But I by no means conclude,—even on account of the last request,—but rather prefer to freshen a little in the mind of the reader the image of the old, joyous Victor, of whom he will hardly any longer be able to conceive. It is an uncommonly fortunate incident that the dog, on the third Dog-Post-Day, handed in one or two facts, which I at the time entirely omitted. For that reason I can now unexpectedly state them. It must certainly give me and the reader the greatest pleasure, when my picture—which was even at that time quite finished—is hung up here on this page.
The hiatus of the third chapter, wherein I paint Victor's arrival at the parsonage from Göttingen, reads, when filled out, thus:—
"The Chaplain had the peculiarity of many people, that, in the midst of the choir of joys and visits, he thought on his most trifling employments; e. g., on the wedding day, of his mole-traps. To-day, in the servants' room,—while his Lordship was communicating his secret instruction to the Court-Physician,—he was cutting in halves seed-potatoes. There were few to whom he could intrust the cutting up of this fruit, because he knew how seldom a man possesses sufficient stereometry of the eye to split a potato into two equal conic sections or hemispheres. He would sooner have passed the seed-time than have divided a germinal globe into unequal sections; and he said, 'All I want is order.'—It may throw a shade over my hero, if it comes out,—and certainly it must through the press,—and especially if it reaches the ears of Nuremberg patricians and people in offices and membra of the supreme court, that Victor in the afternoon marched in state behind the Chaplain and Appel over the vegetable garden, and there executed what they call in some provinces planting potatoes. They gave him the credit, that he incorporated the subterranean bread-fruit in the ground at quite as symmetrical distances as the chaplain; in fact, both looked sharply after the rectitude of the potato-row, and their eyes were the parallel rulers of the beds. The Chaplain had already beforehand looked after and helped on the plough behind a dioptric rule or alidade, in order that the field about which I and the judicial membra are now standing might be cut up into equal prisms or beds. When at evening both came home with great gravity and little waistcoats, the whole house loved him so that they could have eaten him; and the Parson's wife asked him what he would have done in his waistcoat, if the Chamberlain's lady had met him; would he have made a bow or an apology, or done nothing?
"'O thou dear Germany!' (he cried and smote his hands together,) 'shall not then the whole country make a joke, except as the court decrees?' (Here Victor looked at the old, deaf coachman Zeusel; for every humorous effusion he regularly addressed to him who least understood it. I will here, however, have it addressed to the patricians and membra.) 'Is there, then, my dear man, nothing in the country but gallowses and carpenters and officers of justice, so that, I mean, the former cannot touch an axe, unless the latter have struck the first blow with it? Will you, then, get all follies, like fashions, from above downward, as a wind always roars in the upper regions of the atmosphere before it whistles down below at our windows?—And where, then, is there an imperial recess or a vicariate conclusion which forbids a German of the empire to play the fool? I hope, Zeusel, a time is yet to come when you and I and every one will have sense enough to have his own, and his own private folly, begotten of his flesh and blood, as Autodidact in all folly and wisdom.—O men, poor creatures! catch, I pray, at the wing and tail feathers of joy amidst the forced marches of your days! O ye poor creatures! will no good friend, then, scribble an imperial folio, and prove to you that, like the Devil in the Apocalypse, you have but a short time? Ah! enjoyment promises so little,—hope performs so little,—the mowing and planting days of joy stand in the Berlin Almanac so few in number,—if, now, you were absolutely so stupid as to put away and lay up whole hours and olympiads full of pleasure, like preserves in your cellar, in order, the Devil knows when, to come upon them as fifty or sixty entire pickled and salted years—I say, if you did not press out on the cluster of every hour the berry of each moment at least with some lemon-squeezers—what would come of it at last?... nothing but the moral to my first and last fable, which I once made in the presence of a Hanoverian.' ...
"I wish the reader wanted it; for it runs thus: 'The Stupid Marmot is the title. The said marmot was once led by the full crop of a pigeon, the contents of which he was eating, to the prize question, whether it would not be better, if, instead of single grains of corn, he should rather bring in pigeons with whole corn magazines in their throats. He did so. On a long summer day, he arrested half a flock of pigeons with full crops. He slit open not a single crop, however, but, though hungry, saved all up for evening and morning: first, in order to catch a goodly lot of pigeons; secondly, to feast on the batch of corn thoroughly softened in the evening. At last, when evening came, he ripped open the crops of his tithe-officers, six, nine, all,—not a grain was any longer there; the prisoners had already digested all themselves, and the marmot had been as stupid as a miser.'"
So far the Third and the Fortieth Dog-Post-Days.—Poor Victor!
Postscript.—The history stops now in the month of August, and the historian in the fore part of October,—only a month lies between the two.
[41. DOG-POST-DAY.]
Letter.—Two new Incisions of Fate.—His Lordship's Confession of Faith.