The Invisible Lodge

by Jean Paul

Hoppedizel had one afternoon at his house, beside the Captain, five others, the lawyer Kolb, the raft-inspector Peuschel, an old carmen-maker [or rhyme-smith], a court-chamber cleaner, and a court page; for what does the reader care about the surnames of these people? He first drew the lawyer aside and said to him: He must play a joke to day and drink to the other four gentlemen in colored water, which they would take for wine, while they would become fuddled with real wine. "Very good," said the lawyer; "they shall all have cause to remember the lawyer." The same thing the Professor repeated to the raft-inspector, the carmen-maker, etc.; all answered: "Very good! they shall all remember the raft-inspector, the carmen-maker," etc. Every one meant to make fools of the other four; the Professor had his eye on five--all were successful.

At evening five baskets of colored water were brought into the room; each man placed himself behind his little table, and screwed out the cork-stopper from the bottle of quasi-wine. The first flasks of bottled water were drained by the company in silence; true cunning must needs dictate to the pleasure-party or water-party this appearance of gradual intoxication.

But now the solar system began its drawing-of-water. "The wine might be stronger," every one said; and would fain deceive every one. The lawyer with rosy-red nose-button moistened his clay with more water (instead of spirit) than he had drunk or made or wrung from other eyes in his whole eternity a parte ante. A man who becomes so capable of holding water, as he is, that he can hardly stand straight for--soberness, makes it easily credible to his other tippling confederates that it arises from drunkenness; and all smiled very much when he laughed.

The raft-inspector Peuschel led a whole stream of water into his stomach, and made his blood-veins water-veins; but he was half vexed that he should be compelled to cheat the rest with his make-believe guzzling, and longed secretly for a real drunkenness instead of the pretended.

The chamber-cleaner actually macerated and soaked himself through and through with the colored water, and almost drowned out his Gallic malady--he guzzled so in his malicious pleasure.

The page, who almost burst his stomach with drinking, fared worse; three days after, he was carried off by an incontinentia urinæ. The porous carmen-maker was the only one through whom a whole colored deluge glided in and out without doing any harm; he looked round gaily and satirically, and watched for the moment when his next neighbors behind the four tables should fall down dead drunk.

A burning barn might have been saved by the toasts they drank in their whale-like throats.... Now came the time when every one who was in the secret of the joke must appear drunk. They discoursed and gabbled at each other with prancing, overbearing tongues. The page and the polisher actually stretched themselves out into the room like two felled trees, and their puffed-up paunches, the world was to fancy, lay like wine-sacks on their tressles. The man of office opened his mouth and shut his eyes--the carmen-maker imagined he should be doing it in the maddest and most plausible manner, if, in the first place, he should swear, like real drunkards, that he was sober; secondly, if he should collapse against the bed-posts in such a way as to get a real bruise. Fortunately he did in fact get a wound greater than his drunkenness, and was on the point, out of revenge, of breaking out with the information that he had made fools of the quartumvirate and drunk only water. The Professor also was just about to let the cat out of the bag and expose the wine and everything--the rest were going to do the same, and already began to laugh simultaneously in the anticipation: when meanwhile, unfortunately the raft-inspector, who had long been satiated, had stolen away to the polisher and thievishly by way of antidote and alleviative to his imitated wine, pledged himself in the pretended original edition of the same, out of the polisher's (or Frotteur's) cup.... there was water in that too as in his. Quick as lightning and half-foolishly he sipped the cups of all the water-gods; in all was water. Then out he came with the whole story--and the whole marine went flying round and hob-a-nobbing with each other, and each had to say seriously whether he was full and fou'.[^[28]] Unfortunately, the entire fraternity of practical jokers was sober. The Captain, who loved such pranks better than fastnight hens, transformed, from love of morals, the general pretense of drunkenness into pure sincerity, and carried out his plan by genuine wine. When, by and bye, the pentagon skipped homeward, and those five foolish virgins returned to their several abodes as five wise ones, though with an aqueous plethora, then he said: "Upon my soul, such a thing ought to be printed!" And in fact it is printed here.

I should be glad if, before I and the reader leave his house, we might take with us a medallion, an adumbration of this Hoppedizel, as a souvenir; but I shrink from the labor--I would rather emboss all the characters of this work on paper or wax than this man. His character consists of a compilation of a hundred characters, his knowledge of all departments of knowledge, his acuteness of skepticism, his vice of stoicism, his virtue of a system upon virtue, and his actions of jokes and tricks; and grimaces.

For all that, or for all that, the Captain liked him, because he saw him often (he was grum to almost everyone who did not visit him) and because both were merry blades, and because people love each other in a hundred instances without a devil's knowing why. Falkenberg would have exchanged shots with Behemoth himself, for any friend, even for the one who had been the first to take him in--he would have done it out of honor and good-heartedness; the Professor, on the contrary, preferred pure morals, as one might pure mathematics, to applied morality, and seldom acted. One loves to remember, therefore, the proof of his fine consistency to his principles which he once gave as a guest in Auenthal, when at midnight, instead of the Captain, only his riderless nag came home out of the heavy snowdrifts. Another, e. g., the Captain himself, would have mounted the same nag and ridden out to seek and save the lost; but the Professor neatly snuffed the tallow candle and seated himself by the wife, who continued to weep disconsolately, and who at a former time used to worry herself almost to death if her husband was a little late at night, although she scolded herself soundly for it the very next morning--and said to her composedly: "She might just cry as much as she liked, he would gladly allow it; it did little harm, rather it lightened the heart, and withal washed the pupil of the eye and refracted a too intense light; besides the superfluous tears must needs filter through the nasal cavity into the throat and stomach and help digestion; but as to her husband, the worst that could have befallen him would be that he had frozen to death; but he knew, partly from experience, that there was no gentler way of dying than by cold--for, in fact, it was the same as if one were hanged or drowned, for one died by an apoplectic stroke."

But, as I said the Captain loved, and left him nevertheless.