky tongue the feet whose heels he had formerly stung with his poisonous bite. But churls never forgive; Culpepper despised the "ninety-nine per cent fellow,"[[170]] and the "ninety-nine per cent fellow" again despised my court-physician, although, from fear,—as the Prince from love of ease,—he ventured not either to browbeat him or to turn him out of his house.
Poor Victor! the unhappy needs activity, as the happy needs repose; and yet thou wast compelled to look, with bound limbs, into the future, as into an approaching, distending storm.—Thou couldst neither suppress nor guide nor hasten it, and hadst not even the comfort of forging weapons for sorrow, and, like Samson, to express and—extinguish the convulsion of agony by shakings down of the pillars!—He could not even do anything for the imprisoned darling, whom he had plunged into a still greater anguish; for Flamin's sufferings brought back again into his bosom friendship for him, though disguised in the domino of philanthropy. He must wait to see; but he could not guess whether his Lordship was coming or was living,—neither of which suppositions, in consequence of his silence and of the non-appearance of the fifth princely son, had much in its favor.—At last he came to be afraid of sleep, especially the afternoon nap; for slumber lays, to be sure, its summer night over our present as over a future. It draws two eyelids like the first bandage over the wounds of man, and with a little dream covers over a battle-field; but when it departs again with its mantle, then do the hungry pangs pounce so much the more fiercely upon the naked man, amidst stings he starts up out of the more tranquil dream, and reason must begin over again the suspended cure, the forgotten consolation.—And yet—thou good Destiny!—thou didst still show our Victor a streak of evening-redness in his broad night-heaven; it was the hope of perhaps receiving from Clotilda, whom his heart no longer dared call his own, a letter from London....
I was going to close this chapter, first with the intelligence that the chapters come in, in ever-widening comprehensiveness of periods and lessenings of size,—which betokens the end of the story,—and afterward with the request that readers will not take it ill, if the personages therein play and speculate more and more romantically; misfortune makes romantic, not the biographer.