My readers themselves will gather spirits when they now hear that our Quintus, during the outshaking of the poor-bag, was invited by the Senior to come over in the afternoon; and to them it will be little less gratifying than if he had invited themselves. But what will they say, when they get home with him to mother and dinner-table, both already clad in their white Sunday dress; and behold the large cake which Fräulein Thiennette (Stephanie) has rolled from her peel? In the first place, however, they will wish to know who she is.
She is,--for if (according to Lessing), in the very excellence of the Iliad, we neglect the personalities of its author; the same thing will apply to the fate of several authors, for instance, to my own; but an authoress of cakes must not be forgotten in the excellence of her baking,--Thiennette is a poor, indigent, insolvent young lady; has not much, except years, of which she counts five-and-twenty; no near relations living now; no acquirements (for in literature she does not even know Werter) except economical; reads no books, not even mine; inhabits, that is, watches like a wardeness, quite alone, the thirteen void, disfurnished chambers of the Castle of Hukelum, which belongs to the Dragoon Rittmeister Aufhammer, at present resident in his other mansion of Schadeck; on occasion, she commands and feeds his soccagers and handmaids; and can write herself By the grace of God--which, in the thirteenth century, the country nobles did as well as princes,--for she lives by the grace of man, at least of woman, the Lady Rittmeisterinn Aufhammer's grace, who, at all times, blesses those vassals whom her husband curses. But, in the breast of the orphaned Thiennette, lay a sugared marchpane heart, which, for very love, you could have devoured; her fate was hard, but her soul was soft; she was modest, courteous, and timid, but too much so;--cheerfully and coldly she received the most cutting humiliations in Schadeck, and felt no pain, and not till some days after did she see it all clearly, and then these cuts began sharply to bleed, and she wept in her loneliness over her lot.
It is hard for me to give a light tone, after this deep one, and to add, that Fixlein had been almost brought up beside her, and that she, his school-moiety over with the Senior, while the latter was training him for the dignities of the Third Form, had learned the Verba Anomala along with him.
The Achilles'-shield of the cake, jagged and embossed with carved work of brown scales, was whirling round in the Quintus like a swing-wheel of hungry and thankful ideas. Of that philosophy which despises eating, and of that high breeding which wastes it, he had not so much about him as belongs to the ungratefulness of such cultivated persons; but for his platter of meat, for his dinner of herbs, he could never give thanks enough.
Innocent and contented, the quadruple dinner-party--for the Shock with his cover under the stove cannot be omitted--now began their Feast of Sweet Bread, their Feast of Honor for Thiennette, their Grove-feast in the garden. It may truly be a subject of wonder how a man who has not, like the King of France, four hundred and forty-eight persons (the hundred and sixty-one Garçons de la Maisonbouche I do not reckon) in his kitchen, nor a Fruiterie of thirty-one human bipeds, nor a Pastry-cookery of three-and-twenty, nor a daily expenditure of 387 Livres 21 Sous,--how such a man, I say, can eat with any satisfaction. Nevertheless, to me, a cooking mother is as dear as a whole royal cooking household, given rather to feed upon me than to feed me.--The most precious fragments which the Biographer and the World can gather from this meal consist of here and there an edifying piece of table-talk. The mother had much to tell. Thiennette is this night, she mentions, for the first time, to put on her morning promenade-dress of white muslin, as also a satin girdle and steel buckle; but, adds she, it will not sit her; as the Rittmeisterinn (for this lady used to hang her cast clothes on Thiennette, as Catholics do their cast crutches and sores on their patron Saints) was much thicker. Good women grudge each other nothing save only clothes, husbands, and flax. In the fancy of the Quintus, by virtue of this apparel, a pair of angel pinions were sprouting forth from the shoulder-blades of Thiennette; for him a garment was a sort of hollow half-man, to whom only the nobler parts and the first principles were wanting; he honored these wrappages and hulls of our interior, not as an Elegant, or a Critic of Beauty, but because it was not possible for him to despise aught which he saw others honoring. Further, the good mother read to him, as it were, the monumental inscription of his father, who had sunk into the arms of Death in the thirty-second year of his age, from a cause which I explain not here, but in a future Letter-box, having too much affection for the reader. Our Quintus could not sate himself with hearing of his father.
The fairest piece of news was, that Fräulein Thiennette had sent word to-day, "he might visit Her Ladyship to-morrow, as My Lord, his godfather, was to be absent in town." This, however, I must explain. Old Aufhammer was called Egidius, and was Fixlein's godfather; but he--though the Rittmeisterinn duly covered the cradle of the child with nightly offerings, with flesh-tithes and grain-tithes--had frugally made him no christening present, except that of his name, which proved to be the very balefullest. For, our Egidius Fixlein, with his Shock, which, by reason of the French convulsions, had, in company with other emigrants, run off from Nantes, was but lately returned from college--when he and his dog, as ill-luck would have it, went to walk in the Hukelum wood. Now, as the Quintus was ever and anon crying out to his attendant: "Coosh, Schil" (Couche Gilles), it must apparently have been the Devil that had just then planted the Lord of Aufhammer among the trees and bushes in such a way, that this whole travestying and docking of his name--for Gilles means Egidius--must fall directly into his ear. Fixlein could neither speak French, nor any offence to mortal; he knew not head or tail of what couche signified; a word, which, in Paris, even the plebeian dogs are now in the habit of saying to their valets de chiens. But there were three things which Von Aufhammer never recalled,--his error, his anger, and his word. The provokee, therefore, determined that the plebeian provoker and honor-stealer should never more speak to him, or--get a doit from him.
