One wrongs the excellent Evangelist, if one thinks it satisfies him merely to have saved his friend. His good heart was also bent upon setting up for his Lordship a monumental column, and of laying him under the column as its corner-stone. He gladly (as in "Hamlet") quartered in the play another play, and raised two theatre-curtains. We will seat ourselves in the first box. His previous conduct toward the Regency-Councillor shows plainly enough how far he was capable of carrying a true friendship without offending other friends, e. g. the Princess; for to the latter the finding again of the lost son of the Prince was no remarkable disadvantage, since the son was presented at once as master of a Jacobin lodge and rebel against his step-father and father both, and since his Lordship was so terrible a loser in the matter besides. But inasmuch as Matthieu had nothing to reproach himself with in the case, except his excess of philanthropy, he sought to counteract this extreme by an opposite one, of malice, because Bacon writes: "Exaggerations are best cured by their opposites." Neither, according to his too ardent notions of friendship, could he be a genuine friend of his Lordship's, since, according to Montaigne, one can have only one true friend, as well as only one lover; and his Lordship already exhibited one such in the person of January.
Allow me in three words to be short and agreeable. If the Arabs have two hundred names for the snake, they should certainly add the two hundred and first,—that of Courtier. Indulge me further in saying, that a man of influence and tone, by a capital crime,—a so-called debt of blood,[[183]]—flourishes full as well as a whole state does upon more pitiful ones in the matter of money.—
January was now prepared to believe anything that explained the foregoing singular things. A lie which unties a knot is more credible to us than one which ties one. Matthieu went on: "He had attended all the republican concerts spirituels, in order to take measures against Flamin's catching the contagion; and he did not carry to an extreme friendship for the three Englishmen and the Lord's son (Victor), if he looked upon them and him more as tools of some other concealed hand, than as themselves workers on a plan.—This was confirmed by the misuse hitherto made of the innocent Flamin."—By way of excusing Victor, he said,—in doing which, he all along named him the Court-Physician, so that January, in his present mood, was more likely to think of a court-poisoner than anything else,—by way, then, of setting him in a favorable light, he said that individual was a mere lover of pleasure, and only carried out obediently what his father had sketched out for him,—that Victor had disguised himself as an Italian to watch the Princess, and afterward to report to the Lord, at whose behest he probably did it, in a secret interview on an island.—As Italian, he had handed the Princess a watch, in which he had covertly pasted a slip of paper, wherein he had forgotten the higher rank to flatter his own.
The Prince, who loved his spouse with greater jealousy than his betrothed, swept the floor with heavy strokes of the turkey-cock's wing, and pulled out the point of his nose to an unusual length, and proudly inquired how he knew that.—Matthieu replied calmly, "From Victor himself; for the Princess herself knew nothing of it." ...
The reader owes it to me, that he knows better about a thousand things.—Agnola certainly knew the contents of the watch very well; nay, I even imagine, that, when the enraged Joachime informed her of Victor's direct confession of his concepit, she had allowed Mat or Joachime to trace the present recipe, according to which the bridegroom here has to swallow Sebastian's billet-doux.
—"On the contrary," he continued, "she had long after presented his sister the watch, together with the billet.—Joachime had taken it out in Victor's presence, and he had thought fit to confess to her freely that very thing, which neither she nor he himself had, out of respect, yet disclosed to the Princess.—Meanwhile his sister had thereupon given him the slip,—whereupon he had made advances to Clotilda, perhaps according to a paternal instruction to bring the brother into nearer relations.—But in every instance he mixed up with the paternal schemes of ambition his own of pleasure, and was well disposed, just as the Englishmen were, whom he held to be Frenchmen in disguise."
The Prince, during the whole exhibition of these pretty snake-preparations, concealed his fear behind anger; Matthieu, who saw both mask and face, had hitherto cut all according to the former, and made the apparent want of fear the cloak of his boldness in exciting it.—And so he went from the Prince into a sort of indefinite, mock arrest for the murder; but January began to examine persons and papers.
Before reporting the result, let me gladly confess that Mat, the noble, knows how to lie well enough, and all the more, that he puts in truth as lath-work to his mortar of falsehood. As in the Polish rock-salt mines, the good liar always, in the undermining, leaves so many truths standing for pillars as may be necessary to prevent the breaking-in of the arch. In fact, every lie is a happy sign that there is still truth in the world; for, without this, no lie would be believed, and therefore none attempted. Bankruptcies give pleasure to the honest man, as new evidences of the unexhausted religious fund of other men's honesty, which must be extant, if it is to be deceived. So long as treaties of war and peace are disgracefully broken, so long is there still hope enough left, and so long courts will not want for genuine honesty; for every breach of a contract presupposes that one has been made,—and that is what no one could be any longer, if not one were any longer observed. It is with lies as with false teeth, which the gold thread cannot fasten, except to a couple of genuine ones still remaining.
January began the mint-probation days of Matthew's Gospel.
1. The Parson was summoned to confess, in the presence of the supreme authority of the state, what meetings he had suffered in the priestly house. The poor man turned over the leaves of Œmler's Pastoral Theology, to find out how a parson has to behave who is going to be hanged, Without a murmur he now laid his neck upon the block and under the axe for lesser and moderate mishaps, for the Rat-King, who went like a whirlwind through his dwelling, for the garter which, while he walked, gradually slipped down over his knee-pan, and exchanged the anxiety of the happy for the agony of the unhappy. At the audience he said, he had, at church and elsewhere, inveighed against the clubs as much as any one, and had bought Girtanner[[184]] for the purpose. To the question, whether Flamin was his son, he replied sadly, he hoped his wife had never violated his and her marriage vows.—When he got back to his house, in order not to be in agony for fear of arrest, he took a bundle of old manuscript sermons with him into a quarry, and learned them there by heart for three or four Sundays to come.