The Invisible Lodge

by Jean Paul

End of the Extra Lines.

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After the botanical divine-service Fenk gave the departing ladies of Scheerau the additional piece of information to take home with them, as an altar-benediction, leaving it to them, meanwhile, to make the sign of the crossover it: That the two children, whom they had seen, the little boy and the little girl, had had no other cradle than the traveling carriage; but that he, at present, had become at once Pestilentiary and Medical Counsellor; he preferred however to cure women only, and in time hoped to wed one, and hereby made a standing offer....

When the people of Lower Scheerau have anything put upon them which seems at once sweet, sour and senseless, at first they listen to it--then they smile at it--then reflect upon it--then cannot see into it--then for three days surmise nothing good of it--and finally become fairly enraged about it. Fenk did not trouble himself about that, but said from time to time something or other and what neither they nor he himself understood.

Thereupon he explained all to the Captain, as I do to the reader. The pressed plants, he said, would keep, henceforth, all aunts and ninnies and visiting ants away from his lodgings, as an enclosing hemp-thread does caterpillars from a vegetable garden. That he communicated only half the history of his travels and a riddle or two growing out of it, because one becomes most interested in persons about whom one has something left him to guess, and the curious patient females would become his female patients. Whether he was married or not, he did not himself know; nor should others know, because all whose houses were sale-rooms of daughters would invite him in as physician that he might come out again as bridegroom. Finally, that the reasons of his taking only female patients were these: that they were the most numerous; that this exclusive practice would beget a peculiar confidence in him; that this confidence was a woman-doctor's whole dispensary; that most of the ailments of women consisted merely of weaknesses, and their whole cure in abstinence from--medicine; that apothecaries' shops were only for men, not for women; and because he liked full as well to adore as to cure them.

Another point was this, how he had so quickly come to Scheerau and come so quickly to be Medical Counsellor. This was the way: the hereditary Prince, who at this moment on the high throne-coach-box will drive with the state-carriage to the devil, loves nobody; on his journey he made jests upon his mistresses; his friendship is only a lesser degree of hatred, his indifference is a greater; but the greatest, which stings him like a heartburn, he cherishes for his unmarried brother, Captain von Ottomar, Fenk's friend, who had stayed in Rome in the midst of the most beautiful natural nature, as well as artistic, in order to revel in the enjoyments of Roman landscapes and antiques. Ottomar seemed a genius in the good sense as well as in the bad. He and the hereditary Prince could hardly endure each other in ante-chambers, and were often on the point of a duel. Now the Grand Duke of Scheerau hates poor Fenk also, first, because the latter is a friend of his foe; secondly, because he once restored to life and to his allowance-money the hereditary Prince's third brother; thirdly, because the Prince needed far less reasons (or in fact none) for hating any one than for loving him.

Now the Doctor would have been glad to be made Medical Counsellor under the former administration, whose stomach we met on the road; under the coming administration, whose stomach was still filling itself in Italy, there was little chance for him. The Doctor sought therefore to get his fortune firmly rooted a week or two before the new coronation. He found the old minister still at his post, who was patron and whose patron the hereditary Prince was far from being, for the reason that leads hereditary princes generally to think that they must get the creatures of their dead father under the ground just as certainly, only more slowly and delicately, as savage tribes do, who lay on the funeral-pile of the king his favorites and servants also.

When Fenk came, the deceased Regent made him all he wanted to be: for it was in this way: When the departed father of his people had become in the physiological sense a child of the people, i. e., had returned to the age of which he was when they had hung upon him the first order-ribbon instead of leading-strings, namely, six and a half years, the eternal signing of his cabinet decrees became much too disagreeable to the Prince, and at last impossible. As, however, he must after all still govern, when he could no longer write, the court-engraver cut his decreeing name so well in stone that he had only to dip the stamp in ink and press it while moist under the edict: then he had his edict before him. In this way he governed fifteen per cent. easier; but the minister one hundred per cent., who, at last, out of gratitude, in order to relieve the enfeebled Prince even of the heavy handling of the stamp, dipped, himself, the beautiful seal (which he preferred to Michael Angelo's) into his own ink-stand; so that the old lord, several days after his death, had subscribed sundry vocations and rescripts--but this modeling-stamp of men in general became the insect's-laying-sting[^[24]] and father of the best government officials, and at last spawned the Pestilentiary.

Extra-Thoughts Upon Regents' Thumbs.

Not the crown but the inkstand oppresses Princes, Grand Masters and Commanders; not the Sceptre, but the Pen do they find so much difficulty in wielding, because with the former they merely command, but with the latter they have to sign what is commanded. A cabinet councillor would not wonder if a tormented crowned scribe should, like Roman recruits, amputate his thumb, in order to be freed from the eternal making of his mark, as they do to escape fighting. But the reigning and writing heads keep the thumb; they see that the welfare of the land requires their dipping the pen,--the little illegibleness on cabinet orders which one calls their name, opens and shuts, like a magic formula, money-chests, hearts, gates, warehouses, ports; the black drop of their pen manures and forces or macerates whole fields. Professor Hoppedizel had, when he was first teacher of morals to the Scheerau Infante, a good idea, although only in his last month: might not the princely tutor command the sub-tutor to let the crown-abecedarian, who of course must one day learn to write, instead of useless bills of feoffment merely scrawl his name in the middle of every blank leaf? The child would write his signature without disgust on as many pages as would be needed in his whole administration--the sheets might be laid away against the child's coronation--and then (he continued) when he had bespattered pages enough, as a college would often require his signature yearly, if, accordingly on New Year's day the necessary number of signed reams had been distributed among the colleges to last the whole year--what more would the child need to do in his whole administration?