I return. After dinner he gazed out of the little window into the garden, and saw his path of life dividing into four branches, leading towards just as many skyward Ascensions; towards the Ascension into the Parsonage, and that into the Castle to Thiennette, for this day; and towards the third into Schadeck for the morrow; and lastly, into every house in Hukelum as the fourth. And now, when the mother had long enough kept cheerfully gliding about on tiptoe, "not to disturb him in studying his Latin Bible" (the Vulgata), that is, in reading the Litteraturzeitung, he at last rose to his own feet; and the humble joy of the mother ran long after the courageous son, who dared to go forth and speak to a Senior, quite unappalled. Yet it was not without reverence that he entered the dwelling of his old, rather gray than bald-headed, teacher, who was not only Virtue itself, but also Hunger, eating frequently, and with the appetite of Pharaoh's lean kine. A schoolman that expects to become a professor will scarcely deign to cast an eye on a pastor; but one who is himself looking up to a parsonage as to his working-house and breeding-house, knows how to value such a character. The new parsonage--as if it had, like a Casa Santa, come flying out of Erlang, or the Berlin Friedrichs-strasse, and alighted in Hukelum--was for the Quintus a Temple of the Sun, and the Senior a Priest of the Sun. To be Parson there himself was a thought overlaid with virgin honey; such a thought as occurs but one other time in History, namely, in the head of Hannibal, when he projected stepping over the Alps, that is to say, over the threshold of Rome.
The landlord and his guest formed an excellent bureau d'esprit; people of office, especially of the same office, have more to tell each other, namely, their own history, than your idle May-chafers and Court-celestials, who must speak only of other people's.--The Senior made a soft transition from his iron-ware (in the stable furniture), to the golden age of his Academic life, of which such people like as much to think, as poets do of their childhood. So good as he was, he still half joyfully recollected that he had once been less so; but joyful remembrances of wrong actions are their half repetition, as repentant remembrances of good ones are their half abolishment.
Courteously and kindly did Zebedäus (who could not even enter in his Notebook the name of a person of quality without writing an H. for Herr before it) listen to the Academic Saturnalia of the old gentleman, who in Wittenberg had toped as well as written, and thirsted not more for the Hippocrene than for Gukguk.[[37]]
Herr Jerusalem has observed that the barbarism, which often springs up close on the brightest efflorescence of the sciences, is a sort of strengthening mud-bath, good for averting the over-refinement wherewith such efflorescence always threatens us. I believe that a man who considers how high the sciences have mounted with our upper classes,--for instance with every Patrician's son in Nürnberg, to whom the public must present 1000 florins for studying with,--I believe that such a man will not grudge the Son of the Muses a certain barbarous Middle-age (the Burschen or Student Life, as it is called), which may again so case-harden him that his refinement shall not go beyond the limits. The Senior, while in Wittenberg, had protected the one hundred and eighty Academic Freedoms--so many of them has Petrus Rebuffus summed up[[38]]--against prescription, and lost none except his moral one, of which truly a man, even in a convent, can seldom make much. This gave our Quintus courage to relate certain pleasant somersets of his own, which at Leipzig, under the Incubus-pressure of poverty, he had contrived to execute. Let us hear him. His landlord, who was at the same time Professor and Miser, maintained in his enclosed court a whole community of hens. Fixlein, in company with three room-mates, without difficulty mastered the rent of a chamber, or closet. In general their main equipments, like Ph[oe]nixes, existed but in the singular number: one bed, in which always the one pair slept before midnight, the other after midnight, like nocturnal watchmen; one coat, in which one after the other they appeared in public, and which, like a watch-coat, was the national uniform of the company; and several other ones, Unities both of Interest and Place. Nowhere can you collect the stress-memorials and siege-medals of Poverty more pleasantly and philosophically than at College; the Academic burgher exhibits to us how many humorists and Diogeneses Germany has in it. Our Unitarians had just one thing four times, and that was hunger. The Quintus related, perhaps with a too pleasurable enjoyment of the recollection, how one of this famishing coro invented means of appropriating the Professor's hens as just tribute, or subsidies. He said (he was a Jurist), they must once for all borrow a legal fiction from the Feudal code, and look on the Professor as the soccage tenant, to whom the usufruct of the hen-yard and hen-house belonged; but on themselves as the feudal superiors of the same, to whom accordingly the vassal was bound to pay his feudal dues. And now, that the Fiction might follow Nature, continued he--"fictio sequitur naturam,"--it behooved them to lay hold of said Yule-hens, by direct personal distraint. But into the court-yard there was no getting. The feudalist, therefore, prepared a fishing-line; stuck a bread-pill on the hook, and lowered his fishing-tackle, anglewise, down into the court. In a few seconds the barb stuck in a hen's throat, and the hen, now communicating with its feudal superior, could silently, like ships by Archimedes, be heaved aloft to the hungry air-fishing society, where, according to circumstances, the proper feudal name and title of possession failed not to be awaiting her; for the updrawn fowls were now denominated Christmas-fowls, now Forest-hens, Bailiff-hens, Pentecost and Summer-hens. "I begin," said the angling lord of the manor, "with taking Rutcher-dues, for so we call the triple and quintuple of the original quitrent, when the vassal, as is the case here, has long neglected payment." The Professor, like any other prince, observed with sorrow the decreasing population of his hen-yard, for his subjects, like the Hebrews, were dying by enumeration. At last he had the happiness, while reading his lecture--he was just come to the subject of Forest Salt and Coin Regalities--to descry through the window of his auditorium a quitrent hen suspended, like Ignatius Loyola in prayer, or Juno in her punishment, in middle-air. He followed the incomprehensible direct ascension of the aeronautic animal, and at last descried at the upper window the attracting artist, and animal-magnetizer, who had drawn his lot for dinner from the hen-yard below. Contrary to all expectation, he terminated this fowling sport sooner than his Lecture on Regalities.