The Invisible Lodge

by Jean Paul

The Falkenberg traveling train reached Scheerau at evening--the finest time to arrive anywhere, hence so many arrive at evening in the other world. It seemed to Gustavus as if he had been there before during his abduction. But as the fewest possible of my readers can have been abducted on account of their beauty, and therefore they do not know the city, it shall be shown up to them in the tenth section.

TENTH SECTION.

Upper-Lower-Scheerau.--Hoppedizel.--Herbarium.--Visitors' Croup.--Prince's Feathers.

No Geographer and Upper Consistorial Counsellor has ever yet had the misfortune which has befallen Herr Brüshcing--namely, of omitting in his topographical atlas a whole good principality, which shares a seat on the courtly bench of Wetteran and is called Scheerau--which, according to the imperial matriculation schedule, furnishes 8/9 of horse and 9-2/8 of foot, and pays the Master of the Exchequer 21 Fl. 1/91 Xr. (kreutzer)--which was promoted to princely rank under Charles IV.--which has its five fair representative Chambers, which have everywhere a say, but nothing to do; namely, the Commandery of the German Order, the University, the Knighthood, the cities and the towns, and which, among other inhabitants, contains also me. I would not stand in the shoes of such a writer--one who creeps with his geographic mirror into every cul-de-sac in order to take its likeness, and yet in this instance has skipped over a whole principality with its five paralytic estates; I know how it annoys him, but now that I have talked with the whole world about it there is no longer any help for him.

The capital city, Scheerau, consists properly of two cities--New, or Upper Scheerau, where the Prince resides, and Old, or Lower Scheerau, where the Captain lodges. I, for my part, have long been convinced that the Saxon houses are not half so far removed from the Frankforters as the Old and New Scheerauers are from each other in style, face, fare and everything. The New Scheerauer has court-style enough to have dignity, debts and passion for extra-domestic pleasures; and yet, again, too much chancery style--because all the highest colleges of the land are there--not to recognize or demand everywhere stiff subordination, or to sink from the Chamberlain to the Chancery Clerk and Auditor of the Treasury. Now, the old Scheerauer perceives this. On the other hand, the New Scheerauer perceives that the other has the following traits: If in China the jaws of a dinner-party must all move simultaneously like a double piano; if in Monomotapa the whole country sneezes every time the Emperor does; let one go to Old Scheerau, and there he will find things still better; at the same moment all streets must weep, cough, pray, ease themselves, hate and spit; their Blue Book looks like a musical score, from which all play the same piece, only with different instruments and voices, (only in music are they swayed by some true spirit of freedom, and none slavishly binds his elbow or fiddle-bow or quill [Tangenten] to his neighbor's)--they hate belles-lettres as much as they do one another--incapable of doing without social pleasures, of arranging or enjoying them, incapable of enterprise, of openly either hating or loving or enduring each other, they worm themselves into their money-piles and publicly respect the richest and privately only the relative, or, in fact, nobody at all--without taste and without patriotism and without reading....

But I am putting it quite too strongly; no reader will be willing to stir a step after the Captain towards Lower-Scheerau. Their greatest fault is, that they are good for nothing; but, aside from that, they are thrifty, full of none but trades-people, temperate, and sweep the streets and their faces nice and clean. Capitals, like courts, have a family-likeness; but country-towns inasmuch as more commercial, military, legal, mining or marine sap flows through them--a different full-face and half-face.

The Falkenberg ship's company alighted from its traveling ark before the plated front door of the Professor of Ethics, Hoppedizel; in the Professor's second story they usually had their winter quarters. Just behind the said door the Captain encountered an absurd melodrama, namely: the Raft Inspector, Peuschel, was leaning against the wall, vomiting and cursing; and regularly alternating from one to the other, as between Pentameter and Hexameter. The Professor of Morals quickly, with an uninked finger, wrote on the wall the outlines of the following words which he read off as fast as he traced them: "It was indeed disgusting, devilishly disgusting." Any other man the entrance of an old friend like Falkenberg would at once have disconcerted in the whole scene; the Professor, however, was not to be cheated out of his joke, but began his embrace in an unaltered tone with a report of the present case: "The gentleman before you. Raft Inspector Peuschel," (began Hoppedizel) "is fond of tippling, with wine particularly--it was in vain that the inspectoress, his lady"--(for discreet forbearance was never on Hoppedizel's lips)--"had sought to reform him by letting a live frog die in his wine. He himself" (he added) "had therefore to-day tried his hand at making this guzzling sicken him. For he had luckily cut a gall-stone--as thick as a Muscatelle-pear--out of a University subject; this he had hollowed out into a drinking urn and made Herr Peuschel believe it was of lava and to-day had let his vomiting friend drink out of it genuine Hungarian wine of the best crop; and that it might not fail to nauseate him and set his crop into a reaction, he had only a few minutes before made it clear to his patient that the volcanic beaker was veritable gravel-stone. And he hoped it would be some time before his friend would get this piece of earthenware out of his head."

The Professor begged the Inspector to do him the favor, in case the nausea left him, of staying there this evening and joining the Captain in a spoonful of soup.

There are certain houses where, let one visit them as often as he will, one shall find everything revised and turned up and turned over; this was emphatically the case in Hoppedizel's establishment; and the Captain's winter quarters looked always like a summer house in winter. People of refinement charm us by a certain delicate attention to another's little necessities, by an anticipation of his slightest wishes, by a constant sacrifice of their own, by courtesies that wind their silken web more softly and securely round our hearts than the cutting love-cord of a great benefaction. Hoppedizel used neither the silk nor the cord, and cared for nobody. It was not from absence of fine feeling, but from rebellion against it, that, when the Captain, the very first week, cursed both his quarters and his landlord, he simply laughed at him.

The delicate Amandus kept his sickbed all the evening and Gustavus crept to his side, in order to play with him. How, in the Arabia Petrea of the hateful world, are we refreshed by the sight of children who love one another, and whose good little eyes and little lips and little hands are no masks!